Week 10 - create a plan for a company’s communication in the network society

Our sixth  group assignment was to create imaginary company that fits our theme and plan how it reaches its customers via internet. Since our theme was movies, we chose to be company that virtually rents movies, for a price. So far nothing new, there's Netflix and Viaplay for that. What sets us apart from our rivals, however, is how we interact with our community

Social media proves that everybody likes to have their voice in every discussion. Everybody has opinion and wants to show it. We are there to help that; to help people become critics. Our website/app has guides how to write good review, tips from professionals critics. encyclopedia for terms related to movies etc.

We strongly exploit gamification in our business. The term means using video game elements to activate our customers. People love collecting, competing and showing their superiority so we have levels and achievements. You can points towards levels from everything you do: watching movies, writing reviews, rating and commenting reviews of other people and so on. New levels grant you benefits such as new ways to customize your profile and discounts for certain movies. Achievements on the other hand are there just show your milestones, like watching 100 movies, writing 50 reviews, commenting 200 times, attending certain competition in our website etc. This type of gamification enables so-called "whales", term commonly used in free-to-play -games. It means people that spend huge amounts of money, possibly tens of thousands of euros to small game just to achieve highest rank in the ladder and maintaining it. There's always people like that if there's even single element of competition.

Aside from gathering levels by watching movies we have lots of other ways to activating and gaining customers, We hold competition related to movies, such as making new trailers for movies people love. Since we of course have right for these trailers, we can use them as effective way of advertising us and our passionate community. We also attract new customers by sharing our polls all over the social media. These polls have little hook in them: you do poll, for example about which movie protagonist you are. If you then proceed to create account for our service you can watch that specific movie for discount. Aside from those we also have quizzes, interviews with movie directors and actors and of course statistics about everything related to movies, just to increase our reliability as number one movie-related company.

We also are strongly present in social media. Users gain benefits from sharing their content in websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. This strategy is nowadays very common in all smaller applications for phones and tablets and makes it easier for company to advertise itself. Grapevine often works way better than any ad.

HS