Say It Ain’t So!

Good Morning!

Say it ain’t so!

Netflix is increasing their prices! Instead of paying $10 a month, you have to pay $16 a month now to get their DVD and streaming video plan. Now $6 doesn’t seem like a lot, but when it adds up over the year, that’s $72 extra a year! Now I am a huge fan of Netflix, but this does seem like an awfully high jump. But is there really anywhere else that we can go to get a similar deal with a lower price? Here is some more information about the price jump:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Why-Netflix-Raised-Its-nytimes-3842223211.html?x=0

With all of the new technology and services that are offered, you would think that there would be some other options for us. After announcing the price hike, there was a huge backlash on all of the social media sites with outrage. While checking out some of these sites, I could see people saying negative things about the company, negative things about the price, and expressing their dislike for the whole story. This is how the whole thing went.

So what does this really do for the brand? Does it ruin their reputation with their customers? Does it lose business by people canceling their service? Or do you think that people will just come back to the service since there is nothing else out there quite like it? There are many questions that are left to be answered and we might not know for a while. It seems like the brand will lose a lot of the equity that they have built up over the years.

Time will tell what happens with Netflix!!

Ains

Check-in Here, Check in There. . .

Afternoon all!

 

What a week it has been for me. Today I just got back from a 10-day trip to Florida that we went on a cruise for 7 days down in the Caribbean. I had a really great time with my family but the one thing that I was definitely missing was my social media sites. I am always feeling the need to connect to my family and friends and see what they are doing. Having a week away from that, I think I had some withdraws! I knew it was going to cost me a fortune to try to connect with people but I still really wanted to. Here are some tips for traveling and social media:

travel-resource-roundup

When I did get some service while I was in St Thomas, I wanted to make sure I could check in some places and let people know where I was. When did it really get to the point where I felt the need to tell everyone where I am at and what I am doing?  I don’t mind doing it and I actually love it, but when did it get to this point? I don’t think that my mom or in laws really understood why I had to get on Facebook and check in, but there is a bit of a generation barrier there. They have Facebook too, but they do not use it in the same way that my husband and I do.

It’s crazy but amazing how Facebook has evolved over the past 7 years since I had first signed up. And its amazing to see all of these new social media sites that have so much to offer their users. Sometimes I almost feel obligated to get every single social media outlet that there is to see which ones I prefer over others. There is a lot of obligation to check into every spot that I am at and on so many different social media outlets. It gets overwhelming and sometimes confusing at times to try to do it all!

This cartoon is a perfect picture of how it can be sometimes on a trip trying to keep up with all the social media sites!

Me on my vacation!

 

Do you think someday that no matter where we are, even in the middle of the ocean, it will be free to contact anyone from anywhere?

See ya later!

Ains

Fourth of July Weekend or Social Media Weekend?

Well not really weekend but Social Media day was on June 30th. I was unaware of this holiday but I really should have considering what I like to do on a daily basis and what my field of work is. Who would of thought just a few years ago that there would be a social media day for us to celebrate once a year. When you think about it, how important is social media in our daily lives. We check our Facebook when we wake up. We check in on Four Square when we go to a restaurant. We play Farmville in our free time. You can read more about it on the Mashable website.

http://mashable.com/2011/07/02/worldwide-social-media-day/

It’s crazy to think that just a decade ago, most of these sites did not even exist. Now we are having a day just to celebrate these great social networking programs. Everything from Myspace to Facebook to YouTube, to Friendster, these websites have really changed the world in terms of connecting with not only friends and family but with companies and businesses. It has changed the way that brands do their marketing and even how people market themselves.

Not only did websites have this Social Media day but other news outlets had their say on what the day was and how it was being celebrated. There is a huge debate on whether having all of these social media outlets has been a good thing in our lives or being a bad thing in our lives. Everyone has their own opinions but I do believe they have really improved the overall quality of our lives. Being able to connect with others and having a way to connect with brands that we like has changed our world. I am not sure what I would do without social media now! Here is a video from Fox news discussing the presence of social media in our daily lives and whether it is a good or bad thing.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1031470320001/celebrating-social-media-day/

Good night all!

Ains

Link It Up!

Evening everyone!

LinkedIn has become so big these past few years and I think that it is a wonderful tool! As I look to finish my Master’s in December, I will be entering the job market again with a new outlook on my career. Fresh out of undergrad I was very unsure on what I wanted to do for my career. With the education that I have received in the IMC program at WVU, I feel like I am prepared to go back out there with confidence and market myself to different companies!

One of the great sites that I have been working with to build my professional and social network is the LinkedIn website. I love that people can connect with their coworkers and those they have been in school with to help see other career opportunities that they might be interested in. Also, they can have people write recommendations on them whether they are from college, work, or personal. This was a great article on how you can get jobs through Linked In:

http://mashable.com/2011/06/25/linkedin-jobs/

Through this website, I have connected with a lot of sorority sisters that are currently living in the area that I will be moving to in January. I know that it is great to stay connected to them and look at the companies that they work for in order to do my own research on where I want to be. I have had a few people offer to write me recommendations on my Linked In page, which will be a great resource while I am on the job hunt! I love this YouTube video on the value of the website and how it can help you!

I was surprised however to find that the site was not as popular as I thought. When compared to other networking sites, it is lacking a lot of the support that they other ones do have. I think the more people who join this site, the better it will be for the professional networking world. This graph shows the difference between the sites and which are more popular than others.

Help the word get out there of how great LinkedIn can be and check me out on there!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ainsleybrook

Good night to all!

Ains

 

 

Tweet Tweet, Twitter Trendistas!

Evening all!

Just surfing the web and finding some new things that I would like to start reading. I stumbled upon a website called “Mashable” that has some really interesting articles to read. The one article that really caught my attention was the one titled “Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week” that was written by Matt Silverman. Twitter trends have really taken off and you can tell so much about what is going on in the world just but looking at the Twitter trends. If someone was in a cave for 6 months and just came back to the world they could look at Twitter trends and pretty much know what everyone is talking about. This is a pretty cool thing! This is the chart from this week:

http://mashable.com/2011/06/18/twitter-top-trends-of-the-week/

Rank	Topic	Intensity	Description
#1	Father’s Day	2	Father’s Day trended well ahead of Sunday due to hashtags like #BestDad, #ThatsMyDad and #DaddySays.
#2	MySpace	1	This week, many Twitter users remembered the time, long, long ago, when they had a MySpace account.
#3	Lil Wayne	1	“Dear Anne (Stan Part 2)” is a leaked Lil Wayne song, the sequel to Eminem’s “Stan.” It won’t be on Lil Wayne’s 9th studio album, Tha Carter IV, due out in August.
#4	NHL Stanley Cup/Vancouver Riots	1	The Boston Bruins won the NHL Stanley Cup in Game 7 on June 15. But hockey climbed into our weekly Top 10 because some unhappy Vancouver Canucks fans rioted and looted in the downtown area. In response, Twitter users gave Canuck fans some advice (“Dear Vancouver”) after their loss.
#5	NBA Finals	1	The Dallas Mavericks beat the Miami Heat to win the 2011 NBA Finals in Game 6 on June 12. Dallas player Dirk Nowitzki was named MVP. Tweeters responded with a mix of admiration for Maverick players and even more digs on the Miami Heat.
#6	Tupac Shakur	1	June 16, 2011 marked the 40th anniversary of rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur’s birth. 2Pac was killed on September 13, 1996 but his albums have sold over 75 million copies.
#7	Soccer/Football	1	Football players, managers and owners trending this week include Michael Ballack, Kevin Nolan, Roberto Martinez, Mike Ashley, Kyle Walker, Lionel Marlos and Alex McLeish.
#8	Justin Bieber	1	Justin Bieber trended this week just because his fans wanted to thank him for, well, just being him (#ThanksJustin).
#9	Venezuelan Politics	1	Although “Maldito Chavez” (Damn Chavez) has trended several times over the past year, this week it (and mentions of officials Alí Rodríguez Araque, Cilia Flores, Iris Valera and Elias Jaua) was high enough to push Venezuelans’ discussion of national politics in into our Top 10.
#10	Selena Gomez	1	Fans are sending good wishes to Selena Gomez who had a small health scare late last week.

This fascinates me how people bring back topics such as Tupac Shakur and that June 16^th was his birthday so he made it into the top Twitter trends. A person who was not even around to see the whole Twitter revolution made it onto the list. After looking at this article, I went to see if there were more websites that helped to pin point the trends in Twitter topics. I found this site called “Trendistic” where you can type in your own key word and see what the trends for the week, month, or year is. I typed in BSB, one of my favorite groups, to see what the trends were like for them since they just went on tour.

Here is the chart of the trends for BSB:

bsb

Now just going to the Twitter website, I see that some of the trends are #howtopleaseahoodrat, Len Bias, #nextfriday, and ilovemydadeventhough.Not only do you get to read some pretty interesting things by clicking on the trends but you can’t think of some pretty creative things yourself. It gets the creative mind going and makes you think outside the box! Lets see what I can think of for one of them. . .

AinsleyStefan: #nextfriday I will be at my husbands school of medicine summer party with his colleagues and professors!

I think these trends have a really strong future in the field of social media and a lot of marketers can aim to get their brand to be one of the top tends in the world. It’s a great way to see who is talking about your brand and what you can do to improve it.

I will leave you all with a funny cartoon of some birds that have their own opinions of Twitter!

Well that’s all folks. Have a great night!

Ains

Twitter: Potential Disaster for Celebs?

Evening all!

Recently I have been exploring the topic of Twitter and all that it has to offer its users. One of the aspects I like the most about the site is the accessibility that we have to people that we might not otherwise. For example, I get to read what all of my favorite celebrities are doing and see pictures and videos of their daily lives. It’s pretty much a revolution of how we connect with people outside our worlds and I think that is pretty cool.  Here is a website where you can find all different celebrities in many different fields that you can follow on Twitter:

http://www.celebritytweet.com/#axzz1P6foBlgc

It is amazing how celebrities have fit Twitter into their daily lives as a way to connect with their fans to get feedback or comments on their work or lives. Without their fans they don’t have much so it’s very important to keep them on their side and try to stay connected to them as much as possible. With Twitter, they can log on a few times a day or more and update what they are doing or write a few messages to some fans. It helps their fans connect with them on a more personal level to feel like they are in their lives. There even are charts that say which celebrities are mentioned more in one month.

There are various downsides to this whole celebrity Twitter revolution. With freedom of speech on this site, sometimes celebrities stick their foot in their mouth after saying something controversial. For example, when Pittsburgh Steeler Rashard Mendenhall said that when our military killed Osama Bin Laden that “we’ve only heard one side…” to the story. He seemed to be pretty upset that people were celebrating his death.  This was not only a huge problem for him as a public figure but for the Steelers organization. Their PR team went quickly to put out something that said that their opinions had nothing to do with his comments. In this video you can see how powerful those tweets were.

Happy and uncontroversial tweeting everyone!

Follow me @AinsleyStefan on Twitter!

Ains

 

 

Mobile Marketing Trust/Distrust

After spending a weekend listening to experts in the IMC field, I learned a ton of different techniques and trends that we are looking at in the coming years. It is important to keep up to date in all of these new ideas and see how experts are looking at how they will perform in the world today. The WVU Integrate conference this weekend that I attended was filled with powerful ideas, intelligent professionals and professors, and newbies like me who are just fascinated with all of the information there is out there.

One session that I attended I thought was different from the rest and very enticing to me was the Gaining Trust and Avoiding Distrust in a Mobile Marketing Relationship that was taught by Barry Dickinson. Professor Dickinson is the chief executive officer for a mid-sized, mobile computer professional services firm and is an expert when it comes to the mobile marketing field. Being that I have not taken a mobile marketing class in the past, it was interesting to hear someone speak on such an in depth level in this particular breakout session. This is the page that explained what we would be learning about in our session.

http://www.integrate.wvu.edu/breakouts/dickinson.html

When talking about mobile marketing, Professor Dickinson explained how everyone is excited about all the new forms of media and how it all works but pointed out to us the downside of all the information people are getting about us. It really made me think about how scary it possibly could be having all of the personal information that we all do out there in cyber space. In this video, it explains the problems that could come up later with the social media trends that are so popular now. It also talks about the trust and distrust that is out there in the social media world as these professional answers questions about the social media revolution.

All of the information that I leanred in this program helped me realize that social media isn’t always a positive thing but it can be really helpful if used correctly. It is important to keep the trust of your customers or else it can really hurt you in the long run. Two main points that were made were to communicate with permission, not without and to secure mobile transactions that are being made in mobile marketing.

He did leave us with a really funny cartoon that kind of sums up what cell phone users think of other cell phone users.

Made me chuckle cause some of it is very true!

See you all soon!

Ains

Flesh Trademark?

Good evening everyone!

So if you were like the millions of others that saw the Hangover II this past weekend, you would have seen the super cool face tattoo that Stu had after a long night out with his friends. With the super cool being a sarcastic; it still was a great part of the movie. But with everyone being sue happy these days, it seems like the tattoo was a knock off from Mike Tyson and the artist of this tattoo was not too please with the movie using his design. Full details of this story can be seen here:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/human-flesh-copyright/

I seem to have a very strong opinion about this topic for a few reasons. When I was getting married and was having Ace of Cakes do our wedding cakes, they couldn’t feature our cake on TV because of the WVU trademark that was on it due to copy write laws. Walking around Morgantown I see tons of people with WVU tattoos and trademarks, are they going to sue them too for having their trademark on their skin? I see Baltimore Ravens tattoos also in Baltimore city on fans

West Virginia TattooBaltimore Ravens Tattoo

 

Great, But Unrealistic, Expectations

Hello world.

As a women in the world today, there are so many images of beautiful women that I see on a daily basis. It is very difficult to go a day without seeing these images and having them thrown in your face. Its hard to say how much of an impact these images have on a women’s life but it usually can differ from woman to woman.

For me, it has been a battle to look like society’s standard of beautiful for many years. Always dieting, getting my hair done, eyebrows waxed, tanning, are among a few of the things that I was doing to try and be “beautiful” according to the world.

There was one video that really changed my outlook on this standard that has been set for many years. The video shows that a lot of the images that we are seeing are altered or changed in order to make the women look perfect. As sample of this video can be shown here:

Its really frustrating to see things like this because they are not real but most young girls do not know that. They are thinking that this is what they need to look like in order to be beautiful in society. I hope that young women watch videos like the one above to see how fake these images are so they don’t end up with eating disorders or other body dissatisfaction issues.

It is just frustrating how the world puts these unrealistic expectations on women and the same is not put on men. I just hope that people will realize how fake these pictures are and wont fall for all of these fake women.

I also hope that I can teach my daughter, if I have one, the importance of inner beauty and how to appreciate others for whats on the inside. I will leave you tonight with a quote that really made me think about these type of pictures.

“Everybody is unique. Compare not yourself with anybody else lest you spoil God’s curriculum.” — Baal Shem Tov

Good night,

Ains

The new disease. . . Twitaholic

My name is Ainsley, and I am a Twitaholic. No scratch that, a Facebook addict!

When I was a freshman in college, Facebook came into the world. My roommate and I signed up ASAP and before we knew it, we were posting our whole lives on this website that we barely knew anything about. Was it because it was new and the cool thing to do or was something more that this social networking site had powered over us? Whatever it was, we were addicted and soon got our friends on the site. This was in 2004 and it has basically been the #1 constant in my life since then. The first site I visit when I wake up and the last one I visit before my head hits that pillow. Facebook=owns my life.  If you are not sure if you are a Facebook addict, here is a little test you can take!

Are You a Facebook Addict?.

It sounds like it’s a pretty negative thing but realistically, it has helped me keep in touch with people who otherwise I don’t know if I still would be in contact. I get to see my family and friends lives without leaving the comfort of my own home. I see my friends kid’s pictures the minute they are born. I know when my friends get engaged without having to be there to see it. It’s an amazing way to keep in touch and get to be a part of moments that you might not have otherwise been a part of.

What I really don’t get is how people can be a Twitaholic. I can’t see many people caring about what I am doing every hour on the hour. I can’t see me caring about what other people are doing every hour on the hour. But maybe it just isn’t my thing. I am all about the Facebook world but just not getting the Twitter world. Maybe someone can help me understand what is so fascinating about it?!?

Explanations needed but here is a funny cartoon about it:

Here is a little PSA to watch for those social media addicts to watch.

Do you need help!?! 🙂

Well folks, thats all she wrote for the evening. Hope you enjoyed my insight and I hope to be in touch very soon.