Daily Archives: April 23, 2015

Scenarios & Personas for miXXerS

Posted on by
Reply

I looked at a few other types of users that may use the site through creating personas.

CC image

CC image

Scenario – Ed: Party producer

Background

Ed 30 is an event producer for a venue in London. He holds a bachelors degree in marketing. He is very active on social media. Though he loves music he does not produce it. His events are held bimonthly for difference genres including electronic music, hip hop and pop. While they are successful he wants to expand and reach out to new up and coming musicians and DJs on certain nights.

Story

Ed has premium membership because he will like to be able to use all the features of the site. He would login to his account via the home page and personalise his page by clicking what font, colors etc he would like to use on the page and how he would like to order it so that it best suits his audience. He will click on the advertise his events on the site by clicking the button advertise and then and add the name, of his event, the type of genre, location and where tickets can be bought. Given he has information about the audience via the graph that he can access and can gain anonymised information about what type of users are attending as they indicate they will attend and purchase tickets. He can then use that information to tailor the event as he arranges it and make more informed plans for future events

 

laughing-woman-by-eder-capobianco-creative-commons

CC image

Scenario: Su: Party Goer (Competition Winner)

Background

Su is 23 and is an avid music lover. She is from Granada in Spain and is a student at the University of Granada. She loves going to live events and goes out all the time in Granada but rarely goes as much as she would like to larger events because they are held in larger cities. Since has a part time job in a bar so she can earn some extra money while she studies. She likes to dance and is everyone tends to love her.

Story

While trying to find out where her favorite band ‘Limitless’ is playing she finds out that there is the chance to win tickets to their concert in Madrid and Skype with the band on the miXXerS site.  Though not the most popular band she really likes their music. She thinks it is very cool that you can get to actually more intimately engage with the band on miXXerS. She decides to take her chances and registers and apply. To her surprise she wins the prize and is featured on the site (with her permission) She tells everyone she knows about how cool she thinks miXXers is and encourages others in the Granada music scene with which she is familiar to use the site too. Her birthday is also coming up and she was planning to host a party and was looking for a DJ to play. She clicks on the link find DJ and read the reviews for those in her area that are into electronic music and salsa and pop music and books them for her birthday party.

 

Ethical Ways to Attract Visitors To Our Site

Posted on by
Reply

For a social website, especially  a new website, it is important to know how to attract more visitors.  We have thought about this and found some useful and also ethical suggestions from Forbes where this information is sourced.

  1. Focus on content creation. Good content markets itself. When you put the effort into building and promoting great pieces of content, the natural result is more traffic to your website via shares and referrals.
  2. Add social sharing buttons to your website. Don’t assume that your readers will take the initiative to share your content on their own. Instead, make it easy for your site to accrue more visitors from social networking sites by adding social sharing buttons to your company’s blog posts.
  3. Answer questions on social networking sites. When you see people asking questions online, provide whatever helpful information you can. Doing so will earn you both website traffic and customers for life.
  4. Distribute press releases for actual achievements. While you shouldn’t abuse press release distribution websites to promote insignificant accomplishments, take advantage of this traffic stream whenever you have something noteworthy to share.
  5. Use SEO responsibly. Don’t over-optimize your website, but do make use of current SEO best practices (which put the emphasis on looking “natural”) to let the search engines know where they should list your site in the natural search results. High rankings will result in plenty of new visitors to your website.
  6. Invest in your website’s blog. By publishing high-value posts consistently, you’ll build your relationship with your readers, resulting in visitors who check back frequently to view your latest posts.
  7. Share slide decks and other presentations. Posting informative materials to sites like Slideshare will help you to increase both brand awareness and website traffic through exposure to new markets and new potential customers.
  8. Build a killer email newsletter. When readers find valuable email newsletters, they tend to share them with others. If your current email followup sequence is lackluster, making improvements here could result in significantly more referral traffic.
  9. Publish a helpful podcast. Similarly, producing a regular, high-quality podcast will increase referred website visitors, while reaching new visitors through podcast directories.
  10. Deploy infographics. Infographics get shared more often than most other types of content. This makes them ideal candidates for traffic generation campaigns that make use of content marketing.
  11. Run a YouTube channel. YouTube is one of the web’s largest search engines, making it a great way to expose new audiences to your brand.
  12. Ask visitors to share your site with others. Simply asking your visitors to forward your articles to others or share them on their social networking profiles is a great way to quickly boost page views.
  13. Write guest posts for top industry sites. Ask other websites in your industry if you can pen guest posts for their blogs. Having your content featured there isn’t just great for traffic – it’s a good way to build your perceived authority as well.
  14. Connect with influencers in your niche. Having an authority figure in your industry share just one of your blog articles can result in a tremendous amount of new traffic, subscribers and buyers, so make relationship building a key part of your company’s marketing strategy.
  15. Pay attention to up-and-coming social networks. Newer social networks likeTumbler and Pinterest are sprouting up all the time. Because there can be a significant “first adopter” advantage to the people that establish a presence on these sites early on, keep an eye out for these future opportunities.
  16. Eliminate website errors. If the search engines aren’t able to index your website properly (which can occur due to a number of different errors), you may not be receiving all the search traffic you should be.
  17. Add pillar content to your website. Every website should have at least a few pieces of “pillar” content — in-depth, well-written content that will always be of interest to readers — to help drive traffic via person-to-person sharing.
  18. Over-deliver on your company’s products or services. From a word-of-mouth traffic standpoint, over-delivering can’t be beat. When you go above and beyond in your industry, customers will recommend you to others – leading to more traffic and a higher marketing ROI.
  19. Interview experts within your industry. People love hearing from experts, so if you can snag an interview and publish it on your site, you’re in for a big surge of traffic from the authority’s existing audience.
  20. Comment on other websites. Leaving valuable comments on other websites’ blogs can be a great way to build traffic back to your own site. Just be sure to say more in your comment than, “Great post!” or “Thanks for sharing!”

Reference: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/31/20-easy-ethical-ways-to-attract-more-website-visitors/

Case Study: Scenarios and Personas

Posted on by
Reply

I created some persons based on the functionality of the site.

Scenario: Jonathan- semi pro musician and weekend DJ

dj2

Background:

Jonathan, 34, is a sales manager of an franchise company weekdays but he also works as a DJ if he has chances. He is contracted to Juno Record and though he has produced 1 CD he still strugges to success as a DJ. He needs to develop fun base, but how?

 

Story:

Jonathan’s first CD sales is not as good as he wanted. His friends advised him to build a fan base using social network. He wrote information about his CD and music event on his Facebook but basically only his friends saw that. Then he starts using miXXerS after visiting the site to check out some musical events in his area as he learnt about the site from his friends via Facebook.

He went to top page-function 6 registration (DJ/Band/event) and registered his information. Two days after he got an email from miXXerS admin saying he was approved. Jonathan went to the site, top page-1.attend events, select “DJ” from pull down, then found his name and select it to jump to his page. There were no stars, events, nor comments. He then decides to register as a DJ and Musician. He finds out that he can only advertise events if he takes the premium offer and so he decides to sign up for the month free trial. He is then able to customise his profile page and advertise his event and his music. A few days later, Jonathan did a gig that he advertised on miXXerS. He found that slightly more people than usual came to his gig. After the gig he checked his page to find some stars and comments. He now notices that he is starting build a larger fan base.

—————————————————————————————————————–

Scenario 2: Miki-Asian college student/music lover

music

 

Background:

Miki is 23 years old Japanese international student studying in the University of Southampton, music major. Although she prefers dance/music/DJ activities it is not easy to find music event in the city, since she doesn’t have many friends here and she has some challenge in English.  But she definitely needs to have some fun.

 

 

Story:

Miki has trouble finding music events she likes in Southampton. Since she is an international student new to this country and city, getting sub culture information is not easy for her. Then she started using miXXerS.

She went to the top page, click 7.Register(user), and registered herself as a member. In her profile photo, she felt it’s safe not to use her real photo, so she used an icon for now. After a day she got an email from miXXerS admin saying her registration was approved. Then she went to top page, 1. Attend event. She selected  “Location”, then narrow down her choice by selecting “South East”, “Hampshire”, and “Southampton” to check if there are some events in the city. There is an event which she liked, so she asked her friend to go there. Her friend agreed, so she clicked “ticket” button to buy two tickets and was taken to the ticket site being used by the event producer. They also decide they want to take the opportunity to meet new people in Southampton and click to find other people who are looking for people to attend the event with. She and her friend check the profile of one user who would like to go to the event but not alone and arrange to meet with her. She attended to the event with her friend and meets the new person who they both like. They all love the party and decide to write review! Miki went to miXXerS top page, 1. Attend event, then reached the DJ who had a gig on her event. She added 5 stars to his page, recommended him and wrote a comment.

Web maps and Storyboards (revised)

Posted on by
Reply

Following up on the draft web map published earlier here are the revised Web maps and Storyboards that I did. In this map ‘band’ also refers to musician.

—————————————————————————————————————

function 1: Function to attend events.

Select Location/Date/DJ/Band/Music genre and narrow down your search to go to the DJ/Band’s personal page to view event information. All events are linked to google map. ticket should be sold online using Paypal or third party ticket sites like Eventbrite or Ticketmaster.

miXXerS2_1

< Click to enlarge >

—————————————————————————————————————

function 2: request DJ/band

When you would like to ask the DJ/band to play for personal event, use this function. Selection could be by location, data, DJ.Band and Music genre, then narrow down to each event information. When you found the one you wanted, send an email to the DJ/Band to negotiate the detail. Those email exchange will be monitored by miXXerS and miXXerS will take few % of the price.

miXXerS2_2

< Click to enlarge >

—————————————————————————————————————

Function 3: RSS     Function 4: Chat

This is the optional communication site. Members can buddy up to attend an event or chat about their favorite musicians. Those social aspect also is necessary to bound people in the tie of their favorite music.

miXXerS2_3

< Click to enlarge >

—————————————————————————————————————

Function 6: register DJ/Band

This is the site for both DJ/Band and listeners can have profits. DJ/Band looking for fan base will register themselves to miXXerS.

miXXerS2_4

< Click to enlarge >

—————————————————————————————————————

Function 7: register (user)

Users also have to register to use any of this service, since information of DJ/Band and members will be confidential and exclusive to members only. It would be dangerous enough to contact/meet a stranger especially at some night club, so registration is important for the safety of users. It also is required to ask users to buddy up carefully, at their own risk.

miXXerS2_5

< Click to enlarge >

—————————————————————————————————————

Function 8: review   Function 5 : Upload music

After attended to some events members may write review and evaluate stars to each DJ/Band page to contribute the trustfulness of miXXerS. The administration staff may upload legal music or video clip but they can also link to 3rd party sites like Spotify and SoundCloud.

miXXerS2_6

< Click to enlarge >

Potential Risks

Posted on by
Reply

There are several risks that may arise when using social networking sites which users may tend to ignore. These are described below.

Identity theft (IT) – IT is one of the major concerns related with social media. So much information is provide by the individual on these platforms that it is obvious to guess the rest of the information, which leads to identity theft which is further used to commit cyber crime such as fraud.

Sexual Predators – Once again due to disclosure of a lot of confidential information on the webpage, sexual predators are one of biggest concerns faced by social media website. As an individual could easily hide their true identity and target young vulnerable children who are not capable to distinguishing if an individual is legit or a sex predator.

Stalking – Staking is something which raises alarm again and again and is something which is faced by social media website on a regular basis. As individuals cannot see if anyone is looking at their personal information such as pictures or videos it makes it so much easier for a stalker. Even though the majority of the big social media website are providing a lot of facilities to privatise your personal profile there will always be slight chance of stalking.

Unintentional Fame – This is also very lethal form of harassment. This kind of situation occurs when the picture, video or piece of music created by an individual is sent around on social media websites without their consent. As a result of such harassment many young teenager have committed suicide. Once again social media websites have provided the user with the facilities to report such contents which can be cause such circumstances and miXXers will do the same on its site.

Employment concerns – Personally I believe social media platforms and employee do not mix together. This is an issue of many organisation and their employee. This issue has been raised and talked about numerous time by academic research. A lot of individual have lost their job due to uploading inappropriate information regarding working, personal information or information about desecrate circumstance about certain individual, inappropriate images or videos and many more.

Online harassment – This is something which is commonly seen in teenage groups, where teenage are victimised because of their physical appearance , ethnic background etc. This is an extremely serious issue as it can lead to fatal circumstance, this also leave negative impact of social media platform as they are created to keep in touch with family and friends socially rather than for bullying and harassment. (Wikipedia.,2015.)

Privacy Concerns – Privacy of confidential information about an individual has always been a major concern for many year. Due to the fast improvement in the technology and availability of data, this concern is increasing as an individual can share large amount information about their themselves or other without even realising via single click.

According to Acquisi and Grossklags (2007) privacy choices are affected by incomplete and asymmetric information which is defined by ‘bounded rationality ‘. In addition ignorance is rationalised (rational ignorance) because users may consider that truly learning about and understanding privacy implications and acting on that knowledge would actually outweigh the benefits of ignoring the risks.

A lot of personal information such as date of birth, contact details, employment and education history information is broadcasted in Facebook which can easily be for unlawful purposes.

Individuals are sharing their current location via Facebook chat. This can be extremely dangerous as teenager or pre teenagers can leave their current location on which can result in stalker or sex predators follow them and the result of that could be fatal. Here the ‘Valence Effect’ outlined by Acquisi and Grossklags (2007) can be seen to be in effect as a behavioral anomaly as users over-estimate that there will only be a positive effect.

This is something which has been highlighted via a board of member at the university. University students taking pictures of each other or members of staff and uploading them online without their consent.

Invasive privacy agreement is something which always catches the attention of law abiding citizens. This agreement means that an individual is agreeing that all the information which they upload on the website such as their confidential information including pictures and videos are property of the service provider, which seems a bit odd.

There are thousands of agencies which are standing in the queue to retrieve confidential information regarding individual, in order to understand individual behaviour better. Recently, Twitter has admitted that they were scanning the telephone numbers of their customers in order to understand their behaviour better without their consent. This shows there is a lot more going on behind the scenes without your knowledge. It hints at another behavioural anomaly from Acquisi and Grossklags (2007) that users are ‘over confident’ in their knowledge and ability to actually protect their privacy. There are no technologies easily available to users that lets them delete all confidential information about themselves from internet. (Wikipedia.,2015.) There is also essentially a Privacy Paradox (Zafeiropoulou M 2013 et al) because though users may say they are not willing to share information on these sites in practice they still do it. This helps to highlight that despite the dangers that may arise in using these sites, even when aware of them users still usually decide to use them.

Reference:

Acquisi and Grossklags. What Can Behavioral Economics Teach Us About Privacy?, Digital Privacy: Theory, Technologies and Practices Auerbach Publications (Taylor and Francis Group) pp. 363-377 (2007)

Wikipedia.,2015. Privacy concerns with social networking services. Available from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services#Privacy_Concerns [Accessed on 23th april 2015]

Wikipedia.,2015.Privacy issues of social networking sites. Available from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_issues_of_social_networking_sites [Accessed on 23rd april 2015]

Zafeiropoulou, Aristea M., Millard, David E., Webber, Craig and O’Hara, Kieron (2013) Unpicking the privacy paradox: can structuration theory help to explain location-based privacy decisions? In, ACM Web Science 2013 (WebSci ’13), Paris, France, 02 – 04 May 2013.

SWOT Analysis

Posted on by
Reply

This is a SWOT Analysis for our site

Strengths:

  • It can be accessible from anywhere around the world
  • Potential for Discounted Tickets to concerts
  • Potential to meet/chat with artists
  • Secure Way of Purchasing tickets
  • Help new Talents gain Fan Base
  • Records Label can scout talent easily

Weakness:

  • Investing Personal saving
  • As it is a new business people not trust it when launched
  • Difficult to monitor if illegal content is uploaded

Opportunities:

  • Global expansion, record label across the global would like to stop talent
  • New DJ and musicians are always in making
  • Their is room for new innovative services in the music industry that are still to be explored.

Threats:

  • Record label might not want to become part of new business
  • It is a web based business, so it is easier for competitors to program similar functionality on their webpage

Porters Five

Posted on by
Reply

Porter Five analysis

Threat of new Entrance: Threat of new entrance is really high as at the end of the day as it is only a piece of program, so anyone can hire a programmer or a web developer in order to produce a web service which can easily compete with miXXerS. In order to avoid that happening and maintain our customer base miXXerS will carry on updating new features and exclusive offers to the website and try get as many users, musicians DJs and party producers as possible to become part of such a multi cultural platform so it will be harder for our competitors.

Threat of Substitute: Threat of substitute is low to medium as we do not actually have direct competitor. There are webpage floating on internet which provide similar service such as MeeMix, Last.FM, Pandora and Worldsings but they do not integrate events as part of the site. Fans will also be able to buy tickets to concerts online with as well by using Paypal which means their confidential information is also secure.

Bargaining Power of Fans: It is low, as the fans will be able to buy ticket to go visit their favourite DJ at lower prices on this platform.

Bargaining Power of DJs/Musicians: It might high if there is a new entrance because they might have different business examples providing all the services at cheaper rates but for the moment It is also very low, as this is the platform which they require in order to boost their experience and fan base.

Rival vary Among Existing competitors: it is also low as mentioned earlier on their aren’t any direct competitors who are offering exact same service at us, so it will be easier of the brand to create its awareness and gain a fanbase.