I. Thesis: In her book, 30 days to Social Media Success, marketing expert Gail Z. Martin discusses how to achieve social media success in an extremely basic way that is targeted to an older generation who did grow up with the Internet as an integral part of life and business; her lack of detail and use of generalizations weaken what could have potentially been a more useful book for a larger scope of people.

II. Summary of book’s content and format 

•  Goal to “rethink, reenergize, and restart social media marketing”
• R.E.S.U.L.T.S.
• Ch. 1-7: Ensuring marketing strategy aligns with business goals
• Ch. 8-21: How to use social media to promote businesses
• Ch. 22-30: Ties together business goals and social media strategy
• Discussion of intended audience

III. Strengths: How the book reflects popular social media discourse and course concepts

• Martin highlights the domestication discourse (Baym)
• Idea of a real story and a “true voice” – addresses inauthenticity  (Baym)
• Using social media for business purposes calls attention to Beers’ critique of boyd and Ellison – economic components, critique of capitalism, etc.

IV. Weaknesses: How the text contradicts or ignores course concepts

• Discrepancies about what qualifies as social media (boyd & Ellison, Donath) and what it is used for (“On Facebook, it’s ok to talk to strangers…” vs. Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe)
• Assumes all consumers and businesses will engage in media multiplexity (Haythornthwaite)
• Does not address different types of ties and social capital each site fosters (Baym; Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe)
• Does not encourage participant observation of different social media profiles before diving in to use the sites for business purposes (Nardi)
• Approaches social media marketing with somewhat of a slacktivist attitude (Kendzior)

V. Conclusion/Final Opinions

Main points in the book:

• Author Gail Martin takes a domestication approach (with a marketing angle)when it comes to social media. equating it to being a cost-efficient advertisement platform
• “RESULTS” acronym signifying “Recommit, Expect success, Seek partners, Understand your audience, Look for win-win scenarios, Take strategic action, Stay visible”
•  Social Networking Sites=power, how to “harness” that power
• Don’t let SNS use you, take advantage of it for results
• Reconnect with old colleagues, friends, clients to expand reach
• Meet other possible clients and partners online
• Don’t be a social media pariah, or “orphan” as Martin puts it
• Allow your company to come across as more of a personality, and less of a brand
• Make personal connections with those online (goes back to being a “person” online and convincing authenticity)
• Invest time in social media, allocate at least 30 minutes a day
• Those you choose to retweet or befriend is more telling about you than them

Criticism of the claims:

• Hiring one social media guru is not enough to maintain all of the SNS Martin proposes
• Martin seems to paint over her points with broad strokes without even giving concrete examples or advise. i.e. Martin advises to add 30 people/followers a day on Facebook and Twitter. How will a small unrecognizable company garner followers and friends if you and I usually do not befriend/follow names we don’t know?
• 30 Days for results, but what about after the 30 days? How do you sustain the “success” after the 30 days? Author fails to address.
• Author does not define what “success” in social media means. On one hand she says don’t reach too high if you’re a small company, but in the later chapters she pushes you to take your social media to global scale
• Author approaches each social media site with the same methods, but LinkedIn should be handled much differently than, say, YouTube
• Digg is kind of, a little, really, super outdated

Gail Z. Martin’s “30 Days to Social Media Success”

• Consistency and honesty as two most important values for branding.
  • True Voice / Real Story
    • PRSA Code of Ethics
  • Sarah Banet-Weiser’s “Branding the Post-Feminist Self: Girls’ Video Production and YouTube”
    • Concepts behind branding and identity building processes.
• Book targets audience who are not familiar with SNSs and teaches them different ways to target narrow demographics on specific ESNs
  • “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience” by Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd
    • Audience discourse.
• Compare & Contrast with other articles
  • “The complex problem of monetizing virtual electronic social networks” by Eric K. Clemons
    • 4 Ps
  • “E-Tribalized Marketing?: The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption” by Robert V. Kozinets
    • Virtual community member categories
      • Martin encourages “lurking” as well, to better study the traditions and norms of target networks.
• Emphasis on the need of own website, separate from SNS profiles.
  • Examples of corporate websites that offer different functions / affordances uncommon in SNS pages.
• Summary
  • Assessment of the book as a guide to better social media presence
    • The rule of 30
  • Study of the author’s visibility on SNSs / Evaluation of her own website.

30 Days to Social Media Success—Gail Z. Martin

1. Review Baym’s four major social discourses of new technology. How would you describe your book in terms of these discourses?
   1. Technology Determinism: There is no technological determinism aspect that pushes this book because she explicitly states that the audience that the reader is trying to reach will determine which social media platforms the reader should be more focused on
   2. Social Construction of Technology: There is a little of this aspect in the book, but it is not extreme. She suggests that by following your audience to the social media platforms that they are using most, the reader will be able to get a better idea of where to start.
   3. Social Shaping—Because the author didn’t get that into depth with any single platform, it’s hard to make the case.
   4. Domestication—There is almost no aspect of domestication in this book because the author limits the time spent doing any one activity.
2. Who do you think the audience is for your book? Does this affect what ideas the books address and how these ideas are talked about?
   1. Audience is most like small business owners who have few employees. These business owners are most likely wearing a lot of different hats (also doing the accounting, sales, management, marketing, etc.) of the store.
   2. The chapter on YouTube and Flickr seems to open up to a different kind of social media platform that is on a different level than either Facebook or Twitter. I think that once you’ve established a presence on both FB and Twitter, you can move onto bigger platforms (like YouTube/ Flickr).
   3. 30 minutes for maintaining and spreading your social media marketing influence is definitely not enough, especially in the beginning stages of social media marketing. To really get your name out there and build a strong foundation, you really need to commit more time.
   4. I think that the author needs to emphasize the importance of engaging and interacting with the reader’s audience much more.
3. Does your book address any ethical implications of social media and marketing? How so?
   1. I don’t think that there are any overt ethical implications just because she doesn’t actually advise the reader strongly to do something or not to do something. The author basically just introduces the reader to different platforms and ideas rather than really encouraging them to make a strong action.

Book: “30 Days to Social Media Success”

by: Gail Z. Martin

• Audience: seems to be an older audience she is addressing; people who are already established professionals with businesses who now need to expand their businesses online using social media; busy individuals who wants a crash course into the world of social media
• Discourse Used: Domestication- sets up the notion that social media is a necessary part of business and life nowadays emphasizing that it’s not just a fad; if people want to succeed in business they must succeed in social media
• Myths About Social Media: 1. it’s just for kids 2. it’s just a fad 3. it’s all you need 4. quantity trumps quality 5. i’m too busy for social media
• Issues with her points:
• 1. she contradicts herself a lot- says quantity doesn’t trump quality and that you should know your audience, but then focuses a lot on spreading the word of one’s business rather than focusing it on a specific group
• 2. doesn’t suggest that one should participate in social media prior to creating a business profile using it; you need to understand how users use it before you can target your audience
• 3. too brief and unrealistic- seems like a marketing ploy/ quick-fix; also unrealistic to do 1 thing each day for 30 days
• 4. she has no personal stories of how these techniques helped her- nothing to back up her suggestions
• 5. doesn’t clearly prioritize- lists numerous sites to use, but it’s unrealistic to keep up with all of them
• Good Points:
• know your competitors- use them to expand your business/ turn them into partners
• notion of having a “true voice” and telling your own personal stories- helps authenticate your business
• having a business plan/ action plan

Due to my reserved and quite nature, my acquaintances usually do not associate me with the music I play: http://pds21.egloos.com/pds/201105/11/60/SPELL_PREMIX.swf

This skinny Asian guy in glasses you see in your class took three years off from school to receive military training procedures and play music. I remember the first time I got ID’d at the local deli. The guy went crazy and kept saying, “You? 25 years old? Real?” I look so young.

Joking aside, facades can be deceiving. When Barbara Leung tweeted about having found NYU students on OKCupid, I trembled in fear. If anybody remembers our first class, our professor asked if anyone was registered on the online dating website, but I DID NOT RAISE MY HAND. I deactivated and terminated my account few weeks before the tweet, but my profile is still Googlable. Don’t.

What I felt upon reading that tweet is perhaps similar to what this, to quote the article, “Twitter pervert,” felt when he got caught.

Kent Online‘s article, Girl’s lucky escape from Twitter pervert posing as teen, describes how 56-year-old Westgarth, who apparently “has a low IQ and a learning disability,” acquired another ticket to the jail. He posed as Zac, 17 years old, on Twitter, to bait unsuspecting teenage girls. A girl found his facade attractive, considered there was something mutual between them and attempted to meet Zac in person. Instead, she found an old man and his 21-year-old “lover” posing as a sister.

It’s fortunate that nothing seriously harmful happened. The girl called the cops at the right moment. She did the right thing at the end, and she probably does not want to get publicized for such mishap.

However, this incident is such an ideal example for parents to cite when they educate their children about the dangers of the Internet. danah boyd‘s Why Youth <3 Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life is a great article that touches upon multiple subjects, such as examining social network sites’ different affordances and functions of mediated environments / publics. Of all the topics, I am interested in her close study of “power games” between youths and older generations who seek to protect them.

boyd argues that restriction-based protection is an “ongoing culture of fear” instigated by “moral entrepreneurs” which “overstates the actual dangers and obfuscates real risks in the process” (boyd 135). From the perspective of “moral entrepreneurs,” the girl who fell for Zac cannot be sympathized, and she can even be considered a criminal who violated several important rules imposed by them: she revealed her personal information on the web, she believed someone on the web and she went to meet someone from the web.

Incidents like Westgarth’s case can be used to feed the “pervading attitude that teens must be protected from their mistakes” (boyd 135). While it largely employs a neutral tone, the article seems to degrade the victim with this line: “The teenage girl even ran up a £400 phone bill chatting to the man she ‘met’ on Twitter” (Kent). Divide the bill into several months, the actual duration it took Westgarth to make the girl come over to his place, and the amount is not financially devastating for middle class households.

This is not to honor the girl’s actions. It was a dangerous decision for her to travel just to meet a person whom she had never met. Protective attitudes come along the ways of those with physical weakness, as self-defense is harder for them to practice. The fact that she could travel to meet a stranger hints at a lack of advice.

However, protection is not a necessity especially if it is overly done. Youths today are more familiar with SNSs and the dangers.

Here is an excerpt from one chat log I saved from Omegle, a chatting website that lets anyone talk with everyone on the website with total anonymity.

This excerpt clearly shows that the Stranger, who told me she was a “girrlll,” knows how dangerous it is and chooses not to give out personal information on Omegle, even though some people on the website do it. In fact, this excerpt shows the mistake I made years ago, when I tried to recruit a drummer from the Internet. I did find all my band members from the web, but not from Omegle.

Omegle used to be a website full of perverts looking for cybersex or promoting sexual web-cam websites, like this one:

If I had played along, she would have given me a link where I could see her, perhaps naked, for a small amount of fee. It is possible that she was a normal girl who just wanted to sext me on Omegle, but I chose to protect myself.

The girl from the first excerpt of Omegle chat log is a great example of a web-conscious youth who knows how to enjoy SNSs without falling into traps laid out by predators. She is the epitome of the bright future where all youths will learn to think twice before going all out on the Internet.

At one point or another, almost everyone has been friends with that couple on Facebook. Yeah, you know the one I’m talking about: the girl that writes paragraph long status updates about how wonderful her boyfriend is and the boy commenting on his girlfriend’s wall about how much he loves her and how pretty she is. Personally, I’ve never really understood the reason for sharing so much about your personal life on the Internet but apparently many social users, particularly Canadian teenagers, primarily use Facebook for this reason.

The article “Youth, researchers discuss offline impact of social media on teen relationships” was posted earlier this month in Huffpost Style Canada. It discussed a project that a Carleton University professor is currently conducting called the Hanging Out Online Project. Professor Bivens is studying how 13 through 18 year old Canadians are affected by Facebook use by looking at the status updates, photos, comments, etc. posted on the site. Bivens is particularly interested in how Facebook might influence the teens’ thoughts on relationships, gender-based violence, and other individuals. Her observations have found that some teenagers share a considerable amount of information about themselves, specifically details about their relationships and offline activities.

Why, might you ask? Bivens attributes some of this behavior to “broadcast impulse”; She says “we have this impulse to broadcast this information in this habitual way”. But again, why do we experience such an impulse? 17-year-old Hanna Gillis says “a lot of times on social networking sites, it’s more for show”. She believes that people just want to brag and show off that they’re in a relationship because it makes them look cool. This idea was reminiscent of both danah boyd’s “Why Youth <3 Social Media” and Rebekah Willet’s “As soon as you get on Bebo you just go mad“. At the beginning of boyd’s article, she quotes a young, teenage girl named Vivian who wasn’t popular in school, but would always post photos of the extravagant vacations she went on with her parents so the other kids would “want to be [her] friend”. The information that Vivian shared online is just how the article describes teenagers posting about their relationships: the intent is to impress or show off to a particular audience in order to be accepted and esteemed. In her article, Willet discusses Goffman’s idea of identify performance, stating, “We think about how to present ourselves to others, we think about how others see us, we strategise and consider how best to achieve our goals through our presentation of self.” With so many different platforms to choose from, kids are incorporating social media into their self-presentation strategies. Judging by boyd’s interview and Bivens’ findings, as well as the Huffpost article’s commentary from teens themselves, what’s being put online is completely calculated by some users.

Another issue raised in the Huffington Post article was that of privacy. This was something that boyd and Alice Marwick in their article, “Social Steganography: Privacy in Networked Publics“. They talked about the different definition and levels of privacy between children and their parents. In terms of social media, parents think of privacy as a means of protection and a way to keep their children away from the stranger danger lurking around on the Internet. Teens, however, define privacy as keeping things from their parents; they don’t want their parents stalking their Facebook profiles, much like they wouldn’t want them reading their a journal or diary. The Huffpost article brought up the idea that there is also a discrepancy of privacy’s definition amongst kids. In reference to over-sharing online, 18 year old Ben Lord commented, “I can’t judge anyone on how comfortable they are with that kind of thing. But you have to recognize there are different levels (of privacy).” He described how some people have photos of them making out with their boyfriend/girlfriend while others don’t even like to have their relationship status publicly listed online; although there is a more obvious difference between how parents and their children view privacy, it’s interesting to learn that the definition varies so much among teenagers, as well.

Another compelling point that Lord made was that “we’re just such a technologically-driven generation that [social media use] is integrated into us, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to the extent that we’ve taken it.” This was suggestive of Nancy Baym’s discussion of domestication in her book Personal Connections in the Digital World and also Professor P-S’s mention of the third person effect during class. Domestication occurs when a new technology becomes second nature to us, while the third person effect is when you think you aren’t affected by the media but you think that other users are. Although Lord acknowledges how much social media has become a part of our lives, I don’t think all other teens, particularly younger teens, would agree about just how much they’re being affected. A girl interviewed in the boyd and Marwick article said, “It’s pretty much expected you’re on Facebook… there’s [isn't] any reason not to be.” Since it’s become so naturalized, they might not realize the extent to which they’re using sites such as Facebook to communicate a contrived personality that they want others to receive.