ONLINE REPUTATION

For this blog post assignment, I am searching a certain classmate, Chelan Smith, across several platforms to see what kind of trends I can find. I first found her facebook page very easily because we are both members of the same facebook group for the class. The first place I went to in order to find out more about Chelan was her photo link. I instantly saw sky diving pictures. This tells me that she is a very outgoing person who loves adventure. She has several pictures that look like they were taken in a tropical place, which might indicate that she has recently traveled and enjoys frequent traveling. I would say she is a free spirit and a fun person to hang out with. She probably has some interesting life experiences and cool stories that would be great to hear. I also notice a lot of pictures of someone who seems to be a little sister getting ready to go on a formal school dance. I would guess that Chelan is very close to her sister and values their relationship. Chelan also seems to be more of a private person when it comes to social media. Because we are not facebook friends and I only have access to a very limited amount of information about her and pictures.

https://www.facebook.com/chelan.smith?fref=pb_other

 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10202992017991412&set=pb.1533190631.-2207520000.1424930979.&type=3&theater

 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10201112606967311&set=pb.1533190631.-2207520000.1424930979.&type=3&theater

I googled her name but only found photos of a Jamaican bikini model who shares the same name so the next place I looked where I knew I could find information was the blog list on our class facebook page. As I quickly scanned through her blog posts, I realized that she has done every single one ontime. This would indicate that she is not a procrastinator. As I looked deeper into her posts, I realized that she is a very insightful student and has some interesting opinions. She puts thought and time into her blog posts which indicate that she cares about the class and has a knack for social media.

http://www.chelansmith.blogspot.com

The last place that I looked was twitter. I knew that we both use the #socmeddiscuss so I was positive I could find her there. After looking though her twitter, I notice that she is following a prominent LDS leader. I would assume that she is LDS and proud of it. She has tweeted a few times about family and friends. This helps my hypothesis that she is very family oriented and most likely a faithful friend. She follows some funny twitter accounts which let me know that she enjoys a good laugh and probably has a good sense of humor herself. I also see that she has retweeted a few tweets from the twitter account “Common White Girl.” After thinking long and hard, researching her on these various platforms, viewing her facebook pictures, and seeing her in class twice a week, I can confidently come to the conclusion that she is a white adult female.

https://twitter.com/becauseimchelan

To sum up what I think I have learned about Chelan Smith through my social media stalking is that she is a family oriented person who enjoys the company of good friendship. She is religious and not afraid to let others know. She is outgoing and very adventuresome. She also has some serious guts to jump out of an airplane at thousands of feet in the air. All in all, she seems like the type of family member or friend anyone would be lucky to have.

Legal and Ethical Social Media

Legal and Ethical social media

When posting on social media, it is essential to be cautious that your statements not be offensive or unethical. There is also an issue of copywriting or even giving false or damaging information. According to Christina Vassiliou Harvey, Mac R. McCoy, and Brook Sneath in their article titled 10 Tips for Avoiding Ethical Lapses When Using Social Media there are certain things you can do to avoid legal and ethical issues while using social media to protect yourself and maintain face. I will only highlight a few of these steps that I feel most applicable to the every day social media user. According to the article it is always important to “avoid making false or misleading statements.” We see this all the time in social media. People making reputation-damaging claims about certain people that many times are completely false. The other point I would like to illustrate in this post is to “not disclose private or confidential information.” This is good advice for attorneys and other legal respondents, but it is also good for friends and family to follow the same advice. Social media is out there for everyone to see so be careful of what you post.

http://www.americanbar.org/publications/blt/2014/01/03_harvey.html

The next article I would like to discuss is on USAToday titled Social Media Raises privacy and ethics issues by Sharon Jayson. One of the findings illustrated in her article was especially fascinating to me. “Some of Facebook's research on user behavior found that 71% of people drafted at least one post that they never posted. Another analyzed 400,000 posts and found that children's communication with parents decreases in frequency from age 13 but then rises when they move out.” This outlines the ethical and legal issues social media can bring. Legal because people are using posts that are not originally theirs and are not giving credit to the original authors and ethical because children who use social media are less likely to have healthy and constant interactions with their parents.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/08/data-online-behavior-research/5781447/

Collaborative and Distance Communication Platforms and Tools

These platforms can be very useful for business professionals and students alike. A collaborative platform would be like Google Docs. Where there can be multiple people, working on the same project at the same time. Evernote is another example of this. My personal favorite is crocdocs because you can even edit and work on PDFs. The Wiki websites are probably the most known for collaborative work. Distance communication platforms are platforms where you can communicate with someone who is at a distance from you. Skype is the most known example of this. Facebook has adopted a facetime platform that gives the user the same access to distance communication as Skype.

On the Cool Tools for School website, they give a list of many collaborative platforms and list what each of these platforms does well.

According to Lucie Olejnikova in her article titled The Case for Collaborative Tools: Long-distance teamwork on a shoestring budget, she says that “the obvious advantage is the cost. Freely available communication tools can potentially save a lot of money, and the budgetary savings will grow exponentially during a period of time.” This means that it isn’t only cost effective to use these platforms, but it also saves time. Some key points that she makes are that when implementing these into our business or school practices, we need to remember “that choosing the right collaboration tool often depends on the type of collaboration required, the context for the collaboration, and the timing. They also point out that the collaboration
tool must either (a) improve an existing system or (b) implement a new system that is measurably better than the system it replaces.” After we finish this class and go out into the world, I hope we all remember how important these platforms can be.

http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Collaborative+Tools

http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/spectrum/Archives/Vol-13/pub_sp0812/pub-sp0812-pll.pdf

Location Based Social Media Platforms

Location Based Platforms

Location based platforms uses your current location for either tracking the user or letting the user share where they are at the time of the post. This is helpful in many instances. For a mobile business, it can let the company know where customers might be or where they might be able to better solicit their goods and services depending on the content and location of the posts. National Geographic has an app that lets its users upload their own pictures that also share the exact location the picture was taken. According to Ben Adelt, in his blog post titled Why Location-Based Monitoring is Critical to Your Social Media Listening Program, “If something were happening at a physical location, and that something was important to your organization, how would you go about monitoring the social conversation and content coming from that event?

You might say that you’d identify words or phrases that you think people might use during the event, perhaps promote a unique hash tag, plug these keywords into your social media monitoring platform of choice, and analyze what you found.” He goes on to explain that this isn’t very effective because most of the time, the key words, hash tags, or phrases don’t catch on. He does offer a better solution to this problem. The platform needs to develop a “key word monitoring tool.” This would allow the platform to let you know what the key words are that are being used at a certain event or location, giving the business the best chance to catch on to the main needs and wants quicker.

Google Places takes advantage of location sharing. According to Enterprise Social Technology, some of the benefits of using Google Places location sharing services are “Google Places helps you discover nearby places you’ll love. Quickly search for restaurants, cafes, bars and other places you visit. By rating places you’ll get place recommendations based on the places you like and receive recommendations from your friends.

http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/why-location-based-monitoring-is-critical-to-your-social-media-listening-program/

http://www.slideshare.net/socialtech/20-hot-locationbased-apps-and-services-you-should-know-about-12841489

Je Suis Pizza Delivery Guy

As I watched the video for the first time of the pizza delivery guy getting harassed for basically doing his job, I felt pretty bad for the guy. In my opinion, he was completely in the right, and the car dealership employees were completely in the wrong. I have done a little investigation into how this has turned out, and quite frankly, I don’t quite know how I feel about it. First of all, the dealership is basically ruined. Because of bad reviews, cyber-bullying, and terrorist threats, this dealership will likely never recover. I do think that the bad reviews on the website are helpful so future customers would be able to see what kind of people they would be dealing with. But the cyber-bullying is never ok, even if it is towards another bully. Terrorist threats are a very serious concern. I do not think the actions of these dealership employees warrant their death… I do realize that I may have an unpopular opinion. I am just anti-bullying in any form, towards any person. Plus, it seems that the delivery man has been handsomely rewarded by strangers feeling bad for him. A gofundme had been started for the delivery man and reached an amount so big, that he requested it be shut down. According to the site,  "I believe Jarrid should be rewarded for dealing with such crappy people," the campaign by Amanda Marie Rogers reads. "Please watch the video and donate. Even if it is $1, it will make up (maybe a little) for him having to deal with idiots like this.” Jarrid got much more than his tip money, around $30,000 to be exact, as people from all over the country have donated to the cause. The funding page now reads: "We have shut donations down at Jarrid's request. He is so excited about his opportunities thanks to you. This gives him and his family a lot to look forward to. Thank you!" This gives me faith in humanity. On one end, we have thousands of people bullying the bullies. One the other, we have thousands of people who are kind hearted enough to help out someone who they can connect with. I realize that all of this could not have been possible without social media. The attention that businesses and individuals can get from complete strangers can be very positive or very negative. For the dealership, which originally posted the video, it has worked toward their demise. For the delivery guy, it benefitted him more than he ever thought possible. There is a valuable lesson to be learned here. According to Jim Henry’s blog on the subject, “Here’s a lesson for dealerships that run security cameras in the F&I office and elsewhere: Treat all store visitors well.” I would like to add to that statement. If you are not going to treat people nicely, don’t post it to social media. People can really connect with this delivery man. A few posts and headlines read as follows:

“[That dealership] would never get my business!! Share this so those in the NB [New Bedford] area don’t buy cars from them. If they treat a delivery person this way, imagine how they might treat a customer not agreeable to a sale price!!,” says one Facebook post.

“Hell hath no fury like the Internet avenging a pizza delivery guy,” reads a headline on dailykos.com. Another headline, “Pizza delivery man has to deal with insufferable jerks at a used-car dealership,” on a reddit.com video link showed more than 500 comments, one reading: “Je suis pizza delivery guy.” I am pizza delivery guy has also become a viral hashtag in many languages via twitter. Some people have even seen this viral video as an opportunity to promote their own business. “The guys at Quirk Chevrolet in Braintree, Mass., posted a parody of the “mean” video, in which they summon a pizza delivery guy back to the dealership and shower him with money, gifts and praise.

“Here at Quirk Auto Dealers, we like to treat our pizza delivery men like we treat our customers: Excellent!” the dealership employees say. It seems like these guys understand the power of social media and how to use it for their good. F&I Car Dealership, take notes.

http://www.autonews.com/article/20150121/BLOG13/301219994/the-lesson-of-the-pizza-delivery-man

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/27901/20150121/this-pizza-guy-just-got-a-30-000-tip-from-the-internet.htm