FB Reflection

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I have learned from my experience as a Facebook page creator. It was challenging, but I think I have 3 main takeaways that will be helpful for me in the future.

The first: Window of Opportunity

I was very excited to get to work on my page. I was passionate about what I was going to be posting, and I was excited to learn about how many people shared that interest. I invited so many people to the page, around 150 to be more precise, and they started to like my page. The likes were starting to creep up, and my desire to post grew deeper. In the beginning my page had quite a bit of steam. I had people posting on my wall so that I could share it on the page's wall. I couldn't have been more excited to post and see what people thought. I was averaging a post or two a week and I was getting pretty good responses. Then I took about 2 weeks off, and my page's popularity just kind of died out. My window of opportunity had closed. It was kind of depressing, because only my mom would like my posts or interact. I had no idea that people could've lost interest that quickly. It just taught me a lesson that when you're "hot" or "new" to keep posting and going because your time to keep everyone's attention is pretty limited.

The second: Over Saturation 

I think one of the other problems I ran into was that I was sharing stories that people had already seen. I didn't dig deeper for stories that were a little more unheard of. So I didn't really have an original source for positive sports stories. I used a lot of stories from a few of the same sources, and I think that ma have led to people losing a bit of interest in my page. I was always worried about posting too much and annoying people, but it's just as annoying seeing a story just get regurgitated over and over on your news feed. When you're passionate about something you should not be worried about talking too much on social media, because it's more important to know that you are being heard.

The third: Stick to your Guns.  

Knowing what makes your page unique and special is vital to the page's success. I tried experimenting with different kinds of posts, and those experiments failed miserably. I didn't realize that my site was just a source for positive stories. They weren't really thought provoking or a cause for debate. They were just positive stories I put out there in order to have a balance with all the negative ones. Whenever I tried to get interaction it didn't work, because my page wasn't liked by people with that on their minds. I just needed to continue to just share stories and know that people were seeing it. Whether or not they are sharing it isn't my purpose, my purpose was to just make sure that those stories were being put out there.

So now I know. I am grateful I made these mistakes in this class so I won't have to make them in the future. 

ALS Analysis

I love when things go viral on the internet, especially it makes people laugh or when it inspires people to do something charitable. In the case of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge it accomplished both of those things for me. A lot of the videos were fun to watch and made me laugh. It was also fun to see so many people get involved to try and help out others who are in need. There were those who tried to show off their wealth or to “one up” everybody else, but at its core the Ice Bucket Challenge was a way for people to show their support and challenge others to do the same.

This challenge got so huge that, naturally, I began to have a lot of questions. First off, what was ALS? How much money is actually being raised? How much is going towards research? I think a lot of the questions I was having were probably similar to those that other people had around me, and that’s why I decided to write about this. 

One of the best pieces I saw about ALS was about this man pictured above, Pete Frates. His story is pretty remarkable, and he is one of the most popular faces for the disease today. It teaches us a lot about how ALS affects a person. ALS is short for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosisprogressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. It is also know as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named after the famous baseball player of the early 1900's.

So that’s where this challenge comes into play. People wanted to help individuals like Pete who’s lives were completely flipped upside down by ALS. The man who is accredited as initiator of this ALS ice bucket challenge is Chris Kennedy. Time did a nice piece breaking down the events leading up to and following his initial ice bucket challenge. It originally was started by someone else, and was designed to benefit a variety of charities. It wasn’t until the challenge was sent Chris’ way that it had the name “ALS ice bucket challenge.” His cousin Pat Quinn had been diagnosed with ALS, and Chris took the challenge in his honer, and renamed it. The ALS community is pretty tight and it wasn’t very long until Pete Frates caught wind of it, and soon the rest of the world would participate in the challenge. 

Next thing we know everybody and their mothers were doing it. It caught steam fairly quickly, and the trend seemed to last the entire summer. It could have been perpetuated due to the fact that it was summer, and people were looking for any excuse to stay cool but regardless the ice bucket challenge was “a thing.” How many people participated, you ask? Well, Facebook told TIME that by August 18^th more than 2.4 million videos had been shared concerning the ice bucket challenge. Talk about viral! In the span of five days the videos doubled from 1.2 million to 2.4 million. Many of us personally know some of the people who took the challenge, or maybe you participated in it yourself but the real question is...Did you donate?

If you're like me, you may be pretty skeptical when it comes to charities. I feel like all too often I turn on the news and someone has been dooped in to donating to an imaginary charity. Or maybe you even donate to a legitimate charity, but not that much money is even used for research or finding a cure. So that's what I had to ask here. How much is being donated, and how much is being used to help find treatments? As of late August, the ice bucket challenge helped the ALS Association raise over $100 million. That's crazy! Over the course of a few months they eclipsed their entire total from the year before by 3,500%.

Now that we have the numbers, we want to know how much is actually used for research. Can you believe that only 29% of the money donated actually goes towards research? That really irked me a lot when I found out. Then I did some more research. This calmed me down a little bit, but then I heard some more rumors. I heard that their employees were making a pretty penny. So I decided to go directly to the source for answers. Once again I found some answers about some of the myths about their spending. The truth of it is, is that when something great is going on in the world there will be opposition. People have a hard time trusting one another, and I'm probably skeptical at times and fall into this category. We even sometimes lose sight of what was accomplished in the process.

The ALS association used/will use over 29 million dollars for research. That is amazing! Yes there is a lot more money not being used for research, but some of the other things the association is using the money for is necessary. While people have a hard time thinking that people make money in charities, someone has to be there taking care of the finances and getting the ball rolling for research. They spend countless hours planning events, updating their website, and doing other things for the benefit of those with ALS. Heck, they would use more money on research if people would have just specified that on their donation. Which brings me to my next point.

One of the big issues there was with this challenge was the lack of knowledge on so many levels. The obvious one being that not many people even knew what ALS was when they made the video. Another issue was about the money as I talked about earlier. If you are going to donate to a charity you need to do your research beforehand. Find out what they are doing with their money, because believe it or not...they'll usually tell you. Don't just assume that because your paranoid friend on Facebook said the association was spending the money on their lavish lifestyles means that it must be true. Social media can inspire people to do nice things like the ALS ice bucket challenge, but if you're not careful you can believe something that are just silly and not true.

One of the things that I have learned from this whole analysis is that the power of social media is so real. One of the "realest" examples that rings true in this case is the comparison I read about fundraising for charities. They used the example of Livestrong and their donations over a two year period. It took them 2 years to raise $50 million. Which is a great feat. I still remember buying 2 or three of those bands as a teenager. Livestrong had to do that without the help of social media tools like Facebook and Youtube. This ALS ice bucket challenge doubled that amount in the short span of three or so months. Something that even the association acknowledges would have never happened without the power of social media.

Facebook Stats and Overview

Facebook Page

POSITIVE PLAYMAKERS: HOME PAGE

LIKES

VISITS

POSTS

PEOPLE

WHAT IF MITT WON?

Professor Young asked us this question about a week ago, and I've been trying to think about what I would say for about a week now. The truth is that I would like to say things would've been better with Romney, but I am no expert when it comes to politics. In fact, I'm far from it. When you ask me who I think a good president would be, only silly examples like "Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" and "Kid President" come to mind. While the jury is still out on whether or not vampires exist, I don't think anyone would question our president after seeing him hack through a tree like that. Or how could you argue with such an adorable little president. All of these examples and instances do have one thing in common, that being a president means you have to deal with SOME dumb people.

Kid President...and his writers... bring up some of my very own thoughts on what's wrong with America. It's not just our president's fault that some parts of our country are falling apart. We have too many people who are quick to complain about all of these problems, but they don't offer any kind of help or solution to fix it. Money does not solve all of our problems. People still need to roll up their sleeves and get dirty in order to get some things fixed. Some people just like to scream and yell about politics and our problems. Other people think that smarter people will just come along and fix it. There are even people out there who think that there is nothing they can do to help. All of these attitudes are our fault, not because Obama ruined your life. Like I said earlier though, I think the "dumb" people do not outweigh the people who actually like to think and problem solve in this country. So instead of complain about the terrible job Obama or Romney or whoever is doing, how about you do something about it. 

I wish there was a system where we could all vote on stuff from our smart devices. We could create some sort of safe way to vote that way, and there's no arguing an outcome. It could let "the people" feel a little more involved in the decision making, and that way when things don't work they can't just pin it all on one man. I think the voter turnout would be way better than having people traveling to voting booths, but at the same time that weeds out the people who don't care enough to do something about voting. This would be my solution to the problem. Instead of posting a stupid throwback picture every week, we could vote on something that actually matters. 

I did not vote for Obama, but I'm not an Obama hater either. I think anyone who has the courage to run for president has a tremendous amount of confidence and some kind of successful background in the real world. No one is under the microscope and under so much scrutiny as much as they(the presidents) are, except for maybe the Kardashians. I remember watching the Romney documentary and it was pretty sad to see someone under constant attack by the media, but they do know the risks and the territory going into it. After the election the president becomes one of the most powerful individuals in the world, so we should know them very well. That could be one way the gov't uses the voting app I talked about earlier. They could send out simple messages and facts about presidential candidates so we could personally get to know them. 

I feel like I'm rambling or not making any sense now, so I'll finish with this last thought. Things may have been a little different with Romney, but he couldn't have fixed all of our problems. The media would have focused more his stance on gay marriage instead of on the economy. The Mormon church may have been more of a hot topic. His family life would have been under a microscope, even more so than the Obama family. Those are just a few things that I think may have been different looking at a social media standpoint. All of this is just an opinion, and probably not even a very well-educated one. As I said earlier, politics is not one of my strong points because there are so many angles to even the smallest of issues.