Comm 352 Blog 3: Social Media - Tool or Menace?

In the last 5 years, social media has become a norm in society. At first it was MySpace with there music pages, personal pages, and 1 billion dollar purchase by News Corp. in 2005. Now the two social media giants are Facebook and Twitter. The advent of both has brought many positives and many negatives to the world we live in. The question is, "Is it a tool or a menace?" Personally, I believe its a little bit of both. In the world that we live in, everything has its positives and its negatives and social media is no exception. What makes it great is that it can be a great communication tool between people. You're more likely to contact somneone and reach them via FB IM or a tweet than you would be to e-mail or even call them. At the same time, with that positive comes a negative as most people prefer talking via these two websites than any other method, which causes damage to interpersonal communication. Another big positive to Facebook and Twitter is it can be a great way to promote yourself, your brand, and anything you want promoted on your page. At the same time, you can get negative press from Facebook as well with just a simple incorrect post or even a misuse of your page whether it be not responding to people or using it as a forum to make "controversial" remarks or insulting someone just because they disagree with you. It can be great PR or bad PR to have one. Another problem with communication is that there is such a thing as too much communication. This happens easily and accidentally. Most times you don't know you're doing it because you think that you're just doing service to someone by communicating with them. This is what is referred to as "Spamming" and it is a big reason people avoid social media. They don't want 20 messages a day from someone over the same basic thing over and over. It just gives a bad reputation to the user and causes migraines to the people who suffer from it. Overall however, if you were to ask if I would use social media for my webpage, I would say yes. A Facebook page allows the site to be promoted through people seeing a link the page and "liking it". The same for Twitter, sending out small, 140 character messages can go a long ways as it is quick, efficient, and an easy way to promote. But in general, I'm neutral in the whole "Good vs Bad" debate. I feel that Social Media has it positives and its negatives, and personally I prefer "Grey" over "Black and White" in this situation.