Finals Week

Even though finals are still a week away, the social media posts about them are here.  People who claim to be studying for the big exams a lot of times end up checking Facebook and Twitter real quick as a small break.  This small break turns into them complaining about how many hours they are spending in the library and how much their lives suck.  Well, here's a newsflash for them.  If they got their studying done without going online to check your Facebook or Twitter, which everyone knows turns into a lot longer than they intend to they would not be their as long.

Small Business Social Media

One of my friends from back home and his father have decided to take an old run down gym and turn it into a new Self - Defense Training gym.  They, along with all of our friends are advertising this new business through Facebook and Twitter.  I think this is a great way to make this gym more popular especially because a lot of us are in college so we would not see the local fliers advertising the new gym.  Chances are, the majority of the clients they are looking for would be kids, teenagers, and young adults.  These also make up the majority of people who actively use social media sites so this would help spread the news for this gym to the right people.

4/20/12 Blog Post

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter plan on taking a larger role in this years Olympic Games.  Many of the top competing athletes such as Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and Roger Federer are all people who use Facebook or Twitter and have "likes" or "followers" in the tens of millions.  Twitter and Facebook also plan on having contests for their followers and supporters with many prizes for the people tuned into the Olympic games.  It seems that nowadays their is no escaping social media.  No matter what the event, there will be people tweeting or posting something about it, and this is how news is getting spread so quickly.  Instead of watching ESPN to wait for the Olympic highlights that were might have missed, all one needs to do is sign onto Twitter or Facebook and click a posted link or read a tweet and he/she can get the same information without waiting at all.

Post for 4/13/12

As many of you may know, many employers look as the potential employees Facebook page before officially hiring them.  Some may consider this an invasion of privacy, other think it's perfectly normal.  I don't see anything wrong with them viewing your page to see what type of person you are, but when they ask for your password that is where I draw the line.  Employers are starting to ask for passwords so they can literally go through anything they want, including private messages, personal conversations and things like that.  At first I didn't even believe it when I heard they were doing that because that is a complete invasion of privacy.  There is nothing wrong with them looking at your page, isn't that what it is there for to begin with? So that others can see what you post, what pictures you upload...ect? If you don't want people seeing this stuff you can very easily make it more private.  But the fact that they are asking for complete control over your profile is out of hand.  It is none of their business to go through your personal stuff like that and the more people let them have their passwords, the longer this is going to go on for.

Social Media for Money??

The other day my dad was telling me about how there's a page on Facebook, and a Twitter account in which you sign up and give them some information, and then recruit people to sign up under your account and those people will receive text messages sent to their phone.  The more people you get, the more text messages are sent out, and you end up getting paid a certain amount per text (I believe it was about 10 cents).  This doesn't seem like a whole lot of money, but if you get a good number of people under your account, there is actually some money to be made.  This may sound like a scam, but my dad's good friend is actually doing it and he said he's making about 1000 dollars a month.  This certainly isn't like winning the lottery, but I'd be pretty happy with an extra 1000 bucks per month in my wallet.  Social media has evolved to the point to where you can sign up with something such as Facebook or Twitter and start to earn money with barely any work needed.  It's gone from a few posts here and there, maybe putting up pictures and videos, to now people making accounts for a business set up through a Social Media site and make money.

Social Media vs. schoolwork

Is social media in regards to Twitter and Facebook mostly, affecting our schoolwork?  Has it made us worse at writing?  I don't think it has.  Some might argue that all the shorthand we tend to use while texting, tweeting, or posting on social media sites may affect our work and the way we write in a negative way.  If anything, I think it just made us lazier.  For me at least, I know can still write and spell just as good as I used to before using these sites.  When I use the shorthand phrases, such as "g2g" or "brb" it's simply a lazy thing for me.  It's much quicker to just type three letters versus typing out the whole sentence.  When it comes to schoolwork I don't really find myself making the same errors that I do when I post things on social media sites.  I know of some people that do make these same errors such as using "u" instead of "you" but I feel that that is just a sign on poor proofreading, or not proofreading at all.  If they simply read over what they just wrote I bet they would catch their mistake 99% of the time.  Overall, I don't feel that social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter have influenced my writing in such a negative way that it affects my schoolwork and the way I write in a proper way.

Kony Explosion

Recently, all over Facebook and Twitter all I see are people "retweeting" and posting links about Kony.  They are trying to get his name out there to show the world what bad things he is doing and how he needs to be stopped, but along with that some people also write about how much they hate him and what a horrible person he is.  I'm not saying he is right with what he is doing because it's pretty clear he is not, but what I am saying is that these people hear about this guy for one day and all of the sudden act like they have hated him for their entire life.  If it was not for social media in the first place they would have never heard about him, so I do not understand how they can act like they hated this person for so long.  He supposedly has been doing these terrible acts for atleast 8 years now, and the question I ask to these people who feel so strongly about him is: Where were you last year, or last week, or even 3 days ago before no one posted or tweeted about Kony?  If it wasn't for Twitter or Facebook you most likely would have never even heard about him to begin with.  Once again to clarify things, if what I have read and seen online is correct, I am 100% against what he is and has been doing.  This blog is just about how social media can cause a certain act or person to become so famous in as little as a day or two and make so many people feel "so strongly" about it.