Ok, here goes the cherry, my first time blogging… Exciting stuff 
To start with, I’ll explain the story behind this blog: Me and Elli are doing a master’s thesis together in Helsinki School of Economics (HSE) and we thought (ok, I thought ) that it would be nice to document the process. In addition to that, we hope this will help us setting and keeping up with various deadlines, monitoring our development as well as storing data related to our subject. And since our subject has quite a lot to do with blogs, we thought it might be nice to contribute to the blogosphere, get to know it a little better and maybe even get a few insightful comments from interesting people
What is our subject then? Well, we have been playing around with it since late august (when we got the idea of a co-operative thesis) and today we got it almost nailed finally . We are both marketing majors, so that makes marketing one of the areas of interest. And we both covered areas of digital marketing on our bachelors thesis and we wanted to stay on the 21th century on this as well. Somehow web 2.0 caught our attention. These were the two subject matters that we chose as our main themes and we’ve been trying to figure out our angle on those for the past two months..
When it comes to the marketing theory part of the thesis, for a long while we thought we wanted to write about marketing communication, since that is a mutual interest for us, and we tried to find the right way to mix it with all things web 2.0. But that didn’t work out too well.. Now we are set on concentrating on brands: brand management, brand equity and brand communities. Especially brand communities offer a good ground to study and analyze the change in the internet that has been dubbed web 2.0.
And as for the web 2.0, we have had a hard time first of all defining the term (we have a whole lot of nice mind maps and tag clouds up on our walls ) and deciding on which aspects to focus on (since there are numerous more and more interesting dimensions). The natural way to go of course is to try and find the most remarkable aspects from marketers point of view. One of them of course is the idea of harnessing collective intelligence (coined by web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly in 2005). Others include UGC (UGV, UGM, UGwhatever), crowdsourcing, the long tail and interaction/participation/collaboration/conversation.
OK, so now you know the ingredients. Over the next few months (we had our final deadline set for new year’s, but we have already postponed it – a lot ) we’ll start mixing it up and hopefully we’ll have a decent thesis ready by May (when we should graduate).
If you like what’s on the menu, please stay tuned to learn more about marketing in the web 2.0 era and contribute whenever you feel like it!
Tags: Brand communities, brand equity, brand management, crowdsourcing, long tail, Marketing, O'Reilly, thesis, UGC, us, Web 2.0
