Internet Marketing: Learning 24/7 In An Online Community
Online communities fulfill a variety of needs for computer–equipped individuals. They provide links to valuable members–only technical, medical, and/or financial information. Other online communities serve as social focal points where members discuss the plans, events, thoughts, and happenings in their lives. Open 24/7, online communities can play a unique role in post–secondary education courses that appeal to Internet–savvy students. The concept of “community” as a network of interwoven relationships enhances and deepens the student to student and the student to instructor communications in a nontraditional learning experience.
Using an established Internet journal platform known as “LiveJournal.com” (www.livejournal.com), undergraduate students in an Internet Marketing course are asked to create individual accounts and continuously post entries and responses to others’ entries over a sixteen week semester. With the goal of increasing the students’ immersion in a “live” online community, course content is designed to meet one primary and one secondary criterion. Primarily, LiveJournal.com encourages students to openly express themselves in informal written communications, and it develops the students’ skills in understanding Internet etiquette, ethics, and community citizenship regarding contextual postings of written materials. Secondarily, participation in LiveJournal.com exposes students to the Internet on a regular basis and encourages them to make use of the medium to answer marketing research questions and seek other information as required by the class. In this paper, the theory and practice of using LiveJournal.com within an undergraduate-level Internet Marketing class is presented and discussed.
Marketing products and services on the Internet is one of the hottest topics in the marketing field today. As such, undergraduates enrolled in business or business technology programs are often eager to sign up for courses that emphasize this new marketing medium. Despite a firm grounding in general marketing principles based on the completion of previous marketing coursework, many students find themselves exposed to the two–way interactions of true online marketing for the first time while enrolled in an Internet Marketing course. Assisting students in becoming comfortable with the process of creating two–way dialogs and a sense of community on the Internet thus becomes one of the key driving forces in understanding consumers in an online environment.
The degree to which students can become comfortable in interactions over the Internet, beyond the simple sending and receiving of e-mails between friends, is an indication of their future ability to step into the shoes of a businessperson striving to establish an online presence. Establishing a loyal, repeat customer base in an online business depends on the development and maintenance of relationships that exist somewhat in the abstract because of little to no face–to–face contact between business owners and their clientele. A comprehensive Internet Marketing course focusing on online business practices will offer proactive, knowledge–building assignments that expose students to the importance of developing strong relationships with Internet customers.
Last summer, I was playing around on the Internet when I discovered LiveJournal.com, often referred to as “LJ.” My great discovery was by accident. At LiveJournal.com, I found the personal Web page of one of my former students. His Web page was filled with greatly detailed day– by–day happenings, intellectual thoughts with musings on life, and pictures that included his family, friends, and places of travel. He also posted links, embedded inside his postings, to some unique Web sites that provided value and additional meaning to his varied insights. In looking at his journal, I was especially intrigued by his list of virtual friends: people from all over the world representing different ages, interests, and writing styles. Over the remainder of the summer, I found myself becoming more and more fascinated by LiveJournal.com as a learning community, and I started to think about how this virtual magnet for 800,000+ users in 245 countries could be incorporated into my own classroom as a collaborative learning experience.
This semester, in Internet Marketing, I added active participation in LiveJournal.com as 20% of the course grade. My goal was to provide students with a forum through which they could immerse themselves in an online community, build online relationships, and explore what is necessary to keep those unique relationships healthy and growing over a sustained period. Lecture material covering the theory and common practices of online communities was used as supplementary material to the practical experience gained through LiveJournal.com.
Basis for Success: The Use of Online Communities on College Campuses
Use of online learning in various forms on college campuses continues to increase at a rapid pace. It is rare today for a college or a university not to have some form of Intranet through which instructors make course materials available to students or where students can converse on course– related topics. On many campuses, complete online versions of academic courses and academic programs are offered. Before beginning to integrate LiveJournal.com into my Internet Marketing classroom, I performed a brief, non–exhaustive search of the literature to identify the presence of similar efforts, if they did exist. I was somewhat surprised to note that while use of the Internet and campus–based Intranets on college and university campuses is widely discussed from a variety of theoretical and practical bases, the literature on developing and implementing online communities on campus is less robust. Still, numerous papers on the topic exist, and their findings give an important indication that the use of an online community like LiveJournal.com could be successful in an innovative campus environment.
One of the more intriguing papers was published a few years ago by Catherine McLoughlin of Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. McLoughlin stresses the need to understand that online learning is often a compromise between the design of academic approaches that are flexible enough to handle a widely divergent student population and specific enough to address the cultural needs, preferences, and learning styles of highly localized groups of individual learners (McLoughlin 1999). McLoughlin notes that the effectiveness of online learning programs can be substantially improved if one is willing to recognize and develop a community of online learners as an integral part of creating an online curriculum. The direct implication for my own work in Internet Marketing was to include a mechanism through which Miami University’s Business Technology students could develop an online community of learners, one of the primary reasons for incorporating LiveJournal.com in my course.
Similar points are raised by Ann Peterson Bishop in her work on developing online communities for people from a wide variety of economic backgrounds (Bishop 2000). Bishop observes that many of the original online communities were constructed by, and to serve, privileged arenas such as “computer enthusiasts and innovators” or others with a high level of formal education and relative prosperity (Bishop 2000, 472). Her research indicates that success in developing online communities can be enhanced by recognizing the need to make the technology accessible to people of all social and economic backgrounds. Provided that Internet access is available through either public or private means, free or low–cost access to online community software and services such as LiveJournal.com on the Internet are examples of online communities that are available, unrestricted, to widely divergent groups regardless of social or economic constraints. In my Internet Marketing class, exposure of the students to several broad cross–sections of the population that participate in online communities through a LiveJournal.com format appeared to be extremely advantageous.
Many authors focus their attention on what happens after education– oriented online communities are created. For example, C–K. Looi and D. Ang report on the development of collaborative learning environments in which students work together to develop common knowledge through interactions over the Internet (Looi and Ang). Using a much more structured approach than what is described in this paper about LiveJournal.com, these authors advocate posing within a software package problems that allow students to sign on and contribute to the development of solutions. Similarly, John Hedberg and Shirley Corrent– Agostinho describe the importance of maintaining a flexibility in the online learning process that allows the students opportunities to explore materials and formulate their own approaches to solving issues (Hedberg and Corrent–Agostinho). Taken together, these two teams of researchers offer both an opportunity and a watch–out for the use of LiveJournal.com in an Internet Marketing class. The opportunity is that students will explore the advantages of learning in an online community and are likely to propose their own approaches and solutions to the problems and the issues that are presented to the group. The watch-out is that the instructor must be diligent in knowing when some degree of structure must be imposed in order to keep learning on track.
Finally, Ronald Beghetto observes that students are not the only stakeholders in education who may take advantage of the power of online communities (Beghetto). He notes the use of various forms of electronic conferencing such as parent and teacher conferences in the public schools, student and teacher interactions and also business to business conferences that now take place on a routine basis. Beghetto states that in many of these situations, the quality of the interactions increases substantially when carried out through electronic media. Individuals and groups are brought into contact where face–to–face meetings may have been logistically difficult or impossible to achieve. In my case, the Internet Marketing class typically involves projects with external clients from the campus in other departments or individuals from within the regional business community. Could the project interactions with these external clients benefit from being included within an online community of their own? Beghetto’s reasoning would imply that the answer to this question is a solid “yes.” Electronic conferencing is a process of information exchange that may be readily established and followed when all parties are either part of, or amenable to joining in, an online community.
Getting Started: The Logistics of LiveJournal.com
Although LiveJournal.com has a free subscription service, each student in the Internet Marketing course was asked to become a paid LiveJournal.com member for $15 for six months of online service. Paid members receive more options and extras that are not included in the free service. For example, paid members can access an up–to–the–minute directory of other LJ users in 245 countries. For many of the students, paying for this online service was their first online purchase, an important component for class discussion in Internet Marketing. (LiveJournal.com can be purchased directly on the Web or by phone with credit card or through the mail by check or money order.) In addition, students were asked to set up their own Web page’s decorative personality theme by choosing an individual user name, page colors and borders, font size and type, animated mood icons, pictures, and graphics of imaginary images to add visual interest for readers. Personal information includes e–mail address, physical city, and state, college or university, birth date, account type, and finally, lists of interests or friends. Being able to develop and design a personal Web page is easy on LiveJournal.com and adds immeasurable interest to this course assignment, especially in terms of seamlessly integrating technology into the classroom.
LiveJournal.com allows users to select from three different levels of participation. The first level of participation involves all written individual contributions to one’s personal journal. Current music and an animated mood icon (happy, sad, contemplative, sleepy, productive, etc.) can be listed along with each titled, dated, and time–stamped journal entry to enrich the meaning of the writer’s text. The second level of participation involves online contact with one’s “friends.” Friends can be added to each individual’s homepage as desired. There is no limit on number and no formal or informal requirement that one’s friends must be actual acquaintances. As a place for socialization, people often meet other people online through conversation or with like interests, and if there is mutual agreement between the parties, a friend can be added to an individual’s homepage whenever desired. (An individual’s friends page can be accessed by anyone reading his or her journal by clicking on “friends” on the upper left–hand hyperlink of the person’s most recent journal entry.) The third level of participation at LiveJournal.com involves the “interests” area where each journal owner can choose from several thousand interests.
In terms of security, LiveJournal.com maintains three levels of journal access. The first level of security involves writing entries that are open to the public. The second level of security is for those who wish to keep journal entries totally private, with personal access only by codeword. The third level of security provides access only to the journal owner’s selected list of friends. With three security levels of access to information, LiveJournal.com functions as a perfect mix between e–mail, instant messaging, and newsgroup participation.
On the main homepage of LiveJournal.com, there is a hyperlink button that allows browsers to randomly examine the journals of others. There have been many occasions over the last year when I have learned what is happening in the world from randomly reading the journals of others. For example, I first learned about September 11, 2001, at LiveJournal.com.
It was extremely intense experience for me to note through LiveJournal.com the number of New York posts that concerned the safety of family and friends. In later posts, others explained where they were and what they were doing at the time of the attacks. In the days and months after September 11, 2001, many journal entries provided a perceptive analysis of the events that followed the attacks, including an in–depth coverage much like the coverage presented by the national news media.
Application to the Internet Marketing Course
In Internet Marketing, each week during the semester each student was expected to write multiple entries, also called “postings,” in the personal journal. Some students wrote lengthy entries, while others posted short ones. The journal posting style of each individual took shape over the first month or so. At times, people socialized with each other. There were many contributions of poetry and some fictional writing in the form of short stories. Online questionnaires were sometimes exchanged for fun, such as “Which NBC ‘Friend’ am I most like?” In LiveJournal.com, “blogging” creates a unique community language or code. (“Blogging” is a verb comprised of “Web logging” that is often shortened to “blogging”.) For instance, “newbies” are new members of the LJ community and are often sent to the “Frequently Asked Questions” section to help them become acclimated to the social opportunities and technical help required to navigate LiveJournal.com. Other LJ words become routine over time. In Internet Marketing, the ultimate goal for each student was to become immersed within the online community. This form of relationship–building integration will most likely become a necessary component of the business model of the future.
As the course instructor, I believed that it was necessary for me to participate in the LiveJournal.com world and to integrate myself, like the students, into this dynamic concept of online community. Since I am currently working on a Ph.D. in E–Business, this course assignment was also an opportunity for me to explore this innovation in a practical application for conducting an online business. Over the semester, I completed all LiveJournal.com assignments, including the requirement to post regularly. I posted almost every day, and at times, several times a day. In fact, the grading of the LiveJournal.com assignments was based on my weekly posting word count. As a LiveJournal.com participant, I earned an automatic 92% each week, which then became a benchmark that each member of the class was expected to meet or exceed to earn an A grade for the week’s assignment. In addition, I also received some extra points for responding to multiple posts of the others in the class. In other words, to facilitate class participation, I tried to be a good role model and clearly communicate my expectations, through actions, not just words. (This grading practice worked acceptably for the initial use of LiveJournal.com, but has been modified for use in future courses. See the “watchouts” section at the end of this paper.)
During the first part of the semester, as the discussion facilitator, I found that the students needed much encouragement to post regularly. Posting was not part of the student’s daily routine, so it was mandatory to create a warm, inviting course environment that welcomed active participation. By the end of the semester, however, each student was posting regularly. Learning about LiveJournal.com along with the students, I was fascinated, near the end of the semester, to go to the online classroom and to expect with predictable and reliable accuracy to see certain types of content, posting lengths, and posting times from specific students. Some students posted more about personal matters than others. Students also posted at unexpected hours of the day, which is what I refer to as 24/7 online learning. For example, I noticed that some of the students posted on a regular basis between 3 and 6 a.m. in the morning, while other students were just getting up for the day and connected with the late–nighters in the online discussions. I also found that the more that I posted, in terms of number of entries, responses to others and word count, the more that the students posted, both in individual journal entries and in responses to others. Some students increased their word count to increase their grade. Other students increased their word counts for the fun and ease of posting on LiveJournal.com. Surprisingly, I also found that there was an unexpected benefit of improved writing skills, primarily due to the increased frequency of writing but also because the posting online means that one’s comments may be read by everyone.
As may be readily implied from the 24–hour postings, students without direct computer access at home would potentially need to modify their study practices in order to fully participate in a LiveJournal.com online community. This was not an issue during the start of this activity because all of the Internet Marketing students had their own PCs at home. For use in classes where students do not have their own computers, the posting requirements could be modified to rely on a number of original postings and replies during the week but with less emphasis on a daily presence online. Adequate computer lab facilities on campus for students to use during the downtime between classes would then provide access for students who do not have computers at home.
At the beginning of the semester, I found myself writing about the factual details of a tenure–track professor’s life. As the semester progressed, I wrote more about the intellectual challenges of teaching Marketing, Finance, and Economics, along with the Internet Marketing course. After looking at some of the responses to my postings, I also noticed an increased number of classroom debates about current events in the news. Some of the topics of conversation pushed the hot buttons of all of the participants, while other topics of conversation drew neutral or passive agreement. I also started to realize that each student in the class, including myself, was learning in–depth information about everyone else in our small subgroup of learners. Everyone learned about everyone else’s work, school, and family life. Postings and responses to postings started to show considerable support for others. The students began to identify themselves as a part of something larger than the sum of their individual relationships. For instance, everyone provided an immense amount of support for a 21–year old student who summoned the courage to meet her biological mother for the first time in her life. Support was equally offered to another student who lost his management job due to downsizing. It took him nearly three months of interviewing and receiving rejection notices before securing a new, professional position. Everyone cheered for him and posted encouragement for a new job. By the end of the semester, an online system involving a professional and a personal support network was created. Each person in LiveJournal.com felt a sense of belonging. As the class grew closer, the sophistication in writing technique and content increased. Additionally, many of the students started to improve their computer skills in posting pictures or graphics, along with the Web links that they embedded within their journals.
As the semester progressed, most of the students felt more and more that posting was not just another boring class assignment. Instead, LiveJournal.com became an online place to go to get away from the pressures of student life. Stress was relieved by venting one’s problems. Many discussions centered on one’s hopes and dreams for the immediate or distant future. Other online conversations focused on classroom topics and concepts concerning coursework inside and outside of Internet Marketing. In general, LiveJournal.com is an extremely active online place where something is always going on. In my experience, the best– written journals are those that deal honestly with the trivia of our ordinary lives. At the conclusion of the semester, I found that immersion in this online community happened in varying degrees for different students. To forge and to build lasting long–term relationships, the Internet Marketing students discussed the importance of physical proximity in addition to developing online relationships. To keep in touch with the others in the course, most of the students in Internet Marketing were planning to continue their participation in LiveJournal.com after the end of the semester.
The value of participating in LiveJournal.com to the Internet Marketing course, itself, may be measured in two ways. First, LJ participation significantly increased the students’ comprehension of the portion of the course dealing with virtual communities, a key concept in Internet Marketing today. Even though a large percentage of the LJ communications written and read by the students were not directly related to Internet Marketing, students readily made the comparison between LiveJournal.com and business-focused discussion groups present on the Internet such as trade industry councils, consumer watchdog groups, and consumer discussion groups dealing with specific products of interest to select consumers. Second, I found an increased willingness among the Internet Marketing students (as opposed to that of students in previous classes) to branch out and explore the Internet. Having a regular presence online led students to rely more heavily on the Internet to find solutions to other problems posed within the class.
Watchouts: Facilitating Participation
During the course of the semester, I encountered three problematic issues in the use of LiveJournal.com for a classroom assignment. First, for some students, maintaining a regular posting schedule can be difficult. Posting or not posting in an online community is obvious to all members because everyone knows who is or who is not posting. Posting times tend to vary. For example, postings on the weekends tend to be less frequent for most Ljers. Being a good citizen in an online community requires engaged and active participation. At various times throughout the semester, I reminded everyone about the importance of good citizenship. In addition, modifications to the posting requirements designed, in part, to make it easier for students without a computer at home to participate (discussed below) will be instituted in future uses of LiveJournal.com as a means to further encourage participation.
Second, the questions of quantity and quality about student postings becomes important when using this activity as a classroom assignment that involves a grade. In the next course for which I utilize LiveJournal.com the students will know the number of words required in total for all of the weekly postings rather than using my personal posting benchmark in number of words as a 92% guide. Knowing the expected number of weekly words to earn a specific grade will calm some fears about journal writing. Quality of posting content is another matter for which I am still searching for a solution. On occasion, I reminded the students to write about academic issues as well as personal ones. When song lyrics or online personality tests or other similar types of text have appeared for weekly posting material, I let the students know that this would not count as part of the weekly word count. Also, since I was learning about online learning myself, I wish that I would have set up a separate place on LiveJournal.com for the students to reflect and explore their feelings about learning in an online course.
Third, by involving everyone in the class in the LiveJournal.com assignment, there may be an unspoken or forced membership policy when students are asked to add other students to their friends list in order to maintain regular contact with each other. What happens if someone desires to remove a friend from the list? At times, there may be some peer pressure in posting to the responses of others in terms of praising or consoling a certain percentage level of friends per day. Although appearing to try hard to become connected, an individual who often posts with the emptiness of “Way to go!” or “Good job!” or a similar phrase may find him or herself generally ignored or not taken seriously by the others. When this happened in the Internet Marketing class, one individual discreetly pointed out such verbiage to the individual writing the meaningless responses, and the individual’s responses improved.
In certain situations, there may also be a fourth watchout that is related much more to the instructor’s desiring to use LJ than it is to the students involved in such an assignment. That watchout is the time required of the instructor to post original writings to the discussion and to respond to student postings. Several thoughts come to mind in addressing what is absolutely a legitimate area of concern. First, LJ takes time. Instructors will most likely not want to consider adding a significant LJ project on top of an existing course curriculum. LJ is more appropriately thought of as a replacement for, or another approach to, something that the students would be expected to learn. Thus, a portion of the time associated with creating and maintaining a well–rounded LJ project should be refunded to the instructor from a reduced workload on another aspect of the class. Second, instructors should be visible within the discussion on a frequent basis, but that does not mean that they must respond to each and every posting or that they need to answer each and every question directly. I have found that it is often advisable to respond to very specific needs directly on LJ and to bring more general topics of interest back to the classroom for discussion. This approach has the added benefit of cross–checking who was actually up–to–date on what was happening within the LJ community.
Third, instructors should weigh whether or not the added time is warranted. Although not fully tested in my own situation, I would argue that the benefits achieved in small– to medium–sized classes or in advanced or special topics classes outweigh the additional time required to support LJ. These situations often encourage additional one–to–one contact with students in any format, and LJ could even moderate the time required in some circumstances. Conversely, in very large or introductory classes where it is relatively easy for students to slip under the radar screen by not participating, or where individual communications with the instructor would be laborious, LJ may not be the best approach to use and may be untenable in terms of the instructor’s time.
Expanding the Concept: Participation Beyond the Original Class
Interestingly enough, other students not enrolled in the Internet Marketing class on Miami University’s Middletown campus heard about the LiveJournal.com course assignment involving “blogging.” Many of them asked for free invite codes to set up their own personal Web pages and join our small online community. In addition, several others outside of the class and campus found our class Web pages through a specific individual enrolled in the class and joined in our online conversations. Some of the outsiders were other LiveJournal.com members, and others posted in our small community using names through an anonymous posting box that is available for nonmembers to add comments to an online conversation. Talk centered on everything and anything, with the one rule about suitable content revolving around the clearly written rules of the LiveJournal.com Abuse Team. If someone’s journal was taken away for obscene material in written or pictorial form or there was harassing conduct by any participant toward another participant, the student would fail this portion of the course. Although from time to time, four–letter words appeared in student writing, they did not significantly detract from the intended messages. As members of an online community, LJ participants feel that they can speak and debate all of their ideas and thoughts, regardless of topic, without the fear of retribution from any source. The aforementioned situation of one student informally suggesting to another that he or she would generate better interactions within the community by putting more effort into postings was not a retaliatory act but rather a nonthreatening suggestion made between members of the community.
Also, it should be pointed out that nudity and/or graphic sexual talk or discussions about violence can be found in some of the online journals at LiveJournal.com. Discussed by the Internet Marketing students at the beginning of the class, this type of content was deemed to be unacceptable in the Internet Marketing classroom. Near the end of the semester, one student did post an inappropriate graphic of a sexual nature for her user icon. In response, I sent her a note asking her, but not requiring her, to change the user icon so as to not offend others and she promptly removed the material from her personal Web page.
In general, LiveJournal.com members were made aware of diversity in membership from Day One. As I happily found out toward the end of the semester, through its underground form of trendiness, writing in one’s Web log journal can bring the largeness of the outside world into the smallness of a tiny corner of Ohio.
Applications Outside of the Business Classroom
While this paper has focused on the use of LJ as a key portion of the curriculum in an Internet Marketing class, applications to academic disciplines other than business are possible. In the current application, the theory and practice of LJ as a communications medium were under study even as the students discovered and used the online journals for themselves. In other disciplines, LJ can serve as an excellent student– driven communications medium for the discussion of important class topics. Examples may include an instructor posting a discussion topic on his or her journal, followed by students entering into a debate on the topic with or without the instructor’s continued participation. Applications to literature, art, history, and science are easily imagined. An instructor could easily pair a personal Web site containing visual images, Adobe Acrobat ® PDF documents, or other materials with the ready–to–go facility of LJ to create a versatile read–and–discuss or view– and–discuss addition to virtually any undergraduate subject area. Subject to band width constraints, LJ even allows direct linking to graphics so a limited number of pictures and drawings could be directly embedded within a discussion question. Acting in reverse, LJ provides a platform for students to raise topics and pose questions outside of a lecture setting, i.e., the question may often be posed immediately while the student is on the computer for other purposes.
When compared with many other available discussion platforms, private chat rooms and other electronic communication links used in conjunction with undergraduate classes, LiveJournal.com may offer two advantages for use. First, LJ is within the public domain and it is highly likely that individuals not associated with the class will want to join in the discussions. Although this may initially be viewed as an annoyance by the instructor, I have found good value in incorporating these additional points of view in many of the discussions. The LJ community is diverse, enthusiastic, and well–read on an enormous variety of topics. Second, the ability of each student to design and configure his or her own journal adds to the ownership of the materials posted and is a significant encouragement to participate. Students feel more at home using LJ than they often do when using other electronic discussion formats.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, LiveJournal.com is a place where students can network with each other. Miami University’s two regional campuses are commuter campuses. Students have little time to discuss the college experience with other students. On LJ, they feel the freedom to discuss anything and everything or to ask questions about campus–related issues. In terms of networking, they learn the art of making small talk, a useful skill in seeking and keeping employment.
The Origins of LiveJournal.com
LiveJournal.com was founded just over three years ago by Brad Fitzpatrick, 19 at the time. Fitzpatrick created the concept of LiveJournal.com with a few friends who thought it would be fun to combine their love of computers and the Internet with their love of writing. LiveJournal.com was founded as an open source development project where anyone is free to access the software that powers the site. Fitzpatrick, along with a couple of paid staffers and several volunteers, operates LiveJournal.com from Seattle, Washington. Ljers work diligently on improvements to LJ service and to LJ site additions. As an entrepreneur, Fitzpatrick maintains separate journals, one about his day– to–day business operations and another for his personal use. Nearly 350 people read both of Fitzpatrick’s journals on a regular basis. In Internet Marketing, the students were asked to read two of Fitzpatrick’s journals not only to learn about the successes but also to learn about the problems of running a growing business. For example Fitzpatrick, now 22, has recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He is seriously considering selling LiveJournal.com to get a real job, but he is afraid to sell it to a large company because he is fearful that the integrity of the business will be compromised by the addition of site advertising (which he detests in no uncertain terms) and increased user fees. LiveJournal.com is his creation, and he is hesitant to part with it even though it may not fit into his future career plans. To operate LiveJournal.com, Fitzpatrick owns many Web servers, and he has a great deal of personal money tied up in the business. So, what will he do about LiveJournal.com? No one knows for sure, but as a result of his dilemma, the Internet Marketing students spent a great deal of time discussing the entry and exit barriers of running an online business.
In terms of learning about competitive analysis, Fitzpatrick is not alone in providing an easy–to–use journal suitable for online community use. LiveJournal.com has some competitors, including www.diary-x.com, www.diarist.net, www.blogger.com, and www.opendiary.com. Each of these Internet sites provides a different interpretation of an online journal, and each site has its own advantages and disadvantages. One aspect that I like about LiveJournal.com is that it is clearly run by people who differ in age from many of my students by no more than a few years. In addition, LiveJournal.com steadfastly abstains from using any kind of online advertising. Pop–up ads are annoying and can get in the way of rapid exchanges in dialog, especially for students who have slow computers. Subjectively speaking, LiveJournal.com also has a friendlier feel than some of its competitors. My students have reported that they do not feel uncomfortable writing to technical support for assistance, and they like the fact that people their own age with similar backgrounds and interests are invariably manning the help desk. As an online community, LiveJournal.com gets high marks from the Internet Marketing class for its casual nature.
Since most of the LJ journals are viewable by the public, discussions about some of the more unusual customers of LiveJournal.com have added a great deal of interest to the class. To support its online business, LiveJournal.com’s large membership (800,000+) consists of 5% of permanent accounts and paid memberships, with 95% of the membership using the LJ service for free. Fitzpatrick awards permanent accounts to those who have made significant technical or business contributions to LiveJournal.com. At one point, 1,000 people a day were setting up individual Web pages at LiveJournal.com. To curb this excessive demand, Fitzpatrick instituted invite codes which were given to new members by existing members. The membership base of LiveJournal.com has mixed feelings about Fitzpatrick’s decision. It is currently under review. The up–to–the–minute stats page that is maintained by LiveJournal.com is fascinating in terms of understanding the customer, one of the key components in marketing any product or service. It details, using numerical data, significant facts about the customers of LiveJournal.com. For marketing research purposes, the customer profile data display the exact numbers and percentages of men and women, their ages, and their locations by state among its demographic data. (Fitzpatrick does not sell this marketing research information to outside agencies.) Customer satisfaction, nearing 100% at LJ, is becoming almost mandatory in a business world where the customer comes first. Although at times Fitzpatrick scoffs at the value of marketing research and customer service, as a business person, he is learning some lessons about customers the hard way. It is wonderful for the students to see someone, so much like themselves, struggling to achieve business success. The students in the Internet Marketing class have also been able to discuss ways, using the real–life examples found in LiveJournal.com, to improve the online company’s bottom line. This is of critical importance because making money in an online business is difficult, at best, these days.
Partially based on demographics and partially based on owner interest, LiveJournal.com’s future goals are very ambitious and extremely challenging. First, members of the online community would like to develop an index that involves a connected network of journals. Second, members of the online community intend to design, create, and develop a collective intelligence factor to solve computer software and hardware problems. Third, Fitzpatrick is creating “Fotobuilder,” a separate business that will involve posting photography galleries. At some point, Brad would like his newest business to directly link with LJ in a way where there is technical differentiation from his competitors. Work toward achieving these goals is in progress. LiveJournal.com is setting an excellent example of the process of product development work in today’s rapidly changing and increasingly complex world of business.
Asking the Internet Marketing students to immerse themselves in an online community created a shared goal of learning in the class. At the conclusion of the semester, I observed distinct and improved levels of initiative, creativity, and critical thinking skills for each student. Participation in the LiveJournal.com assignment was not only fun but also led the entire class to ask, explore, and answer questions that lent significant enhancement to their knowledge. Learning about the importance of an online community as it relates to the topic of Internet Marketing was just as valuable as learning to actually function inside an online community. LiveJournal.com is a hands–on experience. In order to achieve the maximum benefit from using it as a course assignment, the instructor must participate both as a teacher and as a student. As a 24/7 learning environment, there is no other classroom like the one that can be created in LiveJournal.com. More importantly, learning from a globalized online community, customized and tailored to the individual, can be creatively crafted for many subject areas beyond the world of business.
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Susan A. Baim is an assistant professor of Business Technology (BTE) on the Miami University Middletown campus. She joined the faculty in August 1999, teaching marketing, Internet marketing, economics, online economics, finance, and management courses in the university’s two– year BTE program. Susan earned her MBA in Marketing Management from the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1998 and is currently studying for her Ph.D. in E–Business through Capella University, also in Minneapolis. She was named a Service Learning Ambassador at Miami University in 2000. Susan has a strong interest in distance education programs and how they may be applied to two–year academic programs. She and her students in the BTE program are also known for their customer satisfaction survey work for police departments and other governmental agencies in Southwestern Ohio. Readers are invited to view her own LiveJournal homepage at http://www.livejournal.com/users/baimsa. On her homepage, the hyperlink labeled “Friends” will allow browsing the journal entries of several Miami University Middletown campus BTE students. Baim may be contacted at baimsa@muohio.edu.