Facebook Analysis

I decided to compile all of the posts about my Facebook page into one post to make it easier to navigate through everything we needed to post for this blog.

Mountain Land Sprinklers
I created this page for my dad's sprinkler business that he runs in the Park City area. He has owned his own company for 30+ years and when I asked him if I could make a Facebook page for him he thought it was a great idea. As the semester winds down I want to see if it really was a great idea or not.

-Mission Statement-

Mountain Land Sprinklers specializes in trenchless sprinkler installation and repair. With our machinery we can remodel sprinkler systems without destroying existing lawns. We offer free bids on jobs before you commit to hiring our company.

-Personas-

-Dave, 48, is happily married with seven active children. He and his wife decided to move to St. George a year ago from northern Utah. They lead active lives and love to explore the red rock surrounding their home. Dave works in construction and finds his customers through social media sites.

-Karen is 70, and she and her husband have recently bought a retirement home in St. George. They love the weather that St. George offers during the winter months, but they cannot handle the heat during the summer. They have made connections with friends in their new community and keep up with their family through Facebook. They want to be able to go north during the summer and not have to worry about their lawn or home in the heat of the summer months.

-Daryl is 38, and owns a small construction company. When he finishes building new houses he likes to have the landscape finished as well. He is constantly trying to find people who will do a thorough job without making the new property look like a junkyard.

-Tactics-

I am planning to post only about once a week. I don't want to overwhelm people with my posts. I am hoping to find potential clients for our business by posting shots of our machinery and different yards and landscapes that we have done over the years.

Reflection

Deciding what to make my Facebook page on turned out to be the easiest part of this assignment. I haven't been actively posting to Facebook on my personal page for a long time, so starting out this assignment I kept forgetting that I needed to post. Overall I think it turned out better than I originally expected. 

-Likes-

I had 81 likes for the majority of the semester, and then last week and this week I got a few more likes. Most of my likes came as right as I created the page, and the majority were from my home town that know my dad and the family business personally. It was easy to get the initial likes because it was new and something that hadn't been up on their feeds for weeks already. I needed to keep something new up on the page constantly and I think I would have had more likes.

-Reach-

I wasn't about to pay to make an ad for my Facebook page without seeing if it was really going to work or if I was going to try to keep it up for longer than just this semester. Most of the spikes in the graph correspond with posts. The most successful post this semester was my first one when I was first advertising about my dad's company. I put a video link to his website that his website designer made up several years ago. Looking back if I had put more time into this I think I would have found it easier for myself to get people looking at my page if I had posted more often. I was just glad I didn't have any unlikes. I didn't have many comments or shares because most of my posts were informational and didn't require any feedback from people.

-Facebook Ad Mock-Up-

This is the ad I created on Facebook for free and then I took a screenshot of it and posted it to my page. I don't know how effective it was because when I made it I was looking at the demographics and I based the demographics on my personas. Looking at the people my page actually reached I realized that my choice in who I thought my page would reach was incorrect.

-Visits-

Again most of the visits correspond with posts. I don't think people were really going to my page unless I posted something. I needed to expand my personal page friends and I think I would have  more success and get more visits on my Mountain Land Sprinklers page. I think if I had more friends from the St. George area it would be easier to get more interest for the page. Or if I had one of my siblings who works for my dad as well. He seems to understand social media better than I do and can more easily generate interest in simple things that I just can't seem to grasp.

-Posts-

The main problem I found with my posts is that I didn't post enough. Most of the posts I did were sporadic and either separated by a day or a month. There really weren't any in betweens with me. I realize that posting more often would have made my posts show up on other peoples timelines with more frequency. I was trying to talk to my dad about coming down to do a system, and when he did I was able to take current pictures and post them right after we finished, and that was the post that is second from the top.
I did mix up my posts fairly well. The first two I posted were the ones with a link to the website and a video. Then I would post just words, and a couple had different photos attached to them. The most popular post was my first post with the link to his website. I even got a couple people to share that post, which was a pretty good step for me.

-People-

I was shocked by the different demographics, but at the same time I wasn't. I wasn't surprised because most of my friends on Facebook are my age or my siblings age so the category of people ages 18-24 is all of my friends ages. I think if my dad or even my older brother had created the page the category of people would have been older. I was also shocked that most of the people that liked my page were women. Now I understand that I am a woman and I know how to install a sprinkler system so I shouldn't be shocked that most of the people on my page were women, but I was still caught off guard a little bit. Again most of these are my friends, but it still goes to show that women are interested in things that are generally left to men.

-Overall Experience-
I was pleased by how I did on this assignment. When we were first told we had to make a Facebook page I had no idea what I would do it on. My first thought was to do it on something like a workout page or fitness page, and I realized that I would run out of content way to easily on those pages. When I decided to do it on my dad's business I called him and asked him if it would be OK because if it worked I didn't want to let people down if he wasn't actually able to come down and do it for them. My dad was excited about the prospect. Up in Park City there are only so many months where the sprinkler business is lucrative, and the rest he had to find something else to do. In St. George the weather is much more cooperative and we could install systems into late October. Having my dad on board helped me keep motivated on this assignment.
My personas were off a bit, but I did see some of them outside of Facebook. I had several people actually talk to me that had seen the page and they asked me about it in person. So I guess it was successful in that way, but it didn't reflect on the social media side.
I didn't get to use all of the tactics I had planned because we didn't have pictures of the machinery on something that I could access, but hopefully after this class ends I can keep up with the process and add those photos to see if we can make this Facebook page a real success. I also think that in the future having each of my siblings (who all happen to work for my dad also) share the posts that I make it will increase the spectrum of people we can reach.

Contextual Analysis German Plane Crash

The crash that shook the Alps and then traveled the world all in a matter of hours.
How did one plane crash have such a huge affect on the entire world. The obvious answers: The people on the plane were diverse enough that there were many countries represented in the crash and each country had to have a piece of the news. The world revolves around tragedy as much as we do comedy and this was something important to look at.

Maybe an answer that isn't so obvious though is that after further investigation into the crash there was evidence that the co-pilot locked the cabin door and forced the plane into the crash. Or the news that came out afterward that the co-pilot may have been on anti-depressant drugs or maybe he wasn't fit to fly that day. Either way whether we are looking for the outrageous answers or the commonplace answers we see how fast news travels today. The biggest perpetuator of news today is social media, and it has a huge impact on how the news is viewed.

Type in the search terms german plane and the results are astounding.

Physical Context

This plane crash happened in the Alps in France. The remote location made it very difficult for rescue and investigative teams to get the crash site. This photo shows the airport where the plane was due to land.

Psychological Context

This context had a huge part in the media coverage of the crash. There were reports of depression, illness and suicide in a lot of the articles I was able to find. These impact the psychological context because they make us as readers question whether or not he should have been flying the plane at all, and whether or not this could have been prevented. People started to speculate on whether or not the co-pilot was fit to fly that day. The terror that followed also led many people to wonder about their own pilot or if the standard for deciding if the pilot should be flying that day was too low.

The news was full of different countries and people wondering why they had not seen the crash coming. Many people would have saw the reports that there had been depression and wondered why the airline didn't see it too.
The Lufthansa CEO countered by saying that their pilot selection procedures were not "touched by this single tragedy" and this was not something that was normal for the airline or the pilots who had been hired by the airline.

Social Context

When the news of the crash hit social media it seemed like the whole world thought they had to do or say something about it. The FBI was involved because there were three Americans reported to be on the plane when it crashed. Americans were a minority on the plane crash, but since we feel like we are an important country in the world the rest of the world needs our help to determine why this terrible crash occurred. I understand that we are a social people and that communication is important to us, but in this situation I think we need to take a step back. This was such a terrible tragedy and unless we were affected personally by it I don't think we need to stick our noses into it too deep.

Cultural Context

The people involved in the crash didn't have a chance to tell their stories or say goodbye to loved ones. The descent from the time the pilot was locked out to the time the plane went down was eight minutes. We may never get to know the stories of all of the people on the plane, but they still have a story. The American culture is to know everything about everyone and as the reports kept coming in about people on the plane we wanted to know about the details of everyones lives.

Huffington Post article describing the passengers in the crash.

Airbus issued a statement over Twitter directing this to the families of the crash victims.

Temporal Context
This happened on March 24, 2015 and a few days after the crash every social media site was buzzing about it. It was appearing on the home screen of Yahoo news and all the major news outlets around the country, and even People magazine got in on the reporting. Then something new happened in the world that was tragic and it seemed to get pushed to the background.

The timeliness of the crash made it appear in the forefront of our minds. As long as people were talking about it news channels continued to report on it.

I posted this to my blog about a week after it occurred and the news had started to die down, but when I went and looked up some of the articles so I could create hyperlinks I realized that there was news concerning this crash as recent as two days ago. It will take a long time for this crash to fully work its way out of the media limelight.

My Thoughts

I didn't know much about this crash before I started doing this project, and I didn't realize the scope that social media covers. It travels around the world almost as soon as it is happening. In some ways this is a good thing. We are able to find out what happened with the three Americans that were on the plane, and their families were able to get closure from not wondering what had happened, and they were also able to get support from people who didn't know them personally but felt like they could do something to help.
Media also made this crash worse than it already was. This was already a terrible accident that shook different countries around the world, and then when we continued to look into it it became even worse. We didn't know about the depression and the drugs before social media caught wind of those things. We only knew that the co-pilot had apparently decided to commit suicide and take everyone on the plane down with him. After learning that he had a history of depression and possibly needing to take anti-depressants the accident turned into "what if it wasn't an accident?" People started to question whether or not it was an act of terrorism or if there were more sinister plots behind it.
Social media can do many things, and with this crash we see that it can turn an accident into something much worse if we let it go too far.

Social Media and Climate Change

We were asked whether or not social media impacts what people think about climate change and whether or not it is a barrier or something to help people understand it better. My half of the classroom was asked to find the helpful side and there are a lot of different social media sites that have all of that information on them. I believe it is helpful because you can find anything about climate change that you want. If we want information it is available, all we have to do is look.

Climate change is happening whether or not we can see it here in Utah, or if senators in Washington still see snowballs. We can find all of the information regarding how the world has changed in the past 50-100 years, and that kind of evidence is indisputable. We cannot see it happening, but if we use social media to our advantage we can see how much climate change is happening and how we are being swayed by social media to believe one way or another.

Learning 2.0

What would I change about the public education system?

I am honestly not sure what I would change. I was a 4.0 student growing up and I always did well in school and never really struggled with any of the assignments or classes that I took. I don't know if the school I went to was really easy or if I really am that smart, but if I had to change one thing it would be having to take specific classes for specific things.

I realize that doctors need to take certain classes for medical school in order for them to perform their duty as a doctor and be well informed on the procedures and tasks that have to be done, but what if a communication student wants to take an anatomy class also? Can't that count for something? I think that the higher education system should require students to take a certain amount of upper division, lower division and elective credits in order to graduate. There should be a degree in "College Education." At the end of this course students would look back on the classes that they took and experimented with and decide which classes had the most benefit to them, and be able to use those classes to earn a degree that they will be able to proudly state that they graduated from college and took classes that are useful to them and not pointless classes that they will never use again.

Taking a class on Media Law was not something I wanted to take, and I don't anticipate ever having to use that in the future. I believe that is what law school is for; for those people who wanted to study law and all the in's and out's and stuff you can and cannot say in the paper. They would benefit greatly from this class, but for me it was a waste of time, because I already don't remember anything I learned. Instead I remember the number of hours I spent worrying and wondering about passing this class that I didn't want to take in the first place.

Giving students the chance to take classes they want to take will allow them to invest more in their education and actually want to go to class and learn material.

Connecting the Dots: The Body

Our bodies are always changing and evolving, constantly fighting little battles inside of us that we aren’t even aware of. Well at least some of us aren’t aware of.

With the new advances that are happening with the Internet and technology every day we are seeing incredible things happen. The app pictured above is called Meal Snap. You take a picture of your food, whatever it happens to be, and Meal Snap tells you how many calories it would be and if you should eat it or not. There is a small advancement in technology. We don’t have to just go on our gut reaction that the extra large fry we are eating is unhealthy; we can take a picture and find out for sure from Meal Snap.

In more recent technology, a company called Thamlic came up with an armband that can detect the electrical impulses in your muscles as you use them. It uses those same impulses to control your computer or even your home. That is a little different than just taking a picture of your big juicy burger.

As technology continues to advance there is no end to the possibilities of what can happen for us. It is impossible to know where we will be next week with technology, let alone five or 10 years from now. We have an infinite number of possibilities at our fingertips. Who knows, years from now I could have written this blog in the air with my hand and never even have to touch my computer to post it.

Mission Statement and Personas

Mission Statement

Mountain Land Sprinklers specializes in trenchless sprinkler installation and repair. With our machinery we can remodel sprinkler systems without destroying existing lawns. We offer free bids on jobs before you commit to hiring our company.

Personas

Dave, 48, is happily married with seven active children. He and his wife decided to move to St. George a year ago from northern Utah. They lead active lives and love to explore the red rock surrounding their home. Dave works in construction and finds his customers through social media sites.

Karen is 70, and she and her husband have recently bought a retirement home in St. George. They love the weather that St. George offers during the winter months, but they cannot handle the heat during the summer. They have made connections with friends in their new community and keep up with their family through Facebook. They want to be able to go north during the summer and not have to worry about their lawn or home in the heat of the summer months.

Daryl is 38, and owns a small construction company. When he finishes building new houses he likes to have the landscape finished as well. He is constantly trying to find people who will do a thorough job without making the new property look like a junkyard.

I am planning to post only about once a week. I don't want to overwhelm people with my posts. I am hoping to find potential clients for our business by posting shots of our machinery and different yards and landscapes that we have done over the years. 

Double Standards

I think the reason we heard so much about the Charlie Hebdo attack was because there were deaths. On the podcast the speaker said that there were no deaths in Baga so I think that is why we haven't heard as much about it. I think that we will be able to learn more about this attack if it was anywhere else in the world too. We as Americans are very focused on ourselves and if it does not reflect well on us to report about something we just don't report on it. We may not see that terrorism is as newsworthy in Nigeria because they are so undeveloped compared to France that we see that as just something that happens in Nigeria but not France.

Despite the fact that Nigeria is highly populated with close to 180 million people we still don't hear about them because they are so far away. I am grossly uniformed when it comes to world news, so I had not heard very much about what was going on in Nigeria or in France, but I definitely heard about France before anything about Nigeria ever appeared. We need to extend our global outreach to even the smaller countries, and then we can report on the things that happen when they happen even if they are far away. I need to become more self informed so I can become a better reporter and understand the things that are going one.