Social media profiles can be somewhat limited by privacy settings..... unless you're one of them

Personal profiles on social media sites can be personalised putting on what you want others to see and also limiting certain group of people from seeing all of the personal information such as addresses. However in Louisiana state of USA, there's a law that recently took affect forcing a certain group of people if they were to use social media, they had to put their address and physical description, and most importantly, they have to list their crimes committed on their profiles specifically crimes related to sex, as you now would've guessed, they are sex offenders. This was actually a step down from their initial ban of social media usage from sex offenders.

While the law in Louisiana was adhered to protect people by making them aware of the sex offenders' previous crimes, what they look like and where they live, it seems highly unlikely they would even register for an account considering how they will be tagged with their dark past making it impossible to start afresh, those who have accounts would probably delete their accounts in fear of shame from people they know. This law on the surface may be looking like they have eased up on the past offenders, but in reality, it's probably for monitor purposes should the past offenders choose to continue or take up on being involved in social media.

twitter's use in measurement, presidential debate sentiments

Presidential race in America has become a red hot topic in America (because they should care) and somewhat globally. After the first presidential debate between the republican Mitt Romney and the current president representing the democratic party, Barrack Obama, a lot of people seemed to think Romney won the debate according to a poll conducted by Gallup showed 72% of the people who watched the debate thought Romney won, an unprecedented approval rate. However the people of the twitterverse generally thought otherwise, with 61% of the messages related to the debate being in favour of Obama presented by the Pew Research Centre, though more of the tweets were about criticising Romney.

The entire debate lasts for around 90 minutes and could be a reason that not everyone will be watching the entirety of the debate and choose to follow updates or tweets from others for information relating to the debate. The question raised though is whether twitter can be an accurate gauge for where the sentiments of the the American population lie. For one, a lot of the tweets it may need to be interpreted between the lines, another reason is people can create an infinite amount of accounts theoretically, making it hard to conduct an accurate measure of the American's preferences.

MySpace 2.0

Before Facebook and Twitter became mainstream relevant, there was MySpace and other popular famous social media networking sites. In recent years with the rise of Facebook since around 2006 MySpace has gone on a terrible downfall (unless you are a musician using as a channel for promotion), the pre-teens generations might not even know MySpace has existed.

After years of losing active users it has finally revamped its image, looking a lot more interactive than its static counterpart.

It seemed to have took elements from pinterest, Google+, and Facebook making it appeal to the current expectations of people who uses social media.

While it has yet to be released, the low key promotion may cause a sudden surge of new users registering to the new version of MySpace.

Social media can influence trials?

Recently, sad news has been looming around and it's the highly publicised and horrible murder of ABC journalist Jill Meagher. Major news publications has been covering the tragedy and without fail it has caught on in social media with the Australian public showing grief and sadness which escalated to anger and hate. There have since been Facebook pages created. Originally with the intent to pay respect to the passing of Meagher but has also became an outlet to source out some of the people's anger towards the murderer. 

 

The police has urged the public to stop posting “speculation or comments about matters before the courts” since there's a possibility that they can have an affect on the outcome of the trial of prosecution proving that the police department has been monitoring social media activities surrounding the case. Looking at this makes it apparent that a lot of people probably still see social media as a somewhat private space where freedom of expression is celebrated and people can post whatever they want. In reality that is far from the truth, on 19^th of September an 18 year old girl in Kentucky posted “My dumbass got a DUI and I hit a car LOL” and subsequently got arrested for refusing to delete her comment. http://mashable.com/2012/09/19/facebook-comment-jail/comment-page-2/. Coming from a country with freedom of speech it wont be surprising if anymore hateful comments get out of hand on the Meagher case the police department may soon take more aggressive actions towards the social media users.

Social media you've done it again

It's like any other day, browsing the internet and unsurprisingly I opened up Facebook to check on the happenings of the world. Scrolling down I saw a friend posted “Johnny Depp died?!!” and below seeing how she liked a page dedicated to Johnny Depp. To verify the news I quickly googled with the terms 'Johnny Depp death' and found nothing relating to his pronounced 'death' instead it was a list of results leading to a four letter word …... H – O – A – X, HOAX!

What I later found out was other than Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby and a few others were also victims of the social media celebrity death hoaxes. Obviously this is a trend I missed because I supposed most of my Facebook friends read the news or acquire have other sources of news away from social media. While this might be intended to be a joke or to teach social media users a lesson about relying social media for news but it is all but poor taste leading to people to believe a death of another. On this report http://www.ibtimes.com/bill-cosby-death-comedian-alive-and-well-america-joins-bill-nye-yet-another-victim-twitter-death actually noted one of Bill Cosby's close friend was crying over the news and that Bill Cosby was wrongly reported death four times since 2010.

Considering Bill 'died' four times since 2010, isn't it about time social media admins do something about the page creators and fake news so it doesn't turn into 'the boy who cried wolf'.

Taliban sneaks in with Facebook

Late last week, Herald Sun had posted an article about how the Taliban has used Facebook to gather intelligence from Australian soldiers. What they did was create fake profiles with images of "attractive women" to socialise with the Australian soldiers with the intent of attaining confidential information. There were 3 Australian soldiers murdered within their base claimed to be the doings of an Afghan Army trainee.

A lot of their worries was that people can pose as friends from school or other acquaintances to gain trust, vital information such as geo-tagging "can be data-mined and sold to anybody", pointed out by Security expert Peter Hannay. There are arguments for total ban of social media from troops but for the moment they are working on 'social media guidelines' released by Christmas.

To some Facebook friends fits the category of people who they've met or known personally and adding people unknown would not have made sense, but there are people who would add or accept friends regardless. The latter group is probably more likely to lower their guard when using social media.


While I can understand why people want to ban social media in the military where information can be easily leaked in social media through photos, posts (with location tags), it is unclear what information is used against them by the Taliban. It could very possibly be that the soldiers communicating with the terrorist group lack common sense and are slightly gullible since it would not have made sense to even tell your family about your missions. Then again I've never been in the army and social media may be the only way they can reach the outside world what I would guess they are living in a very tense environment on a daily basis. What could Facebook or other social media platforms could've done to prevent similar cases from happening?

So you're telling me social media is not free?

There seems to be a misconception with social media being a free advertising or marketing platform because so many people use it on a day to day basis without having to pay a single cent since there are no fees to sign up or continuing to use Facebook, Twitter and the likes. That is true if your intention is purely to socialise with your friends, following your favourite celebs or athletes etc however if you run a company wanting to use social media as a marketing channel, there several other aspects that need to be considered and likely is going to cost you.

Running a marketing campaign is time consuming, and so is running one through social media. Social media needs to be continuously monitored throughout the day so it can pick up on what the positives and negatives potential customers or current customers are saying and respond to the issues as soon as possible before it blows up to another social media mishap.

They need to actively update the content of the social media page or tweets, synchronise what they are promoting with traditional means of advertisement.

BP and Coles became a victims of not monitoring their social media websites and and American Express became a victim not having continuous updated content with the appearance of a hoax Facebook page having more fans because the hoax page has more updated content.

More and more companies are now paying, to advertise in Facebook's advertisement column which may potentially be targeted advertising because of Facebook's database on the users with a whole lot of information (what they like, hobbies, gender, sexual orientation etc).

Sure social media is free to register but there are costs tagging along to maintain the marketing channel.