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Implementation Challenges

Moving forward I believe my client will try their very best to follow the practices that have been put in place during this project. However I still think some issues and challenges will arise. My main concern is establishing a sense of community. My client was receptive to the idea of helping to grow the social platforms of the start by providing coupons and discounts through those channels. My concern with the coupons is that it will dilute the sense of community we are striving for, and need to be careful to not become just a coupon source rather than a social organization you’d like to visit. In order to keep up a socail media presence you really need to encompass all aspects of social media into your organization and not skimp in places otherwise no real value will be generated out of this. In my final communication with my client I let them know what goals to strive for and how to achieve these goals. After I sent it over I think they do understand now that improving their social media presence will require them to show a level of support to the community they’re try to establish. One smaller issue I could see with the implementation of their social media presence is to stay on top of posting and responding to others. My suggestion for this was to just have an employee or manager to check in frequently as to not spend a ton of time on the monitoring of the feeds, but to at least appear engaged to the community as a whole. This was very well received and I think that the challenges will come, but they will be able to handle them very well. 

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Effective Content Creation

The biggest aspect of building a following on social media is to share content that will grab the attention of your followers, and this can be done in so many different ways. First of all an organization should share a mix of posts from the two branches of content; curated, and created content. Curated content comes from a variety of sources but is not directly created internally, meaning it requires very little effort to produce. It also allows for more diversity in your social channels by providing followers with other view points rather than your organizations own content. Created content on the other hand is developed internally directly for your social channels. This type of content allows for direct interaction with your followers and can really help to get your own message across effectively. The key for a truly effective social media presence is to use a good mix of curated and created content. To start use the established benchmark of 60% curated content, and 40% created content, then adjust these numbers based on how you want to promote your organization online and also take into consideration your industry needs and overall follower engagement in these different categories to gauge support. I found this article to be very eye opening on determining a strategy for curated & created content mixing. 

The type of content you posts plays a big role in the type of community you build on social media platforms. When your organization first starts the mission to become a social organization you need to align your posts with that of the principles of content development and sharing. What I mean by this is to make posts that correlate with the principle of curated v. created content in order to establish a good diversity between postings in order to keep followers engaged. The other principles follow primarily on keeping up engagement with your followers. Try not to make posts to similar to each other, but try to establish a reliable unique format so your followers know it’s your post without really realizing it.  If an organization follows these principles and the others that revolve around developing and sharing effective content then they will succeed in their social media endeavors.

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Community Building in Social Media

In this weeks text reading I found a lot of great resources for effectively building a community on social media, and leveraging the community to benefit the client. The most useful resource I found in the text for these chapters relates to community collaboration and how this can help to build not only your online presence but also to establish a group of loyal followers and supporters. The first strategy in achieving this is: establishing the means. The way to establish this is to intelligently select community activities or possibilities that will allow your business to be noticed by the groups/individuals you’re trying to attract. This route will be very effective at direct targeting of your selected demographic, however it could take a bit of work to establish a larger following. The second aspect of this route is to focus on determining where and when to invest your social media resources and also when to continue reinvesting in these areas. Both of these strategies combine to become an extremely effective way of building a great community through socail media for your business. Here is a link to determining how best to source your community: Sourcing community.

Now lets dive into growing our online communities. The hootsuite chapter for this week really emphasize leveraging your community and how to expand based on that. I think in terms of my client project in which I am helping my local Dairy Queen franchise that leveraging their devoted fans would be greatly beneficial to expanding their social media influence. This has been done in the past by promoting events via their Facebook page, and during the current pandemic that may prove difficult. However we can plan for the eventual end of the pandemic for those activities, but also expand upon them. One idea that was floated around was giving customers coupons who refer another friend to like the restaurants Facebook page, implementing this could be a challenge at first but the benefits could be great!

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Big data, even bigger problems

After watching the legal side of big data my eyes were really opened to what big data really is. It can be best summarized into really any data that is collected by an organization for its operations. In many cases this data can be collected at the point of sale at retailers or during the development of aircraft engines, big data is really an all encompassing term. The issue with all of this data being collected is that it is often critical data to peoples lives, wether its personal financial data or a company’s private development data, and when this data is compromised it can be devastating to a person or to a company. We all know that not everyone in the world has the best intentions and this goes for hackers as well. That is why companies need to be very vigilant in terms of collecting data they gather from customers, and really they should only focus on data that is absolutely essential to their operations, rather than getting some other data that could be beneficial down the road to them. After watching The Legal Side of Big Data lecture I’ve found that businesses need to be proactive in protecting their own intellectual data as well as that data they gather from consumers, once that data is compromised once its a slippery slope form there. Especially in todays society, if a business compromises users data once, the users will be less and less trusting in the business and thus it will become much more difficult to get data from customers, it could even effect the profitability of businesses. This is why protecting this data is so important. Customers should also be aware of what companies are doing with their information as a way to keep them accountable as well, if no one cared what is done with their data then the businesses would have less incentive to keep it secure. I think the best course of action to balance the risk of data breaches while still gathering data on business operations is to take a proactive approach to protecting this data. Businesses should look to separate key aspects of data with different security measures around each of them so that way if data is breached, the hackers will only gain access to half the data which will be useless without the second half, making it harder to gain access to all of the big data.  

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The Spread of Junk News

Junk news or Fake news is an issue that has been raised in the last few years, and this has really changed the way we look at news. Now that people have access to all possible news 24/7 we really need to take everything we see online with a grain of salt. Algorithms drive most of the information that we see on the internet and that includes what news we see. These algorithms are far from perfect however, they can be built with inherent bias from the start. Vox has researched this topic heavily, you can check it out here - Vox algorithm bias. Sometimes these biases just happen based on how built them. At first companies weren’t that interested in hiring a ton of diverse talent to program, they just wanted the best of the best, and most of the early programmers to these companies were 25-35 year old white males. This itself causes bias to be included in the algorithms just by having a very little amount of diversity in the engineers who build the algorithms. 

Advertising is really where you start to see how junk news can spread so easily. Since interaction is everything and something that is clicked on more frequently will then have increased traffic, which then leads to higher ad sales. This issue has given rise to click-bait, which strives to catch peoples attention by either getting under their skin, appearing to be very interesting, or even to just appeal to gossip. These things combined really help junk news to spread so fast, and really it all comes down to the advertising dollars that are at play on todays socail media sites. 

Exposure is the final component of why junk news can spread so fast according to the Oxford University article. Exposure includes algorithmic information but it tends to focus on the more organic form of information spread on social media and that is all up to the user. This means that you see information your friends, and people you follow share directly on socail media. This sounds fine right? Actually this tends to make the information you see in this way very one sided. Since most of the time your friends share similar views to your own, and have generally the same things going on in your day-to-day lives. In terms of spreading junk news in this way your friend may share an outrageous article on a political issue of which both of you would agree on without giving it much thought, but really if you knew the real story behind this article, you may at the very least be skeptical of some of the claims within the article. Sadly in the exposure category of spreading information you will most likely be unaware that there is more to the story, and you may not even seek out other information just to back up the outrageous article you just read. In order to cut down on the spread of junk news, individuals and businesses should first do a quick fact check on things they read online before sharing them further, a quick check like this can keep you from alienating potential customers, or other friends as a result of junk news. It will also allow more important news to reach the screens of users who actually want to see it! 

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What makes a good consultant?

A consultant is a career that is experiencing a lot of growth in recent years and this shows no sign of slowing down. That being said it isn’t a career for everyone. I think every consultant should possess the following three characteristics at a minimum; flexibility, confidence, and sociability. For starters a consultant needs to be flexible in everything they do since things can and will be changing constantly in terms of what your client wants. Wether you are a social media consultant or any other especially in today’s current pandemic, business needs change on a dime and you need to be able to react quickly in order to be effective. Confidence is just as important I believe since you need to be confident behind any idea you come up with, if you don’t project this confidence to your clients odds are they will be able to tell, and then they may not go along with your ideas since they sense that you’re not confident in it, so why should they be. The third characteristic that I believe any consultant should have is sociability. A consultant needs to be able to speak to a lot of different people while trying to get things done and well this will prove very challenging if you’re not a social person. A lot of what a consultant does is making things easier for everyone and if a consultant is not easy to talk to then getting anything done will prove difficult. I do get that not everyone has these characteristics and that doesn’t mean you can’t be a great consultant, I think if someone is aware of what they’re lacking they can work on attaining all of these characteristics. 

After going over these characteristics of what a consultant should have I will dive into my own social media presence in order to see what can be improved upon. For starters I would defiantly need to post more on other social media platforms. I tend not to use Facebook very often which isn’t a must but I think that anyone starting out as a social media consultant should have a very solid Facebook presence. I would also need to build up my professional portfolio a bit more on LinkedIn. I haven’t planned on going into the social media consulting space, so I just use my personal social media accounts as just that personal accounts, that I really don’t spend much time on. Moving forward I would need to make professional accounts in order to build up a more substantial presence in order to improve my professional portfolio. 

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The Social Delemma

Big data and algorithms are something all of us deal with on a daily basis without even knowing. Just because you don’t notice that your information is being collected and used by this systems doesn’t mean there is no effect on you. After watching the Social dilemma documentary and the lecture I am very surprised to see just how little I knew about these systems and what they were doing with my information. These systems can learn nearly everything about us, well everything that is important to advertisers at least. These tools are so powerful because they not only collect a ton of data from us but they also are engineered to keep us coming back for more. We are addicted to social media, the internet and nearly everything that relates to those services. These systems pose a danger if they’re miss used. For starters they can cause people to become more depressed since the services are engineered to keep us on them as long as possible, and if a person is depressed and being showed more depressing content because that is what they are most likely to interact with, then it will just get perpetually worse. 

Another danger of big data and the systems behind its collection is just who builds these systems. Most of the time the engineers working for these companies are 25-35 year old while males which doesn’t bode well for being an all inclusive ecosystem. Since these systems are designed in a place with little diversity then the systems will not be very beneficial to the furthering of inclusive issues, rights, or things like that. In other words there will be a racial bias built in. This is far more concerning when you look to the future to see just what these systems could be used for, which is limitless. 

Another issue I discovered while watching the Social Dilemma documentary was that the social media is not the product, its users, the people are the product. The way these companies monetize their product is to keep us engaged as long as possible so that we are shown the highest amount of advertised content possible. I think this is something that can be changed moving forward. These services have a ridiculous amount of resources and if they wanted to they could pursue a different or at the least a slightly altered form of monetization so that the platforms could become a bit more organic rather than strictly data driven to keep us online. I understand that this change is highly unlikely but I think it could be a step in the right direction. 

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Social Media Experiment

Over a few days this week I was able to alter my use of social media, and it was a great experience! I decided to take three 8 hour segments out of my day where I would not use social media at all. This seemed like quite the challenge, especially with all of the political news yesterday in which I definitely wanted to check my social media. This all started on Thursday and from 8-4 each day for the next 2 days I would block off this time to not use social media. What a week to do this experiment by the way since a lot of news was being shared this way. 

Below you can see a chart from what a high technology use day looks like for me, including my time spent on social media. Now to be clear these results show some overlap since some of the time I was checking social media on my phone I was also doing other things such as homework among other things. The total time spent on the technology listed below is 15 hours however as I just said theres some overlap so I’d say it was roughly 8-9 hours between all of them combined. 

I saw some vast differences in this data when I chose to not use social media for 8 hours a day over 3 days. For example my time on Facebook, Twitter and snapchat was diminished to nearly zero time at all during these days. I did however increase my in other apps such as Netflix. Overall my time using technology didn’t change much during these days, but what I spent it on definitely did. I shifted to watching a bit more Netflix when I didn’t have anything going on. I also worked on a lot of homework during this time instead. I found this experience to be really eye opening and I would like to limit wasted time on social media more moving forward. It really showed me how much time I was wasting especially when I have other things I could be doing. 

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Like many other people am addicted to my phone. I’m constantly checking it throughout the day usually for little to no reason at all, other than just keeping up with everything I use daily on it. Usually I am just checking my Facebook, Twitter or other social media apps when I go on my phone. I feel as though this constant attachment to social media is a big waste of time throughout my day. Considering 99% of information that I read on these platforms is relatively useless for me to know but I always get sucked right back into it. I’ve never really thought about how much time I waste just by keeping up with all my social media accounts and now that I look back on it, I just think how much more productive I could be without checking social media all the time. After watching Max Stossel’s video my eyes were really opened to the fact that the main purpose of these social media sites is not be social at all, but rather to be engaged for as long as possible so that they can sell ads. Looking back on this it makes a lot of sense these companies need to show growth to shareholders and how are they to do this once most people have an account. Well they will try to get their current base of customers to stay on their platforms for extended periods of time. I find the ways they do this to be very interesting and since I’ve decided to pursue a career in the technology field I’ve also started to think of other uses of this extension in user screen time as well. That all being said I am not against technology or social media but I think it’s a great thing to know so that you can limit your time on these platforms. 

Looking back to a few weeks ago I had visited some friends in the Upper Peninsula to go on a hiking trip in the Porcupine Mountains. We ended up using my parents camper and stayed at a camp ground close to the park, and this place was very much in the middle of nowhere. We know going in that there wasn’t going to be very good cell service if any at all and we all kind of liked the idea of disconnecting for a day or two. So for two days I stayed in there with my friends we hiked all over the park and to Lake of the clouds (pictured below) and it was a great time! I didn’t really miss being on social media or anything else on my phone. It was a great way to relax and kind of forget about all the chaos that’s currently going on in the world. I highly recommend going on a trip like this and disconnecting for a bit. 

Being more intentional with my use of technology is something that I would really like to do more. One thing I’m going to try is using the Grayscale filter on my phone more like Max Stossel recommended in his presentation. I think this will keep me from wasting time on my phone by reminding me that I decided to take a break even when I go to grab my phone for no reason at all. I think this will be a very effective strategy for limited wasted time on my phone overall. 

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Hi Everyone!

My name is Austen Merconti and I am a senior here at CMU studying Information Technology. I grew up in Wakefield Michigan which is a small town in the UP right on the Wisconsin border. I will be graduating after this semester and I am currently considering between a few job offers that I have received. All of my offers are Technology Project Management positions and that is what I am going to be focusing my career on. I will be helping one of the companies that offered me a position to enhance their technology systems and help to improve the value that technology can bring to major corporations. 

What I hope to accomplish with this blog is to start building a portfolio that I can use moving forward to advance myself professionally. I believe that a social media portfolio will become a key hiring component for companies moving forward, and it already is a very big consideration in the hiring process, but I believe we will see that progress into the future. 

A company that I believe has built up an amazing social media presence is: Red Bull. They have gone after such a wide demographic of people with their social media campaigns from the adventure junkies, athletes, and college students of course. They do this by using a principle known as mass collaboration which takes into account their social media presence, the community of devoted followers they’ve amassed, and integrating all of that with a purpose that everyone who follows them can get behind. Just look at all of the different events they sponsor from ski racing events and formula one racing to cliff diving. The last of which they use to drum up support for saving our oceans. This wide range of coverage really helps to unite a bunch of people together under what really is a beverage company.