This Might Already be Old News

Remember the days where we would have to ask our parents’ permission before going on the internet because for that amount of time your home phone could not receive or make calls? Remember the days when the news was something we waited until prime time to watch in order to hear about what might be going on? Slow, non-up-to-date news was expected and embraced because it was all we knew. Thankfully, we have come quite a long way in terms of technology in just those few years, but with such quick speeds, LTE, notifications and social media, it brings about the question as to whether we are ever truly able to stay completely up to date.

Once a news story breaks or a tweet is sent out, it immediately becomes old news. Just within those few seconds, there are already various updates from other internet or social sources. And while I may have just convinced myself that we are always one step behind in our information receiving, I would like to dive into the benefits of the velocity and specificity of data we can receive today using social media as brought about in chapter 14 of Social Media ROI

According to Blanchard, an organization, “can see whether its latest bit of content, messaging, promotional genius, or discussion topic is a hit or a miss and why” immediately, (Blanchard, page 204). An organization can gather likes, screenshots, shares, retweets, responses with such high velocity, and quantify this information instantaneously, alter their strategy and do it all over again within moments of their original use of social media. This type of speed and turnaround time is crucial for any organization to stay ahead and be successful. Think of the ever-notorious Myspace. Myspace did not successfully analyze what its users wanted and did not utilize all of the information or data they could have, and soon enough they fell behind and Facebook skyrocketed. Facebook is consistently listening to its users, analyzing the information they monitor and receive and making specific changes all in real time.

Even while working on our individual platform projects it has been clear what our social media sites have done successfully and where their failures have been prominent. For example, Snapchat has made viewing and sending snaps easier, have added the option to upload images from one’s camera roll, video chat with someone, add a Geofilter, scan a code to add someone and much more. These decisions and improvements were all made based off of detailed feedback and data from its users. They listened in real time, made changes and tested their improvements by implementing them, analyzing the feedback once again and continuing the cycle.

The other reason this cycle is so successful is due to the specificity. Before social media monitoring, surveys were used to attain research and feedback and while they are still widely used and valuable, concepts such as researcher bias and un-honesty of the survey recipients come into play. To get more specific, one can now observe immediate feedback from users by looking at conversations about your brand and analyzing what people are excited about or complaining about, (Blanchard, page 205). We can now acquire massive amounts of specific data in real time and use it to strategically change, alter and improve our uses of the variety of social media platforms we have available. We must constantly be willing to change in order to grow, bringing us back to my way too deep, out of character depressing question, are we ever truly ahead of the curve or in possession of the utmost updated information, changes or news?

Sources:

Wallace, David. “R.I.P. – Top 10 Failed Social Media Sites [Infographic].” Search Engine Journal. Search Engine Journal, 14 Sept. 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

Blanchard, Olivier. Social media ROI: managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2011. Print.
Image 1:”11 Things You Should Do For A Long And Healthy Life.” Indiatimes.com. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

Image 2: Giphy. “Mad Men GIF – Find & Share on GIPHY.” GIPHY. 22 Mar. 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

Image 3: “18 Unspoken Truths About Living With PTSD.” Playbuzz. 15 July 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

Numbers

A lot of people interested in social media are not big fans of math or numbers. Not all, but I assume this is the case (baseless assumption, woo). However, I understand why numbers are so important to social media. A lot of social media in business is “why”? Why pay an employee to spend time on websites that any other employee would be discouraged from using in the workplace? They do it because it can give actual boosts to their companies, and reach different audiences than normal advertising.

This data is gathered through social media analytics. In chapter 14 and 15 of the Social Media ROI book by Olivier Blanchard, he goes into what companies measure, and why they do it. This is often the part of social media jobs that people like to forget, social media manager is supposed to be a fluff job, I have to deal with numbers as well? Sadly yes. There are so many things to measure with numbers, as shown on page 198 and 199 of Blanchard. The chapter later goes on to say that a company should focus on measurements they think are important, as measuring everything would be tiring and not very fruitful. Chapter 15 lists some of the financial and non-financial outcomes of social media use (211).

Numbers don’t have to be misery inducing though. Nay, on the contrary, numbers are a visual display of success, a numerical delight. Each new follower gained, video watched, or post clicked is a guide. This post with a happy dog got 500% more views than our annual hoedown fundraiser? Time to bring in the pups! A lot of people unfollowed after your last political rant? Maybe keep those thoughts to your diary. Analyzing each post can be rewarding and help you (the social media Padawan) become a social media professional (or to continue the Star Wars metaphor, a true social media Jedi).

Once you have a lot of numbers, from a lot of different places, you can put them all together. For our case maybe make a timeline with Twitter likes and followers, Instagram likes and followers, and interest in our Facebook event. This could be used to determine if any particular Twitter or Instagram posts success made a noticeable improvement to our guest list (our primary goal for our social media accounts is to get people to go to our Social Media Symposium. The book says to look for patterns (233). These patterns can give you a wider visual of which parts of the social media strategy are working and which need improvement.

Numbers help us put the feelings of “I think I’m doing well” or “I need to improve” into more concrete terms. A lot of social media is about how it resonates with people, and how posts make people feel, but these cannot be as easily measured as something like followers or likes, so those really help determine the successfulness of a social media campaign, and whether social media is worth investing in or not. With how many companies use social media regularly, something must be working right. Because if it wasn’t working at all, we wouldn’t be in this class.

Sources:

Blanchard, Olivier. Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2011. Print.

http://thecyphersagency.com/blog/2010/03/09/7-ate-9-the-murderous-numbers/

http://www.prnewsonline.com/how-to-pick-the-social-media-analytics-tool-thats-right-for-you/

Analyzing Metrics

Chapter 15 of Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Effects in Your Organization, focused mainly on how to set business objectives and ways in which to measure progress towards these goals. I think this type of skill will be pertinent to our social media platform projects leading up to the symposium. With the symposium being just 3 weeks away, one of which is spring break, time is of the essence in terms of spreading the word and reaching a target audience. Attendance at the symposium will greatly depend on how successful our social media outreach attempts are. We have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest covered. At this point it’s just a matter of who will follow our accounts and be drawn in enough to spend their Thursday afternoon with us. According to Blanchard, “Business objectives give purpose to a social media program, give momentum to a social media program, makes everyone involved with a social media program accountable to the rest of the organization and provides adequate measurement of a social media program and insight into what is working and not working”. We can translate this information into our objectives related to the symposium. Our purpose is to educate students, faculty and Pittsburgh residents on how to use social media in a professional way across multiple platforms. Posting daily gives us momentum into engaging with our audience. Each group is actively posting on their given social media platform on a weekly (or more frequently) basis, involving the entire class in our objective. We are monitoring how many people like, follow, repost/retweet, etc. our posts to see what sort of attention we’re attracting.

Blanchard also advised on how to calculate metrics accurately and to avoid a couple pitfalls. Sometimes businesses get caught up in “popularity metrics”, a term that represents only focusing on the exact number of followers a certain platform contains. Blanchard describes these as “empty numbers”, since the actual interaction of one person clicking follow on a page then moving right on to something else is very minimal. A celebrity might have 5 million followers, but many of these people may not look twice at what they are posting. The quality and actual interaction of the follower is what should be focused on. Empty followers have zero value in terms of reaching a business objective. Another term that is warned about is “moment in time metrics”, this references the rise and fall of certain brands, people, etc. and their popularity. A celebrity that was popular six months ago may have fallen in the shadows by the current date. It’s important to track metrics in terms of overall trends, not by random spikes based on circumstantial situations. I’d say an example of this would be Rebecca Black, a somewhat dated example but we’ll go with it. Black came out with the hit “Friday” in 2011 and was popular for about a week. Her song wasn’t necessarily good, but it certainly made an imprint on the pop-cultural scene of the time. Today, nobody talks or knows about her. Measuring a metric from 2011 for that one week would imply she is very popular, but today the metric would look entirely different.

The best advice I took from this Blanchard chapter was that the only way to improve or rely on metrics is to test them out, evaluate with feedback and then repeat with modifications. We have the benefit of having last year’s symposium to learn from. This year we’ll be able to take the feedback the class received and use it to help our symposium reach more people, be more informative and spread useful information. We’ll be sure to develop a feedback response system so that attendees of this year’s symposium will be able to provide their thoughts on how we did and what we need to change.

 

• Blanchard, Olivier. “Planning for Performance Measurement.” Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2011. 30-40. Print.

 

Embracing Brevity

 

In this week’s readings I resonated with the concept of practicing concise writing.   Often in the professional workplace, the more to the point we are, the better. In a fast-past moving work, the idea of saving time, space, and more often than not—money, is ideal. So in the sprit of brevity, I will make this blog post terse.

1. Writing as though you are an SAT vocabulary prep book does more harm than good

Instead of ‘expeditious’ use ‘fast’; don’t use ‘cognizant,’ instead, use ‘aware’. With people having low literacy levels, the simpler the word the better.

2. Cut the fluff

Words like ‘very,’ ‘extremely,’ ‘really,’ or any word used to emphasize the following word is not needed. Chances are you a. don’t need it the word to emphasize it, or b. the word you’re trying to emphasize isn’t the best word you could use. Every character in your writing counts. Cutting fluff saves the reader time and makes your writing more clear.

Concisely crafted writing takes a certain level of dedication, time, and practice. In almost every piece you write, there are words that can be changed, cut, and moved around. In addition the suggestions from the article here are a few more I have learned during my time as professional writing student.

3. Buzzwords are key

In the professional world it is rare that people will have the time to read every word you write. Using well-known ‘buzzwords’ make it easier for people to scan the writing and still pick up on the overall message.

4. Know your audience

Depending on who you’re writing to can alter your tone and formality. Often, people enjoy reading an inviting and engaging voice—but beware of the differences in writing for a more professional audience. Bonus: stay away from colloquial language—when using local jargon, a non-local audience member can feel taken out of the writing if they don’t know the local slang.

5. Red Pens> Editing on screen

Even though we live in a digital savvy world, there are parts of us that are still old school. When editing, do yourself a favor and print out a copy. Using a red pen, start reading your work backwards from the last sentence to the first. Taking yourself out of the natural flow the words will help catch easily missed mistakes.

 

Image Source: http://howtobemoreconcise.blogspot.com

 

Post Less – Say More

Celebrities have it hard. And by that I mean that whatever they do get critiqued in every single way no matter if what they are doing is good or bad. With social media growing, it has become a great outlet for celebrities to express themselves, market themselves, and more. But it can also be a crucial outlet because of how the world analyzes their lives. So, this has caused some celebrities to be very mindful of what they are doing or saying on these social media platforms. Danny Rubin actually made an article about writing less and saying more. In that article he discusses brevity and how it can be very beneficial when writing. Sometimes taking out needless words is key when it comes to saying what you want to say. This made me think of celebrities and how they have developed their social media pages so they aren’t saying too much, but are still saying enough.

 

Beyoncé (you guys know I love her) is a very good example of a celebrity who says less – but still happens to gets her point across. Beyoncé has always been meticulous with what she does. Instagram is definitely a place where she doesn’t post much, but she posts just enough to keep you updated with what she is doing. For example, unlike many celebrities who reveal their pregnant bellies by letting the public pry into their lives or guess if they are pregnant, Beyoncé waited until the perfect time to post a picture that let the world know she pregnant again. What was truly great about the picture was that she posted a picture in minimal clothes that showed her baby bump because of the rumors that surfaced 5 years ago that said she wasn’t pregnant with her first daughter Blue. Her posting this picture below was basically her saying “I’m a woman who takes pride in being pregnant. I’m still a normal human being like the rest of you – so don’t even say that I’m not really pregnant this time” without her really having to say it. Again, this is similar to what Rubin was saying but with a twist: Post Less – Say More.

Although Beyoncé has mastered the post less, say more technique, there are plenty of celebrities that do the same exact thing. The beautiful and talented singer, Alicia Keys, is a really good example of posting less and saying more. Last year, Alicia Keys began to post pictures of her not wearing make up on Instagram. Now some celebrities do this just for the hell of it, but when Alicia kept posting pictures of her bare face, the public started to ask questions. While the public kept asking questions, she did not respond. The public later discovered from an interview Alicia Keys did was the message she was trying to convey was the fact that you don’t have to wear makeup to be considered beautiful. Still till this day, Alicia Keys hasn’t touched make up.

I think both of these ladies do a great job at saying what they have to say through their Instagram posts without having to spell everything out for people. I think that’s how many celebrities should be and I also think that is how regular people should be. I say this because the less you post, or the more careful and meticulous you are behind your posts will benefit you in the long run, especially if you have employers looking at your social media or you are conducting business on social media. So, post less – say more. Be careful with your pictures. AND Be careful with your words.

Works Cited:

Carter-Knowles, Beyonce (Beyonce). “We would like to share our love and happiness. We have been blessed two times over. We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two, and we thank you for your well wishes. – The Carters”. 1 Feb 2017. Instagram.

Keys, Alicia (AliciaKeys). “Constantly discovering, relearning & deciding again and again who I want to be. I’m my interview with @MuseumMammy @GlamourMag Activism Issue!”. 1 Feb 2017. Instagram.

Rubin, Danny. “Write Less, Say More.” LifeHacker. 5 Nov 2012. Web.

Continued Attention: Red Nose Day

First, go to Youtube. Then, type Red Nose Day. When you type Red Nose Day into the search engine, your search will have 5,170,000 results. Scrolling down the list, you will recognize a slew of British and American celebrities as well as movie and television titles. What exactly is Red Nose Day? My first recollection of Red Nose Day was a self-made music video created by One Direction in 2013 (pre-Zayn split) in which they covered the catchy classic song “One Way or Another” for charity. While sporting red rubber noses throughout, the members interact with children in Africa in between funny dancing and singing. Today, this video has 342,503,372 views and holds the 6th most watched spot out of all of their music videos! That much attention is sure to gain some engagement.

Red Nose Day began as a television fundraising telethon in the 1980s by the British charity Comic Relief. Its mission is to bring about change and “help people living tough lives across the UK and Africa,” (Comicrelief.com). Every two years, entertainers, comedians, musicians and more come together to raise funds and bring laughter to those who need it. Since its establishment, Red Nose Day “has becomes something of a British institution” and aimed to include a global audience for the cause. Social media and the Internet play an important role in how Red Nose Day grabs the attention of audiences. According to Ashlee Humphreys, “The ultimate goal of much of social media content, both commercial and nonprofit, is to inspire the audience to do something,” (Humphreys 48). With the help of One Direction (who at this time were at the peak of their band career) and other entertainers, Red Nose Day 2013 inspired audiences to raise over $125 million!

Not all viral fundraising methods last through time like Red Nose Day. Hype grows around a shared popular video as the audience reach expands. For example, the sensation surrounding the non-profit Invisible Children’s “KONY 2012” video quickly dissipated as people began questioning the video and online engagement dwindled. Even the ALS ice bucket challenge became a tired trend after people grew bored and as the reach extended as far as it could. So what makes Red Nose Day so successful? Red Nose Day has always been successful. Its first year in 1988 raised over $18 million. But, “The secret to a company’s reach strategy lies in the program’s ability not only to acquire fans, followers, subscribers and connections, but to convert them through its use of social media into transacting customers.” (Blanchard 38). Red Nose Day expanded their audience reach with their One Direction video collaboration. Conversion (the donating action made by audiences) is vital to the success of Red Nose Day. Without social media, Red Nose Day could not reach the numbers of donations it makes. They create original material while reminding audiences to donate to the same cause every two years.

In 2015, Comic Relief collaborated with Coldplay and the cast of Game of Thrones to create a musical parody sketch of the incredibly successful show. For me as a follower and fan, Red Nose Day still captures my attention as it did when I was a teenager listening to Harry Styles. I do not know how many times I have watched or shared “Coldplay’s Game of Thrones the Musical” at this point (probably in the dozens). I continue to engage with Red Nose Day every time I watch and share their videos.

 

This year, Red Nose Day will feature the star-studded return of the cast of Love Actually for a 10-minute sketch. Although the movie is more than 14 years old, hundreds of news stations reported on the reunion creating engagement across all social media platforms. Just as previous videos, I’m sure this one will also convert viral views and record donations. Red Nose Day continues to surpass each year with the amount of donations because while trends, shows, and musicians may change, giving and laughter will never fade.

*Red Nose Day is March 24, 2017 in the UK and May 25, 2017 in the USA

Sources

Blanchard, Olivier. “Planning for Performance Measurement.” Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2011. 30-40. Print.

Humphreys, Ashlee. “Measure Social Media.” Social Media: Enduring Principles. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 43-63. Print.

“Love Actually Cast to Reunite for Red Nose Day. heyuguys.com. Image.

“One Way or Another”. One Direction. Youtube. Screenshot.

“Red Nose Day.” Comic Relief. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2017. <http://www.comicrelief.com/red-nose-day&gt;.

“Red Nose Day’s Best Skits: Game of Thrones”. US Magazine. Image.

“Red Nose Day Photoshoot”. Rebloggy.com. Gif.

“You Know Nothing Chris Martin”. Giphy.com. Gif.

 

 

Attention “Whore”? Or Smart Gal?

Social media has always been a great way to connect with friends, stay up to date on what is going on in the world, or even a great way to network with other. BUT more recently, social media sites have turned into great (or sometimes not so great) places for people, especially celebrities, to self-market themselves, or in other words, it is a great place for those to seek attention – but seeking attention in order to make money. According to Marwick, “Self-branding is primarily a series of marketing strategies applied to the individual. It is a set of practices and a mindset, a way of thinking about the self as a salable commodity that can tempt a potential employer”. So like Marwick is explaining, self-branding is a way that many celebrities make their money. Kylie Jenner is such a good example of this. Kylie Jenner was originally known because of her famous family, but now – she has built an entire empire built around herself because of how she chose to market herself. She is now known for her sultry pictures and documenting her life via social media. The boom of Kylie Jenner originally started because of her infamous lip injections. When she posted the first picture of her lips after her lip injections, the world went crazy. But she was smart and developed her brand off of the attention she was seeking. Kylie has now turned into an internet sensation. She now has an entire makeup line which sells out insanely fast because she knows how to market herself and develop brand.

While Kylie is flourishing in the world, she is not the only celebrity who uses social media to their advantage. Beyoncé (QUEEN BEY), also self-markets everything through social media now. Beyoncé uses social media to her advantage because she doesn’t put herself in the lime light as she used to before. She is very private and meticulous with how she handles her business. For example, her self-titled album went platinum after posting that her album was on iTunes via Instagram. Since that day, her Instagram has truly been her primary marketing strategy for her business. Whether she’s promoting her album or promoting her documentaries days before they premier, she uses social media to her best abilities.

Celebrities aren’t the only ones who take marketing and branding into their own hands. I too, have actually developed my own brand and have begun to market my photography business via social media. I made a separate Instagram page (@ShotByJos) to post pictures from photoshoots, in hopes to pull in more clientele and turn my small photography business into an empire. I started this around this time last year because I’ve come to realize that social media can really work in your favor and you can really start from nothing and grow into something. So, hopefully my business will continue to grow.

The media just proves that Marwick was right! Regardless of if you are showing off your body, asset, and lips like Kylie Jenner, surprising the world with a CLASSIC album like Beyoncé, or even just trying to chase your dreams like me, social media is currently a great tool to use to market yourself and build your brand!

Works Cited

Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé (Beyonce). “Surprise!” 13 Dec 2014. 12:00 a.m. Instagram.

Wilburn, Joslyn (ShotbyJos). 19 Feb 2017. Instagram.

“Kylie Jenner Lips – Plastic Surgery Before and After Injections”. Plastic Surgery Gal, 25 June 2016, http://plasticsurgerygal.com/lip-injections/kylie-jenner-lips-plastic-surgery-before-and-after-injections.

Marwick, Alice E. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press, 2013. 19 Feb 2017. Web.

Going Viral

Have you ever had that moment when your posting a tweet, an Instagram picture, or maybe a YouTube video, and you say to yourself: “Oh yeah, this is great.  This is totally going to go viral!” And than your post gets little to no response on it.  Well, if your like me and have had this moment where you think you’re funnier than you actually are, then you’ve experienced disappointment about not going viral.  Every day we see things on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. blow up online.  Some times its viral for a few days, and then it passes.  And then they are other time where it gets so popular that the creators get to go on Ellen! (Yes I’m talking to you “Damn Daniel” guys) How is it that people get their content to become extremely popular online?  While there are a lot of different ways to create a popular post, and how to track it.

In Chapter 4 of Social Media Enduring Principles, Ashlee Humphreys talks about measuring social media and how it can be effective for companies and people.  Humphreys talks about three concepts that are critical to a message being made popular online: attention, engagement, and conversion.  She defines attention as the amount of exposure the message gets through page visits or views.  Then she defines engagement as the “attempt to represent how involved or responsive the audience is to a particular message.” (Humphreys 48) Simply put, engagement tries to represent how engaging the original message is to an audience.  This is the key to tracking how popular a message is on social media.  Humphreys has a great chart that demonstrates how this works.

The amount of liked, shares, or retweets that a message receives directly effects how popular a message gets.  This leads to conversion which “describes some action taken on the part of the user that the sender of that message desires” (Humphreys 49).  In the chapter she mentions the Kony 2012 campaign as a perfect example of how these three concepts are utilized.  The Kony 2012 campaign was a movement started by the organization Invisible Children, as an attempt to spread awareness about the LRA and its leader Joseph Kony.  The organization released a video online detailing all of the gruesome acts done by the LRA and overnight the video spread like wild fire.  The video received millions of views, likes and shares, and because of its clear call to action, received millions of dollars in donations.  Because of all of the engagement and the donations the video and organization received, respectively, the data was easily measurable and allowed organizations to clearly see how successful it was.

So how to we get popular on the Internet?  As simple as it sounds, having a clear and engaging message is the best way to have a social media post or video go viral on the Internet.  The post has to attract a large audience who feel a call to action to share that message or video.  Or maybe the best way is to just share funny memes and cat videos.  Those have been pretty successful in the past for a lot of people too.

Sources:

Humphreys, Ashlee. “Measure Social Media.” Social Media: Enduring Principles. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 43-63. Print.

SpongeBob gif: http://www.reactiongifs.com/the-internet-2/

Kony 2012 photo: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/kony-2012

 

 

Buy, Sell, Trade, Sell, Sell, Sell.

I’ve often thought about the concept of online communities. Of course, social medias can create this. At their core, they are made to connect people—though not all of these people have common interests. However, it’s not hard to find like-minded people through these platforms. I’ve made friends from Instagram purely based on similarities in our “aesthetics,” but this isn’t the norm. When thinking, “hmm, what online communities am I involved in?” I realized the main one—Buy, Sell, Trade apps.

Okay, I’m not gonna lie. Over the years, I may have accumulated a fair amount of clothing and shoes. And by fair, I mean a lot. I can’t help that my sense of style has been ever-changing, and only now has it begun to hit a plateau. So, there are a lot of things sitting around in my closets that haven’t been touched in years. BUT, just because I no longer am fond of these items does not decrease their monetary value or value to someone else. ONE LADY’S TRASH IS ANOTHER LADY’S TREASURE! Poshmark, an app dedicated to buying, selling, and trading, came about at the perfect time. I can now list my dumb things and other people are going to think they’re great! Who knows what someone else may be searching for.

It soon became obvious to me that there are certain ways of being on Poshmark. It’s not just about the clothing, but also about how you operate on this app. When surfing through items, it’s pretty much commonplace to comment the following few things:

lower?

trade?

try on?

Almost nobody is going to buy an item without FIRST inquiring if the person listing is willing to go lower on the price. And, if the price is low enough (or if the user is confident enough), they’ll propose a trade. Trades are almost always declined, as nobody who asks has something equal in value to what they’re asking to trade. It’s a very silly thing. Humphreys writes, “they share particular, identifiable social traits,” which I absolutely found to be true. The norms created on Poshmark are hard to miss.

If the user has added photos of their item without providing one of it being modeled, there will be someone asking, without a doubt, for the person to add a photo of the item being tried on. This is just the etiquette created on Poshmark. Once you’ve been using it for a bit, you understand these rules and participate the correct way on the app. There are even tips provided by the Poshmark makers on how to best get your item to sell.

Users can get quite desperate at times and add photos to their profile such as this:

When I wasn’t finding what I needed or wanted on Poshmark, I turned to another app: Depop. Depop is wild because it’s much more than Poshmark. Depop’s community REALLY focuses on the aesthetics of the photos. It’s pretty much impossible to sell your item if you don’t have beautiful or interesting photos to go along with it. The concept of deindividuation—”this sense of a mass of people acting as one entity”—that Humphreys discusses is largely at play. Additionally, Depop has a “popular” page that allows for browsing chosen items by Depop’s creators. Here, I have noticed a handful of users that are featured nearly every single day. As Humphreys says, “A sense of common identification and affiliation simply emerges from repeated communication with others over a span of time.” Once a Depop user has proved themselves (by having beautiful photos and successfully selling a few items), their ability to sell becomes consistent. A curated shop is created for the purpose of selling. One user in particular, internetgirl, has this down to a science:

Through this, trusted users are created, and other users look to them for guidance on how to sell and for purchasing. Honestly, I still am unsure on how to reach this level of popularity on Depop, but it seems like it is almost a full time job. Internetgirl is consistently adding new items, which means she is probably consistently searching for new items to sell. This is a level of dedication that most users cannot commit to, but it is appreciated by the community. Though friendship or conversation is not the main goal of these apps, they are creating a strange sense of community within people to act and participate in very particular ways.

Pantsuit Nation: 4 Million and Counting

Virtual Communities are a fairly new concept that came along with Web 2.0. Gone are the days of meeting a group in person to discuss mutual interests because now we can do all of that from the comfort of our own home. No longer do people have to feel scared to express their feelings in a safe place because there are so many platforms dedicated to ensuring this. People all across the world are able to communicate with strangers that they otherwise may not have even gotten the chance to know.

One virtual community in particular that came to mind is a secret Facebook group Pantsuit Nation that a relative added me to during last year’s election. As you can tell by the title, the group is dedicated to Hillary Clinton supporters and has amassed nearly 4 million members to date. What started as a group for supporters to come and feel safe has turned into a phenomenon. The group consists of several posts a day where people share intimate stories and photos as a therapeutic method during troubling times in their lives. Since all of the members share the mutual support of Hillary Clinton, the members are empathetic to one another and support each other as members.

When examining what type of virtual community Pantsuit Nation would fall under, it is clear that it possesses characteristics that make it a mesh of many different types. Humphreys refers to an imagined community as one that is bound by belonging to one community or nation. The members of this type of community discuss news and have mutual feelings on controversial issues – just as the members of Pantsuit Nation do. Her description of a subculture community is also applicable here because that type of community is described as a small grouping within a culture that shares the same beliefs, norms, practices etc. The last type of community that Pantsuit Nation could be categorized as is an audience community. In this type of community, the group is formed around a specific product. Although the group has evolved into a safe place for people to share their feelings and stories, the group initially started as a group in support of Hillary Clinton – and one could argue that Clinton herself is a product (Humphreys 173 – 174).

Though I am more of a passive member or lurker in this group, I still see posts and have a general understanding of how the group functions as a virtual community. Since there are so many people in the group, it is hard to pinpoint some of the other roles such as information gatherers, trolls and newbies, but one role in particular that is important in this group is the role of the gatekeeper. In this group, the gatekeeper roles consist of those members who are admins and a new feature that I didn’t know was available as moderator. These individuals are responsible for keeping the peace within the group and vetting posts to make sure they are appropriate and will resonate with the audience before they allow them to be posted. With almost 4 million members, these moderators have a huge task of reading several posts a day and are counted on for their diligence and commitment to the group – just as a gatekeeper would in any other group. One other important role within this group is the sock puppet. Humphreys describes this role as someone who has joined the group under an alias. These members are not creating sock puppets for mischievous reasons, rather they are creating these alias’ in order to shield their real identity when sharing a story. In a group with millions of members, a neighbor of theirs might see a personal story that they would rather not be linked back to them (Humphreys 177 – 179).

(This is not meant to be a political post, just sharing what I see as the perfect example of an online community! I am also not sharing screenshots from the group in order to preserve the privacy of its members.)

Sources:

Hillary Clinton – http://gph.is/2cOpttH

We’re all in this together – http://gph.is/2ddiMlg

Humphreys, Ashlee. Social Media: Enduring Principles. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. Print.