Social Media Tools

Assignment: Choose two Social Media Tools that you have not used before and try them out. Compare these two tools and share your thoughts about which one will reach audiences most effectively. Explain your rationale.

The two social media tools I chose to review were Social Bookmarking and Mashups. I have never engaged in either of these social media tools so I decided to give them a try!

For the social bookmarking site, I chose Diigo. I’d heard of this site before but was honestly too intimidated to try it out. But for this assignment I decided to brave the world of Diigo. I’m still exploring the site, but so far I have created a “list” and added two separate websites. I haven’t quite mastered the “highlight” feature yet – it still eludes me, but I’m trying! I like the idea of social bookmarking where I can keep all my websites or articles of interest in one place with personal notes and highlighted sections all neatly labeled and categorized. I also like the idea of sharing my bookmarks with others, but I believe I’ll mostly keep this site for myself. In fact, I can see Diigo becoming my “academic” site to organize any information I may use for school such as articles for research papers, videos for content and sourcing, etc.

The other social media tool I chose was a mashup site. The site I decided to try was Popurls. This is a mashup site that gives you all the trending social news from various sites. Categories of Popurls include Entertainment, Technology, Politics, and more. I really like how this site takes the most popular stories from websites and puts them into one convenient location.

It is difficult to say which of these tools will reach audiences most effectively since both of them serve very different purposes. A social bookmarking site could be more effective since people enjoy sharing their thoughts, opinions, and experiences. But don’t they have Facebook for that? You could also argue that a site like Popurls would not be as effective since individuals do not like to entertain ideas and opinions outside their own. For example, an individual may be religious about retrieving his or her news from CNN versus FoxNews. In this case, the individual would head straight to the CNN website.

However, I do believe that mashups are more popular since they tend to bring together two things and meld them together. For example, the 2013 Grammys featured PSY Gangnam Style doing a mashup with MC Hammer’s Too Legit To Quit. People went crazy for the combination.

See the Grammys video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12gfHA6vwj0

The Grammys mashup was so popular that the Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Creative Entertainment department decided to incorporate this into the ever famous “Hooplah” of Star Wars Weekends where the characters of Star Wars simulated the PSY and Hammer mashup. It was a hit!

See the Star Wars Weekends video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmD1sW2vgmU

Therefore, in general, I feel mashups have the potential to be most effective to audiences. However, that is not to say that social bookmarking sites may not catch on in the future.

I really enjoyed this assignment for my COMM 510 class and getting my feet wet in these social media sites!