Seoul Video Contest: "Streaming Seoul 2009"

This post is to call your attention to a very interesting and worthwhile video contest being sponsored by the City of Seoul called "Streaming Seoul 2009."   Click on the title or here to access their web site.  The contest is open to all, regardless of nationality, but there is a particular interest in how people from other countries and foreigners residing in Seoul experience and view the city.

Those of you who follow this blog know that I've long been concerned with questions surrounding national image and brand image, whether that be for a city, a corporation or another sort of organization.  Of course, this blog also concerns itself with developments in mobile communication.  One part of the big transformation taking place is the growing ease with which video can be recorded and shared with others via the internet.

I notice that the deadline for submissions to the contest is December 31.  That leaves just over three weeks for videophiles to shoot some video and put together a potential prize-winner.  The contest offers cash prizes for several categories of video.

My personal thanks to Danny Taewoo "Technokimchi" Kim for calling this contest to my attention.

Anecdotal but Interesting: LG more popular than Samsung in North Korea

A short article in The Korea Times today notes that LG home appliances are more popular in North Korea than those manufactured by Samsung.  Even though North Korea is generally regarded as a "closed" society, quite a few Samsung and LG television sets enter the country through China.  To prevent the flow of South Korean electronics products, North Korea started a registration system for television sets in May of this year.

The most interesting point of this story was the reason for LG's popularity.  Reportedly, many people in the North don't know that LG is a South Korean brand, thinking instead that it is an international brand like Sony.  The story also notes that in electronics categories like computers and digital cameras, Samsung is considered better than LG.   Although this is anecdotal evidence of what is happening these days in North Korea, it is interesting and thought-provoking.

Korea's Image Problem

A headline in the Joongang Daily caught my attention: "Korea Aiming to Refine Image Abroad." The article which followed the headline dealt with efforts of the Lee Myung Bak administration to improve the nation's brand image in the world. President Lee has convened a Presidential Council on National Branding. Lee Chan-buom, now the Director General of Korea's Presidential Council on National Branding, noted the adverse impact on Korea's image of news media coverage of the anti-US beef import candlelight vigils in early 2008. Those demonstrations were visually colorful, prolonged and mysterious to most western and international television viewers and internet users. Rightly or wrongly so, they created an image that South Korea is unstable, flighty and tends toward anti-Americanism.

The article notes that nation-branding may be a difficult task in a country that has seen numerous street protests, corruption and frequent confrontation with its neighbor, North Korea. I'll say!

I've long been interested in the effects of mainstream media coverage, especially television, on public opinion and U.S. foreign policy toward other countries. (see, for example, my article on "Quiet Diplomacy in a Television Era Use the link and you can read the full text, PDF.). That was back in 1990. However, despite the explosive growth of the internet, (see my monograph, The Internet and Foreign Policy) the pattern continues.

Korea's new President Council on National Branding will have to deal with television and the internet, most especially since convergence means that television (IPTV) is now part of the internet. In this new media environment, coverage by CNN, BBC World or The New York Times are a fact of life. Anti-beef import protests, stories about the sexual adventures of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, and almost any topic, will be fair game for the world's media.

The internet, television and the media (roughly in that order) are today significant determinants of corporate, national and even individual images. In this context, how should Korea proceed to improve its national image?

I have a couple of thoughts. First, news coverage of North Korea, and news coverage of demonstrations in South Korea are not going to go away. Furthermore, they are not under the control of the South Korean government. The only real solution to the problem that North Korea poses for South Korea's national image is to make real progress toward reunification, and the sooner the better.

Second, any efforts to brand Korea should stay away from quick-fix advertising gimmicks like "Korea Sparkling" or even "Dynamic Korea" and should build from long-standing realities. For example, Hangul is the Korean alphabet and that is not likely to change. Kimchi is eaten by Koreans and that, too, is unlikely to change anytime soon.

It is an interesting challenge. I don't have any further insights at the moment, but will likely comment in future posts.

World Attention in the Information Age: Korea's National Image

In 1941 Harold Laswell, one of the social scientists whose work led to the creation of communication research as a field of study, wrote a thought-provoking article titled "World Attention Survey." Laswell's research tried to map attention patterns around the world by analyzing the content of newspapers, in particular the countries and issues mentioned in newspaper articles. My first book, Television's Window on the World, was based on my doctoral dissertation and attempted to do something similar with U.S. network television in the 1970s. Today, thanks to the internet and some new Google services, it is possible to do a "World Attention Survey," with much less manual effort than when Laswell was conducting his research or when I laboriously, with the help of research assistants, hand-coded television content for analysis in my dissertation.

To illustrate the possibilities, I will show in this post how Google Insight, its brand-new service, can be used to shed empirical light on the question of Korea's national or brand image. In an earlier post, I showed how searches of Google News could be used to help analyze Korea's national image. Google Insight provides an important new piece of the puzzle about national image because it shows patterns of search activity on the internet by people around the world. If you doubt this, take a look at the results of the following global, unfiltered set of searches on Google Insights for Search. Just click on the links to see the results of worldwide search activity, from 2004 to the present, for each of the following terms.

• Korea


• Samsung


• LG


• Hyundai

If you took time to look at each of the results pages by clicking on each of the four links above and scrolling through the results page, you'll agree with me that several definite patterns show up.

• First, searches for Korea tend to turn up news of North Korea's nuclear test and related political problems. Not surprisingly, the topics covered by the 4,000 plus media sources in Google News and the search patterns shown by Insights for Search, tend to be highly correlated. Mainstream media coverage and global search patterns are both part of "World Attention" in this information era.


• Second, searches for Samsung and LG tend to center around information and communication technologies, notably television sets and mobile phones.


• Third, searches for Hyundai make it clear that Hyundai is viewed around the world as an automobile manufacturer, first and foremost.


• Fourth, the results for regional distribution of search behavior around the world show clearly that Korea's corporations have effectively established a presence in developing countries as well as those of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

These preliminary observations are based on a simple, unfiltered search for several terms. Obviously, much more could be learned by comparing search patterns across different countries or regions. However, I do think the results are intriguing. I assume that a majority of Google searchers around the world may NOT be aware that Samsung, Hyundai and LG are Korean companies, so that complicates the question of their contribution to Korea's national image. It also seems that the major mainstream media and their consistent focus on political problems or crises--currently North Korea's nuclear progam and the six-party talks--form a part of South Korea's image. This part of the image, however negative it may be, will be hard to escape short of reconciliation and eventually reunification on the Korean peninsula.