SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media



Social Media

Since consumer transactions on social media can occur across state lines, determine how the federal government can best control these transactions.

It has been recently reported that two thirds of the world's entire population has access to the internet and visits social networking or blogging sites regularly. One of the co-founders of Twitter recently claimed that one billion tweets are posted in the course of an ordinary week. Social media is everywhere and people are using it constantly. In the course of that use, they may be unwittingly supplying evidence, opinions, representations, documents, video and other permanent records that can be used against them in court proceedings, both civil and criminal.

In reality, social networking web sites have become huge databases of information that is reported and input by the very persons that it compiles it upon. About 70% of all Americans under the age of 30 have posted their personal profile on social networking web site, the vast majority of which are on Face book (Masood, 2006).

The Commercial Use by Merchants of Social Networking

Merchants are quickly learning to use social media as a subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, selling tool. Many industries now have dozens of social media networks set up just for their professionals to exchange ideas, collaborate, and actively discuss marketing and selling ideas. In addition, businesses are engaging in direct online marketing with consumers, making online and offline representations that may arise to the level of a warranty in addition to running skirting if not outright running afoul of CSPA and OAC prohibitions. For instance, car dealers have created dealer Facebook pages, they are blogging, they are on Twitter, they have hired professionals to plan and launch social media campaigns, YouTube marketing finds dealers setting up their own “channels” - many are nothing more than commercials ported over to the internet while many are also fine-tuned to appeal to the internet audience, either as a whole or with specific demographics in mind. With marketing in mind, many businesses are using social media for fundamentally two purposes - to engage in conversation with consumers and to get their advertising message out. They seem to be doing it in two ways also. First, to push the selling-right-now message and, second, to establish a longer range presence of availability. In either event, the fundamental goal of all business social media activity is to generate more storefront business (Parry, 2005).

Every once in awhile the marketer tosses in a link or “soft” sales message and spices it up with opinions to provoke interaction. Twitter is a different game. Since each post is very limited (just 140 characters maximum), marketers seem to be using Twitter differently indeed. With Twitter the goal is to either find a conversation or to start one. To find an ongoing conversation the marketer often does a search for a conversation that they can enter - such as a search for a keyword, such as a product name like “Corvette” or an activity ...