so this is mass communication?

Sixteen-year-old Zac Sunderland set sail two weeks ago, by himself, in hopes of becoming the youngest solo circumnavigator around the world. Don’t worry, he’s calling his mom about twice a day so he’s fine even if he is climbing all the way up the mast during crazy swells and letting the boat sail itself while he sleeps at night. 

He’s basically been raised deeply immersed in the sailing culture, having been brought ‘home’ from the hospital to his parent’s boat then spent many days underway with his family sailing to port after exotic port. 

Zac’s documenting his (hopefully) historic trip on his blog at http://www.zacsunderland.com/blog/. 

Here’s a video from a Ventura County Star photographer covering Zac’s story.


Teen Chases Dream from jen edney on Vimeo.
 

If you have a question for Zac, you can e-mail it to zacsworldadventure@yahoo.com. He’s answering questions in just about every post. 

When social media first started out, it was like the clouds parted & little digital angels started singing for me. I saw all the possibilities of reaching mass amounts of people in a much more personal way. I thought we could push the boundaries of para-social relations with celebrities really becoming our friends & companies having real voices. 

No doubt about it, I bought it.

Everything.

But I’m starting to feel like this viral world where everyone is sharing YouTube videos right & left or making cute little games where you turn yourself into an elf & sing songs has become polluted. 

We need a vaccine to protect us from viral marketing.

It’s mutated. 

And I think it’s going to get a whole lot of people sick on this whole social media craze all the kids are talking about. 

What do I mean?

To put it in one word: ethics. 

Oh! Try this one: responsibility. 

Not buzz enough for you? Okay: transparency. 

More companies are engaging in much more questionable social media campaigns then ever before. Like the big Target Rounders scandal my former student Rosie Siman broke last year and this ‘BMW launch across the Atlantic‘ mock-u-mentary. 

Indeed, it is the latter that got me all spun up this time. This video on CNN brings to light many issues which, quite frankly, damage the credibility of social media:

• Decreasing our ability to be media literate
• Creating an extensive ‘Blair Witch’-like backstory 
• Fake Facebook pages & accepting friends (who may not realize you’re fake in the first place)
• Creating a 30-minute long fake documentary
• Waiting for several weeks (after millions of views) to reveal you’re behind the project

Under the advice of many, I upgraded Wordpress. 

I really only did it to get this comment spam issue under control. Even with my new system of asking my users who want to comment to set up accounts, I still had spam out the whaazoo. See, apparently spammers are people too & they all created accounts for themselves. Then commented as usual. Great.

So. I now have some new fancy plug-ins installed to combat spam. 

I opened up comments again (non-registered users welcome to comment) & I need your help! Can you please comment on this post so that I can see how your REAL comment pops up in comparison to a dumb spammer comment? 

Spammers reading this out there - you are welcome to comment too. I don’t even know why I said that, you probably already have your dumb comment on the clipboard ready to paste into the comment box. 

Comment spam is taking over my blog.

You don’t see it because I have comments moderated. But when I log in to my blog & I have more than 8,000 comments waiting to be moderated — of which only ONE (yes, one) is a real comment — well, we have a problem.

I love your comments & don’t want to turn them off. I like that some posts really become a discussion.

So …. To combat this I’m switching around the way the blog handles comments to see if I can beat the spammers. I know this is going to be a pain for those of you who do like to comment, but it can’t be half as big of a pain as it is for me to wade through all the comment spam.

Here are the changes for commenting on this blog:

• people wishing to make comments must be registered users
• I’ll allow any real, non-spammy person (naughty or nice) to become a registered user
• you must be logged in to comment

I hope you still do comment on the blog - even with these road blocks.

And if you have suggestions for other ways to combat this problem, please register & leave a comment

In the time it took me to write this post (less than 5 minutes), I got 11 more spam comments.

Reading a blog by fellow social media researcher, Lois Schiedt, I ran into a call for respondents for a podcasting study. Funny enough - I attended the Oxford Internet Institute’s first ever summer doctoral programme with Kris, the researcher looking for podcasters.

In hoping I can help increase her number of respondents & some of you might qualify, please consider taking her survey of podcasters:

Hello Podcasters!

My name is Kris Markman and I am a researcher in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. You are invited to participate in a survey of independent podcasters. The goal of this research is to find out more about what you are doing and what has motivated you to become a podcaster. The survey is online and your responses are anonymous. By participating in this survey, you have a chance to help spread the word about podcasting and increase the visibility of independent podcasters to academics and the general public.

To find out more information about the survey and to participate, please go to https://umdrive.memphis.edu/kmmrkman/www/podcasting.html

You can find out more about me and my research at my home page:
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/kmmrkman/www

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at k.markman at memphis.edu

Thank you!
Kris M. Markman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
University of Memphis

Good luck to Kris on her study.

When I was an assistant professor at LSU, I had the pleasure of working and collaborating with Guy Golan. Guy & I joined our data sets from the 2004 presidential election (mine on blogs, his on tv broadcasts & spots), brought in agenda-setting mastermind Wayne Wanta, and this article was born. Many moons later it has seen itself into print:

Sweetser, K.D., & Golan, G.J., & Wanta, W. “Intermedia Agenda Setting in Television, Advertising, and Blogs During the 2004 Election.” Mass Communication & Society, 11 (2), 197-216.

ABSTRACT: This study examined whether the candidate-controlled public relations tools of political ads and candidate blogs were successful in influencing the issue and news agenda of the major television news networks during the 2004 presidential election. Data showed strong correlations between blogs and the media agenda. Advertisements did not correlate with the media agenda. Cross-lag analyses showed that the media set the candidates’ agenda. The authors suggest intermedia agenda setting occurred as the media transferred their agenda to campaign blogs.

Keywords: blog, advertising, television, spots, ads, political communication, campaign, election, political public relations, intermedia agenda setting

My univerisity doesn’t have access to the most current issues of the journal online so I can’t download the PDF. If someone out there can & would be willing to send me the PDF then I would greatly appreciate it! If/when I get a PDF, I’ll post it here & on my CV page.

The U.S. Navy announced a special social network targeted to service members on deployment.

Anyone reading this blog would probably agree that social media tools represent some of the best ways to stay connected when away from loved ones, whether it be through a blog post to broadcast to your family what you’re doing or a flickr upload of pictures from your latest adventures.

But these “travel-logues” for forward-deployed service members can just as easily be accessed by adversaries. That means information from these updates can be pieced together with other open-source intelligence to possibly hurt the very forces and causes these service members are protecting. It may seem as harmless as posting a pic, but what you’re really doing is broadcasting your unit’s exact location by showing the surroundings.

They used to say “loose lips sink ships.”

Today we have so many more lips moving in much more publicly broadcast ways that this can potentially be a real problem. My psychology colleague at UGA, Dr. Janet Frick, updated this concept a bit, keeping with the rhyming action:

Loose tweets sink fleets.

Cute, isn’t it?

But back to this social network the Navy announced.

The site offers families of deployed Sailors & Marines a personalized family Web site:

• hosted in a safe & secure environment
• includes 2 hours of streaming video
• unlimited photo albums
• interactive calendars and message boards
• contact list which is really an address book (great for knowing who to send postcards to!)
• used by more than 1,200 families now and is FREE for the family

Yep, acts much like a compilation of all the popular social networks out there.

Check out this sample demo site they have for the “Stuart Family.” Being a big fan of my own sister’s blog for her million kids in Kansas (wouldn’t you just love a link to that one!), I especially loved the little girl’s rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

As the release mentions, many of the social networking sites out there are blocked by military servers … so the Facebooks, MySpaces, YouTubes & Flickrs of the world are not an option for keeping in touch. With the restrictions on file sizes for e-mail, it is also hard to send good photos & nearly impossible to get video through.

This seems like a great service & I can tell you that nothing has a more positive impact than good communication with the homefront when deployed.

I’d be more interested to see their terms of service written in a less legal & more understandable way. Things that I’m not even sure about after reading their terms are whether the content uploaded is still owned by the families (not a company) & can also be posted on other sites by the family, whether there is a screening process to protect operational security, etc. One thing that does suck, which I found in the FAQ, is that the site apparetnly goes away for the family after 12 months. What happens to the family content, I’m not really sure.

But all in all, it seems like a great public-private collaboration helping keep families connected through deployments.

And heck, if you have a few bucks laying around, you might want to sponsor a family.

Disclosure for those who didn’t know: I am a commissioned Reserve public affairs officer in the U.S. Navy. Still, they don’t pay me enough to do their PR on my own time I wrote this of my own will without influence.