Social Networks as Marketing Tools (extra)

           The social networking websites of today have transformed the internet unlike any other web pages.  Recently, people have been using websites like Facebook and Twitter as a special marketing tool.  Social networking makes marketing more than just a message.  It soon becomes a two way conversation between a company and the customer.  For example, everyday on Twitter companies will put out a message via tweet and their customers are able to instant feedback.  Today, the old ways of marketing such as customer letters have been completely pushed aside by these websites.  Social network marketing is efficient because of the large population of people all at one place on the web.  Each day, companies are blessed with more and more potential customers whenever somebody creates a new account.  With this said, companies are often out numbered and often don’t of much control.  This lack of control seems to appeal to many companies because they are able to see what their customers are saying about them.  Marketing on social networks is also efficient in the fact that its free.  The majority of social networking sites don’t cost anything to start or continue.  Social networking is a big part of the internet and it is not going anywhere anytime soon.  Businesses are taking advantage of this tool and they will continue to do so as long as these websites are relevant in society.

Social Media Politics (extra)

         This past April, Barack Obama kicked off is 2012 presidential campaign in a unique fashion.  Rather than making a public appearance in front of thousands of supporters and a throng of media, he did so by making an online video.  By doing this, Obama displays the importance social media in today elections.  Websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr all have becoming a defining force in modern-day politics.  In the 2008 elections, Obama was able to gain an edge by expanding his campaign to MySpace and Facebook.  The core of this political strategy can be found here.  By using this strategy, Obama made it easy for supporters to donate, find local gatherings, and it simply spreads the word of the Obama campaign through mass communication. 

This isn’t the only time we have seen strategies like this during presidential elections.  In 1992, Bill Clinton made an appearance on MTV.  This was unheard of at the time and was a great strategy to gain the vote of the youth population.  This year, the republican party is catching up to the democrats by making sure that they start to use the same social media strategies of the 2008 Obama campaign.  Needless to say, it is inevitable that presidential candidates must use their creative mind and come up with new ideas to spread their good word if they want to win the future elections.

My "New" Phone (Extra)

          Almost two weeks ago, I lost my smart phone after our last football game.  Surprisingly, I went a whole week without a phone.  Over the time of that week, I realized just how much i depended on my phone.  With the new smart phone technologies, people can store almost any information they need in their phone.  Luckily I use my laptop to store the same information aside from all of my contacts.  After my long week of being phoneless, I got a hold of my mom back home and she was able to send me up a replacement phone.  It came up a couple days later and lets just say it was a bit of a downgrade.  But  beggars can’t be choosers and I was just happy to have a phone back, so I have no complains.  But after messing around with my ‘new’ phone for a couple of minutes, I quickly adjusted to a flip phone with 1” by 1” screen and nothing but call and text messaging capabilities.  While many people would be upset, I wasn’t bothered by this.  I had a phone that could text and call with a laptop that could do just about everything else.  I think this experience opened my eyes to just how amazing SMS technology really is.  It is quick, easy to use, and extremely affordable.  In todays society, merely all cell phones have SMS capabilities, even the old junky ones like my new replacement phone.  It doesn’t matter how nice your phone is, as long as you have one.  Around the globe SMS is the most popular form of communication of our generation because of its affordability and efficiency.  Even with all of the new technologies of smart phone, we have yet to see a more efficient technology created since SMS.

RE: Smart Mobs Gone Wild

        Due to the development of SMS messaging, cell phone users have adopted a great sense of power.  People become more connected and gain the ability to organize groups from political advocates to terrorist groups.  These groups are known as Smart Mobs.  As we keep making advances in mobile communication technology, these groups will continue to gain more power.  Smart mobs are a developing threat in todays culture as Howard Rheingold explains in his book Smart mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

SMS technology is an ideal way of communication.  It is efficient, quick, and very affordable.  Because of how cheap text messaging and cell phones are,  even some people in third world countries are able to have a cell phone.  Now I’m not talking about a smart phone, but just a old cell phone that has SMS messaging capabilities.  This quick and easy way of communicating creates a mass communication that often leads to the organization of smart mobs.  Rheingold explains that is important to focus on the mass communication taking place rather than the actual smart mobs that are created.  This mass communication created by text messaging can lead to smart mobs containing political supporters, sports fans, or even terrorists.  Smart mobs are merely uncontrollable and the mass communication will be present as long as there is the efficient way of communicating through SMS.

Some of these smart mobs can potentially be a threat to todays society.  Recently, there was a problem at the Wisconsin State Fair.  It was claimed to be a race based flash mob that led to racial violence.  Alleged racial attacks were said to be taken place outside of the State Fair grounds.  This most likely started out with a good number of teens spreading word of what was going down at the state fair, leading to more and more teens hearing about it which led to more people joining.  This is just one example of how powerful the mass communication created by these smart mobs actually is.  It is often people use this technology to be productive and intelligent, but people who strive to spread hate have the same opportunities to do so with SMS technologies.

RE: MUDs: Good? Bad? Both?

         While I was reading through Sherry Turkle’s, “Aspects of Life”, many questions sifted in and out of my head.  I would continue to read on to find that almost all of them would be answered in the next few paragraphs, but there is still one question I have that is up for debate: Are MUD’s and virtual persona’s more of a positive or negative aspect of our society?  Turkle gives some clear examples on why she thinks MUD’s are a good thing, but overall I disagree with her because Multi User Domains are generally dangerous and overall have many negative affects.

Sherry Turkle explains that MUDs provide an alternate world where people can anonymously interact socially.  Turkle believes that this is a good thing because it is important that people can escape from their everyday lives.  She supports her argument with a solid example of shining a positive light on MUD’s is that of Gordon the software designer.  He uses multiple virtual persona’s in MUD’s to help him socialize easier and he even admitted that he started to adopt certain traits of his characters.  MUD’s are definitely positive when people use them to experiment different characteristics in a social world without having any major consequences, such as Gordon did.  But I argue this position by stating that too many people are moving too far away from reality and carrying out inappropriate and dangerous acts through their life in MUDs.

Personally, I have had a pretty weird experience with people who use a fake virtual personae.  In high school, I accepted a friend request from a girl I didn’t know (that was my first mistake) that claimed she went to my school.  For a couple weeks she wouldn’t stop messaging me and a couple of my friends, so I decided to delete her.  It turns out “she” was some guy that was two years older than me and actually went to my high school.  He was later caught sending nude pictures of himself to a couple of people that I know using that same Facebook account.  This is just a minor case is someone using a virtual persona.

Everyday, there are sexual predators using social networking websites, blogs, chat rooms, ect. to find and seduce children.  For me to agree with Turkle, people must be proactive to protect their privacy on the internet.  Parents must teach their kids to identify dangerous people on the net.  Let them know the internet is no different then real life and they aren’t allowed to talk to strangers.  Monitor what chat rooms and websites they engage in.  As Sherry Turkle states in “Aspects of the Self,” MUDs can positively affect our lives.  In reality, MUDs are a dangerous place for children and to experience MUDs in the positive ways that Turkle explains, it is necessary to take many precautions when engaging in MUDs.

Exposer: The Facebook Factor

Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most popular social networking websites that we have seen since the birth of internet.  It is a great tool to use to get in touch with old childhood friends, touch base with family members, or just keep up with the social realm around you.  When someone activates a new facebook account, they often ignore the self exposer that they are creating.  This lack of privacy has been an aging problem that has come with social networking websites.  People are starting to share more information with more pople and it this has led to people getting fired from their job and even denied by universities.  

Randall Stross of The New York Times gives uses an example of a young woman by the name of Stacy Snider, a 25 year old student, working to get her degree majoring in education.  She was dismissed from the student teaching program at a near by high school and denied her teaching credential after some staff found a photograph on her MySpace profile.  The picture of Stacy at a halloween party dressed as a pirate with a red cup to her lip read the caption “drunken pirate,” which was deemed inappropriate by the school.  The exposer that social networking sites like myspace or facebook allow  employers to search your profile and make sure that you aren’t promoting inappropriate behavior.  This reminds me of when my sisters were student teachers.  They had spent hours upon hours deleting all of their inappropriate facebook pictures they had accumulated throughout their college career.  It may have been annoying, but in the long run it definitely worked out for their best interest.  They were both able to quickly get jobs after they graduated and their newly refreshened image of their facebook account helped without a doubt.

High school teens are also greatly affected when they don’t monitor what they share on their social networking profiles.  I came across a short article on huffington post stating that 80% of college admission officers use facebook while recruiting students.  If a high school student displays an inappropriate image of themselves on their facebook profile, that may alter the chances of them getting into the school that they want.  Problems like these can be easily avoided by untagging yourself from photos and being active with your privacy settings.  Mark Zuckerberg seems to have some obsession of continually updating the privacy, so make sure you check your settings often.  Follow these easy steps and you should be in the clear.  Happy social networking!

Google Knows Everything

         Google is one of the most recognizable brands let alone websites in the world.  The power of Google is unmatched in the world wide web and there is a reason for that.  Google became a public website in 2004, and since then it has made its was to being the most successful website to date.  On November 10, 2010, Google had an estimated net worth of $163.2 billion (ironically, I Googled that).  But what did Google do different than other search engines to gain the top spot?  Siva Vaidhyanathan states it best in his introduction to The Googlization of Everything by saying, “Google was clean. It was pure.... And it offered what seemed to be neutral, democratic rankings: if one site was referred more than another, it was deemed more relevant to users and would be listed above the rest.  And so the biggest, if not the best, search engine was created.”

With Google sitting in pole position of search engines, it has access to collect all website in the digital universe.  By creating a facebook or twitter account, we allow google to collect our personal information, ultimately creating a lack of privacy.  Vaidhyanathan uses an example of the “star wars kid” where a teen uses a school camera to record himself wielding a golf ball retriever as a light saber.  Other kids get a hold of the video and post it on the internet, allowing the video to be one of the most popular internet sensations of our time.  Many remakes were made like the one I posted.  Google made it impossible for the young teen to erase his harmless video and it allowed other websites to host the video.  The surveillance of Google makes it impractical for anyone to go completely invisible.  After class on thursday, I decided to google my name to see what was out there.  To my surprise, there was an old web page that my friend made about an old band that we made as a joke.  It’s weird to think about whenever anyone googles my name in the future, that website will be on the first page of the google search even though it was just a joke when we were in middle school.

Overall, Google makes searching the web much more efficient than it had been in the past.  But with the power that it has gained over the years, it grabs any information floating around in the world wide web.  I understand that It may be hard to focus on what information we are sharing with the world when we are updating our facebook profiles.  But the positive aspects that Google provides to our everyday life outweigh the lack of privacy it comes with.  With that said, we must be aware of what we share with the world wide web and consider power of Google when we do expose ourselves to the web.