Business in a Social World

After watching the lecture on implementation, I understand how difficult it is going to be for my company to implement my recommendations. Since my client wasn’t very interested in hiring new staff for social media or having an individual budget for it, I believe that it will take a while for them to build a social media presence. Due to the lack of interest or dedication to the subject, it isn’t going to be a priority for the company. It is going to add more work to the current staff and without a budget, there won’t be much time spent on the social media platforms. 

Also, with such a large group of people having access to the company’s social media, there won’t be any single person that feels obligated to keep up with it. There also won’t be adequate training with a lack of a budget. Since nobody will know what to post without training, the posts won’t follow the strategy and might confuse their followers.

After completing modules 3 and 4 of Hootsuite, I learned how effective content can be developed and shared. Module 3 stressed the importance of aligning your social media strategy with your organizational goals. This is how organizations make sure that their social media content is effective. For example, the company I am working on is an accounting firm. Their organizational goals revolve around gaining more clients. In order for their social media content to be effective, they must attempt to accomplish this goal through their social media posts.

Along with aligning overall strategies, content strategies are also important. Following a content strategy helps the organization keep a cohesive story behind their brand. With every post following the same strategy, consumers won’t get mixed ideas about your brand. This also helps the company focus on their specific target market and understand what is performing well.

Content calendars are another tool for developing and sharing effective content. These calendars make sure that your company is consistent with their posting schedule on different platforms. It also makes sure that your posts are well thought out and intentional. A helpful aspect of a content calendar is that you can keep track of which posts performed well and which didn’t. This helps your company tailor their content to be more engaging with their followers. 

After reading chapters 4 and 5 of The Social Organization, i learned that there are many effective principles to build online community through social media. In order to advance community collaboration, it is very important for an organization to link the community with their organizational goals. Community culture should help to influence where the company focuses its social media efforts, but is important to always make sure that you are staying true to the goals of the organization. 

The “Six F” Model of Attributes is important in determining how you would like to portray your company on social media. The six attitudes are folly, fearful, flippant, formulating, forging, and fusing. These organizational attitudes are key to determining how effective social media will be for your company. For example, if the leader of the company has a folly attitude, they will usually ignore social media and there will be no guidance about how employees should interact with customers on social media. On the opposite end, a fusing attitude treats community collaboration as an integral part of their business. This leads to a social organization that relies heavily on community collaboration.

After watching "The Legal Side of Big Data," it is clear that businesses establish high security protocols when it comes to using big data. Having data on millions of customers around the world should be taken very seriously and be heavily protected. In the video, multiple major corporations were mentioned that had recently had data breaches resulting in millions of customers' personal data being leaked. As a business, it should be a number one priority to have the trust of the consumers that do business with you. In order for consumers to trust giving their information to businesses, it needs to be more clear that there are intense security measures in place. Unfortunately, many businesses interests lie more in them generating profit instead of developing trust from their customers.

Consumers should be aware that giving out any sort of personal information puts you at risk of getting hacked. In this day and age it is almost impossible to not give out any personal information when it comes to bank accounts and online shopping. Having this awareness will hopefully make sure that consumers limit the spread of their personal information to fewer companies.

Preventative measures are crucial when it comes to protecting big data in organizations. Businesses should spend the extra time and money to protect the big data that they store. While this could be expensive, in the long run it will be beneficial. Having better security not only saves the company from a scandal, but more importantly prevents the hacking of their consumers' information.

In the article, “Three Reasons Junk News Spreads So Quickly Across Social Media”, they discuss how algorithms, advertising, and exposure are to blame for fake news about politics on social media. 

Algorithms prioritize content to each specific user based on their interests and behaviors. This leads to filtering of information that limits diverse information and ultimately leads to bias. These algorithms push out content based on the popularity and whether it goes viral or not. Most times, when things go viral, they either provoke the user or confirm their current beliefs. For this reason, news that isn’t true can be spread very quickly through these algorithms. An example of algorithms promoting fake news to me wasn’t necessarily political, but still has the same outcome. On TikTok recently, there was a huge focus on Brian Laundry who is believed to have killed his girlfriend. During this time, the videos that would blow up and go viral were usually false information about “discoveries” that users made on their own.

Advertising rewards this kind of viral content which has created the use of “clickbait”. Once again, advertisements that we see are intended to play towards our existing biases or create a sense of outrage. These two strategies provoke the most engagement and popularity. In political advertisements, they are allowed to buy user’s personal information and target potential voters with little transparency of the sponsor of the ad. They use manipulative messages to encourage voters to vote a certain way. 

Exposure to diverse content is very limited nowadays on social media. It is common for our friend networks to have similar opinions which filters the contact that we have interaction with. On social media, we tend to only share content that agrees with our preexisting beliefs. It is also common for people to only pay attention to content that they already agree with. So even if there is content from the opposing view, it is unlikely that that user will even take the time to read it. This causes voters to not ever change their political parties because we never seek out news of the other party. An example of this that I have experienced is during the last election, my whole Twitter was catered toward my personal political party because most of the people that I follow have the same beliefs. However, when something would pop up from the other political party, I wouldn’t even attempt to look into it or read it. 

In order to avoid the junk news that we see everyday, it is important to start with ourselves and never share any information without knowing that the source is credible. Fact checking is very important. Another solution is to be cautious about articles with titles that are intended to evoke emotion. These articles are generally written by one political party to evoke anger. Lastly, look up news organizations to see if they side with a certain political party or who sponsors their organization. They can often be biased.

Sources:

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/three-reasons-junk-news-spreads-so-quickly-across-social-media/

Social media consultants must possess certain traits in order to be successful in their profession. The most important trait is creativity. Every business has different needs for their social media, which leads to different problems. There isn’t a textbook answer to what needs to be done to improve different social media accounts. Creativity is needed to come up with unique ways to improve social media.

Another trait needed is attention to detail. This comes into play when you are looking into the new trends and new functions on social media. This is important when being a social media consultant because you need to know which things are going to work for your client and what isn’t. Paying attention to the details of demographics and engagement rates is very important.

If I was acting as a social media consultant, I would definitely have a lot of advise to improve my own personal social media to make it more professional. First, I would have to set up a LinkedIn account. As a college student that is entering the professional world in January, I should really have a LinkedIn account. I would start to share my work experience as well as business articles that I think are important to my profession.

I watched The Social Dilemma last year when it first came out. It was the first time that I had ever thought deeply about hoe much data social media sites keep about us. Social media uses big data and algorithms to keep our attention on their app. It is very powerful because it is a proven fact that if we see things that we are interested in, we will keep our attention there.

One app that has their algorithms down to a science is TikTok. Everybody’s “for you” page on TikTok is completely different. It is completely based on what the app has noticed that you pay attention to or interact with. For example, if you spend more time watching videos of dogs, then your page will suddenly have more dog videos. However, your best friend might be seeing completely different videos based on what they are interested in. It does get kind of creepy to think about how much data these apps actually have about us. 

The documentary describes the use of “positive intermittent reinforcement” when it comes to notification on our phone. It is like a slot machine every time we check our phone. We hope to see one or multiple notifications when we check our phone and when we do, we feel the need to open our phone and check it.

This experiment was very eye-opening for me. Logging my social media usage for a day really made me notice how much my phone consumes my life. For one day I was on my phone for 6 hours and 27 minutes. Almost three hours of that time were spent on social media. The times that I was most active on my phone were right when I woke up and the two hours before I fell asleep. Throughout the course of the day I also had to spend quite a bit of time on my computer. I tracked it to be roughly 3 hours and 20 minutes. This brought up my entire time viewing a screen to 9 hours and 47 minutes.

In the screen time settings on my phone, it recorded that I picked up my phone 154 times throughout the day. That is a huge number. I have realized that I don’t even notice that I am on my phone most of the time. It is a subconscious action and I usually don’t even have a purpose for going on my phone when I do it.

For my experiment, I decided to try to limit my time on my phone as much as possible. To do this, I decided to try to not use social media throughout the day as much as possible, but specifically not go on my phone at all from the hours of 9am to 12pm and 5pm to midnight. It was very challenging. I found myself having the urge to go on social media all day. There was no specific reason, it was just a habit. I ended up spending most of my time on a screen still, whether that was my TV or computer. But i also spent a lot of time reading. My total time for the day on social media was 47 minutes. This is a dramatic change from the three hours the day before.

One of the apps that I made sure to not let myself use was TikTok. TikTok is an app that I can spend hours on just scrolling through videos. I was very proud of myself that I didn’t even open the app once. It made it very challenging when I would get notifications for certain social media apps. This made me realize that it would benefit me a lot if I turned off all of my unnecessary notifications. One of the apps that was really hard for me to stay off of was Snapchat. I use it to communicate with friends, so I did use it quite a bit during this experiment. 

I was successful with not using my phone in the mornings or at night before bed. It is hard for me to not mindlessly scroll through my phone before bed because that is what I always do. However, I did manage to fall asleep a lot faster than I normally would. 

Overall, this experience has taught me a lot. First of all, I use my phone way too much for no reason. Also, I am going to turn off many notification from now on so I don’t get tempted to open my phone. I am going to try to continue not using my phone in the mornings or at night because it really benefitted my sleep and productivity.

I don’t usually see social media as something I am addicted to because I don’t understand the power it holds over me. My phone is never far away from me. I sleep with it next to my bed and it is the first thing I do when I wake up. Many nights, social media keeps me awake because I get sucked in and don’t realize what time it is. I subconsciously grab my phone and open up Instagram all of the time and don’t even realize what I am doing until I close out of the app and realize that I have been scrolling for so long. This creates a distraction all of the time. It was the worst last year when we started online classes and I would miss most of the lecture because I had been on my phone the whole time.

This proves the fact that social media influences my everyday life, and not in a good way. I have even found myself purchasing items that I have seen on social media that I probably don’t need. Max Strossel’s talk mentioned that we are the product of social media. They collect data of what we are interested in and advertise it towards us. I have fallen victim to this many times.

Having the internet constantly available to us can be helpful in many ways. However, it develops many bad habits. We spend most of our time when we are out in public on our phones because it is comforting to us. We would rather interact with each other over the phone instead of in person. I remember when I had an iPod when I was younger. I could only use it when I had access to WiFi which was mainly at home. But I realize that was when the addiction began. I couldn’t wait until I had access to WiFi so I could go on Instagram.

The thought of not having access to the Internet is terrifying. I feel disconnected from the world and as if I am missing out. Even the smallest amount of time when I am on an airplane and don’t have internet access, I don’t know what to do with myself. The first thing I do when I land is check my notifications.

Emma Rathbone’s article really points out how much of life we are missing out on by being on our phones. Moving forward, I am going to make more of an effort to avoid social media during the day. I am more productive without it and will get more work done. I am going to start this by turning off notifications from social media apps.

Max Strossel’s Talk: https://vimeo.com/370135963

Emma Rathbone’s Article: 

Hi Everyone!

My name is Madison Lux and I am from Cadillac, MI! I am a senior at Central Michigan University double majoring in Accounting and Marketing with a minor in Information Systems. I have a job lined up after graduation at an accounting firm and I hope to take the CPA exam soon after graduation!

Tumblr is not a social media app that I normally use, so I’m excited to get to know the platform during this blog. I am also interested in learning how social media is used in the business world!

One business’ social media that I have been enjoying is Wendy’s: https://twitter.com/Wendys