Podcast

Social Media in the World Today

People have become very dependent on social media in today's age. A lot of websites around the web either force you or give you the opportunity to connect with their website through Facebook. They do that with the hope that you allow their site to post messages every once in awhile to your Facebook account and give them free advertising. One example of this is with Spotify. I connected with their app through Facebook and I found them posting messages in my feed of what I was listening to at times and I had to go on their site and turn that feature off so they would quit posting on my Facebook page.

Without a Facebook account though, it can be very inconvenient to set up and register on some of these sites, if not fully impossible. Once you are connected to their sites, whether you like it or not you have to keep your Facebook page activated, or else you can't get connected to their sites. So it pretty much forces you to keep a Facebook account or else you won't be able to access these other sites. I have tried to deactivate my Facebook account a couple times in the past but it never worked out, it just made everything else inconvenient for me.

Technology Presentation

I did my technology presentation on Google Drive, is a very handy and collaboration tool. It makes it easy to have multiple people edit a word document, excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation at the same time. It automatically saves as you type and also allows you to go to different revision points in case you you need to. Another cool feature with Google drive is it gives you a lot of the tools of Google within the drive. So you can use the Google search without ever leaving the document to search it out. You can also translate things within the document as well.

It also has a iPad version which is much more limited in nature but still has quite a bit of flexibility and still allows you to edit and collaborate in real time with other potential users of the document you are sharing. Overall Google Drive is a very useful tool and would recommend it to anyone who needs to work in a group to create a presentation or document together.

Social Media is my area of interest

Social media is Entrepreneurship is very important. As I plan on running my own restaurant, I'm not going to have a bunch of money to throw around for advertisement, especially in the early years. That is one great thing that social media has done, it has given a cheap avenue to advertise your business as long as you put some work into it. It also creates an avenue to keep in communicate with potential customers and regulars, so that they know of specials that are happening with the business as well as keep them interested. There are plenty of times that I would be willing to go somewhere to eat but I don't really know where I feel like going and a simple Facebook post reminding me of a restaurant would be all it would take to give me that last push to go there.

Reflective blog about ICRH meeting's

The ICRH presentation went great, they had a ton of good questions to talk about during and after our presentation and it lasted about a hour. It was great to be able help the organization, especially considering it was a non-profit organization and had a positive purpose that backed it. Throughout the entire class, I thought I have learned quite a lot about working a running social media for business, which is very important for me as an entrepreneur who will not have much funding to advertise my own business. We were able to get a pretty decent backing of people within the couple months that we worked with them and that was very good to see and made me proud to be able to help them and made me feel more accomplished in that matter. I think we were able to give them quite a few good ideas and I hope that overall we were helpful to their cause.

Life without social media for 24 hours.

Life without social media for 24 hours was sort of a weird experience for me. It didn't really effect me too much when it came to talking to people or anything like that but I noticed myself still trying to go to Facebook just out of habit. I find myself using Facebook as a tool to cease my boredom for a couple minutes. Even during days that I use Facebook, I'm not particular active on it unless I feel like putting a silly/stupid quote on there or something like that. That being said, I do lurk on Facebook quite a bit, reading peoples comments or watching YouTube videos / vines people put up on there. When I have time to kill Facebook is one of the main sites I go to in order to kill time. This is especially the case when I only have 10-20 minutes to kill before class or something like that. One area where it was very annoying deactivating my Facebook was when I wanted to listen to spotify, i couldn't because it was tied to my Facebook account so I downloaded Pandora to my i Pad so I could listen to music for the day. It was a big deal anyways, because I like Pandora anyways, but I have a premium spotify account so I can find any song I want and don't have ads or anything like that so it was a little bit of a nuisance for me.

Ch 9 The Social Organization

Chapter 9 of The Social Organization is all about guiding your community. Even if your purpose is clear and have the right environment, it is possible for your community to get off track and you need to guide the community to follow the purpose and environment you would like it to have. Stay positive within the organization and be positive about spin off communities that develop within your organization and create social circles within the community as well.

My normal social media habits

I find myself on Facebook a lot. I don't use it so much to keep in communication with everyone, but I do use it a lot to kill time. I find my Facebook being open a lot on my tabs, even if I'm not actually looking through it, just so I can switch over to it if I get bored or something like that. I post a comment every once in awhile if I think of something silly or stupid to say if I'm bored enough or don't feel like doing my actual work.

That is one bad thing that social media has done for me. I find myself distracting myself from doing my actual work. I very bad A.D.D and get very easily distracted and it can be hard to bring myself back to the work at hand. I can find myself reading Facebook posts or YouTube videos that people post on Facebook for hours at a time and entirely distract myself for what I was supposed to be doing. So I end up not getting my work done and scrambling at the end to get it finished causing unnecessary stress and adrenaline to build up.

Ch 8 The Social Organization

Chapter 8 of the social organization is all about getting results and engaging the community. What this means is not to be narrow minded on the means of getting the results but instead looking at the results entirely. This all means keeping the community engaged and connected through the use of external communication (social media) while still keeping it safe and make employees feel comfortable to share their thoughts on the organization.

Ch 7 The Social Organization

Ch 7 of The Social Organization is all about structure and creating the right environment for social media. It's important to create the right environment so people feel compelled to collaborate and discuss within social media. If people feel overwhelmed and it is all hard to learn how to do, people aren't going to take the time to participate within social media.

It is also very important to make sure it is very structured and people know what they should be doing if they are collaborate with your social media page. If you are giving employees the ability to help collaborate with your organization, then you have to make sure they are portraying your organization in a positive light.

Sherry Turkle Interview

In Sherry Turkle's interview, she goes over the dependance of technology our country has. She gave an example where a parent wouldn't even look her child in the eye or really acknowledge the child until after she was off the phone and got done with the message she was reading. I see this all the time, with people I know and kids in my classes through all of college. My roommate can not stop himself from looking at his phone. There are times when we are going back home for the weekend or something and I have to tell him to put down his phone so he isn't texting or whatever while driving or I'll "borrow" his phone for some reason just so it isn't in his hands. The same thing happens in classes. Every time they get a text, they'll search for their phone and text the person and really disconnect themselves from the real world because they are so interested in the incoming texts so that they feel connected to these people they are texting.

Ch 5-6 of Social Organization

Chapter 5-6 of the Social Organization have a lot to do with building a purpose within the organization and then refining it. Ch 5 gave a few examples of unsuccessful "posts" if you will and why they are unsuccessful, which mostly came down to their lack of purpose within their posts. It is important They you are delivering a message to the consumer and individuals reading the post so that want to take action. Whether that is to buy your product or do something within the community. It is important they have a set goal in mind when doing all of this.

Ch 3-4 Social Organization

Ch 3-4 of the Social Organization is all about collaboration within an organization and the difficulties it can present. Most people within a organization simply use social media for personal use and not really for use within an organization so it can be difficult for them to start using it for the benefit of the organization. Another problem it presents is the potential crisis if social media isn't used correctly within the organization. Because of this it is important to detail out what is acceptable and unacceptable use of social media within the organization.

Ch4 who owns the future

So far reading the book, It's been pretty interesting, however this chapter was very confusing. I don't really understanding the message he is trying to get across in this chapter. It's mostly about finance, real estate and those sort of things, but I really feel this chapter drove off from where it was with the rest of the book so far, all the rest of the chapters haven't been that hard to read/follow but this one I felt was.

Ch3 who owns the future

Chapter 3 in who owns the future had a lot to do with the concept of money. This is pretty interesting to think about. What exactly is money? What makes it worth anything at all. There is no gold backing to money so without the support of the people, money is basically just paper. It goes even further in Today's age with the concept of digital money, without a backing of it, money is useless.

In a lot of ways, money controls our country. It creates social classes and it determines Where people fit within society. It controls our entire economy and the economy on a global scale, so it is interesting to think about that even with it's importance, there is no actual value behind it besides it's conceptual value that is programmed into our minds.

Homelessness in Isabella County, social media outlook

I went to a meeting on Wednesday about the possibility of rotating homeless shelter in Isabella county. There were some pretty interesting things being discussed about during the meeting. A large part of the meeting talked about intake and being screened and all those things before being taken in and then being driven to the homeless shelter. I didn't really realize all the things that had to be taken care of before even being taken in, as well as all the things that they can't take in to the shelter and even the issue of having to supervise them for smoke breaks to make sure they don't sneak things inside. I thought the whole meeting was pretty interesting and they did a good job showing the need, in my eye, of a homeless shelter in Isabella county.

Also while I was there I thought of a couple things we could do with the social media for ICRH. I thought it would be great if we could get the churches involved to try and build an initial audience for the page. There are a couple ways that they could do that. One of the easiest ways is for the churches page and the ICRH page to communicate back and forth with one another and kind of for lack of a better term, give each other shout outs and discuss the good of each others pages. The only issue that you would have to be careful about in those terms is basically idk, converting or preaching on the ICRH page, because there will be people of different faiths and religious backgrounds on that page.

Another good way the churches can get involved with the page is for the churches to share events going on with the ICRH page and if individuals of the church like the page and share the events or blog posts etc. of the site, there is the possibility of a decent following of the site.

Those were a couple things I was thinking about during the meeting and will continue to ponder on the idea of growing the social media page to gain a larger following.

Social Media Observations of a dead game.

Recently in the game that I am helping resurrect, I've had some pretty crucial observations. We have recently tried to do a couple events for the project, to create interest and let the players have a little fun with the game. We were hosting a tournament and it has went pretty badly so far and I think a some of the blame can be put directly upon the posts we have on facebook.

To go into further, we had a bracket made for the tournament and we posted it on our websites forums and on Facebook. the problem is the one on Facebook was being updated properly. to try and accommodate all of the players needs, we kept having to make changes to the bracket, and as we made changes to the bracket, we should have updated the Facebook page so everyone would be notified. That wasn't happening and we ended up having some people no show or try and change their time slot. We had a few people tell us directly that they were going off the bracket on Facebook, which wasn't correct due to the many changes we were making. I think these issues could have been easily handled if we would have made sure to keep the page updated with the correct information.

To summarize, I've just gained some first hand experience on the importance of keeping the Facebook up to date, and with correct information, or it can really ruin and put a damper on events being held.

Challenges of Social media within a dead video game

One of the main challenges with getting people interested in our video game emulator comes in two strides. One challenge is getting any people interested in who did no play it during it's live years, which is something we are very focused on trying to do. There is no way to keep the emulator active if all we try and do is keep the old player base without trying to branch out and grab a new player base. It is a very difficult concept to put forward but it going to have to be done largely through social media because we don't have the funds to advertise the game or anything like that.

The second challenge is keeping people interested even though the emulator is in the closed beta phase of it's emulation so there are plenty of people who still can't play the game. With that in mind, it is important for social media to keep all of these people on the outside looking in, interested. These are the two biggest challenges I can see when it comes to the challenges this organization face when dealing with social media.

Who or What Owns the Future?

Jaron Lanier brings up some very interesting points in his book Who Owns the Future? In the prelude he talks about how people should be compensated for their contributions on social media. The example he gives with Kodak and Instagram was very interesting,  mentioning how most of Instagram's wealth comes from its contributors not its creators. The problem I see with compensating their contributors is that no one will want to do because their contributors feel as if they are receiving a service instead of being the one's servicing creators. Chapter 1 of Who Owns the Future was very interesting, where he discussed our future as a Digital World. He went into some detail of us in a virtual reality and how the price of reaching this virtual heaven who be surveillance, and that is interesting and yet a little scary to think about.

Mass Collaboration of a Dead Video Game?

My organization does very little to exert mass collaboration for social media. We currently only have one person who is responsible for keeping the Facebook and Twitter pages updated. We do have a few however who are responsible for keeping the wiki page for the video game up to date. So as far as the 6 principles are concerned, mass collaboration is almost non-existent. When we decided to make a Facebook and Twitter page, the team leader decided he wanted to keep the page as professional as possible and as a volunteer project, wanted to make sure that the wrong message wasn’t be brought across and I believe that is what led the downfall of mass collaboration in my organization.

The new Digital age.

Both Jaron Lanier book You are not a Gadget and Schmidt and Cohen’s The New Digital Age have interesting takes on what will come of this digital world we are creating. Lanier mostly warns about the dangers of this Digital age while Schmidt and Cohen give us some of the positives that can come from it. I find myself set somewhere in the middle. I love electronics, the possibilities that can come from them, but also understand that we can’t let the digital side of the world overcome the natural side. When we start to become more immersed in the internet and other forms of digital immersion over natural immersion and communication is when we will have went too far. Schmidt and Cohen talk about fully immersive virtual reality and other things of that nature and that is sort of scary to think about because at that point, that is when we are starting to rely on technology to keep us alive.

Social Media in a Dead Video Game

I work with an online organization working to emulate a video game there are plenty of challenges we are faced with when it comes to social media. The video game has been under development for emulation for about 3+ years so one of our biggest hurdles is to keep people interested. We currently have a Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. The Twitter is mostly underused and youtube nearly non-existent. We have a member of our team which posts on Facebook quite regularly however and tries to keep the consumer base interested. Besides keeping people interested in what can be considered a dead game, is also the hurdle of trying to keep things new and fresh on the social media pages, so we can keep people talking and interested about the game. These hurdles of trying to keep people interested in the emulation of the game when it has been for over three years is tremendous, but it'll be interesting to see how well we can complete this task.