Don't be Creepy

In an article I read on Technorati.com they talked about marketers using social media to their advantage without being a social media stalker. I really think there is a fine line between the two these days and it gets more blurry everyday.  The article offers some good advice for marketers in the present time.  It says to be helpful but not pushy.  This is great advice.  When I walk in to a store and the sales clerk instantly runs up to me and wants to follow me through the store and basically shop with me I get super annoyed and want to leave as quickly as possible.  But on the other hand, when no one acknowledges my existence I get almost as annoyed as if they were stalking me through the store.  I feel the same way with my social media.  I understand that you have a job to do and that job is to get your product out there in to the market for me to see. But if you proceed to shove the product down my throat I can guarantee that I will become uninterested just as quickly as I became interested.  The list of advice is very helpful for marketers but this one was the one that struck me the most.  It is just a very thin line for me on whether I am impressed by the way you are presenting your product. And this is a good thing for marketers to know. If you anger your customers who will buy your product?

Banks using Social Media

In an article I read it said that banks are now using customer's social media to learn how to better advertise to certain clients as well as learning whether or not the customer is responsible with their spending and saving.  This is a smart but scary concept.  Writing anything about losing a job or a house can alert the bank to any financial problems you may be experiencing.  Some people view social media as an outlet where you can share, celebrate, gripe and complain to your friends, coworkers and family but more and more it is becoming something to be very careful with.  Companies are catching on faster and faster that they can use these tools to provide them with very vital information.  So I know you have heard it time and time again but be careful what you put on social media. I know I get sick of hearing it also  but it is so true, especially now that it could even influence my chances of having a bank work with me as well as my future employment.

Retweeting

In class we have learned the benefit of retweeting posts on Twitter.  In fact we spent a whole class period just going through Twitter looking for social media type information that we can retweet to share with our own Twitter followers.  We searched for social media type topics.  Twitter makes it really easy to do this because you can search topics by their hashtags.  I was able to put social media in the search bar and every tweet that a user wrote about social media would pop up.  The whole purpose of retweeting is to spread the word on the information that other users are putting out.  People that follow me on Twitter may have never read the tweets that I retweet if I had never reposted them.  Like for instance my roommates are pharmacy majors and even though they are interested in some of the articles that I would post especially articles involving social media because you don't have to be a PR major to enjoy learning new things about your social media.  So retweeting benefits the user that wrote the article as well as the other followers who may have never had a chance to read the article before.

Textbooks vs. PR Books

In Social Media class we are reading books that are very much unlike textbooks.  I find that in all of my other classes I read a highly overpriced textbook filled with lots of words whose meanings sometimes get lost in my head and the concepts are hardly ever explained well.  With the books we are reading in Social Media I am interested in the topics.  I hardly ever find myself drifting off of the subject and becoming bored while I read.  The concepts are very easy to apply to real life as well because they give concrete examples that anyone can understand.  I think that I learn more in this class because of how interesting the content and reading are to me.  (Maybe I'm bias because I love social media) But I really wish that other classes could find a way to make the information more exciting and keep the students interested in what was going on in the class.  I realize not all subject are easy to make exciting.  Like for instance my accounting class.  But if we were reading more books like this than our horrid textbook maybe I wouldn't find myself daydreaming as much as I do these days!

New Facebook

Facebook is going through a lot of changes recently, but the biggest change will be arriving late this week. Facebook is changing to a timeline like format.  People that I have talked to that have tried it out are comparing it to Tumblr.  Your Facebook profile will go back to the day you were born and include everyday from birth to the present day.  Users will be able to go back to any day in the history of their life and update a status or an activity that they were doing on that day.  I think that the new changes to Facebook will be interesting for people to get used to.  I know that most people are not going to like it at first and there will be a lot of complaining for at least the first couple weeks.  But I think that if people just give it a chance and learn how to use the new changes to their advantage it might be a positive change.  Don't get me wrong, I hate change just as much as the next social media user.  I just get used to the format of something and suddenly its different again.  But I think this is what makes social media great.  It is always evolving and changing for the better to give it's users things they may have never even known they wanted! Good luck with the new Facebook!