Blog Social networking

When it comes to ways to use social networking sites like Twitter, the main thing that comes to mind is selling yourself. Whether it is a person trying to sell their personality and talents, or if it's an organization trying to sell their product, the audience that you can gain on these platforms are invaluable. 

One specific method that is especially popular on Twitter is the way that hashtags are used. Companies can use hashtags to promote their product, which is usually done via giveaways where they ask people to use a specific hashtag and they randomly choose one or some of the people that used the hashtag to win some sort of prize. This spreads the awareness of the brand and can sometimes cause enough support for the hashtag to make it appear as a top trend, which gets even more attention for the company.

While companies can use hashtags as an advertisement for their product, one way that it can be used to specifically benefit society is to help spread awareness on important social issues, like help spreading the word on fighting against, or preventing diseases, or even to combat social injustices, which has especially been a hot topic on the social media front in recent years. For example the protests from Egypt which was talked about in the New York Times article "New Service Lets Voices From Egypt Be Heard" where social media platforms like Google, Twitter, and a new one at the time called SayNow, gave the protesters several ways to spread their message across the world. This would have been impossible a decade ago, but with the technology that was present at the time, the protests were able to be played out across the world for everyone to see.

One less important, but still useful way that social media has been used to benefit people is the power that it has to gain instant feedback from companies that deliver a bad product, or poor customer service. This is shown in the Slate article "Tweeting Avengers" which brought up an event where Bob Garfield, who was dissatisfied with Comcast's customer service after spending a month trying to get his cable package installed, had finally blogged about it and opened up a site where other customers could air their grievances with the company. This gained enough attention to where Comcast themselves could no longer ignore it, so they went out of their way to help those people out. This is something that couldn't have been done as easily before the social media age, because it was much more difficult to get an organized group going on something like this unless you were a celebrity, or you were another person of massive influence.

Despite the positive uses for social media, there is a dark side. While it can, and has been used to spread positive messages, it is also a hot bed for people who only want to harass others to congregate too. Giving those kinds of people a free and easy access platform to mobilize their efforts makes the spread of their negativity extra effective, and it is typically very hard to go against these groups, who unfortunately have gained enough notoriety so that they can influence public perception.

The world is still in this transitional period where it is very hard to predict the outcome of what this technology will mean for even the next 5 years, let alone 10. Hopefully we can find a happy medium that can get us away from the more negative aspects of social media and focus more on the benefits.