The day my Aunt found out I wanted to go into Social Media Marketing, she threw every bit of information she had at me. She was sending me emails, texts, and Facebook messages all concerning people she thought were important for me to follow. One name she constantly gave me was Liz Heron. Knowing my Aunt, she hops on bandwagons a lot and I didn’t pay much attention to what she was saying. After much persistency, I gave in and looked up Liz Heron and it turned out to be extremely worthwhile.

I subscribed to Liz on Facebook where I discovered she works for The Wall Street Journal as the Social Media Director. She has over 850,000 subscribers that are fairly active on her site. She doesn’t post as often as some people may, but her posts contain depth and aren’t just there to fill space. She posts pictures of where she is at, and what activitities she is taking part in. She will post links to articles and ask her subscribers to comment on said article. She will also ask her subscribers to take part in polls The Wall Street Journal is conducting and she will try to get #WSJ to trend on Twitter by hash-tagging it with a lot of things she posts. She involves her followers, which makes them interested in what she is doing because they feel like their voice matters. I like following her because she posts things that are actually interesting and can capture my attention when social media gets overwhelmed with useless posts.

The fact that the election is finally over excites me more than the upcoming holidays. Prior to the World Series being over, my entire timeline and news feed was cluttered with Detroit Tiger updates and election directed opinions.

The World Series ended, unfavorably to the Tigers, and the tweets stopped. What drove me crazy was when Obama won, people were beyond disrespectful in their social media outputs. He may not have been the candidate said person wanted to win, but he did. And he is our president and that needs to be respected. The inconsiderate context of a lot of tweets was appalling. People from my hometown were in an uproar that Obama walked away with another four years. They were saying how he was going to ruin the country because he was going to promote gay marriage, not even taking into consideration that legalizing gay marriage is more of a state issue than a federal one.

Several people of the Republican party were posting how they could now drop out of school. They proclaimed that since welfare was such a reliable and easy source of income, there was no need to work hard for a good job anymore. A lot of hate tweets and hate statuses were posted, and my mind kept flashing back to that girl who is under investigation for telling someone to kill Obama in a tweet a couple of months ago. I was curious as to whether people I know were aware of the consequences for some of the things they were saying. I don’t think people are as informed about social media consequences as they should be. There are kids posting whatever is on their mind, and a lot of it is offensive. An employer is going to take that into consideration during their hiring process and it could potentially cost them job opportunity. Being upset about something doesn’t give you a free pass to insult the man running our country. People need to think before they speak, or tweet for that matter. What is said in ones own homes won’t harm them, but putting it out for the entire world wide web to see can potentially cause some damage.

It seems that social media websites completely blew up during the past week in spite of Hurricane Sandy. My Twitter timeline was overflowing with the amount of Hurricane Sandy tweets and retweets. It was extremely handy to use the site because it kept me updated without having to read lengthy articles. One site that did a efficient job of keeping their audience updated throughout the Frankenstorm was NPR. NPR very minimally uses their Twitter handle. Only when prominent and timely stories are surfacing is when NPR will update their account. Hurricane Sandy was definitely no exception to the site. When Hurricane Sandy started becoming more and more newsworthy, their Twitter kicked it into high gear. They started tweeting more frequently to ensure that their 131,000 followers were being informed.

The content of their tweets is what really mattered to their folioing base during such a newsworthy time. They would use their allowed 140 characters to briefly update followers with what was going on during the hurricane, and link it to a story explaining what the tweet said, only more in depth. They would retweet a Spanish news source, allowing their Spanish speaking followers a way to find the updates on the Frankenstorm in their native language. NPR really complied to what their followers needed and provided them with reassurance that despite the storm, NPR would keep them updated throughout the entire ordeal. After the storm subsided, NPR really hasn’t tweeted much aside from a few tweets here and there about the election. This is a news source that takes a different approach to using social media. Instead of flooding their followers timeline, they tweet on occasion, when it is important and necessary. Seeing NPR in their timeline shows their followers that some thing big is happening and needs their attention.

Being from Michigan, I decided to write about a blunder made by someone in Detroit. A couple of years ago, Chrysler launched their “Imported From Detroit” campaign. The first airing of this campaign was on a Super Bowl commercial. A Chrysler employee, on March 9th, tweeted an insulting comment towards Michigan drivers. The tweet dropped the F-bomb on the company’s twitter account. The tweet was only meant for this person’s friends, but the slip up cost him much more than a scolding.

People evidently make mistakes. I have several different Twitter accounts on my phone and they are very easily accessed. The majority of the time my personal account is the main one used and is what the home screen is on, however, I’ll log into another one and forget to switch back onto my personal one. With this mistake I’m much more likely to tweet something off of this other account. It’s very important to be careful where you’re tweeting from and I think this employee was careless before he let this foul word slip. He deserved the punishment he received and he’s lucky that more consequences didn’t occur. With a degree form Michigan State University, he had a very bright future ahead of him. Because of this slip up, his whole career was tarnished. I think his example of not paying proper attention is the definition of why companies are afraid to hire younger generations to manage social media accounts.  The company recovered and moved on after taking proper action towards the employee at fault by apologizing to their followers and deleting the tweet. I think Chrysler handled the situation appropriately and in a way that didn’t make it into a giant deal. By putting it on the down low and not bringing attention to it, they were able to avoid potential crisis and unwanted media attention, a smart tactic that worked effectively.

Just because someone is young doesn’t necessarily mean they are immature and incapable. The way the author, Thomases, describes interns, or recent college grads for that matter, is extremely negative. I have to disagree with with our guest speaker and this article’s author. College graduates who are young and fresh out of school have a lot to offer that older people may not. A lot of classes they are studying revolve around new ways to target specific audiences and how to maximize social media use. Students may lack years of experience, but their strategies are more up to date and can potentially better the companies overall appearance. The author fully believes that giving an intern the key to social media accounts is a path towards disaster. The intern clearly has skills of some sort if a company were to hire them in the first place. They will never learn how to present themselves unless given the opportunity.

My mom asks me all the time about social media. She doesn’t understand the concept of a lot of aspects to it all. I’m 99% positive she never has made a Facebook post in her life and explaining Twitter is still a work in progress. My mom is very technologically in the know as very up to date on a lot of things and is a fantastic writer with skills in marketing, however, handing my 47-year-old mother social media passwords to a company would be an absolute train wreck. She wouldn’t know what to say or how to say it and she would end up making me help her with it. My skills are way more up to date and advanced than hers because of the classes I take to prepare myself with. I understand that interns may be immature and that companies may be concerned about their online reputation, but the right person is more common than what the author made it seem. There’s more than one special college student waiting to take on the social media world; they aren’t that rare of an item.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people who don’t know what they’re talking about, won’t stop talking about said subject. The 2012 Presidential Election is a huge buzz right now. Every person suddenly has a huge interest in politics and seem to become experts on the subject overnight. My Twitter and Facebook news feed are beyond clogged with people’s opinions. I’m all for people expressing their opinions, but I think it’s a tad obnoxious that people can’t even use proper facts, or grammar, while complaining about something a candidate believes in. I will scroll through my timeline(s) and I can’t even focus on what people are saying because I’m too distracted by how poorly written everything is. Words spelled wrong, facts way off, missing punctuation, and just all around poor grammar is all I see. If people are going to post their beliefs and opinions all across their social media page, they can at least take the time to make well constructed sentences.

I understand that social media isn’t a place of “proper” posts. I just think that during a time where people are getting into hardcore fights about Republicans and Democrats, they should use grammar correctly on social media. If there are a bunch of people misspelling things and one person who comments with their views in a well-written fashion, I automatically think they won the fight. Anyone with good writing skills, and utilizes those skills, appears as much more well informed  than those who use vulgarity as their main points. Social media is a place of expression, and people deserve every right to express themselves freely, it just bothers me that during times of controversy and elections, people think they’re experts about the topics and won’t even spell things correctly! They’re not helping their case if they can’t spell and their posts don’t make sense.

Six years ago, when I first made my Facebook account, I posted the most embarrassing of things on there. It became my scapegoat to complain about my parents, whine about school, and just blab about my life to anyone who came across my page. I thought I was the coolest person alive for having this social media tool at the tip of my fingers. Eventually, I grew up and so did my page. I posted more and more general statements and pictures of my friends and I doing God knows what. A lot of things on my Facebook are just flat out embarrassing. In no way, shape, or form do they represent the person I am. Facebook is just kind of there; it’s a place to joke around with friends I can’t see everyday and to go all nostalgic on quality memories.

If an employer asked me for my Facebook password, I would be completely appalled. I think that it’s an extremely inappropriate thing for anyone to do, especially a potential place of work. Who you are in person, and your qualifications, should be enough for employers rather than them having to dig up dirt against you. With texting being such a prominent form of communication for young adults nowadays, misreading messages is fairly common. There’s also miscommunication in emails, tweets, and any other form of contact that isn’t face to face. Someone reading my Facebook out of context or not understanding the point I tried to make, could do a complete one-eighty on their opinion of me. It’s hard to explain inside jokes to someone. If they have the right to look at my page to see what kind of person I am, do I get the right to look at theirs to see what kind of person is hiring me? I think that’s only fair. Don’t mix business with pleasure, right? Facebook could be considered a pleasure of mine, and the business side of me should be kept completely separate from that.

A employer could “creep” on me all the way back to when I was in seventh grade. They could judge me on a racist comment I may have or may not have made, or a suggestive picture implying something their company doesn’t support. To be honest, not even I know what I have on there. I think how I present myself to the employer is all they should base their hiring process on. They should not have the right to check into my personal life like that. It’s an invasion of privacy and no one gets the chance to say no to it. No one wants to tell their employers no.