The Groundswell within Your Company

This week’s post will be my last  since it is my last semester at NAIT. So without further ado, I will be going over chapter 12 of the groundswell book.

Source: http://workplacepsychology.net/2010/06/14/motivating-your-employees/

Chapter 12 talks about the groundswell that is inside your company. Compared to  previous posts throughout my semester it was all about connecting with your customers but in this chapter it will be about connecting with your own people (employees)  inside your company.

As we all know in terms of communication within a company, if a company is getting bigger communication between you and your employees would get further and further apart that it makes it hard to communicate with each other. This definitely would be creating misunderstandings and even false information to spread throughout the company having either excess or insufficient resources for each departments of a company & making either too much or  too little products, late assignments or projects due to slow communication, and reputation of your company could go down along with your employees.

In order to communicate inside your company these strategies are used:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing

Do these look familiar? These strategies are the foundation for groundswell whether you want to use it for the customers or your employees or why not both?
In order for communications to go well within your company it should start by creating a community, it could be small or big and hopefully it grows. Communities could be creating a Facebook Group where both customers and employees could give and receive feedback simultaneously, Online discussion exclusively to your own company where your employees could give suggestions or new ideas and comment or criticize on them, have online surveys weekly, monthly, or even yearly to see where you and your employees are at, and have a group of people combining their ideas into a single blog and switch between peoples for daily discussion.

The next step when you decided what kind of groundswell you will use for your company inside, focus on the relationships between you and your employees and not too much on technologies themselves. By developing relationships, employees are more inclined to participate much more because they feel like the company is respecting and caring for them, they will be motivated and have confidence in themselves so that they can freely give suggestions, new ideas, comments, feedback, and much more to each other without judging each other for whatever reason.

And lastly, don’t forget to reward, encourage them, and to keep on trying different kinds of groundswell and see if it is better for the company or not.  This way you can adjust to what groundswell your employees are comfortable with and then stick to it, improve upon it, and move forward.

Nintendo

Source: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/mission.jsp

For some companies, they solely focus on just the customers and not employees. I have seen this type before in a restaurant, I’m not going to bring up names but what happens is that they focus so much on customers and doing it well and have somewhat a good reputation but they treat their employees really bad and even yell at them on the spot for doing even one thing wrong. It’s like they don’t see them as their people and since it is a restaurant they could easily find people to replace as a result.

But as you can see here in Nintendo, they focus not only their customers but their own employees as well. By treating both their employees and customers together they can market better through groundswell and even finding potential new employees easier because they are treated as if they are family within the company.

 

Source: Groundswell by by Li, C. & Bernoff, J. 2011. Boston, Massachusetts

Last Question for you guys: So how will you use groundswell for your company? For customers? For employees? or maybe both?

 

 

Energize the groundwell

          For this week discussion, we’ll be going through chapter 7 of the book focused mainly on energizing the groundswell and your customers.

Source: http://www.forestviewchurch.ca/energize/

          We talked about energizing customers a couple weeks ago on the topic of “Strategies for groundswell” and you can find that here.

Energizing is about energizing your people (Customer). You will be dealing with people who are going to talk about your brand, your product, and spreading them through throughout the internet, word-of-mouth, and on the social media networking sites.

If you do want to energize your people, you have to change the way you think by following the five steps for applying the techniques of energizing to your own organization:

1. Figure out if you want to energize the groundswell

Not all companies can be energized depending on what your brand is and who your customers are. It only works well for “companies that have customers who are or could be enthusiastic about the company and it’s products” (groundswell, 2011, p. 148).

For example of Nintendo, last week they have just released a new video of the game called “Super Smash Bros” for the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U on Nintendo Direct.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUWnQu2Grs

 

The company really did a great job in energizing their customers by revealing bits by bits of information of the game that is in progress for their target audiences. They revealed new modes, new items, new stages to play in, what changes were there from the previous game, and especially revealing new characters into the roster which really got me and all the others who were there watching it. I even shared the video on my Twitter account. But the most energizing part of the whole video is the one who hosted the video (Talking about the contents of the video).

This amazing person, Masahiro Sakurai, who is a video game director for Kirby, Kid Icarus, and Super Smash Bros was talking on Nintendo Direct. He is very well known for the games mentioned above and to be able to talk about the brand and their products can energize their customer very effectively because he is not someone that they just hired or someone who is not well known, depending on who the company decides if they are not well known customers potentially not care or listen to them which instead could do the reverse instead which is spreading bad rumors or false information to others instead of spreading the exciting news, updates, and information to everyone.
2. Check the social technographics profile if your customers

Companies should do some research if your customers know how to use groundswell. In this case, Nintendo selling video games, software, accessories, and more, there customers are probably already using groundswell. These includes blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and more to see what they do to spread information, buying their games on which websites, and who goes on to research what new games are coming up or talking about the games themselves like how good it is.

If you are a company that are selling mattresses or estate planning for example, you should not start a community because most of these customers probably do not know how to use groundswell at all and you would have low profile or even wrong ones of your customers (groundswell, 2011, p. 149).

The technographics profile was already discussed on this post.

3. Ask yourself, “What is my customer’s problem?”

By doing yourself a favor and asking the question of “What is your customer’s problem?” it shows that you and your company are actually trying to help the customers and showing that you care for them. Finding the real problem is key here so if you identified the wrong one, it definitely shows to the customers that you don’t understand them very well which may or may not losing loyal or new customers. (groundswell, 2011, p. 149)

So with the real problem, focus on the Customer’s problem, not the product itself. By doing this, customers will be able to save that your company provided very good service in fixing their problems which raises your company reputation indefinitely.

4. Pick a strategy that fits your customers’ social technographics profile and problems

Using Nintendo as an example again, they have their products in retails and other direct sellers which makes ratings, reviews, feedback information really easy to obtain for the company. This way Nintendo can easily pick what strategies that they need from their customers profile and how to solve their problems.

5. Don’t start unless you can stick around for the long haul

This final step is very important because commitment is required (groundswell, 2011, p. 150). You can compare this with marriage because it needs to be constantly adjusted to each others needs or wants and this will help both customers and the company grow to become stronger and become a well known community. But if you do not commit.. well the customers will retaliate by either not supporting, especially the energized customers they will be hit hard and starts ranting or even start a hate community and create a huge backfire on the company. And because the energized customers who once supported them they will probably have a huge community backing them up which really no company would want to deal with.

So with the five steps to energizing the groundswell and customers, I hope you can apply this to your organization just like Nintendo did.

Source: Groundswell by by Li, C. & Bernoff, J. 2011. Boston, Massachusetts

 

Question of the week: Can your organization energize your own customers?

Twitter!

For this week’s chapter, chapter 10, I’ll be explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

Source: http://marketingland.com/library/twitter

Until a few days ago, I have never really used Twitter before. So the content that I’ll be explaining would just be focused within the textbook instead of me trying to explain what is on the website.

This video is about fifteen minutes long but the person in the video will help you guys learn the basics of Twitter:

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7w5l8OYphA&w=560&h=315

So what are Followers?

Followers are people who have an interests in following other peoples.  These followers expects daily tweets from following others for their entertainment and could potentially reply or re-tweet something that is an interest to them or reply with an opinion or a comment. By commenting others are also encourage to do the same which creates relationship with others with common interests and they will be able to follow each other and expand their followers on their own accounts.
An example is that if you already found someone or something you like to get their attention use this symbol @(insert following name of a person or company) and then comment on it and this will notify them that you have tweeted them. For a company that interests me I would type in “@Nintendo Can’t wait for the Nintendo Direct on Tuesday!” this is how I would Tweet to Nintendo on Twitter.

What are Hash Tags and Searches?

For Twitter their updates are always public which makes it very easy to search and find what you are looking for. So if you were interested in searching Nintendo for example, enter their name on the search page of Twitter and it will direct you to Nintendo or anyone that also mentions about Nintendo with a hash tag #Nintendo. Here’s an example page for  searching on Twitter.
As for hash tag, these are just simple terms that refers to a topic of interests by inserting the symbol #(insert topic here) so this way whoever searches #Nintendo can see anyone who mentions them on their Tweets.

What are Mentions and Re-tweets?

As mentioned earlier on what are Followers, Twitter provides a way to easily reply to or reference another Twitter user by simply adding the @ symbol and then the user’s name right after and then comment which will direct the comment to the user. Twitter makes it easier for people to see who’s talking to or who’s talking about you. Here’s the link for mentions if you have trouble finding it on Twitter.
Re-tweeting is another feature that allows you to quickly spread messages to others like your followers for example, this allows everyone else to do the same and who knows it could be the most popular message that goes around all over the world about something you liked.

What are Links?

Many social networking sites includes links that directs you another website, videos, or anything that you might have an interest in. You can share the links anywhere like what I do on my blog sharing the links that directs you to their website page. On Twitter, you can create links for pictures that you recently taken as well as videos for followers to enjoy.

What are Lists?

Lists on Twitter is a way to see your list of people who follows you and these lists can be shared. So this way you can easily see tweets of other user’s lists.

What are Apps and Tools?

Since Twitter updates (comments, shares, and everything else) are open and live, you can use a variety of tools and apps for your own use or a company.  An example from the book, groundswell, “One of the best tools for twitterers is TweetDeck, a free application for collecting mentions and searches into columns which helps responding easier” (LI & Bernoff, 2011). Apps are also available on your phones (Smart Phones, Androids, Blackberry, and more) and also on tablets (iPads, android tablets, and more).

Nintendo

Here is an example of NintendoAmerica on Twitter. As you can see from the link earlier, they have Tweeted about 5,880 times, Following 1,330 people, and have Followers of 638,000. This tells us that these guys are very good at tweeting daily, updating new information of what’s to come in the next couple of months, and even post links, pictures, and sharing videos to the followers to share.

Source: Li, C., Bernoff J., (2011) Groundswell. U.S: Forrester, Inc.

Question of the week: Do you now know how Twitter works?

Building A Community

This week’s discussion is on chapter 8 of Groundswell.

Source: http://knowledgeadvisors.com/about-us/community-service/

This chapter is about building a community for support of your company. Your customers are very important as they are the ones who will be give feedback, suggestions, & criticism of your company and comparing services & products and prices of competitors. So by building a community around your products/services of your company, one can see what is good or bad about those products/services and adjust to meet the demands of the customer to make your company a success.

 

Here are some of the suggestions from the book:

Start small, but plan for a larger presence

Starting small seems to be a good way to start because you can test your products/services and see if it meets the customers expectations andknowing which customers you are targeting. Once you finally found what the customers want and who to target, your community slowly builds up a presence because you are already letting your customers know that you are listening to know by adjusting the products/services to what they want.

Reach out to your most active customers
Now that you have a bigger presence in the community, find those people who are the most enthusiastic about your product/service and communicate with them. These enthusiastic people are the leaders of your community, so by keeping them updated or have important news about your company’s product/services, they can actually participates in online or in real life groups and talk with the community and spreading good news about your company.

Plan to drive traffic to your community

This is where your company needs to have a website already or a forum for the community to have discussions. Your company should try to have advertisements on search engines, where customers usually shop, on YouTube and other websites that are high active for customers. By doing this, returning customers or new customers can see your advertisements and they could potentially click on your advertisement and lead them to the company’s website or community group.

Build in a reputation system

Building a reputation on forums or online discussion is very important. An example is having an important participant from your company and having them to post about information daily, keeping up a discussion with customers, and responding to customers questions fast to show them that you actually care.

Let your customers lead you

This is a very important part because this is where you have to listen to your customers very well. The community can help you on how you should run things on group discussions or on forums, if you are doing it right or wrong. Also to further improve on this, try to make a new post about “Improving this community” on forums and discussion groups. This way, even customers can help each other and your company all at the same time.

 

Nintendo

Here’s an example when the commercials and advertisements were all on T.V., newspaper, posters, and on boards around your area. But now with the internet and social media, customers can interact with your company’s customer support staff. It is so much easier to respond to customers now then before. Nintendo now have a YouTube account, E3 & Ustream streaming sites,  and forums to talk with customers. They started from T.V. commercials to now having interviews online, talking on forums, and many more.

 

Source: Li, C., Bernoff J., (2011) Groundswell. U.S: Forrester, Inc.

Question of the week: How will you start your community?

Common Techniques for talking with Groundswell

This week I will be going through the most common and effective way to talk with groundswell in chapter 6.

These are the 4 techniques that were discussed in the book:

1. Post a viral video – The first technique is about sharing one of your own videos and let the others do your job. The “others” are the people who saw the video that you have posted and then if they have interests for it, the people would copy the link and share it with others. Examples such as Tweeting on Twitter and having those followers re-tweet it on their account, another example is Facebook, just by click on “Share” it will be posted on your front page for others to see and they could also share and like the video.

This is an example of Nintendo’s Viral Video:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5_7zpUGNfM&w=560&h=315

This help people know what are the contents of this game, Bravely Default, collector’s edition. People who liked these kind of games or collectors edition would definitely watch and share which in return advertises the game itself to others.

2. Engage in social networks and user-generated content sites – This is about networking with others on social networking sites. The trend here is all about fast and reliable for replying to customers/clients. People who watches T.V. commercials or read advertisements either on newspaper or a poster are outdated and interacting with customer is extremely low compare to networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.

3. Join the blogosphere –  For any businesses, one should encourage others to blogging because this strategy can help with teaching and learning from other bloggers. This can develop relationship with companies or the individual that have similar interests, see different perspectives of others so that if there were a situation that others had experienced with, you can either follow their ways of doing things or if it was a bad experience you can try a different method and this would really benefit the company by just commenting and reading others blogs.

4. Create a community – This relates to the three mentioned above where you create a community of what your interests are and sharing them to the community. By having a community, it is an effective and efficient way of delivering a message to the community by listening to what they have to say and responding to them.

Source: Groundswell by by Li, C. & Bernoff, J. 2011. Boston, Massachusetts
So this week’s question is: Which techniques will your company choose?

Strategies for Groundswell

For this week, I will be discussing the POST method which is a four-step planning process to use for building your groundswell strategy.

Source: http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2007/12/the-post-method.html

People – Company should always focus and value their people/customers so that companies could see exactly what their customers want to meet their needs. Company should have a tool to see how and why their customers engage when buying their products/services, who and what age group does the people belong to, and to determine which type of groups of people that buys and research companies products whether it’s from friends and family, advertisement, or online (Forums, blogs, & more). We’ve discussed about this before on my previous post called “Targeting the right people” where I gave an example of Nintendo of how much people there were ranging from the age of 18-24 in Canada in specific groups (Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives). By knowing all of this a company can connect and engage with their customers.

Objectives – In this section, this is where the company should focus on what their goals/objectives are. A few questions could be asked are “Are you more interested in talking with groundswell for marketing?” or “In generating sales by energizing your best customers?” Or are you interested in tapping the groundswell internally to help your employees work together more efficiently?” (groundswell, 2011, p. 67-68). I will go into more detail of the five different objectives later on.

Strategy – This is where a company determines their strategy. This is where you ask yourself what does your company want to do? Do you want to have an relationship with your customers or maybe you want the relationship to change? Or maybe you want the customers to be more engaging with your company? After answering some of these questions, your company should be able to focus all their efforts and desires for change and then you can measure your success after. This way you can test if your strategy and methods are working effectively or not and adjust accordingly if something is wrong.

Technology – For the final process, this is where everything are decided from which people you want to target, what objectives your company is aiming for, and what strategies to use to reach those objectives. You can then choose to either buy or make your own application so that you can pick what technologies to use them for such as “blogs, wikis, social networks and many more” (groundswell, 2011, p. 68). There was an example from my previous post where Nintendo uses Nintendo Direct and E3 for anyone that comes to watch it directly or they stream it LIVE on streaming sites such as YouTube & uStream to engage with their customers. Nintendo uses the groundswell to keep customers updated with their new games and services while gathering data as to how much people were watching their video, how many likes, and reading comments so they can plan for their future videos.

To clarify with Objectives mentioned earlier, these are the five primary objectives a company should choose from to best suit their needs:

1. Listening – This is where company should use the groundswell to research their customers and understanding them. So basically, a goal for this is best suited for companies that looks for feedback, suggestions, and criticism from customers to use for their marketing and developments. (groundswell, 2011, p. 68)
2. Talking – For this objective, this is where you spread messages about what your company does (Sell products & providing services). So choose this when you want to further reach out to your customers other than using banner ads, search ads, emails & etc. (groundswell, 2011, p. 68)
3. Energizing – This is where you find your most energized customers and then using groundswell for the customers and power up their word of mouth and spreading them. What this means is that when someone or a customer who is enthusiastic about their favorite brand of product or service, they could talk for hours about it. So using groundswell and finding these people and providing new updates on products, services, and etc could energize these people which in turn the people would spread the news to others very fast.
4. Supporting – This is a objective where using groundswell to help your customers support each other. “This is effective for companies with significant support costs and customers who have a natural affinity for each other” (groundswell, 2011, pg. 69). I believe what this means is that setting up good customer services to help your customers when needed and also if their are blogs, forums, or any online discussion boards and customers can also help other customers as well if they have already encountered a problem before and the company had already fixed it for them, so a chain of supporting each other is also another good goal for a company.
5. Embracing – The last goal is hard and challenging goal for most companies because it does require the four goals/objectives prior to this. This is where you get your customers to help you design your products/services by integrating them to your business. So communication and the customers are key for this goal. This is to ensure that you have listened to the customers exactly what they want, spreading it to others so that they know that it’s being developed, showing the customers the design and development so that the enthusiastic people and other customers can spread their brand to even more people that may not heard of them before, and finally to support each other through donations, ideas, and suggestions.

These five objectives is like a business function in your company but it is more engaging with the customers through communication with groundswell.

So another question of the week:

“What are your company’s goals objectives?”

Transforming your Company

For this week’s blog, we’ll be discussing chapter 11 “How connecting with the groundswell transform your company.”

Source: http://acelebrationofwomen.org/2012/09/transformation-is-a-mysterious-journey-worth-the-walk/

In this chapter, it discusses about how you can transform your company from the current state to better state by following the three elements of groundwell:

• Take small steps that have big impact
• Have a vision and a plan
• Build leaders into the plan

Source: groundwell by Li, C. & Bernoff, J. 2011, p. 220-221

What the three elements mean is that first by taking small steps at a time and actually have a big impact with its customers/clients, it will then be acknowledged and accepted by a large or small group of people who reads or saw it on media (T.V., word of mouth, internet, Facebook, and more).  The company could then focus on those people that liked what the company has already accomplished and support them. After that the company would have to be patient and do research as to why the customers like what they have done by doing surveys or polls on a company’s website or their store directly and use those information to come up with a new vision and plan to meet those customers needs.

So the company has finished their research and gathered data on those customers, now what? The company must now need a vision of what they are trying to accomplish here. An example from a company that has a vision of everyone talking about their products or services and using them over other brands. So in this case, a company would try to seek a way to put out a message or a meaning to their customers with their products and services. An example to do this is through multiple advertisements such as: YouTube where millions of people could see it, Facebook which potentially gather hundreds of thousands for people who liked their page or sharing them through friends, or using a traditional way using a T.V.

Now that were at the last stage, even if you have do have a plan and a vision, the executives and the top managers would need a good reason as to why they should implement it. So this is where leaders are need to be built to represent their new ideas or innovation that could potentially make their company a success and these leaders would try to get their support and fund their plan to make it a success. The plan here is  to persuade some of these top executives from either through results from a small campaign, through their research of how many customers would support them, surveys to see that customers have a demand for them, a plan to how to market those plans to reach to those customers, and especially how much does this cost, what is the potential sales, and can they do it with a “x” amount of budget.

With all three of these elements at work the company should always be looking at the customers responses, feedback, and both positive and negative comments, this way the customer feel that they are engaged and actually feel like they made a small impact with a company’s products or services to be changed and that single customer would be satisfied and would love to continue to support the company through many years to come.

Here’s an example where changes were made from way back to now, the present. Apple’s iPod History

This shows about the new models throughout the years way back in 2001. It was at the time where walk-mans and disc players were roaming everywhere. But by the time the iPod showed up it was new, different, an innovative product that no one did before. There was no CD’s or DVD’s involved which mean that Apple had done their research by creating something entirely new and changing the ways they would watch videos and listening to their music without any extra hardware.

The small steps was to introduce something new and see if it gets a reaction from customers and then if its a success, build upon it, vision of what your customers look like using the product, in this case the iPod. And finally get the executives to support you!

 

Source: Groundswell by by Li, C. & Bernoff, J. 2011. Boston, Massachusetts

Question of the week: What were some changes have you experienced through your company? and if so was it a success? Why or why not?

Targeting the right people

Today we’ll be discussing about targeting the right people for businesses.

The book that I am currently reading, “groundswell,” will be mostly used as reference in all of my posts.

Source: http://empowered.forrester.com/groundswell/book.html

To start things off, what is groundswell? Groundswell is: “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather from traditional institutions like corporations” (groundswell, 2011, p.9).

So these “technologies” or Social Media tool includes the following: social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, and more), blogging (Like mine!), reviews & feedback, uploading pictures, music, and/or videos, all of these are what most of us are doing today.

If you want to read more about Social Media, you can go to my previous post here, “Social Media Today.”

So from the book of groundswell, in Chapter 3, it discussed  about “Social Technographics Profile,” which is “a way to group people based on the groundswell activities in which they participate” (groundswell, 2011, p. 41). The activities are already mentioned above which are the technologies or tools we used today that involves around groundswell.

These participants are then grouped together into 6 categories which in the follow picture below:

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

The groups from the picture above allows us to identify which specific target group that a company wants.

For example the tool below will show specifically how much percentages of young male from ages 18-24 and that is currently resides in Canada:

Source: http://empowered.forrester.com/tool_consumer.html

Considering the high percentage within the groups of “Joiners” and “Spectators”, most people in this category belongs to people who uses Social Networking Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and many more to maintain their public profiles, connecting with others like friends and family, and basically reading what others have to say.

For example. on a blog or a forum, people can express their opinions to the public and others can either criticize it and just comment on it. From the group “Spectators”, these people usually just read and learn from it and potentially apply it to real life situations. When they do apply it to real life and when someone ask where did they learned this, the “Spectators” would tell them that they learned this from this forum or blog and this chain could potentially spread from people to people and creates a knowledge spread amongst friends or potentially the whole city and beyond.

So finally without further ado, an example of how this could help a company target these people who participated in groundswell.

The example that I will be using is Nintendo. They are a company that developed gaming consoles way back dated in 1985 as their first console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and now the Nintendo Wii U. The company also have handheld gaming device such as the very first Game boy and the current one now, the Nintendo 3DS.

For more information click here, Nintendo’s History.

Using the information from the picture above that showed the young males ranging from 18-24 and that resides in Canada, Nintendo should have a grasp of what to do to appeal to these targeted groups, “Joiners & Spectators.”

Nintendo should create a discussion group (like on Facebook) or forums based on the new games that comes out so that people can read and discuss about what they like about the games and what they can to do improve for next time. Nintendo could potentially hire or train representatives to represent the company through discussions and forum to teach the “Spectators” of what new updates, features, or products/services  will be heading their way so they can prepare to discuss and potentially buy them. This will definitely help out the company to increase their sales and profit.

As for “Joiners,” people who maintain their profile, on Social Networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and many more, Nintendo can also have another representative and posting updates and pictures for everyone to see. This also let them see how many likes and comments from the updates and pictures so they know that if they are doing good job or not.

 

Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.nintendo.com

The picture above shows a comparison between how much genders visits Nintendo’s website, if they are in school or not, and where are they browsing from (home, work, school). The second image on the bottom shows how much visitors are going through this website and which country they are from.

So now that you have read and learned about “Targeting the right people,” you and your business can use this as an advantage to seek out potential customers and to get involved with many peoples as well.

 

Source: Groundswell by by Li, C. & Bernoff, J. 2011. Boston, Massachusetts

Question of the week:

“Where do you fit in the group of; Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, or Inactives?”

Social Media Today

Social Media in today’s society which include: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, wikis, and many more.
Most of these Social Media Networks lets us upload pictures of ourselves, personal information such as our name, gender, date of birth, and etc, connecting with other peoples like friends, families, companies and somethings or someone that might interests us.

The Social Media that I currently use are Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram because I would usually like a page, video, subscribe, or pictures depending on what interests me and I continue to look out for updates to see what’s new and learn from it. An example from YouTube are subscribing from the channels of IGN and Nintendo which constantly updates on what new games are being developed from the future, what and how a gaming company is doing, and which games would be a “Must” play.

I believe that with so much Social Media out on the internet, some issues may arise. An example from using a blog is that contents from other websites may be stolen and is used without permission. The result might end up damaging the reputation of a company and losing some of its valuable customers and clients. Another example is Social Networking sites such as Facebook which includes personal information that may result in companies that may want to look at their employee’s profile and to see what they might be doing and to see if this is the right person to hire/fire within their company. But Facebook now have settings that helps the user to make searching their profile harder or having their account private specifically to counter this issue.

I find that the Social Media will keep on influencing now and the future because of the connection with people all over the world. I believe opportunities will be given to those companies that uses the Social Media because of how easy it is to connect with people, from a company’s view, they can use their customers/clients information to create a product or service to meet their exact needs and constantly updating news to these customers/clients so they would keep coming back for more content or products/services that they might want.

Source: Groundswell by by Li, C. & Bernoff, J. 2011. Boston, Massachusetts

Question of the week: What other social media can you think of?