Social Media Smackdown

I chose Instagram for my social media smackdown project because I believe that it provides the most benefit to businesses that are trying to market their products to new audiences. Instagram provides features specifically for the purpose of advertising products. A business can make a free business account giving them access to analytics, promotion of posts, ad creating, and displaying all business information. On the analytics side of things, Instagram provides the business with insights into their stories, posts, and followers allowing them to see who views what and what the demographics viewing it is. It does not stop there. Once a business decides to promote a post, Instagram provides real-time data to show the business how the prompted post or story is doing throughout the day, allowing them to decide if it is worth continuing to promote the post or not. Now that I mentioned promoting a post, let me explain what that is. One of the features that you have access to as a business account is for a fee to pay to have your post pushed as an advertisement on to other people's timelines. This allows for whatever you are promoting to reach more people and potentially boost sales and gain new followers. Additionally, Instagram provides a way for the business and customers to interact. This can be if a customer has questions and business can answer them right there or if customers are giving feedback, it allows the business to see and address what the customers are saying.

This would benefit me in my future career as a manager because one of the potential paths I could follow would be to oversee a marketing team. One of the tools that we could use would be Instagram because of the number of people who use it and the convenience and simplicity that it provides. With all of the features that Instagram provides, it would allow for any marketing team to gauge whether they should continue to push the promoted product and knowing if the post is doing well on Instagram as a business we could check our website and see if there is an increase in traffic and sales. If there are then that could be attributed to the advertising work that is being conducted on Instagram. The more people the promoted posts or ads reach the more potential sales and customers we would receive which would allow for the business to become more successful. As a manager, it would be up to me to make sure that these campaigns are successful in order to help the business grow.

The Connected Educator Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter 5 of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall's The Connecter Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age discusses the importance of using social bookmarking in order to filter information so that it is relevant to what you search for. There are many different sites to use in order to filter through all of the different sites online for your convenience. Additionally, there are many different tools in order to connect and collaborate with people in your personal learning network. some of the tools are bogs, microblogs, RSS readers, podcasts, wikis, and google docs. All in an effort to maintain one's reputation on a professional level to aid in networking and establishing a strong online presence. "The Twitter website is a good resource for connecting and collaborating with educators" (Nussbaum-Beach and Hall 82). Twitter is one of the most popularly used microblogs and it requires the least amount of time to invest. One of the most important aspects of Twitter is its use of hashtags to tag tweets with. It allows for the tweet to easily be found through search with people who have common interests.

The use of filtering through information and different tools that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall describe would benefit me in my future career as a manager because it would allow for new ways to network myself to different people while also learning new information from these people. As a manager communication is everything, so and easy way to communicate while building a strong online presence is crucial. Twitter would be an excellent app to use since it requires the least amount of time, is easy to sort through, and puts everything in chronological order regarding tweets from people that you follow. The easy line of communication allows me to interact with people all over the world and gain valuable knowledge from them. Additionally, another tool that would be good to use as a manager is google drive. Google drive allows for easy access to documents from any computer anywhere, it even allows for easy document sharing with people.  As a manager, this would allow me to easily disperse pertinent documents to the people that I oversee in order for fast and easy communication. 

"Using Tools to Support Connected Learning." The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, by Seryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, Solution Tree Press, 2012, pp. 73-89.

The Connected Educator Chapter 6 Summary

Chapter 6 of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall's The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age discusses the importance of building a connected learning community. These personal learning networks are composed of many people from around the world who bring there own information, expertise, and learning objects that are interests of yours. The best part about a personal learning network is that they are all about the individual. These networks come in handy for anyone in any field because it allows the user to find new information and ideas and bring apply them for use in their life and at work. Creating a personal learning network does not happen overnight it takes time, effort, and perseverance. Social media is a good place to grow this personal learning network and there are sites that help you vet potential people to follow in order to ensure that you are following the right people who will aid in the personal learning network. By having a large personal learning network it allows someone to reach out to get information about topics so they can apply the results to their life. For example, they used an example of a high school teacher who "...learned he would be teaching a section of algebra in 2010-2011, he turned to his personal learning network as he planned his lessons and assignments" (Nussbaum-Beach and Hall 95). This is one of the most useful benefits of the personal learning network because it allows for an easy way to reach out to people to gain aid for you to apply to your field of work.

This personal learning network that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall describe would benefit me in my future career as a manager because it would allow for easy communication with anyone in different departments within the company or someone who is stationed in a branch in a foreign country. It allows for the sharing of ideas to be done with ease and research that they have for a project that they could be working on could apply to a project we are working on. Sharing this kind of information allows us to apply those findings into our project or vis versa our research or project could help them. The personal learning network would not only benefit me because it would allow me to aid others by helping provide valuable information that they would need. For me, personal learning networks are beneficial just for the communication aspect because in this day and age the ability to easily communicate with others is crucial in the workplace in order to accomplish what needs to be done. This is especially true for managers since they need to effectively let their staff know what tasks need to be completed and when and if they need help they would have access to this personal learning network allowing them to receive aid if they need it.

"Building Your Connected Learning Community." The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, Solution Tree Press, 2012, pp. 91-108.