Bryon Sabol
A Blog for Multimedia Authoring

How does an academic focused magazine generate interest in its content and build a following on Facebook and social media without simultaneously hurting its main focus of goal of selling its magazine.  Websites have often been thought of as being in competition with magazines.  The users expect that the content is free or heavily discounted.  This hurts the business model of magazines that rely on subscriptions and paid advertisements. A couple academic focused magazines, the Harvard Business Review and The Scientific American, are proving that social media and the providing of web content can be used to generate increased interest in the magazine by building communities around the brand.

The Harvard Business Review is extremely proactive on social media sites.  The have a presences on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  The have a popular blog and podcast.  They use these tools to broadcast and cross promote their content to their followers.  Across multiple social media platforms, discussions from readers and listeners are very active.  Their target audience is business professionals who are looking for business and career advice that can give them leverage to be successful.  This group of people actively responds to the posts with their own ideas, insights, and opinions.

Harvard Business Review Facebook Page

On the Harvard Business Review Facebook page and the LinkedIn group page, the magazine publishes their content.  Interestingly, they don’t actively respond to their fans and followers.  They present the discussion topic and allow the community discussion to evolve.  Wittkower wrote that “the indeterminacy of Facebook allows the users to create our own personal meanings around the social interactions that take place on the site.”  The Harvard Business Review’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages are the perfect example of providing users with the freedom to create, interact, and establish personalized communities and allowing the followers to formulate their own meaning of the social environment.  It’s not that different from Holzer’s Please Change Beliefs where users can navigate through ideas and then write their own truism.

The Harvard Business Review cross promotes to other social media sites.  For example, they promoted an idea sharing event on Twitter by asking users to tweet comments and questions to #HBRchat.

Harvard Business Review Facebook Twitter Promotion

#HBRchat Twitter Discussion

The Harvard Business Review social media sites are telematics at its best. People from around the world gather in these forums, exchange ideas and media, comment in real time, and try to establish a collective understanding of the presented topics.

The Scientific American Magazine follows a similar approach to the Harvard Business Review on Facebook.  They post stories, blog entries, and podcasts to their Facebook.  They cross promote their Twitter account.   Similar to Harvard Business Review, they do not respond their fans on Facebook, but they do on their blog and Twitter where there is more personality associated with the writers than the brand.  The community on Facebook does not suffer from this lack of two-way communication on Facebook.  The fans respond to the posts with their own opinions on the articles. There are a lot of interactions between fans per posting.

The Scientific American Magazine Facebook Page

The Scientific American Magazine provides exclusive benefits for their Facebook fans.  They offer special offers, such as discounted subscriptions.  Additionally, they provide exclusive fan only articles that are published on Facebook.  They hold essay contests on the site with cash prizes and the opportunity to be published in the magazine.

The Scientific American Magazine Facebook Only Article

The Scientific American Magazine Facebook Promotion

The Scientific American Magazine Pick a Magazine Cover

They publish their Twitter stream directly on a separate tab.  This provides their fans with an additional way for them to receive the Scientific American Magazine’s content. The blog site for the Scientific American Magazine contains a lot of social features and more interaction with the followers.  They have tools that allow the readers to share the articles on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.  They encourage dialog with their readers.  They include polls in the articles.  They have go as far as allowing their blog readers to vote for the cover of their magazine.  This gives the readers an active stake in the creation of the magazine.  It gives them a sense of ownership.  Similar to allowing their Facebook users to define the environment and meaning of the Facebook site, they are expanding that sense of ownership to the printed content.

One of the reasons that the Harvard Business Review and the Scientific American Magazine are successful in these mediums is because of their brand reputation that is associated with excellence and intelligence.  When a fan likes on these sites, they are announcing to their friends that they are a part of the magazine community.  They are branding themselves with what they feel is attractive.  The LinkedIn account that lists that they are part of the Harvard Business Review group announces to potential employers that the person is concerned with intellectual discussions surrounding business management.  Every time that a person writes on the Facebook page of the Scientific American Magazine, their post displays in their stream and they announce to their friends that they are the type of person who comments on a science website.  Essentially, the fans are branding themselves through the liking of these magazines.  They are presenting the image of themselves that they want the world and their friends to see.  Through the associations, the fans are redefining themselves.

Harvard Business Review LinkedIn Discussion

Both the Harvard Business Review and the Scientific American Magazine are examples of how academic magazines can successfully use social media and telematics to promote and sell their product.  Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or their blogs, the magazines use the power of community discussions to create awareness and interest in their content and products.  Meikle describe Facebook’s mode of communication as a broadcasting model that combines one-to-one communication and one-to-many with a many-to-many model.  These magazines take advantage of the platform capabilities.  They broadcast their message in similarly to an advertisement, but then they rely on their users to create the many-to-many discussions.  They allow the fans to define and redefine the meaning of the sites.  They use these mediums to create awareness for their brands and sell their products.  The magazines capitalize on the desires of their fans to be associated with an image of intelligence and academic studies.  The magazines allow the users to create their own meaning of the magazine, while ultimately redefining their own images of themselves.

It happens almost every single day of her life; a stranger approaches on the sidewalk or hiking path looks at her, starts laughing, and says “Hello, ears!” or “Wow! Look at the ears on that one” or “Those aren’t ears, those are satellite dishes.”  I’ve even had a man raise his hands over his head mimicking the ears and laughing. There is something about a cute dog that lowers the inhibitions of dog lovers.  People stop acting rational, say whatever is on their mind, and approach strangers they would avoid on the streets with the enthusiasm of an extrovert. My dog Bogie and her ears are a magnet for these people. They laugh, pet her, and leaves smiling and giggling. We continue walking, awaiting the next mockery, the next pointing, chuckling, or the laughing stares from distant approaching people.

Yes, Bogie has crazy ears.

Bogie

Bogies’ ears are disproportionately larger than her head.  They point straight up and flop back and forward and sideways and invert themselves and sometimes a combination of every direction.  They are a source of humor to everyone who passes us, but personally they are a source of guilt for us.  A guilt brought on by a dog loving stranger, who made us aware that my wife and I are horrible dog owners. I’m ashamed to admit it, but we inadvertently broke her ear cartilage when she was a puppy.

Bogie as a Puppy

My wife and I first met Bogie at the Charlottesville SPCS.  The photo on the website said Yellow Lab Mix.  When she entered the playing room, she ran straight to us, plopped on her back, rolled around, and spread her legs to have her belly scratched.  We knew instantly that we would be taking her home.

She had a happy puppyhood full of playing for hours, eating, belly rubs, chewing on our shoes and furniture, going to the bathroom on our carpet, biting our feet and hands, stealing food from little kids’ dangling hands, and having nonconsensual sex with our friends and families arms. Bogie had the softest ears, which she loved having massaged.  She would stare up into ecstasy as you rubbed her head and ears. They were always large but we loved her anyways. They added character. We figured that she would grow into them.

Then one day, one of her ears started to rise.  Over the course of weeks, we watched with fascination as the ears became more and more mobile.  They went sideways, up, down, back, forward, and every which way.  Labs’ ears are floppy.  We started to realize that Bogie wasn’t a lab.

Bogie Sporting the Side Ponytail

Sure enough, the DNA test showed that she was a White Sheppard, Golden Retriever, Belgium Tervuren, and one unknown species.  All of those dogs were large breeds, but Bogie was medium sized, no bigger than thirty pounds.  We began to speculate about the unknown. Was she coyote?  My sister found a site dedicated to American Dingos and Carolina Dogs, which are a native North American breed that were domesticated by the Native Americans.

Bogie Rocking the Flying Nun Ears in the Snow

As Bogie grew older, the one constant was the inconsistency of her ears positions.  We assumed that they would eventually rise and stay pointed up like a Sheppard, but they never did.  We began to come up with names for the positions.  There was the “Side Ponytail” when she placed both ears to the same side.  There was the “Uni-ear” or “Visor” where she placed both of them over her nose, almost crossing.  There was the “Slicked Back” where she pulled them straight back to where it looked like she had no ears. There was the “Flying Nun” where she placed them arched and to the side.

Bogie at Barboursville Ruins

We often laughed with passing people on our walks.   Then one day at the dog park, my wife and I were approached by the owner of a German Sheppard. She bred dogs and was admiring Bogie. We mentioned that Bogie was a Sheppard mix.  After looking at Bogie, the lady concurred.

“The only thing is her ears are all over the place,” I mentioned.

“Well, did you play with them when she was a puppy?” the woman asked looking at us.

“No, not that much,” I lied, but my face gave away my guilt.  We had massaged her ears for hours throughout her puppyhood.

“The last thing that you ever want to do with a Sheppard puppy is play with their ears,” The woman sternly said. “You will break their cartilage and they will never rise. It looks like you broke your dog’s ears.”

She looked at us with disgust as if we were running a dog fighting ring. Again there is something about the presence of a dog that makes people lower their reservations, approach strangers, and chastise them in public. We felt like the worst dog owners in the world.  We broke our dog’s ears.  No longer did the laughter of passing strangers feel like it was communal.  We were being reminded of our deforming love.  We are reminded of our subjecting the dog to laughter for life.

Bogie at the University of Virginia

So, if you pass us on the hiking trail and start to laugh, please forgive us if we walk by with only a slight smile.  We’ve heard all of the jokes and comments already.  We are responsible for the ears’ craziness.  We love Bogie with her crazy ears.  From what we can tell, she still loves us regardless of what dog loving, strangers say.

At the core of political campaigns is the art of persuasion, the articulation of a message, the establishment of an image and brand of the candidate, and the fostering of hope for the future. If successful, the end result is convincing more people than your opponent to vote for you.

With the invention of the television, 24-hour news, and the Internet, politicians have become aware that their image is scrutinized every moment of their lives. This creates the challenge of consistent branding over the campaign, and arguably throughout their entire lives.  In American politics, the candidate who can make it through the campaign with the least number of gaffes tends to be the winner.

The 24-hour scrutiny also presents the opportunity of creating moments that brand the candidate as a leader.  These pseudo events, which Boorstin describes as planned or planted events with the primary purpose of being reported or reproduced, are designed to continuously place the the polished image of the candidate in the public’s conscience.

Gabler wrote that since Kennedy, “candidates were the putative stars, the primaries open casting calls, the campaign was an audition and the election itself the selection of the lead, while the handlers served as drama coaches, scriptwriters and directors.”

Every element of the campaign is plotted to develop the brand of the politician as a leader, fighter for a cause, and savior of the constituents. The images and messages are refined, tested through polls and study groups. Everything from the ties that the candidate wears to the backdrops that they choose to stand in front of on the campaign trail.  Similar to a movie shoot, all elements that come into contact with the candidate are vetted for consistency and appeal. These pseudo events are designed to portray the candidate as the image of a president. Like in the an audition for a movie, political ads serve as an audition for the job the title role as leader and president. Everything is practiced and scripted to achieve the goal of getting the job.

Rick Perry’s original ad contained all of these elements. The music is upbeat.  His personal image is clear and consistent with the image of an American leader.  He speaks to creating jobs through his experience and knowledge of energy policy in Texas. Every image in the ad shows the orange, red, and blue color tones of a sunrise, the image of a new day in America.  Rick Perry speaks stoically and confidently into the camera.  Images of him working with American construction workers shows that he is knowledgeable about the industries of the common people and trusted by these hard workers.  Perry is the creator of hope, the generator of jobs, the savior of a country in dire need of economic hope.

For my ad, I wanted countered this image of Perry with unflattering photos of him and images of the results of unregulated energy policies. In contrast to Perry’s campaign image that portrays him as the invisible, strong leader who will save the country, I chose to portray him in an unfavorable light as a confused, unintelligent leader. The ad is full of images of destruction and oil.

The ad starts with Perry speaking about how he created jobs in Texas while the rest of the United States lost jobs. The truth is that Texas has a mediocre job production numbers, with 8.5 percent unemployment, which ranks 28 best out of the 50 states. To counter Perry’s message of job creation, I selected two unflattering images of Perry with the message 8.5 percent unemployment written in red.

As Perry speaks about deregulating the energy industry to create new jobs, I placed images from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The goal of these images of explosions and animals covered in oil is to remind the viewer of the energy policies that lead to the oil spill. They are designed to create cognitive dissonance in the viewer, giving them a level of discomfort that can only be resolved by dismissing Perry’s message.

An Audio Walk Through Manassas Battlefield

Audio Walk at Manassas Battlefield Bull Run by bryonsabol

The Creation Process

When I first set out to record my audio walk, I wasn’t prepared for the awkwardness of the experience.  I had a general idea of what I wished to cover.  I planned to walk along the banks of the Bull Run at the Manassas Battlefield towards an old stone bridge that created a bottle neck during the First Battle of Manassas and the retreating Northern Army was trapped as cannon balls rained down on them.  It was a site of horrifying terror, yet it’s modern day setting is peaceful and calm.

As I walked and began talking into my cell phone, I quickly realized how poorly I can walk and talk.  I had long pauses.  My mind raced at times and words flowed freely.  At other times, I was stuttering and uncomfortable.  I started and stopped my walk at least four times.  Finally, I recorded a 12 minute walk along the river.  I started to become more comfortable.  I felt like I was giving a tour to a close friend.  Afterward I finished my first recording, I recorded a second and audio walk from different routes.  I spent over two hours walking through the park recording sound clips.

When I began to edit the clips down to three minutes, I had over 40 minutes of audio clips to use.  I first started off with what I believed was my best complete audio walk, which was approximately 12 minutes.  I had a hard time narrowing down my narrative.  First I got it down to a solid five minutes.  I then edited out one of my favorite clips of descriptions of old photos of the bridge to get the clip closer to three minutes.

Using Susan Stone’s Virginia Reel and Bélen García-Alvarado & Randall Packer’s Diena as inspiration, I attempted to blend segments of sound into the background of the clip.  I found clips in my library of the water flowing under the bridge.  The volume was low, so I amplified it.  I placed the sound clip at section where I began to describe the panic at the stone bridge.  Next I took a small clip of cars passing by on the highway and I copied and a joined the sounds into a loop.  Then I duplicated the track twice and placed each of the iterations slightly spaced apart, so that it sounded like there was a repetitive flow of cars and insect chirps.  Additionally, I found a free use audio file of a cannon.  I duplicated and scattered the sound clips together and weaved it into the background to give the impression of a battle being fought in the distance.

The Audio Walk

When I conducted my audio walk at the Manassas Battlefield, I started off in the same general area on Bull Run’s banks.  When I conducted my recording, it was around sunset on a rainy day.  During the audio walk, it was a perfect, blue sky day.

As I pressed play on my headphones, I was meet by the sounds of water, crickets, and distant cars on the highway.  As with Janet Cardiff’s Central Park Walks, I had a difficult time deciphering what was coming through my headphones and what I was occurring in the real world.  It was somewhat discombobulating.  Is that my footsteps that I hear, the footsteps from the headphones, or someone else approaching me?  Is that rain that I hear in the real world or on my headphones?  Hearing both the sound of water and cars flowing by in real life as well as in the head phones created the sensation of an altered reality.

My audio walk blended the present and the past for me.  The inclusion of the sound of cannons added the element of an even more distant past.  Hearing the cannon fires, while standing on the bridge where people died from similar sounding cannons was haunting.  It placed me in those people’s shoes.  It changed my perception of the place.  I could see how the small bridge could become a place of terror.

Ultimately, I was surprised by how the altered sounds from the Manassas Battlefield changed my perspective of the serene place.

When I initially read through the #911thread as it was occurring on September 11, 2011, the stories, emotions, memories, and observations of my classmates appeared as jumbled voices that inconsistently branched off on different tangents.  The different voices from different parts of the country describing different memories and observations seemed to me to be too fragmented to follow thoroughly.  It wasn’t until after the project was over and the finalized narrative was complete that I realized that there was a collective and complete narrative present among the tweets.  The individual tweets and narratives weaved together to tell the story of both September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 seen through the eyes of student.

From around the country, we were united through the collective writing, photographing, producing, reading, and viewing experience. It was a telematic experience where people from around the world could have and did contribute to the narrative.  It can be described as what Ascott called “gesamtdatanwerk”, which is telematic forms that have the ability to unite people collaboratively and globally.  This collective narrative project turned into a mosaic of life and remembrance.  You could view each tweet individually or view it as a complete body of work and receive different meanings.  The reader could enter the story where he or she wished to and then explore the #911thread stream for as long as he or she wished.  There was no plan meaning of the project, but each reader could develop his or her own interpretation from exploring through the narrative.

Like Amerika and Holzer’s works, our group’s narrative involved short descriptive statements that the reader navigated through, choosing their own path of narration by clicking link options. Some of the links went to videos, photos, and more stories.  The incorporation of multimedia made the viewing of the collective narrative more impactful because it incorporated images and sounds, involving more of the senses than regular text did.  The use of a mouse and the touching of keys on a phone or computer, incorporated an involved sense of touch and ownership of the narrative.

As a reader, there was a lot of similarities between the collective narrative and Amerika’s Grammatron.  I could choose to click which links I desired to read.  I could then either return to the collective narrative or explore my classmate’s entire experience.  I could dive deeper into their individual storyline by looking at their biography, photos, and tweets.  I discovered more about them personally.

Similar to Holzer’s Please Change Beliefs, the Twitter platform allowed the users to add their own experiences, observations, thoughts, and memories to the narrative.  The reader was given ownership of the story by including the hashtag #911thread on the end of the statement. They could alter the meaning of September 11, through a 140-character tweet.  The ability for the reader to alter the narrative added a layer of complexity and richness to the story.  It provided for me a more reflective and engaging experience on the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

As I read through the tweets, I began to think about how these images and tweets began to take on a deeper, symbolic meaning.  These tweets and nonlinear stories weaved together was a symbolic act.  As Baudrillard discussed in The Spirit of Terrorism, the instantaneous distribution of media allowed for images to transform into symbols.  For me, the collective narrative became a symbol of remembrance and perseverance.  As I read through the stories, I saw a country and world transformed by an act of terrorism, but I also saw I country that was more compassionate, reflective, and aware of a common humanity.  For me, the #911thread’s meaning was the symbolic statement of communality that transcends geography and brought together through telematics.

A slight breeze blows the American flags that line the Charlottesville downtown mall.

Photo from setting up of the 9-11 ceremony on the downtown mall in Charlottesville.

We remember in our own ways, longing for a rebirth.

Hiking 3 miles to the top of Monticello today with my wife, Melissa, who on 9-11 was weeks into her 1st job at the Pentagon.

Made it to the top of the mountain at our nation’s third president’s home. A peaceful remembrance hike.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s the pursuit of happiness that I dedicate to the 911 victims.

Hi Everyone, I’m Bryon Sabol. I’m a Johns Hopkins MBA/MA in Communication student and a full-time marketing and communications professional blogging from Charlottesville, VA and Centreville, VA. This is my first test post for my Multimedia Authoring course.  I look forward to working and blogging with everyone this semester.

For the past couple years, I've managed video and photo shoots at several bowl games. Here's me at the Sugar Bowl.