Integrating Social Media in a Post-Convergence Era

Being in convergence era surely takes a lot of interesting changes of society. In this era, it marks a shift in thinking about the relationship between audiences and media producers without overshadowing the requirement to think about the process of sociocultural stratification. In instance, using convergence could produce a remix of culture, which it will establish a shared space where various genres in different media would consolidated to the new ways and used by individuals that able to produce, add to, or change media texts.  

According to Fagerjord (2010), remix is the process of creating an alternative version of a media text by altering or introducing new elements to the existing form. Although remix could be the great alternative for individuals from various cultures to collaborate on project or even making new cultural forms of media, this blending of cultures might have another implications as the dominant culture will take over smaller subcultures. As this has many advantages to individuals who may experience of place in their immediate community, it could also reduce the cultural borders and small nuances within regions, which resulting to the individuals to considering the essential of culture preservation in a post-convergence era 

Implementing convergence will certainly produce similar challenges of media production that majority of company faced since the beginning. Generally, robust audience analysis, paired with a formative audience research strategy, is the foundation of a converged marketing strategy. In result, there are eight items that practitioners must consider when making content in a post-convergence era, such as transmedia, environments, narratives, rituals, community, audiences, identity, and devices. 

Transmedia is the ability to create media texts across multiple media platform that emphasis on developing materials that could be chosen and organized to generate many diverse forms. Furthermore, using transmedia could give more access to the audiences, which it would assure that similar message will produced differently in each social media platform. 

Practitioners should plan on establish the appropriate environment for their content. Each products must have a strong narrative for reaching the audience, which this narrative exist within overarching brand environment. To create good environment, practitioners should focusing on a brand environment that allows the product to support various stories, character, and play patterns, rather than repeating the same story over and over. Which will mostly shaped the social media messages on lifestyle rather than a product. 

After established product environment, practitioners could begin to think about the appropriate narrative for their social media content. It is important to decide the product narrative as it could help increasing the number of audience to view the content. In result, within a post-convergence era, it is crucial to give users some space to share their narratives with a structure that suitable with the overall brand story, so that users could post their narratives freely without worrying the limitation. 

According to Laurel (2000), ritual is a kind of social form in which designed narratives can be found simultaneously in the broader context of an interactive environment where most of the action is improvised. Some patterns in ritual, such as providing inside joke within organization and audience, will support audiences to experience the moment within the content and deepening the relationship to the community that they will not found on other online forum. 

In this post-convergence era, having community is essential for all organization to strengthen their relationship with their members. In order to establish good community, the use of media structures must able to promote dialogue and interaction among members. As the strong balance between control and participation is highly required, it is crucial for organization to maintain high trust between the organization and the customers as it will give the courage of customers to have a freedom for giving their feedback or input matters and organization believes that the community will keep their product brand reputation exist. 

Audiences are imperative in the post-convergence era since without audience, all the social media messages will not widen and delivered successfully. Therefore, organization must have priority to developing on audience engagement and audience research, so they could analyze their audience’s habit and equate it with social media message and narrative, not just an evaluation once the marketing strategy has been distributed. 

When there are some narrations that requires participation, it is important for customers and organizations to have their own identity in order to be recognized by other audiences. Mostly, individuals tent to engage in process that speaks to their own lived identity. Based on Laurel (2000), organization should focus on an idealized lifestyle, permit collaboration with professional actors, or create characters with functional identities even allows audiences to customize their identity although it is not the same with their real personality by using technology. By following those advices, it will give more experience to their audiences when participating with the related content or narration. 

Lastly, Practitioners should decide the devices they will use to spread their social media messages. To maximize the number of audiences, they could use various devices that able to support the quality of their messages. While choosing the device, make sure to pay attention on the device that audiences mostly use and choose the device that will support the quality of content in the audience’s device because not all people are having updated software or device.    

References: 

• Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change. L. Meghan Mahoney and Tang Tang. (2017) a