Social media: the new frontier of advertising

From Facebook to Twitter to YouTube, retailers and food chains plan to use social media this holiday season to get their brands in front of consumers and possibly win a bigger piece of their limited shopping budgets.
-- Reuters

We all saw this coming. Even if you rarely use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc you had to have seen this coming. It seems you can't go a day without these words coming into one conversation or another. And if you thought advertising in the past was too intrusive, you better get ready because it's a whole new ballgame.

Society wants unfiltered, direct contact with each other and the sites mentioned above have for now fulfilled our craving. However, these sites can be used by anyone and if you're business savvy you knew it would only be a matter of time before they were infiltrated by companies looking to expand their consumer base.

So remember how I mentioned these sites create direct, unfiltered contact? Well guess what? That means companies now have these benefits when trying to reach you, the consumer. So what does that mean? Well it's too early to discuss if it will be productive, but it's not too early to discuss how it will affect us. In fact, there already concrete examples. On Youtube, there are now commercials on user-generated videos. On Facebook, companies are allowing users to become "fans". And if you thought Twitter was safe, guess again. There is no denying these sites will allow for incredible brand exposure, but there is one question? Will users who primarily use these sites for social discourse even acknowledge the companies? As of now you'd have to say for the most part these companies are being ignored. For instance, the Wal-Mart fan page I linked to earlier only has around 5,500 fans--you could hardly call that productive. Only time will tell if companies will be successful in their social media endevours.

It's the right mood for a ... bat fight

Mental break of the day ...


Dare I say best thing Will Ferrell has ever done?

Maybe Browns fans aren't that stupid after all.

Browns fans to hold protest on Monday Night Football, I really hope this happens. In case you can't read it (it's kinda hard to see) the picture says, "Are you ready to arrive late?" The idea is that there will be no fans in the stadium for kick off. Come on Browns fans, use those brain cells and MAKE THIS HAPPEN!

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/...

Salute of the week: Harry Reid

This week's salute goes to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Today he announced the Senate's version of the health care bill will have a government-sponsored health care option included in it. When asked if he thought the bill had the 60 votes needed to block a Republican filibuster Mr. Reid stated:

I believe there is strong consensus to move forward in this direction. I feel clearly we'll have the support of my caucus to move this bill and start legislating.

further reading: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...

Beer Review: Stone Leviation

I like beer. Well let me put that differently, I like good beer. So you'll probably see many more beer reviews to come.

I was at Taco Mac tonight because, well, we (my friends) had nothing better to do. We decided a few beers and some good conversation would be a good idea. The latter was a bit hard as we forgot Saturday night means college football which means constant hootin' and hollerin' as they say in the south. Nonetheless I was able to try Stone's Leviation Ale which I've heard good things about. So let's get to it.

For a tad weaker beer than I'm used to (it's only 4.4% ABV) it was surprisingly full of flavor. The taste is similar to an IPA with a hoppy citrus and just a hint of pine start with a clean and crisp finish. There was a bit of carbonation but it went well with the flavors. There was minimal bitterness because of the restriction of malts for the low alcohol level. The appearance was another surprising characteristic. It was a dark brown with just a hint of red, unlike the picture in this post which does not do it justice. Now maybe it was the lighting in the bar but I couldn't even see through the glass. The head was nice and thick and had a off-white color that laced the glass nicely as I drank. For drinkability reasons only (yeah right), I had two and let me just say, I could have easily had two more. I had heard this was a great session beer and I was not disappointed. I believe I've added another go-to beer to my list.

Grade: A-

Détournement

So I had to create some examples of Détournement for a Media Theory & Practice course so I figured I would share them on my blog for perhaps some responses from readers. I just want to note these are not intended for distribution or financial gain and would like to make it clear I am not advocating destruction of copyrighted material. Also the Apple image was not from an advertisement, it is an altered photograph I found online.

What is détournement? wikipedia says it's when an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original.

My examples:

Hello and welcome

Casual Discourse is everything and anything I find interesting, informative, funny, important, or in some cases, ridiculously stupid. This is not my first blog and will certainly not be my last but I hope to make it endure the initial "new blog phase". As it happens, pretty much all of my blogs in the past have failed to survive. At first I post, and post, and post, and post and then all of sudden I stop. I don't usually have a particular reason for doing this, I just stop. Then a couple months down the road I try to pick up again but it never works out.

This blog will be different, or so I hope. I think my problem in the past is I wasn't necessarily being me. To use a pretty clichéd idea, I was trying to create an online persona, something not quite entirely me--almost a vision of something I wanted to be. I have two goals for this blog, the first is to post as actively as I can and the second is to post on topics that truly represent me, what I stand for, and what interests me. So were do you, the reader, come in. Well, hopefully if you've found your way here the topics peak your interest. After all, a blog is intended for an audience, not the blogger.