Here you go, the final and published version of the thesis (in Finnish, except for the summary). Enjoy!

Pro Gradu -tutkielma (Lähdevuori&Tuominen)

Feel free to borrow, copy and use it, just remember to use citations (as in the Creative Commons “Attribution” license).

I’ve been working on the last stages of the project today: correcting the language (huge thanks to Aksu!), checking the layout and thinking about the foreword. Since it’s already kinda late already and I’ve been really prolific (considering it’s saturday), I decided to come up with something nice to end the day’s work with. The result can be seen below: a tag cloud for the thesis. (click here for bigger image)

I made it using OCLC’s Tag Cloud Builder which allows you copy-paste any text to its site in addition to clouding a web site. I simply discarded the “contents”, “abstract”, ”references”, “appendices”, pictures and tables from the main text of the thesis, which I then copied to the Tag Cloud Builder. The text had over 22 000 words, so those 100 words in the cloud should be proud of themselves for making the cut

The tag cloud reveals something about the structure of the thesis. Fortunately the revelations turned out to be good of us: brand communities and its members are mentioned many times, as well as the internet (or web as in web 2.0), consumers, marketer & marketing. Participation and content are also mentioned. Some tags underline the academic side of the text.

And to those of you who are not fluent with Finnish: “Ja” means “And”

This is a little bit off the topic, but I had to post this since I’ve shown my (and Elli’s) love for Threadless here before too. In a nutshell it probably the best example of a thriving internet based brand community there is. The point of interest is tee shirts, which the community designs, votes, buys and comments. Check it out and fall in love.

Anyway, we got our first Threadless-tees delivered two weeks ago and I got so excited that I had to post a design submission of my own. Well, now its up for voting at their site (click the link below)

Because of the absolutely amazing quality of the designs, the chances of being selected for printing are pretty slim. Anyways, click the link above, give it a fiver and check out the rest of the site as well

Yesterday we gave a presentation on our (almost complete) thesis to our thesis group at the university. Although we would’ve wanted the thesis to be completely ready at this point, the presentation went very well. We received good feedback on the thesis as a whole from those who had read it thru — especially on the theoretical framework and the Web 2.0 chapter.

We also got some good advice on what we should still do or at least consider doing. This was mostly focused on the empirical study and how its results were presented. Last nite we already made some changes on those according to our mentor’s advice.

Only one thing on the downside: Elli told me later on that I kept talking about “me doing this, me thinking that”… Could’ve said us, but no — not me, the selfish bastard

Here you go (in Finnish again, sorry):

Our sample consisted of 388 answers, of which 249 were qualified for analysis. There were 65 % girls and 32 % boys (the rest were missing) in these 249 cases, aged primarily between 14 and 16.  Here are some basic facts of the sample:

• 22% used the internet more than 20 h per week. Only 16 % used it less than 5 h a week.
• 76 % (!) had created some kind of content (text, pictures, audio, video, ratings etc.) on the internet in the past two weeks. Compared to a 2005 PEW study which discovered a percentage of 57 %, we can see that we are constantly moving towards more and more UGC (although these studies are not totally comparable because of the different measures and geographic location).
• Everyone was a part of a some web-based community — 24 % were members in just one community, 22 % in two, 15 % in three, 13 % in four, 9 % in five, and 17 % in six or more. Of those who weren’t qualified only 24 didn’t have profile in any community — which is a mere 6 % of the whole!
• When asked for their most important community, an astonishing 60 %  mentioned IRC Galleria, a Finnish social networking site. This is of course no news to Finns, who all are aware of the popularity of Galleria among teenagers. The interesting point here is the difference between boys and girls: 86 % of that 60 % above were girls.
• Other important communities cited ranged from Suomi24 to Facebook, from deviantART to Youtube, and from Last.fm to World of Warcraft plus a whole lot of smaller Finnish sites.
• 27 % spent more than 10 h per week in their afore mentioned most important community. 31 % spent between 5 and 10 h, and 42 % less than 5 h a week.

That’s all for starters. Next up, some cross-tabulation highlights.

Last few weeks we’ve been preparing for and then doing our quantitative research on the motivations to participate in online communities. Right now we have all the data collected and we’ll move on to analyzing it with SAS (or SPSS). That’ll be interesting since that’s quite new for both of us — if you don’t count the two courses on which we quickly tried the softwares. 

Anyway, I thought I’ll quickly tell the basics of the study here. Later, we’ll post the results of the analysis here too. But right now, let’s take a look at the design of the study.

Research question

What motivates internet users to participate in online communities and content creation within them? We also wanted to see what, if any, are the moderating effects of the user’s internet usage and his/her commitment to the community.

Sample description

We chose teenagers (14-17 years old) as our target group. This for two reasons: 1) the teens of today have grown up with the net — especially web 2.0 — and it has a central role in their life. They have been dubbed the Gen C — as in Content or sometimes Community — because creating content and sharing it with their friends thru online communities is a typical form of self expression for them. 2) They represent an interesting and important segment for marketers, because not only do they have a relatively substantial amount of disposable income, but they also have a great impact on the decision making of their families considering more expensive purchases – and thru web 2.0’s ratings and recommendations also on the the internet public as a whole.

Data collection

For the sample to be as representative of the youth as possible we decided to collect the data from schools — of course it would have been easier to collect the data directly from some online community, but then we would’ve missed a whole lot of people, for example those who don’t frequently visit that site or those who only lurk there. We conducted the study in both of ours old middle schools, Matinkylä and Pohjois-Tapiola. 388 questionnaires were filled — of which about 1/3 did not qualify for the analysis for various reasons. 

Questionnaire design and test

We based the questions on both brand community and motivation literature. (I’ll post the questionnaire here later.) Before the actual data collection we conducted a qualitative research on the questionnaire in Lauttasaari middle school, just to make sure that the teens understood what we were asking. And they did.

Right now we have almost all of the data coded from the papers into Excel (man, I tell you that was fun! Well, actually it sounds worse than it is — you can listen to music and just unwind while filling those rows). So soon we’ll start toying aroung with the statistical methods and all. Hope we’ll get something good out of the bunch!

I’ll get back to you with some highlights soon!

Holidays went past quickly whilst we were preoccupied with the thesis. But the hard work paid off, and we got the theoretical framework almost done. Some bits still need a little polishing, some bits are yet to be written.

And the most important thing: right now we both are satisfied with all of it. 

Here are some interesting quotes from various sources, that all describe what’s the real deal about Web 2.0.

“What we’ve seen in the past five years is a whole new phase of the internet. One of the most important principle of this is participation – everyone can easily set up blogs, upload videos and create music and podcasts. For the first time we are not just consumers but are enabled to become creators, so we have this doubling of media space leading to a world of infinte content, of infinite entertainment.”

- Ross Dawson, Trends in Living Networks blog 

“To me web 2.0 is not a technology revolution. It’s rather users accepting the idea of collaborating.”

- Jay Adelson, CEO, Digg (quote from Marketing 2.0 blog)

 ”The terms being thrown around concenrning Web 2.0: web as a platform, architecture of participation, web as OS, these are not the real innovations. These are enablers of the real innovation: a social revolution brought on by an incredible leap in the creation of software that allows humans to be, well, more human.”

- Joshua Porter, Bokardo blog

“In my talk, I point to threadless.com and our own Make magazine as examples of two very old-school businesses — selling t-shirts and a print magazine — that act as, and succeed as, Web 2.0 companies. How? They put their users front and center.”

- Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Radar blog

“Marketing 2.0 is not about understanding or even mastering this blog, flickr, del.icio.us, or YouTube phenomena. It’s rather to take action upon consumers and customers driving our initiatives. And to me, it’s above all for us to establish and maintain a transparent and empathic dialog with them.”

-Emmanuel Obadia, Marketing 2.0 blog

In a nutshell: User rules and customer is the king.

Empirical study got postponed. Everything else is on the to-do-list right now.

Those of you who are regulars (and my friends on Facebook) already know that I’ve started the writing process this week. Wohoo! It’s gone pretty smoothly so far — just as planned. I should have the first two chapters done at end of the week, just in time for the holidays. Then I’ll hand the writing process over to Elli, who’s doing reading and planning for her part as we speak.

We should have the all the theory written around new year’s, which means at least half of the pages overall. Empirical study is now scheduled for the last to weeks of January (due to reasons that we couldn’t affect). And this probably means that the finishing line is reached by the end of February, not January.

All in all, we’re still on track — this small-time setback with the empirical study only delayed the project two weeks or so.

“Tell me and I forget.

Show me and I remember.

Involve me and I understand.”

- Chinese proverb

This one is dedicated to all those brands still pushing their message thru like they always have for the last century or so.