Digita and Interactivity

Digita and interactivity

Theme: always, everywhere and interactivity

Digita is a radio and TV broadcasting company with a network covering almost the whole of Finland. Its customers are media companies, household consumers and mobile and broadband operators.It´s the biggest company in Finland so it hasn´t got many competitors; they are not rivals because it is so big.

During the group meetings, readings and while gathering information I have come to realise that radio is more important than what I thought. We listen to radio every day and everywhere even without noticing.

The traditional view of radio is disappearing towards a tendency to interactivity. This means that instead of listening to the radio when the programmes are available, we listen to it when we want to, and that is when we have free time. Now we can use our computer, phone or tablet to choose exactly the programmes we want to listen to and when we want to listen to them. The user is able to decide and choose, something that he was not able to do before. There is also a tendency to make it each time more interactive, as people like giving feedback and taking part in it. This can be done through the use of multimedia, social media, computer clouds and a variety of ways. The audience is no longer passive but active. They get bored if they can´t take part in the programmes.

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Sources

http://www.digita.fi/
Radio becoming r@dio: Convergence, interactivity and broadcasting trends in perspective - Paula Cordeiro

 

Modern Radio-interactivity

Modern Radio

The new media environment challenges traditional radio broadcasters who are online to improve their traditional broadcasting towards multimedia content and distribution.

Internet is available worldwide, which has led broadcasters to approach the Internet in two ways: using it as a process (creating intranets for content production and management, and as a working tool, as a  source of information and news gathering); and as a distribution platform.

Multimedia takes radio out of its traditional business and broadcasting model, giving the listener a broad set of capabilities.

Interactivity

Interaction is the communication between user and system.

The purpose of an interactive system is to aid a user in accomplishing goals from some application domain.

An interactive communication is characterised by three factors: it is multi-way (it involves two or more actors), it is immediate, as responses occur within seconds; and it is contingent in that the responses of one actor follow directly and logically from the action of another.

By using digital devices and computer interfaces, interactive systems and frameworks applied to radio establish different types of interaction, changing its effectiveness, which depends mostly on two different factors: the design of the interface that allows the user to express himself; and the computer literacy of the radio listener.

In media, the goal is to be able to give feedback, introduce ideas, comment or simply take part in the communication process, participating in media content and conversations.

Nowadays listeners’ participation in radio is also an online participation. It is characterised by written posts, such as emails, blog comments, or online social network posts; images video and audio.

Cloud computing aims to allow access to large amounts of data in a virtualised manner, by aggregating resources and offering a single system view.

Radios today create a media that broadcasts real-time audio. Audio that can be accompanied by texts and images, even if these aren’t necessary to understand the message being broadcasted.

Radio broadcasting has evolved into something more than just an audio media with new features (web-only music channels, web-only video channels, blogs, polls and online comments).

Radio stations are developing multimedia content, storing and sharing online (videos, audio archives and pictures), incorporating webblogs, photoblogs, podcasts, videocasts, wikis (as examples of social media) into their websites with associated sharing platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter buttons.

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Sources

Radio becoming r@dio: Convergence, interactivity and broadcasting trends in perspective - Paula Cordeiro

Reflection on different tools

Tools (Reflection)

User journey mapping:

It is a visual representation of the journey that a user makes when he/she attends a service which allows us to identify the weak points and strengths of our service in order to improve the first and maintain the second. Its goal is to identify the elements of the service and understand the interaction between them in order to improve any fails during the process, which is counted since the user gets to know about the service until he/she leaves it.

The main benefit is that as it breaks down the process into smaller parts it makes it very easy to identify the problems, which is the main step to be able to correct them.

It is important to bear in mind that different users will make different uses of the same service so it is very useful to repeat it for different types of users, thus creating a map with multiple journeys.

I will create an example with a small store which sells kitchen material:

Lisa is passing by the street and sees on the window of the shop cooking utensils. She remembered she needs a special baking utensil and enters the shop. After searching for a while she is unable to find it, and asks the staff. They take some time to find it but finally they hand it to her. Lisa was not expecting that it would take such a long time for this because she is a busy working mother but buys it and leaves.

With this example we have discovered that there is a problem referred to the time the particular task of searching for products in the storage section takes, which we can now improve by implementing a better storage organisation which could even include having an inventory linked to the computer.

User shadowing:

A user is observed in order to identify and understand his/her needs.

The key point here is choosing the right people to shadow in order to get as much information as possible.

The main advantage is that it shows an outside view of the process which makes it possible to identify things the consumer is not aware of and also prevents the information the consumers give from being biased as what they say they do and what they actually do might not necessarily coincide.

User personas:

Information from many different people is gathered, these people are then divided counting on their similarities and their information is synthesised into one sole character or persona which represents them all.

Focus should be made in the fact that these characters or personas must be archetypes, which means that their differences must be rounded up, and not stereotypes, which are based on believes more than on objective information.

This is useful as today’s market demands each time more personalisation of the services instead of mass producing. Although it is risky to make a representation of a whole group of people based just on an average value of their personal information it is something that has to be done as it is impossible to take into account everyone’s individual wishes.

I have chosen these 3 particular methods because I think they complement each other very well. Journey mapping takes the consumers point of view (which is one of the most important things as the use of our services relies on them) and divides the service into its basic tasks and activities which makes it very easy to identify problems. Shadowing does a similar thing but records the process from the outside (not from the customers view) which takes away the bias on the information provided by the client and includes information he/she might not be aware of. Lastly Personas takes all these different personal experiences and clusters them into representatives to make it easy  to attend to the different needs of the customers.

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Sources:

Design methods for developing services-Technology Strategy Board

http://www.slideshare.net/fred.zimny/design-methods-services

About Digita

DIGITA-Marketing

DIGITA has several ways of marketing. As it is a big TV and Radio broadcasting company whose customers are mostly TV and Radio channels it does not need to focus on mass marketing.

DIGITA has a webpage in which we can find general information about the company and its history. There, we can find a section called image gallery, where they have posted pictures of the managers, the TV and Radio stations, employees during their work and logos so that people can have an Idea of how they work.

On the internet they also have a twitter, facebook and  linkedin accounts, where they post news about the company’s activities (DIGITA invests in young people, participates in the national telework day, they post news about TV and radio programmes and special emissions such as hockey matches broadcasted by them, and info on weekly contests with prizes organised by them).

On TV and radio they have several advertisements such as akkoset and ainutlaatuinen yhteys.

They have also done interviews in magazines and TV, such as the interview with East Dublin magazine (in spring 2013) about rescue practices to ensure safety in the company  in Mikkeli. There is a video version of this interview as well.

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Sources:

Images section: managers, TV and radio stations, employees working, logos.

TV ads: akkoset , ainutlaatuinen yhteys, etc.

http://www.digita.fi/yhtio/media/netti-estradi

Interview: East dublin magazine interview (spring 2013) about rescue practices to ensure safety  in the company  in Mikkeli.   ‘’ High masts workers are working in good physical condition.’’ 

Video interview:

http://www.ita-savo.fi/uutiset/video-ja-kuva/mastossa-ei-turvallisuudesta-tingit%C3%A4-katso-video-56355

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Digita_fi

-News -digita investing in Young people.

-Information on radio/TV channels  (their customers). Wappuradio,radio rock, TV kanavie...

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/digita.fi/photos_stream

-News: Info about karttapalvelu and info about hochey matches’ emisions.

Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/digita-oy

Ad about a weekly contest they organise in which you can win and ipad.

Digita participates in the national telework day.

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Personal reflection:

The main obstacle I experienced during this task was that all the information was in Finnish, and due to my imposibility to understand it I had to run everything through google translator, which's translation was very bad. Even so, I managed to get an idea of the marketing that DIGITA carries out and the main conclusion I get from this is that although it is a big and very well known company that one might think doesn't need to focus that much on marketing it is very active on TV advertising and on social media.