Category Archives: Social Media

For social media diary entries.

Do you live where you spend?

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Some Bay Ridge small businesses, including privately-owned stores, bakeries and salons are mainstays in the relatively quiet, residential New York neighborhood, but too often, when new stores open, the businesses can’t stay afloat for long.

Since Bay Ridge is on the far south end of Brooklyn, a commute there from Manhattan is relatively long compared with the commute to many other Brooklyn neighborhoods. A long commute, combined with limited store hours and generally more shopping and dining options in Manhattan, may be hurting small Bay Ridge businesses. But it’s unclear whether the same case could be true for many other neighborhoods in the city.

Please take this survey to help me find out whether this is a problem specific to this Brooklyn neighborhood or whether it’s a citywide phenomenon. Thanks!

Charlie Sheen = winning. Me = not so much.

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Two words for this week’s assignment: Epic fail.

I tried. I really did. I put up posts on Facebook and Twitter promoting my question blog post…

…and I got exactly one comment, which can’t be reprinted here. (It was a joke from a friend of mine.) Looking at the posts as they’re laid out here, I wonder if the issue was partially visual. I don’t know how to insert a thumbnail pic into a link posted on Facebook, but I clearly need to figure that out, because the posts look kind of hideous and unappealing without images. I don’t know that I’d click on them, either!

For my survey blog post, I’m focusing on the connection between the crime rate and the economy in Brighton Beach. Most crimes are actually down in the neighborhood, but burglaries have jumped 17% in the last year – which I think makes sense, in a difficult financial time.

I tried to think outside of the box and post on Facebook groups devoted to Brighton Beach. Unfortunately, the only such groups focus mostly on the TV show “Russian Dolls,” or on comparisons to “Jersey Shore.” So the handful of replies I received were irrelevant and spammy. But, for the sake of transparency, here are the original posts, just from my own Facebook and Twitter pages:

So after this assignment, here’s what I know about social media promotion: Just putting the post up – no matter how many times you do it – isn’t gonna get you automatic audience engagement. Like so many of my classmates have commented, much to learn…

Social Media Diary

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  • On September 22nd, I posted my question on Twitter and linked to my blog post in the following tweet:

Tweet

I used the hashtags #USPS, #postoffice, #SouthBronx, #Bronx, and #jobs as they seemed like they were the most relevant that would garner the most amount of hits.  I however failed in attracting any response.

After I didn’t receive any reply to this either, I started to wonder if there were better hashtags for the Bronx and the South Bronx, and found out that people use #bx as a Bronx hashtag.

I tried using some other hashtags, and rephrasing my query in order to attract possibly business owners in the South Bronx.  I still did not unfortunately receive any response. Because so much of the South Bronx’s population is living under the poverty line, I think it is safe to assume that a lot of them have very limited internet access. A lot of the unemployed people of the South Bronx (who are the people who I am most interested in speaking with, in all likely-hood do not peruse Twitter).

  • On October 5th, I posted the following on Flickr to promote my question and blog post:

I posted my question and link in the description of the photo, and added relevant tags (Melrose, South Bronx, Post Office, USPS…).

Social Media Diary: Does Rejection Make You Stronger?

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I used Facebook and Twitter to try and promote my last blog post as well as solicit opinions for my next blog post. It is clear to me after all my attempts, despite the fact that this was already painfully obvious anyway, that the most effective way to get people to respond to questions is to already have a big following.

Question Blog Post Promotion

Below is what I tweeted a couple of weeks ago to promote my question blog post.

Being as I only have 29 followers, I’m not certain how helpful this tweet was in gaining responses. Seeing as the only people who commented on my post were in this class, I’m going to guess that I probably didn’t get anyone to respond to my post because of Twitter.

On Facebook, to promote my post, I tried to use more specific questions to drive people to comment on my post. My tweet didn’t really contain any questions for people to ponder over as they debated clicking on my blog post link, so I thought perhaps it would help to try and get everyone thinking about the topic before they read the post.

In this situation, I realize that most people only click on links that interest them as Facebook tends to be over-saturated with links already. Despite the fact that I have many more Facebook friends than Twitter followers, it would probably be better next time to target the ones who are actually interested in the topic I’m asking questions about, rather than just posting it on my wall and hoping for the best.

Survey Blog Post Research

The topic I’m doing for my survey blog post is the effect youth unemployment has had on the issue of “Stop and Frisk” and arrests in East Harlem. I chose a topic that I felt would get different opinions because it seemed like this would make a good survey. To solicit responses, I posted a public Facebook note with a few statistics and quotes to try and get people thinking about the issue before they answered the questions.

Below are the responses.

This worked a lot better in gaining responses, despite the fact that there were only four. I was also pleased that the comments were clearly very thoughtful and had got at least few people thinking about the topic. I also tagged people I knew who lived in East Harlem in this note, to try and target it to people who might be interested in the topic for personal reasons.

Additionally, I promoted this note in two groups on Facebook (here and here) as well as on Twitter. I also tweeted the question with a hashtag to see if people using that hashtag might respond. Below are the two tweets and one of the Facebook group promotion posts (the other one didn’t get any responses).

Again, on Twitter, I probably didn’t get anyone to read the note and comment for the same reasons as with my previous Twitter promotion campaign that I detailed above. The Facebook group I promoted my note on, however, is the group for people in my building which is in East Harlem (it’s the CUNY GC Housing building). It’s a group of 57, so I wasn’t really expecting many responses, and I was surprised to get a comment, frankly. Not that the one comment the post got was eloquently waxing on about the issue exactly, however he did have an interesting question to ask about the unemployment rate data of the arrested, which is something I can look into for my survey blog post.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that I was mostly rejected in all my various attempts to get people to respond to me on Facebook and Twitter, I did learn from it. Other than targeting the questions appropriately and using hashtags effectively, I honestly believe the one biggest factor that helps the situation is to have a large following. It seems to me that this is probably one of the most important things to work on, by constantly posting insightful and thought-provoking things on these various forms of media.

Social Media Diary

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So, totally unsuccessful!

I first posted my question blog post as a status update on Facebook about a week ago and so far no one has answered it.  I think this is because things that go out to a general facebook audience are easily lost in the weeds — i.e. if they are not directed toward certain people no one will care to look at them.

 

Since that didn’t work, I directed my attention toward Twitter and tweeted my question at a few local blogs in hopes they’d retweet to their followers. Surprisingly, @BrooklynBased tweeted my question to their nearly 12,000 followers! And, also surprisingly, not one person answered my question blog post after that tweet!

Here’s a link to my question to BrooklynBased and their RT:

http://twitter.com/#!/PeterMoskowitz/status/119206766989938689

Because no one answered my question, I’ve decided my survey should probably be about the same topic.  This week on Facebook I directed my inquiries toward local businesses by posting

“Hey Fort Greene Businesses! Please help a CUNY Journalism student out by answering the following question in the comments: What do you do to keep customers from shopping online instead of at your store?”

on the pages of blogs and local business associations like MARP and the FAB Alliance.

 

I think part of the problem is that no one knows who I am, so they have no reason to answer my questions.  I don’t really know where to go from here because it seems like people have no incentive to give me their time and answers.

Social Media Diary: When Your Question Is the Wrong Question

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I’m going to take a cue from my classmates and start with some visuals for my social media diary because it generally makes things more interesting. But first, I do want to address the fact that Coney Island is a complex place; it’s always a bit strange to visit a place that has two very distinct feels to it.

Hope Campbell works in the Family Resource Center at the Roberta Bright YWCA on West 37th street. She describes Coney Island as a neighborhood that is “very much right and wrong side of the tracks.”

Stay on the boardwalk, you see the “right” side:

Photo by Rachel Sapin

 

Step off onto Surf Avenue and you see–well, something else. There are 10 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments in Community District 13, according to the 60th Precinct. Nine of them are in Coney Island (zip code 11224). You can search for them here.

Coney Island Flea Market on Surf Avenue. Housed in the historic Herman Popper building. Photo by Rachel Sapin

My initial question that I wanted to gage the relevancy of via social media for was, “What would you like to see stay or go as Coney Island reimagines its future? (Read the original post here).

I posted my query to Facebook and Twitter, but this strategy garnered little attention.

Continue reading →

Robert’s Social Media Diary: Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places

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I recently joined my CD’s local facebook group (Kensington, Brooklyn), which has almost 2,000 members. So I thought it would be a great place to try and drive traffic to my previous blog post. In a stroke of luck, it just so happened that several people in the group were having a conversation about the local post office, the subject of my post. So I jumped into the discussion.

So far, there haven’t been any responses (I did get one “like”!). But my previous posts to the group have generated a pretty substantial back and forth so I’m hopeful I can persuade at least a handful of members to follow the link to the class blog.

I also tried a more general post on Facebook, similar to what I initially did to try to promote my blog post. So far no luck there either.

To gather material for my survey blog post I again turned to the FB Kensington group. I was hoping to get a sense of what issues its members were thinking about in regards to jobs. So I asked several questions that I thought might generate some discussion. Of course, everyone’s a comedian.

I wasn’t nearly as confident about using Twitter. My account is pretty fledgeling so far, but I hoped that tying in some hashtags would help draw people. I used twitter to promote my post. and to start fishing for some survey ideas. To promote my blog post I tied my tweet to #kensington and #postoffice. As for the survey ideas I ended up choosing a pretty generic hashtag through Google trends, although #unemployment is trending pretty hard right now. Instead of just asking for general ideas for a survey, I tried a more specific question in the hope that the range of responses would give me some good material.

The caveat to all of this is that I tried to see how quickly people respond to FB and Twitter posts so I did everything today. It is possible that I might get some good feedback in the next few days

Tom’s Social Media Diary, or How Not to Solicit Comments

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This week, I was charged with promoting my last blog post and soliciting responses to my closing question: “Are you a small business owner in Brooklyn? How has the arrival of big box stores affected your business? How have you responded?”

How did it go? Let’s look at exhibit A.

Well, exhibit A doesn’t exist. Why? Because I didn’t screen capture the note that I posted to Our Brooklyn, Our Business — and because it no longer exists. Apparently the group doesn’t take kindly to strangers clogging up its feed. So lesson numero uno: build a relationship with people and groups before you post to a page or ask any other sort of favor.

Moving on, let’s look at my first efforts at promoting on twitter:

I didn’t get any response to the 22 Sep post. That #sbo hashtag stands for small business owner, which I found on hashtag.org. I probably could have been more explicit that I wanted people to follow the link and comment.

Moving forward, I thought I’d try to solicit help from a specialist, the Brooklyn Small Business Development Center, or @BrooklynSBDC. What did I get back? Bupkis. Same lesson, different platform. People who don’t know you aren’t likely to help you.

Perhaps the poor response also had to do with my klout. My overall score is a “steady” 35. I have “a good size network that is highly engaged.” I’m engaged by “influencers.” But much of what I’ve tweeted about relates to my past life: Vietnam, ASEAN, and Southeast Asia. So my Brooklyn small business message is likely reaching the wrong audience.

This klout session gave me an idea for my second assignment: soliciting a topic for my survey blog. One of the people I influence is @katelizdee, aka, my big sister Kate. Kate is a Socializer, influential on public relations, social media, and extras (whatever extras are). She’s also a human resources specialist, so…

Kate got back to me via email. Her response: “What about something along the lines of the domino effect from the recession and grads competing for entry level jobs? Something like that?” She also said she’d have to email her contacts, as many HR folks aren’t actually on twitter. So that’s still social networking, right? Right?

Back to Facebook. Here was another attempt:

 

 

 

Nothing. Perhaps I was a bit vague. Taking a page from my twitter lesson, I decided to narrow my scope and give people a bit more direction. I wouldn’t look for a specific topic, but fodder for inspiration. I sent six friends who work in editorial or creative capacities the following message:

Hey there. If you’re receiving this, it’s because you are or were in a creative or editorial field in New York between 2007 and today. I’m soliciting insight on what folks like yourselves did to keep afloat during these tough years when we were introduced to such cherished terms as “permalancer”. How did you cope? Did any unexpected positive experiences come out of your brush with the downturn? What steps did you take to keep yourself sharp and competitive when work was trickling in or at a standstill?

By the time I wrote this very post you’re now reading, one person had gotten back to me. And a CUNY J-School graduate no less. Her insight was troubling to say the least. But it did give me some ideas for a survey, which I may conduct on job-hunting and expectations for post-graduate school life.