New Mindset for Marketers

This video shows social media's huge impact on businesses today. So how should marketers utilize these tools to the fullest? When I was on twitter the other day, somebody's tweet said something like this "many tv news started tweeting nowadays but they just copy and pasted what's on their web. Rather than that, let's have communication. Isn't it a place to discuss criticism, reflection and foresight of the news honestly?"

Many people who's already familiar with social networking will think, "duh" to this tweet. But sadly it's a fact that many companies who do use social media for their marketing don't realize this. They take social media just like other advertising medium and nothing more. While it's biggest potential is in communication.

"One of the fun challenges of working in the social media analytics field is helping companies figure out how to learn and apply knowledge from what consumers say online about their brand, products and competitors to strengthen customer relationships and ultimately grow their businesses."
said Mike Spataro, in his article.

Although it is difficult to determine ROI in social media and might not seem like working at first, the return's dimension is a whole lot wider than original advertising medium. It makes marketer to communicate with customers and find the way to improve their business in addition to earning more customers.

As companies go into a new way of marketing using social media, the marketer also needs to have a new mind set of "learning" from the stream.

+photo credit+ http://www.nodiamonds.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/istock_000004936705xsmall.jpg

Being Part of the Live Stream

Web 1.0 was all about receiving information online, then Web 2.0 allowed user to participate in generating the content. It made social networking a very common thing to all of us, so what's next?

As I surfed through the internet looking for articles to read, I found a key word that kept appearing in web pages: Live Stream. More information technology development and increased number of users made it possible to create "streams" online, and future's social networking is all about being part of it.

Tac Anderson explained how future of journalism and advertisement will be in his article on SocialMediaToday. He explained that more people will act like journalists, participating in reporting what's happening real time, making a stream. Not only bloggers and journalists but ordinary people could become a part of it. What's more interesting, is that through this process, advertisement become the part of stream, not something that pops up on your window and irritates you.

I also watched a video of Michael Stelzner interviewing Steve Rubel, who quit blogging five years ago. He puts more importance in "being everywhere" meaning making his appearance on every social networks to speedily convey messages to customers, rather than blogging. I also see the similarity here about being in the "stream". Businesses needs to know what people are interested in at this moment in real time. Twitter is sort of proving this future prediction is right. And whatever the business that could be part of the stream will success in catching customer's attention.

+Photo Credit+
Mashable, The Social Media Guide

Journalism=Business?

When I read an article AOL Moves to Build Tech 'Newsroom of the Future' from Business Week, I had some mixed feelings.

Journalism is changing. Many people stopped reading news papers, and most people get daily news from the Internet. AOL came up with this idea of tracking what people are talking about online, and use that information to write news articles that people are interested in, or what is popular at this moment. In result, more people will read the news and more advertisement income for AOL.

I felt a little bit scary, be honest with you, that this technology one day might make journalism a mare business. If journalists only write about what people would like to read, it loses its meaning. I work for a national TV and I cover mostly about politics. I know people don't necessarily love to hear about political news all the time, but I feel like that's our call to keep reporting about it. But if more people rely on Internet news source and AOL way becomes the majority, the news that is important but not necessarily popular will start disappearing.

Although it is important, that journalists get to hear readers' opinion too. It just shouldn't control what journalists write about. I hope the technology AOL came up with, will help journalists and readers communicate, instead of making journalism no more than money making business.

New Ways of Job Searching

As a student getting ready to start job hunting in a few month, I was very excited to read articles for this week about job hunting using social media. I was not sure about the whole idea of using social networking sites for my job hunting because I only used facebook, blogs and twitter for my leisure, thankful to this class I became more open minded about the social networking and business.

"The Blog is the New Resume" was very inspiring as it talked about how people are now able to present themselves without any control (good, or bad?) to the recruiters. You can post about your education, past experience etc.. in the way that no original paper resume could have presented about you. "Social networking has its perks" talked about use of Profiles (such as Facebook and LinkedIn) and Twitter in job hunting. It is important to have a consistent character in all of those accounts, and people should present more about their business skills then personal stuff.

I was very excited to see these ideas, but it left me with one big question. I felt like job hunting using social media may not work in trying to get a job at larger companies. The question is whether the recruiter will have time to go through all that we posted online about ourselves. A blog, facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, twitter, is a lot to look through. Once my internship boss told me they have about 15,000 applicants every year for about 30 positions available, and they don't even have time to look through everyone's paper cover letter carefully enough. It's an extreme case, but I think that this method does not work for larger companies like this, who gets very large number of applicants. Through more research and this week's class, I hope I could find answer to the question or know more about job hunting using social media in larger companies.

Make sure it HAS to be online

As Web 2.0 became common in everyday life, online collaboration had started being used in many different places.

Kristin Alloway's article talks about how it's becoming more common to use online collaboration in the field of education. From using "online classroom" that has video calls and chats to publishing blogs or articles of their own, student have utilized many Web 2.0 technologies in their education. There are many benefits in using such tools of online collaboration, including distance learning, give students motivation and giving reluctant students opportunity to speak up in online conversations. However, there are always risks for young children using internet such as security issues, non-reliable articles, inappropriate contents and simply the destruction by many other things online. After reading the whole article, I was not sure if the benefit of putting children online is more than the risk associated with it.

Although I believe that online collaboration means so much for education today, I don't think it is appropriate to use online tools for what we could do off-line. Collaboration is everywhere in education, and online collaboration made it easier to collaborate with people who were not reachable before. I think it is questionable to conduct online collaboration if collaboration could happen in the real classroom without putting it online. One example in the article talked about how classroom conversation continues online as homework at night, but I think it is such a nonsense.

It is in a completely different field, but info Zine's article talked about the greatest example in this case. It talks about the use of online collaboration for open government and transparency. In this, online collaboration brought "new" collaboration that was not achievable before instead of putting existing collaboration online. I'd like to see more of these collaborations in the future.

+Photo Credit+
http://www.huddle.net/images/hero/globe_1.jpg

Culture Changes over Technology?

Michael Sampson put an interesting article about Virtual Work Environment and culture changes. He argues that despite many critics saying working in a virtual environment will require a cultural change in the company, it is not true.

I can imagine why Andy Adkins and other critics say that working in a virtual environment takes cultural change within the company. Working in a virtual world seems a lot different than what people are used to. However, I think that things like this is talked about whenever new technology comes up. I'm pretty sure people were afraid of changes in the work places when technology like internet and email came up for the first time.

I think it is important that developers of these technology understand these thoughts of users. Instead of focusing on technology only, they should think more about user interface and make it easier for users to start using these technology like virtual work environment.

Don't let Second Life become your Life

I wasn't really familiar with Second Life, but Learning in Second Life: Virtual Education gave me tips on what you can do on SL, and found it very interesting. I thought that it's a great tool for distance learning, providing education to anywhere that it's difficult to get education and providing education to people who have difficulty in come to a class physically (like, handicapped people).

But then I thought, what good does it do to the people who don't have problem in coming to a class and receiving education? Argument on which one is better: real or virtual reality classroom, is too large to discuss here, but it's pretty understandable that people who don't have any problem in coming to a real classroom is better off coming to a class room than taking a class in a virtual world.

Then the article Augmented Reality Vs. Virtual Reality: Which One Is More Real? gave me a great knowledge about Augmented Reality (AR). Easy said, it's more like adding virtual reality to the real life- instead of replacing real life with the virtual reality. In this way, I think people could combine the benefit of real classroom and virtual class room and use the fullest of technology today in education, or in any other field. I'm excited that in the future, I will be walking around the "real" town and receiving many information and enjoying anything that technology could provide us, than to be getting lost in the virtual world at home, which is not real.

+Photo Credit+
http://teamsubmarine.wordpress.com/2009/07/