Blog 4: Mashable.com

How many times have you bee Rickrolled? Its happend to me quite a bit. Rickrolling is when someone is tricked into opening up Rick Astley's music video for "Never gonna give you up." You think you're going to watch the video you clicked on, but really you're about to be rickrolled. I was reading on Mashable.com that you are no longer able to get the original Rick Astley video anymore because of copywriting issues. Will it still be a true Rickroll if it's not the original music video? What do you think?
http://www.mashable.com/2010/02/24/they-killed-rickroll/

Another article I found on Mashable.com talked about creating a Facebook landing page for your business. Social media networking websites are becoming increasingly popular these days and they can be very powerful sites to advertise on. All types of businesses are creating their own Facebook pages and then adding as many fans as they can to increase awareness of their business. Take Best Buy for example. They have their very own Facebook page and if other Facebook users like shopping at Best Buy, they add them as their friend. There are many other ways for businesses to advertise on these websites, but that's just one way that mashable.com talked about.
http://www.mashable.com/2010/02/22/build-facebook-landing-page/


The last article I read on Mashable.com talks about how much time we spend on Facebook. Everyone knows that Facebook is a timesink, but did you know that on average people spend more time on Facebook than they do on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon combined? The average Facebook user spends 421 minutes per month on Facebook. That's 14 minutes a day. I actually thought it should be more than that. I see people on Facebook for longer than 14 minutes during class each day. Either way, Facebook is where the majority of people spend their time on the internet. Interesting.
http://www.mashable.com/2010/02/16/facebook-nielsen-stats/

Blog 3: Case study analysis summary

The case study that I chose to write my paper on was the Skittles Twitter campaign. Basically Skittles thought it would be a good idea to completely transform their website's homepage into a live Twitter feed. They made it so that every time someone tweeted the word "Skittles" anywhere in Twitter, that sentence would show up on the Skittles website on their Twitter feed. This sounded like a good idea at the time, but they soon realized that people were using the word Skittles in profane sentences, and those sentences were showing up on their website. Many people think that they failed with their campaign because the profanity became too overwhelming and they had to take the Twitter feed off of their website. I think that it was somewhat successful though, because it got people talking about Skittles. I think it was a good use of social media because at the time they started the campaign Twitter was the #3 most visited social media networking website with over 54 million visitors every month. Whether it was a good idea or a bad idea the saying still remains. "Any press is good press."

Here are some links that help explain exactly what happend.

http://www.badidea.co.uk/2009/03/skittles-twitter-campaign-turns-into-potty-mouthed-echo-chamber/

http://www.businessweek.com (type in Skittles in the search bar)

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com (type in Skittles in the search bar)

Social Media commentary

I recently found a story about social media on the local news website. Milwaukee legislator Josh Zepnick got into a little trouble after he updated his Facebook status that talked about rising local health insurance costs, and blamed it on Aurora Health Care. Aurora Health Care found out about it and was furious. They wrote Josh a 3 page single spaced paper explaining that his status update was wrong. I thought this story was interesting because it just goes to show how careful people need to be when they post things online. With many different social media tools out there today such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, you never know who is going to read your posts and who will be offended by it. By Josh posting that on his status it was the same as if he would have called every one of his friends on the phone and told them that Aurora Health Care was to blame for rising health insurance. These sites are powerful tools, so people need to be careful what they say on them.

Below is a link to the story.

http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/83299602.html