Online Customer Behavior

Dentsu, a Japan advertising agency, develops the AISAS concept to explain the online user behavior in Web 2.0 era. AISAS stands for Attention-Interest-Search-Action-Share. This process explains how online user usually behaves when they are using Internet especially in decision making of buying product. Web 2.0 enables the web designers to provide a rich communication environment such as multimedia to foster interest level among online user. At the first level, Web 2.0 technology can generate interest to online user comparing to Web 1.0 that only attract simple attention from online user.

When the online user has reached the high level of interest, they will search the product or company that they are ready to buy in order to search a cheapest price and the retail store. But somehow, in search level online user may find the other competitor offering the better product or finding the bad news/comments about the product that the online user wants to buy. That is why recently the term of Search Engine Optimization/ Marketing begins popular in virtual world. SEO/SEM is an effort to put the company/product website not only at the top of the search engine list but to put the best content at the top of search engine top list.

If online user has decided to but (action) and already used the product then the online user will share their experience of using the product in social networking or in their blog. This last level will directly effect in Search level because the sharing content of online user will be put in search engine top list and this is how PR should always the monitor the result the product/company in the top search engine like Google.

Internet and Digital Economy

Internet has been kind of revolutionary thing in our world today. Internet has changed our habits in playing, learning, and collaborating with other people. It is now easy for me to access much information for my assignments / research. That is a simple example on how Internet has created the information revolution era. It is the era where the information is the most important thing to have in order to survive especially in business environment. The old economy says that the bigger will defeat the smaller but now in new economy information-based, the faster will defeat the slower.

E-Commerce becomes popular in previous year, people now can sell and buy the goods from all around the world. Although the e-commerce is still considered the less secure to do the trade but still it is one of the promising way to do a business. Social media and networking that enables user generated content or consumer generated media has been the best example of Web 2.0, a new form of web that has many more interesting features like interactivity between peer to peer, attractive web content such as multimedia.

In conclusion, Internet is not about the substitution of the physical real life but it is a tool to improve our life. It is not important on how good we are in using Internet but it is very important on how Internet can be used to improve our quality of life. Therefore, we don’t have to be so dependant on Internet, but we should know when and how Internet is needed to solve the problems in our life.

Cultural Diversity againsts Globalization

The globalization helps to reduce uncertainty in communicating with people which has different cultural background. Communication and transportation technology enable people around the world to live and understand the life of other people culture. This may be good for some reasons but on the other hand the globalization may threat the cultural diversity into cultural extinction. For example in Indonesia, our people are influenced heavily with westernization brought by fast food, TV cable, Internet, and MTV culture for the teenagers. Those things can be a serious threat for our national cultural diversity.

Intercultural communication is not only about communicating with people between nations or continents, it can also between the ethnic in one country or even between different company / organization. Ethnocentrism is still one of our sociocultural issue until now. People in Indonesia are depended on stereotype that people used to believe long time ago. We may hear about this following stereotype such as Padang known as “pandai berdagang” and stingy, Sunda as “suka dandan” and materialist. This stereotype may create a gap between one ethnic to another ethnic in Indonesia.

Therefore, communicator should have intercultural competence to be able communicate with other culture. The basic competencies that communicators should have are sensitivity and self-consciousness. These two things can help communicator to start a conversation and maintain relationship with other people background.

Coordinate Management of Meaning

Theories in interpersonal communication have been evolved into many forms and it becomes deeper from macro-social context into micro-social context. It starts from social influence, relationship development and recently interpersonal theories using cognitive psychology approaches to explain how humans process the information flow and the construction of meaning in interaction.

In Coordinate Management of Meaning theory, it is said that the communication is about a meaning. In daily interaction, people try to prepare/ coordinate their meaning when start communicating with other people. It looks at how individuals within a society create their own realities through communication. With that being said, realities are made, not found, meaning that communication interactions dictate what realities are created within a society and how they are affected by others. This reality is constantly evolving and adapts itself due to interactions. This theory also sees a conversation as process in which each participant affects and is affected by the other

Today, the Web 2.0 technology offers the social media/networking that enable human-computer interaction more entertaining and educating. I understand if computer-mediated communication is less socio-emotionally than face-to-face communication, but now as the internet user is increasing, the computer-mediated communication becomes a routine social interaction.

New Wave of Political Communication

It has been 10 years of reformation era since 1998 where Soeharto resigned his position as the President of Indonesia. In Soeharto regime, we had a non-democratic political system that affected the political communication system in Indonesia. At that time the citizens were really districted to criticize the government performance. Instead of their role as the watchdog of government, the media was used as a tool of government to inform its policy that may only benefit the government.

Nowadays, the political communicator whether they are journalist, opinion leader, or any political party now can freely communicate about their opinions and ideas or even criticize the current government performance. The democracy process in Indonesia is getting better where people now has more attention about the political issue and participates into political communication.

This situation is also supported with the advancement of information and communication technology that enable people to share their ideas and opinions about the current political situation. The information is democratized, many information about the political actor in government or any issue about politic can be found in Internet. The information is spread in blog, web portal, forum, social networking, mailing list and influence the perception of public that may lead into next political activities.

Communication Challenges in Organizational Communication

I always see the organizational communication as an internal communication process in organization. As we know in a large organization like a multinational corporation, its international communication will be so much harder because of its complex system and situation. The leaders in any organization must design its communication based on the type of their organization to make communication process easier either it’s vertically and horizontally.

Nowadays organizations face many challenges in advance. The competition, customer and changing situation enable flattening organization to make organization more effective and efficient. In hyper competition, organizations are demanded to more faster in doing their job and new technology in communication like e-mail, instant message, video call or video conference have helped organization to respond the challenge.

In conclusion, I think all organizations should understand the changing environment in political, economy, social and technology. They need to be proactive to respond to all changing environments. Communication officer in the organization should identify the public issue earlier (defining pre-issue) and preparing the crisis management before the crises occurs in organization.

Language and Social Interaction

Learning about the language and social interaction is never boring for me. Language isn’t just a vehicle to name the things or conveying the information but also I see a language as a form of life. To analyze a language we will interpret it in many ways depend on our culture and the context. For example say hello for greeting purpose and say hello in phone conversation.

In social interaction, language is not just a verbal communication but also as non-verbal communication such as body language or gesture. Something like sign, logo, and icon are also the language that can be interpreted and analyzed in many ways. This is so important when a company or a business creating its brand logo to represent its value and positioning of its product or corporate image. The brand logo should match with its specific target market audience/market to create a parity image.

As we know in mass media like newspapers, we use framing analysis to identify how media try to drive our perception with the journalist writing and the language has important role to drive the readers’ perception. This means language is considered as one of main point of communication study.

Globalization through Popular Communications

In my opinion, Popular Communications has an important role to support the culture integration as a part of a globalization. A borderless world that is created by the development of communication technology and multinational businesses enables the idea of Global Village to make it real. The word of global village refers to the world that has the same of culture or understanding. While this may be seen as a positive step towards unifying the world but in the other hand it’s consider as the threat for cultural diversity.

Popular Communications enhances the process of mass consumer culture in business perspective. It helps the adoption and adaptation of multinational company product/service such as American fast food that we can find anywhere around the world. TV , Radio, Newspaper and Internet contribute the process of making a new market trend that later can be a global consumerism of products/services.

The future of popular communications will take a part in blogosphere where everyone will write/speak about the recent news or trends in their blog. The reason why people tend to read in the blog than in newspaper because of its originality and the objectivity. People will find what’s new and what’s the next thing in their friend’s blog or any blog that people love. The blog as a new media is also considered as a new place for next popular communications practice.

Communication in PR 2.0

The advancement of information and communication technology has made Public Relations field more complex than ever. A conventional PR that everyone calls PR 1.0 has moved into PR 2.0. The birth of many channels of communication in Internet such as Blog, RSS, Forum, Social Media, Instant messaging have made overwhelm information to the people. It also makes the message uncontrolled and it's a PR job to deal this thing.

Recently, many companies begin to start their corporate blog while the others also not ready for doing that. The advantage of having a corporate blog is to identify the pre-issue that may appear in their public. The gap between public expectation and organizational performance is always happens but the corporate blog as a PR tool is expected to be able to deal this problem.

The blog itself has 2 major functions. The first one is “outside in” function which encourages participation to the people into a blog. That first function will lead people to make a comment to start a conversation between public and its organization. A conversation makes the second function which is “inside out”. This second action will influence the people /public perception about organization’s image.

PR today will be fully responsible to maintain issue in electronic communication such as blog that I mention. It also drives organization to be more transparent and accountable to their stakeholder.