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Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Here are three members of the BU community telling you why you should cast your vote for Dean Elmore in the Shorty Awards. The Shorty Awards honor innovators in social media, particularly Twitter. Go to shortyawards.com/DeanElmore to vote today!

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Vote for Dean Elmore for the Shorty Awards!

People with low self-esteem post more negative updates, which makes them less likeable. On the surface, Facebook would seem to offer important benefits to people who have low self-esteem. Sharing is easy and feels safe on Facebook, and sharing is an important way to improve friendships. Having a stable network of social connections helps to improve self-esteem. In reality, though, it may not work out that way. A new study conducted by Amanda Forest and Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo found that people with low self-esteem tend to post too many negative updates, causing friends to see them as less likeable. The study will be published in the journal Psychological Science . Initially, the researchers, who have a special focus on self-esteem and how it impacts which emotions people express, thought that Facebook would be an ideal venue for people to go to learn social skills and improve friendships. People who have lower self-esteem typically find it hard to share their feelings in a one-on-one setting. However, Facebook allows users to share and have social interactions without the need for face-to-face contact. The researchers found that participants with low self-esteem often view Facebook as a chance to connect and interact with others in a safe setting without the awkwardness they often feel in live, in-person social settings. Participants were also asked to provide the ten most recent updates about their life that they posted for their Facebook friends to see. The updates were rated for negativity, then an undergraduate research assistant went through the updates and indicated how likeable they found the person who made the statements from the updates. Participants who had low self-esteem tended to post updates that were more negative on average. In turn, the assistants who rated their updates tended to find them less likeable than people with higher self-esteem. Although the raters did not know the people who posted the updates, according to Forest, a previous study showed that almost half of the friends people list on Facebook are strangers or mere acquaintances, rather than close friends. The study found that when participants with low self-esteem placed very positive messages on their pages, they received more responses from members of their actual Facebook friends list than they did when they placed negative or neutral messages on Facebook. However, participants who had high self-esteem got more responses from their friends when they posted negative messages. Forest and Wood speculate that this may be because, in both cases, these types of posts are more unusual for these users. The investigators concluded that, while people who have low self-esteem may be more willing to share on Facebook, they might not receive the same benefits from doing so that they would get from face-to-face encounters. This is because people may not be as willing to provide feedback on Facebook the way they might in person. According to Forest, in a live social setting, people may be able to pick up on a friend’s negative reaction to to something they said. “On Facebook, you don’t see most of the reactions.” Related posts: Facebook positively influences education, study says Facebook’s Effect on Interpersonal Relationships [Infographic] Almost Half of Facebook Users Have Profanity on Their Wall

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Don’t Use Facebook If You Have Low Self-Esteem [Study]

Top marketing experts divulge their lessons learned and secrets on social media with everything you ever wanted to learn, from the basics to the most advanced techniques. Easily consumable in short articles, discover if your company should use social media and determine how to hire a social media agency (or if you should keep the position in-house). Dive into the latest trends, learn specific methods to gain maximum exposure from your efforts and define how to measure results. Download the February issue of the Social Media Wrap Up now and receive it in your inbox in less than a minute! Request Free!

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Social Media Wrap Up Report: February 2012

Our lives are awash in the blue-white light of our smartphone screens. It is hard to walk down a street without bumping into someone, often literally, who is busily typing into their smartphones. More and more Americans are cancelling home phone service in favor of using their cell as their primary number. Servicing or even purchasing a non-smartphone is becoming harder and harder. Our phones keep our schedules, take our photos and videos, store our contacts, and –oh yeah– make phone calls. One of the primary reason we love our smartphones is the ability to keep in contact with friends far away. The pioneer application for this is of course Facebook. Facebook has altered the way this generation socializes. We can keep up with our friends who we may have otherwise fallen out of contact with years ago. Grandma can see all the photos from Junior’s birthday party in Time Square from her comfortable living room in Phoenix. A whole host of  apps have been spawned to give you Facebook on your phone. Each app offers different levels of access and features. Likewise each application has its own unique quirks and shortcomings. Let’s explore a few of them to better our understanding: Blackberry Facebook 2.0 beta Positives Facebook Chat – catching up in real-time New Navigation Grid – easier to find what you’re looking for Negatives Still sluggish for photos – don’t expect to thumb through an album quickly Bugs in chat app –these will likely be ironed out in the near future. Android: Friendcaster Facebook App Positives All in one app, instead of accessing some features through the browser. Tablet friendly taking full advantage of the larger screen Negatives Invasive notifications open the app itself despite what else you might be doing most of the time. Your farm will miss you if you don’t use a browser to keep up with it and your other games. Facebook Version 4 for iPhone Positives Games! You won’t have to open a browser to keep up with your farm and more Apps – access your favorite apps on the go! Navigation and Notification – Send a message or see your notifications or browse without losing your place in News Feed Negatives Scaling for the iPad causes spacing issues Comment bugs – sometimes the posts tease you from just off screen tapping around randomly will often fix the problem Related posts: The Facebook Obsession and Its Effect on Communication [Infographic] Facebook Profile Picture Statistics [Infographic] Study: Facebook photo sharing reflects focus on female appearance

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Facebook App Comparison for Your Smartphone

With over 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, 200 million Tweets posted daily, and an average of 90 pieces of content per user posted to Facebook every day, we are uploading our personalities, our thoughts, and our ideas onto the web, but what happens to these online personas after we die? Already services are offering options for this — such as IfIDie.Net — which lets you record a last video or Tweet to be posted once you die. Even Facebook’s recent rollout of Timeline allows users to make a digital archive of their lives. But SVP Content & Exec Editor at Mashable, Adam Ostrow, takes it once step further in this video as he discusses the implications of these ideas mixed with machine learning, where computers can make intelligent decisions based on data. Ostrow notes that computers grow more advanced at analyzing content every day. He wonders whether a person’s death and the personification of their analyzed content can extend their life virtually. For example, what if we could program robots to act like a person based on their created content? This isn’t too far of a stretch. One site, My Next Tweet, already offers a service that will analyze all your tweets to predict what you’ll say next. What if Adam is right? Will we need to redefine our definition of “life?” Related posts: Fotoshop by Adobé Makes Fun of Media Beauty Standards [Video] The Ramifications of Social Media On Actual Social Interaction Perry Hewitt on Harvard’s Social Media

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Social Media After Death [Video]

In this age of natural disasters, chronic unemployment, terrorism, public protests and housing foreclosures, one might expect newspapers and social media sites to be flooded with a deluge of negative words. Surprisingly, however, that is not the case. Researchers at the University of Vermont have found that the English language contains a natural positivity, meaning that even in troubled times, people use more happy words than sad ones. The study, entitled “Positivity of the English Language,” examined billions of words collected from Twitter, 50 years of music lyrics, 20 years of the New York Times and nearly six centuries of publications on the Google Books Project. From those sources, researchers singled out the 10,222 most commonly used words and hired a panel of subjects to rate, on a scale from one to nine, the level of emotional happiness each word inspires. “Laughter” received an 8.50, “food” 7.44, “truck” 5.48, “greed” 3.06 and “terrorist” 1.30. Words receiving a rating of 5 were considered neutral. When researchers then analyzed the top 5,000 words by frequency of use in each of their sources, they discovered that the rate of positivity remained pretty much the same over time. Whether the writer was a country music star, a sixteenth-century poet or an angsty teen complaining about homework on Twitter, happy words dominated the text. The study comes on the heels of another one by the same group of scientists that showed a two-year decline in global happiness based on the language contained in Twitter updates—a story that drew national attention. The researchers now say that while people’s short-term happiness has decreased, the language they use to express their discontent remains fundamentally positive—at the “atomic” level, so to speak. Even news articles about war, corruption and death reveal a “net happiness” inherent in English. Scientists say this universal “bias of positivity” in language reflects the social nature of humanity. Social contracts often hinge upon one’s ability to be pleasant and upbeat. Therefore, it stands to reason that a million years of language development would ingrain more positive words into our vocabulary than negative ones. The study’s findings support the Pollyanna Principle of 1969, which theorized that humans naturally use positive words more easily and frequently than negative ones. The study appears in the January 11 issue of the journal PloS ONE. Related posts: English Language Has Doubled In Size Over Last Century, Says New Study Ability to Gauge Emotion is Independent of Language, Study Says Building Language Skills More Critical for Boys than Girls, Study Finds

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Even in Tough Times, Language Remains Positive [Study]