Lights, Camera, Silence Your Phone.

I can think back to a time, long ago, when before a movie began you were asked to silence your phones… and everyone did so. Often, it wasn’t just a flip to silent people ACTUALLY turned off their phones, crazy thought right. As the number of mobile apps on our phones has grown, our investment in them has too. I’m sure we have all heard at one point, or thought to ourselves, that our heads are stuck in our phones and not the world around us. Granted, I’ve written a post before discussing my generation’s reliance on technology, and I still stand by my argument that at times it would be inefficient to not take advantage of the benefits the latest technology provides. But it was at the UGA v. Auburn game this weekend I was reminded how our dependence starts to affect our ability to genuinely enjoy life happening around us. It was as the Georgia Bulldogs, yes the 2016 Georgia Bulldogs, were about to score on the game winning drive. As I looked around me I was surround by Snapchat apps ready to capture the moment, as if our eyes weren’t enough.

This reminded me of an article I read this summer about an altercation between Slipknots lead singer Corey Taylor and a fan. A fan in the front row was spending the entire show with his face in his phone screen. Corey Taylor took it into his own hands to ensure his “fans” were enjoying the show, and reached off the stage slapping the concert goer’s phone from his hands. I definitely recognize the performer’s frustration, whether his response was warranted or not is another discussion. I think this has been a long time coming, people were going to hit their tolerance limit of being ignored for a little square. Social Media began with the purpose of sharing and enhancing connections, as someone with many friends and family miles away I still cherish it for this purpose. But how has it advanced to the point where people are more concerned if the person next to them is liking their photo than the fact this person is sitting next to them. Built with the purpose of building connections, are our social media apps beginning to hinder just that? 

Take me out to the... ESPN app

Social media is changing the game, literally. Over the past few years how I view sports has changed based on my phone apps. The obvious was the downloading the ESPN app, I could save my favorite teams and be alerted about stats, start of games, and score updates if I can’t watch live. It made it easier to be a loyal fan when I was on the go or away from my T.V. Next was the integration of social media, and it’s not just friends posting about games. Teams all have their own Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages to keep their fans up to date. Additionally, Twitter now has the right to live streaming Thursday night football. With constant score updates and now online live streaming ability, sports fans are not nearly as reliant on live television as they once were.

I realized how much the way I view sports changed during the World Series (Go Cubbies). Mid-Game 7 I had to leave for a class group meeting, so I switched over to my ESPN app to keep up with scores. As the game tied back up I moved over to twitter for more in-detailed, real time updates. Through google I watched a real time pitch count, and when I couldn’t stand it any longer I turned on a live stream. Social media still came into play after the bottom of the 10^th, I opened Facebook to watch a live feed of the crowd outside Wrigley Field. I saw personal videos of generations of fans celebrating the win, and in days to come even caught glimpses of the Cubs homecoming parade. With this added convenience of being able to keep you favorite teams right in your pocket, I wonder the threat this causes for Television. One of T.V’s remaining draws is the viewing of live events, but if this is moving online and to mobile I am finding less need for my remote control. 

Social Media Scare.

As Halloween quickly approaches I wasn’t thinking too much about getting into the spooky spirit. As a UGA student my Halloween celebration mostly consists of a trip down to Jacksonville for the Georgia v Florida game. Due to several New York blizzards, I honestly hadn’t dressed up or celebrated Halloween in easily 5 years. So it’s safe to say this Holiday wasn’t top of mind, but this year I suddenly find myself taking part in many Halloween activities. The urge to dress up, carve pumpkins, and visit haunted houses has returned and I can’t help but question why.

As any Millennial does, I spend a fair amount of time on Social Media. I’ve definitely noticed a push, much larger this year than in the past, of Halloween centered posts across several platforms. On my Facebook I’ve seen several “Tasty” food videos with pumpkin flare, persuading me to roast pumpkin seeds. Snapchat has started to include scary Halloween filters and featured stories increasing the urge to get into the spirit. My Instagram explorer page is filled with videos of make-up artists creating scarred and bloody looks, inspiring me to purchase liquid latex to create the most extreme Joker look on my friend.  

Now here I am with full costumes planned for local Halloween events occurring around Athens. I spent 3 hours of my past weekend in line at Netherworld haunted house, and have pumpkin seeds pouring out the window of my apartment. Where did this urge come from, was it from years of deprivation or did snapchat make me do it? 

One site to rule them all?

Facebook has been an online leader since its start. Quickly driving out MySpace, the site (and now app) has continued to grow and find ways to knock out competitors. Even as time goes on and people claim that its popularity is waning, but Facebook has had the most consistent high number of users and retained them overtime. To ensure their success, Facebook has continued to make intelligent purchases buying out other high performing competitors, i.e. Instagram, to ensure they retain the biggest share of the Social Media market. But as more competitors appear in this online and mobile social space each day, does Facebook really have the capability to continue to run this all out? Is it possible for Facebook to create a monopoly of the Social Media space and potentially the entire online space?

As mentioned Facebook showed its power in 2012 when they purchased Instagram. The two social platforms together collected a large section of millennial users and have continued to hold them ever since. In the most recent turn of events we saw a power play from Instagram trying to drive out a competitor they couldn’t convince to buy, Snapchat. Although it hasn’t taken off yet, Instagram’s live stories just goes to show Facebooks fueling need to possess it all.

This may have gone unnoticed by many users but at one point Facebook  paired up with another online engine struggling against competitors. Facebook had integrated Bing into their site graph search feature, changing the way Facebook users search and the information they can find from just their sites search bar. Bing had been pulling in external information for users while the search. After some back lash Facebook removed Bings external pull. But Facebook graph search continues to thrive and be edited, allowing you to search things like restaurants or events around you but also see what your friends recommend. 

Lastly, and most recently, Facebook has restructured their site for the new Facebook marketplace. A new place where people can buy and sell their goods, they can name their price and find interested people in their area. Using the Facebook messaging feature people can contact each other to discuss prices and purchases without ever have to exchange personal phone numbers or emails. Wondering how sites like Craigslist and EBay are feeling about this…

In the end Google reigns supreme among search and unless Facebook creates something spectacular, and beats Google to it, I don’t see them ever ruling the internet. But as far as Social Media they may have a chance. There will always be companies, for example Snapchat who turned down a billion dollar offer from Facebook, who will be determined to hold their own. However, if Facebook continues to buy out fast growing apps as they did Instagram they have an opportunity to create a large portfolio of “flanker brands” if you will. Owning these apps but keeping their original name could give Facebook the opportunity to run the social circle without the majority of consumers even realizing it. 

Cheers to Venmo

In a pure act of genius a student added his Venmo username to his College Gameday sign a few weeks ago and reaped the benefits in ways I don’t think even he expected. Sam in an act of either humor, desperation, or both made a request for beer money from his Mom via the College Gameday camera crew. His response was well received, getting almost 2,000 Venmo payments made to his account in the weeks to follow. Whether people just enjoyed his humor, were sympathetic, or just longed for their college day’s back, Sam found his audience and struck a chord with them.

Because of the signs success, of course buzz began to generate about the real motives behind it. Many tried to claim that it was sponsored by Venmo as a marketing ploy. Venmo has since come out with a statement saying that they in no way incentivized the sign, but if I were them I would be pretty happy about it. This sign is the perfect, most natural form of word of mouth marketing, and the College Gameday crowd and viewers are mostly compromised of College students who are a great target audience for Venmo.  Venmo was sure to take advantage of this free marketing by tweeting an ongoing tally of Sam’s Venmo account transactions. Is College Gameday signs the best new marketing channel for targeting millennials? Or is beer just something we can all agree on? 

Life is like a Bowl of Skittles.

This election has had its fair share of twitter drama. Which is why this week when another attention raising tweet was sent out by one of the candidates I wasn’t too surprised, but found myself more focused on the brand that was dragged into it. Candidate Donald Trump tweeted an analogy drawing a comparison between a bowl of Skittles and refugees.  This sparked two different thoughts in my mind, one when I saw the original tweet and one when I saw the Skittles brand response.

The original tweet made me wonder how brands handle these situations and whether or not they should have to be accountable for them. After sending his tweet, Donald Trump drew a line of association between him and Skittles in the media, something Skittles brand never set out to do. The brand never came together and decided to sponsor or support the candidate, but now their names have become buzz words together for the week. There’s really no way for the brand to prevent this, they cannot (nor would they want to) forbid people from speaking about their brand. But now they are forced to make some type of response, or face the wrath of not acknowledging it at all.

My second thought came when I saw Skittles response:

"Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing." – Denise Young, vp of corporate affairs Wrigley Americas

The part of this that stood out to me was the last line “…anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing”. This is an issue I was first introduced to when interning for a well-known, international brand this summer. In the heat of the Black Live Matter movement, I was able to sit in on a companywide town hall hosted to discuss how the employees felt the company was handling the movement. It was in this meeting I recognized that large brands taking stances on these controversial instances goes well beyond just determining what side they should take. This company was in the middle of determining not only the best stance to take on the matter, but more importantly how to go about presenting that stance. They had several focus groups testing out responses to commercials, print ads, social media posts, etc. all of which came back with some negative thoughts. There is an incredibly thin line for large brands between taking a stance, and making money off tragedy. The last thing this brand wants is to be creating “advertisements” when they are just trying to share their thoughts on an issue. This is a huge issue often missed by outside consumers, they are often quick to bash brands for not taking a stance sooner when often these brands are battling an internal moral issue. 

Finding my Waze.

I was driving home to my parent’s new house a few weeks ago when the worst thing imaginable happened, I closed out of my Waze app in the middle a dead cell zone. I had driven to their house a few times over the past year, but still feel completely lost without my app on my phone. This has become true for most trips I take, I feel incredibly insecure when I can’t look down and confirm I’m heading the right direction. As I drove “blindly” down this country road I started to question what I recognized, panicking I repeatedly glanced down at my phone praying to get service back. This whole ordeal caused me to miss a slight turn, but soon after I was able to find service and it all only added 15 minutes to my trip. After returning home I began explaining this stressful event to my parents which lead straight into a speech from my father about millennial dependence on technology.

This got my reflecting on driving before apps, my family always took long road trips to places we had never traveled before. First there were the books of maps we kept in the backseat pockets, I remember my mom getting so frustrated trying to bring me to practice at a new location and pulling these out. Then it was google maps on our desktop, my dad would spend hours mapping out our road trips and printing out the google map directions to bring with us. Then our family purchased a Garmin GPS to guide us on our trips. My dad still printed out google maps documents to use along with the GPS as he tested out the technology. Over time technology has always evolved and changed the way we did things, and my parents took advantage of it every step of the way. Is it really a millennial addiction problem that I now use my phone for directions, or am I just using the newest form of technology? I think technology is constantly getting more convenient and user friendly, more so than it ever has. The same way my parents tried and used the newest and simplest way to travel I’m doing the same, it just now comes straight from my pocket. Wouldn’t it be ignorant to not take advantage of the technology I already have and inefficiently resort to using older technology?

You won this one Mom.

It was to my Mother's joy and my absolute horror I discovered I could zoom in on Instagram posts this past Thursday. I was a bit stressed out about the fact my “zoom it out and throw a filter on it” method for posting bad photos was beginning to fail. I played around for the feature for a little while, but as the weekend moved on I quickly forgot about it and don’t think I used it a single other time. I imagine I will use the feature a few more times in the future, mostly to harass friends, but otherwise won’t be zooming in and inspecting every post and comes through my feed.

But just in these few days I have noticed certain users taking advantage of this feature, advertisers to be exact. I’ve seen a couple of ways that different companies have been incorporating the zoom feature into their Instagram advertisements. One way through a type of scavenger hunt, where they have their products placed smaller so you have to zoom in to find them. An example of this I saw was a desk with a ton of stuff on it that you had to zoom in to see all the details and product placement. Another way is the idea of zooming in on quality or options, mostly I have seen this with food products. Cheesecake factory ran an ad with nine different slices of cheesecake, each of which you could zoom in on and check out the flavors and details.

I think it’s really smart of these brands to stay on top of the most current features and incorporate them into their advertisements. This shows the brands are relevant and keep up with fast moving technology.  My only concern is as I mentioned before, how many people are really taking advantage of this zoom feature on every post they view. I don’t think I would zoom in on these ads unless prompted in the caption, which means I would have to stop and read the caption, and that doesn’t frequently happen. By minimizing the size of your product are you prompting users to zoom in and interact, or scroll through without even seeing what you are selling? 

123 People Like This Post

Social Media giant Facebook has been the top player among social sites since their establishment, but maintaining this #1 spot has branched out beyond their little blue logo. Back in 2012 Facebook purchased the increasingly popular Instagram app for a very healthy price. With Instagram now in their power, Facebook continues to own a huge majority of the market without many people even noticing. I recall the headlines of Facebooks purchase a few years ago, but since then went about using Instagram seeing no difference and quite honestly forgetting it was now a Facebook product.

Until lately, over the past few months when I open my Instagram apps I’ve began to noticed striking similarities between “new” Instagram features and the already existing Facebook features. I’ve noticed these overlaps across three different categories, but this may just be the beginning.

Who you follow - Scrolling through my Instagram feed I could help but stopped when I came to several small boxes horizontally crossing my screen. The different size and orientation of them caught my eye and as I started to scroll through the faces I realized they were suggested followers… mirroring exactly the suggested friends section of my Facebook page. The same as Facebook, I scrolled through the suggestions and recognized a few and added none. At a later time on the app, while stalking a girl, I clicked into her profile to find a list of my friends who also follow her written in light gray on her profile. Very similar to the mutual friends listed on a Facebook profile, I found this aspect helpful on Instagram. With people using usernames that aren’t their exact name it’s sometime helpful to confirm they’re who you hope they are.

Advertisements – This one is no surprise, if you have the app you’ve noticed them. It was only a matter of time before ads found their way to Instagram, but they don’t bother me much. I feel Instagram does a great job integrating their ads into their content so it doesn’t inhibit my user experience and I honestly find myself stopping and looking at Instagram ads more than those on any other site. To be honest I feel that I saw a shift in Facebook ads following the start of Instagram ads, maybe they learned something from their new app. I feel that Facebook ads have begun to become much more integrated into my experience in the form of promotions and product placement in videos being shared on my newsfeed.

How you “like” - Now this appeared and left… hopefully for good. This past week I couldn’t help but notice some testing going on in my Instagram app, because I yelled “omg I hate this” to my roommate who then opened her app and said she had no idea what I was talking about. For one night my Instagram likes began to be formatted the same as Facebook likes “Blabla , Blabla2 and 123 Other people likes this photo” spacing out the “likes” like enough to catch my attention and throw off my visual experience. I was irrationally mad about something that has no impact on my life until the next day when it returned to normal.

The real question is will this really change or boost Instagram usage? I assume that Facebook would only think to implement these ideas if they had seen success with them on Facebook. But as Facebook begins to die out and users find interest elsewhere, i.e Instagram, will this just bring frustration to see just what you are trying to escape? I personally feel like it’s in Facebooks best interest to try to keep the two apps true to their original feel and continue to allow people to associate them as two different brands in their mind. This avoids driving away Facebook “protestors”, and allows others who are just looking for a different experience to continue to find that. But then again, I did just add a new suggested follower. 

Add me on snapchat.

My love (want to) hate relationship with snapchat continues to grow with every app update. I swear I'm done with it, then I find out I can make myself into a puppy or switch faces with my Dad and I'm hooked again. Suddenly I have a "100" emoji next to my friends name and realize I have a problem. There's few to none social media apps I currently have that haven't snuck in some sort of advertising in the past year, and snapchat is no exception. At this point I've come to expect it, and in a way am okay with it. The question is where is the line? How much advertising can they sneak in before is begins to hinder my user experience, or more honestly makes the puppy filter not even worth it?

Up to this last update, I had been fine with snapchats advertising. No I don't love the promoted stories, usually trash, spread throughout my stories page but I was too busy being irritated by the new autoplay feature (I was avoiding their story for a reason snapchat). I felt that I was able to avoid these ads and promotions if I so chose and that they were intended in a way to enhance my user experience, even if I didn't always agree. The advertisements I noticed came in the promoted stories on my stories page or through occasional promoted filter or geotag on my snapchats. But this last update had me noticing something new, ads played between snapstories. Now as I tried to avoid autoplaying the next snapstory, I have an additional full screen ad to shut out of too. It’s reminiscent of accidently clicking into a spammy website and frantically trying to close out of the pops ups to exit the site. I feel like this is where I draw my line, I know I personally will never fully watch one of this ads. Even if I do, I know there slim to no chance of me exiting snapchat to go find out more. I feel like this is an inefficient use of ad space, I don’t see it brining much reward for the advertiser and seems nothing but annoying for the user. But we will see what the next update brings… *sends snapchat*.