Writing for new media - Something about promotion on the Internet

Writing for new media

You might have already seen this comic recently.
Yeah.
These few pictures have already explained a lot about how our lives and habits have changed -- we can do almost everything with our computer.

Moreover, what attract people most on the computer, of course, is the Internet. Writing for new media has thus become an important skill for many companies. To keep the customers' loyalty, a lot of companies have created their own Facebook page, Twitter, weibo, and blog. They must change their writing style from traditional to modern in order to attract the audience's eyeball.

Internet users are always multi-tasking: listening to music, watching American drama, doing homework, blogging. They are not as willing as people in the past to spend much time reading paragraph by paragraph, word by word. Therefore, in order to attract more audience,
we have to pay more effort to
learn how to write better for
the new media.

My experiencing in writing for new media, as well as how I utilize the new media

Don't know if anyone of you know, there's actually a Band Society in CityU.
This year, I am one of the committee members of the society(the 16th Band Society).
Being band music enthusiasts, we do not only go out together for band shows or playing in bands, but we also organize band shows.

The very last show we are organizing will be a reunion(relaunch) band show of a local indie band, Chochukmo.

(Feel free to contact me if you are interested in our show!)

As a general secretary of the society, my friend and I are responsible for finding media for promotion. The media we're finding include traditional media (e.g. radio, magazine, newspaper) and new media (e.g. Facebook, discussion forums, weibo).

In the last two to three weeks, we have been trying really hard on promotion on the Internet. And we found that the effect is actually a bit different among different new media.


Facebook

1. Create an event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=268204539886067

This is very convenient for the guests to check what the date, time and venue are, when and where they can buy tickets.

What we found most important is that as the people being invited are more likely to read the information at first glance and will not bother to read it twice. So, we better not have any information corrected after we invited people to attend our event.

2. Posting the event onto our wall

It works quite effectively when our Facebook account has over 1000 friends that are interested in band sound.



3. Adding the suggested persons or people who are attending other band shows

Continuing the second point, we add some more music lovers and let them know about our event.
However, we have to pay much attention in adding people. Facebook has already blocked us for more than three times because people are not always accepting our friend request and may not be accepting our request immediately. Facebook will record our "spam" requests which our friend request and inbox message function will be blocked for several days. (First time it's 1 day, then it's 2 days, and this time it is a 4-day block!)

4. Posting Youtube links of the band

Nowadays people are more likely to watch motion pictures than reading words. It'll be more attractive to our target audience, who are band lovers, to watch music videos than only to read our event details.



Discussion Forums

1. Start a new topic about the event.

This is actually quite hard to think of a topic. Yes! It IS HARD!
The users of the forums most probably have their own habit in using the forums.
For example, adding emotion icons:  (from hkgolden)
OR having their own special online slangs, like LOL(means laugh out loud) in the western countries.

We have to pretend not to be the new users in order to let more people read our threads.

2. Leaving comments on related posts

This works better than posting a new thread. The tone we use to start a new topic may look too much like advertising or propaganda. People normally ignore these posts.

We can also post the Youtube links and let more people know our bands.


Weibo

1. Following people

In terms of the function of "friend request" of new media, this is a lot better than the one on Facebook.
On the first day when I open an account, I've already followed over 200 people.

2. Using keywords

Like the hashtags on Twitter, people can type their status with keywords, which other users will see their status if they search the corresponding keywords. We use 'band shows' both in Chinese and English to attract more people's attention.


We are pleased that other than discussion forums, the other new media seem quite effective in raising the number of attendees. We hope to see more people know about our event after we have the help of the traditional media, including magazine and radio.