New Media Application
Google Analytics & AdWords
Google Analytics is a service that provides detailed statistics to its customers that help to keep track of the traffic on their own websites. It is a service that is aimed towards marketers and it benefits them by painting a broader picture of their customers’ habits. This makes it easier for the marketers to cater their advertising to their audiences needs.
Google AdWords provides a platform for its customers to advertise their businesses from. It works by giving its users the option of setting their own ‘Keywords’ for their online adverts. The advert appears on Google to anyone that will have searched for the ‘keywords’, or anything relating to the ‘keywords’. It is a relatively cheap and easy way of advertising your business online that also directs your customers straight to you.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is a website that provides a global audience to anybody that has a new, creative idea that they would like to pitch. It helps the creative projects to get funded, and the funds can come from anybody around the world. People donate money for the projects they believe in and would like to get made. Since 2009, Kickstarter has funded 51,000 projects by pledging over $867 million. Each project has a set target of money that they need to be donated. If they do not reach their target, then the project doesn’t get the funding. The creators of the projects can offer the would-be investors some kind of reward for their donation. There is often competition among investors as the better the donation is, the better the rewards are.
Kickstarter is getting bigger and bigger and is starting to attract some high profile names. Zach Braff, star of Scrubs and creator of the film ‘Garden State’, used Kickstarter to fund his follow up film. He used Kickstarter because it gave him the freedom to create what he wanted, without interference from any financial backers that would just like to see a return on their money.
Zach Braff' Kickstarter video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nAw_WtIuY
Social Media
Social Media has become one of the most powerful marketing tools around in the world today. With over a billion users on Facebook alone, it has a consistent global audience that are easily within reach of promoting our product to. We are all pretty used to social media sites by now so it is nothing new to us, however, the scope that these sites have make it useful not just for us as a student group, but high end, multi-million pound production companies use it as it has that much power and potential to reach an audience.
Social Media sites have started to cater advertising to all of their users by monitoring what they like and what they do, which is what makes them so popular for promoting their products. Although, When you take a step back from focussing on how well it can promote, you can realise that there is quite an ethical debate as to whether it is acceptable for users to be watched like that.
Facebook and Twitter Logos