Social Networks and How to Use Them

I found on Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global;0) that the top social networks ranked in the following order as of today: Facebook at #2, YouTube at #3, Blogger.com at #8, Twitter at #9, WordPress.com at #19, LinkedIn at #22, MySpace at #35, Flickr at #37, and Second Life at #3,082.

Facebook is a social media tool for anyone over the age of 13 to connect with other people they know as well as to make new online friends. Facebook users can also "Like" products, people, businesses, activities, and other interests. The like option helps Facebook determine which ads would be good for a certain group of people to see. For example, if a Facebook user liked wedding planning and weddings, Facebook might show that person an ad for bridal gowns or a travel agent or honeymoons. Because Facebook is responsible for placing the ads, the businesses who choose to promote themselves through ads on Facebook do not have direct interaction with the users of Facebook, so user information is never sold. The like button is also a way for the user to claim that they like something, whether it is the post of a friend, a photo, or a page of a business, product, activity or interest. This helps the other users on Facebook (based on your privacy settings) get to know you a little bit better by seeing what you enjoy and what interests you. I think the target audience of Facebook includes users 18-34, but I know a lot of people over the age of 50 are starting to use it as well as there have been many jokes about "the old people taking over."

Twitter is a social media tool that allows the user to pass information around the web faster and easier without the added applications of Facebook and MySpace. Unless you have a private account only viewable to friends, your tweets (posts) will be made accessible to the entire world as you post. As Twitter says, "You are what you Tweet!" As with Facebook, Twitter's services are available for anyone over the age of 13. Recently new to Twitter is the ability to add a location to your tweets as you post them. Twitter allows you to follow any person, business, or group and see all of their posts. In return, based on your privacy settings, anyone can follow yours as well. As I am a graphic designer, I'm following a lot of graphic designers and design firms. They tend to share a lot of helpful links, including free fonts, free images, helpful tips, tutorials, and marketing strategies. Twitter's audience is a bit more diverse than Facebook's. I believe the target audience to be professionals, approximately ages 25-44. However, more mature businesspeople are starting to use it for their marketing strategies as well. The linked article "Twitter Has a Business Model: 'Promoted Tweets'" suggests that Twitter is gathering revenue from companies like Starbucks who tweet special offers using Twitter. Companies would pay based on resonance, or how much the advertising tweet is retweeted (passed around). Professional accounts are also coming into existence and will allow one company to post from multiple employees.

MySpace is a social media tool most similar to Facebook. It existed prior to Facebook and so many of the 25-35 year olds today might have started out on MySpace. I briefly had a MySpace account, but I already had Facebook at the time, and I quickly saw the advantages of Facebook over MySpace. Over the years, MySpace has been becoming a less reliable source of conveying who a person is online. I'm not saying Facebook is perfect and has found a way around all the issues, but I think MySpace is generally seen as the less powerful of the two. Even the Alexa ratings will support that theory. As I see it, MySpace allows everything a user posts to either be available to everyone or only friends and a MySpace user does not have to tell the truth about who they are. Facebook allows you to share even one status with everyone, no one, some friends, all friends, or block it from certain friends but not all friends. Facebook offers many more privacy options and that's why I think it is the more trustworthy of the two. There have been problems with fake names and accounts or spam accounts on Facebook, but the company has taken the initiative to try to weed them out, unlike MySpace which seems much more like a free-for-all. With all the customization options MySpace offers in a profile, any given profile can end up looking quite trashy (from a web page point of view). This is where Facebook's sleek and clean design helps it project a more reliable image. MySpace's audience is most likely kids that are too young for Facebook or people that already had MySpace accounts when Facebook became popular.

I'd never heard about Second Life until I was researching for this post. Going to the website didn't actually tell me that much about it except that as a user, you could create avatars and interact. There are also paid accounts where you can do more things like sell items. Most of what I learned about Second Life, I found in a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life. I would assume the audience for Second Life would be the more entrepreneurial type or the teenager interested in the latest avatar technology. Alexa.com reflects that the highest audience is most likely 18-24 year olds.

Businesses use social networks in a variety of ways including incorporating social media in their marketing campaigns. Social media for marketing is very popular because it is free (for the most part) and it gets any business a lot of exposure because of the number of people using the internet. This number has increased with the increase in smart phones as well because now you can be on the internet anywhere. As a graphic designer, I already have a portfolio hosted on a website (though I am in the process of making my own website to host it) and I have this blog. I don't use many tactics to market my portfolio and blog, but social media is one I use. Interconnecting your social media is bound to have the greatest effect on your advertising reach. That is to say, I hooked up my blog to my Twitter to my Facebook. The result is that any time I make a new blog post, it sends a short summary to my Twitter and posts it automatically and the Twitter post is sent directly to my Facebook account where it posts my Twitter post advertising my original blog post. My Flickr and YouTube accounts work the same way. This makes it a lot easier to maximize the potential of social media because you're getting the same word out three different ways and it's automatic instead of you having to create three unique posts. Every time a post on a social media is made, it is accessible to the world and featured on search engines as long as the content is not marked as private. Personally, I keep my Facebook account private as it is used for my personal ventures. I would never add a client on my personal Facebook page, but I keep my other accounts professional enough for it not to be an issue. I would not be inclined to use MySpace for marketing my website or blog because I see it as being the most unprofessional of the social media tools. I probably wouldn't use Second Life either. I would use all my existing social media: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Buzz / Google Reader. They are all connected, so I could very easily make many posts advertising my website and blog and the new content on each. It is important to make the most of each post and make it memorable or appealing enough for someone to want to click on it from just a short blurb.

Internet Sales Tax Debate

As a consumer, I am inclined to hold the position of not wanting sales tax on online purchases. I buy products from Amazon because I think they are a good deal, though I'm not fond of the added shipping charges. When I buy an item from Amazon (I usually buy books online), I weigh the price of the item plus the shipping against the price with tax in a real store or online store such as Borders to decide where I should purchase the item.

However, from a government perspective, and the perspective I will support in this discussion, I believe every online company should charge a sales tax. At first I thought that filtering the sales tax to each of the states would be confusing and maybe even add an element of confusion to the easy task of transferring information online. I also thought that paying a tax based on the location of the store employees would be insanely complex too, especially in terms of stores that have bases in multiple places, possibly including foreign countries. However, our book for this class said that an online banking transaction costs $0.04 versus more than $1 for a transaction at a branch, which was greater than a 25x factor of improvement (page 11). Additionally, screening for potential credit card fraud is more complex than evaluating sales tax rules, according to the article "Internet Retailers Outgrow Their Sales Tax Exemption," published in 2009. In the early days when this issue was first debated in 1992, technology was not developed enough to even make it worth suggesting that huge online stores like Amazon should be including sales tax. Now that nearly 20 years have passed and technology has furthered itself so much, it really is time to bring up the discussion of online sales tax once more. Over the years, online stores that have physical locations, like Barnes and Noble, have been forced to add sales tax for online transactions. If some online businesses have to face this "disadvantage," then all online businesses should have to include the sales tax that you would find at any other bricks and mortar store in which you shopped. When Borders was in the process of finding out whether it needed to impose an online sales tax, it was said that the court rejected the argument that Borders and Borders Online were two separate companies, according to the article "Online Tax Debate Heats Up." That argument was because the courts had ruled that if an online store had a physical store, the online store must charge sales tax as well. However, most if not all online stores have some type of storage place or even home office or hub (even for the computer system it takes to run the site), so I think for the sake of fairness, that should count as a bricks and mortar store. The best way to solve this issue is to impose a sales tax for all online shopping, the same as you would in actual stores. It would be a change, and one we're not necessarily used to in online shopping, but after a certain amount of grumbling, everyone would accept it and move on. While a fixed rate / universal sales tax would be the quickest and easiest solution, there would be a humongous debate on what it should be because different states have different rates. Additionally, that would still put online stores like Amazon on a different playing field from online stores that already charge the sales tax because they have a physical location. I feel the best solution is developing and implementing software that could calculate the appropriate sales tax for online shopping over the next few years. While it would take longer to implement, it would be more fair in the long run, to consumers and to states (who are the ones who see this money and can hopefully use it instead of adding or raising other taxes to increase revenue).