Thoughts

Politics and Social Media With the rise of the internet, political debate and key social issues are now discussed on social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube etc. As the masses adopted this new way of life, politicians followed suit, by spending more money on online ads and launching entire campaigns to target their voters and raise awareness about themselves and the issues they stand for. In fact, since 2008, when Barack Obama announced his intention to run for President of the U.S.A, his campaign was the first major election that relied so heavily on recruiting volunteers online. The Obama campaign was able to identify the power of social media very early, long before there were any big analytics firm to use AI to affect change. Despite this, they were able to sign up over 1.5 million volunteers for their eventually successful campaign effort. Social media and politics have been intertwined and have continued to grow their influence on the public ever since. Today I learned, how ...

The Emergence of Influencers I've long felt that promoters are an essential marketing element to any successful product or service. In fact, this form of advertising is certainly a very personal and effective tool to get people to engage with products. However, this personal element to marketing has consistently fallen out of favour with big corporations and advertisers. By nature, promoters had two issues, their effectiveness was either too localised in terms of their sphere of influence or too expensive, hiring celebrities to show off their sponsored content.  The marketing world has come a long way since mass marketing to all, inspired by the group thinking philosophy of Edward Bernays and blowing out their marketing budgets for Super Bowl adverts and sponsored shows/matches. The rise of social media since the late 2000s has given rise to the phenomenon of internet influencers. As these influencers often grow to popularity in sub-genres of media production, they build a unique a...