Management Platforms and Tools

   So in preparation for this blog post about management platforms in social media I have been looking into specific aggregators for all of my different social media accounts which is really just Facebook but all of my little secondary accounts have helped me to know more about the website Hootsuite.


   From what I can tell it basically just takes all of your social media accounts and stuffs them into one super account that you can use to see everything that is going on in your social media life. So I made a Hootsuite account and threw Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn onto my "stream" and watched to see what happens. And the answer? Nothing, they just show up like their regular selves with a wall or page of some sort with all of the new information you need to see.

   With all of this information now at my finger tips I felt a new level of power, like I could take over the world or even save the world! Depending on if I go the Anakin or Luke route in my personal adventures. Now, because of the lack of sarcasm that comes through the written word I would like to take this time to say my whole first line of this paragraph was sarcasm. Why? Because I already had all of those things at my fingers tips and so it really doesn't do much for me and the present time. Also, the fact that I do have all of those things really doesn't give me power to take over the world in case you didn't pick up on that.

 Even all of the reasons listed on the Social Media Today website don't really give me enough incentive to convert my whole social media life to my Hootsuite account. The big problem I have is that I basically have a social media aggregator right now... it's called a smartphone. Isn't that exactly what I already do with my social media apps? I put them all on my phone, swipe through them in under a second and connect and receive notifications for as many or as few as I want. I'm sure that there are individuals out there that can find some use for these types of programs, or even productive uses for these programs, but my current lifestyle and needs do not require something like this idea or set up.

    While I might not have found any personal use you productive uses for an individual that does not mean this couldn't be effective for a product, brand, company, or organization. In an article from Entrepreneur.com they do lay out some of the possible websites or programs that could be effective for your company to use. This would only make sense if you had a bunch of different marketing tools in your social media platforms and needed to monitor activity and happening of a lot of different conversations at the same time.

   Well, as always, the the choice is yours as to whether or not you would like to use an aggregator program, and if you do chose to do so please leave a comment explaining why you think it is a good idea and what some of the pros are in having one. Maybe you'll just convince me!


 

Organizational Uses

     With the seemingly infinite number of organizations in this world it would be considered difficult, and for small businesses impossible, to establish a strong online identity without having large sums of money and huge amount of resources to pour into online advertising and marketing. It is clear that while not all marketing an organization is done or should be done online there is still a very large chunk of their efforts being poured into the world wide web as a source to get their message out as quickly as possible and to as many different individuals, groups or other organizations as possible.


   All of these potential readers and seers of online advertising, marketing or just online presence pose a problem. How do we reach all of them without a great deal of power to back up these internet campaigns? Well, thanks to a relatively new and well know medium we can see a glimmer of hope and maybe a possible solution to that problem. Let's take a look at a small business perspective and how social media might play into an established online presence. There is a business in Honeyville Utah that focuses on selling homemade honey to as many locals and nearby customers as possible. Their information can be found at their Honey Jar website and it seems like great local business with some fun potential.


    But now let's look at a problem they might face. Let's say they only have about a dozen employees, most of them are focused completely on taking care of the bees and honey, and the rest are so consumed by other responsibilities in the business that they can't run all of the online marketing on top of their already demanding workload. They could hire someone to be in charge of the digital marketing process but really the profit margins haven't been booming off the charts at a high enough rate that they could afford to hire someone for such a task. What then could be done? (This is where social media applies and a great article from Kelsey Humphreys highlights exactly how this could be accomplished if you're interested in looking into how social media can be effective in a busines). Social media can take its role in this company because only a small amount of time as effort can be used to start up the process and if it were to grow then it would be assumed resources would now be available to really drive it home.

    All that someone would need to do would be to start a few social media profiles and begin reaching out to friends and encouraging them to reach out to others. Especially those who have purchased your honey and have a great opinion of your product. Then just make sure to through a couple interesting picture, videos, deals and incentives on your websites and monitor the progress of each social media profile until something takes off. Of course, this whole idea is a gamble, but the time and money (no money because it is free) is definitely worth the reward of finally developing some online power outside of just a website.

Reflection 2 on Shaq and Officer White

   A little over a month ago there was an awesome video going around of a police officer showing up to go see about a call that had been made reporting children being loud and disruptive in the neighborhood. Those kids were playing basketball. Upon arriving that police officer started asking the kids some question and then began playing basketball with them. He ended up playing with them for a long time and it seemed to be a pretty fun experience for everyone involved.

   The whole video was recording on the officer's dashboard camera and it ended up being posted on social media a short time later and became the subject of conversation for many online newspapers and media outlets. Such as CBS who highlighted the great fact that these were outside playing and enjoying themselves instead of inside playing video games all day. The general public deems long amounts of video games instead to be a terrible thing (which is a conversation for another time) and so CBS made to highlight that aspect of the case. By highlighting that it showed they were very much on the police officer's side.

   But with all these media outlets on the side of this cop, who is pretty clearly awesome, what about that person who had originally called the cop into the situation? What was their opinion of that cop after the incident? Police officers have been taking a lot of heat lately in the media and it makes you wonder how that individual, who had called Officer White, felt once they saw how he took care of the situation. We don't know what they were dealing with at that time or the reason for calling in all of the noise. What if they were taking care of a baby or someone struggling with a bad illness? Or what if they work night shifts to take care of their family and they hadn't been able to sleep because of it? Did the boys have another options of where they could have played and had it been a reoccurring up to this point?

   Of course I don't know the answer to these questions but it reminds us of how incidents like these can escalate quickly and throw someone or some people onto "the losing team." They can go from someone who was really trying to get help or to help the neighborhood (in their eyes) to a person that is basically a joke and a laughing stalk who now wouldn't have much traction if they were to try and argue against the officer's side because the media would immediately turn on that person.

    But wait, there's more. On top of everything the media had already done for this situation there became another key factor to the story.

   Everyone's favorite 7 ft TV basketball analyst and TV star in general Mr. Big Cactus himself, Shaquille O'neal decides to join the officer in a rematch. This huge (pun intended) rematch took place after Shaq surprised the officer and arranged for them to be teammates in this street ball game to take place.

   How big did the Shaq (and Officer White) basketball game become? Well according to journalists in Venezuela it was a big enough story that they would right about it down there! Imagine all of the publicity this story is getting around the world and some of the reactions that look to America as a huge source of their news. The people in Venezuela now might assume that all American police officers are cool and fun and that Shaq is totally legit. Both of which might be true but now this could be the only story a little Venezuelan boy sees, hears, or reads about related to Shaq, policer officers and how our law enforcement runs in this country and might be slightly disappointed to find out this isn't how it always work in every situation.

   A great example of this would be an American hearing one or two stories of a police officer in Mexico being corrupt or making a bad decision all of a sudden there is a stereotype placed on these Latin police officers and that American might not really have much ground to stand on. Basically one of the big points I want to make about this story is while the story is awesome, funny and great it is there is a lot of power in the media being able to shape how large groups of people are viewed and perceived just because of a viral video or two that makes its way through outlet after outlet. That being said, Shaq and Officer White are pretty sweet!

Twitter Cloud

    In my most recent social media class we had a class cloud day. What does that mean? We took to Twitter to jump onto an floating but not really floating internet cloud. This took place over about an hour and we jumped onto the metaphoric cloud through hashtags and conversations on Twitter.

   While leading up to this hour I posed a question about why people ended up on Facebook instead of Google +. Through recent information we learned about Google + in our class it had become apparent that there were a lot of great benefits to using Google + as a primary social media platform.


   The responses were interesting and straightforward in the sense that Facebook gets more users just because it is Facebook. What I mean by that is everyone seemed to love the fact that if they wanted everyone in their online friend circle to see their most recent post or update it would be most effective on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook. Even though the argument between Facebook and Google +'s pros and cons hasn't happened on a large scale it would seem that even if Google + came out guns a blazin' with a seemingly endless list of pros it would still fall short of the great pro that Facebook holds for the time being in that, if you want people to know, you go to The Facebook.


   My time spend on the cloud was basically focused on the this Google + vs Facebook conversation as I went onto make a poll of where we would turn and social media users if Facebook were to shut down and we had to find a new time waster... I mean social media platform. The poll while limited in participants and possible answers did give an informative answer for those of us who had taken place in the mini experiment. The options were MySpace, Snapchat, Google + or some other form of social media. The majority came back as possible Google + users. I named this event the #SocMedApocalype because in order for this event to take place it would be safe to assume there would be such a huge outrage related to social media that it would be apocalyptic in nature.


    Beside the cool apocalypse related hashtag that was created a lot of other conversations popped up, like my attempted to get Mark Zuckerberg to join the cloud and a small break off group that created a little cloud dedicated to cats.

Overall the experience was fun but had the feeling of a lot more potential. There were other celebrities and public figures that were reached out to but besides a few smaller local celebrities there wasn't a lot of big name player conversations. It showed me how many people it really takes to get the world or country or even a small area talking about and engaged in the same thing.