"Do you've Facebook?"
"Yes, naturally. However i don't think you will discover me, with there being too many people that have the same name as me. Try searching with my surname also."
"Hey, you celebrated your birthday in K-Box, right? I saw the photos within your Facebook."
"Bro, I saw your comments in regards to the YouTube video that I've posted during my blog. I'm happy that you're also deeply moved by the 'Dancing Peacock Man' at the same time."
Social media or "social networking" has almost get involved with our everyday life and being tossed around over the past number of years. It is just like every other media like newspaper, television and radio however it is excess of pretty much sharing information and concepts. Social network tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Blogs have facilitated creation and exchange of ideas so quickly and widely compared to the conventional media. The strength of define and control a product is shifting from corporations and institutions to the people and communities. It is no longer for the 5Cs (e.g. condominium, charge cards and car) that Singaporeans once brought up. Today, it is about the fresh new Cs: creativity, communication, connection, creation (of recent ideas and items), community (of shared interests), collaboration and (changing the sport of) competition.
In January 2010, InSites Consulting has conducted a web based survey with 2,884 consumers from over 14 countries between the ages of 18 to 55 years of age on online community. Over 90% of participants know at least 1 online community site and 72% of participants are folks a minimum of 1 online community site. For the average, people have about 195 friends and they join two times a day to social networks. However, 55% from the users cannot access their online community websites at the office. In the past, very few adults were able to make more than 500 friends, though social networking, even a child or teenager could possibly get to learn greater than 500 folks several days by only clicking a button. Social websites has devalued the original concise explaination "friend" where this means trust, support, compatible values, etc. Although we to learn lots more people, we aren't capable to build strong bond with the people whom we met as our available time is fixed. Hence, it has an upcoming social trend of people with wider social circles, but weaker ties (people we don't know perfectly but who impart us with useful information and concepts). social networks
Social websites also influences people's buying behaviours. Digital Influence Group reported that 91% of the people say testimonials are the #1 assist to buying decisions and 87% trust a friend's recommendation over critic's review. It really is thrice prone to trust peer opinions over advertising for selecting decisions. 1 word-of-mouth conversation has an impact of 200 TV ads. Using the prevalence usage of social media, there is numerous news related to it from the most viewed YouTube video on "Armless pianist wins 'China's Got Talent'" to Web-assisted suicide cases (e.g. New Jersey student who killed himself after video of him in a sexual encounter with another man was posted online). Thus, does social media make us better or worse off like a society?
Positive results of Social networking
Besides having chance to know a number of people inside a without headaches way, social media also helped teenagers who have social or physical mobility restrictions to develop and look after relationships using families and friends. Children who go overseas to analyze could stay in meaningful experience of their parents. Into a greater extend, there exists anecdotal evidence positive outcomes from all of these technologies.
In 2008, President-elected Obama won the election over the effective using social media marketing to succeed in numerous audience or voters. The Obama campaign had generated and distributed a large amount of contents and messages across email, SMS, social websites platforms and their websites. Obama with his fantastic campaign team fully understood the essential social need that shares - the necessity of being "who we are". Therefore, the campaign sent the content as "Because It's really down to YOU" and chose the right type of media in order to connect with normal folks, require actions and build community for any social movement. They encouraged citizens to share with you their voices, hold discussion parties in houses and run their unique campaign meetings. It truly changed the delivery of political message.
Obama campaign had made 5 million "friends" on a lot more than 15 social network sites (3 million friends on Facebook itself) and posted nearly 2,000 YouTube videos that have been watched over 80 million times. At its peak, the website, MyBarackObama.com, had 8.5 million monthly visitors and produced 400,000 websites. To make sure their contents were found by people, the Obama campaign spent $3.5 million on Google search in October alone, $600,000 on Advertising.com, $467,000 on Facebook in 2008, etc. Currently, Obama's Twitter account has near to 6 000 0000 followers.
Really, as soon as the earthquake happened in Haiti, many of the official communication lines were down. Other world was not capable to keep the full picture with the situation there. To facilitate the sharing of information making up for your lack of information, social media marketing started in very handy to report what is the news regarding the affected area on what happened as well as what help was needed. Tweets from lots of people provided an amazing summary of the ongoing events from the earthquake. BBC covered the event by combining tweets in the work of its reporter Matthew Price in Port-au-Prince in the ground. Guardian's live blog also used social media alongside the information from other news organisations to report about the rescue mission.
It has been 2 yrs since CNN officially launched iReport being a section of its website where individuals can upload video material, with contact info. In the Haiti crisis, CNN had published a selection of social networking material but not all the materials were verified. The editorial staff would vet the reports from the citizen journalists and labeled them differently in comparison with unverified contents. On Facebook, a group, named "Earthquake Haiti", was formed to demonstrate support and share updates and news. It had more than 14,000 members and several users even pleaded for assistance on the injured Haitians in the group. Using email, Twitter and social networks like Facebook, a huge number of volunteers in Project Ushahidi could map reports sent by individuals from Haiti.
Essentially the most impressive section of the social media's influence on Haiti will be the charity text-message donations that soared to over $10 million for your victims in Haiti. People interested in helping the victims should text, tweet and publicize their support using various social networking sites. The worldwide Philanthropy Group had also started a campaign to question wealthy people and celebrities, like Ben Stiller and John Legend to work with Twitter to encourage others to give to UNICEF. An aid worker, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, allowed counsel from other aid workers and donors to post on her blog regarding to choosing which charitable organisations to support. For the time being, donors were asking questions in Twitter, Facebook and blogs regarding their donations and endorsements of these favourite charities. After every crisis, the social websites for social cause becomes a more potent medium to spread the word.
Unwanted effects of Social networking
There will always be two sides of the coin. Social media is just a tool or mean for those to make use of. Will still be around a gamers regarding how to employ this tool (as being a knife, can help you to cut food or hurt others). Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center conducted research on "The Way forward for Online Socializing" through the highly engaged, diverse list of respondents with an online, opt-in survey consisted of 895 technology stakeholders and critics. The negative effects presented from the respondents included time spent online robs time from important face-to-face relationships; the net fosters mostly shallow relationships; the act of leveraging the world wide web to get familiar with social connection exposes personal information; the internet allows people to silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; as well as the internet will be employed to engender intolerance.
Some respondents also highlighted there is going to be continuing development of newer and more effective psychological and medical syndromes that will be "variations of depression brought on by having less meaningful quality relationships", along with a "new world society". The term, "Social Networking", has begun to deceive a gamers to think they are social creatures. As an illustration, spending a couple of hours using Farmville and chatting with friends concurrently will not convert into social skills. People become dependent on we have and end up forgetting how you can socialise in face-to-face context. The online personality of your person may be distinct from his/her offline character, causing chaos once the two personalities meet. It's apparent in online dating sites if the couple gets together in face-to-face initially. Their written profiles usually do not clearly represent their real-life characters. It really is more enticing for folks to type something which others need to hear than saying the reality.
Apart from the "friendship", creators of social media sites and users redefine the word, "privacy" in the Internet at the same time. The challenge in data privacy is always to work together while protecting personally identifiable information. Nearly every information posted on social network sites is permanent. Whenever someone posts pictures or videos on the internet, it is viral. If the user deletes a video from his/her social media, someone may have kept it after which posted it onto other sites like YouTube already. People post photographs and videos on social network sites without thinking as well as the files can reappear at possible time. In 2008, a youtube video of a group of ACJC students hazing a girl student in class to be with her birthday was circulated and another video of a SCDF recruit being "welcomed" (was hosed with water and tarred with shoe polish) with a local fire station made its way online.
Much news may be reported about online privacy breach in Facebook and Facebook is continually revising their privacy and changing their privacy controls for your users. Interestingly, even when users delete their private information and deactivate their Facebook account, Facebook will still keep that information and can carry on using it for data mining. A reporter asked whether the data will at least be anonymized. The Facebook representative declined to comment.
Inside the corporate world, human resource managers have access to Facebook or MySpace to access learn about a candidate's true colours, specially when job seekers usually do not set their profiles to non-public. Reports have found that nearly half of employers have rejected a potential worker after finding incriminating material on his or her Facebook pages. Some employers in addition have checked the candidates' online details in Facebook pages to see if they are lying about their qualifications. Nowadays, younger generations have a very complete disregard for own privacy, opening doors to unwelcome predators or stalkers.