CMMA Group Experience

I believe that thus far this experience has been helpful. It has been nice to connect with an organization that isn't one you might think of in the traditional sense as needing social media. Also, many of the stakeholders in the CMMA, particularly the board, are a bit older and do not have experience working with social media. I am excited to present this information to them as well as learn about their message. After they described it to us, it was something that I had never though of, but made total sense. I believe as a group we have a unique challenge because their social media map looks significantly different than most organizations. I hope that the information that we are able to obtain allows us to be successful.

Money in Technology

In Chapter 3 of Who Owns the Future, the author discusses money in relation to advances in technology. I think that it is really interesting to analyze this concept over time. If you look as recent as the last couple decades, we have moved off of a money backed system, the gold standard, and are now utilizing no standard to hold the value of our money. Also, think about the revelations in banking technology over the last several years. Most major banks allow you to complete almost every transaction via the web, app, or ATM. The necessity over making your way to a bank is almost gone. Debit cards and credit cards have even advanced with contactless capable technology. Going forward, several economics have discussed the realistic possibility of using NFC technology or biometrics to facilitate the transfer of funds, eliminating the necessity for paper money all together. Governments argue that this could keep better track of financial transactions.

Social Media Segmentation: How much is too much?

Social media has been a hot topic in organizations as a marketing effort and a way to communicate with interested parties in a way that they already utilize on a daily basis. Obviously, we have proven that this is something that can be done both well and disastrously. An example case is right under our noses here at CMU. Many departments have social media presences on Twitter and Facebook. However, it is difficult to know who does and who doesn't. There is not common directory nor naming scheme. One effort that the university has tried is to make the links to their overarching official social media pages available via the website. However, because of the presence of all of these various pages, communications are actually being missed. People can connect with so many pages they feel like how could they possibly have missed one, when in reality, they may be missing several communications. It also could allow for organizational mission segmentation. When you have over thirty people posting on various social medias, how can you ensure that the message is the same.

Education of Social Media

Social media is something that we find all over the place now a days. Many organizations have not taken the appropriate planning steps to present a social media strategy to everyone involved. This does not just include those in the organization who are responsible for posts and replies to the social media sites. It is important to provide clear justification on differences between using social media individually and how it can help an organization work to achieve their goals. It is critical that this education takes place after good social media strategy for community collaboration has been created. Ultimately, this will help filter out what is not relevant in the saturated market.

Destructive Social Media

Yesterday I attended the drag queen bingo that was presented by LGBTQ services for coming out week. One addition they had this year that was different was TweetFall. This program allows users to live-tweet an event by hash-tagging their post. For example, yesterday's event hashtag was #SabinCMU. If the user's tweets are not private, then they will be displayed from most recent at the top. This was a really cool thing to see. However, I noticed one major pitfall. Some people in the room became destructive with their social media. Tweets were becoming inappropriate or conversational between friends. This detracted attention away from the proper meaning of the program. It was not being utilized at this even for people to make inappropriate comments. Rather they were expected to ask questions of Sabin. I think this is a prime example of how quickly a collaborative community can stray away from the actual purpose.

Communities

Communities are an interesting concept when it relates to social media. For the most part people think of communities as groups of people that connect on social media. Facebook groups are a prime example of this. However, the real question is productivity. Are these groups being used and viewed as productive by the members. The alternative is finding more collaborative solutions, such as wiki pages, or other internal solutions. I have utilized these in organizations that I work in and found them to be significantly more productive.

Application of Social Media Strategy

After working with the CMMA today, I know feel as though these concepts can be applied to an organization. The CMMA has virtually no social media or electronic presence which makes it nice to be able to truly start this process from scratch. I am a bit nervous about there reasoning behind utilizing social media. They are trying to combat a stereotype rather than share information. A lot of the information they want to convey is to a group of people who don't necessarily thrive on social media, for example school counselors and young junior high-school students. I think the best bet for them will be to perfect their website since it requires the least amount of updating and already exists. They already have someone familiar with web editing and wouldn't have to get someone new to take over other platforms of social media. I am excited to get back their social media map to see what they want us to focus on.