Blogging Tips

There’s always lots of new and interesting things going on in the world of social media and it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at this Internet phenomenon as a social medium or the new way that businesses is doing business, it’s a good idea to keep involved with what’s going on.

And one experiment involves a group of high school students from Seattle who gave up all aspects of social media for one whole week. That meant that the students didn’t text or use Facebook or Twitter and there were some interesting results at the end that were reported in the seattletimes.

The Social Experiment as it was called actually had students phoning each other on their cell phones and one of the most notable things they found was that emotion translates better in a human voice than in the smiley or sad emoticons for texting. The article goes on to state that one girl was so worried she might break the rules she actually even gave her high school teacher her Facebook password to avoid temptation.

Another student who was responsible for 6000 texts per month found that she was actually getting more exercise when she didn’t get up and sit in front of her computer to check her Facebook page before she spoke to anyone every morning.

Some of the parents who were involved are also pleased because now they get numerous phone calls from their children and are getting reacquainted via longer telephone conversations. All this leaves me wondering if anyone remembers the old short story called The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.

Unfortunately not every new invention is all good and that’s certainly the case for social media. Audri Lanford runs the North Carolina-based scambusters.org with her husband and she’s convinced that social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are the latest tool that scammers are using to separate people from their money during the holiday season.

“Somebody follows you, you follow them. They friend you, you friend them,” Lanford explains in a recent issue of ajc.com. “They might try to get you to buy stuff that may or may not exist to steal your credit card numbers.” Lanford suggests that one of the easiest ways to avoid these scammers on the Internet is never ever respond to spam.

Even the heavyweights in the industry are in her corner. McAfee has just released a spoof called the 12 scams of Christmas and one of the more obvious ones that’s making the route on social media outlets is an offer of a free iPad to anyone who buys bogus gifts with their credit card number.

Even the more legitimate companies like FedEx and UPS have scammers that are representing them during the holiday season in an attempt to give social media a bad name. All these examples aren’t designed give social media a bad name, really.  It’s just a friendly reminder that with all the good that comes with any new invention like this there will always be people lurking in the background to take advantage illegally.