Broadcast yourself

Today I had a lecture about “economics and human behaviour”. It was about blogs, communities (like brand communities or hate communities), broadcast yourself like youtube and opinion leaders and their importance for marketing. As I´m interested in this I decided to write some things here...

Some facts provided today in my lecture about decreasing importance mass media (only us market):

- CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox had a historical low audience rate in July 06

- Sales of music albums (incl. digital downloads) were on a 10-year-low in July 06

- Audience rate for radio decreased for antoher 8.5% this year

- Newspaper consumption decreased 2.6% this year

Compared to this consumer generated content is highly increasing. Some facts as well provided in todays lecture:

- 100 Mio. videos are watched on youtube - daily. Growth of 297% (!) in the first half of 2006

- Each day 1.6 Mio. postings in blogs per day = 18.6 postings per sec.

- The social network Myspace has 15 Mio. logins per day and has a growth of 240´000 users per day.

Why am I blogging about this? First of all because I think there´s a huge shift towards an e-life. People are not only using the net-technology to send emails and disconnect afterwards. They´re using it to gather information, to entertain themselves. Instead of meeting face-to-face or calling people, they spend evenings on msn chatting with friends while playing online games, watching movies or surfing on the internet. They spend hours each day in front of their computer and connect to the web. And with online communities, “broadcast yourself” sites and blogs they´re not only consuming, they´re producing content...

Secondly I´m blogging about this, because I´m studying marketing. I think that we have important changes in society here. Those changes affect consumption behaviour, they affect the way of gathering information about products and services and thus they have an influence on what we buy and how we decide what to buy. We might not want to buy an ipod anymore because we visited http://www.smashmyipod.com? Maybe we suddendly dislike Starbucks coffee because we visited http://www.ihatestarbucks.com? Online communities and blogs can have a huge impact on the opinion of each of us. As a future marketer, I´ll be probably dealing with stuff like that.

And thirdly there´s a post about this because I have just an intrinsic, personal interest in this. It will probably affect my future in my field of work, then I´m a member of this new, 2.0 web society and I´m interested in information- and communication-technology which is closely linked to this topic. And maybe I´ll write a thesis about a specific topic in this field. Who knows?