Deep fried cheese

The exams are coming! Routine questions are of course: What can we expect, what do we have to learn and more importantly what not. We have a filosophy exam, a language exam and... tumtumtumtum.... a social media exam. I wonder what that will be about. Actually, I hope it is about Twitter with questions like: What is your funniest tweet ever? And: Who do you find the most irritating person on twitter? Stuff like that.

Twitter is amazing! I can read about Balkenende's breakfast, and when Wilders is walking his hair and when Rutten is sitting on his yacht. I will probably be voting on the person with the best tweets. But appartantly you have to have a supported argumentation for your vote. Luckily, they came up with changes in the softdrugsdepartement. Something I happen to have an opinion on! Now I am allowed to vote, hurray!

Maybe I should buy some new shoes. Voting shoes. In the color of my party.. Unfortunately orange and blue aren't my colors. What are your colors? (If I like them I can buy shoes in that color.)

Evil Overlord

I discovered that this study about social media has my interest, but that our University, the one in Tilburg, has a thing with language. See, there is a problem: I don't have a thing with language. So other options need to be looked for.

Luckily, I found this website: eviloverlord.com. This website shows that if there is nothing that I want to do, I can always become the Evil Overlord. It suits me well, don't you think? We learn all about social media, how to manipulate people with it and stuff like that. Evil Overlord stuff. Maybe they can call our study Howtobecomeeviloverlord-science.

Marketing

Have you ever been a target for marketing on twitter or hyves or facebook?
Luckily, I am not (yet). I heard a story from my English teacher that he Tweeted something about kitchens and cooking or something like that. He got an immediate response from some kitchen-selling company that wanted to know if he was interested in the latest updates in the kitchen-world.

Obviously, anyone would want to be updated about the kitchen-world. It' s what you live for.

But that' s not the point. The point is, that these companies apparantly have certain software that locates the use of the word kitchen on Twitter, people that watch the software closely and everytime there is a hit FLY to the page were they can react! So WE, the innocent people, can be updated about KITCHENS.

In short:
1. People are actually payed to annoy us.
2. Kitchens will soon rule the world.
3. Twitter has become a advertisement that is adapted to YOUR personal interests.

Is anyone worried?

Slamming doors

Is there a twitter page on people who slam the door too hard? The guy who lives next to me does that. I hear him come in, putting every foot down as if it is a 800 ton weight. So the house is already shaking. And then he walks into his room and SLAMS the door! The flowers fall of my table and I have to re-arrange my cd-collection.

And now it isn't that much of a problem if you come in every now and then. But no, the world does not agree. He has to come in and go out every half an hour and make it some kind of contest which time of the day he can slam the door the loudest.

Right, social media. Imagine him reading this! It is not really possible because he doesn't know I have a blog, but imagine he does know. Would he slam the door less loudly? Too bad I don't have the guts to tell him to read my blog and then watch the effect. (But when you're reading this: Dude, why are you calling so often =O Just go there! It's way cheaper!)

It's the same thing we do with our blogs, change the layout and see what it does. We had a class today in which we were told that little changes can generate unexpected results. Who knows, maybe I will get four readers instead of three =D

iPads and letters

What is it? Something like an electronic agenda right? It might as well be that in a year, the iPad is the best selling 'pad' until now. The reason I thought of the iPad as a social media item is (besides the fact that it continuously in the news) that there was a comic about it in the newspaper, where the character says that people should be careful: the iPad is multifunctional, so people might try to put it in the senseo-machine.

Now I am actually thinking about doing that.

But something else, until now, i've only been talking about digital social media. But there has to be something non-digital that is a form of communication... Think hard... Newspapers! Magazines! The big difference is that there isn't very much interaction within these social media. However, there is one form of social media I can think of that is non-digital and interactive.

LETTERS! In fact, people write to little to eachother. And with too little I mean NEVER. Why don't they do that? It is so much fun to receive a handwritten letter from friends, or your partner or family. In fact, I'm going to write my best friends a letter very soon! But not too soon, because when they read this they will expect it.

The moral of this story: write your best friend a letter to tell them how much you appreciate him or her. It will make you feel so good!

(Or you can just chop wood...)

Cell Phones

There are two types of people.
1. People who want a phone to call other people.
2. People who want not JUST a phone, but the most recent version of a type they bought two weeks ago.

Are you feeling adressed by the second type? A generalization of your type would be 'type two are people that want the newest gadgets and don't know what to do with them'.

I'm sure that is not applicable to you.

It is funny though, how the development of gadgets rides right past the time we need to create these new skills we need to use the gadgets. BUT! They sure look cool! The best thing about these gadgets is you showing them to others and say: "Yes, I know, you don't really need it... but look at this. I can do this, this and that. In theory. You can't do that? Aw, too bad..."

I love it.

Bill Peterson, a Florida State football coach:
"You guys line up alphabetically by height." And "You guys pair in groups of three, then line up in a circle."

Just talking

SARCASM WARNING!

People warn you about the internet. The government does, your teachers, parents maybe. The basic content of that warning is something like: 'don't put things on the internet'.

Great job people. Whoever thought of that must be a genius. Because it is obvious that it help's. Internet is after all not at all fun or profitable. And there is absolutely no random 'stuff' on the world wide web.

Just type in 'random stuff' on Google. Or, if you live in the past/ are a fossile/ are an absolute computer noob, another searchengine.

I found a website of which the slogan "This is the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else on the site. If it did, it'd be there, but it doesn't, so it's here" is.
See if you can find the site ;)

If you're ever bored... which you probably are, just look this stuff up. It's really good. Unless of course you don't have a sense of humour.

Mobile phone background

Today in class we talked about software and hardware. During class, there were a few minutes I was not totally concentrated. Only a few minutes. Honestly. Maybe 10. 15. Anyway, I found myself another activity: taking pictures with my phone. I know, very common, everybody does it.

I personally like to take pictures of things from a very short distance. So you can hardly see what it is. Today, I took pictures of water, my agenda, written tekst, pens and stuff like that. And I wrote a message for my sister (Stay off my phone) and made it my background:D

These days you can do so much with your phone, but there is an application I haven't found on my phone (yet). My idea was to choose an order of appearance of backgrounds on your mobile phone. The fun you can have with that!
First background says: Stay off my phone! Then you put the phone away and next time you open it, it says: Yes, I mean you!
And the next one: Seriously, back off!
Next one: Ok, NOW I'm getting angry.

And so on. It's actually the same thing as all those annoying commercials of Jamba. You know: "Now! A fart on your mobile! Shock your friends, text 0909 etc." It's fun to make something like that up, but that people actually buy it scares me a little.

Annoyance!

Talking about social media!

Twitter is so annoying! I clicked 'find people'. Did I find people? Yes, I did, but unfortunately it was 10 % of the Dutch population! How am I supposed to find someone without knowing what their exact twittername is?

I told my computer to do what I want, but it doesn't listen:(

This is not only a problem with Twitter. Has anyone of you found out how to find people's blogs? Without getting the exact adress from Twitter? It is a miracle if you have. Or... I'm just stupid. That's a possibility too. But sometimes computers make me so angry! There are too many things you can and should do on the internet/computer.

Almost everyone has a hyves nowadays. Everybody knows how it works, how to add friends and how to find people (allthough that is not easy either), and Twitter works somewhat the same. But finding blogs.. whole different thing.

So if you have an interesting blog, please post it by comments, I will definitely read it!

Oh, quote of the day: Actually I don't remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs. By the Lizard King. (AKA Jim Morrison)

Twitter

Two weeks ago they told us to get a Twitter account. We should know how it works, so we can better estimate the value of it. My first reaction was: HELL NO! It's stupid and unneccesary, I am NOT, I repeat NOT going to get a Twitter account.

So I got myself a Twitter account.
And it is actually fun(A) The trick is that all the messages you get are oneliners. So there is no option but to keep it short and to the point. I like that. People create way to much unneccesary text. I'm not saying Twitter is always neccessary or even coherent for that matter. It is just easy to read, easy to use and fun. You'll be amazed what people can say in one sentence.

I love to post stupid facts. You know, the ones that don't make sense at all (like American Law). Or quotes! From movies or series... The one everyone knows;

Why.. so.. serious?

Hello everybody,

Welcome to my blog about Media Use In Organisations. On this blog I'll be keeping track of my experiences and opinions about Social Media.

People read about things they know they like. Therefore, when they see a name or sentence that has a concept in it that they know, they are (in my opinion) more likely to read it. For companies, it is important that they know how to use social media in order to promote their product.

Does anybody know the site failblog.org? It is a social media system where people post crazy, funny and sometimes incredible weird stuff. Pictures, products, and videos are the main things that people post. On the right side of the website is a advertisement-banner, where all kinds of companies advertise. I once saw an advertisement about retro clothing there, so I visited the site and saw some amazing stuff. It turned out to be a very expensive 'click' for me.

What I mean to say is that companies should be aware of the power of Hyves, Facebook, Failblog in advertising. This generation is all about the internet and all the fun things you can do with it, so my advise to all companies is to respond to that and give the people what they want!