Social Media/Web 2.0 Group discussion

Group Members: Sean Connor and Ben Thiefels

1) Professional production values will always increase. An example of this would be the multi-million dollar movie named Avatar. They used really high quality special effects. For regular movies on television, quality will most likely be lower being that you are watching a free broadcast. As technology advances, it becomes cheaper to manage higher quality productions. Some shows on TV use the "camera effect" which the scene is shot by an actual camera making it seem like there is no camera crew but instead one person shooting the whole scene. User generated content will most likely get better just because it is getting to be more available to the general population.

2) The news article we have found is titled "How to Get Costumers on Facebook and Twitter. The terms we have used to define this website are facebook, twitter, advertisement and communication. Finding this same article on http://delicious.com/, we have found out that there are similar tagging words that we described. The tagging words "facebook" and "twitter" are already used on delicious.com, mad "advertisement" and "communication" are similar to some of the words there. For example, if I were to describe advertisement in relation to the tag word used, I would say it is about marketing and the term marketing is used as a tag word there. Same thing with communication but instead it is tagged social. We think these words are important to describe this article because obviously the article is about facebook and twitter so we will use those key terms right away, also, facebook and twitter use a lot of advertisement. These advertisements are how these free websites make their money. Companies pay facebook and twitter for a website "space" so they can have their marketing place online in a social environment for many people to see and to maybe even persuade people to get or buy their product. We used the term communication because all in all, thats exactly what facebook and twitter are about. They are both social;l networking websites which allow you to "communicate" with friends, family, and others you personally know or even people around the globe.
Website: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100301/how-to-get-customers-on-facebook-and-twitter.html

3) Why is transparency such an important concept in the Social Media world? Is it MORE or LESS important in the offline world? Why?
For a lot of people, it is important to be transparent because it shows their true self. It allows them to be open and trustworthy. It seems like it is important for people who follow user-generated content. It is important for a business to be transparent because no one wants to follow a company and not see the true values of what they are doing. An example of a company not being transparent would be one in the subject of toxic "E-Waste". This company claims that they will recycle and re-use computer parts in the U.S. and do it in the cleanest way possible. They lose credibility because a crew of environmentalists wanted to see what was actually happening with these computers. They found out that these computers were delivered to China for cheap labor to get rid of these products. This company obviously isn't transparent to the public. Here is a link of the article: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/06/60minutes/main4579229.shtml