The Blame Game

Pointing fingers is something we tend to do a lot more often these days. With the economy taking such a nasty downturn the past two years, the community would love nothing more than to point the finger at somebody, make someone responsible, have someone fess up and explain why we are going through the roughest of times lately. Healthcare, housing, jobs and automobile industry, have been the topics of discussion all over the United States. Wall Street has been labelled as the big green monster eating away at our hard earned money and a lot of us are just not trusting our government and where our money is going.

The automobile industry has really had a difficult time because they have been a part of that collapse of Wall Street, when major auto company owners were exposed for living the good life while their employees and companies were tragically failing. Consumer confidence was at an all time low and more than the Internet is to blame, I think that is the main issue at hand. Families where the primary provider has lost their job, cannot afford to make expensive car payments as they are trying to keep their homes, therefore, nobody is going out buying buying buying and instead are trying to save save save, which is a culture unknown to our generation. Another reason is also, a very significant, new wave of "green" consumers. From celebrities to common folk, everyone seems to have been bitten by the bug, consumers, especially younger generation that are easily influenced, are looking for more cost effective, environmentally friendly vehicles that fit with their new lifestyles and when automakers could not meet these demands, sales ended up taking a slump.

Therefore I think the attitude of saving, being environmentally conscious, and having to make the tough choice between shelter and transportation have all lead to the consumer lack of trust in auto companies have all lead to the demise of the automobile industry. And did I mention the sky high gas prices?????

Till then......toodles!

8-12 Weeks

The rise of the digital age affects every component of our lives. It is only expected that our governments would eventually have to follow suite and join in on the party. Graduates of today are more “technologically aware” than our parents generation. In order for the government to keep up and change with the times, they have had to change the way they communicate with their people, they’ve also had to  convert a lot of their services to online format in order to still be relevant to their citizens, some more than others.

On the social aspect of things, countries like North Korea, have strict governance over internet content within their borders. They monitor almost everything its’ citizens view on the internet, content is filtered and they pretty much have a “big brother” system in place. Anything that is deemed harmful to the country’s reputation or president will not be accessible to view. Because the internet is so flooded with all types of views and opinions, it must be a very very difficult process to monitor and filter all this content and as a citizen of that country, your views are therefore very biased.

In the United States, we have seen a lot of content that were previously deemed as “sensitive information” digitalized. From making appointments at the local DMV for your ID to filing your taxes, to applying for a passport or immigration status, a lot of these processes can now be done from the comfort of your living room sitting in front of a screen. The waiting lines at government agencies and endless paperwork to fill out has drastically decreased because of this conversion. The problem I have is the time it takes for information to be processed once you enter it into the system. From the time you enter your private information in a “safe” portal to the time you receive feedback, the waiting period is extremely long usually 8-12 weeks for response. The very limited or lack thereof face-face connection has become very limited and vague. When you call these agencies for an update on your application, you usually get a generic response of “your application is still being processed”. This of course makes sense due to the vast amount of data that has to be processed, the manpower to do all this almost nonexistent as the government are not the biggest hirers in the economy.  Yet they still encourage you to apply online as it is “faster” and “more convenient”...for whom?  All the while the time passes by, your information is passed off  from department to department, computer screen to computer screen, system to system, there has to be some loss of privacy and sensitivity to your personal  information and by the time it reaches the actual hands of a person, all you are is a case number.

I am optimistic that in the future, it is evitable that more and more processes will be converted online, and frankly that is fine with me, as I am part of the computer generation. My only issue is how they intend to improve on the lag time of information processing and response to citizens because when most of us are contacting the government for something, it is not an issue we can wait 8-12 weeks for.

Till then….toodles!

Privacy Schmivacy

Internet advertising has taken the lead in the marketing industry as far as companies reaching their consumers. The traditional way of advertising, contextual advertising, which consists of an advertising system that scans through web pages the consumer is viewing, taking keywords from that website and placing ads, or pop up ads on that page to get the users attention to a particular product. This form of advertising has come with its form of problems and controversies. The techniques of third-party hypelinking software that downloads itself on consumer computers and interacts with the browsers catching keywords typed in and linking them to webpage advertisement, or as we better know it, internet spam.  These tactics were considered invasive according to polling done, highly objectionable by majority of the internet surfing population. Sales numbers based on this type of advertising were not impressive either as you would imagine, privacy invasion was met with great resistance by users.

According to SearchEngineWatch.com behavioral targeting or behavioral advertising:

“refers to advertising that is targeted to a specific individual based on that user's previous surfing behavior. This is quite different from the more common targeting method of displaying ads matched to the specific content of an individual page or to all users in general”

Studies are shown that advertising through behavioral patterns of users returns a higher conversion to sales rate that the conventional contextual advertisement. With the new implementation of the “Advertising Option Icon,” consumers are given more control and understanding of what information they would like shared and what they can keep private. Companies can put this icon on their website and consumers are prompted to read the rules and regulations and have the option to opt out of future ads targeted at them.

The question is, will anyone actually take the time to read through all the documentation presented? I know for myself, just as most of my peers, companies have been very successful at making the “fine print” irrelevant. Television ads, internet rules and agreement of websites we visit, products we download and purchase, it all seems like a a bunch of irrelevant stuff. We give reputable companies the benefit of the doubt that visiting their website and purchasing their product means that they have our best interest at heart and that is not the case. Social media sites have come under scrutiny as well for how they share user information, and some such as Facebook have taken steps to allow user more privacy control over their content. But does it work?  On a regular day, while I browse through the internet, I am looking for a specific thing, and once I find it I am engaged in whatever it is, I don’t think to look for advertising opt out buttons, or cookie control buttons, and unless prompted by my PC to block pop up ads, I just ignore them. So will this new measure really have any effect on my day to day surfing life? Will I be more aware of what behavioral patterns I am sharing with companies, I’m very much inclined to say no it won’t.

Till then...toodles.

Contextual Advertising , Behavior Advertising, Advertising Option Icon 

*******"e" and "i"*********

Hey there bloggers and blogettes,

I’m sure your week has been as conducive as ever, mine sure has. I managed to read 3 whole chapters from this new e-book I just got on my iPad, then went on to do homework in my online classroom, designed a website via web conference with my brother, and of course, its first Sunday, had to go get my praise on and couldn’t seem to find my Bible but luckily, there’s an app for that!!

Notice everything I did today was without the requirement of paper. Yes my friends, we are now moving faster than ever, into the digital paperless world (queue scary music!) My generation has taken technology and turned it into things that our forefathers would have never dreamed of, the phrase “If you can think it, there’s an app for it” seems to ring true more and more every second. If it doesn’t have an “e” or an “I” in front of it then it isn’t necessarily “hip”. 

 

Growing up, all the images I saw on television, was the pretty mommy sitting in the cute little kids’ room reading his or her favorite bed time story while daddy is downstairs sitting in his favorite recliner reading the latest happenings in the world.  Somehow, that “tradition” has sort of faded away and now. Books are so much more interactive, they talk to you, the characters can move, thanks to technology, children are supposed to be more engaged in learning through this way. But does it take away from people’s creativity, I liked hearing my mom try to make car noises or animal noises to emphasize a passage from the book, I personally felt more engaged in the story than maybe if I had just the book doing all the work.

Some ways digital media has taken over in my life are:

Something about me just doesn’t want to let go of the need to have a cassette player in my car. Not because I can still find an ancient cassette in this day and age, but because I want be able to use it to connect my iPod to the radio!! After purchasing my iPad, it has made it increasingly difficult for me to look to anything paper based as a source of reference, whether it’s the news, weather, research for class or even leisure games, I can find anything I want whenever I want and I don’t have to move an inch!Growing up in Kenya, East Africa, one of our biggest pleasures was being able to go to video stores and renting the “latest” movies on VHS, but with the rise of Netflix and all kinds of ways to download movies to your PC or handheld device, there was no longer a need to make that trip to the friendly video store clerk and rent out a movie, I guess that was our equivalent to Blockbuster in the USA, and even they have declared bankruptcy so imagine what’s happened to that local video store.

The goods and the bads of the digital technology era will forever be debated, and there are valid arguments on both side. Digital media, internet media, eliminates the use of paper, which means we’re cutting less trees and we are so concerned with the global warming crisis that I’m sure this is a GOOD thing, but the emotional attachments people have to reading a book, or writing a paper by hand or listening to a cassette, or watching an old movie with all the imperfections in it are traits that people are not ready to let go of yet, or sitting in the living room reading the paper and ripping out the sports section to give to your significant other.  Digital media gives us the freedom to do more with less energy, but does it take away a little bit of our ability to be “human”. Meeting and getting to know someone in person, going to the coffee shop with a good book on a rainy Saturday afternoon cozied up, parent’s taking the time and effort to engage with their children during the few hours they spend with each other in the busy day, not to mention being able to give credit where credit is due and actually paying artists for THEIR music that we’re listening to.

Whichever way we look at it, one thing’s for certain, it ain’t stopping. So we all need to just buckle our seat belt and enjoy the ride into the world of the impossible becoming possible. So before I get into bed tonight, I’ll check my emails on my Blackberry, read the news and especially sports highlights on my iPad, read my scripture for the night, and put my iPod on to rock me to sleep, I’ll dream about all the endless possibilities the new era will bring to my generation and I must say, it is exciting (but that’s just the techy in me talking!)

Toodles!!! 


Journalism and the Digital Age   , The Demise of Non-Internet Media

***Power to the People***

If I were a company in the era of social media domination I would be afraid to exist. In the past decade or so, social media has risen to heights one could only imagine. With the explosion of blogs into the online community, the web was not just a place to seek information about strange topics you didn’t know about, or get instructions on how to assemble a computer; it became a vessel for all those who felt like they needed their voices heard no matter what the voice was saying.

Political campaigns, celebrity gossip, controversial human rights topics were all over the internet, and due to the anonymity of the online world, anyone could say anything and be protected from persecution. Blogging created a new lifestyle for people, shortly after grew social media sites such as Myspace, Facebook and now the infamous Twitter.

All of a sudden, all the little things that you normally wouldn’t hear about on your local news channel were coming to light and it was coming fast. If a company mistreated an employee, if a store had a disgruntled customer, if a restaurant had bad hygiene, consumers were not afraid to let the world know about it. With up to the second live updates and feeds like Facebook and Twitter, large corporations who have been getting away with a lot of things we may never know about, are all of a sudden getting put under the hot seat.  People have begun to take “justice” into their own hands, after all, what is worse than having your company logo tagged to an embarrassing story on Facebook and Twitter and there is nothing you can do about it?

Here’s the thing, the average Joe or in my case the average Mary, will be inclined to believe what my friend @johnnyhotcakes has to say on Twitter about a certain store or a certain product before I believe what the company has to say to me and his experience may be the make or break as to whether I return to that store again, buy that product again, or spread the news at how horrible they both are. People are easy to base their judgments on what others have encountered as they feel they can relate to them rather than what someone in a suit has to"legally" say to me. Some of this is a good thing, I think a lot of companies have to be held accountable for things that 20 years ago they could have either gotten away with, or paid some money under the table and the issue never existed, the exposure of fraud, lies, scandal, is so much more detrimental when done on the internet through social media than being fought in court (if it ever reaches court) with fancy lawyers and huge price tags.

The power that people have now, no matter what their motives are, is something that companies have to start taking into consideration, when they send out that company email or when they respond to a consumer who has issued a complaint, because they may not be held liable in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion, where their reputation and consumer review weighs heavily, they will be tarnished forever.

Till next time bloggers and bloggettes….toodles!

Twitter,  Social Media-Power to the People