Up in the Stacks

  I’ve been thinking about how social media analytics are used to provide customer service. I’ve worked with customers in person and not in a virtual setting. I’m used to seeing facial expressions and hearing what people say (or don’t say) and instead express nonverbally.   I think we’ve probably all spoken to representatives who are working from home and navigating this, plus what is going on in their life and home at that moment.   In my experience, using a chatbot can be convenient if it connects me to the information I need. Skipping waiting on hold is a wonderful thing.   Otherwise, we wait again as we get connected to a person. It must be a very different experience providing customer service virtually.   This article highlights customer service online. customer service online. I would find it interesting to be able to see how people go about searching for for the products they want.   There is a lot of information out there about us and what we se...

 oof- hope you all are doing better than me. It's been a rough week and I'm handing in the first draft of my portfolio Wednesday so wish me luck! Anyway, my thoughts for this week are on how our providers are over-inundated with ways in which people can communicate with them throughout the workday. We have page, text, desk phone, personal phone, email, voicera phones, in basket in Erecord, and instant message in record just to name a few. For some odd reason, the hospital has been increasing the amount of ways in which you can contact a provider. I find the amount of ways a person can contact me to be overwhelming, and often forget where I saw crucial information because we have so many platforms. I can't imagine how stressful it must be for the doctors! About a month ago I had overheard three of our oncology doctors discussing how horrible this has been and how they cant keep track of everything. It also made them seem more available than they actually are and makes it har...

Confession: I scroll too much of my day away too often on social media. Every day I tell myself, "I'll just watch one more video" or "I'll scroll for 15 minutes after work" or "I'll check updates for 5 minutes before bed"... but that never happens. I do watch YouTube, scroll TikTok and Pinterest, and check for updates on Goodreads, but the idea of "one more video" or those short time crunches is preposterous. Part of the problem is my desire for quick distractions from stress and life obligations between home, work, and school. Scrolling social media feels like less of a time commitment than reading part a novel I'm very into, because I know me. When reading any book that I'm invested in, one chapter can quickly become ten chapters. The social media I use typically consists of short form content, though, which is easy to consume and (on the surface) involves little time commitment. However, short form content in all its forms ...

One of the main reasons I check Facebook daily, albeit without ever posting or registering a like or dislike, is to seen what news pops up. Although I generally go directly to news organizations’ home pages directly first, there are other, smaller entities whose coverage I may not have noticed had they not appeared in my Facebook feed. I’ve wondered about the concept of “getting news from social media”, then, but am learning so much more about that through researching for the Social Media course and following certain reliable news sources such as Pew Research . Perhaps because I haven’t been entirely relying on any one social media platform as a news barometer, I didn’t notice that there had been a slowdown in social media platforms promoting news. As with most of what can be traced with platforms’ behavior, much depends on money and algorithms. A cascading effect of Apple’s 2021 change to its cookie policies that allowed consumers to opt out of a certain amount of tracking had the cas...

 So as I work my way through the Hootsuite Platform Training I thought to myself - why do we need SO MANY platforms???  I began to think about how posts from Facebook now feed Instagram and how often I go from one to the other just to be annoyed.  If I am not seeing ads I am seeing the same posts I just saw on the other platform.  So why am I continuing to do this when, honestly, I just feel bored with it al?  Especially when I know there is someone out there getting rich off of me just because I scroll this stuff multiple times a day.  Like John Brandon says in this Forbes article regarding the boredom he found using the new Threads platform:  " Mark Zuckerberg keeps counting his money and softly chuckling to himself about how we’re stupid enough to play along .   (please be advised, you are only allowed two articles a day unless you have a subscription). I'm Already Bored WIth This Brandon uses the analogy of a never-ending treadmill to explain ...

There are many strategies to help brands make perfectly-timed marketing moments on social media. Many are a success , and people– including myself –are often ✨influenced✨ because we associate the products with their marketing campaigns. If you’ve been on social media long enough, you’ve seen both successes and social media marketing strategies that were misstep  failures . One of the things I’ve learned is that we have very short attention spans when it comes to these failures. A company like McDonald’s isn’t really known for their fine cuisine, but they are popular for several reasons, such as convenience, nostalgia, etc. Despite brand missteps , major or minor, there will still be loyal customers. Or, people will just get distracted by another marketing scheme. I’ve eaten there maybe five times in the last decade. Every time I eat there, I get that eugh-this-doesn’t-agree-with-me-feeling-I-regret-this choice feeling after eating. You know, that feeling you get when your entire me...

 Hello all!  Hope are you doing well now that we are starting to get into the thick of things! After just completing our assignment due on the 31st, the experience reminded me of one of my pet peeves. Having to log in to a social media platform that I have no interest in participating in just to see some content. I had to use my brothers X (twitter) account in order to finish my assignment as I had no intention of making one. This has happened to me several times when trying to read an article, trying to see someone's post, or attempting to just look at some pictures. While I understand newspapers having to make you pay a subscription to read their content (they have to make a living pass advertising I can imagine) the fact that something as small as twitter or tumbler content needing to have. The following article makes a good point as to why this can backfire on company's: if content isn't available, the search engines could rank their results as lower. https://techcrunch...

  Through core courses of information science, I was surprised to learn about the issues of finding enough space for digital storage and the implications for what can get lost along the way, often due to costs and challenges in setting up systems to maintain it. It was a similar feeling, then, when I recently heard more about the environmental implications of online advertising. We have been learning about social media’s impact on business, as the ever-increasing number of social media users has resulted in an increase in advertisers as part of their monetization strategy.  In its overview of The Environmental Impact of Advertising,   Earth.org  analyzes digital advertising’s impact, noting that “It can be difficult to comprehend that the digital world even has a carbon footprint.”. While it seems like we are saving paper and other related printing costs, the ads that pop up on our screen consume electricity. Much has been reported on low-quality ads, especially tho...

In the digital age the best marketing is free. Social media marketing costs nothing to reach out to intended audiences; generally, the devices needed to create social media content are already on hand - smartphones, computers, tablets. Word-of-mouth recommendations are a great way to drive people to an organization, and social media content can easily be shared by existing followers to others in their social circles, whether online or IRL. The cost of free is music to the ears of library staff, where funding is often tight and how to allocate it must be well thought-out. These days a great social media platform libraries can use to reach out to teens is TikTok. Exclusively using older social media platforms such as Facebook leaves out the teens, because they simply are not found there in as high numbers as their parents and grandparents. Library staff cannot rely on parents and grandparents to excite their teens about books and events at the library, though, because teens are like cats...

 Last year I fell for it, more than once.  Blasting into my face during my morning scrolls through Instagram and Facebook are the neverending ads we all complain about.  I never know what to buy for my 90-year-old mother-in-law for Christmas.  She has everything she needs and doesn't have many hobbies at her age.  But she does love birds!  And there, in my feed, was the perfect window decoration!  Click...the price is right, and the image looks perfect, so why not?  October passes, November passes, and then...December passes.  OK, well, how about for her birthday in February then, since this thing hasn't shown up on my porch yet.  Doesn't February go by too!  Finally, it arrived in March, after attempting to contact the company many times.  The birds were distorted, the hanger looked crooked, and it was definitely not what I saw in that Instagram post.  Did I learn my lesson? Nope.  I just ordered chapstick from Kobee...

  When I think about my earliest memories of commercials, they were the ones for toys, cereal and theme parks in between Saturday morning cartoons.   They were exciting and fun and really stuck with me.   I remember jingles from radio ads in the car, or on the radio station my Dad always liked to listen to at full volume in the house.   Some of the ads were so corny, they made me want to leave the room, and my fingers itched to change the station.   The ones I heard on long road trips with him were about the same, except I didn’t have the option of walking away from the obnoxious advertisements, or changing the station.  The ads may have made me cringe (thank goodness for headphones!) but did they really work?   Everything about life changed during Covid. CNBC looks at how advertising was affected during the pandemic. Some things stay the same, though. It’s interesting to see what ads people respond to. This article discusses several approaches to ...

  Misinformation and disinformation were some of the topics of the readings for this week.   This got me thinking about why stories that are untrue seem to be so prevalent and spread so quickly. Anyone who has observed how quickly rumors travel in real life can attest to this, and it’s difficult to know just what to believe. This article from The Ohio State delves into why people might mistake fake news for a legitimate news story. If you think things spread quickly from person to person in conversation, social media is even faster.  A study from MIT looks further into why misinformation travels so fast here . The American Psychological Association examines why these stories get shared between media users in this article. When it is time to look more closely at the news, Rutgers University Libraries offers some guidance .