The Robot – Innovative Technology in Marketing & Communications

As a university student undertaking a double major in both digital media and marketing, I always try to combine the two disciplines whenever I am tasked with deciding on a project topic. I do this for multiple reasons, the first being that I never want to complete a project on something I’m not passionate about. A project will never reach its full potential that way, due to a lack of interest and dedication. The second reason is that I always want to leverage the work I complete at university to assist with my career trajectory, as I get to discover the things I like and dislike, while also creating something that I can use in my portfolio.

An Ethnographic Approach To Marketing: Project Communication Part 2

A specific arm of ethnography that is commonly used to gain information for marketing purposes is digital ethnography. Moore (2018) describes ‘digital’ as something that is changeable, dialogical, always in motion, connected to processes such as electronics and is easy to overwrite.

An Ethnographic Approach To Marketing: Project Communication Part 1

As mentioned on this blog previously, ethnography is used to observe and analyse people within a society or culture (Coleman and Simpson n.d.). As a multifaceted research practice, ethnography isn’t limited to anthropology and can be used to explore groups of people and cultures in other areas such as business, media and beyond.

Digital Ethnography

Moore (2018) defines ‘Digital’ as something that is dialogical, always in motion, connected to processes such as electronics, changeable and easy to overwrite. Digital ethnography is a way of researching the experience of reality transformed, or mediated by the digital through “theory and empirical observation” (Moore 2018).

The Cinema: An Ethnographic View

It is often viewed that the cinema going experience is an overall declining pastime (Seitz 2018). This includes Australia, where cinemas only experienced 85 million admissions in 2017 (Screen Australia 2018).  This seems like a large number and only a small drop from 91 million in 2016, but the peak of Australian cinema admissions was 187 million in 1928 (Screen Australia 2018).

The Networked Home

Kennedy and Wellman (2007, p. 646) and Venkatesh et al. (2001, p. 5) describe the networked home as having two distinct components. The first being the information and communication technology networks within homes, and the second is the idea of personal relationships as elements of a networked home.

Media Ethnography: The Television Evolution

Ethnography is “the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution” (Coleman and Simpson n.d.). As Anderson (2009) discusses in the Harvard Business Review, an ethnographers goal is to view people’s behaviour on their terms. He explains that conducting ethnographic research for companies such as Intel has influenced their strategic decision making.

The YouTube Somnolence Phenomenon

As an introduction into BCM241 – Media Ethnographies, I have decided to look at certain situations where I have used particular media and really reflect on why. Upon reading the work of my peers, a common trend is to look at the more prominent social medias of our generation such as Snapchat and Instagram. And while I do find it interesting to think about specific scenarios and why I have used these platforms during that time (such as why I Snapchat live concerts but never use the app any other time), I have ultimately decided to focus my attention on another regular life occurrence.

Research Project Reflection

Similarly to my last blog post where I reflected on my experiences in another BCM subject from this semester, I would like to reflect on my research project and the BCM212 subject overall. My research project was successful overall, It fulfilled its goal of finding out the specific reasons why students were making changes to their university degree, and identifying what particular issues students were having with this process.

Research Project Update

Following the proposal to my BCM212 research project, there have been many developments in getting the project underway. These include designing a survey with fellow BCM student Tegan Sharp, due to our similar projects it was more efficient to create one survey and both distribute it to maximise responses. The survey was communicated via twitter and my particular tweet has gauged over 1500 impressions over the past week resulting in 41 responses to our survey. I hope to gather additional responses over the coming weeks and explore other methods to gain traffic to the survey.

I am conducting a #survey on why university students change their degrees for my #BCM212 research project, would be great if anyone could check it out! https://t.co/D8nk6lEz9Q #bcm110 #bcm112 #uow #surveys

— Alex Mastronardi (@alexm4stro) April 23, 2018