It has become second nature for us to pick up our phones and log on to our social media profiles immediately after waking up. We mindlessly scroll through hundreds of posts. We comment, we react, we ‘like’ and we ‘share’. Many of us prefer not to think of the disadvantages of social media, because of how dependent we are on it as a form of entertainment — a way to kill boredom. For many of us, it is an unknown addiction. Although we jokingly admit that we can’t get enough of Instagram or Facebook, we sometimes don’t realise how much we need to look through our phones to fulfil the little hole inside us. According to a recent survey by the Royal Society for Public Health in the United Kingdom, social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol. Just imagine you smoked as much as you checked your feed. Are we truly aware of how many times a day we pick up our phones to look at other people’s perfectly curated online life?
Best Social Websites
During the mid-2000s social media has had a surge in popularity. It completely changed the way we communicate and share information with one another. Social media has overthrown presidents. It has been the force for many revolutions including ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the Arab Spring to name a few. We can follow the lives of people that we haven’t physically seen in years. We can be proud of the success of our family members, or appreciate the humour of our summer camp friend from 10 years ago. Social media is a revolutionary tool. But most of the time, we see what we don’t want to see. We see too much. According to a recent survey of almost 1,500 teens and young adults by the Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement (YHM) in the UK, Instagram is the most damaging social media platform on mental health. The image-sharing platform causes high levels of anxiety and depression. Sometimes, all you do is see people, who may not even be your friends, on holiday or enjoying nights out.
They can make you feel like you are missing out, or not doing enough with your life. These feelings promote a ‘compare and despair’ attitude, where we look at what someone else has and wonder why we can’t be the same. I have to force myself not to look at Instagram or Facebook first thing in the morning, because it usually sets the tone of my day. While I am getting out of bed to go to my day job, influencer Karen is jetting off to London to enjoy a dinner hosted by a famous candle company. It gets to you after a while. You realise that you hair isn’t perfect and your outfit is average and then you’re unhappy. Social media was created to be a positive outlet. A platform for people to express themselves. It has now become an avenue of negativity. If any celebrity, athlete or political party sends out a tweet that the public doesn’t agree with, they can be taken down with a viciously overwhelming injection of cyberbullying. If you don’t have thick skin, you can easily change who you are and what you stand for, for fear of being criticised by your followers.
I sometimes think twice about the photos I post online. I wonder if people critique me for enjoying my life a bit too much. In an offline world, social communities tend to follow and practise the norms of privacy. You don’t have to share your birthday, address or marital status with the people in your neighbourhood. They don’t need to know your likes and your dislikes and what your breakfast looked like. But when you’re online, if you want to join a social networking site, you have to disclose your personal information in order to be accepted. Once you become an active member of the site, they delve into who you are and what you like. They find out about your habits, your browsing history, where you like to go, what you like to eat and who you interact with the most. You get unsolicited messages from strangers and pokes from long lost acquaintances. In what real life world is poking someone okay? It’s not. But it’s just online. You don’t really feel it. Some young people have never known a world without social media. Around 91 per cent of 16-24 year olds use the internet for social networking. They use social media now more than ever before. They give away information without thinking or knowing the consequences. They get sucked into a world of online games and dangerous online trends. There have even been cases where suicide games were trending online, that children all encouraged each other to participate in. It can be a dark and unpredictable place. Although most of us know all these things, we decide that we don’t want to give up on social media after all. We don’t want to be gripped by Fomo, “Fear of missing out”. We scroll through perfectly curated Instagram posts capturing people’s happy moments, and we ask ourselves why we aren’t as happy or fulfilled. We just need to realise, the free encyclopedia that it isn’t real. It’s all just for show.
Ultimately, these will be people that have no real relevance to their life. And while one can believe that they are being informed about the world through using social media, this is not going to be the complete truth. This comes down to the fact that social media is often no different to the mainstream media in as much as they define what events will be exposed and what events will be overlooked. Due to this, one can end up being conditioned to see life in a certain way, and this will stop them form being able to come to their own conclusions about what is taking place. The alternative might be for one to do their own research, and they won’t need social media in order to do this. It could be said that one’s time is one of the most important things they have, and this is because they can’t get it back.
When one uses social media, it can be so easy for them to get caught up in what is taking place, and before they know it, they could have spent a number of hours online. The time that one could save through putting social media to one side could be used to enhance their life. This could be used to create more fulfilling relationships, to learn a new hobby, or to build-up their own business, for instance. Author's Bio: Prolific writer, author, and coach, Oliver JR Cooper, hails from England. His insightful commentary and analysis covers all aspects of human transformation, including love, partnership, self-love, and inner awareness. With over one thousand in-depth articles highlighting human psychology and behaviour, Oliver offers hope along with his sound advice. His current projects include 'A Dialogue With The Heart' and 'Communication Made Easy'. Please Register or Login to post new comment. Emotional Self: Do Some People's Childhoods Set Them Up Disconnect From Their Emotional Self? Critical Thinking: Are Mental Health Problems Out Of Control Because People Are Talking About Their Feelings? True-Self: Can Someone Lose Touch With Their True-Self If They Disconnect From Their Feelings? Self-Development: Can Self-Development Cause Someone To Become Even More Disconnected From Themselves? Be Careful What You Consume! Adrenalin: Do Some People's Childhoods Set Them Up To Be Addicted To Adrenaline? Why do Some Dreams Feel So Real? You Need To Stop Caring About What Others Think! EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION -- RIP OFF THE BANDAIDS!
Chapter 3. Making the Transition to the Social Web (First Change Your Marketing Mindset).
Today, marketing is exploding with possibilities and complexities as it reaches out into new forms, media, and models. Marketers have an exceptional opportunity to use these new tools and models to reach new markets, even in a fragmented media market. Marketing to the Social Web helps marketers and their companies understand the context of the new marketing, and prioritize what they need to do to build customer communities and maximize profit in a time of marketing confusion. Larry Weber presents specific ideas to find and engage customers, describes newly available tools and platforms, and shows readers how to apply them to see immediate results. PART I: PANDEMONIUM: THE LANDSCAPE OF THE SOCIAL WEB. Chapter 1. The Web Is Not a Channel (And You're an Aggregator, Not a Broadcaster). Chapter 2. Community and Content: The Marketer's New Job (Or How to Cut Your Marketing Budget and Reach More People). Chapter 3. Making the Transition to the Social Web (First Change Your Marketing Mindset). Chapter 4. How to Let Customers Say What They Really Think (And Keep Your Job). PART II: SEVEN STEPS TO BUILD YOUR OWN CUSTOMER COMMUNITY.
Chapter 5. Step One: Observe and Create a Customer Map (Otherwise, You Can't Get There from Here). Chapter 6. Step Two: Recruit Community Members (With a New Toolbox and Your Own Marketing Skills). Chapter 7. Step Three: Evaluate Online Conduit Strategies (And Don't Forget Search). Chapter 8. Step Four: Engage Communities in Conversation (To Generate Word of Mouse). Chapter 9. Step Five: Measure the Community's Involvement (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How). Chapter 10. Step Six: Promote Your Community to the World (Get 'Em Talking and Clicking). Chapter 11. Step Seven: Improve the Community's Benefits (Don't Just Set It and Forget It). PART III: MAKING USE OF THE FOUR ONLINE CONDUIT STRATEGIES. Chapter 13. The Blog Strategy (Everybody's Talking at Me). Chapter 14. The E-Community Strategy (Go to Their Party or Throw Your Own). Chapter 15. The Social Networks Strategy (Connecting with a Click). Chapter 16. Living and Working in Web 4.0 (It's Right Around the Corner).
How can you do that?
Reality check: It isn’t just the boss who gets anxious about participating in social media - so do people who work for the business. Think about it - new tools, new responsibilities and a greater risk of accidentally saying something in public and embarrassing themselves (or the company)? Yikes. Why would an employee voluntarily step out into social media on behalf of the company they work for? Well, perhaps because you need them to. Grooming social media-ready employees is essential in helping to spread company awareness, building trust and creating a more unified brand. But before your employees can hop on board and help the company achieve its social media objectives, you first you must help them feel comfortable participating. You need to groom them for social media success. How can you do that? Below are a few tips to help you calm employees’ fears and help them become social media superstars for your brand.
As people, we don’t like adding new tasks to our plate unless we understand their purpose and/or benefit. But once we do see and understand their importance, we’re much more open to completing them. We want to help the company we work for; we just want to know how to do it in a safe way. This one is really important. If you haven’t created a corporate social media policy for your employees to follow, you’re essentially throwing them in the deep end of the pool without first teaching them how to swim. Don’t look at your social media policy as something intended to restrict or control employee social media use; look it as the guide they need to help them engage better. A good social media policy will lay out best practices for representing the brand, explain how to handle common issues that may come up, and even include possible conversation starters.
These are invaluable tools for an employee who may not be sure how to engage in social media or how to do it safely. By teaching people how to use social media, you build their confidence and help remove their fears. Make social media part of your team’s everyday job. The same way they have to check email and answer customer service calls, they should be tasked with “checking in” on the various social media sites to see what customers are talking about and starting conversations within your community. If you try to fragment social media away from the rest of their day, they’ll never see it as part of their job function, and it won’t stick. By turning social media into an everyday tool that they can use to collect feedback, ask questions and see what’s of interest to the company’s audience, you reinforce its importance to the company. You know which networks are most important for your audience. However, pick just one to let employees get their feet wet with. By focusing on one tool, you allow them to feel comfortable experimenting and give them the time they need to master that site before you throw them into another. This will help them be more successful and it will also prevent them from making the same mistake on multiple different sites. Give them the time they need to get established before you introduce them to all the different social media channels. If you are highlighting in-house successes, considering doing it publicly or offering a small reward for a job well done. Every business can benefit from having social media-ready employees, people who act as the face of your brand and increase exposure and goodwill. But before you can send employees out into the world, you need to groom them for a more public role. The tips listed above should help you get started on that process.
WASHINGTON, December 18, 2007 - Companies will focus on upgrading and integrating their human resources technology in 2008 in an effort to improve administration and better engage employees, according to experts at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a leading global consulting firm. Among likely trends are the increased adoption of advanced Web solutions, such as wikis, blogs and social networking, 8 Arguments Against Social Media and a focus on making HR technology easier for employees to use. “Managing a workforce is increasingly complex, and employers are searching for the right solutions to help them address this challenge,” said Richard Hubbard, director of Watson Wyatt’s North American technology and administration solutions practice. “Technology will continue to help companies manage the most intricate HR tasks, including some, such as talent management, that were once done more by intuition than by data analysis. Adopting Advanced, Web 2.0 Technology. With the rapid growth of consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications, organizations are considering increasingly interactive strategies and technologies. While many corporations are using Web 2.0 elements such as blogs and wikis, organizations are just beginning to implement other elements of social networking. All of these systems could reduce the focus on traditional e-mail and make work communication a more dynamic experience for employees.
About Social Media Sites
With the advent of the web, people started to create their own websites and blogs. While many of those blogs were just basic diaries, a few of them were about topics like health and politics while others were how to blogs. Many blogs have turned into rumor mills, spreading misinformation that people tend to believe just because it’s on the web. Rumors about hurricane Sandy and gunfights in other countries like Mexico have been picked up by reliable news services, and this misinformation has been shared without the proper vetting of the sources providing the information. Here is another argument about the pros and cons of social media as it pertains to students. Statistics show that pupils using social media too often tend to have GPA’s of 3.06 compared to GPA’s of 3.82 for pupils who don’t use social media. An even scarier fact is that students who use social media tend to score 20% lower on their test scores then their counterparts. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a direct cause for lost productivity at the workplace. In a survey 36 % of people said that social networking was the biggest waste of time in comparison to activities like fantasy football, shopping, and watching television. Not everyone in the 21st century thinks about the negative effects of having social networking accounts - but simple things like not setting your privacy settings properly or liking someone's photo can sometimes have adverse results. Cyber bullying can be a problem as people can take advantage of the fact that there is no one who can effectively stop the bullying when it happens, due to everything being performed behind a screen. The only way for a bully to be stopped is if they are reported and victims may be too intimidated to do it.
Online marketing "the 21st century version of word of mouth advertising".
Social network marketing is prospecting successfully by pushing the right agenda. A more effective method for using the internet to promote your business is online social network. It is one of the newest way to reach not only to the internet generation, but also the casual user. Online marketing "the 21st century version of word of mouth advertising". Successful brands have something up their sleeve yet - a well overdue effective weapon specifically targeting the 'always-online' users.. With all this in mind then, the modern phenomenon of social networking is soon no longer a phenomenon. It is the new approach many network marketers take now and it guarantees them success by successfully targeting and offering the right product to a targeted audience. Marketing is about helping others succeed, not selling your agenda. Also with websites such as twitter, myspace and Facebook comes strong with helpful tools that you can use to leverage your time in social media. If you have been on the internet for any time now, you have probably heard of network marketing.
Which Is The Best Social Networking Site
Myspace will most likely never stop as long as the website is popular, and the resource box below will show you how you can make it work for yourself also. Social networking marketing offers the benefit of using personal connections and dialogues to promote businesses. Some of the most effective marketing services are twitter, Facebook and myspace, although there are a multitude of additional networking websites that can also be used to spread a viral marketing message through a number of people. Social marketing can promote your business. Since social site marketing can be seen as a form of publishing, be aware of online copyright issues. Social network marketing is an industry now. Members of these sites will have to get used to online communities. No wonder, marketing online has helped many people to increase their business online and offline. Maximize your social media marketing. And getting friends is the hardest part of social network marketing for businesses.
Network marketing or social level marketing, is an advertising method that makes use of social network service and to increase their web presence. Companies sometimes invest in internet presence management, which can include marketing online. Also to mention social media marketing is much cheaper than tv marketing which makes it hot favorite as social network is "cheap to operate but highly productive business model" and in recession times its the only survivor. Through social network marketing services, the experts that get found now will evaluate your internet presence at no cost or obligation. Learn marketing strategies, tactics and build an online road map for your business. The potential benefit that a business can gain from a firm grasp over social network marketing opportunities is an impossible potential to ignore. Whether you own your own business or work for the a company, there are distinct competitive advantages for better understanding and using social community network marketing to promote your product or service.
There is a lot of information on the topic of social network marketing, that it can be difficult to separate the good from the bad. Facebook, myspace, twitter, flickr, youtube, wikipedia, digg, stumbleupon, delicious and technorati are just a few social site to consider when planning your online marketing campaign. You may have heard a lot of buzz about how great social network marketing and online marketing is for your business. Yet to be effective and successful with you online social networking strategies for your business, you need to learn the right marketing tactics by attending social network marketing workshop training. Network marketing is still a fairly new concept when it cones to online marketing strategies. With social marketing, you will enjoy more targeted website traffic and link-backs, improved customer relationships and increased brand awareness. To promote your business, product or service where everyone is looking online, add social network marketing to your internet marketing strategy. Social marketing has really taken off!
Topic title: The Dangers Of Social Media That No One Likes To Admit
Topic covered: benefits of social media marketing, main social media sites, social marketing platform, top ranked social media sites, twitter social media marketing
