A New Kind of Marketer

Our group discussion (Jonathan, XiaoYe, Matt, Nate) of Mitch Joel’s article led to us describing the characteristics of the “new” marketer.

First, the marketer spends more time listening than talking. In a time when consumers are more savvy shoppers and have a platform to share opinions on products, marketers need to keep an ear to the ground at all times. There needs to be a conversation between seller/consumer — marketers can’t simply tell us what to buy anymore.

Second, the job of marketer also needs the title “community manager” under their job description. In our group discussion, we talked about the example of @comcastcares on Twitter. Marketers need to be quick to address complaints before they spread virally.

 

Group Discussion Notes: Peer-to-Peer

My group discussion on Peer-to-Peer (just me in the group):

Salient Points:

1. Peer-to-peer disrupts the client/ server model of the Internet that rose out of the mid 1990s with the rise of the Web.

2. Peer-to-peer networks vary in their nature and purpose. Books features a variety of different networks, such as SETI@home, Gnutella, and Freenet. These networks can be organized differently (centralized versus decentralized).

3. The p2p model faces a number of challenges, such as risks related to trust and security, and demands on bandwidth.

Most Intruguing: The history of p2p has a longer, richer past than I realized. The Internet, as originally devised, was essentially p2p, and Tim Berners Lee’s original vision for the Web was a participatory groupware system, not client/server.

Book’s relevance in context of class: Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons was discussed in several sections of the book, as demands on bandwidth from networks like Napster raised serious concerns for future growth and regulation of p2p networks.

 

Group 4 Class Discussion: “We the Media”

Group 4 discussed the following six points regarding Chapter 7: “The Former Audience Joins the Party.”

1. The main “take away” from this chapter is that the former audience is now the gatekeeper, the reporter, the editor. An individual can fill every role in a newsroom. Blogs offer greater depth than mainstream news due by eliminating constraints in space and offering unique perspective (e.g., an average person reporting on daily life in Iraq). There is still a certain arrogance among many professional journalists, but they need to be careful.
2. Gillmor is very enthusiastic about future of grassroots journalism. Our group felt he glossed over concerns about accuracy and fact checking, but we recognized that We the Media was written more than three years ago, at a time when blogging was just starting to take off.
3. The Wikipedia factor. Gillmor believes in the wisdom of the crowd, and sees Wikipedia as an ideal journalistic tool. Horizontal process of reporting, not vertical form of reporting. Bonnie believes Wikipedia is a great place to start when researching a topic, but it is just a starting point and not the most reliable source.
4. Mark asked: at what point do citizen journalists fall under rules that apply to professional journalists? Where is the line drawn? If a blogger is a journalist, do they receive the rights of the press as stated the constitution?
5. Gillmor talks about business models for blogging. How will blogging be monetized? Will advertising affect credibility?