Social Media usage from teens through the eyes of Kate Winslet

2

November

2015

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Kate Winslet is starring in the new movie dedicated to Steve Jobs as the marketing executive Joanna Hoffman. Recently she made a statement for the Sunday Times encouraging parents to take the mobile devices out of the hands of their kids. She further shares concerns regarding the usage of social media, which according to her has too big of effect on the girls’ self-esteem. She claims: “Because all they ever do is design themselves for people to like them. And what comes along with that? Eating disorders,” and furthermore: “We don’t have any social media in our house.” (CNET, 2015).

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Such statements place a great importance on the social media usage of young teens and the potential effects for them from following their peers, idols and imitating them in a way online. According to a survey published in 2012 (Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 2012) fully 95% of all teens aged 12-17 are now online, 81,8% of which use some kind of social media and the figures keep on growing. It is inevitable for us to connect in some way online but is it right to start this interaction for kids at the age of 12 or 13 when they should be playing outside happily, outperforming each other in monopoly rather than sending an invitation to their friends for a game on Facebook?

References

CNET, (2015). Kate Winslet says parents losing control of kids to social media – CNET. [online] Available at: http://www.cnet.com/news/kate-winslet-says-parents-losing-control-of-kids-to-social-media/ [Accessed 2 Nov. 2015].

Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, (2012). Teens Fact Sheet. [online] Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/teens-fact-sheet/ [Accessed 2 Nov. 2015].

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Homework Assignment – Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and prediction markets

2

November

2015

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The first article (Malone, Laubacher and Dellarocas, 2010) focuses on explaining the collective intelligence genome, by focusing on the 16 principles genes framework, of which it consists. Their research uses building blocks (‘the genes’) to explain the intelligence systems. A gene is explained as a particular answer to key questions such as: What?; Who?; Why?; How?. The article goes in great detail of the Linux case answering all the four main questions. An interesting part for me is the answer to the Why-question. Namely, Why would you want to consider the Crowd option? In the case of Torvalds, he simply did not have the time to do all the activities by himself, which left him with no choice by to use the Crowd option, which automatically also answer the How-question: people would accomplish the task through creating certain interdependencies. In terms of disadvantage, I believe that the only major one I could mention would be the fact that at a certain point the framework gets too complicated and the reader might miss the meaning of the paragraph.

The second article (Pisano and Verganti, 2008) talk about what should be taken into consideration when it comes to choosing the best way of collaboration for a particular business. It is so important due to the fact that failing to choose the right model would result in failing the race to lead in new technology development. I personally cannot direct any criticism to the authors of the article due to the following reasons. It provides incentives as to what kind of network a company should use according to its structure with examples as in the case of Alessi Italian company, Apple model as well as IBM in a consortia. It goes in great details regarding crowdsourcing and its advantages and disadvantages as well as it provide valuable tips.

The third article (Borison and Hamm, 2010) talks about strategic decision making-theories, processes and tools used to limit uncertainty both in the private and public sector. The article’s aim is to outline the conventional approaches being used in terms of decision-making and introduce a new promising tool called ‘prediction market’. The article goes in great detail outlining the decision theory consisting of probability encoding process and expert aggregation. A big advantage of the article and I believe the core strategy of the writers was to explain those processes in great detail, outlining the main problems when it comes to their usage in order to highlight the new tool they want to introduce.

The fourth article (Konnikova, 2011), which was chosen by me, challenges the concept behind all the articles and examples related to Crowdsourcing. It has been considers as correct that from diversity of estimates comes improved accuracy. The article uses a study of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science), which states that social influence could have an impact on the wisdom of crowds.

HARIBO FAN edition campaign was announced as ‘one of the most successful crowdsourcing project in the German-speaking world’ (innosabi, 2015). The project was such a success due to following a three-pillared structure. The first pillar states the motivation behind participation: to take part in the Haribo Goldbären selection. Secondly, the familiarity of the brand allowed for a development of the stand-alone platform. Lastly, the fans’ desire to include a blue bär in the Haribo selection. The biggest advantage this campaign had for the brand was creating a growing community and excitement around the label due to the fact that every week a winner was selected. This campaign proved that large companies with long tradition could profit a great deal from crowdsourcing.

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An example of a successful crowdfunding campaign (Peaksmaker.com, 2015) was that of the The Women’s Fund Endowment of the Community Foundation of Tompkins County. The foundation provides grants to improve the lives of women in the community through education and by fighting to solve the inequality of women in the community. Their fundraising goal was $5,000 dollars and at the end the total raised was $5,005 dollars, so their crowdfunding campaign was successful. Therefore, I wanted to use this example to highlight what is needed for a campaign to be successful. Firstly, the campaign had a vision and mission behind it with which women were able to identify themselves. This helped to raise funds for the campaign. The second thing is the transparency they were providing by sharing with people successful stories in the community. Lastly and very importantly is that the campaign was boosted by social media and marketing promotion.

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References:

1.Borison, A. and Hamm, G. (2010). Prediction Markets: A New Tool for Strategic Decision Making. 1st ed. California: California Review Management.

2.innosabi, (2015). GOLDBÄREN FAN-Edition Case Study – innosabi. [online] Available at: http://innosabi.com/en/goldbaeren-fan-edition-case-study/

3.Konnikova, M. (2011). The Wisdom of Crowds, Revisited: When The Crowd Goes From Wise to Wrong | Big Think. [online] Big Think.

4.Malone, T., Laubacher, R. and Dellarocas, C. (2010). The Collective Intelligence Genome. 1st ed. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

5.Peaksmaker.com, (2015). Why Crowdfunding Campaigns Succeed: 10 Case Studies from the Best Crowdfunding Websites – PEAKS. [online]

6.Pisano, G. and Verganti, R. (2008). Which Kind of Collaboration is Right for You?. 1st ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review.

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Is crowdsourcing used by the majority of people (ex.Google) and businesses out there?

23

October

2015

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Crowdsourcing is a very interesting concept, which shows the big potential of innovating further the collaboration between the Web 2.0 style of community- meaning Facebook, Wikipedia Youtube etc. We all know about examples involving Crowdsourcing such as InnoCentive ,Wikipedia or Linux. But what a lot of us are unaware of is that almost every day we are part of a crowdsourcing projects! How so? Take for example, Google, which has been named the biggest secret crowdsourcing platform. It is secret because every day people contribute to its content without even realising. Take for example Google search. So the results that come up once you type something depend on the popularity of a website and its content that is related to what you have typed in. Furthermore, you have a lot of crowdsourcing projects within Google that you might have not realised give you the opportunity to crowdsource information. For example, Google translate. When you type something for translation and it translates content for you, in the down right corner you have the option to correct the translation, as shown below.

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This crowdsourcing is aimed at improving the content with the knowledge of the platforms’ users.

Furthermore, let`s take into consideration another activity we do really often which could be described as another crowdsourcing project: writing reviews. In the case of Google plus, which gives you the opportunity to look at the profile of a restaurant for ex.Vapiano Rotterdam Plaza. On the restaurant’s page there is a section, as you can see below, which shows you ratings and reviews about the place.

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There you can also write your own review and comment, again taking part in a crowdsourcing.

Another crowdsourcing project of Google would be the Google Map Maker. The presumption is that there is always something to be improved when it comes to Maps and you can contribute to this development through the platform.

The snapshot on the left-hand side shows you how it would look like when someone adds a new place, the status of his/her update. On the right-hand side you can see how you can comment on this new edition, share your opinion as to whether the newly added location is correct or not.

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In conclusion, taking aside the many crowdsourcing projects out there, we should consider also some of the successful crowdsourcing business models. Some of them are InnoCentive, Linux, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, E-bay, Wikipedia and many more that are powered by crowdsourcing and its advantages. Therefore, I believe that behind crowdsourcing there is a lot of potential and it could add value to a lot of companies If they would like to explore its benefits.

References

Google.com, (2015). Google Map Maker. [online] Available at: https://www.google.com/mapmaker

Google+, V. (2015). Vapiano Rotterdam Plaza – About – Google+. [online] Plus.google.com. Available at: https://plus.google.com/111668239942523542713/about

MakeUseOf, (2015). 7 Google Crowdsourcing Projects That Help Us Today. [online] Available at: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-google-crowdsourcing-projects-help-us-today/

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Which Social Media Platforms Drive The Most Sales? (Infographic)

13

September

2015

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Which Social Media Platforms Drive the Most Sales? [Infographic]

Business owners often wonder about the “ROI of social media”. Is my Facebook page actually driving sales? Is all this tweeting really doing anything for my bottom line? Should I be on Pinterest and Instagram?

Well it turns out, when it comes to ecommerce, being social matters.

To better understand how social media is impacting the ecommerce industry, we analyzed data from 37 million social media visits that led to 529,000 orders.

Here’s some interesting data points we uncovered:

  • Facebook dominates as a source of social traffic and sales. Nearly two thirds of all social media visits to Shopify stores come from Facebook. Plus, an average of 85% of all orders from social media come from Facebook.
  • Orders from Reddit increased 152% in 2013.
  • Perhaps most interesting and surprising was community style site Polyvore which is generating the highest average order value ahead of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Also noteworthly in this category is Instagram which is also generating higher average orders than those same sites. This is especially impressive considering the only clickable links in Instagram are those in profile bio’s.
  • Facebook has the highest conversion rate for all social media ecommerce traffic at 1.85%

In addition to these stats, we’ve also analyzed specific industries to determine which platforms are performing well for them. You can check out all of our findings in the infographic below. Please click on the image to view it in full-screen.

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