Final+Results

Lyndsay Adamson, Shivani Handa, David Soo Professor Mike Jones CCT300H5 November 24, 2011

CCT300 Group Project on Viral Content  For our attempt at creating viral content, we decided to explore the current competitive culture of loyal mobile handset users, namely Apple’s iPhone, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, and Google’s Android platform. These three are the most dominant players within the hotly contested and constantly changing climate of smartphones. Each company has a large and loyal user base. As such, comparisons are constantly drawn against each of the platforms capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses, providing an ample amount of content to draw upon. We chose not to prefer one brand to another, instead picking well-known issues from each platform and using it as a subject in a comic strip. We believed this had the potential to go viral because it’s a topic many people can understand due to the popularity of the three mobile platforms. In addition, consumers tend to incorporate products into their identities (your personality is defined by the clothes you wear, the technology you use, the car you drive, and the music you listen to), which encourages people to share a comic that is relevant to whom they are as a person as represented by consumer choices. Our goal was to use brand loyalty to our advantage, with the hope of provoking people into reacting to our work thus creating the potential for viral content.

 We chose to use simple, familiar images, such as their logos, to represent each of the handset brands. This allowed the spotlight of discussion to remain on the handset brand and not specific models or handsets. Choosing simple imagery also ensured the reader did not have any difficulty understanding the depicted action and would therefore focus on consuming the content and message. For example, the comic illustrating Android’s operating system fragmentation simply had three rows of panels, without speech, illustrating the action. Through careful selection of images, we were able to convey our message, albeit, with satirical humour, in a fashion that was short and precise to the point. The only comic that did not employ elements from the previous two was the final comic directed at Blackberry. We chose to use real-life images from each of the brand’s product launch events, as it was relevant to the message we delivered. However, the images were stylized in a comic-book fashion in order to retain some semblance of consistency with the rest. One challenge was creating content that would be relevant and entertaining to Android, Blackberry, or iPhone users without alienating consumers who may not be technologically inclined; aware of the different features and issues; or, who didn’t own any of the three phones we focused on. Our target audience was quite large (all mobile phone users) so we were able to explore a variety of media when disseminating our content.

 The comics were hosted on a private URL at [|http://www.ccitproject.com/foodfigh] . Our group contacted the comic creators Snaggy and Nitrozac from the popular tech comic “The Joy of Tech”. We reached out to the creators in hopes they would share our content on their blog voluntarily. Unfortunately, we did not accomplish what we hoped for but we did receive positive feedback from the duo regarding our creations. In addition, we posted our content to Crackberry, Facebook, Facebook groups, iPhone/iPad/iPod forums at Tubd, Reddit, and Android forums. We received about 25 comments, 4 likes and 600 views on Crackberry for the Blackberry comic, but the content was quickly removed and we received a warning. We decided to post the iPhone one to Crackberry despite the warning and continued to receive positive attention, but unfortunately, after approximately a day we were banned completely from the forum for apparently spamming. On Facebook, we received 270 likes, 130 shares, and lots of comments across all three comics using two personal pages as well five different relevant groups (I Hate Apple, Apple, Apple vs. Microsoft, Apple Sucks, Tricks for Troid). On the iPhone/iPad/iPod forums at Tibd, we created a thread called iPhone 4s Battery issues and posted the iPhone Spoof (acting against the forum as the forum is for iPhone lovers). We received 24 replies and 620 views. We then posted the picture in an existing thread known as “Battery Issues” and 534 replies out of which three were specific to the post and 42,478 views. On Reddit, we posted all three comics with no response, while there were 2 diggs and 30 views on Digg.com. Android Central had results of 1 comment and 99 views. On another set of Android Forums we again posted the iPhone comic and compared it to the android battery issue resulting in 54 replies and 1066 views. The results are continually increasing.

 Overall, the iPhone comic was the most effective and this is probably because it was the most accessible by the most amounts of people (you don’t need to be tech-savvy or particularly well informed to find the comic entertaining) and is arguably the more popular platform with the most consumers willing to pick a side over it. In general we received a great response. We found we had the most success when an accredited source re-posted our content as opposed to us attempting to spread the comics ourselves. The success factor was most likely due to limited time constraints from project inception to results aggregation. Google Analytics supports this claim with only seven unique visits to the site, all within Canada. The geographic disbursement is most likely the result of our limited blogosphere of local friends on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook

Figure 1: Apple iOS (iPhone) comic

Figure 2: Google Android comic

Figure 3: Research In Motion BlackBerry comic