Messages Sent By Military Websites

For my media project I studied what messages the military sends with their websites.

I predicted that their would be a lot of challenges like "are you strong enough?"but the theme that was most frequent was that they were helping the world and the challenges were second to last.I also looked at how many times education, skills for your career and money/salaries were mentioned. here's a graph showing what was mentioned most. (all services are clumped together.)

I was also surprised to see that the second most mentioned thing was skills for careers I was thinking it would be one of the least mentioned ones. I wasn't surprised that money was the least mentioned of all the themes.

Helping World

When I was looking at how many times helping world was mentioned. I thought that the National Guard would be the leader because they help a lot with natural disasters. I thought the Army would be second and all the others in the same general area at the bottom, I never would have guessed that the Navy would be so high. But given by the what the navy's website is called, "America's Navy A Global Force For Good" I shouldn't have been surprised. The Army is at the top because on their homepage the have all theses articles on how their doing good here's two examples: National Guard engineers work to protect Louisiana coastline. and U.S. military wraps up earthquake response in Haiti.

Education
I didn't think that there would be many mentions of education, so I wasn't surprised that the leader (Navy) was only seven.

Salaries/Money

I thought that since the economy is doing bad they would mention a lot about how much you get payed and how you can have a job. I think that the attention went to "you learn life skills that can help you with your job." more then "you get lots of money." (But even the career skills didn't get that much attention.)

Life Long Skills For Careers

I was surprised at how little most sites used this as a selling point I thought that it would be closer to the middle. I didn't think that there would be any sites that didn't mention it because it seems like a great selling point "join the army and learn life long skills for when you go home." I thought that there might be one that mentioned it more then the others but I didn't think that it would be such a high difference.

Challenges

I predicted that the most numerous theme would be challenges because all military commercials I've seen have mentioned a challenge e.g. the Army Strong adds.

I was really surprised that challenges ranked fourth overall, kind of weird to send one message in their adds and barely mention it on your website.

Conclusion

# of themes per website

After I finished looking at the websites I wondered who was the site with the most messages I wasn't surprised it was the navy they always were at the top they also had the most user friendly website http://www.navy.com/navy.html I could find everything I was looking for. They have obviously embraced the recruiting power of the Internet.

Sources

http://www.nationalguard.com/?kw=national+guard

http://www.airforce.com/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_term=Homepage&utm_campaign=CTA?m=CTA&pl=Google&cr=CTA_search

http://www.army.mil/

http://www.goarmy.com/?bnrcd=A607-ITBP-ACNP-01012010-07-07021-TEXTAD#/?channel=careers&marquee=strongStories

http://www.navy.com/navy.html