Protecting Twitter Users

Following the social media theme of this class, I chose a video based on someone who works for Twitter. In the video I watched this evening, Del Harvey, head of Twitter's Trust and Safety Team, explained how multiple different tweets that look like spam could not be removed from their website. Her argument was "What about the .01% of Tweets per month" this describes about 150,000 Tweets a month that have to be shifted through to check if whether or not they are truly spam and how they should act towards these messages. Ms. Harvey uses multiple examples in this TED video such as using explicit language, sending the same message to multiple people, and sending the same link to multiple people.

Explicit language is fairly common in today's social media presence, no matter how high up the corporate ladder you might be. “It’s a sizable fraction of the words we use. On average, one tweet out of 13 tweets will contain at least one cursing word, because of social media, people don’t see each other. They can say things they wouldn’t say in the physical world.” stated Wenbo Wang, the Ph.D researcher at Ohio’s Wright State University. Even though it might seem unprofessional and vulgar most of the time, Del Harvey showed a tweet that was an exception to the rule. I won't quote the exact status of what she showed on my blog due to this blog being family friendly, but the quote was a single word that is a synonym for a female dog.What she didn't show was the picture under the quote. She left it up to the audience for them to question whether or not the tweet was offensive. After a short time, she showed the picture which happened to be a picture of a female dog sitting near a computer. Although quite humorous in this case, this is what her job entails day-by-day.


Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter. Ms. Harvey shows a couple of examples throughout the presentation to represent some of these tweets. However, she explains why not all of the tweets that look like spam are actually spam. She uses the example of posting a link to multiple people by using the @ symbol.  Normally phishers do this to make you fill out information for them to gather and use for their own personal benefit, but in this case, she states that someone may be sending out a mass tweet to inform people of a video that needs to be heard for human rights activists. She recently tweeted that the TED conference that this video covers improved spam reduction by making people aware of the difference of spam and not spam. Twitter offers an easy to use "report spam" button that every user has.

Although the chart may be outdated, Twitter has been working on spam for a long time.

In conclusion, Ms. Harvey's speech was pretty inspiring due to her changing the way I see what reporting spam truly is. Even though the video may have been less than 10 minutes, it had just enough humor to keep my attention fully and also made me want to research more about her work of analytics at the end of the video. I haven't seen any other video's of her on TED Talks, but I'll be sure to look for them now.



Sources:
https://twitter.com/delbius
https://blog.twitter.com/2010/state-twitter-spam
http://www.ted.com/talks/del_harvey_the_strangeness_of_scale_at_twitter
http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/popular-curse-words-twitter/

Social Media's Presence

In order for companies in the modern world to get their name prominent in their industry, they must use multiple social media sites to connect with their client base. A recent study by the Internet Advertising Bureau UK found that nearly 80% of consumers would be more inclined to buy more often in the future because of a brand's presence on social media. The two companies I decided to look into this week was Twitch and Android.

 

"Twitch is the leading video platform and community for gamers." Twitch uses its Facebook and Twitter accounts to reach out to their primary customer base of male teenagers to young adults. Most of the posts in the past few months have been about what the company has done for the world, not just for their own benefit. A good example of that was their Extra Life campaign that raised $5 million dollars for children's hospitals. These social media outlets allow these companies to spread the word out to their clients through phone apps and notifications. The critical difference between these social media platforms and Twitch is that they allow audiences to engage with each other around content and influence its creation. Some viewers may not always have a Twitch stream open, but if the viewer is connected to one of these social media sites, any update post would notify the viewer to tune in on something important.

 "News, tips, and tricks direct from the Android team."Android has been pushing their new #NotTheSame promotion thoroughly on both Facebook and Twitter. Their social media sites draw attention to these promotions, enabling a larger consumer base in the long run. If you compare and contrast their official website to their social media accounts, their social media actually reveals more information on the main page than Android's official main page.Unlike Twitch however, Android doesn't seem to respond to their followers as much. This might be due to how many more followers they have in the comparison. On the other hand, if a company spends too much time responding to customers, it can be observed that too much money might be being spent on the social media account instead of elsewhere that would improve the company.

Both companies show that they are almost always active at all times of the day as well as all their information is constantly updated. They both seem to understand that social media can be accessed on different mediums instead of just the normal computer and have formatted their posts for those situations. Overall, both companies have spent a lot of time (and probably money) on making sure that their presence is known on the web.


Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/Twitch
https://twitter.com/Twitch
https://www.facebook.com/AndroidOfficial
https://twitter.com/Android
http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2013/aug/29/social-media-boost-business-tips

Tech Savvy

In my beginning steps towards my professional career as an IT Support specialist, I was to create multiple forms of resumes including both functional and chronological this week for my Social Networking and Business class. At first, I thought I had a strong resume only because my first draft had a lot of information on it that described my previous work experienced. I realize now that if I truly want the title I'm going after, changes will have to be made with my old ways.

As you can see, this resume would be deemed "alright" if I used it for my first part-time job. However, it would never hold its own against other resumes in the IT world. I was taught from my professor Larry Domine that one's resume needs to impress those hiring you in less than 30 seconds. Those 30 seconds could be wasted if your personal resume is filled with paragraphs of hard to read text or pictures that have nothing to with the resume (including tables, charts, or unnecessary underling/italicizing. With the two new resumes that were created, many possibilities opened for me. My new LinkedIn account also allows me to share my resumes out there with people that are looking for Support Specialists.

If you would like to see my new and improved resumes, email me at JamesBeMurph@gmail.com and I will definitely get back to you right away.

"Why I am at MATC"

I decided to come to MATC after leaving the University of Louisville's engineering school. This means that I have a had past college experience with a lot of math as well as working on computers for a multitude of reasons, rather that be building a computer to process programs such as Autodesk or having to design a machine from the ground up to complete multiple tasks. That is what truly intrigued me in the engineering field and that fascination let me pursue a degree in IT Support.

In the past two years, I have not only built my own computer from scratch, but also helped four different friends build their computers also. I'm not only interested in building them, but what also runs on them. I've had some experience working on a Teamspeak server that allow people to talk to one another with up to 200 other people at the same time. The server I help work on has never had that amount of people before, but we structured it that way just in case.

I'm hoping to further my studies after MATC by completing my bachelors at another college. I'm glad MATC is guiding me on this path that I set out on.