So the Grammy website had a discussion panel called Social Media Rock Star Summit before the show (http://www.grammy.com/live). The panel consisted of the founders of Facebook, FourSquare, Pandora, and music celebrities Adam Lambert and Chamillionaire. The purpose was to discuss how social media plays an important part in our society and what social media means in the music industry. I thought it was a pretty interesting discussion and relevant to our ETEC class.
They discussed how social media enables change at a rapid rate in the society and the world and how the young people are at the forefront of social media and music. They discussed how it democratizes the public and empowers the individual to dictate personal interests rather than have it dictated to them, i.e. Pandora, a mobile radio station where users can list their preferences in genres/bands/artists and the radio station will stream music that matches these preferences.
What I thought was interesting was the discussion on what the founders of sites like Facebook and Pandora would imagine social media will be like in the future. They all agreed the future of social media is mobile, mobile, mobile, and that the average user in the future will not even have to sit in front of a computer. There will always be designated places for a desktop/laptop, but they say mobile is the big market and they hope videos, music, pictures, streams, etc. will be able to be shared amongst many people with one click from their phones.
Another interesting question asked of these founders is if they thought more females used social media than males. They skirted the issue, of course, but the Facebook rep said he thinks males initially discover and use social media, but then females take over and use it more than males, whether it'd be sharing family pictures or playing Facebook games and socializing.
A drawback they discussed was that certain foreign countries can't access certain social media because of bans/blocks/political reasons. This is in line with what Jin told us China was doing with Facebook and from what I hear from people in Iran where they filter youtube videos and social media. People in Canada and in European countries can't access certain streaming videos on a US site. The musicians said this is a big problem in the music industry because their label has different departments that control different parts of PR in the world and sometimes the chain of command is slower or there is a communication disconnect. They also suggested what the public needs to do is a "ground-up" push for more access by making their concerns known to their community leaders.
I think the Grammy website is a great example of how a site can be very useful using social media. They have HD live feed with multiple cameras streaming from different locations: the red carpet, the stage, and a director's cut. The user has the option of watching different streams by maximizing one screen while the other streams are in little windows below so the user can still see what is going on. They also have a twitter feed streaming live under the HD live feeds so the user can read the Grammy comments coming from twitter of people watching (by putting a hashtag in their comments #grammylive which then shows up specifically on the Grammy website as soon as one posts it).
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