How media influences people about disease---ALS and its ice bucket Research Paper

How media influences people about disease---ALS and its ice bucket challenge - Research Paper Example People who use Facebook and Twitter are for all practical purposes running little media houses, and face the problem of their much larger brethren, where will the next story come from? Originality is too time-consuming: emulation is inevitable. Fads ensue. What gets emulated? Anything that can contribute to social capital. The content must be easy to create but not as easy as photographing ones morning cappuccino. For example, someone in Toronto snapped a selfie with the controversial mayor Rob Ford. Overnight, hunting Rob Ford became a Toronto sport, and your face next to his became social currency across Canada. Its easy to write off these fads as simple stunts of digital narcissism, but they matter to marketing because they carry incidental meaning. It was not lost on Fords reelection team that media coverage on Facebook was as good as, perhaps better than, press coverage. Selfies with Ford carried the incidental meaning that he was one of the people, a fun-loving regular guy. He began to make himself selfie-friendly. Brands, too, ask how they can become incidental props in these viral stunts. The challenge that brands encounter, however, is that their involvement could come off as merely jumping on the bandwagon because spreadable stunts tend to carry no meaning beyond the stunt itself. Take "planking" for example. An early Facebook fad, planking is the act of lying face-down in an incongruous place. It is the epitome of digital narcissism and any hint of motive other than "look at me" just clouds the picture. By contrast, the ALS ice bucket challenge offers an example of a brand harnessing the energy of a narcissistic fad on social networks in service to the brand itself. The usual elements are there: an act that is incongruous, not easy to do, and screams "look at me." Yet here, the incidental meaning is not at all dissociated from the personal meaning. Im