ccriandrew

[ccriandrew]

Social Media Ethics

The current state of social media ethics: what trends are happening in the industry? What are two current cases related to social media ethics? Outline the current code of ethics for social media by a professional organization you would be interesting in joining as part of their social media staff.

Recently we have seen a trend on social media with influencers and companies. We have been seeing influencers make offensive and bigoted remarks and companies publicly cutting ties as a result. An example of this is currently happening with Kanye West and Adidas. Kanye has been acting narcissistic, ignorant, and intolerant, while manipulating his fanbase with misinformation. West has been pushing Black Hebrew Israelite beliefs, thus promoting antisemitism. Michelle Boorstein and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post describe the Black Hebrew Israelite movement as beliefs that, “African Americans are the true descendants of ancient Israelites, a belief that is often blended with accusations that mainstream Jews aren’t the legitimate Jews”. West has manipulated many of his fans into believing the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrine, his audience then continues to post and support these antisemitic beliefs. We’ve seen, West, firsthand start a new trend of antisemitism on apps such as Instagram and Twitter. As a result of Wests antics it has understandably sparked outrage online. In response we’ve seen Adidas make an official statement and cut ties with West, Adidas stated, “adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech… the company has taken the decision to terminate the partnership with Ye immediately” (Herzogenaurach). Another trend related to ethics in social media is many influencers neglect to disclose whether they are getting paid to promote a product or not. Most notably and recently, Kim Kardashian promoted a cryptocurrency and decided not to disclose she was paid for the promotion, effectively manipulating her audience into believing she actually believed and supported this product. As a result of this the SEC has begun getting involved and actually punishing influencers like Kim Kardashian. The SEC stated that, “Kardashian failed to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish a post on her Instagram account about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax. Kardashian’s post contained a link to the EthereumMax website, which provided instructions for potential investors to purchase EMAX tokens”. The SEC requires that you must disclose whether or not you’ve been paid to promote products via social media. Kardashian was fined $1.26 million by the SEC for her lack of openness surrounding her promotion of EthereumMax. A company I would be interested in joining their social media staff is ESPN. I believe ESPN has a rather strict, but understandable code of ethics for social media. ESPN wants their employees to keep the posts, “civil, responsible, and without overt political or other biases that would threaten our or your credibility with the public”. They are all about upholding journalistic integrity and not ruffling any feathers. ESPN also preaches respecting your colleagues and specifically states in their social media guidelines that you are not to do anything to undercut your colleagues.

Brands/professionals with strong social media ethical codes: what brands are utilizing proper social media ethical practices? Are there any professionals that you feel practice strong ethical behavior on social media? Support your choice with evidence. What are some takeaways you can bring forth in your own practices?

Simply based off ESPN’s social media guidelines and seeing they follow them; I’d say ESPN is utilizing proper social media ethical practices. ESPN always stays pretty neutral in their posts and doesn’t typically seem to be pushing a particular narrative. A professional I feel practices strong ethical behavior online is Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton posted about a drink called AG1 a few days ago. On this post he made a video and wrote a blurb about how great the drink is, but what is important is he ended the caption with “#ad”. We can clearly see here that Hamilton does not aim to manipulate his audience and is upfront about the fact he’s been paid to post this. I think it is always important to but clear about what your intentions for each post as to not deceive your followers.

Key concepts and issues: what main concepts do you are necessary to adhere to for your own personal conduct online?

The concepts I would deem absolutely necessary to adhere to are, diversity, inclusion, and representation. It’s important to me that when I post or people look at my accounts they feel welcome. I would hate to hear that someone visited my account and felt uneasy or unwelcome due to the content I post.

What to do and what not to do: what main concepts do you feel strongly against and want to make sure you avoid on social media?

The concepts I would deem absolutely necessary to avoid are misappropriation, ignorance, bullying, and narcissism. Growing up where and how I did misappropriation and ignorance are very easy to fall into and it’s something I actively work to avoid, by educating myself and broadening my horizons. Nothing feels worse than when you realize something you said hurt or offended someone because you didn’t have enough information. As for bullying and narcissism, when building a platform for yourself it is important to keep in mind that you’re not the only important person and that just because it’s your platform you’re still not allowed to say and do whatever you want.

Bullet point 5-10 core concepts that you will follow as a practicing social media professional. Include citations that you used for sources/supports for this.

Transparency (CompuKol Communications)

Be honest/upfront with your audience

Communication (CompuKol Communications)

Start and participate in civil conversation

Be critical of everything, including yourself (LinkedIn)

Be honest and take responsibility if you mess up

Present your opinion as your opinion (LinkedIn)

Don’t make it seem like your opinion is fact and the only correct answer

Give credit where credit is due (LinkedIn)

If you’re using someone else's content in any way, give credit to the originally creator

Preserve the intended meaning of a given statement (LinkedIn)

Don’t change or misrepresent statements, present statements as they’re intended to be presented

Works Cited

“Adidas Terminates Partnership with Ye Immediately.” Adidas, Adidas, 25 Oct. 2022, www.adidas-group.com/en/media/news-archive/press-releases/2022/adidas-terminates-partnership-ye-immediately/.

Boorstein, Michelle, and Isaac Arnsdorf. “Overt U.S. Antisemitism Returns with Trump, Kanye West: 'Something Is Different'.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 28 Oct. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/27/antisemitism-kanye-trump-adidas-jews/.

Cohn, Carolyn. “Social Media Ethics and Etiquette.” CompuKol Communications, CompuKol Communications, 12 Apr. 2011, www.compukol.com/social-media-ethics-and-etiquette/#:~:text=Ethics%2C%20by%20definition%2C%20is%20the,the%20context%20of%20our%20society.

Hamilton, Lewis. “Lewis Hamilton- AG1 #Ad.” Instagram, 26 Oct. 2022, www.instagram.com/p/CkL4BROJpI3/.

Rand-Hendriksen, Morten. “A Code of Ethics for Social Media Influencers.” LinkedIn, LinkedIn, 7 Sept. 2021, www.linkedin.com/pulse/code-ethics-social-media-influencers-morten-rand-hendriksen#:~:text=To%20preserve%20your%20own%20trustworthiness,unless%20it%20is%20clearly%20stated.

“SEC Charges Kim Kardashian for Unlawfully Touting Crypto Security.” SEC.gov, SEC, 3 Oct. 2022, www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-183.

“Updated Social Media Guidelines 10.22[1] - ESPN Front Row.” ESPN.com, ESPN, Nov. 2017, www.espnfrontrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/NOV-2-RECEIVED-UPDATED-SOCIAL-MEDIA-GUIDELINES-10.221.pdf.

[ccriandrew]

Improving Movember

I decided to do my research on the nonprofit Movember, Movember is a nonprofit that focuses on both men’s mental and physical health. This is a very important charity to me specifically for the men’s mental health advocacy they do. According to Movember, “We prioritise funding for the three biggest health issues facing men: mental health and suicide prevention, prostate cancer and testicular cancer” ( https://us.movember.com/about/cause).

Movember utilizes, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. The content they put out on all of their social media accounts is really good. The content does a great job of representing Movember beliefs and values, but they do not seem to be reaching as big of an audience as they could be. On Facebook their page has 176 thousand likes and 181 thousand followers. Despite the seemingly large following their followers don’t seem to be engaging with the content. They post a decent amount, around 1-3 times a week, and they get 5-25 reactions a post. All the reactions they seem to get are in support of them, so do not have a hate problem and this is consistent across all their social media accounts. Most of their engagement on posts comes through shares, they can get up to 50 shares on a post, so people are connecting with their content they just aren’t publicly interacting with it. I would say Facebook is Movember’s second strongest social media behind Instagram. After Facebook I would Twitter is their next best account. I used https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/movember to get most of my statistics for their Twitter. Movember has 58 thousand followers on Twitter which sounds good, but in the last 30 days they have lost 100 followers. They Tweet at a fairly frequent interval, they’ve had 36 tweets in the past 30 days, but the number of interactions is extremely inconsistent. In the past 30 days their Tweets can get anywhere from 0-45 likes a tweet and 0-12 retweets; in that same period, they have gotten a total of 11 comments on their Tweets. Movember struggles the most on YouTube, they have 11.7 thousand subscribers, with 5 million total views across all their videos. In the past 6 months they’ve averaged about 2900 views per video over 30 videos. They get 0-5 comments per video, even on a video with 40 thousand views they managed 3 comments. I did not see a single negative comment on any of their videos, so they are getting quality comments just not a large enough quantity. Instagram is Movember’s best social media account; it has the most followers and like range of any of their accounts. On Instagram Movember has 255 thousand followers and they manage anywhere from 250-2 thousand likes on posts in the past 30 days. In the last 30 days Movember has posted 15 times, so they post about every other day. While they always seem to get less than 10 comments on their posts the comments are always supportive. For such a good charity it is upsetting to see all of their social media accounts perform so poorly.

Obviously, Movember has room to improve, but I would say their biggest weakness is posting consistently. Using a blog from Hootsuite (https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-for-nonprofits/#:~:text=The%20best%20way%20to%20reach,in%20what%20you're%20doing) I think I have found a way for Movember to improve the consistency of their posting. Movember uses most of the tips provided from this blog, but I think what they could use to improve is making a content calendar. They tend to go through content droughts, where they do not post and then post a lot in a short period of time, which is a shame because they make great content. I think planning a content calendar will make their followers more engaged and grow their platform which may lead to more awareness and donations.

Suggesting one advanced metric, one channel metric, and one behavioral metric for at least two platforms can be difficult to do because these platforms spend tons of time and money to make the perfect platform. I think most social media apps nowadays are looking to nick features and metrics from TikTok. Using the table of metrics provided by the textbook, Social Media for Strategic Communication, 2021 (https://reader2.yuzu.com/reader/books/9781071826881/epubcfi/6/32%5B%3Bvnd.vst.idref%3Ds9781071826867.i1503%5D!/4/2%5Bs9781071826867.i1503%5D/22%5Bs9781071826867.i1598%5D/28%5Bs9781071826867.i1638%5D/8/8/2/8/2/4/1:0%5B%2CAve%5D). First, I want to examine Instagram, the advanced metric they could use is audience overview. For a creator or in this case nonprofit being able to see what their followers interact with and like it can be a huge advantage. This would allow for a more tailored content plan for their followers, truly delivering what your followers want to see on a consistent basis. The channel metric Instagram could use is average time watched, showing a creator how much of a video their viewers are watching on average lets the creator have a better idea of what types of videos their followers enjoy. The behavioral metric I think Instagram needs is completion rate. If a creator could know how many of their followers are watching to the end of a video or are swiping through all the slides on the posts it would be a great help. This would let creators know if their posts contain too much or boring content. Next, I want to address YouTube, they seem to be missing some key metrics. For the one advanced metric follower activity would be great for its creators. Letting a creator see what other channels their viewers are watching would let them know what styles of content their followers enjoy. For a channel metric I think channel visits would be awesome, seeing how many people are visiting a channel a day lets the creator know how many views/subscribers they’re missing out on. Finally, YouTube’s behavioral metric they could add is repeat views, it’d be cool to show creators just how rewatchable their content is. Obviously making rewatchable content can lead to growing a following. To wrap up Movember has a lot of room to improve its social media game, but social media also has a lot of room to improve.

Andrew Rosa

[ccriandrew]

Me and Social Media- Andrew Rosa

Social media is hard to define, and I do not think there is any one correct definition. I would define social media as, an online application that affords its users an easy way to create, share, and consume content with people around the world. I also believe that since social media is constantly evolving so is the definition. I have been a social media user since the third or fourth grade and it is completely different from what it was back then. I believe the definition of social media has changed in the ten or eleven years I’ve had it, it use to be a much simpler experience with out such an emphasis on good content or playing into the algorithm.

Though I have had social media for such a long time, I think of myself as a pretty casual user, I personally don’t post much on social media. My feed on Instagram is mostly sports and memes, I don’t tend to see friends or family when I log on. I prefer to consume the content that others post rather than posting myself, though I have been posting my photography more often. I prefer to post on my story because I like that it’s gone after twenty-four hours. I spend a lot of time on social media apps like Instagram, though I only post once or twice a year. When I do post its usually photography or me and my friends. I don’t post to grow an audience, but rather just to have a record of what I’ve been doing.

The app I use the most and am most familiar with is Instagram. Over the years that I have had Instagram I have learned a lot about it mainly gaining an understanding of how their algorithm works. I’ve learned what time of the day to post on my story to get the most views on it, I learned this just through trial and error. I’ve also learned how long after post on my profile to cross-post it on my story to get the most traffic from my story to my post for more likes. Also, the more you post the more views and likes your profile will get. I love numbers and analytics, so these are things that I pay close attention to on social media. Ironically, my biggest challenge on social media is the social part of it. I have trouble knowing how to communicate with people on it and knowing all the un-written rules.

When I signed up for this class, I didn’t really know what I wanted to get out of it, I just thought it seemed like an interesting course to take and I knew and liked the professor. Through writing my first blog I’ve gained a better understanding of what it is I might want to get out of this class. By taking this class I would like to learn and have a better understanding of how to communicate on social media. I want to learn how to become a better creator and viewer on social media.

Written by: Andrew Rosa