What Do Social Media Workers Do

Matt Sunbulli Contributor Share on Twitter Matt Sunbulli is a co-founder and CEO of Fishbowl , a workplace social network bringing together professionals during the new era of remote work. With the arrival of U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, breaking up Big Tech has reemerged as a major policy discussion in Washington. The issue seems to be bipartisan, with Republicans and Democrats alike in favor of stemming monopolistic behavior in the tech industry. Of course, the situation on the ground is more nuanced. One month after the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance five bipartisan bills that would force Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google to split up or walk away from core businesses, Republican committee members introduced new legislation to give Americans legal recourse against online censorship by Big Tech companies. The more conservative-driven policy measures also ...

Now that we are more than half way through 2021 and COVID vaccines have been circulating for several months, the majority of Americans have been vaccinated or plan to be in the near future. Vaccine confidence is standing firm. However, there is still a small percentage that are staying hesitant. It’s important to enable vaccine confidence for everyone in order to create herd immunity.  Recent statistics show that 83% of social media users are vaccine confident; 92% of social media users believe the vaccines are safe; and 86% of social media users believe COVID vaccines are effective.  When it comes down to geography, race, and political affiliations we see that the likelihood of vaccination breaks down to 95% for the mainstream left, and 65% of the right; 90% for rural areas and 93% for urban areas; and 94% for Asian-American, 88% for African-American, 90% for Caucasian, and 93% for Hispanic.  Although those in the right wing political spectrum have the lowes...

Let’s face it: you probably spend more time with your smartphone than pretty much anyone in your life. It is likely and unfortunately one of the first things you see in the morning and one of the last things you see when you go to bed. That said, many of us have an impulse to always get the latest and greatest smartphone, but is this the wisest investment after all? Chances are, this is not the case. Let’s explore the phone repair economy. Smartphones over the last several years have been getting more reliable and have a longer replacement life. In 2019, the average American was replacing their phone after 33 months – this is a significant improvement over 23 months from 2016. In this same timeframe, smartphone prices have risen by 52%, quite a financial deterrent for many. Before considering replacing your phone, you might want to consider repairing the one that you have first. There are many services that can make quick work of fixing your existing phone quic...

Following its announcement late last month, Facebook’s new 128GB model of the Oculus Quest 2 is now available to buy. You can purchase the VR headset from the company’s website for the same $299 price as the previous 64GB base model. “Long story short? We’ve created this 128GB model so that players can easily store and access more games and apps on a single device,” Facebook says of the new variant. Facebook announced the 128GB model at the same time it issued a voluntary recall of the Quest 2 to address an issue with the original face insert that came with the headset. The company temporarily stopped selling the Quest 2 for about a month so that it could add a new silicone face cover inside the box of each new unit. If you’re a current Quest 2 owner, you can request Facebook send you the new silicone cover by visiting the My Devices section of the account settings. The new 128GB model also comes with the silicone cover inside the box. Editor’s note: This post originally app...

In addition to being the go-to online platform to post cat photos and express superficial opinions about popular social and political topics, Facebook can also be a powerful marketing tool. Due to frequent changes of Facebook’s advertising rules, marketers are sometimes confused which method to use in order to monetise their contacts. Standard tools like paid posts are very frequent on the network and many users are routinely ignoring them, forcing businesses to search for less spammy and more personalised approaches. At present time, Facebook sponsored messages are one of the most cost-effective engagement mechanisms available to businesses that want to advertise on the largest social media platform. Here is everything you need to know about this simple and innovative communication channel: How sponsored messages work? Sponsored messages are sent through Facebook Messenger, and are typically short promotional messages referring to a commercial Facebook page. They can c...

There are key ways for you to protect your brand on social media. There’s a pretty good likelihood that all your staff are on social networking sites, so you’ve got plenty of avenues to deal with. Your employees use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, so ensure that they are using them in a professional manner, with appropriate comments. Ensure that there’s no blatant promotion of your business or products here, or there’ll be a problem with complaints from customers. Here are 7 tips on  how to protect your brand on social media .  You need to reinforce these principles with everyone on your staff that uses social media. Don’t spam: A spamming investigation could land you in trouble with the social media giants, so it’s best not to do this. Don’t push your brands, products or services on the people who are likely to use them. This is one of the tips to protect your brand on social media. It’s not illegal, but it’s not a sma...

Just days after Elastic announced the acquisition of build.security, the company is making yet another security acquisition. As part of its second-quarter earnings announcement this afternoon, Elastic disclosed that it is acquiring Vancouver, Canada based security vendor CMD. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed. CMD ‘s technology provides runtime security for cloud infrastructure, helping organizations gain better visibility into processes that are running. The startup was founded in 2016 and has raised $21.6 million in funding to date. The company’s last round was a $15 million Series B that was announced in 2019, led by GV.   Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon told TechCrunch that his company will be welcoming the employees of CMD into his company, but did not disclose precisely how many would be coming over. CMD CEO and co-founder Santosh Krishan and his fellow co-founder Jake King will both be taking executive roles within Elastic. Both...

The U.K. government has named the person it wants to take over as its chief data protection watchdog, with sitting commissioner Elizabeth Denham overdue to vacate the post: The Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today said its preferred replacement is New Zealand’s privacy commissioner, John Edwards. Edwards, who has a legal background, has spent more than seven years heading up the Office of the Privacy Commissioner In New Zealand — in addition to other roles with public bodies in his home country. He is perhaps best known to the wider world for his verbose Twitter presence and for taking a public dislike to Facebook: In the wake of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal Edwards publicly announced that he was deleting his account with the social media company — accusing Facebook of not complying with the country’s privacy laws. An anti-Big-Tech stance aligns with the U.K. government’s agenda to tame the tech giants as it ...

Facebook is looking to create a standalone advisory committee for election-related policy decisions, according to a new report from The New York Times . The company has reportedly approached a number of policy experts and academics it is interested in recruiting for the group, which could give the company cover for some of its most consequential choices. The group, which the Times characterizes as a commission, would potentially be empowered to weigh in on issues like election misinformation and political advertising — two of Facebook’s biggest policy headaches. Facebook reportedly plans for the commission to be in place for the 2022 U.S. midterm elections and could announce its formation as soon as this fall. Facebook’s election commission could be modeled after the Oversight Board , the company’s first experiment in quasi-independent external decision making. The Oversight Board began reviewing cases in October of last year , but didn’t gear up in time to im...

It seems every year someone comes out with a new article saying that SEO died, is dying, or is six feet under. There are a few reasons for this, mainly centered around the way Google’s algorithm works. There are hundreds of search engines, but Google has managed to reign supreme through their general Google Search and their other specializations such as Google Images and Google Scholar. In 2019, Google products were used in 94 percent of searches. “It is no question that Google owns the market when it comes to internet queries,” says David Brenton, President of BluShark Digital, LLC . However, Google has made several changes to its algorithm over the years, leading some to claim SEO – or search engine optimization – is going the way of the dinosaur. Here are the facts and figures to get a better idea of why people think this (and why they are wrong). Why They Think SEO is Dying There are three main reasons people think SEO is dying, but first, let u...

Creating & Running a Successful Blog Blogging Creating and running a successful Blog is completely possible and even considered simple and easy for many. However, let’s ensure that one understands what a blog is and some of it’s background. With today’s innovative technology and the internet, blogging is very common and many even make a living fulltime from blogging. A blog is a website that is informational or sometimes it can be a discussion. The writing or post is typical informal or even diary style. Usually on a blog website the posts are displayed with the most recent first. Blogs can be individual or single-author which was very popular for a while(and still is), but now just as popular or even more popular are MABs which are multi-author blogs where there are more than one author and even edited professionally at times. It seems that MABs have cornered the market of newspapers, advocacy groups, think tanks, universities, etc… Blogs are mainly ...

Whether you’re selling online courses, kitchen appliances, or trivia games , getting noticed on social media can be a huge boon for your business. It’s not just about going viral — just amassing a loyal audience of a few thousand people is already enough to help signal boost both your current marketing efforts and the efforts associated with any new product you decide to launch. 1 – Target the right crowd Just like your marketing efforts in any other medium, your social media marketing campaign will work better if it is well-targeted. Trying to appeal to everyone will generally lead to you not quite appealing to anyone. So make sure you’re putting up posts and writing content with a specific target demographic in mind. Having a clear audience in mind will also help you find the groups where those users congregate, or which hashtags they use, depending on the platform you’re on. And while you don’t want to be that brand that floods hashtags with spam, making the occasio...