Take Twitter at Face Value (Unless You Think It Doesn’t Have Any)

Professor Boutros brought up in our final lecture that we really hadn’t touched on Twitter very much during the course. I spent last summer investigating social media for the Ministry of Natural Resources, and would like to clear up some common conceptions about the social networking site.

If you're confused about all this tweeting nonsense, read on.

1. Twitter is a place for people and/or celebrities to tweet about their lives and is, therefore, a general waste of time

While tweeters are meant to answer the question “What’s happening?” most users don’t use their account solely for Facebook-like status updates. Twitter is a vehicle for information and links. You have to watch our for spammers and those who are just trying to gain web traffic, but otherwise, there are a lot of interesting things to learn.

For instance, do you care about  the environment? You can follow tweeple dedicated to posting on that topic. I am interested in a career in publishing, so I follow professionals from the industry. You can follow fashion websites who post amazing sales. You can follow your favourite news sites, or local organizations in your hometown/school area. Seriously! Anything you can think of, or want to be informed about, is most likely available to you on Twitter. If it isn’t seek it out and tweet about it yourself!

Be careful though, or else you will look up from the screen and notice that hours of tweeting have flown by.

2. You can’t connect with strangers on Twitter

Twitter is more of a free-for-all in terms of following and re-tweeting, and the account isn’t designed to be as private or personal as Facebook. However, I have met and shared private messages with people I have only met online. Re-tweeting someone else’s message usually results in them politely thanking you. Meeting someone in real life and then reconnecting with them via their Twitter is also very helpful and a way to get to know someone’s interests. I met social media expert Amber Mac at a conference in my hometown, and now I follow her updates knowing what she does and what her thoughts on social media are.

Plus, hey, maybe a celebrity will respond to your @reply!

3. No matter what the career centre says Twitter will not help me get a job

Not with that attitude it won’t!  While not every company is tech savvy, Gen Y is expected to be able to use social media, and it’s important to show that you are connected. I’ve managed to land a job interview based on the fact that I had followed a company on Twitter and told the story of my interaction with the head of their PR department in my resume. It has also helped me to reconnect with people I used to work with.

Last night, I participated in a Twitter chat with the Intern Queen and Heather Huhman on how to increase your chances of receiving an internship. There was no travel, no prior networking necessary to gain an invite, and no need for me to even get out of my pajamas if I didn’t want to, to get free career advice from experts. It may have been a bit clunky to do on Twitter, but using other tools, such as Tweetdeck, makes the process of twitter “chatting” much smoother if you know how to use it. I also made some new twitter friends afterwards.

If a company you want to work with isn’t using their account wisely (and perhaps they’ve only created it to protect their online identity and prevent others from claiming to be them), you could offer them suggestions as to how they can use it to increase traffic to their websites or promote their events. Which brings my next point…

4. Twitter is supposed to be this revolutionary marketing tool…but I think it’s dumb and I don’t get it

Twitter is an interesting way to disseminate knowledge, product information and is sometimes even used for customer service. While it can be useful for marketers, one misconception should be cleared up that I discussed in a previous blog: Most Twitter users are males in their 30’s, not the young 18-24 MTV demographic marketers assume is consuming social media. If someone wants to use Twitter as a vehicle for marketing, they have to research very carefully where their audience is and how Twitter is going to help them to reach it. If you ever find yourself working on a social media marketing strategy, don’t promise your employer the world on a silver platter via Twitter, but be realistic in your analysis of the possibilities.

A lot of internships are actually going virtual, meaning that one can work from home for an organization, but being tech-savvy is generally a job requirement. In this article, Heather Huhman, an online HR guru helping students find meaningful job opportunities, discusses what good and bad virtual internships look like.

Armed with this knowledge, I ask you not to give up on the “old school” ways of connecting (because a thank you card is better than an email, and meeting in person is better than a phone call), but to use Twitter wisely as a tool for sharing knowledge, sharing your blog posts and tweeting about more than what you ate for breakfast. It won’t land you a job by itself, but it could lead to a new connection or an interview! After that, your real life personality is needed to seal the deal.

To learn the ins and outs of Twitter, read Mashable’s guidebook.

What are your thoughts on a virtual workspace?

Advertising Killed the Music Video Star

A few days ago, Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s much anticipated “Telephone” video was released on Vevo, a video hosting site a site dedicated to featuring music videos from 3 major music labels without the hassles of copyright infringement. Seems that music companies are getting much smarter in terms of distribution and cashing in on social media networks.

The video is weird and I don’t understand what all-female jails and mass homicide have to do with not wanting to answer your phone in a club, but such is the creative inner workings of Lady Gaga. The script for the video is supposed to be written by Gaga herself, who  likes to take a lot of creative control over her music and image (which is good). She said in an interview with AngryApe that she wanted to make the video “high art” and “take a decidedly pop song, which on the surface has a quite shallow meaning, and turn it into something deeper.”

What she ended up getting was a 10 minute commercial from a song that is only 3 minutes and 40 seconds long.

Chile’s “People Finder” on Google Admirable Effort

Chile: The forgotten earthquake?

We’ve been discussing the use of social media in emergency situations a lot in class. I just stumbled upon this blog post at physorg.com (Thanks to Paisley Schwager’s Twitter Stream) which describes Twitter’s “People Finder” in Chile. Much like the Google Maps used post-Katrina (which was mentioned in my group’s seminar last week), it allows for people to share information about missing people or request news.

However, I have to ask why Chile hasn’t received the same media (social included) attention that Haiti has. The counry was hit with an 8.8 earthquake and scientists feared it would be on par with the South Asia tsunamis from a few years ago. Yet in comparison, I feel as though the media has gone silent and tumbleweeds are slowly rolling by.

Are we “reliefed” out? What is going on? Do you believe social media has the ability to truly help and raise awareness? I’m starting to doubt. Was it because the Olympic hockey finals were the next day? I don’t have any answers.

World Economic “Snore-um” on Social Media

Social media experts and representatives from the big networking sites met in Davos this January, for the World Economic Forum, to discuss what is apparently “the second biggest human activity after sleeping.” While I’m sure it was filled with sweeping generalizations and hopeful rhetoric of a digital revolution, I haven’t had time to watch the entire 2 hour YouTube video on the subject.

Filled with somewhat meaningless statistics (25 million Twitter accounts, a ton of which are bots and spammers or inactive), the focus was mostly on how companies could use social media to improve their products. I understand it was supposed to be somewhat basic, but most of what I’ve seen isn’t all that informative, interesting, or more than common sense. Follow a few social media blogs and try out social media yourself for a few weeks, and you too could catch on just as quickly. I think a band of tweeting tweens or our social media class could have offered insight on par with this.

Even he can't keep his eyes open...and he's ceramic!

In sum, it seemed to be a lot of buzzwords, not a lot of substance.

However, they did note that they could not survey users under the age of 18, but they expected that those number of users had doubled.   The speaker made it sound like 18 and under to 25 was the largest age groups consulting social media sites, and grouped the 30 year olds with 45 year olds. Yet, as far as I have learned, the largest group of internet users is not youths, but those in their 30’s (and this was reported last summer on Mashable as well). I do seem to recall my brother’s best friend’s step-father whooping all of them in online RPG’s…

The only interesting quote I have found on the blogs is this one from LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman:

“All these concerns about privacy tend to be old people issues. ”

This actually had me thinking about a recent project I undertook to learn about my ancestry. So, the first thing I did was Google family member’s names that I was looking for. I discovered the marriage certificate of my great grandmother and grandfather (although his name is mispelled) and the census that noted my great grand mother who lived in the Algoma Region in 1901 with her husband and children.

Wait a minute…these people are dead. Yet I can find their documents, histories and marriage certificates online? They certainly didn’t give permission to ancestry.com to make them findable. If privacy issues are old people issues, our my family members rolling over in their grave? Or is this a great tool so that we can all discover out heritage?

I can only imagine the digital imprint my grand children will find of me online…Hopefully computers will be obsolete by then and we will all live in a world of virtual reality via surrogates.

Are privacy issues “old people” issues, or do the old not even have a say of what we can find out online? When does my birth/marriage/death certificate go up there?

(If you want to learn more, forumblog.org has pretty much cornered the market on bringing together all the resources you can find on the session.)

Facebook Picks Up The Slack: Success Story

As an update to my previous post on slacktivism, I’d like to say that I actually found out about an awesome event, and participated in it, because of  Facebook.

The Jewish Student’s Association at Laurier helped to promote OneMatch being on our campus. I stumbled across the event, read up on all of the information (which was provided for by the OneMatch Facebook page), and decided to visit the booth and get swabbed. I knew from the event that I didn’t need my health card (which was good, because I forgot it) and the process was quick and painless.

Now my information is stored in a database for stem cell and marrow network in case anyone is a match with me. Did you know “Fewer than 30 per cent of patients who need stem cell transplants find a compatible donor within their own families.” OneMatch will contact you if you are a match for anyone needing your tissue type.

One day it could possibly save a life!

“Tell Her She’s Beautiful” – Another case of Slacktivism?

I receive plenty of  those “gets you right in the heart” invitations on Facebook. However, I won’t join the group about someone’s 3 day old puppy who caught parvovirus, or add the latest application to raise awareness for this charity or that disease. Want to know why?

Much like those email forwards of the late 90’s that weren’t actually going to send a nickel to that starving boy in Africa with no legs, no arms, no parents and no goats for every time the message was forwarded, these types of online gestures are mostly fueled by Western feelings of guilt, and I don’t believe most of them actually help the people or organizations they mean to. This phenomenon has also been known as “slacktivism”:

“Valuing” Blogs = Mission Impossible

To say one blog is more legitimate or valuable than another is nearly impossible in my eyes. While I can personally rank a blog by its usefulness or enjoyability, what I value will most likely be radically different from others. Case in point: People who read Perez Hilton VS those who follow a CBC Blog.

Both are technically news sites, but because one is considered “gossip,” and the other reports “facts,” one is “valuable” and one is not. Yet how do blogs that aren’t about news function if no one reads them or subscribes to them?

Oh wait, they do.

Does Online Video Makes Activism Easy?

I urge everyone to visit The Story of Stuff and watch a video or two. They are entertaining and easy to understand.

I doubt one would expect to find such poignant arguments in  national publications or newscasts,  because criticizing large corporations upsets advertisers, who fund our media. Subscriptions to newspapers and your cable bill isn’t enough to promise accurate and informative reporting. However, with a small amount of money for a host, and a bit of ingenuity one person can express themselves to the world online. The video has already been translated to other languages.

Is this ad racist? The answer is yes.

This commercial for the KFC, posted on Mashavble about six days ago, for the “crowd pleaser” chicken meal, features a white male sitting awkwardly among a rowdy, and predominantly black, crowd at a cricket match. To fix the “awkward situation” he holds up a bucket of fried chicken. This Australian ad, which popped up on Youtube, quickly gained notoriety for its implied racial stereotypes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQfZRnqQr-k&feature=player_embedded