LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Fall 2010)

I chose to review the Social Media usage of Netflix. Netflix, Inc. is a for-profit company. It is the world’s largest subscription service for streaming movies and TV episodes over the Internet and sending DVDs by mail. I think Netflix is such an interesting company as it’s business model was enabled by the Internet, and in essence it is a virtual company, and if not a Web 2.0 company, at least it is a lasting result of the dot-com boom area. While the company has a physical presence in form of distributions centers and headquarters, the company’s customers “shop” and interact online.

I chose to cyberstalk Borders this week, as I worked there for 2 years as a supervisor before entering the SLIS program. 

I was at an Oakland A's game earlier this week and thought they would be fun to evaluate for this exercise.  If you go to their official website, they actually have a page called Social Media Clubhouse (it's not super easy to find on the front page, you need to click the "Fans" tab for the link to appear).  This page consolidates many of th

I was sitting at my local Caribou Coffee working on my assignments and enjoying a cup of coffee, one of my favorite things in the world. I was pondering which company to choose for this exercise when I looked around me and realized that the one I was sitting in seemed to be a logical choice. Caribou is the second largest coffee shop chain in the US after, of course, Starbucks. They have over 400 locations in 16 US states (plus DC) and locations in the Middle East and Asia. The company is based in Minnesota and opened its first store in 1992.

Weight Watchers International uses Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace to interact with the public and entice future members.  I used the following social media tools to gather my information:

SOCIAL MENTION
YELP
GOOGLE BLOG SEARCH
KEOTAG
BLOGPULSE
TWEETSCAN
BACKTYPE
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
MYSPACE
YOUTUBE

Social Mention presence

For this exercise, I chose National Public Radio (NPR), because I am an avid listener, but I haven’t ever explored their social media tools and just recently became a Facebook follower. I have to say, I am seriously impressed by NPR’s use of various social media.

After completing searches on Social Mention, Yelp, Google Blog Search and Tweetscan, I was able to get a good idea of what people are saying about 24 Hour Fitness. The reviews are mixed, and most of the complaints have to do with specific facilities, not the company as a whole. Social Mention shows that the sentiments toward this company are mostly neutral (607) with the positive (138) outweighing the negative (30). Most of the results on Google Blog search were related to promotional deals that the company offers.

The purpose of this assignment is to give you experience using social media monitoring tools and looking at an organization's overall use of social media. Choose a for-profit company that you're at least somewhat familiar with. It could be a clothing company, car company, software company, food manufacturer, etc. It might be interesting to choose a company that is currently embroiled in a PR issue to see how they are handling it.

Use some of the tools we discussed this week (or any you discover) to find out the following:

The goal of this exercise is to get you familiar with some of the great blogs that are out there for continuing professional development and get you thinking about the different types of blogs and blog posts. Once you're out of school, blogs are a great way to keep up with current trends in libraries and technology. There are literally tens of thousands of blogs that would be useful to librarians interested in technology, but obviously, no one has time to read that many.