On The Horizon

Marybeth Denton

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Why, oh why, did I get involved? Because I ❤ my students and it's a great cause! Friday is the last day to prevent me from getting 🥧! https://www.instagram.com/p/BwJGXIYD1VF/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=11respvgpquze

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Celebrating National Pet Day with my fur babies! ❤ #nationalpetday #dogmom #furbabies #australianshepherds https://www.instagram.com/p/BwJEADojDZG/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1q3t22o92wkc0

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Organizational Challenges in Social Media Implementation

Developing a plan to effectively use social media and implementing that plan are two different things. I have often heard people say many variations of this quote, “The good news is, we developed the plan. The bad news is, now we have to implement it.” It is important to remember that the documents developed throughout this process are ‘living’ documents – meaning that they are not supposed to be put on a shelf and left to gather dust. Instead, these documents should be easily accessible to everyone on the team to use as a guide, and can and should be reviewed and updated as the social media landscape changes.

Social media initiatives fail for many reasons, with the main reasons being a

Mis-guided focus on technological tools used instead of focusing on achieving a purpose through the technology being used;

Lack of knowledge of the fundamental principles of a social organization;

Lack of willingness to adopt new practices and technologies, and/or

Perceived lack of value in assigning a compelling purpose to its community.

The organization I am working with will face many of these same challenges when implementing a social media strategy. However, I believe the most important challenge will be to find ways to influence the organization by educating others, helping them understand the value of a social organization, and how it can help the organization accomplish their goals.

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Effective Content Builds Relationships

According to Hootsuite, the key to developing and sharing effective content is to keep your audience’s interests, goals, and pain points in mind. An organization must know who their target audience is (demographics), understand what content will resonate with them (interests), and understand what they're up against (pain points) or why they became a customer. This iPage.com blog provides specific examples of how to create effective content based on your audience’s pain points.

 There are two ways to develop effective content: created and curated. Created content is produced within an organization, such as blog articles, white papers, infographics, guides, and visuals. It allows the organization to position themselves as a thought leader, with unique insight, knowledge, and perspective. It is also better for driving traffic to the organization’s website. A good rule of thumb is to post 40% created content and 60% curated content.

 Curated content is gathered from trusted sources, both internal and external. It is a great way to grow an organization’s social media audience and demonstrate the company’s position as a trusted advisor in an industry. Internal curation of content is repurposing or breaking apart the most effective created content into smaller bits. External curation of content can be either sharing user-generated posts or aggregating or distilling industry content that resonates with your audience and supports the values of your organization.

 So what does developing and sharing effective content have to do with becoming a social organization? Content plays a crucial role in achieving business and social media objectives such as brand recognition, thought leadership, audience engagement, and lead generation. It allows an organization to cement its position as a go-to destination, whether it be for entertainment, education, or inspiration. Effective, well-planned content is a great way to build long-term, trusting relationships with your audience, ultimately supporting the needs of your business. A strong content strategy acts as a game plan for coordinating, creating, and distributing content in a way that cultivates a community. A social organization uses that community for mass collaboration to identify change and press for its adoption within the formal organization to improve corporate competence and remain competitive in the market.

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Cultivating an Online Community

In the book titled The Social Organization, authors Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald outline three steps to cultivating an online (collaborative) community: refine purpose, launch, and guide.

Defining a purpose is the most important step because it is the reason people collaborate. People need a compelling cause; one that is magnetic, aligns with business goals, has low risk, is measurable, and facilitates evolution to other purposes. The Twitter page @LEGOIdeas is an example of an online community with a high-quality purpose that meets all the characteristics mentioned above.

Launching a community involves strategic planning and community engagement. A strategy will describe 1) how individual community members should interact with one another, 2) the community environment and how it works, and 3) how to gain attention, draw in users, and become self-sustaining. Community engagement requires your business to lead by example. A company must address comments from users, be timely in its response, be honest, seek out and respond to brand mentions, address negative sentiments with grace, and always follow its brand voice. Despite its large size and years of success, @McDonalds engages with members of its online community in an effective way.

Lastly, guiding a community requires leadership to keep it functioning well and stay focused on a purpose. Managers must be careful not to micromanage an online community, which will strangle it. Yet, they must also ensure the online community operates within the context of the company’s overall goals. @USATODAY is a good example of a company that guides its social media properties effectively while relying on user content to generate page content.

Once you have a well-established online community, the next challenge is to grow it. According to Hootsuite, here are three easy ways to grow your online community.

1. Reach out to your offline community and encourage them to join your brand online.

2. Connect with the right influencers to help you attract the right following.

3. Find people who are already advocating on behalf of your brand.

Additional resources for growing your online community can be found from

Revive ME Marketing or the Gartner Blog Network.

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Big Data… Opportunity vs. Threat

‘Big Data’ is the volume of data businesses collect from consumers. But, did you know that the law considers this data to be intellectual property? According to Doug LaLone, Patent Attorney, intellectual property is trade secrets, copyrights, patents, and trademarks, and ‘big data’ is considered a trade secret.

Businesses should be aware that with great opportunity comes great risk. The more valuable the data, the more incentive hackers have to obtain it. No one is safe, so everyone must assess their risk of a hack, and be prepared to invest in security measures to get ahead of the problem. If you wait to react to a hack that has already happened, your business’ viability will already be at risk.

Consumers should be aware that no one is safe; both the private sector (businesses) and governments around the world are under siege from hackers. According to Di Porto and Ghidini, consumers have no control over, or option to avoid, which personal and non-personal data fragments from what sources can be combined to create a detailed profile about you and your online activities. Additionally, Facebook, Google, and other online platforms have data-sharing partnerships with third-parties that allow the non-transparent transfer of data and its use. So what can you do? In my previous blog post, Surveillance on the Rise, I discussed that consumers must be diligent in protecting their private information.

So how do businesses (and governments) balance the opportunities and threats of big data? First, businesses need to have strong privacy policies, have clear vendor agreements and service contracts that outline who owns and has control of what can/can not be done with the data, and clarify what happens in the event of a sale, merger, or bankruptcy. Secondly, businesses must reduce the threat of hacks by investing in security measures to protect the data BEFORE a hack happens, and continue to invest in the monitoring and updating of those security measures to stay ahead of hackers.

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Are You Spreading Junk?

If someone asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, what do you do? Google it! Google and many social media platforms run algorithms (or bits of code) to tailor search results and/or find content most likely to engage users (you). Based on the calculations made by the algorithm and learning tool, users receive selected and prioritized results/content, with the most likely answer/product shown first. In my view, algorithms help us by eliminating all of the non-relative data; however, humans still need to review those results to determine which one best fits the context of the question/situation. For example, if you Google the word ‘pathway’, you receive many different types of results – including a word definition, university program, retirement community, addiction treatment center, child development resources, and manufacturing company.

For years, individuals and businesses have been using keywords and phrases to ‘help’ algorithms select, prioritize, and deliver their advertising content to their target audience (you). So, what does this have to do with Junk News? Recently, other groups (i.e., political, radical, and special interest groups), have also started using these same strategies to deliver their content. Because the internet is based on this advertising model, the more time you spend searching, watching videos, or shopping on the internet, the more ‘big data’ is collected about you. This data is then used to sort, filter, and deliver content that is most likely to engage you, including the junk. I believe that today, many adults accept that there is no privacy on the internet and understand that not everything you read is true. However, users are much more likely to accept something as truth when a trusted friend, colleague, or family member shares/posts it. In my view, the algorithms and this advertising model, make it easier for these manipulative messages to go viral because it only takes a few people to share it. The more popular the post, the more often it appears and the more often it gets shared. One specific example is an article regarding The 28th Amendment. I received a message from a trusted friend, who is also politically active, so I took the time to read it and respond. However, I recently discovered that it is a false report that has been circulating on the internet since 2009.

The 28th Amendment also a prime example of exposure. The more engaged you are, the more popular the content you are exposed to. The longer you engage, the harder it becomes to receive search results and/or content that includes unbiased content. This means that your chances of receiving accurate, balanced, and representative information become less and less. In my view, the power of exposure can be used for both good and bad, and it is up to individuals to be responsible for not spreading false information. One recent example is, the recent news report that California education authorities are trying to force children to be taught that there are 15 genders. Initially, I was shocked to hear this, but before posting any comments on social media, I did some fact checking. Snopes.com reports this news to be false; a complete explanation is available at https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-15-genders/.

So, what can we do? Be intentional about your information preferences. Choose to visit sites that use reliable sources of information, discuss diverse opinions about a topic, and are of recognized brands. Beware of offers that sound too good to be true, political posts, and sensational news items. How do we discover the truth? By checking facts from other sources. Snopes.com is a popular website for checking facts, but there are many other sites available as well, such as education and research institutions, extension services, and unbiased consumer groups.

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Social Media Consulting

The most important qualities for a social media consultant to have are excellent knowledge of the features, benefits, and target audience of each social media platform, a great deal of accessibility, and expertise in content development and design. Mass collaboration enables a community to change quickly so a consultant must be accessible to quickly react to those changes. Understanding how each platform functions, who the audience is, and how best to optimize the platform’s features, enables a consultant to quickly develop appropriate content. However, consulting also requires someone to be self-motivated, have first-rate investigative skills, pay attention to details, offer innovative ideas and solutions, and be willing to educate others.

If I were a social media consultant providing services for myself, I would:

Thoroughly review current social media presence to assess its effectiveness and professionalism.

Make improvements to existing profiles and link the profiles together.

Add a presence to any missing channels, if appropriate.

Choose an online management tool, such as Hootsuite, to make maintaining my presence easier.

Currently, I have a social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube. In the future, I need to:

Review each profile to ensure that I am following generally accepted best practices to optimize traffic and engagement with my friends, family, customers, and followers.

Review my profile information thoroughly - such as the cover photo, thumbnail, name/title, bio/description, location, contact information, and webpage links - to ensure keywords are placed in priority areas where they can be indexed to optimize search results and expand metadata.

Connect with other people, pages, or groups that influence me.

Find a way to moderate the pages more effectively, either through an online management tool or by setting aside time in my schedule each week to create and schedule relevant content.

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Surveillance on the Rise

Privacy is important to everyone – to some more than others. I believe older generations typically place a higher priority on privacy than younger ones do. It’s hard to imagine the world we live in today did not always exist, but the internet is only about 30 years old. Prior to this time, personal information was not readily available to everyone and those seeking it were questioned regarding their purpose. Today, giving up your personal information in exchange for free use of an application or service is widely accepted. This default acceptance is what has allowed a huge volume of seemingly unimportant information to be collected and stored, and ultimately, endangers the privacy of millions of users.

The relationship between information privacy and ‘big data’ is a vicious cycle. Internet businesses use the default revenue model of convincing companies to invest with them because they can provide the most effective advertising strategy to expand their potential customer base. However, in order to effectively advertise, the company must do surveillance to gather data on its users. Users who want the service for free, willingly provide the information the company is seeking. The company then uses this data to advertise products to targeted users. The more effective the advertisement, the more likely other companies will invest as well. And so, continues the cycle…

So why is ‘big data’ important? ‘Big data’ is a powerful tool that allows seemingly unrelated pieces of data to be married to personal information you previously volunteered to produce a bigger picture of the user – an identifiable profile. For example, companies can use data from credit card statements, purchase history, online activity, and location tracking on your mobile phone to learn about your health, addictions, location, and finances. The danger is that those who abuse the data could cause long-term social and legal damage for individuals who are trying to get a job, buy insurance, or do any other number of things.

I believe that we must use several approaches – both personal and legal – to limit harm from big data. Legally, we must regulate its storage, provide a way for users to view their information and dispute it, and pass legally enforceable policies and/or laws. Personally, we must be diligent in our effort to protect our private information and be aware of the extent to which data is collected about us – both volunteered and by default.

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Technology Free Zones

This last week, I had an opportunity to assess my social media usage for 24 hours. This was actually quite easy to do because of the Screen Time feature in my smartphone settings. I still had to keep track of the number and duration of time(s) that technology interrupted a face-to-face interaction, but my smartphone tracked the rest. At the end of the day, I identified four time periods throughout the day when my social media usage is at its peak - 6:30am, 5:00pm, 8:00pm, and 11:00pm. During these time periods, I am getting ready for work, driving home from work, or preparing for bed.

Over the next few days, I implemented two technology free time zones – one in the morning and one before bed. I hoped that eliminating technology use in the morning would improve my morning routine so I could function with less stress throughout the day. Likewise, I hoped that eliminating technology use before bed would improve my sleeping habits and make the morning wake up easier.

During the experiment, I found that my morning routine did improve. Because I did not use 30-45 minutes in the morning to clear all my phone notifications and check my social media channels, I was able to have breakfast and spend some time with my dogs. I was also able to arrive for work on-time more often. However, I was quite annoyed at not having been able to catch up on what happened while I was sleeping, or how my friends’ mornings were going. This seemed to ‘nag’ at me throughout the morning, so I ended up increasing my usage during my lunch hour. However, over the next few days, I found that being online during my lunch hour meant I could connect with my friends in real time, instead of just leaving messages, because they were also using social media at that time. This helped me look forward to my lunch break every day so I could change my scenery and take time to de-stress. Overall, changing my morning routine by eliminating social media usage, was a positive experience; one I plan to continue to practice.

During the evening hours of the experiment, I found that I had a hard time settling my mind and relaxing to go to sleep. This was not a reaction that I expected. There has been so much ‘health talk’ in the media about technology use and its effects on using it before going to bed, that I thought doing this would improve my sleep, but it didn’t. So why not? For me, using technology right before bed is a way to quiet my mind. It is my last review session of the day; it allows me to review items I accomplished, put items not finished on tomorrow’s list, and reflect on my priorities and goals.

After the experiment, I have decided to continue to use the technology free time zone in the morning. Mornings without social media usage allow me more time to prepare for the day ahead. Being better prepared means having less stress. We all need a little less stress in our lives, right? I have also decided to set a technology-free zone in the car. Not using social media in the car is simply for my safety and the safety of others on the road.

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A New Frontier in Relationships

 As a child, I remember life before the internet. Time was spent doing chores, working in the garden, doing homework, playing games with my siblings, and inventing new ways to get each other in trouble. In high school, I took keyboarding, and in my freshmen year of college, we still used paper for everything. My first year in an office setting was spent learning the black and white DOS computer system, but by the third year (2001), we had the ‘new’ Microsoft Windows. During this time, there was a lot of emphasis and training on using computers to increase productivity and improve the level of service the office could offer its clients. The goal was to provide accurate information from an expert directly to the customer while they were still standing in the office, and this would help build relationships of trust and integrity.

Today, social media’s influence in my daily life allows me to stay better connected to family and friends far away, helps me to find creative ideas for my hobby, and stay connected to current events in the community. However, it also exposes me to many more negative events happening in the world, shows me the lack of empathy others have for each other and makes me more aware of the importance of personal safety. Having the internet constantly available at my fingertips allows me to find the information I am seeking to make better decisions right where I am. It allows me to be aware of the weather, find directions to a specific place, find cheaper gas, check my account balance before making a purchase, and much more. However, it also creates a sense of pressure (or low level of anxiety) to get as much done as I can with the time I have. Life becomes a race against time.

Many families, including my own, intentionally create opportunities to unplug by vacationing at places with limited access to the internet. Each year during the last week of June, the Denton family cousins camp at a state park in Northern Michigan for the exclusive reason of spending time together. It is not a typical family vacation though, between twelve to fifteen families plan and organize the trip six months in advance. Days are spent eating breakfast together every morning, running or working out together, spending time on the beach, golfing, hiking, and playing family kickball. Evenings are spent preparing and eating dinner together and talking around the campfire. It is a time for generations of families to connect – adult cousins reconnect with those whom they used to live next door to one another, their kids learn to adventure and discover their world together, older cousins learn to look out for the younger ones, younger cousins learn life lessons like sharing, including everyone, staying together, and watching out for each other. In the end, everyone benefits from better relationships in families.

In 2013, Sheryl Turkle summarizes why the internet has become so important to us. It promises that we can always be heard, it transports us to where ever we want to be, and it means we may never have to be alone. There is no doubt that social media channels influence our daily lives in all three of these ways. However, today (2019), I see another shift happening. A shift where the internet and social media is so integrated into our lives that more and more people are choosing to create time(s) or spaces to unplug. They are choosing to prioritize relationships and experience life in real time instead of through a lens. Instead of taking everyday relationships for granted, we are choosing to create more meaningful opportunities to spend time with those we love. This is the next new frontier.

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A New Beginning...

Hello and welcome to my blog! My name is Marybeth Denton. I am a sophomore at Central Michigan University who works full-time, runs a small business out of my home, volunteers with the MSU Extension Master Gardener Program, am a wife and mom, and loves my Australian Shepherds (Penny and Sawyer). If my life appears to be a bit full, I can assure you that it is always busy, but never boring!

My career goal is to continue my education so I can continue to advance within CMU. I am grateful for the opportunity to return to college to finish what I started so many years ago, and I hope to become the first member of my family to earn a four-year degree. In this blog, I hope to learn new things from others and share those revelations with you.

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A company I believe is exemplary with regard to its use of social media is Mary Kay Inc. I believe the organization has successfully cultivated a sustainable collaborative community. Mary Kay’s clear company vision has enabled them to develop a sustainable environment with its stakeholders where they can launch new communities (i.e. new product), guide the community in finding its initial value, and then use the ideas generated as end results to refine new goals (i.e. product development).

Below are links to some of their social media accounts:

https://twitter.com/MaryKay

https://www.facebook.com/MaryKay

https://www.instagram.com/marykayus/

https://www.youtube.com/marykay

https://www.pinterest.com/marykayus/