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.

Where is the dislike button?

Facebook has been using its like button since april of 2010, first on status updates and expanded to photos, comments and shared links. Though there are a lot to like in this world, there are times when people don't agree or 'dislike's' someone else's posts or comments making users wonder, where is the dislike button?
 

So to answer that question, here's my take on part of the reason. Take YouTube for example, first off it's pretty evident that there is a dislike button, there's even a bar showing the amount of likes and dislikes. Secondly, YouTube because of the anonymity of users without videos of themselves, can post a lot of negative or hateful comments without repercussions. On top of that, having a dislike button adds fuel to fire, it insinuates people to harbour negative feelings stronger than a mere dislike. Although people are still able to post negative comments in Facebook, they are identified with a full personal profile making them perhaps more reluctant to do so and without a dislike button, they can perhaps look at things in a more positive manner.

Twitter blunder

Twitter in US is used very frequently with companies promoting and encouraging the usage of Twitter amongst the employees.

A niche company called UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) offers Twitter bonuses of $5000 per category with 3 categories: most followers, biggest increase in percentage of followers and the most creative tweets. In the case of UFC, their employees are fighters who gets paid per showing of an event (usually 3-4 times a year) to compete with another fighter. The fighter's pay begin at $6000 per showing with a win bonus of the same amount and only a handful of the top fighters earn six figure fight money making a bonus of $5000 to be more than enough of an incentive for the employees to get active on the twitter network.
People who have yet to have a twitter account would jump at the opportunity no doubt. The problem with this is there were several tweets that went out of hand with the intention gaining more followers and get creative through generating humour and shock value with their tweets.
Forrest Griffin, a popular UFC fighter tweeted on November 2011

In a sensitive world like today where everything public is expected to be political correct, this has sure to offend a lot of people. The fighter copped a lot of flack and an earful from the boss for the idiocy and however there were no fines from the employer for this misbehaviour.

A month later another fighter Miguel Torres quoting from a sitcom tweeted
“If a rape van was called a surprise van, more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.” which he later changed the word 'rape' to 'windowless'
it was too late, the damage is done, this time the consequences were a lot harsher, an immediate termination of Torres's job.
The treatment of the Torres was felt inconsistent by many also due to that another fighter Rashad Evans, not in twitter but in a public avenue, at a pre-fight press conference 'in the heat of the moment' clearly referenced an incident about a school staff and the act of sexual assault on children and received no formal repercussions.

 The president of the company Dana White retorts "We don’t come out at the UFC with these canned statements that are written by our lawyers. We handled everything on a case-by-case basis with the idea that people are going to make mistakes and it’s how you handle yourself after you make that mistake", and concludes "When you’re getting ready to twitter, or you’re getting ready to say something, think about what you’re going to say. Think about what you’re going to tweet and use a little common sense."

While he did bring up a good point of using common sense which all should, the treatment between fighters has been biased and unfair because there were no official guidelines as to what would happen and what makes one more message tolerable than the other. The two fighters that were safe are a much bigger draw of audience for UFC events meaning more revenue, hence the lesser known fighter was to be made an example of. Since there were no pointers on how to conduct oneself in social network so people will only find out after the damage is done however to their credit till now no one else has been stupid enough to post controversial and/or offensive tweets.

For public companies, they know it is better to prevent problems than to fix, could this have been prevented had there been guidelines or policies?

Fancy 'The Fancy'

For those of you who are familiar with Pinterest, you'd know that it allows users to 'pin' images they find interesting or photos they took onto their pinboards to be organised categorised and shared to people around the world. What if there was a social media network that allows you to purchase the things you pinned on to your image collections, this is where 'The Fancy' comes into play.

Fancy provides a platform where people can browse through categories or random photos, see what they like, 'fancy it' and if they like it enough and at the same time can afford it they can simply purchase it through the fancy website/app itself.

There's the ability to follow other users especially on the people who you think have shared or similar taste with yourself so in the future your customised wall will be filled with photos based on your interests. This emphasizes the peer to peer recommendation which seems to fare better than advertising through the brands themselves.

An incentive to invite friends and convincing them to make purchases within 60 days is that there are credits to be earned when they accept the invitation and make a purchase. Bloggers are also rewarded with 2% of the purchase price on the product to their fancy account when a person buys a product through the 'buy with fancy' button on their blog via a javascript code.

High fashion brands such as Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent have associated themselves with fancy and integrated a 'fancy' button on their site perhaps seeing the e-commerce opportunities with the avenue of fancy the reach to potential customers will be greater than before.

Although it does provide great convenience to people who want to buy products or services that appeals to them, it doesn't always work seamlessly as people would want it to. One of the issue of the system is that unless the poster puts the appropriate web link to the image he/she posts, it'll only take the person to the URL of the image and won't allow them to make a direct purchase through fancy. Another problem is the fact that while one may fancy a lot and frequently, chances are they are likely not to be able to afford all that they fancy especially if they are luxury goods.

Compared to the main social media networks, fancy can be considered not so well known outside of US, however they do have a more than adept board including Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Chris Hughes of Facebook, also a celebrity following including Ashton Kutcher,  Marc Jacobs, Kanye West and Pink, even Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg  has a fancy account with the id 'zuckd'. Recently there's even news that Apple are interested in purchasing fancy. With buzz like this it won't be surprising that fancy will grow in popularity more so currently than previous years, could 'The Fancy' be spearheading a new form of e-commerce?