Guest Blogger- TOW 15

My guest blogger this week is Meghan Beytagh, I chose her because before reading Meghan’s post I thought Foursquare told anyone where you were at that time, I didn’t realize that it was just “your friends” on the site. Read Meghan’s post if you are interested in knowing more about Foursquare.

Here is the link where I found the post: http://meghanlane.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/topic-of-the-week-foursquare/

 One of the newest social networking sites that is showing up on the scene is Foursquare. With over 500,000 users to date the company which employees 16 people grossed about $1.35 million dollars last year. Which is not bad for a year old business.

According to PocketLint, Foursquare is a location service-based social network-come-game. Its purpose is allowing its members to share their location with their Foursquare friends by “checking in.” They “check-in” at different locations around town via their cellphone and earn points. You see, whenever you walk into any location around town you simply “check in” to Foursquare and your friends can see what restaurant, bar, or location your at and you earn points. The more points you earn the higher your Foursquare ranking becomes. You can even become “the mayor” of a particular area.

From a business stand point, the opportunities from this location-based network provides endless opportunities. Business can use Foursquare to reward frequent visitors with coupons and incentives. They can also do what Starbucks is doing and use the site as part of their new customer loyalty program. The site is even rolling out a free analytics program to business that provides detailed information about who is “checking in” to their locations and provide them the ability to communicate to these customers.

For the individual members and potential members of this site, there are obvious dangers. They are giving out information about their exact location at a particular time and broadcasting it over the internet. The comforting thing is that the information is only sent to “your friends” whom you have to approve. So, if you are using this particular networking tool or are about to, I would advise you to post locations that you have recently visited or make sure that you have a friend tagging along with you when you post your exact location

Guest Blogger- TOW 14

 My guest blogger for the week is Brittany Cook, and the post below was written by her after she listened to the podcast “Social Media: Friend or Foe?” The reason I chose to use Brittany Cook as my guest blogger, is because everything she said in this post is true, regardless of what it is, social media skills are essential now in the business world and regardless if we like it or not we need to be prepared for it.

Here is the link to the original post: http://zta0621.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/social-media-friend-or-foe/

After listening to the podcast “Social Media: Friend or Foe?,” my perspective on social media becoming such a huge role in communication in today’s society has changed.  There are many different pros and cons to communuicating through social media.  Checking/updating our Facebook or Twitter has become an everyday thing just like reading the newspaper.  Social media has become such an important part of communicating with one another, especially for businesses and organiztions that are in the marketing and PR fields.  Social media is now being used to locate and market target publics which has become so very important to the overall success of their companies.  Even though face-to-face communication is very important in establishing and maintaining relationships with customers, social media has also become another means of creating these relationships.

During the podcast, those who opposed the use of social media for targeting important publics said they did not like not being able to network face-to-face with others.  Some people voiced their concern about not being able to take their clients on activities that would allow them to create business relationships because the internent would take the place of these activities.  This could possibly hurt them in the long run because businesses would be commnicating to a broad audience and not to just a few people.  One person even said he did not like not taking his clients golfing or other ways that create an opportunity to network.  Those who opposed social media communication would rather use traditional methods of establishing relationships with customers rather than using the internet, which does make sense to me.

Businesses are going to have to adapt to the new means of communication, whether they want to or not.  It does not have to be the primary means of establishing relationships, but it will be necessary in reaching large audiences.  While I do think that social media will improve the communication means for PR and other related fields, I do still think that traditional methods should also be used.

Career Services Workshop Reaction: Cover Letters and Resumes

Today I attended a Cover Letter and Resume Workshop put on by Career Services in honor of Student Employment Week here at Georgia Southern University. I found the workshop to be helpful especially with graduation just around the corner. First the instructor went over how to build a winning resume; a winning resume is a good marketing tool that shows off your skills, talents and abilities. An important thing to remember that the instructor said is that the potential employer cannot see you, so you must put together an accurate, brief and concise professional document that will project your professionalism and potential worth to an employer.

In order to first start your resume, you need to begin by making a list of everything significant you can do or have experience in. It is important to list any jobs, education, experience in the field you are applying for, computer or technical skills, activities and involvement, awards and honors, foreign language fluency, professional affiliations, etc. Then when it comes time to actually creating your resume for your potential employer, then you pick out what best matches the job description from your list.

One thing that really surprised me today was how the instructor told us not to limit ourselves. For example she said it is okay to have a resume that is over one page even if you are just getting out of college. I found this surprising because I have always been taught that you have to “earn” additional pages on your resume, for example by staying with a company for more than 5 years, or just have been in a particular field for a long time with a lot of background knowledge. I found this helpful, because when creating my resume I had to make cuts on what should stay and what should go because I felt that it was not supposed to go over one page.

I also learned today that your objective and your cover letter are not just the same for every position, and that each one needs to be tailored for the position that you are interested in. Also if you are graduating college within the next year, it is not necessary to put any high school relevant information on your resume, this includes what high school you graduated from and when. But if you did receive an academic scholarship in high school for college, this is something that you would want to have on your resume.

In your cover letter, it is your goal to give the potential employer enough information for them to have interest into actually looking at your resume. Be sure to address your letter to an individual, make the most of the opening paragraph, use simple language, tell the employer how you can meet their needs and expectations, and be sure to have the correct and updated information for how they can reach you.

After all this, if your resume and cover letter describes exactly what the company is looking for, then you could be called for an interview or for references. The instructor today made it clear that your voicemail needs to be personalized, or at least say your name that way the potential employer knows that they have called the right number. In addition, stay away from downloading ring-backs or music; you never know if the person calling has a different taste in music as you. Lastly, be aware of the location of where you are when you answer your phone if the employer does call, for example if you are watching a football game with 20 people screaming in the background, it is best to just let it go to voicemail and then call them back at your earliest convenience.

A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization *Chapter 13* Looking to the Future

• A lifestream is similar to a blog in that it is a chronologically ordered collection of information, but its content consists mostly of feed or “streams” of information from other social sites like: WordPress, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc.
• Lifestreaming services:
  • FriendFeed
• While Web 2.0 is about interaction between users of the Internet, Web 3.0 will be about interaction between the user and the information itself.
• More people are turning to their mobile devices to connect to the Internet and to each other.
• Creating applications for mobile devices like the iPhone have become much easier for development, since Apple first introduced a more open platform.

A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization *Chapter 14* Measuring Your Success

• Examples of goals for measuring your success in the social web:
  • Increase website traffic
  • Driving sales or new business
  • Monitoring brand awareness
  • Improving customer relations
  • Managing reputation
  • Establishing credibility
  • Creating buzz
  • Improving public relations
• Tools to help you measure:
  • Google analytics
  • Google alerts
  • Google trends
  • FeedBurner
  • Blog Statistics and tools
  • Technorati
  • Blog Pulse
  • Twitter Search
  • Postrank
  • Xinu

A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization *Chapters 11 & 12*More Social Tools/ Pulling it All Together

• These tools can benefit most social media strategies:
  • Social Calendars
  • Social Pages
  • Wikis
• Social search portals offer your visitors a unique search experience right from your website or blog.
• Social media and Web 2.0 optimization websites use technologies such as blogs, RSS feeds, widgets and social bookmarking to allow visitors to interact and share the site’s content, thus creating an environment of collaboration.
• The nature of the social web is to connect people through social platforms and applications.

A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization *Chapter 10* Social Media Newsroom

• Social media newsroom is a place where you view all your major media coverage, you can see and look up all of your past and present news releases and future events.
• Social media newsroom is for individuals and businesses that tend to get or want to get a lot of media coverage, or who put out news releases on a regular basis.
• Building your social media newsroom:
  • Install WordPress and your theme, design the functionality of the theme, and set up your newsroom.

What makes a video go viral? TOW 13

What does it take for a video to go viral? In my opinion I think the video has to be humorous in order for people to keep telling others to watch it. The video also need to be unique, meaning no one else has created a video like this. Some videos that go viral are not always planned. For example, “David After Dentist” was a father filming his son after his son got a tooth pulled and then child was still on medication in the car ride home and the child didn’t realize what was going on in his body…just that he “felt funny.” I’m sure the father was not thinking that this video was going to go viral all over YouTube, because he probably did not think that people, who did not know his son, would find it nearly as funny. But that is the best part about viral videos; you never know how many people really are going to end up watching them and referring them to other videos to watch and download. Another factor that I believe makes a video go viral is when the footage is so unexpected. For example one of my favorite viral videos is one originally shot by a news camera crew in Mobile, Alabama. The video talks about how the people living in Mobile have been seeing a leprechaun but no one can seem to catch it. The best part is someone drew an amateur sketch of what they saw when they had their encounter with the leprechaun, and the sketch was used in the news story. Also the whole idea was just hysterical, the fact that these people thought there was a gold somewhere nearby because the leprechaun had brought it. In addition, one man said he had inherited a special leprechaun flute from his ancestors and this is what he was trying to use to attract the leprechaun to him. Other examples of popular viral videos are the ones made and uploaded by Chris Crocker. One of my favorites is one called “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE.” Crocker is obsessed with Britney Spears and considers himself her biggest fan. He made a video of himself lying on a bed talking about how the paparazzi and everyone else out there needs to leave Britney alone and why she needs to be left alone. The funny part of the video is how intense Crocker gets, he begins to cry and scream at the camera and try and really show off his love and obsession for Britney by defending her. Crocker has made plenty of videos and all of his seem to go viral, and I think it is due to how extreme he is and how he always pushes the limits too far in every video.

 ”LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc&feature=related

Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nda_OSWeyn8

A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization *Chapters 8 & 9* Media Communities/Widgets/Badges

• Media communities are social sites where you can save, share, and comment on multimedia items.
• Image sharing sites such as Flickr
• Video sharing sites such as YouTube
• Searching and search engine placement is searching images in Flickr and videos in YouTube using search terms just as you would do in search engine like Google.
• Widgets are snipped of code, usually displayed graphically, that can be used to syndicate content.
• Some widgets help you show off all of the places you are in the social web.
• Some widgets encourage others to subscribe to your RSS feed and to share your site on social bookmarking or crowd-sourcing sites.

Widgets & Badges – TOW 12

Widgets are “a stand-alone application that can be embedded into third party sites by any user on a page where they have no rights of authorship.” (Wikipedia)

 

 Badges are “ small images used on a website to promote web standards, products used in the creation of a web page or product, or to indicate a specific content license that is applied to the content or design of a website.” (Wikipedia)

 

The difference between the two is that a badge is more of a form of advertisement in a sense; they are made for others to notice and use. You can click on badges. Where as widgets are snippets of code that are displayed graphically, that can be used to syndicate content, for example RSS feeds, or to add interactive features that users can drop onto their own blogs or Websites (pg. 222, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization).

 

Badges and Widgets are helpful because they can provide more information for others. They make it easier for people when they are trying to access information. Badges and widgets can both be created, but widgets are more difficult due to their complex coding.

 

One organization that I’m apart of that can benefit from widgets and badges would be the Society of Communication Scholars. They could have widgets and badges and this way people could easily access information about any area within the organization that they might be interested in and then become more aware about it. Having these applications can only help.