jondoose-blog

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Social Media News

Does a social-media-only news diet provide adequate depth of information to enable effective participation in the political process?

I really don’t think having a social-media-only news diet is the best way for someone to be informed enough to effectively engage in the political process.  While a fair amount of news that is being shared is accurate, there is likely more that is overly biased or even just fake.  This is certainly an issue that has been addressed in the previous presidential campaign.  According to Pew Research, "a majority of U.S. adults - 62% - get news on social media (Gottfried).”  While TV and radio are much more heavily regulated, social media platforms are not so it isn’t that hard for someone to post false information to a large audience. Another problem is that news agencies even very reputable ones, are seemingly more worried about getting their story out first rather than checking all the facts.  This can also lead to a spread of misinformation.

Gottfried, Jeffrey and Elisa Shearer.  "News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016."  Pew Research Center.  Pew Research Center.  2016.  Web.  

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Social media: The latest/greatest political tool

Social media is the latest/greatest political tool, and some candidates are better than others at harnessing its power. Should we be concerned that social media will provide a strategic advantage to certain types of political personalities, perhaps lowering the overall quality of political discourse?

Although I can see why some would be concerned about social media providing a strategic advantage to certain types of personalities, I think it is simply just the evolution of where political campaigns and discussions are going.  This isn’t the first-time technology has changed politics.  As the article from Politico "How Social Media Is Ruining Politics” mentions that new technology has changed the political world in the past during the 1920s with radio and 1960s with television (Carr). This change in the way candidates campaign can be seen as a good thing.  While it does seem that it is initially lacking some quality, I think it is because it is still a fairly new concept for candidates to place the majority of their focus.  Although Obama first utilized social media in 2008, the 2016 campaign was the first that had so much emphasis on social media and what the candidates were communicating through their various accounts.  Overall, I think this shift will actually make candidates more engaging in terms of actually communicating directly through social media rather than through TV ads or another form of traditional media.

Carr, Nicholas.  "How Social Media is Ruining Politics."  Politico Magazine. Politico Magazine.  2016.  Web.    

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Competition

Currently, ThunderZone Pizza and Tap House’s main competitors are “Toni & Joe’s Pizzeria” and “Do Drop Inn.”  Both companies have been around for a much longer time and have been successful so they present a good example of how to run a social media campaign, at least in terms of Facebook. 

Based off “Toni & Joe’s” page, it seems like they rely on scheduled posts as most of their posts seem to be exactly the same as previous ones.  So it may be that they have hired HIBU (currently manages their website) to do their social media. I say that because if all the content is basically the same, it is likely that someone uses a few items of content and schedules posts based off of them.  I think what brings Toni & Joe’s the most success in terms of online is their advertising.  I don’t even like their page yet I often see banner and sponsored ads from them.

“Do Drop Inn” tends to post most updated and current material.  After reviewing their page, they often do the same thing as “Toni and Joe’s” by posting the same content for specials over and over but they also add content about their catering and other business activities.

Since ThunderZone has daily and weekly specials, I think that creating more scheduled posts to cover that will help free up time to focus more on content as it arises.  Another example that is useful is “Do Drop Inn” posting pictures about catering.  ThunderZone does cater quite a bit and hopes to make it a regular service that they offer.  So following “Do Drop’s” example might help my client also gain more business outside of the restaurant.

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What are you passionate about?

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Norm Breaching Experiments

I actually attempted two of the experiments to try to get a better idea of how people interact.

First I started with “Way Off Topic” on Facebook.  What I would do is find a thread that had a decent amount of activity.  For example, a few times I commented on “Cheddar” posts.  However, I didn’t get a single response.  I think I may be due to me being so off topic that maybe people thought I was commenting on the wrong post.  So since this didn’t produce any results after 2 days I decided to try another experiment.

I also tried the “Oversharer” with my dad.  At first he would respond with a fairly positive or assuring text like when I told him “I’m eating popcorn and having a beer” his response was simply “sounds fantastic.”  This is basically how the conversation went for the first few hours.  I would update him and about 30min later, he would respond with a very simple message.  By the night time, he confronted me on why I was texting him so much, I responded by texting him that this was an experiment and if he would like to talk to me he would have to do so through text until the next day.  That is where the conversation ended.  He stopped responding to my texts.  So, I think I should have tried to keep the experiment a secret until it was over since once I told him, he stopped participating. 

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Social Media Analytics/Audience

This week in Interactive Media 336, we studied social media analytics/insights.  The lectures and presentations provided very useful information for planning and implementing a social media campaign. 

Since Facebook is my client’s primary focus on social media, utilizing Facebook Insights is going to be important to achieving my goal.  The client would like to increase awareness and foot traffic among the 18-24 age group.  With Facebook insights, I can not only form a better evaluation of whether or not certain posts work to attract that audience.  Also, Facebook will allow me to target that specific audience, while being able to mirror posts to Instagram via Facebook boosts.

My client maintains a regular flow of customers from the age groups 25-34 and 35-44.  Currently the client has 1560 followers on Facebook.  The 25-44 groups combined equal approximately 58% of that number.  While there are slightly more women, men seem to engage more with the page and posts.  These customers are largely made up of both college staff and local residents.  However, being so close to the college, ThunderZone would like to attract more customers in the 18-24 age group.  The 18-24 group only makes up about 15% of the followers and accurately reflects the clientele that ThunderZone receives on a regular basis. 

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2/20 class summary

Today consisted of a few presentations.  The first was from our guest speaker Virginia Berndt who spoke about Yelp.  We also had a few Pecha Kucha presentations from classmates about Interactive advertising, SEO, and Latency.

Yelp presentation

Today we got to hear from Virginia about Yelp.  Yelp is used to connect customers with businesses.  Customers can provide reviews and information about the business for other customers or even potential customers.  Businesses also have the ability to engage with customers through their reviews.  Virginia suggested that this is a good practice as it lets customers know that the business is ran by a real person.  Another way that businesses can utilize Yelp for attracting more customers is by creating check-in promotions such as “5% off when you check in through Yelp.” Although Yelp is often used for restaurant reviews, it is also useful for all businesses including salons, photographers, and even doctor offices.  However, one unfortunate element of Yelp is that a business is unable to delete their listing if they receive many negative reviews. This means that a business must work harder at improving customer experience to improve reviews.

Classmate Pecha Kucha presentations

Interactive Advertising: Monique discussed interactive advertising which is basically a way for companies to advertise by encouraging engagement with the advertisement.  For example, Reebok created a sign with shoes inside.  It had sensors that stated if people could run a certain speed, the sign would open up and give them the shoes for free.  Other companies like Motorola and Ford have created magazine advertisements that required users to use their phone in order to interact with the advertisement.  Since media is becoming more interactive, advertisers see the need to create more interactive advertising to catch the users attention and get them involved rather than using passive/boring ads.  

SEO: Joshua talked about Search Engine Optimization which is the process of improving results ranking through search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.  SEO is very useful as it can help business increase their visibility on search results which should correlate to more business.  Businesses/companies can focus on just their name however, they are also able to utilize keywords through SEO.  For example, a salon can use keywords that relate to the services they offer like hair or nails. 

Latency:  We also heard from Chris about Latency.  He covered quite a lot of information in the short time he presented so it was hard to retain all of it. However, what I was able to gather from the presentation is that latency is the delay before information is transferred from transmitter and receiver (end-user/server). Latency is important in many areas of interactive media.  For example, online video game players experience issues with latency which creates what is known as “lag.”

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LinkedIn

The speaker from LinkedIn provided a lot of interesting information about what LinkedIn wants to achieve as a company.  It seems like they are the biggest social media platform for professionals.  They ultimately plan on creating an economic graph that will contain a digital profile for every professional and employer. LinkedIn wants to be the ultimate platform to connect professionals in the world.  They plan on doing this by creating profiles for a 1.3 billion global workforce.

So basically, it seems that LinkedIn is an extremely useful tool when it comes to networking and finding work or employees.  This is done by provided information about what individual professionals’ skill sets are. Another option that LinkedIn is using to make providing information easier is allowing users to drop their resume through Microsoft to upload to their profile.

Overall, it appears that anyone who wants to connect with other professionals, LinkedIn is a great resource to start.  For the most part, those that use LinkedIn are serious and intend to connect with other professionals.

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Easy Social

Timothy Zercher from Easy Social provided some helpful information for running a social media campaign or for anyone looking at getting into digital marketing.  To start, he mentioned how important relationships are between the social media manager and the client.  It doesn’t seem like a big deal but in my experience, maintaining a good relationship with a client has resulted in more work and opportunity for myself. 

Another useful bit of information was when he mentioned that it is important to know that market or community that your client has.  For example, he mentioned that his company had made a campaign that used the word “victim” rather than “survivor”.  I don’t think it really hurt his relationship with the client however, it is safe to take measures to prevent any possible issues such as that.

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Youtube Pecha Kucha

http://ebersolemedia.com/scalar/interactive-media-sp18/youtube

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Social Media Best Practices

I recently did the discussion for social media best practices and I think that I’m going to start implementing some of these in the pages that I already manage.  To start I am going to post non promotional content that is not from our company. 

The next thing I will do is cross-promotion.  I already have the accounts linked so I only have to post from Instagram and it goes to Facebook and Twitter, however I don’t believe all of our followers are following us on each platform so I will create some tabs via Facebook to hopefully increase followers on Instagram and Twitter.

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Additional accounts

For the 3 additional social media accounts I signed up for:

Instagram: @doose336

Instagram is unique because it focuses primarily on photos.  The creators wanted to have an app that allowed users to instantly edit and share photos with a stylistic appearance.

Pinterest: jdoose25

Like instagram, Pinterest focuses heavily on photos.  A lot of people use Pinterest for DIY or other types of projects and ideas based on photos or products that people have uploaded or shared.

Meetup: Jonathon Doose

Meetup is often used to connect people that share interests or even professions.  People can create a meetup to promote events or to meet other people that share similar interests.

#MC336sp18

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LinkedIn

here is my linkedin profile

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-doose-213ab6158/

I’m not a big fan of LinkedIn, maybe I just need more time with it but it doesn’t seem super intuitive.  On the other hand, it is meant for professionals to connect so ease of use might not be necessary.

I sent connections but still haven’t received notice of any progress. 

I also decided to join the 3 groups: Photographers, Video Editing, and Vloggers.

I followed 3 companies that I want to work for: Vayner Media, iHeartMedia, and Vice Media

  #MC336sp18

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Facebook Page

Here is my Facebook page for class. #MC336sp18

@jondoose336

https://www.facebook.com/jondoose336/

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10 individuals/companies I follow on Twitter

INDIVIDUALS

- Gary  Vaynerchuk - I chose Gary Vaynerchuk because he seems to have a lot of insight about creating a brand and growing it.  A lot of information he shares is useful for people that want to start their own business.

- Casey Neistat - Casey Neistat is a very popular YouTube contributor.  He previously had a guerilla style documentary series on HBO.  He is all about creating the most interesting videos from a limited amount of equipment. 

- Joe Rogan - Although many people know him for his comedy or work on TV, Joe Rogan has an extremely in depth podcast that discusses everything possible.  He often brings on well established scientists or politicians to discuss and debate important topics.

- Jon Soohoo - He isn't so much of an opinion leader but he does have the job of photographing the Los Angeles Dodgers, I've been following him for a few years now and he is a major influence of mine.

- Jared Polis - Jared Polis is currently running for Govenor of Colorado.  I figure he might have some important information to share over the next year.  I also wouldn't mind working for politcal campaigns in the future, so following him might provide me with useful information.

COMPANIES

- VaynerMedia - I chose Vayner media because it is Gary Vaynerchuk's media company and they set a good example for digital marketers to follow.

- NBCUniversal - NBCUniversal is a huge company that offers positions in a wide variety of fields within media. 

- Vice News - I've always liked the style that Vice uses to cover stories.  They are less like news but rather a short documentary series.  I would really enjoy to work for a company that spends time to really dig deep to get the most of a story.

- Alternative Press - Alternative Press has been one of my favorite magazines since I was a kid.  They cover alternative/underground music.  Whether it would be writing, photography, or graphic design, I think they would be an interesting company to work for.

- iHeart Radio - iHeart radio seems to have a lot of presence in social media which is really where I would like to end up.  

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336 twitter

here’s my fancy twitter account

https://twitter.com/jdoose336