5 Ways to Support World Malaria Day Online

While on Mashable today, I found this article about World Malaria Day, which I just found out is today, April 25^th. According to the article, the “ international malaria community has less than a year to meet the targets of ‘delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria,’ as set forth by the United Nations.” As ways to reach more people and raise awareness, the article points out five different things you and I can do to help out.

1. Text to Donate $10 and Retweet an Official Message- If you’re really short of time then you can text NETS to 864233 which will see $10 charged to your phone bill.

2. Retweet to Donate $10-Thanks to the RT2Give twitpay service you can retweet one simple message to donate $10 to Malaria No More, which is roughly the amount required to buy one mosquito net.

3. Download the Nothing But Nets Toolbar-If you’re an Internet Explorer or Firefox user the downloading (and crucially using) the Nothing But Nets browser toolbar will mean that every time you use the toolbar to search and shop online, you will raise money for Nothing But Nets

4. Follow the Social Media Envoy-The Social Media Envoy group, organized by the United Nations, is a collective of people who have agreed to spread the word about malaria prevention through the medium of social media. The group includes the likes of Bill Gates, Biz Stone and Kevin Rose.

5. Raise a hand to End Malaria with DailyBooth-DailyBooth is asking people to pass on the simple message to “End Malaria” with the simple gesture of writing the phrase on your hand, snapping a pic and sharing it with the hashtag “#endmalaria” which will mean the mosquito icon will appear on your photo, and in your friend’s dashboard.

I really like the use of social media in this endeavor, and the way they are using twitter to help such an important cause. The last way they mentioned to help, also seems pretty interesting in the sense that a lot of young people would probably be interested in doing this, which would further spread awareness and get the word out.

Crisi Communication- British Airways

“The eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in south-east Iceland, which sent a plume of ash across some of the world's busiest flight paths, has brought the worst disruption to international air travel since September 11.”- guardian.co.uk

Recent events have propelled airlines into a crisis situation. After Southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted, airlines discontinued any flights. But it is important to note how these airlines are dealing with this crisis situation. In class today, I specifically researched British Airways and all that they were doing to deal with this. From their twitter posts, I think they did an excellent job of talking directly to people asking questions. Even though they did have posts concerning general information, they had a lot of direct tweets as well, which shows that they are concerned with each of their customers. Although I couldn’t find their official facebook page, the British Airways website has links to some FAQ’s and a statement from BA. I liked that this information was on their main page, making it easy for customers to locate any necessary information. The only improvement my class could think of was using the appropriate hashtags on twitter, in order to get the information out there as quickly and efficiently. Besides that, I think British Airways has done a great job dealing with this unfortunate crisis.

Twitter predicts the future? Box office future, that is

A Prediction: Twitter to Predict the Future

The idea of Twitter being able to predict box office hits doesn’t seem too strange to me. After learning about monitoring activity online, it only seems appropriate that twitter would be a go-to source for information on things such as entertainment, politics, etc.

“Aside from foretelling performance, Apple, or any brand really, can monitor the same activity to unearth opportunities for new features, prioritize fixes, and also assess experiences to ideate future products, applications, and iterations. Brands now also have the ability, if properly aligned with the prowess and empowerment, to detect potential problems before they swell and become official social tsunamis. In the case of the iPad, for instance, conflicts, crashes, hardware issues, etc., are identifiable in real-time and if the infrastructure of the company is designed for rapid response, it can then initiate the development and distribution of fixes, communication, and solutions.”

Among all of the technological advancements and benefits bought to us by social media, this one is definitely beneficial to companies. Thanks to social media monitoring, companies now have another way to measure their success (or lack of).

My Personal Learning Plan- A Digital Portfolio

“With a social media resume, you’re able to paint a completely different portrait of yourself for hiring managers and customize it to reflect your personal brand. With the inclusion of various multimedia elements, sharing options, integrated social networking feeds and the same elements you’d find in a traditional resume, you are better equipped for success.” – Dan Schawbel

For my Personal Learning Project, I decided to create my own social media resume using weebly.com. With today’s growing dependency on social media, I thought it would be beneficial for me to create a digital portfolio not only for this assignment but for me to use and to build on in the next coming years. My personal learning network consisted of social media experts, mashable guides, and examples of social media resumes from twitter, blogger, and delicious. I know that a number of other people from my Social Media class were also working on their own social media resumes, and I’m looking forward to viewing their completed sites and all the sources they used to guide them. Although the assignment is complete, I still plan on expanding my personal learning networks and my digital portfolio.

Here’s a link to my digital porfolio- take a look!

-For those of you interested in creating your own social media resume, here are my Delicious Bookmarks which are filled with some really useful information. enjoy!

-Through Delicious, I also found out about Visual CV- a great site to host a multimedia resume and give it a sleek, professional look. It can also be shared online or as a PDF file. Here's mine. it's still not done yet!

YouTube is down!

YouTube, the popular video sharing site we all know and love, was apparently not working yesterday. I wasn’t aware of when this happened, or how long it went on, but everyone seems to know that it is back up. Now, how do so many people know the approximate time YouTube started running again? Social media, of course! The mashable article “We Interrupt Our Regular Programming: YouTube Is Down [UPDATE: It's Back]” includes these three updates:

Update: Interestingly enough, the videos on YouTube seem to work, only the front page seems to be affected.

*Update #2: We’ve received the following short message from Google: “YouTube is temporarily unavailable. Our engineers are currently working to restore the site.”

*Update #3: It’s back. The downtime lasted approximately one hour.

I think this shows a great example of how social media offers a fast and efficient way of connecting people around the world. Whether or not you think YouTube is significant is up to you, but you cannot deny the fact that tweets definitely help spread the word.

I’d also like to point out that even the article itself included various posts within the hour offering updates regarding the status of YouTube.