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Slacktivist

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Today is my 21st birthday. My parents came and brought me flowers and took me to lunch. On the wrapper of the flowers I noticed a little green frog. That little green frog, while seemingly insignificant, represents a campaign with a massive mission - to save the rainforest. The video is the bases of the campaign. The Follow the Frog campaign started in 2012 and promotes and encourages slacktivism (yes, it’s a real word). It a word that describes people that only support a social cause through social media posting and it’s become all the rage with younger generations. It requires little effort to be a slacktivist, just the ability to post, tweet, or YouTube yourself. There have been many movements that have started from slacktivism. The biggest one I can think of though is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. If you were living under a rock during this crazy, here’s a little insight. If you were nominated to participate in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge you would have to dump a buc
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Podcasting

I went home this past weekend to College Station, Tx. Which means an hour and a half in a car… alone. That’s a lot of time to sit in silence. Most of the time I would turn on a random playlist on Spotify, but I decided to put on a podcast while I drove home and back. It wasn’t my first time to listen to a podcast, but I definitely don’t do it often, so it was still kind of weird to me. But I decided that I LOVED it!   I started with a podcast from Relevant and finished with a podcast from Breakaway ministries. The Relevant podcast was about 2 hours so I didn’t finish it all before I switched to the 45 minute Breakaway podcast. One big thing that I noticed about the Relevant podcast was the sponsors. They spent the first 5 minutes talking about one of their sponsors and another 5 minutes about an hour into their show talking about their second. Both sponsors were nonprofits, and sounded like they were doing cool things, but it was just too much right at the beginning. I found an artic
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Negativity

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Just about every company has some form of social media. It’s allowed companies to talk to their customers directly. They have taken their business to their customers and customers unashamedly share their opinions about the business with their business and friends. That means… Negative comments are going to happen; it’s inevitable. What's important is how a business responds to them. Here are some ways businesses could avoid a social media crisis according to Salesforce.com:  1. Take it out of the spot light. If at all possible, take the discussion to an appropriate forum. This isn't an attempt to delete or silence critics, it's an attempt to better help them and understand the problem.  2. Try to see it from their point of view. Don't try to come up with a list of excuses. This will only make the customer more mad, and the situation could spiral out of control. The ultimate goal should be ma
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Whole Foods and a Whole Lot of Information

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Just about every company has some sort of social media account, blog, YouTube channel, or podcast. These different platforms allow customers to connect with a brand on a deeper level and creates a stronger brand loyalty among followers. The loyalty with in follows and the trust they have for a brand causes them to become thought leaders. So, what is thought leadership? It’s creating content over a specific topic for a specific audience. It’s not mean for small advertisements, it’ meant to answer the bigger questions that customers might have. This can be a nonprofit having a blog that highlights everything they are doing or the people they are serving, it could also be a car company having a YouTube channel showing their customers how to do things like change a tire or engine oil. One company that does this well is Whole Foods. Whole Foods is known for selling healthy foods. Because of their brand reputation, they have authority to say what is healthy and unhealthy.
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Keep it Simple, Stupid

It is imperative for effective communication to utilize proper dictation and syntax, without this, it will be impossible to properly apprehend the meaning of a sentence. Typical businesses strive to appear incomparable by utilizing exceptional and intelligent phrases. Without the use of proper jargon, nonprofessionals would be able to comprehend their complex information. It is unimaginable for conventional people to need to understand the highly critical information presented by businesses. In order to keep their superiority, businesses should continue their adoption of technical and complex jargon.   Let’s get real, this post up to this point was kind of hard to read. It was all Goddledygook. Goddledygook is language that is meaningless because of the excessive use of technical terms and jargon. It’s a funny word for a serious problem.   Basically, what they first couple of sentences are saying is that it’s important for businesses to use complex and confusing
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Power of YouTube

Last year, a friend of mine had a tire blow out on her car. She was all alone and didn’t know how to change a tire. Instead of panicking or calling someone to come help her. She pulled out her smart phone opened her YouTube app and found a video that showed her exactly what to do. Just about everyone has an experience like this; you don’t know how to do something so you find a YouTube video to show you how.   YouTube is considered one of the largest search engines, obviously not as big as Google, but definitely larger than Yahoo or Bing. If fact, it has become so large that people are canceling their cable and relying solely on YouTube and other streaming sites. So how does this affect advertising? Well, people can choose if they want to watch ads or not. This makes the impressions that are happening more meaningful, because people who are watching actually want to be. According to VisualNarrative.com, in 2014 people choose to watch over 1 billion minutes’ worth of YouTub
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Going Viral: Random or a Science?

Think about your favorite viral video. Is it “Charlie Bit My Finger”, Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, someone ranting about something, or a just a cute puppy? My favorite viral videos have to be anything with Gavin in them. Here’s a link to some of his best vines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOCr8eSqXgM . So, what is a viral video? Well, it’s any video that becomes popular through internet sharing platforms such as social media and email, and it usually happens very quickly. Going viral has become a quick way to get fifteen minutes of fame and anyone can do it. But is there a way to guarantee that your video will go viral or is it all just random? Well let’s look at some stats: According to Kevin Allocca, a Trends Manager at Youtube, 48 hours of videos are posted every minute to their site (Allocca, 2011). That means that every hour, 2,880 hours’ worth of content is up loaded. That’s 69,120 hours every single day. Of every single video ever posted, there is a 0.3% chance of go
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