social media | Agent-X Comics

Facebook Haters Club

May 2, 2011 Agent X 3 Comments

It is no secret that there are many people out there that absolutely hate facebook.

In fact, FB has become the default website to blame for most of the wrongs on the internet. In someway or another, haters can track a relationship between facebook and pretty much any bad thing they happen to face.
Yep, facebook has taken over the title of “cause of the downfall of humankind”, which television used to hold.

So many people openly hate facebook, yet many of those same people use it all the time.
It is a weird, self-abusive kind of relationship that I personally do not understand.

It is true that information can be shared via facebook,which you may not want to have shared. Yet, the people complaining about this are the same people that put the info there in the first place.
If you don’t want the info online, then just simply DON”T PUT IT ONLINE.

Unfortunately, common sense seems to be turned off when a lot of people log-on to the internet, and this means that after they do something stupid online, they need someone to blame. So they turn to FB.

Many of the reasons that people hate facebook are silly little things that can, and should be, overlooked if you want to use facebook.
Getting angry & starting a group because you don’t like the font facebook is written in is ridiculous.
(Although, any groups asking for Friend suggestions to be stopped are totally OK with me. *LIKE*)
There are not just groups, but entire sites devoted to hating on FB, such as sickfacebook.com. These sites have top-notch articles on them, like “How Facebook makes you Dumb and Stupid“, “6 Advantages of Not Using Facebook” and “Facebook is Stupid”

I find it ironic that the articles on this site have a “Share to Facebook” link. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the site?

At least the Quit Facebook Day site had a clear objective to achieve. Granted, it failed miserably, but it let you know WHY it was asking you to leave facebook. Sites like SickFacebook are unclear in their aims and appear just to be against FB for the sake of it.

Overall, I am not personally anti-facebook, but there are things about it which annoy me.
However, I also realise that I need to understand that using FB is a choice I make, not a requirement to living.
And if I really find that I hate it, I can leave.
Or else, I can just go onto twitter and slag it off,like any other self respecting social-media user would do.

Social Mafia

April 10, 2011 Agent X No Comments

Who is in your social media ‘family’?

It is inevitable that anything humans create, that allow us to connect to other people or share information, will eventually be used for two things.
Porn is normally the first thing that new networks are used for. This internet is rife with it, after all.

And next comes criminal activity, which takes advantage of the ability to connect to people, in order to extend the numbers of people they can easily reach.
The level of the criminal activity varies, from full blown organised crime syndicates that can bilk people for thousands of dollars, to local thieves using Foursquare to find when victims homes are empty, and right down to cyber-bullying.

It almost seems inevitable that something which is created with the intention of being used for good, will somehow be used to promote negative behaviour.
We even have a category for people who perform all of their criminal behaviour online – Cyber Criminals.

Nothing on the internet, or mobile devices, is excluded from the reach of those that want to use technology to commit criminal acts.
Sometimes the people doing this may not even be aware that what they are doing is criminal.
Cyber-bullying, for example, is on the increase and it is only in the recent past that cyber-bullies have been charged for their actions.

Another very common activity that can be a criminal activity is peer-to-peer file sharing. (Of course, this really depends on what you are sharing, and with whom.) But the act of sharing files on line is so common now that many users do not stop to consider if they are breaching copyright laws.

Similarly, sharing and re-posting images that are found online, is an extremely common activity,which many people simply do not think twice about when they copy an image from a website.
There are users that will actually argue that images/art/comics/videos, become public property as soon as they are published online.
Therefore, taking them to use for your own purposes is totally fine and is actually what the creator intended.
This is, of course, just not true and often the theft of creative pieces can have a very detrimental effect on those creators.
Sometimes, it can even result in those creators never making anything again.

So next time you are going to repost a comic,video or photo, take a few seconds to include a link back to the creator of the piece.
You don’t have to buy their stuff unless you really like what they are doing. (But this DOES help them to make more of what you like)
As long as you at least show the location of where you found what you are re-posting, then that is all we can ask for.

So, please remember – Link back so there will more in the future.

Beauty of Social Media

March 20, 2011 Agent X 5 Comments

The best thing about social media is that most people still are not sure what it is all about.

Especially many businesses.
Sure, they know it has something to do with connect to their customers, but they are not precisely sure how best to do this.
Many believe the marketing department is the best part of their organisation to handle social media, as it is just another marketing medium, right?

The great thing for many “marketers” who now promote themselves as being experts in the field, is that they can claim this based on the flimsiest of reasons.
They claim to understand and be experts on this new medium, with reasons such as:

they migrated the company from a facebook group to a facebook page
they suggested adding “share to” links onto the company website
they have a personal blog that gets commented on at least once a month
they read the latest stats/graphs/demographic charts and can recite user specifics in a general sense
they once got the company facebook page over 200 likes in a week, by running an online competition

The truth (i.m.o.) is that the marketing department should stay away from social media in many cases. They are not always the right people for the job, and social media is not just a marketing medium.

Community managers should be employed to help mange your social media presence. These people are usually the ones with a much better understanding of the new landscape.
They can work in with marketing to help make a campaign more successful, but their most important task is to help keep your social media frontier moving forward, especially when marketing have forgotten it while they go off to prepare their next EDM strategy, or website promotion.

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