(02/08/18)

This week, I thought it would be a cool idea to discuss how the affordances of Instagram affect the way COMPANIES author, publish and distribute their advertising materials to the public. (I know right, trust the PR gal to twist the class prompt and place it under a business/marketing lens.)

When reading ‘New Media’ by Martin Lister, this particular quote stuck out to me.

“Desire for communication and the pressures of commercialisation have interacted to bring us Web 2.0 and its expression in the form of social networking sites.” (Lister, 2009)

It led me to reflect on how in this day and age, companies are all about cultivating relationships with their customers. There’s this idea that businesses want to stray away from the whole ‘one-way communication’ flow whereby, businesses acts as a sender, pushing out their products, advertisements and services out to their targeted audiences with no real intention to hear an immediate response or opinion; thus making them mindless receivers. This one sided form of interaction leaves little room for genuine relationships; making the interaction between the two incredibly limited and sterile.

Businesses want to be seen as human entities, less so than corporate robots. This can be shown through the array of millennial age brands that relate to their demographics through publishing relatable content on Instagram, whilst simultaneously promoting their products and services.

With the introduction of social media platforms such as Instagram, businesses are able to directly communicate with their consumers, thus fostering an intimate and personal experience when individuals choose to purchase from said companies.

Think about it this way- when a business publishes a photo onto their profile, it is usually with the intent that it will urge their consumers to respond in some way; whether it is simply liking the photo or commenting/tagging their friends- which will eventually lead to visibility of the brand and eventual purchase.

Here’s an example:

A photo like this is one of many examples of brands with an Instagram account trying to engage with their followers. Princess Polly is famous for treating their customers like friends. This is done so through the continual usage of pet names when addressing them. By hosting frequent competitions that involves participants to actively comment and engage with, it showcases the perfect example of Instagram harvesting a “symbiotic relationship with media culture which has offered audiences participatory opportunities.” (Lister, 2009)

“The capacity of networked communications to connect with a multiplicity of niche markets ensures that lower volume products can attain a sustainable margin of profitability” (Lister, 2009).

This quote relates to the case study of Princess Polly as a brand. They have no physical flagship store; all of their clothes are sold online and promoted through their Instagram account. In short, they would have monumentally failed prior to the digital age. The brand is known to publicly reply to comments on their photos, follow their customers back and like a photo where customers have tagged them in when wearing their clothes. Without social platforms like Instagram, brands like Princess Polly would never take flight as they would have zero visibility.

Conversely, the ability to tag brands in photos, mention brands in stories and utilise appropriate hashtags to gain their attention are all examples of how the increase in brand marketing on social media platforms alters the way we publish our photos and behave on social media platforms.

On another note, the second reading by Adrian Miles discusses the term ‘folksonomy’ which refers to the act of categorising posts by appropriately assigning them tags. This allows users to easily search others’ content on the basis of specific tags and discover new profiles (Miles, 2012). Switching it back to how this can alter the way individuals author, publish and distribute their Instagram posts would be tagging clothing brands in their photos to gain the attention of said brand to then respond.

All in all, Instagram provides a platform for not only consumers to share and communicate with one another, it spans beyond that and serves as a vital marketing tools most, if not all brands must embrace in order to deem themselves successful.

References

• Lister, Martin, et al. New Media: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2009.(Networks, Users and Economics 163-169/ Wiki Worlds and Web 2.0 204-209/The Long Tail 197-200/User-generated content, we are all users now 221-232)
• Miles, Adrian. Soft Cinematic Hypertext (Other Literacies). RMIT University, 2012. (Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge 201-208)