Introduction:

New media emerges in an endless stream. The emergence of new media forms which means that the popularization of Web2.0 and the progress of the network. Since 2010, the participation and activity of Chinese netizens have shown explosive growth. The emergence of this situation is related to the birth of a new media which is SINA Microblog. This essay is going to have a mixed evaluation on SINA Microblog in three perspectives–social media presence, social media campaign and marketing and new media policy, law and governance.

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Critical Evaluation:

Social Media Presence:

With the continuous development of society, people are more and more eager to show themselves, so ‘micro-blog personal image’ has become a stage for people to sell themselves to society. As an enterprise, it has been constantly exploring new ways to shape and improve its image. Whether from the cost of shaping or the speed of promotion, SINA Microblog fully meets the needs of enterprises. According to Story (2012), ‘Creating an online body of work by being a social media user will help you get the interview. It doesn’t matter if you are starting out looking for a job, are a midlevel practitioner looking to advance your career, or are a seasoned professional: you need to have an online portfolio that people can easily find when they Google you’. In SINA Micro-blog, each user can build up a huge circle of communication by paying more attention to it. Besides that, they also can know more about the latest developments of his friends, and publish letters on micro-blog at the same time in order to let more people know you and achieving the purpose of shaping and improving their own image. Users of microblogs have become disseminators of information, and this change of identity has strengthened the dominant position of the ‘silent majority’. The communicative mode of communication makes the audience and the communicator become the main body of communication, while the traditional mode of communication is impossible to do that. The emergence of micro-blogging urges more people or organizations to really show themselves to the public and successfully shape or improve their own image. Although micro-blog plays a huge role in image building and improvement, it is not 100% succeed to create and improve their own image with micro-blog. How to shape and improve one’s image through micro-blog is a knowledge. According to Story (2012), ‘There are three good ways to accomplish this: build as many sites as are practical to create an online body of work that people can easily find, use good search engine optimization in your online profiles to help hiring people find you, and list all of your social media properties on your resume’. Actually, it is the language charm of the micro blogger that plays an important role in his image, language should be regarded as a dimension of the body. Attracting attention does not mean building social media presence for himself, it must add value. For example, streaking naked or shouting ‘somewhere is on fire’ can get the attention, but it has no value in shaping and improving their image.

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Social media campaign and marketing:

Micro-blog marketing refers to a kind of marketing method that creates value for businesses and individuals through micro-blog platform. It also refers to the business behavior way that businesses or individuals discover and meet the various needs of users through micro-blog platform. Micro-blog marketing takes micro-blog as the marketing platform. Every audience (fans) is a potential marketing target. Enterprises use micro-blog to disseminate enterprise information and product information to netizens, and establish a good corporate image and product image. Updating content every day can communicate and interact with users, or publish topics of interest, so as to achieve the purpose of marketing, this way is the newly launched micro-blog marketing. According to Serazio and Duffy (2017), ‘Often, we think of social media as a way to drive traffic to websites, or build brand awareness or as another channel for marketing communications… but one of the best outcomes with social media is how it can build trust in customers and the general public that ultimately adds to your bottom line. (Campbell, 2014, para. 3, italics added for emphasis)’, trust is the most important thing between customer and the general public. For example, “Yesterday in Haidilao hot pot, I had no intention to complain with my friends about how the Naomi album in JD had not arrived yet. As a result, when the waiter checked out, he asked for my account in JD. Today, three albums were sent in the morning!”, said by a microblog user named ‘猫叔Ryan’ and the text was retweeted over 35000 times. In fact, the content is totally fake, even though Haidilao hot pot is famous for its service attitude.

New Media Policy, Law and Governance:

According to Flew (2014), ‘The legal, policy and regulatory implications of the internet’s rapid development are rendered even more complex by three particular issues: the unique attributes of digital information, the global nature of the internet and network infrastructure, and the extent to which the internet is not a single medium, but rather a series of layers that are already subject to particular forms of media and communications law’. In China, network governance has always been a serious problem. There are three important reasons. The first reason is that ‘new media policy and law cannot catch up with the development of new media’ China has promulgated several laws and regulations on the management of new media, but the overall level of legislation is not high enough and the legal effect is low, which cannot cover the rapid development and change of network communication. The second reason is that new media governance doesn’t play an important role. New media involves radio, film, press, publishing, culture and art and other fields, together with various ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘Internet marketer’ manipulation of public opinion, illegal and harmful information exists in large quantities. SINA Microblog is a place full of ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘Internet marketer’. The third reason is that the self-discipline role of trade associations is not fully played. In terms of social supervision, local public reporting channels are not smooth enough, and the investigation and punishment of reporting problems is weak.

Conclusion:

This critique outlines three point of SINA Microblog, which are form the establishment of image, marketing strategy and regulations and laws. The new media and the internet cannot be the place of pure freedom beyond law and morality. It is recommended that establishing and improving the laws and policies of mew media governance. If necessary, implementing the real-name network system is also very important if necessary.

Reference List:

1.  Flew, T. (2014). New media (Fourth edition.). South Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University Press.

2.  Serazio, & Duffy, M. (2017). Social Media Marketing.

3.  Story, M. (2012). Starting your career as a social media manager. New York: Allworth Press.

The relationship between people and media undergoes revolutionary changes in the mobile Internet era. Individual is digitized and embedded inside the mobile Internet as a digital code, eventually people become the extension of Internet media. Based on the user’s open, multidirectional, real-time interactive new transmission pattern preliminary established. The traditional transmission model and the traditional media marketing model are running down. The operation mode of the new digital media and communication industry is still at groping stage. This essay thinks that improving consumer loyalty based on user participation and intellectual contributions is the key to the success of digital media industry. “Gamification” design is a method to solve the problems of consumer loyalty, which has its own function and value. It will firstly describe ‘Gamification’ and it will be applied to the real-life examples to illustrate how ‘Gamification’ works. Then, another concept ‘convergence’ in media and communication industry will be discussed and be combined with examples.

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‘Gaming’ online systems can be traced back to 1980, Richard Bartel, a professor at the University of Essex and pioneer of multiplayer online games, put forward the concept. The concept was first explicitly used by Nick Palin, a British game developer in 2003. After that, ‘Gamification‘ was introduced as a new word at the 2011 GDC (Game Developers Conference). Since then, ‘Gamification’ has begun to attract widespread attention in the industry. However, ‘Gamification’ was clearly defined by Werbach and Hunter (2012), which refers to applying game design elements to non-game areas. From the definition, we can see that the core of ‘Gamification’ is the application of game elements in design, and what are the basic elements of the game itself, or what are its basic characteristics? Huizinga (1956) provides a universally accepted analysis for future game researchers, which is that ‘Game is a kind of free activity, which consciously breaks away from normal life and makes it not serious. At the same time, it makes the player devote himself wholeheartedly and forget everything. There is no direct relationship between games and material interests, and players cannot profit from them. The game unfolds in a specific space-time range, abides by fixed rules, and is in good order. Game promotes the formation of community. The game community is often covered with mysterious atmosphere. Gamers often dress up or put on masks to show that they are different from ordinary people.’ This basic feature can be refined into six basic elements of the game: the game is voluntary, the game has isolation and limitations, the game steps out of ordinary or real daily life, the game has absolute rules, the game creates order, and the game promotes the formation of the community. On the basis of drawing lessons from game elements, ‘Gamification’ has formed its own four basic characteristics: voluntary participation, rules, goals and feedback system. Game itself and ‘Gamification’ have a common basic element, that is, the specific game is restricted by specific time and space, that is to say, only with a certain number of voluntary participants and limited space and time field, the game can be carried out. In fact, the earlier well-known ‘Gamification’ is not in the field of games, but in the field of management. For example, the first time I knew ‘Gamification’ was ‘Shanda Group’, which was the largest game company in China. At that time, I knew that the management system of ‘Shanda Group’ company was a set of things like 3D MMORPG (3D massively multiplayer online role-playing game). There was also an integral system in their management system. Every employee in this company seems like the independent role controlled by the player(company). Their work would be quantified as these numerical feedbacks in the performance and be used flexibly. This kind of management system meets four basic characteristics: employees are willing to go to work to earn money, they also have company regulations as their rules, to make profit and get higher positions as their goals and how much money they earn according to their integral system as their feedbacks. ‘Shanda Group’ company uses the game elements, such as the integral system into their employee management system, which meet the needs of the definition of ‘Gamification’.

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 ‘Convergence’, which is a high frequency word, appears in most media and communication industry paper. According to Dwyer (2010), the meanings of this word in different communication contexts are classified into six parts: convergence in media and technology, convergence of ownership, convergence of media tactics, structural convergence of media organization, convergence of information gathering and convergence of news story telling. I will introduce two of them, which are convergence in media and technology and convergence of news story telling. According to Dwyer, the convergence of communication forms gives us a vision of the future development of media science and technology: the creation and widely-use of digital communication content management system in Media Institutions can relatively easy to transfer various digital forms to different communication platforms. For example, television will have more computer features to connect with the network, which can receive and store digital content, as well as allow viewers to interact with content such as advertisements on the screen. Nowadays, mobile phones have many functions, such as videotaping, recording, watching TV programs and sending and receiving e-mails. It can be said that the convergence of media science and technology is the basis of all the convergence in the field of news communication.

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The emergence of the network makes it possible to integrate the narrative forms of news. Multimedia news communication is a kind of news narrative mode which combines text, photograph, sound, video, animation and graphics. For example, ‘Online Interactive Special Report’ in ‘st. Petersburg Times’ in Florida made a series of excellent in-depth multimedia report. The news combines newspaper writing, radio voice, television images and interactive charts to give the audience a full range of sensory enjoyment. Compared with the past single media reporting mode, the multi-media news produced by the convergence of news narrative forms has the following characteristics: 1. Large capacity, which means the content of network multimedia news based on information technology quantity is almost infinite, no longer limited by traditional news layout and time and their storage costs are getting lower and lower. 2. Real-time: multimedia news can update information anytime, anywhere, to meet the needs for people who demands for the timeliness of news. 3. Interaction: Unlike the one-way transmission in traditional media, the multimedia news is bidirectional which means users can not only receive information but also give some feedbacks. Besides that, the users can also decide the content, reading order and browsing time. 4. Multi-terminals: Multimedia news terminals can be computers and mobile phones. It can also be a TV, or even an e-book or newspaper that you can carry with you.

Reference List

Dwyer, T. (2010). Media Convergence. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education.

Huizinga, J. (1956). Homo ludens : a study of the play-element in culture . Boston: Beacon Press.

Werbach, K., & Hunter, D. (2012). For the win how game thinking can revolutionize your business. Philadelphia: Wharton.