Kony 2012

The Kony movement in 2012 to try and save the invisible children was highly viewed once the documentary went viral on twitter and Facebook.  In a two day span, there had been over 7 million views of this video making people more aware.  One thing that many people did not realize was that this had been going on for many years prior to the spread on social medias sites.  The movements wanted people to donate money to random organizations which people put trust in these movements which some of the funds were being embezzled by the organizations.  Individuals put their faith in these organizations which is hard to build trust over the internet.  The video pulled on people's heart strings and made they victimize these invisible children and make Kony an infamous leader.  Invisible children became a known term and was no stranger to the social media campaigns.  One of the biggest contributors to the publicity of Kony was twitter and Facebook which had almost one million fans.  This was an active and engaging way for people to get the message out their and make people world wide aware of the atrocities going on.  The hashtag #LRA was a common and very well known on Twitter and helped spread the word to people and make this campaign well known.  People posted many videos on twitter or would tweet "for all of those who know who Joseph Kony this one goes out to you all and if you don't watch this video."  People had to trust others on the information being given out and many people conformed to the views that were publicized.  Social media sites have been making it easier to make the world smaller and know the many events or movements going on around the world like the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement.  The social media sites helped keep everyone up to date but also had to put a lot of faith in the information that people were posting.

Groupon

Groupon is a site that had a lot of potential to be very beneficial to individuals looking for deals but to boost small business this site was not as effective.  Groupon should be projected to everyone and be universally friendly.  By universally friendly, I mean that it is not gender specific and is appealing to all types of people.  Being openly diverse like this is extremely important so that different groups do not feel this site is meant for a certain "gender".  Also, promoting small business is important in the economic system today and is a ideology that groupon wanted to promote but unsuccessfully did.  If I were to run a site to promote small business, I would broadcast it to different social media sites including pintrest, twitter, and facebook but not exclusive to these sites.  the use of twitter would be to show deals that are being promoted at the time instead of irrelevant information that is posted on the Groupon website.  Twitter is a great way to get little blurbs of information out and have people look more in-depth into information.  To gain new viewers or members would be utilizing pintrest.  This site would gain probably a more female basis.  To gain more male viewers, putting advertisements on sports blogs would probably be the best bet for this.   These social media sites must be viewed a few times a week so that it is a common viewing and not just for boredom.  This is because people are more willing to look more into items if they are actually interested in it instead of just quickly scanning over things.  The only problem would be keeping people coming back and repeatedly using the site but keeping people updated on deals through social media sites like Twitter could help with this cause.   

Politics and Social Media

Social media has become more and more important in the role in political campaigns.  This was prevalent in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Candidates utilized social media to reach out to groups that not always has a high percentage of turnout voting rates.  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2008/11/19/barack-obama-and-the-facebook-election Is an article that shows that Obama had gained much of his vote from the under 25 age group which is astounding seeing that not this was the highest percentage since exit polling began in 1976.  He reached out through using Facebook mainly.  A fact from this site said "Some 35 percent of Americans said they'd watched online political videos—three times as many as during the 2004 presidential election. And roughly 10 percent said they'd logged on to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to engage in the election." This just goes to show how we have evolved in the world and have put more emphasis on social media sites to get a point out into the world.  In a different article a source had said in the 2012 had utilized social media for the worse.  Candidates used social media sites to bash their opponents and post inappropriate adds about their counterpart.  So, the article had said that people will be pushing away from using social media in the next election if they know what is best for them or at least use it in a beneficial and publicly correct manor.  I believe that the social media sites put out a good representation of what a presidents stance may be or even give the public a chance to get to know them.  Twitter in this past election helped people put the presidential debates under a scope and have allowed us to move forward in understanding the presidential elections.  In 2016, I feel like the campaigns will still use sites as such to get the point across.