Politics 2.0

While I just briefly touched on how the media 2.0 era we live in today has changed businesses and their marketing strategies, it has also changed the way politicians campaign. President of the U.S., Barack Obama, is the prime example of the new way of campaigning. During his campaign in 08′, Obama began to use social media outlets in order to reach out to his potential voters. Obama thought using these various social medias, Facebook in particular, would allow him to get in contact with people my age (born after 1982). Obama didn’t just stop at social media platforms though, he also created a website BarackObama.com which allowed people to donate to his campaign. It turns out Obama received countless amounts of small donations from voters, which in-tune lead to him having a drastic financial advantage over his competitors. Even though Obama has had an overpowering advantage in media, that doesn’t mean he didn’t do the traditional aspects required in order to win an election. He is just demonstrating that in today’s society you do need both in order to be victorious. 2012 Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, tried to use some of Obama’s methods in his campaign. Romney could be found on Facebook, Twitter, and two other social media outlets during 2012. He had thousands of followers and likes on both accounts. The thing is though, Obama had so many followers that he made Romney’s look like nothing. Not only that, Obama also was on 9 different social media outlets, opposed to Romney’s 4. Barack Obama has always just been one step ahead of the game during his campaigns and it has unarguably given him a large help in grasping voters. Obama has opened the door for the new style of campaigning and it should be interesting to see how the candidates in 2016 go about it.

Favorite New Social Media Outlet: Vine

I know that Vine isn’t the newest of social media outlets, but out of all of the “newer” ones it is definitely my favorite. Vine allows you to share a 6 second video with all of your friends and followers. You can break up these 6 seconds into as many different cuts that you’d like, wether that be 2 breaks or 50. To me the best part of Vine is the uniqueness about it. Everyone has their own style and it allows each individual to express themselves in their own creative way. Some of the Vines people make leave me completely speechless. Like how could someone possibly think of that? All of these famous viners have inspired me to reach my goal of vine stardom (yes I know that’s pretty pathetic.) Currently I’m sitting at a lackluster 192 followers which is far from being Vine famous. Some of the really famous viners have over a million followers. It pisses me off a little bit because most of those viners are not even remotely funny. You can check out my Vine profile by looking up my name, Matt Rossier. I’ve been working on some new material but hopefully you’ll enjoy some of my older stuff.

 

 

I Lost a Friend to Twitter…

I never thought the day would come, but sadly it has. I have lost my friend and bunkmate Matthew Connor to the social media network Twitter. Like many kids and young adults today, Matt just refuses to put his god damn phone down. He’s always giggling to himself, scrolling aimlessly through his Twitter feed, and tuning out the rest of the world, including the rest of my friends and I!! Don’t get me wrong I use Twitter too and it is one of my favorite social medias, but Matt has taken it to the next level. He’s become obsessed with how many followers he has and how many retweets or favorites he can get on something. I just want to slap him in the mouth and tell him, “Nobody cares bro!!” Since he follows all of these famous people he thinks he knows exactly what’s going on in the world. Just because Kim Kardashian says something doesn’t make it true. I’m really hoping this is just a phase because I think I might have been like that when I first started using Twitter a lot. If not, Matt will become the poster child of what’s going wrong in America. Too many kids getting their souls eaten by social media outlets like Twitter.

before Twitter took Matt

Too Many Facebook “Friends”?

In class last week my teacher prompted us with this question: How many of your friends on Facebook would you consider to be your “real” friends? At first I thought I would have hundreds of real friends on Facebook, then I looked for myself and boy was I wrong. Just going through my news feed for a little while I didn’t come across one of my real friends. My news feed was filled with people I haven’t spoken to since high school, friends of friends, and some people I have never actually met in my entire life. If I wouldn’t consider these people to be my “real” friends then why should I be “pretend” friends with them on Facebook? I could only think of one, completely pathetic answer to justify these Facebook friendships: it’s just too much fun Facebook creeping. I can’t believe I just admitted that, but don’t even act like I’m the only one. Everyone has been at the library “studying” for a test, and the next thing you know you get caught creeping around Facebook for an hour. Guarantee you’re not just looking at your “real” friends Facebook pages during these couple hours. Facebook creeping is given a negative connotation but I don’t really see what’s so wrong about it. I already know what’s going on in my real friend’s lives, but without Facebook, I would never know what’s going on in the lives of the people I grew up with or went to high school with. I’m curious to know what’s going on in the lives of these people, even if I would feel uncomfortable calling them right now. In my mind I don’t see anything wrong with that, so I’m going to continue checking in on the lives of old friends from the fourth grade if you don’t mind.