Emerging Media

So, if you are someone like me who does not have cable you may have seen the show 'New Girl'. It is one of my favorite shows to re-watch multiple times because it never stops being funny. If you have seen it then you know exactly what my title is referring to from New Girl. If you have not seen it I will give a short explanation: the character Schmidt grows through a rough break-up and during this a woman breaks his... man parts, we will say. When he can take the cast off he wants to "re-launch" his personal brand to "danger". He is a marketing professional, so he holds a launch party with different elements of "danger". From that we are going to roll right into how branding of a blog and online reputations can make or break a company. Another real-world example of how important online reputations can be is the current climate of YouTube beauty gurus. There is a vlogger named Jeffree Star who in the past was a musician and in present day...

Have you heard the word “viral” used when talking about videos? Unless you live inside of a cave on the side of a mountain (my personal dream honestly) or have been in a coma for 10 years your answer is “yes”. If the situation is that you were in a coma for 10 years, then welcome to 2018: everything is terrible, and the Earth is dying. Anyways… I am going to give some examples of things that have gone viral in the last few years, but I am only going to provide one of two words about it. Here we go: Double rainbow, Covfefe, Friday music video, Boaty McBoatface (if you are not into UK news then you may not get that one), Tide pods, and I am sure there are plenty more I could name. Businesses use crowdsourcing, feedback from their customers, to get an idea of what their consumers, or “followers”, want to see from them as an organization/business. Crowdsourcing is when a company takes the “power of the crowd” or the opinions of their consumers into consideration when creating a new pr...

We live in a loud world. News stations with their constant stream of unfortunate events, social media throwing the opinions of your friends and loved ones in your face, and smartphones that keep you trapped in the digital world. Everyone has an opinion about everything and they need everyone else to hear what they have to say. When in reality, their opinion is exactly that – an opinion. An opinion is not fact, it is not research, and it is not credible no matter the medium because opinions are influenced YOU. I believe that now more than ever people should be doing their research about a subject before spouting off figures they saw in an article on The Onion. We have talked about how an attention-grabbing headline is very important in modern day journalism but sometimes that catchy headline can lead to the downfall of a lazy reader. People click “share” on Facebook without even opening the article or looking at the source. I have a friend who shared something on Facebook the other da...

Hello and I hope all of you lovely people had a great Labor Day. This week was an exploration into social media for both business and personal purposes and how the two can intermingle. On a personal level I am not very active on social media, I stick to Facebook and Instagram. But on a professional level I have always had to be very active on social media. When I worked as a Relay for Life manager I was constantly on social media accounts for each event. Whether it was Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, or some others means of internet socializing it was my job to make sure I was constantly interacting with people who followed those pages. Although the American Cancer Society is a huge organization it does not follow in the footsteps of companies like the Wall Street Journal, who have bots manning their smaller social media accounts. The only accounts providing "real" human interaction are their major Twitter accounts like WSJ and WSJD according to an article from Neima...

Here’s a thought: if the invention of the cellphone was revolutionary then how would the invention of the smartphone be classified? This week I am back online to talk about how the rise of the smartphone has affected how we do business. Think back to a time before smartphones, even before laptops and tablets, now. If you were waiting for a “make it or break it” message and had to check your email, what were your options? It was not a possibility to check it on the go at that time. You would have to wait until you were somewhere with access to a computer and then check it at that time. An interesting fact about my family is that my parents were some of the first people to form an eBay account when the website started. At that point computers were not even hugely popular and our internet was dial-up so if you were on the phone you could not use the internet and vice versa. As the internet evolved eBay evolved with it causing my parents to adjust along wit...