"Blog your way to the Blogosphere"

I have truly enjoyed blogging as part of The Social Web course. As recommended by our lecturer I opened a blog on Blogger and entered my first blog post on 2^nd October, 2011. This blog post was mainly about the course and what social media I use and why I have chosen to use certain social media services and tools.

During this autumn I also started to use Klout – a tool to measure social media influence (N.B. Not to be confused with real life influence). This has been more like a fun game and my Klout score has risen to 57 according to Klout.com.

One part of blogging was a separate course assignment to write a Personal Media Diary during one week in October. This was documented in seven separate blog posts and a final analysis & summary of my own findings regarding the time I spent with traditional and social media, and also involved analyzing why and how I spend my time with certain media. As a gadget man and an early adopter of new media services my media consumption is more mobile than ever before in my life. The smartphone and the tablet play a big role in my media consumption. The analysis can be read in my blog post of 10^th October.

As I got used to the idea of blogging it was really fun to keep on writing about things that interest me within my research about new trends in media and marketing. Towards the end of October I blogged about the changes in Facebook regarding its new “Timeline” function and how people feel about targeted marketing. In Facebook it’s you and I who are the products, the information we give about us and how we communicate with others, what we do and what we like, drives how marketing is done in Facebook. The “Timeline” was officially launched on 15^th December, as commented by Mashable and Wired.

The research work we do within the EDGE research group at Åbo Akademi was also documented in two blogs: 1) one about trends in business models of traditional media companies, and 2) another about how the sale of digital content surge after Apple introduced its Newsstand App as part of the iOS 5 update.

The most interesting subject from my personal point of view is the interaction between traditional and social media. This blog post was entered on 5^th December and based on articles read in both Finnish and international media, as well as social media sites. I truly believe that it’s time for traditional media companies to become active in social media and most of the leading companies have already adopted this new way of working in conjunction with readers and consumers. The term “co-creation” becomes real when people’s ideas and opinions are taken into account and blended with editorial work done by the journalists. Many social media sites such as Mashable use co-creation as a tool to create content on their news site, both on the web and in Apps for smartphones and tablets.

This was a very useful course and I thank both the lecturer and the teams who did group work on the subject of social media, podcasting etc. Great fun!