Hootsuite Management Platform

              I didn’t know much about how tracking your social media worked before this blog post. It is actually very beneficial for people who put it to use. Businesses would benefit from using a management platform to improve their business needs. It can provide information as simple to where the person is, how many people viewed your page, to what their age is, what their gender is, how often they use a key word, etc. According to Hootsuite a management platform they give us 10 reasons how it could benefit a company. The blog mentions how it is a lot more effective in targeting who is involved with your product, better known as the target audience. I didn’t know that it would even include the age and gender of each person. Hootsuite then breaks it up into graphs and charts so it’s easier to read. It helps you find new customers based off of tweets and other social media posts. Depending on your industry you can focus in on the key words and figure out how you can reach out to these people. Which would be great for promoting your products and business. It also helps increase your ranking and the traffic of your website.

                I also found another list of 7 benefits that Hootsuite will provide and make monitoring social media easier. They were similar to the list of 10. However, there were a few different ones as well. It was more in detail, and provided a better explanation in my opinion.

Benefit 1: Monitor Multiple Social Media Streams in One Place. You can access all of your social media accounts via Hootsuite. That makes it more convenient for you so you don’t have to bounce around pasting your post from another site into the new one.

Benefit 2: You can schedule your posts in advance. You can set it to where you make a post when the social media platform has the most traffic. This will ensure that people actually see your post. This is great for spreading the word.

Benefit 3: The data is set up so it’s simple to view. It gives you an in depth view on how your social media is being viewed and rated.

Benefit 4: The Hootlet plug-in makes it so you can share information more easily. You simply click the button and instantly all of your followers will see the information you wanted to share. It doesn’t matter what social media you were on it will share it to all of them.

Benefit 5: Social media listening. Hootsuite tracks key phrases and notices what others are saying to make it easier for you to gain new customers and reach out to the needs of others.

Benefit 6: Makes it so you can manage customer service more efficiently. It alerts you whenever someone makes a comment, and it puts all of the comments in one place no matter what social media platform they left the comment on. So that will save you time from going back and forth between social media sites.

Benefit 7: Team collaboration makes it easier so you can work on what is going on as a team. It alerts your team members so you know what is being addressed and what is not. You can edit what your team members say as well. This benefit helps you stay on top of things, but not all the tasks fall on you.

All of these are great benefits to using Hootsuite. It gave me more knowledge about what Hootsuite really is, and how beneficial it can be to businesses and even personal accounts. I would use this in the future. It cuts out a lot of time and inconvenience from switching back and forth between platforms. You can manage them all in one place!

Organizational Uses

               Growing up I have always thought that using social media during work was unacceptable. I still remember my first job out of high school when social media started to become a big thing. It had already been around for a while. However, it was not as popular as it is today. During the interview, and job description it mentioned that I could not be on any social media platforms while clocked in. I never knew how effective social media could be for companies and their employee’s. Of course, being a teenager I was a little reluctant and on slow days I would check out social media. I knew that a lot of people wasted time on it, myself included. However, it could be beneficial for companies to communicate with their employees via social media.

                I came across an article emphasizing why social media is important in communicating with your employees. According to this article nearly half of all the companies in the U.S. still ban the use of social media while on the job. The interesting thing is that the majority of top 100 companies to work for allow it. Now, that’s saying something about how effective social media can be to the business and the employees. It may or may not have anything to do with being able to use social media platforms during work, but the majority of their employees would recommend working there. I won’t go over all of the points just the few that stood out. They mention that it “unleash creativity, diverse thinking and innovation”. They can have a discussion with every person in the company group at the same time. They can throw out ideas that will help improve the business. I thought that was a great idea. I have yet worked for a company that does that. This will get everyone involved in the “vision”. I believe it would unite everyone in the company and everyone would feel like they are benefitting the company in some way.

                I also liked the point that they mentioned about making the information mobile. That makes it accessible at any time. You could be sleeping, and then wake up in the middle of the night and make a post via social media of this great idea. Many people would forget it by the time they get to work the next day. However, the majority of people sleep close to their phone or tablet. This makes it easier to keep people up to date no matter where they are. They could be on the other side of the world and chime in on important work conversations. It makes work accessible at any time, or place.

                Another article I read talked about how social media has impacted an organizations structure and behavior. A point that stood out was when they gave an example of Southwest Airlines. They have a one seat policy, and the pilot asked this passenger if he would “de-embark” the plane. Little did they know the passenger was a famous writer with millions of followers. The passenger went to social media and explained the situation and how he felt. The airline responded quickly. I believe it was about 8 hours? They explained the policy and why they have it. They also explained that they were sorry and it showed they cared about this persons business. Would it have been that quick if it was not a famous writer? Who knows, but they showed that they cared about their business and it showed all of the followers of this famous writer that Southwest Airlines care about what goes on in the plane, and about their customer’s satisfaction.

                That is a company’s worst fear is to see a bad review on social media. They will do whatever they can to fix the problem, and gain a customer loyalty again. With social media everything is public and anybody can view these reviews unless it is a private message. So this is beneficial for customers and businesses to keep up with how they feel and how the business can improve. Businesses will do anything to keep their customers happy and social media keeps them on their toes, and helps them know what they can improve.

Interaction on the Cloud

              This was an interesting and entertaining experience. I have never had an experience like this before this one. I posted a few tweets on twitter posing a question and then tagging an acquaintance to see if they had an opinion about the subject. Only a few people interacted with the question, and it was interesting to see their point of view. The person I tagged in one of the posts didn’t respond, so that was unfortunate. I had no control over that so I started looking to see what caught people’s attention.

                One question I remember that caught people’s attention was a question about what’s better a cat or a dog and why? This one was the most popular question that I saw in the hour that I was actively posing and answering questions on twitter. Why did this one get so much attention? Is this something people were passionate about at that moment in time? That could possibly be the case. It was late in the evening and people have been gone all day and miss their cat or dog or even both. This topic took over many other more “important” questions such as topics about the presidential election. I finally came to the conclusion that it was more entertaining. Posting your opinion about cats and dogs is a lot more entertaining. You find funny pictures and quotes and that just makes the next person want to find something to top the last post. This would have been a lot different if everyone was back at their own place or even doing it alone. It would still be entertaining, but you wouldn’t hear or know if the people reading your post were enjoying it as much as you were.

                Social media nowadays is more for entertainment than anything else. Yes, it is good for collecting new information and an instant update on what’s going on in the world. This experience made me realize how it is more for entertainment. The more tags/handles you use, the more people who are interested in that topic will join in on the conversation. It was interesting to see how quick something can go up in popularity, and also how quick it will go down. Some tweets that are being followed by many people will get skipped or won’t grab anyone’s interest. We don’t have any control over that. All we can do is ask questions and hope they catch someone else’s attention. If not you just move on to the next question or the question about cats and dogs.

                This was an interesting experiment, and it was beneficial to see how handles and hashtags can connect the world just by a press of a button!

Here is a link to the site of all the questions posed if you're interested:

https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23socmeddiscuss

Online Reputation: Max Benson

          Have you ever thought about the information that is on the internet about yourself that people can find? What is your “image” on the internet? How much information about your personal life do people have access to? Do I share my name with anyone in the world? And if so, how many? There are so many different questions you could ask yourself about the information you can find online. While doing the research you could possibly find things you didn’t know about yourself. Of course, there is that possibility that it isn’t you but it’s tied to your name somehow. We need to know what’s out there so we can correct things and improve our online image.

                               

Max Benson is a student at Utah State University. I knew that without a little “online stalking”. He is actually friends with a lot of my friends. However, I have never talked to him. He is pretty good friends with some of my family that lives in Hyde Park, Utah. I would have never known that if it wasn’t for this project in one of my classes. I had to mention this was for a class so I didn’t come off as a creeper. However, we all know we have “stalked” someone online before. Maybe, not to this extent but, we have looked up someone we didn’t know to get to know them a little better. Anyways, back to writing about Max.

Max Benson is studying Marketing and currently part of the Society of International Business and Economic Development. He is a Peer Advisor as well. You can tell he is very involved in school activities. He is originally from Oregon, and is an Oregon University fan.

Max enjoys running. He ran cross country in High School for Sky View High School in Smithfield Utah. His senior year he ran at the Murray Invitational Max ran the 5,000 Meters in 21 minutes 39.5 seconds. Max seems to be in-shape and enjoys fitness. Running 5,000 meters for any reason does not appeal to many people.

 

           Max seems to be an adventurous person. He has many photos of him out and about in the woods, by a river, and he shows his love of photography. He gets pretty creative with his pictures and selfies. He enjoys doughnuts, and actually created a picture of him with a doughnut. It was pretty funny as you go back a little through his Facebook and Instagram you see that there is an “inside joke” or meaning with this doughnut. Or maybe he really enjoys doughnuts? You can see that a lot of thought went into this picture. He bought a shirt with doughnuts on it a little before this picture was taken. He then posts this masterpiece of a picture with him posing with a doughnut.

He worked at the Playmill Theatre from April 2013- December 2013. This made me think more about him being adventurous. It is nerve racking to be in front of hundreds of people performing. Max seems to enjoy the “rush” of performing live, and being put into uncomfortable situations. This shows that he is creative as well. Along with his picture taking he enjoys creating new things on the stage.

Max is involved with the University and is always promoting new ideas, clubs, and events going on with the school. Is this part of his job experience or is it something he enjoys to do? Like as in a hobby?  He ran for Mr. USU, and for Mr. Congeniality. He won Mr. Congeniality, which proves he is well liked by his peers. He mentions that he was grateful for that experience, and mentions everyone who was involved. So you see that he really cares for others, and that stands out for a lot of people! He seems to be very optimistic and courageous. It takes a lot of courage to do some of the thing Max has done with his theatre career and his competitions at his school. Overall, I can say that Max seems like a great friend, and people enjoy being around him.