Monthly Archives: April 2011

This being my last blog, I wanted to discuss a service that acknowledges the growing internet dependency and social media usage. This article lists the best times to Tweet for you to get the most exposure. The website is basically an advertisement for a service called Garious which is a Tweet scheduler for professionals to market themselves and their businesses. Garious argues that Tweeting at 9 a.m. gets the most exposure because “you can target people coming to work in America and Canada’s West Coast, you can tweet to tweeple at lunch time in the East Coast, and you can have your tweets reach as far as London where  Britons are calling it the end of another work day”. I, myself, do not have a Twitter account to test this out, but the article’s claim seems valid.

This started out as a useful social media tool for businesses to get their name out there, but this other Garious advertisement offers their services to social media addicts who feel that they need help with managing their time. It seems a little ironic that these internet addicts are using another online resource to control their social media obsession. Garious offers their services to “pre-schedule your tweets and other social media activities”. It seems that the future of some online services will be, strangely, along the lines of trying to curb internet addiction. In a way, Garious is a useful tool for those who spend a majority of their time marketing their business online, but could possibly be used by internet addicts who want to manage their time better by planning social media activity beforehand.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/if-youth-can-post-its-facebook-status-age-can-too/?ref=facebookinc

While looking through the NY times I found this interesting article about how the older generation is trying to keep up with the younger generation. But from reading this article and to no surprise to me, the older generation purpose of getting involved with Facebook is to keep tabs on their children to make sure they are not engaging in any illegal activities or doing anything that they would not want them to do. There are a number of reasons why older people decide to joined Facebook. Some as I mentioned before joined to keep tabs on their children but there are others who joined to surprise their children or grandchildren in a good way to show that they are keeping up with our generation.

This link is interested because it is showing that even the older generation who probably five years ago could never see themselves getting involved into a social network website but now more and more people in their 50’s and 60’s are signing up for Facebook. They are even going as far as to going to classes to learn the basic in and out of social network website. When I see something like this taking place it just makes me think that just maybe after hearing about how great Facebook is for the last 5 or 6 years that you just end up succumbing to the temptation and decide to make a Facebook page just to see what is all the excitement with Facebook is about. I thin all of us is like this with something in our life. If you continue to hear everybody talk about how great something is, you are going to want to test it out at some point and that is what is taking place with the older adults and Facebook.

In this article written by Jenna Wortham, she is exploring the idea of the fear of missing out and how it affects us now. Are we so dependent these days that all of us who are in the social network world actually undergoes the fear of missing out issue? Do those of us who are addicted to our Facebook and twitter pages feel that if we don’t log on to our homepage for several days that we are going to be missing out on the social world and about what is taking place in our friends or followers life? I think that this much easier said than done because of all of the technology in the world today. Maybe if smartphones did not have applications on our phones for Facebook and Twitter, this would be much easier to do, but now that we are always checking our Facebook on our cell phones, I think that it is much easier to get caught up in the fear of missing out world. We always want to see what new statuses friends posted on their wall, and to see if they added any new interesting pictures for our viewing pleasure.

Maybe we are just too addicted to the social media world and always need to be in touch with that world. Jenna Wortham suggested ideas that we can do to address this situation such as hiding your phone, limiting time on social networks on the weekend, and finally to put your cell phone on silent for long periods of time. I for one actually currently do put my phone on silent and keep it far from me for several hours during my day to avoid seeing my phone blinking because I have a facebook notification or something.

How do you handle the FOMO?

We all know the internet has an extensive amount of influence over today’s society. Our class discussions revolve around the impact of social media on people and their interactions with each other. Our final project for this course includes our construction of our own Tumblr page which relates to this article that I found on Social Media Today. The article gave me some insight on what to include in my final project and may help you too in order to grab attention. It also shows us what we, as consumers, go after and the marketing tactics that appeal to us. When you break down the elements of popular pages of Facebook and other social media, there are several noticeable similarities.

The first common aspect of popular Fan pages is that they include eye-catching content such as “images with text, images alone, video, text, external links, and polls”. This data reflects our desire to be entertained by social media. People want variety and change along with a way to connect. It is only human nature to socialize, so pages that allow feedback are attractive to social media users. The article also reported that the top reasons fans choose to follow a page are that they are “being treated in a special way by the brand and can be spokesman for [the] brand” which shows that consumers want attention. It is natural for people to respond better to brands that seem concerned with them and give them special attention. There is a lot of psychology behind marketing that is often found in the way we may conduct ourselves through social media.