The impact of new media on customer relationships

From Journal of Service Research

The ways consumers communicate with each other have been changing dramatically over the last decade.  New media require a shift in marketing thinking – consumers have become highly active partners, serving as customers as well as producers and retailers, being strongly connected with a network of other consumers. This paper introduces a new ‘‘pinball’’ framework of new media’s impact and from a detailed analysis of the specific characteristics of new media, the authors identify challenges relating to understanding of consumer behavior. 10 new media phenomena have been identified, for each they summarize the existing literature and highlight important areas for future research. While the enormous rise of new media is highly disruptive for the management of relationships with customers, it also creates extensive opportunities for new business models.

Making friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music culture in the context of web 2.0

From Cultural Sociology

Recent years have seen some significant changes in music culture, the Web 2.0 movement has been a catalyst. The general shift has been toward virtual cultural artefacts, where individuals download digitally compressed music files from internet sources or ‘rip’ them from CDs(or even audio tapes and vinyl records). By focusing specifically upon the presence of the popular music performer Jarvis Cocker across various Web 2.0 applications, this article seeks to open up a series of questions and create opportunities for research into what is happening in contemporary music culture. Of significant interest to cultural sociology is how senses of ‘belonging’ and ‘taste communities’ are altered as music cultures move out onto the web-top in the Web 2.0 context. This exploratory article lays out an agenda for research into music culture and Web 2.0 that is not only concerned with the implications of Web 2.0 for music. It concludes there is a need to think in some detail both about the implications for other cultural spheres, and the possible ways in which each of these spheres might in turn come to affect the nature of the connections that make up Web 2.0 itself.

Political scandal and new media: A technology of liberation?

Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia

From New Media & Society

This article challenges the long held assumption that political scandals can only occur in liberal democracies, also as most studies on scandals were authored before the rise of the internet and social media. It scrutinizes scandals that emanate from the new sphere of social media. To address both aspects this study asks the question how are such ‘internet scandals’ impacting politics in contemporary Russia?  Furthermore it aims to enrich the broader, currently on-going academic debate on the question of whether the internet is to be seen rather as a ‘technology of liberation’ or as one of ‘control’. Do scandals that emanate from the new sphere of social media actually ‘empower’ Russian citizens?

Two case studies are presented to vividly illustrate how public outrage over key political issues can also be sparked by blatant violations of moral feelings deeply rooted in the populace. Russian citizens were not outraged because the culprits of the scandals had broken the law. Nor did they later care if the perpetrators were punished according to it. Rather, Russian citizens were appalled because they shared the deep moral feeling that the occurrences were so despicable that they simply should not happen in their country. These scandals presented could not have occurred without the existence of certain ‘spheres’ of media that functioned independently of central power. The relative weight of these media spheres, their respective political ideologies, and their internal structures seem to be crucial variables that determine the course and outcome of political scandals in a context that might be called a ‘hybrid’ media system. The approach proposed in this article seems to open up promising avenues for further comparative research across cultural and political contexts. While the scope of this article was limited to two case studies from Russia, it would be valuable to see how the findings are paralleled by or deviate from those, for instance, related to internet scan­dals in China, Arabic countries, or other regions of the world.