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.