First we were all professional photographers… now we’re all doctors, too?

Our growing dependence upon taking others’ advice is scary to me when I back off and think about it.  Seeking advice on purchases as Qualman describes on pages 89-99 is just good economical sense.  We can save a lot of time, money and frustration by learning from the experiences of others and have our eyes opened to aspects of the purchase or the item itself that we hadn’t considered.  But hmm… medical advice from Facebook friends and acquaintances?  I can see the sharing of home remedies and suggestions for minor health issues, as with the burn example on page 100 of Qualman’s book.  However, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, say, put a photo of a mole on my arm on Facebook and take a survey as to whether or not they thought it was cancerous, then subsequently base my decision whether or not to go to the doctor on their opinions.

That being said, I do participate in exchanges like this all the time, as both the person asking the question and one of the individuals offering opinions.  Do I think I know what’s best for whatever a friend’s ailment might be?  No.  I just want to help and not seem as if I’m ignoring a friend’s concern.  We have a saying at work, “trust but verify.”  (I know, we seem to have a lot of sayings at my workplace, but they fit a wide rage of situations.)  We take our friends’ input into consideration, but I don’t think most of us take the advice of our social networking friends as seriously as Qualman makes it seem – or at least we shouldn’t.  I acknowledge that on further down page 100 he says that, “After their physician, nurse, or pharmacist, people look within their network from those they trust for good advice on medical treatments and medications.” He then further cites an iCrossing study that suggests that, “Some even list the advice from their friends above that of their physician.” Yipes.  Don’t get me wrong – I know doctors are people like everyone else, they make mistakes, they are working for a paycheck, and there are “good” doctors and “bad” doctors. But even though I have some pretty intelligent friends, I’m sure that in eight-plus years of medical school and continuing education my doctor and the Walgreens pharmacist learned something about health and illness that even my smartest Facebook friends haven’t.

Hold on, Dr. Whoever. I need to get a second, third, fourth and fifth opinion from my Facebook friends.

I suppose the basis of my concern here lies in how disturbing it is that so many people distrust the medical field in general that they would even consider taking friends’ advice over a trained professional.  Often, if we ask six people the same question, we will get six different answers.  Isn’t it likely that we will pick and choose our favored answer, even if it is subconsciously, potentially ignoring something that requires medical attention?  We can talk ourselves into and out of things and allow our friends to convince us one way or another, but hearing a diagnosis or advice from a medical professional carries a certain amount of authority that our friends simply can’t or shouldn’t provide for us. We don’t know the big picture of our advising friends’ situation, even if it seems they’ve experienced the same issue we are asking about, but doctors with access to medical records can take into account details we may not realize are related to the condition. Qualman states on page 101 that the increase in our health care and medical equipment discussions via social networking is benefitting society, but I think this is only true if we apply a healthy dose (pun intended) of common sense, and unfortunately, not everyone has that.

Turkle vs. Johnson

Just in time for your midterm: “Lonely, but united: Sherry Turkle and Steven Johnson on Technology’s Pain and Promise.” 

I can’t get the video embed code to work here, but please watch that dialogue. The 10-13 minute marks are quite interesting to me in terms of the reception of Turkle’s book and how she’s been slammed for being critical of the web.

This exchange actually reminds me a lot of the Keen vs. Weinberger “Reply All” debate from July 2007 titled “The Good, the Bad, And the ‘Web 2.0,'” although that exchange is more about the useless noise vs information filtering aspects of the web rather than people’s behaviors/online addictions.

Feel free to refer to either of this exchanges in your midterm responses.

Google Trends: It’s Cool to Stay in (Public) School

Social Media as Community Conversation

While reading Chapter 4 of Qulaman’s book Socialnomics, I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with his arguments. On page 61, Qualman states, “It is essential that traditional broadcasters [news] embrace socialnomics, otherwise, they will be overrun into oblivion.” This statement is most likely accurate. It is probably safe to assume that every major news organization, print and broadcast alike, have embraced some sort of social media, or combination thereof to reach their audiences. The use of online newspapers and you tube broadcasts is necessary to reach younger generations who spend a lot of time on computers. Indeed, print journalists are now more and more expected to both write hardcopy and for the web. 

However, I think that the print version and the traditional TV broadcasts will continue to exist for years to come. A large portion of population in the U.S. is 50 and older are perhaps more accustomed or prefer to read traditional papers and enjoy watching the 6 or 10 o’clock news. Qualman quotes Andrew Hayward, ‘We should be careful of these zero-sum games where the new media drives out the old.’ That is, a balance is necessary between traditional coverage and coverage presented through social media. Qualman goes on to argue that social media greatly helped our current president win the election in 2008—so did the traditional media and all of the traditional campaigning and speeches. Yes social media spread the message to millions of people, but the speeches were given to live audiences. Thus, to some degree, one could argue that social media is no different than any other medium; it just restates what has already taken place. What makes social media different then, is the fact that once a speech is posted, it exists forever, and people can view content over and over and post messages about it. It goes “viral.” As such, a single speech, a moment in history, may be preserved and disseminated for criticism or praise. Individuals may base their decisions regarding the speech not only on what was said by the speaker, but also by what all the other social media users have said about it. A conversation is formed.

Social media, I believe, may offer a useful forum for facilitating on-line communities and communication. However, one concern may be that people viewing these conversations may make decisions based on the content—which may be purely opinion—or even false. This possibility has always existed, but it seems that social media and the huge volume of “views” and people who follow a topic create a large space and audience for the dissemination of misinformation.

To change topics slightly, I also found Qualman’s section entitled: Is the Flu a Virus or Just Simply Viral? I just heard on the news (traditional TV broadcast) that the campaigns use data from web searches to determine which topics to cover in their advertisements. That is, they analyze search engine word trends—if the work Medicare is a very popular search, the politicians address Medicare. Until I saw this on the news, I did not realize to what extent this data was used. Everything that is typed into a search engine is tracked and analyzed. Further, this data can be sorted by location, so campaigns can determine what a specific region is most interested in—it is their form of audience analysis I suppose. Similar to social media, I have mixed feelings on this topic. Rather than a candidate discussing what is truly important to them, or, for that matter being honest, candidates can now simply go to a state and talk about what she/he already knows is the concern. Is this good for democracy overall?

Qualman goes on to state, “Whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or a member of the Bull Moose Party, you can’t deny the power of real-world community relations combined with the reach and engagement of online social communities and networks to change politics as usual.” Qualman is right—one can not deny the power of social media and online communities. On the other hand, the past few years politically have been as gridlocked and partisan as ever before. Is social media a contributing factor to the political situation we are in, or is it a means to facilitate be-partisan compromises? Or, is social media neither, but rather only a virtual place for people to talk about what is really ocurring?

Letting the Masses Promote the Brand: Is it Worth the Risk?

It was hard for me to choose what to write about from this week’s readings because they touched on a lot of interesting and valuable topics! In the end, I’ve chosen this week’s readings from Eric Qualman’s Socialnomics. Qualman chose a great example to highlight in chapter four, as he explores the successful use of social media in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Not only did Obama’s campaign actively use social media, but it embraced it, allowing social media to take the campaign further than it would have otherwise been able to go.

During the 2008 election season, it was apparent to me that Obama’s campaign readily took advantage of social media. What I did not consciously realize, though, was the extent to which the campaign built a grassroots following, and allowed that community to do some of the heavy lifting for it. Qualman uses the example of the parody on the well-known Budweiser “Whassup” commercials.

Essentially, the campaign allowed someone on the outside to “take ownership of the brand and promote it” (p. 68). The parody was a wild success and received millions of views. What I find striking about this is how beautifully it worked for the campaign, but also how risky this type of thing is. It could quickly go awry if the party doing the promoting does so in a distasteful or offensive way. To successfully leverage an online community in this way, communicators must be able to stay on top of what’s happening with their brand, and react swiftly and decisively when needed to avert crisis. Clearly, the Obama campaign of 2008 was able to do this, and it paid off—the risk was well worth it.

I have to believe, though, that the risk is not worth it for some brands, and that’s why some are hesitant to fully embrace social media to this extent. Maybe I’m thinking about this in a limited way, but it seems that allowing an online community to take some brand ownership may only work well for certain types of brands and in certain industries. The Obama campaign proved that it works for promoting a person or beliefs, but how well would this work for a product? (I’m having a hard time thinking of a parallel example for a product.) In the end, I think companies and organizations need to weigh their options: maintain near complete control of their message and brand, or relinquish some of that control and hope it pays off.

Obama – just one example out of many

Qualman’s chapter 2 and all the previous readings seem to come together. Great insights. To me this is pretty much all new. My question from before about if the position of a sales person and a technical communicator will eventually merge, found somewhat an answer in this week’s reading. Qualman says, “advertisers need to become providers of content” (p. 65). How do you market yourself, how do you create your own brand, it all have changed with social media. Actually, I was wondering if Obama would combine private with business life on Facebook or if it is all about his brand. So I checked his FB page and found mostly political posts on it. Just his and Michelles 20^th wedding anniversary I found – at first. Scrolling down more, there you go there is a picture of him and his two daughters with a comment about what they did last night.

However, the wording of the comment brings it all back into perspective. You think at first there is a private moment, but no, it is about the convention speech Michelle gave. Ok, so we are back into marketing. I guess where I am heading to with this is I still wonder how do combine all these different personalities we all have on social media. Do you do it at all? Do we need to see Obama and his private life? If not, how is he sharing with his family and friends his important moments? Does he not use social media at all for that or does he use a pseudonym?

Another aspect out of these readings is: Even though I heard about it, I never looked in detail in how Obama benefited from using social network. However, one thing that stood out to me was that you could actually track down what was searched for the most at Yahoo or Google. I don’t quite understand how do you actually access the search results? How do you find out if people google for soda or pop? Literally, how do you do that?

Utilizing Search and Browsing History at a Micro-Level

Erik Qualman’s book, “Socialnomics” once again entertained with interesting points in this weeks readings. The most interesting of which to me was the described ability of a search engine to predict phenomena before its occurrence by collecting and reviewing search data for trends (p. 69). One example was Yahoo’s ability to successfully predict the fast and powerful rise of pop star, Brittany Spears prior to the actual realization of her success. Also noted was Google.org ability to predict the rise of flu season prior to the Centers for Disease Control’s ability to do so. As Qualman states (p. 71), “[P]owerful stuff.”

MIT Professor, Thomas W. Malone is quoted as saying, “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence” (p. 71). Although Qualman looks at this available data as a set, it seems as of late I’ve been noticing more and more instances where my searching and browsing tendencies are being utilized in a individualized manner. For example, has this occurred to any of you: An ad pops up on the banner of your email browser that just so happens to be the exact product you browsed the evening before? I know, impressive, but slightly creepy right?

What have the advertiser’s done incorrectly in those too-obvious, banner ad, product placements? Really they are advertising the very product you viewed back to you and in a timely manner. What could go wrong? BUT, what is overlooked is that those advertisers don’t know what you thought of that product. It may be that you felt the product you viewed was sub-par. It may be that you decided it was too expensive. It may be a whole host of things. In addition, their very blatant use of your search history is borderline obnoxious. Not a good first impression for any potential customer. The search history of a potential customer must be useful to companies, but there has to be a better approach! Well, I think I experienced just one such tactic this week…

Wednesday afternoon I viewed a dress coat on LandsEnd.com. (It was a beautiful raspberry color, just gorgeous ladies… but I digress.) I read the coat’s reviews, checked out the details and even found my size. Ultimately though, I left the coat in the cart, deciding that it was too large of a splurge. The following day a coupon arrived in my inbox from Younkers. Now this happens very frequently, but what was unique is that the generic coupon that typically arrived had a unique title: “$50 Coupon for Coats.” Huh. Now THAT I clicked on and browsed their selection with the intention of using that tempting coupon. It wasn’t until I didn’t find anything of interest that I realized I had more-than-likely just been marketed to in a VERY powerful way.

Yes, it is possible that the Younkers’ coupon arrival and tagline was just a coincidence (being Fall anyway), but the lesson remains intact regardless. If a company utilizes search and browse results on a micro-level (as well as a macro-level, as explored by Qualman) they can craft very timely, individually-focused marketing campaigns. As Qualman teaches, by using social media to listen to an audience, a company can stay in constant contact with them. Does this sound familiar to you too? Once again, no matter whether we are discussing rhetoric, marketing, or politics – to be successful in engaging and motivating your audience you must first know them.

Obama’s Blackberry

I had almost forgotten that there was a controversy about whether or not President Obama could keep his Blackberry until Qualman mentioned it.  According to Qualman the reason they were going to take it away was that all his messages would become part of the public record, “The reason for the discussion about whether Obama would need to relinquish his BlackBerry did not center on overuse. Rather, it revolved around the fact that his text messaging, tweets, status updates, and e-mails would be part of the public record” (p. 77).

But that isn’t the whole truth I think.  This is a little off subject, but Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry, has a proprietary email service that runs on servers located in Canada.  Every single BlackBerry message flows through these servers.  That’s why when they go down it takes down the service of every single BlackBerry.  As I remember it, the bigger concern was the security issues around having the private messages of the President of the United States being sent to servers in another country and the fear that some hacker would be able to tap into it.

I don’t think that people were afraid that he’d text a mistress (cough, cough, Tiger Woods).  I think everyone believes that he is savvy enough to use a BlackBerry (or other device) intelligently, but it wasn’t as simple as Qualman made it sound.  Even with GPS turned off on your phone, the cellular provider can still determine roughly where you are based on which cell sites your device is connected to–a potentially bad thing for the President of the United States.

Ok, rant over.  Other than that, I think that Qualman made a lot of valid points about how social media really propelled Obama into the White House.  The way he was able to connect in a personal and direct way with voters energized people in a way that robo-calls and junk mail can’t.  Also, I think he is the first President to really understand and leverage the power of the internet to gather analytical data about what people are thinking about at a specific moment in time.  Why conduct polls to find out what people are saying they think, when you can go to the internet and see what they are ACTUALLY thinking and doing by analyzing search phrases and page hits?

Qualman used the flu to illustrate his point, “Comparing the CDC data to Google’s data showed that Google’s insight was roughly two weeks ahead of the CDC” (p. 71).  If Google can get a two week jump on the CDC, then how much of a jump did the Obama campaign have on McCain?

Symbolic-Analytic Work

About four or five years ago I remember having a cup of coffee with a lady I used to work with.  She had a PhD in English and was working in our group as a Writer/Editor.  We were discussing the current state of Technical Communication and where we thought things were headed.  She had spent her entire career in academia and had recently joined our company.  We had already started to go through a lot of layoffs and she wanted my thoughts on which jobs were the safest.

I told her that I thought she would be safer if she moved away from editing and took on more writing.  I told her that I thought management would start to cut anything that was not directly related to pushing manuals out the door.  She burst into tears.  She loved the English language and I think it kind of broke her heart that editors would be seen as non-essential.

She left our group and within a year we had no editors–we still don’t.  And now even the writing is going away to places like India or Poland.  I think that the group I’m a part of has shrunk by about 75% since 2000.  Two weeks ago the guy that hired me 15 years ago and the writer that mentored me both left the company.  Whatever TC was when I started, it is no more.  As Stanley Dicks explains:

Writing or editing will continue to be important activities for many technical communicators.  However, they are increasingly being viewed as commodity activities that business considers questionable in adding value and that are candidates for being outsourced or offshored.  (p. 54)

According to Dicks we need to find ways to do more “symbolic-analytic work” that has more strategic value to the companies we work for (p. 53).  This could be the old standby of doing more with less, but I think that most companies have gone about as far as they can with that.  If it can be outsourced, it pretty much has been

So what’s left then?  Where I work, there are still some people that write manuals, but they probably also lead a team of people in India that write most of the content.  These writers may also develop e-learning and flash-based tutorials.  I think that just about everyone else is dedicated to figuring out how we can use new tools and technologies to communicate to customers more effectively (and, of course, more cheaply).

That means figuring out how to make single-sourcing and content reuse work using DITA and a CMS.   For more than a year now I have been leading a team within our organization to move from a book/course based model to a topic-based model.  This includes things like:

• Change management – How do you get people to buy-in to making such a huge change?
• Development process – What happens to the process when we stop assigning book/course and start assigning topics or lessons?
• Graphics – If people are reusing graphic content, how do we make sure it has a consistent visual language?
• Metadata – How do we tag the content that goes into the CMS so people can find it, manage it, and reuse it?
• Templates and Usage – What kinds of authoring templates and guidelines need to be created to ensure that content authoring is consistent?
• Curriculum – What training needs to be created to bring people up-to-speed on this new way of working and all the new tools?
• Content Structure – How do we organize all this information within a CMS so that it makes sense?
• Pilot Project – What projects do we want to put choose for the initial testing of these new tools and processes and how do we use the findings to adjust our approach?

All of this is stuff that is strategic and that can’t be outsourced.  Doing this right could mean huge improvements for the customer as well as huge efficiency gains for the company.  Before this, I used to write books and my life was predictable, but I was so bored.  This is really scary and stressful, but it is exciting and meaningful in a way that my old job wasn’t.

I think that is what Dicks was getting at with his article.  Even though technical communication has gotten a lot smaller as a profession, for those that remain the work is going to be more challenging and more meaningful.  The club is a lot more exclusive than it used to be, but the upside is that TC will get more respect as we add more value.

Me! Me! Me! Otherwise known as social networking

 

I’ve been discussing visualizations and infographics with my ENGL 335 Digital Humanities students [check out their course blog here], and I came across this. Relevant to this week’s readings and blog posts, right?

 

We No Longer Search for “All the News that Isn’t”–It Finds Us (And then we copy it)

In his book Socialnomics, Qualman reminds us of the Tina Fey/Sarah Palin skits on Saturday Night Live.

Do you remember how much fun people had watching and talking about these satires? Qualman finds the skits interesting in terms of how popular they were, and where people watched them. According to NBC estimates, 50 million people watched the skits, but according to Solutions Research Group, more than half the viewers saw these over the internet. People had it pushed directly to their social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

I wonder if that’s how Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets his news from The Onion. Does he have The Onion “liked” on his Facebook page? Maybe not anymore. The satirical news source, The Onion fooled Ahmadinejad and Iran’s official news agency with a story titled “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama.” The spoof article states that results of a recent poll show that rural white Americans would rather vote for, go to a ball game with, and have a beer with Ahmadinejad than President Obama.

Well, not only has the internet made it really easy to share the news with others, it has made it really easy to steal the news as well. Iran’s official news agency took the article (you remember it was a satire, right?), passed it off as their own journalism, and then published it in Iran.

I suspect heads may roll over this goof-up.

Qualman’s book says that some people think the SNL skits with Tina Fey may have influenced the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. Did some people think that was actually Sarah Palin? Did people mistake SNL’s comedy for serious journalism?

Similar questions can be asked of The Onion incident. Does Ahmadinejad really think I’d rather share a home brew with him than with President Obama? Really? The Iranian news agency can’t recognize the satire in The Onion?

Actually, I’m not surprised. Sad, but not surprised. Satire and verbal irony can be tough to catch. (Every time I go through Stephen Crane’s poem “Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War Is Kind” with my sophomores, I have a frightening number of students who insist that Crane’s message was pro-war, despite me and other students pointing out the gruesome battle imagery and lines such as “… a field where a thousand corpses lie.”)

So what if people get fooled by internet content? A lot of people are being fooled by what’s on the internet. It used to be that the reliable news sources “looked” reliable. They hade professional layout, quality graphics, good photography, and they were the only sources that could afford to be published or televised. Now, digital technology and the internet give everyone the ability to self-publish professional-looking content. If our material is packaged right, it might get passed along to others. The problem is that it takes a more sophisticated audience to recognize credible sources today than it did ten years ago. Maybe satirical internet content should have to carry a warning label or start with the standard opening, “A funny thing happened on the way to Tehran the other day…”

Roles change for technical communicators

For this post I decided to write about Rachel Spilka’s book, Digital Literacy For Technical Communication. I learned a lot from the first chapter regarding the evolution of technology and thus the evolution of the role of the technical writer.

Chapter one, in Digital Literacy For Technical Communication by Rachel Spilka provides a straightforward description of how technical communication as a field has evolved with technology. In this chapter, Saul Carliner analyzes one company—the largest employer of technical communicators—to represent the field at large. The result, in my opinion, is a robust essay that suggests technology has indeed altered the roles of technical writers. Carliner’s analysis begins in the 1970’s, “In a few instances, people were hired with formal training in technical writing, but during the 1970s, this employer typically emphasized technical knowledge over writing skill” (23). The primary reason for this was that they were writing for individuals who already had an in-depth knowledge of computers, who didn’t need a step by step guide or manual (22-23).

However, as technology progressed into more and more people’s homes, the audience of the technical writers began to change. That is, Carliner states, “Both the change in markets for computers and the rise of word processing and desktop publishing led to profound changes in the work of technical communicators in this organization” (26). As a result, the emphasis of the technical communicator shifted to include writing technique, audience analysis, and the ability to prepare user friendly guides. To show when each significant advancement in technology occurred and how each advance in technology affected technical communicators, Carliner breaks a 40 year period, 1970-2010 (roughly) down into five phases.

The fourth and fifth phases, the rising popularity of the internet as a communication tool are perhaps the most relevant to me, since this is what I have grown up with. It seems clear that the internet has had a large impact on virtually all aspects of daily life. For technical communicators, the internet created not only new topics to write manuals for, but also provided a new method to transfer the information from those documents. Carliner states, “Electronic file transfer had many effects on technical communication (38). Indeed, the internet made possible email and on-line meetings/discussions. Thus, Carliner notes, “Electronic file transfers also facilitated remote work, as workers in one location could now easily collaborate on or manage projects across multiple locations” (38).

In essence, technical communicators transformed from being product specialists to product designers/explainers. Their primary roles changed from writing for a few individuals with an advanced knowledge of a product, to writing for potentially millions of users with limited or no knowledge of a product. The primary result of the advent and popularity of the internet on technical communicators then is that, technical communicators of today need to have specialized writing skills. They need to be able to write across cultural borders, across many levels of user experience, and in such a way that all audience members find the technical documents useful. This is a large task and why we are all learning how to do this in the MSTPC program!

What Does Social Media Have to do with a Leaf Blower?

In his book “Socialnomics” Erik Qualman writes, “To effectively leverage the social graph (the interconnectedness of social media users), every company needs to understand that they need to make their information easily transferable” (p. 14). Let’s write this another way: To put to best use the networks of social media, companies need to understand that they must make their information easy to share. Huh, simple, but SMART.

I would say companies are figuring this out. Have you noticed how many opportunities you are offered online to click a button and post that you had an interaction with a company/product/post? It was bizarre, but again my readings this week tied into a recent experience. My husband decided to purchase a gas powered leaf-blower online both for the savings and ease of the purchase. (Read: Fifty bucks cheaper and he didn’t want to leave the recliner.) My husband, who only started on a computer a few short years ago, ventured onto Amazon.com, read the reviews and easily completed the transaction. What shocked him was that after the purchase, he was invited to click a button that would post the following to his Facebook page: “Eric just purchased a Husqvarna, 28cc, 170 MPH, 2-Stroke, Gas-Powered, Handheld Gas Blower from Amazon.com.” (I know, holy souped-up leaf blower! FYI: leaves wreak havoc on the job site of a concrete crew.)

The hubs didn’t accept Amazon’s offer to post his purchase to his Facebook page, but how smart that he was given the option. Qualman explains why, “The average person on Facebook has 150 friends – there is a lot of viral potential when one person posts a story or video.” All it takes is one or two friends to hit “like” or comment, and then the post is visible to their approximately 150 connections, and so on and so forth. In the event that no one comments Amazon isn’t out advertising dollars either. It really is a win/win for them.

In my current position I have been producing email newsletters. Newsletters are rather hard to get excited about anyway, but after last week’s Qualman readings that said emails themselves are on the way out, I have had an increasingly difficult time! Is the fact that e-newsletters are so stagnant exactly why? They are too single-sided? They are currently a grocery-list of upcoming events and relevant topics. This may not offer any significant reasons for the reader to even think about passing them on! My new plan is to include a section that has comments provided from the very-connected e-newsletter readership. Possibly if readers are also part-author, the e-newsletters will be more interesting and more “post-worthy.” Oh, if only I can make the e-newsletter as cool as a new, souped-up leaf blower.

Encyclopedia Titanica (Qualman Ch 1)

“Internet dead ahead!”  The thing that interests me most when I look over the carnage that the internet has left in its wake is at what point did these industries–encyclopedias, newspapers, record labels, magazines and book publishers–realize that they were doomed.  Was it something specific like the papers piling up at the end of all their neighbors driveways or their kids getting busted using Napster, or did/will they live in denial all the way to the bitter end?

The publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica probably never thought that it would be possible for unpaid and unvetted people to equal the quality of the articles produced by paid professionals, but recent studies have shown that Wikipedia is at least the equal of Britannica.  Is Wikipedia the first real example of large-scale crowd sourcing?

In chapter one of Socialnomics by Erik Qualman, he summarizes how technology and human nature conspired to overthrow industries that have existed for hundreds of years.  For example, Encyclopedia Britannica began publication in 1768 (I looked that up in Wikipedia ironically).  The big surprise to me–and maybe to these industries–isn’t that they disappeared, but the fact that it all happened so fast.  As Qualman points out, social media has only been around for a few years, but it is so perfectly aligned with our basic human need for connectedness that it is like the internet on steroids.  I mean, it has surpassed porn as the most popular activity on the internet (p 1).  I never thought I’d see the day when porn was overthrown on the internet.

According to Qualman, “As human beings we have the dichotomous psychological need to be our own individual, yet we also want to feel that we belong to and are accepted by a much larger social set.” (p. 2) Why have an editor of a newspaper that doesn’t even know me decide what I see in the newspaper when I can have my friends and colleagues on LinkedIn and Facebook recommend stories based on a personal/professional relationship?

Newspapers aren’t doing themselves any favors by moving to a subscription model for internet content locking it behind a firewall.  That only works if you have a product that can’t be obtained elsewhere.  News and commentary are available from tons of sources for free, and, as Wikipedia has demonstrated, just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s bad.  Qualman’s scenario about the Idaho-senators blogger (p. 14 – 21) did a good job capturing the futility of the old business model.

There was really only one area where I question Qualman’s argument.  He contends that the time that appears to be a waste on Facebook, actually makes us more productive since we gain access to potentially critical information much faster.  I’ll admit that that can be the case, but sometimes it’s like drinking from a fire hose of  Zynga requests, political status updates, and funny cat pictures to find the kind of useful tidbits that Qualman uses in his example.  Have you ever had your boss walk by while you had Facebook open?  Did they think you were being productive?  Did you?

It ain’t what it used to be: Digital Literacy (ch1)

I don’t think I have ever really met anyone famous, so I never get to name drop.  But, the foreword to Digital Literacy  was written by JoAnn Hackos, whom I’ve talked to many times–I even got to interview her once.  In technical communication circles she’s about as famous as it gets, but that doesn’t really help me with my friends outside of work.

Ok, back to the task at hand.  The thing that stuck with me in JoAnn’s foreword is summed up in this quote:

The authors argue throughout that the roles and responsibilities of technical communicators are changing rapidly–in some cases for the worse.  The focus on producing “books” by individual authors working independently is rapidly coming to an end. (p. ix)

If you have worked in TC during the last decade or so, then you know this to be true.  The dot com bust followed by waves of cost reductions and outsourcing have really demolished a lot of training and documentation groups.  The jobs that remain require different skills and a lot of flexibility.

Part of that change is due to the death of the book-based authoring model that Hackos mentions at the end of the quote above.  The rise of XML, DITA, and CMSs is destroying the technical communication profession in the same way that the internet has wrecked the newspaper industry.  And that is actually a GOOD thing.

Yes, if it is your goal to go out and get a job writing a technical manual you are going to be disappointed.  But, if you are a curious person that likes to explore all the possible modes for communicating technical information to people in a way they can understand, then you are in luck.  Technology–including social media–has done such a thorough job destroying the old tech comms model that you can get in on the ground floor of defining what it means to be a technical communicator in the future.  Most of the Introduction  of the book was spent driving this point home, for example, “[Technical communicators] need to define their own opportunities and them move boldly forward.  In short, it’s time to adapt or move over.” (Myers p. 2)

I think the hardest part for a lot of people that I have worked with is that the new model (whatever it turns out to be) will require us to be a lot more social.  It might mean creating interactive training, or holding webinars, or interacting online with real customers.  You might need to have video or audio production skills–I talked to a guy at Microsoft that rewrote job descriptions so he could hire people from CNN and Lucas Film rather than typical tech writers.

Pretty much the whole chapter was a trip down memory lane for me and I think that Carliner was dead-on about everything in there.  Being in tech comms isn’t about locking yourself away in the corner and writing your book anymore.  It’s about leveraging all the cool new tools, including social media, to more effectively communicate with our audience.

Is Social Networking Right for School?

According to Jack Molisani and his article “Social networking for you” “Our job is not to write user manuals and sales brochures. Our job is to get user-optimized content to people when they need it and where they want it. In other words, follow your audience.”

What if my audience ranges in age from 15 to 18 years old? What if my audience is already physically captive in my room? What if my audience is my Literature of the Land class or my American Studies class? What if I’m my audience’s teacher? Do I still have to follow them? Yes I do.

And that’s a tough task because they come from so many different backgrounds and are going in so many different directions with so many different talents, concerns, questions, and challenges that it’s hard to follow them all.

Ah, but perhaps social networking will actually make it easier—or at least more successful since that’s what so many of them are familiar with anyway.

Sure, Molisani is talking about social networking to advance a career or business, but many of the arguments he uses make sense in education too.

The ease of finding information. Right. So why would students want to listen to a teacher lecture about the difference between alliteration, assonance, and consonance when they’d be able to google the terms and find definitions and examples in about 45 seconds if they ever found a need to? Since students don’t need help finding such information anymore, teachers need to find ways to push students to put the information and technology tools they have to good use.

Ask a friend. Molisani suggests that web sites should allow people to interact since they may have valuable information to share and will find a way to talk about a product anyway. The most engaging classrooms encourage student interaction and input. Wouldn’t it be nice if students could interact in an extension of that classroom (the web) after the bell rings. Teachers might as well help provide the structure for that.

Molisani says, “You are the master of your career.” Students could become the masters (or at least very active advocates) of their education too. Rather than wondering where the teacher’s plan is going, the internet offers students the opportunity to have some say in the direction a lesson takes. If the curriculum states that everyone has to learn how to write persuasively, why do all students have to show that the same way and to the same audience. The answer is they don’t, and social networking on the internet gives students the opportunity to reach an audience that may be more meaningful–outside the walls of the school.

Since students are already so good at social networking in the halls and after school, why not harness their natural talents for class-related purposes too?

RE: Social Media Taking Over

Chapter two in Qualman’s book: Socialnomics was interesting to read because I related to much of the content being covered. Qualman suggests, “ Cameras document everything, and technologies like Facebook’s Mobile Upload and ‘tagging’ can disseminate a naked keg stand to your network faster than you can count to five.” I recently attended a birthday party for a relative, and my niece recorded the whole thing via her smart phone. I don’t think she ever actually watched the party through her own eyes—rather through her display screen. After the recording was finished, she was so excited to upload it to Facebook. I didn’t understand this—I asked myself: why can’t we just enjoy the moment anymore? I asked her why she recorded the party to put on Facebook, she didn’t have much of an answer.

This need to record and post everything is also true in other situations. Anytime I go out with my friends, someone is taking pictures and uploading them to Facebook, no longer does privacy exist. I am not sure if this is bad necessarily, but it is different. The notion of connecting with one’s children via social media rather than through oral conversation is also different. Qualman notes, “In many instances, social media can help bring families a little closer by enabling parents to unobtrusively follow their kids’ lives.’” Perhaps in some cases, but I can certainly see how this may backfire. More to the point however, if parents begin to rely solely on social media to communicate with their children—to find out about their day—what is lost as a result? To argue that passive communication is better than active is also interesting to consider.

One topic that I have not considered, addressed in chapter 3 is the notion that email may go extinct. I send many emails everyday, so the idea that in the not so distant future email will be obsolete is hard to fathom. However, I don’t doubt it. The rate at which technology now evolves is staggering. For instance, as Qulaman notes, even the way we date has changed due to technology. Qualman states:

First, people used to give out their home phone number. Then people began to give out their email address instead. At first it seemed odd to ask someone for a date over email, but then it became quite natural. Then we progressed to mobile phone numbers because some people didn’t have land lines anymore. Besides it was easier to message one another—it was less intrusive and awkward: ‘What are you doing tonight?’

To some extent I think it is appropriate to ask the tough questions in person, or over the phone, rather that take the passive approach—perhaps I am just a traditionalist. While text messaging and social media offer a means to gain knowledge about another person—it is only portrayed information. That is, what you see on Facebook may not be what you get in real-life. As such, in-person conversations may still be the most fruitful. Overall, chapter 2 and 3 in this book forced me to question my own decision regarding my use (or lack their of) of social media. Further, it provided a lot of good insight regarding why social media is so popular which is beneficial to someone like me who does not have a very good understanding of it due to never participating in it.

It’s All About Attitude

Chapters two and three of Eric Qualman’s Socialnomics do a great job of explaining how companies can leverage social media to build and enhance their image and reputation. The key, it seems, is to focus on the positive. Some companies take a very reactive approach, viewing critical feedback on various social media outlets as something to be controlled or contained. Responding in this way (essentially by stifling the opinions of consumers) really doesn’t do much for the company or the consumer. Companies that are truly successful use criticism in a more productive way, as Qualman explains,

“Effective companies and people relish online feedback. They use the information to make themselves more competitive by improving their products and services in the eyes of the consumer . . . Good companies view it as an opportunity to prove to the customer that they are willing to go the extra mile for them” (p. 40).

Personally, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. It’s really in a business’s best interest to respond to online criticism proactively. Then, they can not only acknowledge the consumer’s complaint, but also create an opportunity for themselves. If they are able to rectify the situation, they demonstrate—in a very public way—their willingness to help and that they care about their customers’ satisfaction.

Today, the companies that embrace the social capabilities of an online environment are in the best position to thrive. While doing this week’s readings, I found a good example. Zappos, the online shoe retailer, uses Twitter to as a way for employees to communicate directly with customers about their products. This is exactly the type of positive, proactive interaction Qualman is talking about. Not only can employees assist customers, if needed, but they can also interact with them on a personal level—in front of a presumably large audience in the public sphere.

Companies who are struggling to develop a social media strategy would do well to examine their approach. Using lemons (criticism and complaints) to make lemonade (a lasting, positive impression to customers and their social networks) is an invaluable tool. The company doesn’t necessarily control what the online community is saying, rather it uses it to positively influence the way consumers feel.

Grab the reins…

This week’s readings were pretty interesting, since I don’t consider myself as being very familiar with social networking. So the article by Boyd and Ellison out of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication was a good start to learn more about the history and some of the few researches that have been done here in the U.S. According to the authors “social network sites are structured as personal (or ‘egocentric’) networks, with the individual at the center of their own community” – or like Baron states they are for relationships that are not “physically proximate” [p. 71]. One thing seems for sure, social network sites will reshape offline social geography (Lee Humphrey in Boyd/Ellison). How so? Well the just the simple fact “that ‘friends’ on social network sites are not the same as ‘friends’ in the everyday sense” (Boyd/Ellison) will have a great impact on our social skills overall. Often we use these sites by staying connected with people we don’t really want to go through the effort and really connect with them by spending time with them and by sharing our lives. As email seems to be outdated in the younger generation already and the new way to communicate is via text, IM or social network sites like Facebook, as there will be a different form of social interactions created. I guess the process started already.

However, to me more interesting is the professional aspect of social network sites. Qualman offered in both chapters great examples on how customer service can be redefined using these tools. I never heard about vanity search or Miles. I found the example about the how to connect with your customers as really eye-opening. For a short while I worked for a real estate broker. I held a few open houses and my main goal was to get people’s email addresses. It didn’t matter if they weren’t really interested in that particular house. It mattered to connect with them, to reach them, to get their email so that we then later could send them newsletters etc. about other listings. According to Qualman, it is nowadays not anymore about getting that person into my database, but it is about starting a real – well online – relationship with the customer via social networks. “Your customer wants to have a relationship with you and even help out where they can. All it takes is honesty, transparency, listening, and reacting” [56]. To boil it all down: Let the consumer brag about your products – not you. After reading those chapters, Molisani’s article in the Intercom was tailored even more to our profession. He states: “Our job is not to write user manuals and sales brochures. Our job is to get user-optimized content to people when they need it and where they want it. In other words, follow your audience” [4].

Even though, I try not to share my private life that much on social network sites, I believe Molisani is right that we as Technical Communicators have to leave a digital (positive) footprint of our works. We have to know these tools and platforms to be able to advise our customers and employers how to best connect with their audience – and we have to brag about it … online. To speak with his words: Let’s start “grabbing the reins of” our “career and steering it where” we “want it to go”.

Keeping up with the Jones’s Status Updates

There were a couple of things that really stood out for me in chapter 3 of Socialnomics, by Erik Qualman.  First, email is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.  And, second, if our friends have better status updates than us, we will get off the coach and run a 5k just to one-up them.

First let’s start with the horse-and-buggy that email has become.  Qualman provides the following quote from a director of Apple iTunes . . .

At Apple, we generally hire early adopters.  That being said, I was still blown away when we recently hired a 22-year-old and he had literally never sent an e-mail.  Via his iPhone he had always communicated with his friends either by instant messenger, text, phone call, or comments within Facebook.  I believe he is not alone and this is a trend we will continue to see with the next generation. (p. 47)

I’m almost twice as old as this kid–so maybe it is because I’m old–but I still use email at work all the time.  That said, when I think about my life outside of work, I’m not that much different than Apple-boy.  I text my family and friends, or post to their FB page, and I send private messages to their FB page if it needs to be private.  So, I can kind of see how a young person today could get through life without email, but what about work?   I think maybe work needs the formal structure the email provides.  If not, what is holding back the spread of social media inside of companies.  I bet that 22-year-old learned how to use email after he got hired.

The second phenomenon that Qualman described was about how constantly commenting (and reading others comments) on life causes us to live more meaningful lives.  He describes the case of an 83 year old man named Bill Tily who consciously examines all of his status posts (p. 51).  Then when he finds that he is wasting his time, he redirects himself to do more fulfilling activities.

I’ve thought about this myself, though not to the same degree as Bill.  More commonly, I see that my friends are doing something cool while I’m watching Wipe Out and I take stock and try to make some changes.  I’ll be honest, I have a couple of friends that are hard-core athletes: one runs triathlons and the other travels the planet riding in and writing about bike races.  While I admire their drive, I often find their posts incredibly annoying.  Things like, “Just completed a seven-mile run to 7-Eleven for a bottle of YooHoo”  or, “Sipping wine in Tuscany after a long ride.”   It just makes my life seem kinda dull.

But again, it does somehow motivate me to ask myself if I’m really making the most of my life.  Wasn’t it Socrates that said that, “The unexamined life is not worth living” ?   Could social media really be what causes us to shut off Farmville and live better lives?

The New Company Website

Chapter three of Socialnomics was a perfectly-timed read for me this week. In this chapter Erik Qualman explains that email is on its way out, referring to the decline in the use of this technology by Generations X and Y (p. 46). He also points out that websites are serving different purposes these days, they should no longer be the sole means of online information about a company:

… [A company] could be in communication with fans and consumers on someone else’s database (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.). Yet, many companies fail to grasp this new concept. They build elaborate YouTube or Flicker pages, placing callouts and click actions that send the user outside the social network, often to their company website (p. 48).

Qualman vividly compares this antiquated strategy to the following…

It’s analogous to meeting a pretty girl in a bar and asking if she would like a drink. When she responds “yet,” rather than ordering a drink from the bartender, you grab her and rush her into your care and drive her back to your place… (p. 49).

Okay, so we all get Qualman’s point, but why was this read well-timed for me you ask? Well I would just love to share… A friend of mine introduced me to her photography business this week. It is a small, hobby business, but growing quickly and earning her a nice supplemental income. Over lunch we were discussing new businesses, marketing them and the-like when she happened to mention she didn’t have a website. (Gasp.) I had to hide my surprise and the inner-dialogue, What is a snazzy little photography business doing without an equally-snazzy website?! Well, as I found out later, the answer is quite a lot.

After lunch we scheduled a time for her to come and take pictures of my kids the following evening. The next afternoon I noticed a Facebook message from her suggesting I “like” her page so that she could “share” with me a sneak-peak album she would post after the shoot. Hmmm, now you have my attention. Absolutely, I will like that page right this minute… task completed.

Painted Iris Photography + Design’s Facebook Page

After an hour of photos and lots of good chatting, my friend headed home. The next morning I checked Facebook, thinking she couldn’t possibly have anything posted already. Yet, there they were, a dozen or so darling shots of my kidlets. And the marketing beauty of it for her little business? All I had to do was hit “share” to post them to my wall along with the link to the original album located on her Facebook page. Twenty-four hours later, dozens of my friends and family had commented about the photos and quite likely browsed her business page. A page that is updated almost daily, unlike most websites, with new sneak-peak albums… all spreading kiddo-cuteness among family and friend networks. THAT, my friends, is brilliant and in this particular scenario MUCH more effective than a static website.

The best way for me to summarize this lesson is to finish with Jack Molisani’s frank comment in Is Social Networking for You?: “Why should your company have a Facebook presence? Because that’s where your audience is” (p.10).

SNS = Social Network Sites (not Super Nintendo System) Boyd and Ellison

I’m guessing that most Americans understanding of the history of Social Network Sites (SNS) comes from the movie The Social Network, myself included.  Based on that, I assumed that there was MySpace and Friendster and then Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook smote them.  Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison, however, clear that all up in their article Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.  I think the thing that surprised me the most about the history part of this article is how quickly the members of the various social networks abandoned them when they got annoyed.

When Friendster got more popular, the network performance suffered and then as more and more people joined it became less cool, “. . . exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: Users had to face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends.”  If FB messes up bigtime could they fold up too?  I can’t remember where I read this, but I have heard that many young people are abandoning FB (or are at least downplaying it) in favor of Twitter since their Mom and Dad haven’t joined Twitter yet and they can still say what they want.

Now Facebook has been pretty stable in terms of performance, but it definitely seems to be declining in the coolness area.  Maybe it is just me, but the more people I add to my “Friends” the less I post to FB.  Yes, there are privacy settings, but figuring them out is like doing one of those logic puzzles.  You know, “Jane likes bananas and grapes, but only on Sundays.  Bill hates grapes and likes bananas, but will only eat them in the morning.  What kind of fruit can Jane and Bill eat on Tuesday afternoon.”  Is there anyone out there that hasn’t been burned by a status update that somehow made it to someone that it shouldn’t have?

And now our employers are busy implementing their own internal SNSs, “This growth has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in creating, purchasing, promoting, and advertising SNSs.”  It’s one thing to post something that annoys your Sister-in-Law, it is something else entirely to offend the Director of Marketing (or some other muckety-muck).  I have no evidence of this, but I suspect that this is a significant reason why most corporate social networks are lame: no one wants to offend anyone so no one challenges anything–no matter how stupid.

In our private life we can choose our friends and we stand a chance in understanding our audience, “In listing user motivations for Friending, boyd (2006a) points out that “Friends” on SNSs are not the same as “friends” in the everyday sense; instead, Friends provide context by offering users an imagined audience to guide behavioral norms.”  But corporate SNSs are guided by org charts and not personal relationships.  Without having this guide, how can companies leverage the power of social networking for collaboration and sharing without triggering all the bad aspects–misunderstanding and mistrust?  And add cultural differences to the list and it starts to look a little hopeless.

But Boyd and Ellison do offer a little hope, I think, when they say, “Although exceptions exist, the available research suggests that most SNSs primarily support pre-existing social relations. Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) suggest that Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections, as opposed to meeting new people.”  Maybe rather that dictating to people who their “friends” should be inside a company, they should allow people to share comments with colleagues of their choosing. It seems counterintuitive, but maybe we need less connections to get more sharing.

Blogging: Not a newbie, but not an expert either

I don’t consider myself to be an expert in the blogosphere, but I wouldn’t categorize myself as a beginner either. I’ve used free blog offerings in the past – ie. BlogSpot, but about nine months ago switched over to WordPress.

For my purposes, I use and follow blogs that are done in a conversational style, are easy to read and aren’t overloaded with content. As a former newspaper editor, I relish white space and get overwhelmed if there’s too much going on. I appreciate the thoughtfulness that goes into each post.

Personally, I set-up a family blog about five years ago as a means of saving money and not having to print hundreds of photos of my children to mail out to family members. Instead, I posted the pictures to the family blog and if family members wanted to print them off, then they had that option. I still use our blog for this reason. We had family pictures taken by my sister this past weekend and posted them to our blog for friends and family to see. We’ll make copies for grandparents and parents, but are happy not to be making 100+ copies of photos every time one of the kids does something adorable. We’re soon to have four kids so that’s a lot of photo prints!

As we entered into the adoption world, I realized how fantastic and educational following other families’ blog was so we started our own adoption blog, and later decided to merge previous blogs into one so everything is at www.kellibloomquist.com. We’re planning to blog while we’re in China next month to adopt our son, Blake. This will allow friends and family members to follow on our journey of a lifetime.
This is a recent picture that we received of our little guy last month. I can’t wait to love on him in a few weeks. We think he’s pretty handsome and are smitten.

Zero experience with blogging

This is the first blog post I have ever written. I have heard of blogs, but have never had any reasong to particiapte in the act of blogging. At this point, writing on a blog site seems very similar to writing in the discussion board area of D2L. The primary difference (I think) is that when one posts to public blog on the internet, a broader audience may possibly read it. I am looking forward to learning more about how written communicaiton processses are changing as a result of these interactive writing portals where people can post thoughts and others may respond.

Final Paper | How Did Social Media Effect Occupy UC Davis?

As I was searching for a paper topic, one was unfolding before me over the Thanksgiving holiday. I am writing about how social media played a role in the Occupy UC Davis movement and pepper spray incident that happened in the city I live. Maybe you heard about it on the news. My family in Wisconsin called the day after students were pepper sprayed and were surprised Davis made the national news. So, below is my proposal:

YouTube videos of the pepper spray incident shed light on campus police taking extreme measures to clear away non-violent protesters.

Education is very important to the citizens of the State of California. For a long time, tuition had been free or very inexpensive to residents of the state who were accepted at the University of California (UC) System. It is part of the California culture that low-cost higher education is a right and not a privilege. Within the past years due to a major budget crisis, the state has significantly increased tuition for its UC schools. A significant increase in tuition was one of the main reasons students have recently protested as part of the Occupy UC Davis movement.

While tuition increases have been protested in the past, the Occupy UC Davis movement has gained special attention due to social media. On November 18, campus police used pepper spray as self-defense on non-violent student demonstrators. The pepper spray incident was caught on video and uploaded to YouTube. The video went viral, and it gained national and international attention as the campus community and nation scrutinizes what went wrong. The incident even caught the attention of Jon Stewart, satirist and host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central who mocked the event on his show, stating there were better ways than pepper spray to get the attention of college students, like free tacos or Green Day in the quad.

College students are heavy social media users. Student protesters are heavily utilizing social media, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, creating wikis, and blogging. Social media gave them power to communicate what happened, and because of its viral nature, news of the event spread quickly to many people, including people across the country and across the globe. This is a paradigm shift in power from few distributing information to many, to many creating and distributing information. 

Campus administration and others with high authority roles on campus, including Chancellor Linda Katehi, do not implement social media the same way the students do. People like the chancellor have less time available to interface with social media and tend to rely on more traditional communication devices, including email, press releases, and websites. The chancellor’s staff assists her with communication duties, including sending and answering emails, facilitating her blog, and writing speeches. While Chancellor Katehi emailed the campus community after the pepper spray incident occurred, several hours had passed while her email statement made its way through the appropriate channels before it could be sent to all students, faculty and staff. While her email had an air of authority, the lag in time opened the opportunity for information from other sources to fill in the gaps of what happened. Timeliness of a message is important. Breaking the story first, whether completely accurate or not, is worth more now than it ever use to be due to social media.

There are positive and negative consequences of social media, including the speed and accuracy of the message. This includes accuracy of the message context. Other important issues include an increased participation and awareness, increased two-way interaction between sender and receiver, and an increased authority given to messages that appear online. By examining these issues, I hope to better understand social media’s role in the events that unfolded surrounding the Occupy UC Davis pepper spray incident.

 

The Final Paper is Only the Beginning!

Emerging Media Topic

Because these are my first final papers as a Graduate Student, I am a bit anxious.  Luckily, I have been able to nail down a good paper topic that I feel comfortable researching and presenting.  I will be doing my paper about:

Are iPads Suitable Substitutes for Manuals, Textbooks and Other Paper Documents in the Business and Educational World?

This topic will allow me to present information relating to how people in education and business have fared in the past utilizing paper documentation as well as present how iPads can make life easier.

I know people who like to redecorate. One of the ways they find inspiration is to use one picture, pillow, rug or piece of furniture and then design the room around this piece.  A similar opportunity afforded itself to me.  As I was researching a similar topic for another course, I came across an article by the Air Force:

Fontaine, S., & Blake Johnson, N. (2011, September 19). Table takeover. Air Force Times, pp. 18-20. In this article from the Air Force’s own publication a realistic review of the role of the iPad is presented. In early phases of testing, there is a very optimistic outlook for the iPad tablet as it is charged with being able to reduce costs and weight on flights. While the Air Force and other branches of our armed forces are beginning to utilize the iPad because of the need for added mobility, there are also concerns regarding security. These concerns are also identified.

 

Looking to the Future

While working on this one project is important, the process overall has been enlightening in many ways. The past two weeks have been spent in contemplation of what my (3) final projects will be about.  What started out as separate thought processes has coalesced into a realization that all that I do while here at UW Stout is of value farther down the line. 

As I was perusing topics on graduate studies on the internet, I stumbled across an article at the Dartmouth Writing Program website relating to Writing a Thesis. The information presented, though quite simple, is also very powerful. It de-mystified the process for me and urged me to begin “thinking” about how I want to finish.

To this end, I am designing a data base to house information relating to my time at UW Stout – more particularly to organize and add notations to articles, books, chapters, magazines and other print media (both on the internet and hard copy).  I really think that by doing a lot of reading, making a few notes here and there and being able to search and re-read, I can save an enormous amount of wasted time later on and have a much better understanding of my choices when the time comes.

Once I have a workable version, I would be happy to share it with anyone else that would like to use this as a tool.

Week 11 | Consider Cultural Differences for Social Media

The use of social media sites are exploding across the globe.

I enjoyed Thatcher’s Understanding Digital Literacy Across Cultures. He laid the chapter out well, first defining digital literacy (“accessing, understanding, and appropriately using in specific communication situations”) and ethnocentrism (assuming that another culture will use digital media the same as your own), p. 169. He then presented an excellent example where he had to make adjustments in an email that was presented to two different cultures in the U.S. and Mexico. He then discussed the background for understanding how digital literacy relates to cultural conventions (through I/Other, Norms/Rules, and Public/Private degree of involvement). Lastly, he discussed how technical communicators can make adjustments to communication practices for other cultures through five strategies (determining the purpose of the communication, determining the audience, determining the information needs, determining organization strategies, and determining style preferences. Thatcher illustrates his strategies for transforming the Texas Tech University homepage into something that would be more suitable to an audience from Mexico.

Thatcher’s email and website examples are very thorough, and I agree that technical communicators should adapt their digital communication to account for cross-cultural differences. How, though, can technical communicators adapt digital communications for social media, and do these strategies apply?

One company’s blog, Global Partners International Translation Blog states that marketers must localize content for different cultures. Communication through social media in other cultures means determining what local social media networks to use, what languages to use, what topics are trending, and information about the culture. I think this is only the starting point because as the use of popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are exploding worldwide, technical communicators should realize that using social media effectively means more than just knowing which medium to use or translating words into another language. I think that Thatcher’s strategies apply to social media. Let’s say Coca Cola wants to have a presence on China’s most popular social media network. The company would have to think about its purpose, audience information needs, style preferences, and maybe to a lesser degree its organization strategies (as social media sites tend to have already set structures).

Social Media and Aps

Please bear with me as I post this. I am using a WordPress ap on my IPad and unfortunately it is a bit clunky. Over the last week, I have tried to find a way to view more than only my own posts, but alas I have yet to figure that out. So far, this ap only allows me to see and edit my own posts. It seems to be an interface for posting alone.

To this end, it is quite elementary at best for even posting, but I am tenacious – I will see how this works out.

As my topic suggests, this is about more than just WordPress. Tonight, as I was checking out some Twitter posts, I came across a tweet that did more for me than any other since I started stalking the Twitterverse.

http://stumpteacher.blogspot.com/2011/01/twitter-102.html

The above link is a must-see for any aspiring Twitter-er? Tweetster? Oh heck, you get the picture. Unfortunately, his reference to an IPad ap (TweetDeck) is a bit premature – there is only a workable ap for the iphone. But, never fear, I plan on testing it out on my laptop.

Oh yea, I suppose I need to take a picture to test this ap and post it here. Let me see if there is a photo option….. alas there is not, but that is all the better because I look like hell right now.

Wait, I found it – here is a picture of my puppy, Spaz. She is sitting here waiting to watch the #DWTS result show – OOPS, I mean Dancing with the Stars.

Well, for some reason,I am having trouble now seeing what I type because the program will not scroll. In the end, I think this ap needs a bit of work!

One last thing, are we allowed to link our posts here to twitter if we want to share them?

Week 10 | LinkedIn – Social Media for the Career Minded

How people shared their resumes before LinkedIn

Qualman, Chapter 10 could be entitled “All the Things Leftover that I Wanted in My Book, but Could Not Find Places for in Other Chapters, and I Really Want to Be Credited with Naming the Glass House Generation.” The subject matter in Chapter 10 jumped around. From being snarky and calling flight attendants exasperated stewardesses who don’t know what to do when their box lunches run out (p. 219) to stating that young people have declining oral communication skills without presenting substantial evidence that this is true—only an anecdote about two people who met in the virtual world of Second Life. The two had issues, but the story does not say whether the couple’s issues were due to a lack of communication skills.

The last part of the chapter was more cohesive. Qualman discussed social media’s role in job hunting. I agree that the middlemen of the job recruitment process will not go away. Online job boards and fairs will continue to help connect potential employees with employers. People also will still look to professional organization job boards and the employer itself, but career social media like LinkedIn is exclusive to helping employers and job seekers connect with each other. In the end, I believe that companies make the final hiring call during an interview, but LinkedIn is a great place to get a foot in the door and make a good first impression.

LinkedIn is useful for networking. LinkedIn helped me find contact information for my company’s database and Christmas card list. In a few weeks, my company will be sending our Christmas cards out to our clients. One of our clients left one organization for another. While the old and new organizations had not yet updated their websites, the client had updated her public LinkedIn profile. I was able to figure out where she was currently employed so we can send her a Christmas card.

 

Advertising through Niche Market Bloggers

While reading Chapter 8 in Socialnomics, they talked about the paid-for-search programs they had in place. It was great to learn about how those function and actually put cash back into the consumers pockets because I’ve heard about them before but never really understood the mechanics.  The same principal applies on advertising on blogs – blog owners get paid based on blog reader clicks.

From what I understand, bloggers often sign up with a company that provides the advertising that the author, in turn, posts on their blog. I know there have been blogs that have been scolded by their readers because their ads are for controversial companies or companies that are known to support controversial causes.

Additionally, and I see this more often (I follow a lot of blogs!), companies often get out information about their products or services through blogs. I think it’s great that companies are so in touch with their customer base that they know the blogs that reach their wider customer base. And people who read the blogs trust the author on the subject their speaking on, so if they give an honest, positive review, there’s a greater chance that those who read the blog will view the product the same way.

For example, one of the blogs I read on a regular basis is Clean Eating Chelsea (www.cleaneatingchelsea.com) and she regularly reviews products sent to her by food companies. She takes posts beautiful, sharp photographs of the food she’s sent and honestly reviews it. It costs the company the cost of the product and the cost of shipping but that more than makes up for it with a positive review that’s basically “free” advertising. Sometimes the company will send additional products to the blogger to offer to their readers in the form of a giveaway. It’s an extremely cleaver, inexpensive way for companies to reach a particular market.

Here is one of her reviews on coconut oil:

Source: http://www.cleaneatingchelsea.com

Week 10 Readings: Human + Machine

The Longo reading from the Spilka book was interesting, even though the article was all over the place. She makes several statements about the genuineness of computer mediated interaction:

Virtual communities encourage simulated social interactions that lead to simulated human connections” (p. 148).

Those of us who inhabit digital worlds often claim that virtual communities are like “real” communities or are even better than “real communities, reassuring ourselves that a virtual life is OK, that it is not detrimental to “real” life (p. 155).

As people become more removed from one another in the physical world, we assure ourselves that the technological revolution enabling this alienation facilitates an idealized community, while also dismantling our physical community. This assertion comforts us, because we come to believe that an online virtual world such as Second Life is just like “real” life and is, therefore, OK (p. 156).

These statements just really set me off. I think it is because of the “normal-centrism” of her statements. Both Long and Turkle are criticizing a milieu that attracts people who are often marginalized within their physical communities. People who like games like Second Life, World of Warcraft and other online games are considered “geeky” or “nerdy.” They are either shy or have been teased into isolation or otherwise rejected by others. Now that a different environment has been created where they can thrive, scholars are trying to assert that what they are doing is somehow wrong. Longo asks, “Can virtual social connections established within a human + machine culture satisfy our human need to connect with other people?” (p. 148). If that’s the only kind of interaction wherein these people have been successful, I say, YES!

One of the sources she quotes says “…to “simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t,” and “simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’”(Baudrillard p. 167-168). If the choice is to continue to try and insert yourself into a physical social construct that rejects you over and over again versus thriving in an environment where people accept you, most people are going to choose acceptance over rejection.

One of the silly things about this argument is the fact that nobody gets their pants in a bunch when people talk on a home phone. That’s machine-mediated communication, and it is so unsophisticated as to only let you talk to one person at a time. Why aren’t scholars freaking out about telephone calls? They’re studying cell phone use, but why not the cordless we carry all over our homes?

The geeks finally have someplace to be. Like it or not.

Here’s my creative bit for this week. It’s a rap about geeks, to the tune of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which you can listen to before reading the rap to yourself.

Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
And I like to take a minute: just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I kill a dragon in its lair.

Now out in a suburb born and raised
I was a chubby kid with a funny old face
Kinda getting’ teased when I’m going to school
By the jocks and the greasers who thought they were cool
When a couple of guys who were up to no good
Startin making trouble in my neighborhood
I got in one little fight and my mom got scared
She said ‘You’re playin’ in the basement, now stay down there.”

I begged and pleaded with her day after day
But she bought me a computer and some games to play.
She gave me a keyboard and then she gave me my mouse.
I put my headphones since I was stuck in the house.

World of Warcraft, yo this is bad
Drinking potions out of a round flask.

Is this what the people of Azeroth living like?
Hmmmmm this might be alright.

I joined up in a guild and we had no fear
The monsters said “RAAAR” and we put it in gear
If anything I can say the treasure was rare
Told my guildies – “To the big boss, we’re just about there.”

I pulled up to the dragon cave at 7 or 8
And I yelled to the my guildies “Yo homies this is fate”
I looked at the dragon
We were finally there
I was having an adventure sittin’ right in my chair.

Addendum: I found this yesterday on the internet:

 

PPS. For some reason I thought the creative tag meant I should separate it. Don’t know where I got that idea from but I put it back together with its original post and just clicked the “creative” category. DERP!

Electronic Cultures

 As I contemplate the concept of culture, more specifically cultures in an electronic sense, I find that there are some elements that do not necessarily jibe with main-stream cultural ideas. Online or electronic cultures seem to be a bit more malleable. The members of these cultural communities tend to fade in and out and change much more easily than members of a culture rooted in long-term traditions.  As I thought about this, it seems to me that the reasons could be attributed to the internet itself. As a medium of expression and communication, the internet is a virtual (no pun intended) infant. If this is the case, then how can a culture even exist? Wouldn’t you consider a culture to be something of a more static and solid nature?  Because the traditional connotation of culture conjures images of generations of members who have developed traditions and morals over a period of time, how can the internet produce cultures of its own in such a short period of time?

I would venture to say that the internet has not produced culture.

Culture has been uncovered and nurtured through this device; however, the internet is just this – a portal to view people through and bring them together.  Because you can boot up, log in and figuratively “step through” the portal to a new land, a room full of friends or even the halls of an institution, I see the internet not as the culture, but as a venue for people of similar interests to come together and be recognized.

I have belonged to many cultural societies over the course of my time perusing the internet. What I find interesting is that these societies are not new to my being; they are merely doorways that I step through to do something that I am already inclined to be a part of. I play games (World of Warcraft, Asheron’s Call and others), go to school, and talk about family and other interests that are mere extensions of me, not new me’s.  This is what I mean: The internet did not make me play games; I already played similar games with my family on Nintendo. The internet did not make me learn to cook, sew, bead or do other crafts – it was merely a tool to help me learn.  I could have gotten a book or asked someone or joined a local club for this type of support.  The internet did not make me go to UW Stout; I could have gone to the University in person if I had to.  Facebook was not necessarily for me to speak to my family and friends. If these activities create what someone would call a new culture, then I believe the term needs to be re-thought.

Bernadette Longo makes some great references to online communities in her article: Human + Machine Culture.  Here she refers to the differences between the way non-electronic communities and the universal community that can occur online.  I believe that her reference to the impossibility of a universal community is something I very much agree with. In mainstream communities, there are those that are included and others that are left out.  While this may seem to happen online, (maybe through a facebook page that friends and unfriends), this is but a small aspect of the larger whole.  But what I think is more interesting than this is the commitment that is lacking online. People hope from site to site, and literally take a bit from here and a bit from there but really do not have to commit to anything on the internet. Yes, in our courses we are making commitments; however, can the instructor really holler to you as you leave class and hold you back?  Even an email request can go ignored and later some electronic glitch of an excuse can be noted.

This is actually a first post this week.  As I was reading about culture in Spilka, I just could not resist “sounding off” about the concept of culture.  I also want to post about  LinkedIn as well because this is an amazing resource that I am still getting used to. One of the questions I want to ask is: Should I pay for the full service?

We Gain Nothing If We Lose Our Humanity By Utilizing Technology.

The Rise and Fall of a Company

The evolution from dependence on IT to an overflow of unemployed IT professionals (along with the rest of the company) is something I can relate to.  The company my husband used to work for grew at an astounding rate in the 90’s. In fact, they would hire 20-30 temps each week and as long as they worked out, by end of 30 days, they would be on the permanent payroll. Here is a picture of how fast this company grew: (numbers are estimated)

They needed an entire infrastructure to link the hundreds of employees that worked full time in house as well as programming to handle sales, service and manufacturing. The IT professional was GOD!

The company began their rise to fame, so to speak, with a modest 12 employees, and as you can see by the general timetable above, they were gobbled up and thrown to the wind with little effort.  Six months after this company was bought out, there were 100 scattered employees who were systematically absorbed or let go. The facility is now a ghost town. What used to be miles of corridors marked like streets of a small town is now a molding mess of stagnant air. Because this all occurred in a very small town, the implications for the residents were amazing.

This  company was a pioneer in a field that was very technical and highly in demand, their own need for technology was tremendous. During their hay day, there was an army of IT professionals, miles of coax cable which was then replaced by Cat5 cables connecting a network of computers. An intranet for the entire company with submissions by the departments and a large security force was in evidence.

That was then – This is now

So, why did this company sell out?  There are many thoughts on the subject, but one of them is that the owners were old-school and could not understand the value of the internet. After their rocket rise, they began to falter and lose ground in the industry. They felt that their level of technology should be enough and to spend more on IT functions was frivolous – they were very wrong.

What they were not wrong about is the time it takes to take good care of the customer.  When the new company took over, there was no question that the concern was for the bottom line.  Special programs were designed to track time on call or bring about data to analyze the total amount of cost per intervention on average.  The same technology that was supposed to make life easier for the employee and customer was now being used to squeeze every moment out of every day and pack as much profit into every second. 

As our reading “A Sea Change in Enterprise IT” illustrates (AIIM P. 5), there is a definite evolution of content and I am not sure it is totally for the good.

What I don’t get

I understand that our technology is changing so fast that it is difficult for the professionals to keep up, much less the business people who will be using it.  I also understand that profits, especially in these economic times, are a high concern for businesses.

What I do not understand is how companies can utilize more technology to cut out the personal touch that customer service used to provide, but then use our personal social networking interactions to get into our pockets.  This seems to be like burning a candle at both ends.

I do not agree with the AIIM white paper when it claims that B2C will “use social media to extend and IMPROVE customer service” (AIIM p. 8).  Customer service SUCKS in our country and further automization will only erode what little confidence we have in customer service centers. I do not understand how talking to a computer will be any better than talking to someone who hardly speaks English. 

We definitely need to foster advancements, but I fear that we are replacing humanity with technology all too much.

IMAGE CREDITS:

http://www.communication-type.com/technology-and-human-communication/

Understanding through Poetry

For this week’s reading on information design, I decided to get a little creative. Therefore, I explored three different information architectural elements presented in the article by Salvo and Rosinski through the lens of a Shakespearean sonnet, employing his ab, ab; cd, cd; ef, ef; gg rhyme scheme and using iambic pentameter.

Sitemap: A Sonnet
When writing for the web a scribe should know,
That men and women often can get lost.
Their quest is: ride the information flow;
But sanity could be the reader’s cost.

They ride the ship that leaves behind the shore,
Their origins these people can’t recall.
And find themselves distracted evermore
With hyperlinks that whisper siren’s call.

But like the sextant and compass used past,
There is a tool that saves these weary souls.
A sitemap shows them site from first to last
And helps them reach their information goals.

Once these travelers tame the digi-seas,
They can explore most other sites with ease.

Using Granularity: A Sonnet
As all know, puzzle pieces have their place
With websites info comes in large and wee.
The principle that governs placement space
Is something we call granularity.

When pictures take up every bit and byte,
And text is crammed in tiny as a speck
Applying granularity is right
To keep the page’s balances in check.

Should TPS report be sent by post?
Or sent through faster electronic mail?
Which mode of message can convey the most?
When using granularity: no fail.

Identifying granularity
The finer is increased technology.

The Many Forms of Tags: A Sonnet
If only metadata were applied,
Each piece of info could be simply found.
By labeling each doc you will have tried
To organize and find your way around.

Taxonomy’s another way we can
Form stronger links leading us to the docs.
A limited vocabulary, man.
Like Dewey dec’mal’s system really rocks.

Folksonomy tags info in the cloud,
But keeping tabs on older stuff is hard.
So hash your tweets and keep your trending proud,
But from your past tags you may well be barred.

These types of tools help readers find their way
Through pages on the web both night and day.

But seriously, the Salvo and Rosinski article was an excellent way to learn about the different ways to conscientiously design information so that users can find it. I am glad that we went through all of the spatial metaphors. Right now at work, I am in charge of scanning all existing paper documents and tagging them for retrieval in the Image Now system. Not only do I have to tag documents, I have to come up with tagging classifications and criteria for the different areas (department governance, curriculum, the new school structure, etc.) and I am having a hell of a time wrapping my mind around what I think future users might use as criteria to find a particular type of document. It’s been kind of a nightmare.

Reading up on these concepts gave me a bird’s eye view of what I am doing. It is a whole different way of thinking of things. I have been banging my head against the proverbial wall trying to cram this tagging stuff into a metaphor of a filing cabinet so I could understand how to set up tagging fields. That isn’t working. This reading has helped me gain more insight into what I am doing.
It’s also kind of neat that I AM learning how to set up the criteria and classification. It ties in with what Hart-Davidson says about the future role of technical communicators as content managers. One of the areas that he talks about is “Creating and managing information assets, defining relationships between these and specifying display conditions for specific views of these” (p. 135). I am learning to bring about his “tangible outcomes” by using “Taxnomies, Object metadatas, document type, definitions and schema” (p. 136). Although Image Now management is for an internal document retrieval system, many of the principles cross directly over into content management. The more of these skills I am able to master, the better my chances will be when I look at other jobs.

What Happens Here, Stays Here.

What’s 11,688 people strong, has 670,200 likes on their Facebook page and 7,292 views on their YouTube video?

Give up?

It’s the “Know the Code” campaign created by the Las Vegas tourism department. It’s essentially an anti-social media push in certain circumstances. Of course, Vegas tourists want you to Tweet/Facebook about their restaurants, casinos and entertainment but warn against taking photos of people and sharing them through the same social media facets. They even have a place on their Facebook page where you can “Report those who violate the code” through their Facebook page.

I first saw a video on TV and as I dug into it more, I thought it was interesting that the Vegas tourism department used social media to encourage visitors NOT to use social media. Further more, they created rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to Facebook-ing, YouTub-ing and Tweeting.

I think this campaign is successful for a couple different reasons:

1. It creates buzz around Vegas and buzz equates to more visitors. More visitors create more dollars.
2. It demonstrates that Vegas is still a “cool” place to visit and shows that they understand issues and challenges that their audience faces. Not only do they understand their problems, they’re proposing a solution.
3. It created interactivity for participants rather than just allowing the audience to view their site. Audience members can sign an oath, respond to Facebook messages and Tweet “#knowthecode.”

Here’s one of their promotional videos:

Additionally, their web site has some interesting elements that help “humanize” it by calling out individuals who have broken the code. Now, weather these people are actually “real” is another matter all together but I definitely appreciate the effort. See left for an example.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  In Digital Literacy, Spilka talks about combining “rhetoric” and “technology” and I think this is a perfect example of the melding of the two. Essentially, the tourism department is trying to promote Vegas through a round-about campaign that not only says “visit Vegas” but also says, “We want to keep Vegas a safe place where ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ still applies despite the advances in technology.” Additionally, Qualman states that “people value the opinions of other people” and I believe this campaign relies on that type of thinking. This campaign boasts the accountability factor that by “knowing the code,” you’ll hold others accountable to do the same. Granted, this is different than what Qualman means in chapter 5 as he is addressing socialommerce, but the bare bones principal that “people value the opinions of other people” holds true in this case.

Podcasts Don’t Need Rules

Qualman, Chapters 5 and 7—I like how Qualman brought up the point that as a consumer, you can actually have all three—cheap, quick and quality because of social media. Social media allows consumers to complain or express good things about products. This type of content makes companies respond because negative publicity in the world of social media isn’t limited to a certain group; it ends up being broadcasted everywhere. 10-years-ago if you wanted to complain about a company’s product, you had to contact the company to file a complaint. Now days, all you have to do is post your comment on Twitter or start a blog that expresses your opinion. I think it’s great for consumers to be able to post their opinions about products but I also think it can be pretty scary for a company because the company has a challenging time controlling lies that people are saying about them.

On page 137, Qualman brings up a great point about podcasts. A podcast doesn’t have a set amount of time to fill. It only lasts as long as the news is relevant. I think this is a great point because a podcast is less likely to waist the audience’s time. For example, an average local news program will last about 30 minutes. That’s what the consumer is used to, but there are times when the news could be longer or shorter. I think the news programs are hurting because each program needs to be a certain amount of time. I think ESPN really noticed the value with showing the audience what they want to see because ESPN now runs a tool bar on the left of the screen that shows the next five stories and they also show a timer on the screen that shows how much time is left of the current topic they are discussing.

ESPN

The local Fox news program in Minneapolis, MN does something like this on their 10 pm show. They list the top 10 stories in 10 minutes because they understand that viewers like me don’t want to waste our time watching stories that I don’t care about.

Spilka, Chapter 3—I loved the comment that since Twitter is public, people can track topics and events that are too new for Google (p.87). I think that shows the true value with Twitter and with social media. I always use Twitter to find current news stories. It’s funny because I am so current with my news that by the time someone tells about something, I already know what he or she is talking about. Social media allows people the ability to know more about a news story than the people that are supposed to report the story.

Week 8 | Social Media are Tools of Influence

This week’s readings cover many topics relating to how people use social media, including Twitter, product reviews (which I feel are a form of microblogging), and Facebook as tools of influence. Dave Clark’s chapter, Shaped and Shaping Tools on the rhetoric of technology is complex by the nature of its subject matter. He says that both rhetoric and technology are difficult to define individually, yet the two concepts go hand-in-hand. Nevertheless, it is even harder to define the rhetoric of technology. Clark says by its very essence, technology is rhetorical. When it comes down to it, Dave is examining how “technologies structure, shape, and influence the ways we communicate (p. 87).”

Twitter’s Influence
The structure of the author’s latest muse was 140 characters. He was marveling at the fact that while it was a simply coded program and a basic concept, the rhetorical implications of Twitter were very powerful. This was because Tweets are public (unless the author has an account with protected Tweets), Tweets are searchable and allow trends to surface, and Tweets in large numbers about the same subject can be powerful. Those who don’t use Twitter, yet have something powerful to say, lose an opportunity to compound the message through this potentially influential tool.

Product Reviews Influence
Twitter is changing how people communicate and who people communicate with. Similarly, other social media outlets are changing the way people shop online. I like how social media influences the way my friends and I shop. “Socialommerce is a referral program on sterroids (Qualman, p. 94), and “consumers are taking ownership of brands and their referral power is priceless (p. 97).” Qualman says that retailers are encouraging consumers to review products because whether a product is good or bad, eliciting feedback only helps the brand either sell more of the product or improve it. I look at online product reviews when I purchase things online and in the store. They often influence my purchasing decisions, too. Sometimes I write product reviews, too.
Yesterday I received an email request from Eddie Bauer to rate some outerwear I recently purchased online. Since reviewing seemed easy to do, and I liked my new purchases, I took a minute to review the products. On the other hand, I have also reviewed products I didn’t think were that great. I bought a clothes drying rack at a Target store. The rack is low quality and keeps falling apart. While I could no longer return it to the store because the 90-day return period had passed, I decided I could at least write an online review in hopes others not to make the same purchasing mistake I did.

Facebook’s Influence
Shoppers consider anonymous online product reviews, but shoppers also seek the advice of people they know via social media. Just the other day, I saw my friend recruited her friends’ advice on Facebook. She wanted recommendations on best smartphones, but not from anonymous reviewers or technology experts. Since people generally feel strongly about phone brands like Droid and iPhone, her friends and family rushed to her aid. She received many comments on the best phones to buy. Seeking advice gave my friend a list of phones to consider and hopefully helped her narrow down her options.
Companies miss an opportunity to connect with consumers when they don’t utilize social media like Facebook. I love shopping at Trader Joe’s, but I feel the company is missing out on a great advertising opportunity by having a profile on Facebook. The store could tell people about new products, new store locations, specials, and fun recipes to try.

Other Clever Ways to Influence Consumers
In “Winners and Losers in a 140-Character World,” Qualman discusses how integrating product advertising into the programming like the Charles Schwab podcast is smart, but it is not new. When I was young, my mom listened to famous announcer, Paul Harvey on the radio. Paul often endorsed products on air like the Bose Wave Radio. He was known for endorsing his favorite products on air (in turn for advertising support for his program). I felt that when Qualman talked about product advertising incorporated into programming, it was a tangent and not so much about social media. However, maybe it is best to think about it as talking to people where they are and where they will listen. Social media are powerful tools, and they shape the way people and companies communicate.

My friend receives many product recommendations on Facebook from friends and family.

This request was for my review of a recent purchase.

I left a rating for the junky drying rack on Target’s website.

Is it time for a Different Social Network?

Is it time for Twitter, is it time for a different  Social Network?

I am not old – I am busy! 
This is my excuse for not utilizing Twitter up until this semester. Of course, when I realized what the content of this particular course would be like, it became apparent that the only way to really understand this phenomenon was to experience it firsthand.

Because the majority of my experience lately is with Facebook, I just assumed that there would be similarities – there are not.  Dave Clark, in his article:  Shaped and Shaping Tools presented me with a much different perspective of Twitter.  When he described his frustration with a program, subsequent Tweet and then an answer from a perfect stranger, it became apparent to me that, unlike Facebook, what we say and do on Twitter reaches the world.

So far, I have found some very interesting Twitter feeds to follow including Mashable, Lifehacker others specifically relating to our school and my own personal interests.  Mashable is purported to be the largest independent online news site and caters to social media. Lifehacker is such an interesting feed and so far. I have seen everything from holiday decorating ideas to feeds about our cyber lifestyles.

This brings to mind our conversations regarding social networking. Because there is not only a possibility, but a probability to meet new people daily through Twitter, I find that this is, indeed a social networking activity.  Not only that, it is much more organized than I ever imagined. My initial impression was that this was a random, willy nilly type of activity where people posted randomly everything from where they were and what they were doing. It is much more than this.  The quality of information available via links and searchable content make this a very powerful resource.

Of course, you will note that what I mostly took away from Clark’s work was his introduction. As he continued on in his writings and the concepts got thicker and thicker, I found that it was increasingly difficult to maintain focus. This is not to say that his concepts and information is not valid and worth study.  I just find a more direct and lest scholarly approach easier to digest.

This being said, Qualman’s readings are much easier to assimilate and compare to real-life situations. His references to the power of social networking are such amazing information. I equate his references to the proverbial drop of water in a bucket. My one purchase may not really mean much on its own, but couple that with the purchases of my friends and their friends and everyone that I am a fan of on Twitter and our bucket is overflowing.

Social Networking on Blogs by Penny C. Sansevieri CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. is an amazing reference to the power of blogs and their place in the land of social networking.  Penny states in her blog post that

“Commenting on blogs posts is a sort of social networking, even better in fact because blog posts and their associated comments are searchable.”

Just like Twitter, we are able to search blog posts for pertinent information and use this information however we desire.  While Penny’s post relates to the trials of getting a publication noticed, it is a powerful statement about the uses and abuses of blogging.

After going through this week’s readings and paying a bit closer attention to both Twitter and blogs posted on the net, I am coming to feel the immense power of social networking. I am also becoming very disillusioned with Facebook. I am starting to yearn more for interesting concepts and tire of daily drama.  Does this make me a bad person? I am curious – how do you answer the following?

The Dos & Don’ts of Social Media

Least interesting title, huh? I’ll try to do better next time, I promise.

Digital Literacy – Chapter 2

I was surprised to learn the the majority of technical communicators are women (Spilka, 51) – I guess you know what they say about assumptions! Spilka stated that the entire landscape of technical communication is changing so much so that technical communicators  now know possess a set of skills that weren’t even in existence 5 years ago. It’s safe to say that social media has a lot to do with that. Technical communicators have so many more options to communicate with their audience in the social media world, which can be more effective in a way because the conversation can be on-going and continual when using social media networking sites, like Facebook. At the same time, the author warns that it’s important not to assume (going back to what I just said about assumptions…) that the latest communication trend is the most effective way to communicate with any and all audiences. I think this is something good to keep in mind – as technical communicators, it’s important to do our homework on the front end in order assess and evaluate our audience and figure out the best method to relay the message so it is received the most effectively.

Socialnomics – Chapter 4

When I first saw the title of the chapter – Obama’s Success Driven by Social Media – it mad me think of an article I read recently. It was a critical review of a book where an author dissected typestyles and commented on the typestyle that was used on Obama’s campaign materials, stating that it was a font that can be described as “self-assured” and “take charge.”  Anyway, just a interesting little tidbit…

I thought the number of social media supporters for Obama and McCain was really interesting. It would be interesting to research the issue either further to see if Obama had more Facebook friends fans and Twitter followers due to the type of demographic Facebook/Twitter attracted during the election or if it was just truly because he used social media more effectively.

Socialnomics – Chapter 6

The mention of Sims in this chapter was interesting. I never understood why anyone would want an avatar. For me, personally, it’s hard enough keeping up with my professional and personal personas that I don’t see any fun or value in adding another one to the mix.  Of course, I realize people do it for different reasons, which I totally respect, just not my thing in the least. And I chuckled at this sentence: “or perhaps these simulation games will experience a quick death because people may find it difficult to brag about playing a simulated game that replicates life instead of just leading their own lives.” I couldn’t have said it better myself!

I’m not sure what I think about the NFL creating fake Facbook pages in order to gain access to potential new players. I see their point, of course, but I’m not sure if I like the “I gotcha!” mentality.  But in the end, Qualman is right – don’t put anything on your Facebook page that could damage your reputation. Keep it PG!

Week 6 | Obama Drove His Own Success

I was listening to NPR on the radio on the way home from work on Thursday when an interesting story came on the air. Ahmed Al Omran, a NPR social media intern was discussing the how social media was helping to influence political change in the Middle East in an interview on Morning Edition with host, Renee Montagne. Omran spoke about how new technologies and tools like Twitter and Facebook allowed bloggers in Arab countries to “stimulate and accelerate political change in the region.” He was on a panel at a meeting for bloggers discussing the role of the social media, and discussed this with Montagne:

MONTAGNE: You know, much was said about Twitter at the time because Twitter, of course, is much quicker and can really, you know, help organizationally. What are people there saying about the role of Twitter?

OMRAN: I was sitting on a panel about the role of Twitter on the first day, and most people on the panel seemed to agree that while Twitter was important to help people to organize and also to get the word out, and then it’s just a tool. You know, we cannot call this a Twitter revolution or a Facebook revolution. It’s the revolution of the people. And the people in that revolution would use whatever tools that are available to them.

I thought, bingo, Omran—it wasn’t Twitter or Facebook that caused Obama to be elected to presidency in 2008. Obama was just using whatever tools he had available on the road to presidential victory, and using them extremely well. I disagree with Qualman’s comment in Socialnomics that “Obama would not be president without the Internet (Qualman, p 87).” It’s hard to say what would have happened if Obama ran a traditional advertising campaign. That is a speculative premise. Would Obama not have used traditional media well enough to win the election?

When all was said and done, the campaign was still about people casting votes. People voted for Obama because he connected with them. He was extremely charismatic, he had a popular message of political change, and he didn’t have much political baggage. Like Montagne said with tools like Twitter, his messages were delivered quickly, and the conversation between presidential hopeful and voters was a two-way conversation. People connected with the man through his camp’s tweets and behind the scenes footage. Obama’s eloquent speaking abilities sealed the deal with the American public.

This reminds me of another presidential hopeful who used new media to his advantage. John F. Kennedy used television to his advantage over Richard Nixon during the famous televised debate between the two. Kennedy looked glowing and calm while Nixon looked haggard and nervous. That was a milestone debate because after it, everyone learned that makeup and camera charisma was essential to putting the right foot forward on TV. Obama wasn’t elected because he had the internet, although he was the first presidential candidate to utilize social media tools extremely well to connect with people.

Social Media and Online Issues

Social media has forever changed the way people interact with each other.  People are interacting more online and less in person. This is good news for people like me that don’t like to talk to people face-to-face.

Qualman, Chapter 4: First of all, I love this book because it makes sense and I think almost anyone could learn a lot from it. If I believed that the management at my company could read and comprehend good information, I would have them read this book. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Anyway, I loved how Yahoo saw a trend happening and then shared that information with Pepsi so Pepsi could sign a contract with Brittney Spears before she became really popular. This showed me how powerful the Internet really is.

On page 70, Qualman talked about how they can create kind of a “flu neighborhood” due to how and where people are searching ‘flu symptoms’ online. I never realized that this could happen and I think it’s pretty remarkable that the Internet can actually be used for good instead of evil.

Everything that seems to happen online is tracked, charted, and used to try to make some money. That sounds pretty familiar to any company.

Qualman, Chapter 6: On page 124, Qualman talked about how the NFL set up fake Facebook accounts to spy on cheerleaders. This is something that I don’t understand. Do people actually accept the friendship from people that they don’t know on their personal Facebook account? Maybe I’m missing something but I only friend people that I know. If you’re an NFL cheerleader and you friend everyone because you’re kind of celebrity, then you should know better than to post something that could affect your job.

It also seems kind of stupid for the NFL to spy on people. The world has become too politically correct and I can’t stand it anymore. It seems like if one person gets offended then you have to make a huge apology to everyone.

Where do we draw the line about what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate for social media? I don’t think you can. Social media seems to have created a problem where companies cannot only interact with their audience; they can offend them, too.

Spilka, Chapter 2 by R. Stanley Dicks:  There were two things that jumped out to me in this chapter—Paper catalogs doing the same thing as Web sites and using electronic data storage instead of paper when possible.

At my company, I write catalogs for aftermarket power-sports products that get printed and I also write the same information for the Web site. The problem is doing this is a lot harder than you would think. The catalog is easy to write because it’s more of a linear document and all the necessary information for a certain product is in one spot of one page. When you put a product from the catalog into the Web site, you have to figure out how many different ways a user might search for that product. The user might search by the fitment, part number, color, brand, cost, manufacturer, material, style, size, and so on. In the catalog, the user can only search by brand or the name of the product. As an author, I have to be careful so I make sure that all of the necessary information is in the Web site for the user. If the information is not there, then the user might get frustrated and shop at one of our competitors.

The other thing about my company is they are super old-school when it comes to documenting everything. They want everything on paper. We could save a ton of money if we would store and share information electronically but they won’t because management thinks it would cost too much money to supply everyone with the proper software. The thing is, the money the company would save on paper would offset the cost of the software over time. It’s frustrating to work for a company that is stuck in the past when you’re used to working on the front line of the future.

RIP Steve Jobs

In Laura Gurak’s 2001 book Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness, she defines “cyberliteracy” as inherent of four traits:

• SPEED:  the Internet inspires speediness; it is one of the key features of Internet communication.  And this speed inspires certain behaviors and qualities.
• REACH:  partner of speed and one of the axioms of communication technology.  Digitized discourse travels quickly and it also travels widely to reach thousands, even millions, quickly!
• ANONYMITY:  sometimes you really never know who is at the other end of an electronic text.  In cyberspace, the identity behind what you see floating on the screen is not always what you imagine.
• INTERACTIVITY:  online communications technologies allow you to talk back.  Interactivity inspires us to consider—access to the inner circle [everyone can be part of the discussion and step through the screen], capacity to talk back [form communities of common interest], a two-way presence online [the lure of an audience of millions], ecommerce and connections to the customer [ways for customers to interact with each other and with customer service], privacy [more interactive a site, the greater the potential for privacy problems]

I mention this tonight to call attention to the first two traits. The speed with which news of Steve Jobs death has spread across Twitter and Facebook is astounding. And many of the “RIP” messages and memorials exemplify the reach he and Apple products have had over the years.

Apple.com now looks like this:

 

 

 

with the following call on http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/:  “If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com.”

Google and Wired.com already have tributes up as well, but I’m most interested in seeing what Apple does with the emails it receives. Online memorials & crisis communications are very interesting to me…I’ll write more on this as the news emerges.

Week 5 | Digital Technology Gives Power to the Little Guy

If He-man were a technical communicator in the age of social media

Social media and personal computers at every work space has cut out a lot of middle men and shifted power from a few big entities to many individuals. It is a fundamental shift and the overarching theme between Spilka and Qualman readings this week.

Many people have heard how online news and content is quickly diminishing the viability of printed newspapers and magazines. Readership of printed newspapers has declined. People don’t have to wait for the news to break, be printed, and get distributed. Even more, social media is changing who is distributing the news.

Qualman features a hypothetical news story example involving the car accident of a U.S. senator from Idaho. Both a popular newspaper conglomerate in New York a local political enthusiast blogger cover the story. In the end, more people probably read this news from the blogger than the news source because the blogger knew more about the local senators, was able publish the news online faster, and offered her content free. Her friends read the blog post, and her friend’s friends keep passing the word on. People get news with less of a middle man like a news organization. It is an interesting case study that shows the power may be shifting to bloggers. Qualman (p. 12) states that newspapers can’t just get by on delivering news to stay viable. Instead, the newspaper must provide analysis and commentary.

I have to note, however, that the reputation of the newspaper must have some merit. I would more likely click on the newspapers link on the story than the bloggers link on the story. I might not have guessed the blogger to be a credible source on the topic. If I could not read an article because a subscription was required, I’d search for another name in news who was delivering the news story for free.

I appreciated Table 1.1 (Spilka p. 24-25), but I would have understood the example faster if I would have known who the large employer was. I wasn’t sure at first what point the table was trying to make, being that the technical communicator’s role in a large corporation has changed drastically since the 1970s. My guess is the table is a case study of IBM because the company went from making mainframe computer systems to PCs to networks and databases like Watson, the supercomputer.

Spilka reviewed how technology has fundamentally changed the role of the technical communicator. I believe technology has changed every field of work, nonetheless, Spilka made an important point. Before personal computers desktop publishing, communication would have to go through a lengthy production process. But now, the power shifted from a technical communicator who could not produce communication to a technical communicator who could do it all—create and produce.

By being able to do it all, so to speak, bloggers and technical communicators can reach niche markets and small interest groups like never before. Traditional media’s content like TV and newspapers is generated by only a few and is good for reaching the masses. On the other hand, internet’s content is generated by many. Social media has created a huge shift in information holders and distributors (Qualman, p. 11). People are web authors through wikis, they develop micro content with blogs, and interface in an online software applications, thus cutting out the middle man TV or newspaper distributing the content. Like never before, an individual has power and influence.

Expand Your Drama Universe or Make a Real Impact on the Virtual Plane

Good news and bad news.

First the bad news:

At the very start of Qualman’s 1^st chapter, I was a bit annoyed.  It goes without saying that Qualman will be “Pro-Social Network” – I get that. But what aggravated me was the wholesale way he touts goodness for all through social media.  Personally, I think that there is as much crap coming out of social media as there is goodness and light.

I am speaking from personal experience. I began with a Facebook page, added only my family and some friends, closed off my access to just those that are friends, and ended up deleting about ¼ of the people on my list.  A good majority of these were family.  These are the reasons:

• Games, games and more games being posted at all hours of the day and night (yes I would select not to show, but then some new  game would come out and I would be back at it again) Farmville, Fishworld, Cafe’ World, Gardens of Time, The Smurfs & Co. – you name it!
• Profanity – while I can swear like a drunken sailor driving a truck with a broken foot, I don’t need to read it over and
  over by people not old enough to drive
• D R A M A! “I am so mad at the %$ing )*$(%) and  you know who you are” (I don’t care)
• REPOST this if you think Facebook will charge next month, if you are wearing pink underwear or if you mom is a real %*(%$

Qualman states “The younger the generation, the less concerned they are about privacy” (Qualman, 2). He sure has that right!  Does TMI mean anything to these people?

I understand that by keeping in touch we can get that perfect recipe ingredient, know how to decorate a bicycle and find out the most intimate detail about the neighbor, but this really doesn’t always save us time. What it does is sanitize our interactions and makes us a little less human. (personal opinion folks).

In a perfect world, the social networking scenario would be responsible and productive – but most humans are just not built that way.  Too many of them use these venues to expand their Drama Universe.

Please do not get me wrong, I am not saying that all social networking is the devil – far from it!  I am saying that reality needs to be brought into the room, and not simply checked at the door.

Now the Good News!

I have stared at a blank word document on many occasions trying to figure out how people write and post on the internet and then ultimately become known for what they have to say.  Sitting here, it seemed to me that by posting to my blog that has no followers or to my twitter account which as 2 followers, there is no way I can speak to the world.

But Qualman enlightened me to the “and she told two friends” concept of social networking. Now I can see how my little blog post, which I post to my facebook page and twitter about can be “liked” by someone, reposted and eventually reach someone I never, ever knew.  This is powerful stuff!

**NOTE: While I begin posting today quite harshly, please do not take that as an indication that I feel Qualman does not know his stuff. I merely tend to disagree with someone who says that the top and bottom of my shoe will remain equally clean no matter where I will tread.

Dear Tempur-Pedic, You got the right stuff.

I was watching a commercial today for Tempur-Pedic and they stated it was “the most recommended bed in America.” They said to log on their Facebook page and see for yourself. So, I went on the site to see what the buzz was about and I was so shocked to see how popular it was. People posted photos of their new bed (!), opinions of their recommendations and asked questions regarding their bed while other posters responded. Additionally, Tempur-Pedic posted articles about sleep studies and updated their status, one that said “Who needs a nap?”, which 156 people liked. I was floored! I don’t think I’ve seen that much interaction on a company’s Facebook page and I didn’t expect it, especially with a bed company. I love to see that companies that previously didn’t have that type of interaction on the web and with their customers now have an inexpensive outlet to reach their customers through a two-way conversation with other customers and between the customers and the company.

And if all those things I mentioned above were not enough, here’s an example of how the company really takes care of their customers:

I think Tempur-Pedic’s response to this was perfect – and the fact that they responded and offered a solution is great. I really appreciate that they didn’t delete the post to “help” their reputation but posted both the good and the bad, which gives them credibility and, additionally, you know it’s a company that’s willing to work with you if you’re not satisfied with their product.

Qualman mentioned in Chapter 1 that there’s an argument out there, “well I already don’t have enough time in my day, how can I possibly follow anybody else or keep those following me informed? I can’t waste my time like that!” I think that ties into the Tempur-Pedic “case study” nicely because it shows that people follow and keep up with what’s important to them. While I have no interest in what bed I sleep in (and, no, I don’t own a Tempur-Pedic), I do care about what my best friend is up to and going to Better Homes & Garden’s to download a free cookbook. I think that’s the beauty of Facebook – that you can find your own niche and concentrate on that instead of trying to absorb everything out there on social media networking sites.

Do you guys know of other companies who’s social networking web sites are successful?

Social Media–The Leader for News

Qualman: I really liked this chapter because it explained social media and why it can be valuable. The part of the chapter that reached out to me was when the author was talking about how all blogs are not bad. I liked the example of blogger Jane because it showed me how a national news story isn’t only a national story, it’s also a local story to the people that live in that area.

The blogger Jane story reminded me of the 35W bridge collapse that occurred in Minneapolis, MN in August of 2007.  It was a huge national story but to me, it was a local story because I live in Minneapolis and I have crossed that bridge a thousand times. I could relate to Jane and how she had a close connection to details about the senator because she worked at the courthouse and already new a lot about him. When the 35W bridge collapsed, I new two people that were on the bridge when it fell and one of them survived and one of them did not. I never posted anything about it on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet, but I did tell some of my friends and family and I’m sure they used my details (that weren’t in the news) of the victims and spread them by word of mouth.

Qualman is right when he said that word of mouth goes world of mouth because news travels faster than ever. I used to love reading the newspaper but that doesn’t happen anymore because by the time the newspaper is printed, it’s all old news to me. I get all of my news from Twitter, Facebook, and some news apps that I have on my iPhone.  It seems that everyone who uses social media is a journalist because everyone with social media, has an audience.

Spilka: I liked the history that Spilka provided about Technical Communication. I pretty much knew the history of Tech. Comm. because we always talked about it in my undergrad classes at UW-Stout. The thing that jumped out to me was when Spilka was referring to technical communicators and she said, “It’s time to adapt or move over” (p.2).  This is totally true.

I used to ignore technology and it really hurt me for a long time. Now that I’m a Technical Communicator, I have learned to embrace technology and use it to my advantage. I think my problem was that I didn’t understand a lot about technology and that scared me. Now that I’m familiar with it, I’m not afraid of technology at all. A little knowledge can go a long way.

The only thing I question about the Spilka reading is that not all companies are willing to adapt to technology. My company understands the need for technical communicators but they will not let us use current technologies so we can operate at a maximum level. It’s so frustrating knowing that I could be more efficient in my job if my company would just put some extra money back into itself and if they would try to learn about the benefits of technology. They are so old-school and afraid of change that they hurt themselves financially and internally because employees that brace technology can really see how much better the company would be if it would embrace technology too.

Oh, yeah. And Qualman too…

I think it is very interesting to see Qualman’s “Jane the Idaho Blogger” scenario in action. Initially there was little to no major media coverage of the Wall Street protests that are happening. I kept getting updates on my Facebook page linking to blog stories about the protests. I think that so many people were disseminating information that the major media outlets were forced to cover it or look like they were siding with corporate. Silence can be an endorsement.

Back in the olden days, big media could have ignored this and Nobody Would Have Known About it. Had it not been for social media, this would have been a non-story, and the lack of viral information would probably have killed it after the first couple of protests.

Here’s the most recent story one of my friends linked on Facebook: http://wapo.st/qXQExI

Social Media Manager – could be your next title

Lately, I have been trying to check in with the various
social networking sites that I am affiliated. When I stopped by LinkedIn to
update my title at work, I came across this interesting article. It should come
as no surprise today to know that being a beer-loving Facebook diva can earn a
decent living.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-social-media-jobs-20110929,0,6158114.story

This fact alone shows the impact of social media on our
world.

The number of social media-related jobs on Monster has surged 75%
over the last year, O'Reilly said. About 155 positions are available a month,
up from an average of 88 a month a year ago.

At first, I thought that the position and the article in
general would be a bit of fluff; however, they are darn serious! To think that
someone is actually monitoring Twitter and Facebook for information about users
that “like” products and services puts an entirely new spin on how I see social
media.

Social Media Revolution

There are tons of these types of videos, see here, but I’m using this one since it’s associated with our Socialnomics author, Erik Qualman:

Week 4 | It’s a Social Media Explosion!

Upon reading this week, I gained a better understanding of social media. I see it as an influential exploding social force. Having a social media presence is not just for teenagers, but for professionals and companies alike. The readings better defined social media, and I picked up a few great vocab words along the way. These include:

• Braggadocio-describing Facebook posts that boast of awesome fun adventures one recently had (I went mountain climbing and parasailing last weekend, and wow it was awesome—aren’t you jealous sort of thing).
• Vanity search-Using a search engine to search oneself and especially one’s company to get a clear picture of what the public is saying about the person or the company.
• Microblogging-Short form of blogging, like Twitter
• Web 2.0-Website view interacts with the website, as opposed to viewing it passively
• Social Media-Content developed by users
• Social Networking-Building relationships and sharing information (a part of social media)

All the readings did not draw a clear line between personal social media use and professional social media use. They all bounced back and forth between the two. It is somewhat symbolic though, as I read in Socialnomics that the lines between work and play for young generations tend to be fuzzy. For this generation, some would prefer, using some of the the work weekday for play (i.e., social networking) and using the weekends to catch up on work (Qualman, 55).

I was surprised to read that social media was overtaking email and that young generations feel that it is yesterday’s method of communication (Qualman, 46).I was even more surprised to read that Boston College was no longer providing students with BC email addresses. An article on Read Write Web stated that students already have online identities established, including email addresses.

Companies are discovering how to leverage influence in consumers’ eyes. Companies like Nike are providing valuable and useful tools like jogging aps. The consumer uses the tool and feels like they own the brand—make it a part of who the person is. The person using the ap shares results of a jog with friends on Facebook (with subtle Nike branding), and voilà, Nike’s sphere of influence expands to all the people on the jogger’s Facebook page.

My company started a Facebook page. It’s safe to say that whatever is posted on the Facebook page is a part of the West Yost brand. Whatever I put on my own Facebook page becomes my individual brand. A corporate Facebook page is slightly different in that it’s more about what other people are saying—good or bad.

Comcast came up several times in the readings as case studies. Comcast provides internet, cable, and phone to millions of customers. However, Comcast has strong competition, including Time-Warner, AT&T, DirecTV, Dish Network, and others. Comcast must pay attention to what people say about the it, especially customers who make decisions about which service provider to use. People—potential customers—pay attention to what others are saying. What was said about a company use to be more company controlled. With social media, the user now plays a strong role in what is said about a company. Companies like Comcast must find out what others are saying and make sure
customers are happy.

Social media is influential in behavior modification, in both companies and individuals. If a company with a Facebook page doesn’t have anything to brag about (like winning awards), social media dictates that the company might modify its behavior and do things that are more interesting or beneficial. Likewise, a teenager might be influenced to behave herself if she knows that her mother, who is in her social friend network, might see whatever mischief the teen has been up to if it is posted on Facebook.

Social media is definitely influential at a corporate and individual level. I thought of a few types social media may not be as compatible with. This includes psychologists  with crazy stalker patients, recluses, members of the CIA, indigenous tribes on remote tropical islands, criminals, and antidisestablishmentists. The article, “Is Social Networking for You?” discusses that in claiming and shaping an online footprint, businesses can grow their sphere of influence and take charge of their initiatives (Molisani, 11). Professionals alike should use social media because having an internet footprint can bolster credibility. (Molisani, 12-13). Those not in the groups I mentioned should give social media and social networking a shot.