figureitout-matu

[figureitout-matu]

Assignment #4 - Final project proposal

[figureitout-matu]

Assignment #1 - Social Media Best Practices

For this assignment, I'll be further delving into social media best (or worst) practices of a game called PUBG: Battle Ground, developed by PUBG Studios and published by Krafton company, as well as the involvement of Tencent. 

The game is quite popular and is free for players to play. However, it uses a seasonal subscription model to generate profits, as well as an in-app option to purchase "UC," which is the game's currency for users to buy special items or surprise "crates" that are not available for users who only want to use the free version. As per BusinessofApps, PUBG in 2021 was the highest-grossing game and generated $2 billion in revenue. 

As a player myself, I was curious to look into their social media more closely and found the following:

The company has Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook social media accounts. While they have slight variations to their content posted to all three platforms, they use the same content and posts on Twitter and Facebook interchangeably; this is not a social media best practice, as each forum should have its own content and manage according to its user base. You can see this with the levels of engagement through Twitter, which are higher, as opposed to the minimal engagement the game receives on Facebook. For example, the company posted similar posts with the same 50-second promotional video on Facebook on May 18th and Twitter on May 19th. The company would benefit from creating different content or, at the very least, a variation of the content tailored to each platform. Please see images I & II for reference.

Furthermore, the company does not engage with its users regularly. Additionally, they do not address complaints and concerns from users. Both of these issues are not social media best practices, as discussed in Module I. This has created a negative image for some consumers, as seen in Image III, as users complain that the company only cares about making profits, not its users. While researching the company's social media platforms, I saw multiple users with similar complaints left unaddressed by the company. 

[figureitout-matu]

Assignment #3 - Advertising

As a mid-20s millennial, I am digitally savvy and have been exposed to computers and the internet from a very young age. However, before this course, I had never paid close attention to the implications of my online behaviour nor who could be paying attention to it. Mostly, I was de-sensitized to privacy policy agreements and anything to do with companies tracking my information online. I was a student until fairly recently and have been connected throughout my life, so why would I have to care? Now, I realize I was wrong.

Throughout this exercise, I navigated a few online articles typical of my behaviour when on my phone while on the TTC or something of the sort, nothing out of the ordinary. However, upon further inspection using the disconnect add-on, the number of tracking websites interested in my personal information is overwhelming at best. After navigating for 20 minutes, I realized over 100 tracking websites would have had access associated with them. I was stunned to find that several of these websites would be interested in my data. Now I've started to wonder how many websites and, even more importantly, who has access to my data regularly and how they can use it. I will look further into ad blockers and other software/add-ons that can help me mitigate risks, as well as the number of websites that might have access to everything I do online.