Users of the world, unite! Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media

After reading the assigned reading for week 1, I thought I would write a brief overview of my thoughts on the reading about the challenges and opportunities of social media.

There was one statement made in the reading 'Today everything is about Social Media'. This statement could not be more true. Following reading this piece you see how social media is element in almost everyone's life. From college student who use a blog to track there academic progress, or even Facebook for social purposes and also college work, From an organisation who use social media in more ways than one from using it as marketing platform for example the movie Fred Claus created their own Facebook page to create some media buzz for the release of the movie, or they use it as a social forum, for instance Nokia have an internal wiki which updates employees on various project status.

We really see the full extent to the beneficial use of social media, especially for companies it is a high impact and low cost media coverage , which seem to be very popular recently. In this reading they have included ten tips for companies using social media for their firm. They are useful simple tips, yet very insightful , for example ensure activity alignment, companies must ensure that if they are using various social media applications such as twitter and Facebook, the information on these pages must be the same. Communication between company and consumer is so important and it must be clear, the company must eliminate any uncertainty.

Yet there is downfalls with social media, you must be careful not to spread your wings to far. There is constantly new social media applications being introduce, the company must choose one app and a specific target and focus on that. They should want to be the best on that app rather that have bad quality information on numerous apps. Another challenge of social media is in most cases is that it is very accessible from employees have access to social media pages and consumers have a place to express there thoughts.Companies must ensure they are constantly keeping track of the credibility of their social media devices.

Here an attached a link to the reading
http://michaelhaenlein.com/Publications/Kaplan,%20Andreas%20-%20Users%20of%20the%20world,%20unite.pdf

A small reflection..

As we have just finished the two week semester I would like to discuss the benefits I have seen in my knowledge of social media over the past semester.

Before I took this elective, I would have said that I would have had an average knowledge of different social media outlets from Facebook, twitter and instagram. Yet this three mention are just the standard websites. I was amazed to discover that there is actually so much more out there.

Pinterest- This an online site to like and share different things you have an interest but also see what other people are posting . I have found some really interesting things on this website from different make-up ideas, nail ideas and cooking recipes. It has really been useful there has been so much accessible information on it.

Google Maps- Even though this is such a commonly used thing I never knew how to design and create an map. As I am travelling this summer along the west coast of america, when I finish my exams, I plan to create a map for our journey. I intend to include images and locations of different hotels that we plan on staying in.

Diigo-  Yet the social media device I have found most helpful is Diigo. As I am a final year student,I have an endless amount of readings. As I like to print my readings out and highlight them it was becoming infeasible to print them all with the load I had. I started then saving all my files in pdf form so I could work in that way but this was starting to take up my memory. After we had the elab on Diigo, I have been using this website to save, bookmark and highlight all my readings. It has been so useful. I am able to group my readings by modules, I am able to bookmark readings that I find interesting and most importantly to me, I am able to highlight readings. All this useful tools will stand to be in the next coming weeks.

Not only have I found out about more websites to use but also, I have gained a greater knowledge on privacy issues. Before taking this lecture I would have known to be careful about what I post up online. Yet I never would have thought not to post a passport like photo online incase of fraud. On each website we use there are different privacy settings that we should all check before setting up our page, even on blogger.com we can see who has access to our page or not.

I know the above is a small minority of what else is out there, but so far the above have been so useful to me and cant wait to explore more.

Flickr Week 8

As the time is flying by this semester, it is great to see things in the early weeks still appearing now. Today's e-lab was all about Flickr, from being on social media websites I had seen the icon but never knew exactly what it was. Flickr is an image and video platform page, where people can go on and look at each others images and collections. I was actually surprised when reading this because I actually collect a lot of photos and love doing scrap books. This useful on-line tool will help keep all my photos together and I will be able to access them anywhere as long as I have WiFi.

So quite easy and simple to follow, I set up my yahoo account and then I signed into Flickr. I selected photos from a Basketball Trip, as you can see in the first photo. I then described each photo and also added in different tags that I wanted to include for each photo which is shown in the second image below. Following that I uploaded the photos and also shared an image on my Pinterest Account, here is a link to that image  https://www.pinterest.com/pin/293508100691543675/ .

It is great that you can combine websites together from Flickr to Pinterest. Another aspect that I will find very useful with Flickr is being able to store my images online, as I do love to collect and take phots this is a great storage option. It will also allow me to be able to access my photos from any where and from any computer assuming I have WiFi.

Mash Up Week 7

This week in our face to face tutorial we learned how to create a map.This to me was very interesting as I use the maps app on my phone daily and never once thought about how it was created. Creating this map also showed us the collaboration on two sets of data it was a mash up. This was putting theory from this weeks lecture into practice. We had data on excel from the book Heritage Trees of Ireland and then we combined this with Google maps so we could actually see the locations of all these heritage trees. The process of making the map was quite simple, thanks to the step by step guides. Firstly we created our map then we made a layer based on the Oak heritage trees of Ireland, this appear on the map after the data was downloaded.

Then following that we downloaded more data , which then also appeared on the map but with this data we learned how to change the style of the data. So to distinguish between the different types of data we changed the icon and the colour, to make the difference more visible to the user.

Then finally we were able to left click on the different icons on the map and see the unique data each icon had,such as the place, the county and the species.

I have embedded my map to this post. I hope in the future I will be able to create a more detailed map.