I stumbled on to something interesting the other day. I was exploring tweets related to New York City and New Yorkers and things of that nature (since I’m from NYC myself), and I came across a few people tweeting and it grabbed my attention. What caught my eye was, and I say this not to sound mean…but to be honest, the terrible spelling.
Upon further investigation I found that it was a project by underheardinNY. It started off as a social experiment of some sorts, giving four homeless people Twitter. And the effects were resounding. You can see some of their tweets at @putoDanny and @albert814. They amassed thousands of followers, some who were interested in their lives, some for their own bemusement, and some who wanted to help them out in their situation.
So UnderheardinNY tries to help the homeless have a voice through the power of Twitter. And these are some of the results:
- words of encouragement for these struggling men
- job leads that resulted from Twitter use
- found @putodanny’s daughter through Twitter
- found support at New York City Rescue Mission
And similar to UnderheardinNY is We Are Visible, a site that teaches the homeless online tools to help share their stories.
Even though they haven’t updated their Twitters in a while, the impact social media has had serves several lessons we can take away.
- Connect with your readers as best as you can. You can be awesome at posting articles and other great content, but if you don’t listen and respond to your followers you can only go so far. It’s like throwing a ball against the wall.
- Be yourself. A big reason why people follow you is because of your voice, mind, and content.
- Be knowledgable in what you’re posting. If your posting content, know it! Don’t blindly shotgun content at a surface level. Build relationships. Empower others through contributing.
The social social media.
With the introduction and use of social media on the rise, there has been a recent trend that utilizes the social aspect of social media. I see it grouped in several different ways: check-in, group buying, customer reward, and leisure. These different groups, to me, reflect how social media is taking a more active role, sort of like the backseat driver, in how we interact with businesses and even other people.
Sites and applications like FourSquare and Gowalla are essentially for social check-ins. Frequent the places you would normally go to whether it be Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts (choose your poison) and get perks for it. However, it is difficult to get those perks unless it’s either a) your first time or b) you go there so much that you are the “mayor”. These check-in sites conform, for the most part, to your habits and your schedule and time.
Along with sites/apps whose purpose is to complement your daily life, are those where it becomes a customer reward card. A digital stamp count for repeating customers (buy 10 get 1 free sort of deals), Perka and Levelup go a step further than the classic check-ins. Why do I have to be at Starbucks at the first time or on the flip side, why do I have to live at Starbucks to get benefits for going there everyday? Instead, you get rewarded and build up your free credit each time you go so that you can keep going back to the same place to give the business business. It is a relatively new idea of customer reward that has become even more novel with the ever-present social media.
Then come the game changers. With so many coupons and deals we find on the Internet, why can’t we do that for the places we want to go to or even haven’t thought about going? Sites/apps like Groupon, Yipit, and LivingSocial have breathed life into the idea of using social media to go out and try new places through the bargains and incentives because trying new things are great but doing them at a bargain is better.
But, what if you wanted to do the opposite? Rather than doing something new with people you know…what if you wanted to do things you enjoyed with new people? What if no one amongst your group of friends enjoys eating pig brain or live octopus quite like you do. Or maybe there is another friend but it would be weird to have this sort of man-date. Sites like Grouper and Meetup literally take the social aspect of social media and help you and your friends pair up with strangers who are interested in the same activities. It is becoming increasingly easier, what with all our likes, dislikes, interests, and hobbies up on our Facebook and Twitter. With all the technology at our fingertips, we’re trying to use it to free ourselves from it into the real, everyday, experiential world and game-changing sites like Groupon, Yipit, LivingSocial, Grouper and Meetup are serving to do exactly that.
I was recently passing by the jungle gym, and I had the strangest revelation. Maybe it isn’t really a revelation, but it definitely made sense to me when I made this self-proclaimed connection. Bear with me… Imagine social media *pause* as a jungle gym. What? How?
Well I’ll tell you. Think back to when you were younger and were at the jungle gym. It was the place to be at. You have the group of friends you already know. Maybe you guys are the trendsetters and trailblazers, trying out new things together like rocking on the swings while standing on it or maybe even crawling on top of the monkey bars like a daredevil. These trailblazers, to my crazy imagination, are the Google Plus’, the Pinterests, and the Levelups; the social media that takes standard and brings it to the next level. Perhaps it is too innovative, but we all know that we are just waiting for everyone to just catch on to the new trend because we can’t imagine ourselves going back to just riding on the swing sitting? Can we? For these newer social media tools, it is the combination of the community and innovation. For Google Plus, it is the community of friends, workers and just different social spheres that you are plugged into. For Pinterest, it is the community of designers, artists, fashion enthusiasts, and decorators that make the appeal so great. But what happens when it becomes so popular and everyone wants to use it? Will it become congested and dangerous on those swings and monkey bars, as everyone wants a piece? Will content be diluted as it becomes broadened? As for Levelup, it is the modernization of things once taken for granted. The monkey bars that were once swung across are now crawled on top of. The user engagement of location based social media like Foursquare is combined with moneymaking components to bring two things together. From the article by CNET, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57367720-94/how-levelup-aims-to-shake-up-mobile-payments/, cool things are happening through “shaking things up”.
Then, there are the new friends you meet while at the jungle gym. Maybe you won’t go crazy in trying new things together, but hey. Who is to say that you and your new friends can’t go down the metal slide (that is blazing hot on a summers day) together? Standard and classic fun is timeless after all. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, have become the standard of social media. It is the default that you automatically check whenever you go on to your computer. A means for people to connect with friends old and new, the classic slide is the go-to and the default for whatever you happen to need it for.
Oh! Then there are those outliers when at times you decide that maybe it is more fun to play Tic-Tac-Toe! After all, who are they to dictate how you enjoy spending your time, and how much fun you are having playing Tic-Tac-Toe! Social media that is overlooked, often under-appreciated means of social media such as WordPress and other sorts of blogs and outlets. They require the use of strength, not like the monkey bars, but rather of the mind. Conveying a mental aptitude of what is going on around us through these different social means show a type of mental prowess that drawing 3 X’s in a row demonstrates on the mean streets of the playground.
Or perhaps the fun jungle gym will become cold, calloused, and corporate; a mechanical autonomy with no real excitement, or sense of adventures that we once had from the gym and social media. To close, here’s a clip of a great show some of us watched when we were younger about “The Economics of Recess”.
And perhaps pose the question, just like how we look back to our childhood and see the many social and personal advantages for our growth, how do you think social media will evolve twenty years down the road and what world will that look like for the youth growing up with it?
Social media has become such a powerful source of inspiration, news source, and tool for mobilization, communication, promoting, and sharing. It makes the collective power of the group that much more powerful and that much more asinine. It is an instrument to robustly impact our lives and those around us.
Think… what if social media existed for major historical events?
Imagine how different if social media such as Twitter and Facebook were utilized in protests, sit-ins, and other movements.
Perhaps we would see tweets from John Wilkes Booth with the hashtag #assassination #infamous, or Thomas Edison saying about the light bulb #finallyafter3000tries #lettherebelight. The way information is disseminated would be vastly different if such powerful social media tools existed; Evidenced through political/social uprisings, news and information arriving quicker than official news sources through the power of open conversation, these tools has been influential!
Think upon prominent leaders today and their use of social media… the Dalai Lama motivating and reaching others through tweets, and President Obama tweeting national/international political news, just to name a few. The power of followers becomes a source of rallying strength and information gathering. Martin Luther King Jr. with his tweets would be able to mobilize powerful sit-ins, peaceful protests, and marches on a national level, all the while spreading his vision of equality, peace, hope, and color-blindness.
Looking at social media nowadays it is pretty unbelievable how plugged in and tapped in we all have become as a society. It’s been a long and swift road from the Pony Express to express mail to e-mail. With the rise of social media websites, and applications, being connected to people across the globe has become easier than ever before! Sites have become such a large source of resource, information, and networking.
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With Facebook wielding such power of information, it makes you wonder how they will utilize it for either themselves, its users, or even corporations seeking for marketing research information. But I digress.
Although understanding how companies are utilizing is important, let us focus on an equally significant side to that duality: people. How do people use social media and what will that look like? Well one thing that we see all around us is the advent of cellphone usage for a variety of purposes. Phones now not only help us to call friends, butt-dial parents at inappropriate times, but also has become a means to tell others where you are through GPS, what you are doing through photo uploads, tweets, and statuses, write to your hearts content with blogs. Not to mention you can also watch videos, the latest illegal movie you downloaded, and read news and message boards.
And this interconnectedness that social media/connectedness brings continues rampantly throughout the web. In the specific case of Twitter, there are tweets, retweets, forwarded on the web through different articles, emails, blogs, and social sites. Throughout the coming months and weeks, let’s dive deeper this ever-growing, always-present, sometimes-recycled world of social media!
acs2kim 