Archive for social media
I can barely remember a time before computers – let alone remember what I used to do before the social media explosion (I’m kidding… I don’t spend my entire day online). Although computers were always (somewhat) around throughout my childhood, there are a few moments that describe my progression through technology and social media as a child of the digital era:
1) I saw a computer for the first time in 2nd grade (I played Oregon Trail)
2) I was 9 years old when I first got on the Internet (supervised by my parents of course)
3) I spent the majority of my adolescence on MySpace
4) I was on Facebook when it was only accessible to college students
5) Created a Twitter account last week (some would say I’m a little behind on this one)
My experiences probably aren’t too different from my peers, but for an aging population I would imagine their experiences are completely different. With the rapid rate of technology growing everyday it can be hard for anyone to keep up. I find myself struggling to understand the ins and outs of Twitter.
Unfortunately, it seems that the digital age is in full swing and we have to learn to adapt – otherwise we’ll be left behind. Okay, maybe that statement is a little dramatic but from an organizational standpoint it may very well be true.
In recent years companies have dove into the social media realm in hopes of broadening their client base and making themselves more accessible, and Facebook has been the social media outlet of choice… until Twitter. But from my personal point of view, I don’t think Facebook helps companies connect with their clients like Twitter can – especially with the new updates Facebook has made.
So in hopes of spreading the word about Twitter, I found a great article from http://www.socialmediatoday.com that does a great job of breaking down reasons why companies should use Twitter to better connect with their clients, customers, and other untapped populations. Below is a summary of the reasoning listed in the article.
- Have engaging content that people want to read and respond to. The content should humanize the company, providing an approachable online presence.
- Twitter allows businesses to have real time interactions with their customers.
- Gives companies a way to monitor what people are saying about brands and can react accordingly.
Please see the full article HERE.
Take the plunge and dive into Twitter! It could really help your business!
Check out our Twitter page @MikeMonar
Social media is America’s new supernova of wealth, and has created a new young generation of millionaires. This new boom of wealth is reminiscent of the 1990 dot-com explosion. But are these new millionaires going to learn from the mistakes of the past?
Investors, analysts and reporters have speculated that this new technology bubble is inflating. Last week, after going public the market value of LinkedIn swung from about $11.5 billion to $7.5 billion, currently it is valued at around $7.99 billion. Basically, we are entering the world of the unknown. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/shares-of-linkedin-fall/
With more IPOs in the future, are Silicon Valley’s newly rich going to learn from the dot com bust (which left internet millionaires with worthless stock and massive mortgages) and start out the right way? The Wall Street Journal identified a few tips for the newly minted millionaire and billionaires to avoid the mistakes of the past: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704083904576335593881998326.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_News_BlogsModule
1. It is not cash; don’t spend it – limit expenses to cash instead of paper wealth as paper wealth can vanish in a heartbeat.
2. Hedge, pledge and sell – advisors have recommended that founders and executives sell a large majority of their stock so they don’t have all their financials tied up in a single investment.
3. Stop and listen – instant wealth can be highly distorting. The newly rich should hold their money until they understand the customs, rules of investing, spending and giving away large sums of money.
4. Protect the reputation of your company – make donations, be philanthropic, and make sure that your organization is still invested with in the community
It is clear that social media is a technology that is being utilized by the majority of organizations and that it is highly valuable. However, because it is such a new technology, we will not understand its true value until more IPOs become available and we see how stocks progress over time.
What’s more important, swiftness or accuracy? High profile tweeters would argue the former, world class journalists should argue the latter, and star hurdlers would say it fell somewhere between the two. Which one makes up most of the content that you read within a day? Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t have time to read through quality news stories, and Runner’s Digest isn’t available in the continental US (mainly because it doesn’t exist). If you’re getting most of your information from a source that is more concerned with relevance than rightness…now you see a problem.
The damage control for not thinking before you speak takes much more time and energy than actually taking a beat. Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of the Aflac duck–and Aladdin’s Iago, for Disney connoisseurs–was fired within three days by the insurance company for posting ten or so insensitive tweets about the earthquake in Japan. A media strategist for Chrysler tweeted something derogatory regarding Detroit, the target city for the company’s ad campaign, and cost the company their client. The problem with social media is that once it is live, it can be distributed hundreds of times over within thirty seconds, just as long as it could have taken you to think before tweeting. Not thinking can cost you and your company a job.
How is this applicable to you? In the last several years especially, corporations are feeling pressure to be relevant themselves and are putting special emphasis on digital strategy–marketing and branding through sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and so on. To stay relevant is to stay current, and this means making sure that your company utilizes these media as frequently as possible. But as frequency receives emphasis, accuracy and appropriateness-check fall to the wayside. After Kenneth Cole released their tweet re: Egypt, what began as a 140 character marketing tactic turned into thousands of characters of backlash and even more in public apologies. All of this could’ve been mitigated with even just another pair of eyes.
This extends beyond the world of social media. In a rapid fire situation with a client, your instinct may be to parrot back responses as quickly as possible. This is neither conducive to you nor them; it does not allow you the time to think, and it does not give them the impression that you are digesting what they are saying. Silence, while often terrifying, is not always a detrimental feature. Consulting firms that provide a case study interview within their recruiting piece stress this little-respected fact and insist that interviewees take the time to writhe their thoughts out, so long as they are sure to mention beforehand that that is what they are doing. You cannot give a good recommendation without listening to the facts and giving yourself time to ponder them.
The takeaway here is something that your kindergarten teacher tried to use to indoctrinate you into honoring a quiet classroom: silence is golden. Resist the urge to hit “enter” before thinking about what you’re about to post for at least twenty seconds. Despite as Erica Albright says to Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, “[you think] every thought that tumbles through your head is so clever that it would be a crime for it not to be shared,” ask yourself: is this an accurate reflection of my company? Could I show this to my boss? And while meeting with a client, make sure to check facts–both yours and theirs–before making any sort of recommendation. The time taken will be much appreciated.
Aim somewhere between right and relevant. Think like a hurdler. Maybe a Runner’s Digest could help the corporate folk more than they realize.
To our readers: how do you find ways to remain relevant while still making sure to remain accurate?
I have a revelation to make: despite the bevy of interesting stories that both my friends and my own experiences provide me, I have fallen victim to writer’s block.
Yes, dear readers, this means I’ve exhausted my organizational communication notes, I haven’t finished any new organizational development novels, and nothing particularly zany has happened in the news lately (aside from the woman who fought a drive-thru worker for not serving her chicken nuggets…but that’s not even immediately relevant anymore). This is unfortunately not the first time this has happened; my Google Docs is currently housing three or four false starts that would probably ruin my credibility as a (semi)capable writer, and they will thus stay in Google Docs. Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time I began with an idea only to find it fall short of my own expectations, I ironically would never have to write again.
So what to do? I can’t quit. I’ve considered letting MonarMusings just be a link to MTV-famed Spencer Pratt’s blog, a gem I stumbled upon this weekend–but that may hurt our credibility even more than the blog I tried to write about the aforementioned chicken nugget incident. Rumpelstiltskin somehow consistently spun straw into gold and yet I cannot spin an entire Internet’s worth of resources into an OD-related entry. For shame. My ancestors allegedly walked up hills both ways barefoot in the snow six miles every day, and I’m having trouble sitting in my desk chair, “educating” the masses. Thank god social Darwinism is just a myth.
Again, I’ve used my personal misfortune to try and prevent you from falling victim to a similar ailment. Roadblocks to creativity happen on a daily basis, but work still needs to get done. We don’t always have the luxury of handing off work to someone whose mind may be more creatively in tune that day. So our brain dams have to be hurdles, not brick walls.
The question is: how do we unblock a clogged creative artery? What are some of the reasons we get stuck, and how can we un-mire ourselves from a creative mud pit? And how many more metaphors for this predicament can I come up with in the next two paragraphs?
An overabundance of ideas can, ironically enough, contribute to our creativity block. Sometimes we’re trying to simultaneously think about what it is we want to say and in what order we want to say it. The end result is an overwhelmed, frustrated individual with nothing to show for the brainstorm process. Part of what can help us unlock our brains is using a mind map, a tool we introduced in our Presentation Skills workshop, and one of Jessica’s favorite ways to brainstorm. The mind map involves putting the topic of your presentation or project in the center of a page, and branching thoughts off of that center idea as they come to you. Using different colors is also said to help the creative process. With a mind map, your brain is allowed to go on tangents without your losing sight of the main idea. The creative process is often non-linear, and it’s helpful to use a means of brainstorming that pays homage to this tidbit.
There’s a quote that’s sourced to several individuals ranging from Mark Twain to Tony Robbins that reads, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” The same is true for the creative process. If you try and write in a site where you’ve had blockage in the past, you may begin to associate the spot with the blockage, and instead of finding new ideas you’ll be more akin to dwelling on your past inabilities. Often all it takes is a change of scenery to start the creativity flowing. Taking a lap, sitting elsewhere, putting up a new poster, even placing crayons on your desk can help. The brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised; using different processes to come up with creative ideas will help you better reap results. Novel experiences and sights help increase your brain’s flexibility so that it becomes easier to flex in the future.
There will be times where we just cannot get our mind to function laterally. There are ways, however, to turn your brain to an off-road instead of waiting aimlessly in a traffic jam. (Again with the metaphors.) Tapping into your brain’s creative side involves changing up your usual method of brainstorming, and it can be as simple as shifting locations. Keeping an open mind about your abilities is key–you’ll be less inclined to shut down if you believe you have the capacity to open up.
Next topic: learning to take your own advice.
To our readers: what tactics do you use to help you overcome a creativity block?
The Monar Staff is holding our weekly Presentation Skills workshop again today. Here’s a break from organizational-educational content:
What did Emerson, Thoreau, Coleridge, and Salinger do that we in the 21st century absolutely cannot (besides that whole “literary masterpieces” thing)? They all had a distinct willingness to disconnect from the people around them, a readiness to discard their social networks in order to attain some higher purpose. For those that get on their soapboxes about people being glued to their iPods, iPads, iPhones these days, it seems ironic that it never is just “i”–we feel the need to be connected to someone or something almost all the time. We find cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world is akin to a limb amputation. Not all solitude is good, however. Solitary confinement is for the criminally insane, for example. And it’s not called “being really good at solitaire;” it’s called “demonstrating antisocial tendencies.” Human beings are social creatures, and it’s not our fault that technology has just made it easier to behave as such.
In this day and age, too, our social networks may be our most important resource. Discarding them is almost foolish and short-sighted. As a college senior who will soon be vying for jobs along with the rest of the class of 2011, you can bet your bottom dollar that I will harness my human capital so that the sun may come out tomorrow. Companies hold networking events purely to expand a professional’s social network. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were all created for the expressed purpose of keeping in touch, both actively and subversively. Being connected is not only comforting, it’s helpful. As enlightening as transcendentalism may appear, trading social media for social isolation doesn’t have the same appeal as it did some 150 odd years ago.
The question is–why are our social networks so important, and how does social media help us realize the full potential of our networks?
The reason why social media is so important to our social networks is because it allows us to foster our weak ties. Weak ties within our social networks are those people that perhaps we’ve met once or twice but don’t keep in regular contact with. They can be someone that perhaps we were close with before they moved, or someone we at one time worked with until they–or we–switched jobs. While we do have a social connection with them, they are not as strong as the connections we hold with people we see or talk to on a regular basis. Hence, “weak.” Before sites like Facebook, once these people relocated, we would have no way of keeping in touch with them save calling (GASP) or even scarier…WRITING A LETTER. Even that could be thwarted if they move again and fail to update contact information. Ultimately, though, we wouldn’t expend that kind of energy trying to contact someone we’d only met once.
But what happens when you move from Chicago to New York and all of your strong ties are from the same place you are? What happens when you want to get a new job but all of your closest connections are in the same industry? Enter Mark Granovetter and his theory of the strength of weak ties. Our weak ties tend to give us better access to novel information. Friends within your social network tend to be friends with other people in your network, and so if you were to turn to them for connections, they are likely to refer you to someone you already know. Weak ties, in contrast, link you to new people. They may know of someone in New York looking for a sublettor. They may know of someone to contact career-wise that you could not have contacted on your own.
Social media sites allow you to keep abreast of the information on your weak ties, and, if need be, convert them to strong ones. To refer back to that hypothetical time you were about to New York, your college roommate–the one you didn’t keep in close touch with–just so happens to live in the Big Apple. How do you know this? Facebook. How do you contact him about your impending move? Facebook. Guess what? You find out he needs a roommate through his posting on the Facebook Marketplace. Even better–his best friend ends up being the most stunning, fantastic human being on the planet, and she gets you a stellar job. You instantly fall in love, get married. Through a guy you hadn’t actively spoken to for the past two years, you now have a place to live, East-coast contacts, a job, and a spouse. This is not a dramatization. It could happen. And Facebook can make it happen. Invite Mark Zuckerberg to your wedding.
All jesting aside, our social networks are of paramount importance. By using those people that perhaps aren’t closest to us, we can harness the true potential of the connections we hold. Social media allows weak ties to keep from slipping into oblivion and forcing us to make an uncomfortable phone call asking for help or advice from someone we’ve only met once. Transcendentalists may have had a point in the 1800s, but they also only had the telegraph. So the times have a’changed.
I’m willing to admit that I may be a bit short-sighted…maybe the transcendentalists knew something about the relative merit of befriending squirrels that we have yet to understand.
To our readers: what do you think are the benefits of social media? How do you use your social networks to attain your personal and professional goals?
