Taylor Rose and Professor Jeff Parkin, Media Arts
New Media technologies are changing consumer engagement expectations. As media author and researcher Mimi Ito observed in the Transmedia Hollywood forum, the Pokemon audience—who grew up engaging with highly social, customizable forms of media—has now reached adulthood and has very different media expectations than previous generations.
In addition, Elder Russel M. Ballard recognized the revolutionizing potential of New Media, calling the Internet the “modern equivalent of the printing press” and urging members of the Church to “join the conversation”.This research has been an effort to follow and explore Elder Ballard’s admonition. We have strived to understand the potential of New Media storytelling by engaging with some of the industry’s prominent New Media thought leaders and then experimenting with the principals we learned by designing our own New Media narrative.
Our first research objective was to explore characteristics of successful New Media projects; we wanted to find out what New Media projects did and how they did them. This took us to the Transmedia Hollywood forum organized by the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media. The hybrid panels of academic analyst and industrial practitioners generated the ideal conversations to inform the questions pertaining to our objective. I will briefly explain two of the most important characteristics of New Media that we gathered from our participation in this conference and through our own analysis of case studies such as The Matrix franchise, the Why So Serious alternate reality game, and the Farmville facebook game.
New Media Narratives are Social
One of the major differences between New Media and traditional media is that New Media is social. It has what Diane Nelson, President of DC Entertainment, called “social currency” which allows users to connect with each other while engaging with the media.
New Media Narratives are Expansive and Adaptive
Good examples of New Media narratives create expansive spaces where the users can explore. The creation of worlds is equally as important as the creation of story and should allow the user room to speculate and craft her own experience. New Media narratives should give users pieces they can interact with on their own and give the user a sense of achievement for working with and discovering uses for the tools designers give them.
Our next objective was to understand how users are drawn to New Media, and look at the new ways marketers reach out to consumers. For this we participated in the Thrive 2010 Ins and Outs of Online Marketing online seminar. Here top online marketing publishers and practitioners shared the knowledge they gathered from working in the field of online and content marketing. The many pragmatic techniques we learned from this seminar and through case studies such as VideoCopilot.net and yahoo.com can be summarized in two overarching principals.
Pull Versus Push Marketing
Traditionally advertisers and marketers have invested in “push” systems to go after potential customers. These systems are as diverse as direct mail, telemarketing efforts and spot ads. While they are direct outreaches to users, they facilitate little to no interaction with the consumer. However, successful Internet and social marketing campaigns are different in that they aim to get the users to come to them and actively seek out their advertisements. This involves search engine optimization practices as products that are easily found through search engines are more highly approached by customers. Still, the aim is not just to engage the user with the product but for the user to actively recommend the product to her friends as well. In order to achieve this result the marketers have to supply rich content that will interest their users, often times without any cost to the consumer.
Listen, Interact, Invite
Successful online marketers use social media tools to understand their consumers, build brand trust by interacting with them, and then inviting them to engage in their services. An ideal result of this method is that consumers feel a sense of camaraderie with the product and, because they have been listened to, feel a sense of ownership in the product’s success.
The third objective has been to experiment with the various techniques we gathered from our research by implementing them in the design of a New Media narrative.
After researching our target audience of 18 to 35 year-‐olds through surveys and observations of the most successful online videos, we determined to have video based content that lasted no longer than 3 to 5 minutes and contained humorous musical elements.
We also designed an interactive element where users can explore the space where the scenes of the videos took place to gain further insights and make new assumptions about the world they experience.
Finally we included widgets users can share filled the story with difficult mysteries and puzzles. This will encourage users to work together to discover the vastness of our story as they connect with each other on the forums we will create on our main website.
After spending some time designing and developing our New Media narrative, we have hired actors, choreographers, and artists and have begun to video shoot the various elements we need to build our interactive New Media experience. We anticipate the full project will be completed in December of 2010.
References
- Ballard, Russel M. “Sharing the Gospel Using the Internet.” Ensign (2008):58-‐63