Technology

Technology is growing every single day and is constantly changing and bringing more ideas into the equation making technology extremely fast and gives it the ability to do or make anything that we try to figure out how to make. Technology and its growth brings the world to where it’s at and how it operates.  Once a new technology comes out, they are already working on the next better version of whatever they made, that is why technology is always changing and improving, it will also never stop improving as long as we are here on this earth.

The biggest technology that I can think of that is going to change how we use social media and how it is going to change the way that people communicate over the internet. This technology would definitely have to be the Apple watch. There has been so much hype about this product that I am pretty sure that it is going to be the next big thing that everyone wants and will eventually have if they want to keep up with technology and the way that people function and interact. From the Apple watch it is going to make our messages a lot more relevant, getting your point across short and sweet because it is such a small screen that it located on your wrist so that when notifications or messages come through, you don’t have to pull your cellular device out of your pocket but can just simply check your notifications just from looking down at your wrist.

So many cool functions attached through the Apple watch, you can just talk into your watch and it will write a text message for you or even type in a tweet you would like to send out. This watch will not only tell time but will allow you to monitor yourself and control other devices. It allows you to operate your phone using voice control, also to be discretely alerted to incoming calls, it can make credit card payments, get weather forecast, download apps, so pretty much anything you desire to do can be done through a device attached to your wrist. This device will change social media in the future because it will provide a way for everyone to collect and analyze data on both a personal and global level.

Apple has always tried making their products to be extremely user friendly. People now a days are always looking for the easy route where they don’t have to put much effort but receive the response that they want. The Apple watch is just another device that distracts us from face to face interaction with others but allows us to easily interact, connect and communicate with people close or far away. This watch will be really convenient and allow us to communicate in more ways than ever.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-apple-watch-change-social-media-brands-jason-ealey

http://www.inc.com/associated-press/3-reasons-apple-watch-will-or-wont-change-the-game.html

Apps

Ever since the smartphones started coming out back in 1992 is where apps all began. Smartphones have come a long way since then in just a short period of time to becoming very popular and affordable is when apps went through the roof! One of my favorite sayings is “there’s an App for that”. Pretty much any game, platform, music, or GPS has some kind of app on the smartphone which can come to good use. From having a cellular device on our person 24/7 has brought our generation to spend more time online than any other media. Which most of that mobile time is spent on apps, which has brought apps to become the most dominant form of digital interaction. The reason apps are so popular and are used by pretty much everyone now a days is because consumers want the simplicity and focus that apps provide, rather than the variety found in websites.

Mobile apps have changed the way we live forever, and will continue to do so. From changing our relationships and how we communicate with one another. People are so attached to their phones and are starting to become socially awkward and are missing what is happening around them by only focusing on a false reality that comes from all of the social media apps that are out there. “Our app-driven life: Smart-phone apps are becoming the north star for millions of Americans who use them to navigate through life – shopping, playing, reading, dating, learning, and more with their fingertips.” Although these apps and technology are extremely incredible by making things so much easier for us, but at the same time it is making us lazy by providing no reason to leave the house because we can do pretty much any daily activity through our smartphones. Some different apps that I use on a daily basis are Instagram, Pandora, Facebook, Gmail, Venmo, Snapchat, and Google Maps just to name a few. This just shows how much apps are used in our daily lives.

http://www.convinceandconvert.com/mobile/why-apps-may-become-more-important-than-your-website/

http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Tech/2013/0127/The-app-driven-life-How-smartphone-apps-are-changing-our-lives

Viral Videos

I have always wondered how a video can go viral, as well as wondering how money and ads come into play when a video does go viral. A viral video is the process of making a humorous, catchy film that gets over one million views in just a couple of days. It’s a process of internet sharing through different social media platforms, emails, and the big one would definitely be Youtube. Viral videos become popular through quick films that catch the audience’s attention, whether it be funny or an inspirational video that makes someone want to share that or show it to a family member or a friend to let them see what they saw.

There are a ton of different aspects in getting a video to go viral. Most videos that go viral fall into three different categories which are humorous, promotional, and unintentional. I have noticed that the funniest videos are ones that are not planned out but are people that don’t know that they are being filmed and just acting as themselves. “Having a piece of content go viral is like winning the Internet’s version of the lottery.” Videos going viral is not an easy task, here are a few tips in helping your success of getting your videos to go viral:

Be short and sweet – Our generation’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter by the minute. The video must be catchy from the get go in order to get the audience to continue to watch the film. Make the film positive and upbeat, no one is trying to show their friends something that is negative.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ilyapozin/2014/08/07/6-qualities-to-make-your-videos-go-viral/

http://socialmouths.com/blog/2014/07/23/tips-to-make-a-video-go-viral/

Social Media Case Reflection 2 - Arab Spring

          Before getting into my research on Arab Spring, I wasn’t too familiar on what I was going to find. As I looked it up I came to know that the Arab spring was an event that happened back in 2010 over in the Arab world and continues to go on till this day in different parts of the country such as in the Middle East and also a continuation in North Africa. Arab spring was a revolutionary wave of different demonstrations and protests, such as riots and civil wars. Some of these protests had no violence involved with them but for the most part it was a mess of violence throughout this time. The reason that these protestors were so mad was because of the unfairness of the security, the ridiculous amount of unemployment, and the rising prices on everything. Although these are hard things to deal with in life, I firmly believe that it could have been handled in a different manner, riots and fighting never is the answer, this matter should be handled by the government through good communication and compromising on an agreement.

            These protestors used social media to their advantage and used it most effectively to communicate to the people as well as organizing them into groups and areas and also by raising awareness in the face of state attempts at repression and internet censorship. Social media and digital technologies allowed citizens in these areas that were affected by the Arab Uprisings for collective activism to avoid the state operated media channels. The amount of social media that was used indicates the kind of people that were powering the Arab Spring. It was young people who fueled these riots by using the new generation’s abilities of social networking to release this information to not only the Arab nations but to nations all over the world.

            I think that some of the pros of the Arab Spring is that there is no more full control by one party or person. Instead of blindly following other leaders or countries we can have our freedom and not be forced to do things that seem un-justice. On the other hand it is never a good idea to start civil wars, riots or to have disagreements or any kind of violence between the government and other countries, but having chaos for a little while is sometimes necessary in order to make things right. These things definitely are going to take some time to overcome but I think it’s something that needs to happen or no one is ever going to change and the horrible leaders will continue in their ways corrupting the world. At this point is the only time I think war is appropriate because it’s the only way to put a stop to it.

            “Chronic instability in countries undergoing political transitions have put additional strain on struggling local economies, and deep divisions have emerged between the Islamists and secular Arabs.” These Arab countries are amongst the poorest countries and have a rapid population growth, slow economy and weak governments. People just expected that things would change just in the blink of an eye if the authoritarian regimes were replaced with stable democratic systems across the region. They thought that the removal of corrupt rulers would instantly improve their living standards. Things just don’t work out like that, first of all it takes time to get those leaders out of their positions and to also change the mindset of the people of the community that were following these leaders. Then a new leader that has good values, and is highly respected and can show people that they can trust in him must come into position and completely turn things around. People need to realize that these things take time and don’t happen without much thought and effort and unity of everyone to be put into this cause.

For almost two generations, waves of democracy had swept over other regions, from southern and eastern Europe to Latin America, from East Asia to Africa. But not the Middle East. Tyrants shut down the political world and became owners of their countries. There was terrible rulers and a terrorist fringe. “Arabs had started to feel they were cursed, doomed to despotism. The region's exceptionalism was becoming not just a human disaster but a moral embarrassment.” In all the Arab spring was something that had to happen in order to make changes in those countries and I understand that it takes time but it should have been resolved already and it needs to be stopped.

http://middleeast.about.com/od/humanrightsdemocracy/a/Definition-Of-The-Arab-Spring.htm

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137053/fouad-ajami/the-arab-spring-at-one

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

     I wasn’t too sure what SEO meant as I began my research about it, so that we all can be on the same page and understand what it means I am going to give you the definition of what it stand for. SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” SEO is the process of getting traffic from the free, organic, editorial or natural search results onto the search engines. It is also an online marketing for any company that is trying to get recognition to their websites and making their content higher on the search engines. People are more likely to pick the first thing that pops up when they type a certain subject in, so companies try to focus on getting connections with their users, making their website something that is a benefit to their company because people that are interested in their product are noticing and most likely clicking on their website before the click on the competitors website. How SEO works is they pull the title of the website, links that are attached to certain words, title page descriptions and also the reputation that a company has. Search engine optimization is about putting your sites best foot forward so that it is clear and visible in the search engines, but they need to realize that their ultimate consumers are their users, not the search engines.

       “Both Google and Bing have acknowledged that social signals, including link shares and brand mentions on some social network status updates, are currently playing a role in natural SERPs rankings, which means that maintaining a presence on these sites is vitally important for your startup’s SEO.” Make sure to put links to your site all over social media to connect with the social networking to receive more recognition. 

         Some important things to remember when making a website, and having it work best to your advantage by getting it the recognition that you are looking for is first off to create unique, accurate page titles and improve the structure of your URLs making it easier to navigate your webpage. If you are starting up a company and trying to think of how to best begin you website, your marketing goal should be to identify a list of potential keywords to target within the natural search results. These keywords should include phrases that you think your potential customers are going to type into the search engines, make them unique but very applicable to what your site is all about. Think simple and ask others what keywords they would use if they were trying to find information that has to do with your product or site. Search Engine optimization is very beneficial to all those who are looking for recognition and having the highest percent of people clicking on their site because it is easily accessible and simply explains the info of your meta tag description.

http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

http://www.homestead.com/blog/05/2013/7-basic-seo-techniques-all-webmasters-must-know#.VRrnr_nF_hs

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-seo-techniques-all-startups-should-be-using/45827/

Management platforms and Tools

Before I began to research about this topic of management platforms and tools I truly didn’t have a clue what I was going to find about this topic and wasn’t sure what it was all about. I quickly realized that I was pretty familiar with the way that platforms are managed such as the way that our cellular companies can track us and know exactly where we are at all times. The way that they can do this and always know where we are is because we always have our phones on us no matter what. From putting the location services on, each app that we use can track our location and help to narrow down our search to places that are close to us. I think that it is extremely helpful to always turn on the location service to get the best most helpful full effect of each app that we are using.

Another tool that is used and is extremely effective is called aggregators. The definition of an aggregator is a website or program that collects related items of content and displays them or provides links to them. For example if you are on amazon looking for books or football cleats or any kind of item, the next time you are on any kind of website, links will pop up on the side that are closely related to previous searches that you have done. This is a great way to bring back these items to your attention and distract you from what you were doing at the moment and display item that are to your own interest. “There are two kinds of content aggregators, those who simply gather material from various sources for their Websites, second is those who gather and distribute content to suit their customer’s needs.” Aggregators are the perfect way for target marketing. Instead of putting links of Barbie dolls and girls lingerie on a page where a male college student athlete is on, there will be links of sports material and school accessories which one is more likely to click on the link and buy the product because it will be something that they are actually looking for and are in need of. Sometimes it is a bad thing having links pop up on any website that you go on for example around Christmas time my mother would look things up to buy for her kids and then we would use the computer and see all of the things that she has been looking up so it wasn’t really a surprise like she wanted it to be. “At the other end of the aggregator spectrum, we have The Huffington Post, one of the smartest digital news machine ever and, at the same time, the mother of all news internet impostures.”

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/content-aggregator

http://www.mondaynote.com/archive/archives.php?t=aggregators-the-good-ones-vs-the-looters

Organizational Uses

I remember asking my mom a few years back what would we do without technology? You hear this question all the time but the older generation laughs at that question because they lived through college and most of their lives without most things that we have now a days. Technology is incredible and has completely changed how the world functions. We can communicate through multiple different organized programs and platforms. This makes it so much easier for us to be able to communicate in a much easier manner with family members or friends from across the world. This process of using the technology that we have now has made communication quicker, easier and can even provide visual face to face contact with people thousands miles away.

                “Technology innovations change the way customers think and behave. From the time our smartphones wake us in the morning to the last tweet of the night, our brains are wired. Along with this change comes great competitive advantages.” It’s so crazy to think about how much we rely on our smartphones. Technology has gone through the roof in the past five years and you can pretty much do any day to day thing that you need on a device that can fit into your hand. You can work from it, do school work, find restaurants, directions, communicate with anyone. It’s pretty incredible to see how technology will always be on an uphill grind bringing more and more ideas to increase the potential and capacity of the technological uses.

It amazes me how much things have changed throughout the last century. “People used to be valued for knowing a trade. Then came the industrial revolution and those skills became devalued.  Machines took over physical labor and most people either did simple, repetitive tasks or managed those who did.” For how amazing technology is, there definitely is some cons such as diminishing the connection that comes from communicating with people face to face and having machines replace physical labor.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-BladeSystem-News-Events/How-can-organizations-use-technology-to-adapt-to-changing/ba-p/2383387#.VQh-mPnF_hs

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/06/08/how-technology-is-changing-the-way-organizations-learn/