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  Poppi is a prebiotic soda that is reinventing soda. With only 5grams of sugar, poppi is taking over. The Instagram handle is @drinkpoppi and they are constantly posting. With just today having 2 posts, they reach audiences of people. They include pop culture references in their posts and very bright/vibrant colors to attract others. None of their social media posts are ever dark and gloomy.  When we think of social media, we want active posts, beautiful colors and images that speak to us. That is what poppi is all about on their social media pages. They attract a certain audience of individuals who would/have bought this product. Their posts are connected to a larger theme of bright colors.  Their strategy seems simple. Their photos are all connected to poppi, soda and colors that are vibrant. Their main goals seem to attract people to poppi and away from soda as we know it. They want individuals to try their products and taste the difference!  Back in August when ...

 I am someone who has a keen interest in the arts, particularly in the field of motion pictures. In the house I live in, there is a collection of hundreds of pictures and movies on DVD/Blu-Ray/4K UHD. Upwards of 80 of these titles over the years is published by the Criterion Collection, a physical media and streaming service firm owned by Janus Films (and in turn owned by Steven Rales and his film financing company Indian Paintbrush) that started in the days of Laserdisc in 1984. The purpose is to finance the restoration of older and select newer films to pristine conditions, often with an emphasis on singular titles from well-established filmmakers and present these restorations to the public by either a Blu-Ray/4K release or on the Criterion Channel, which is their streaming service. A physical media release usually includes supporting material in both visual and written formats going into many details about the movie.  There has been a continued presence from Criterion/Janu...

  One organization I tend to follow quite closely on social media is that of horror centered magazine Fangoria. Since I am quite familiar with this brand and have followed it on social media apps like Instagram I have a pretty good idea of their content strategy. One tool Instagram has that the Fangoria account takes advantage of is the ability to pin posts. Pinned posts will appear at the top of a user's Instagram page when you view their account, this makes the pinned posts one of the first things you see on the users page. Instagram allows you to pin up to three posts this way. Fangoria always has its first pinned post advertising the most recent issue of their magazine. Featured in this post is a picture of the most recent issues covered with the description highlighting some of the articles one will find in that issue. This helps bring attention to the magazines, one of the company's primary income streams. The second pinned post is currently advertising Fangoria’s yearly ...

Inside Walter's Hotdog's Instagram: Patterns and Strategy Zoe Manalo, Post #4 After going through this week's content I wanted to focus on a company's social media presence. For this I chose Walter's Hotdogs which is famously known in Westchester. While scrolling through Walter's Instagram feed it's clear that it's more than food. There's an intentional curve to their content, a mix of mouthwatering visuals, community engagement, and brand storytelling that builds appetite and brand love. To me, this matches the structured approach Luttrell (2019) lays out in Social Media: How to Engage, Share, and Connect specifically in Chapter 4. Luttrell emphasizes identifying goals, knowing your audience and maintaining branding which Walter's Hotdog's clearly follows. There are visual themes that pop up which draws the users in. Detailed shots of sauces, toppings, hotdogs. They post lifestyle and behind the scenes glimpses. With cooks grilling, staff pr...

[ source of image ] Marketing strategies have been on my mind a lot lately. At work, my union is currently in the process of negotiating our union contract with my employer. It is not going well. My employer has proposed an offer that is less than what we had in our previous contract and is refusing to negotiate further. Our union delegates are seeing very little participation from the members when it comes to calls for testimonials and attendance at the negotiation meetings and they are, understandably, blaming this abysmal contract on the lack of membership participation.  I do see where the delegates are coming from, but I also see that they have failed to successfully market the union and contract negotiations. To their credit, they are doing better than they did before; they set up a Whatsapp group chat for all the members! That chat never existed before, and it definitely helped with communication. However, it wasn’t enough. Where I believe my delegates went wrong, was expec...

  Social media has proved itself to be a powerful tool for corporations and brands to advertise themselves and make them a part of our everyday life. Social media is clearly very effective in this regard, but are there any other ways in which social media is used to help advertise other products? Absolutely,  social media is a fantastic tool for advertising, especially horror movies. A successful example of this is with the recent horror film from earlier this year Weapons directed by Zach Cregger. For the purpose of familiarity I will focus on Weapons marketing primarily in relation to social media platform Instagram. The marketing began on April 14th of this year with the posting of five separate images with the caption “And they never came back…” The first of these images was a digital clock with the time 2:17. The second was a grainy photo of an open front door. The third was another grain photo of a group of kids who appear to be part of a baseball team along with their...

 These days, many of our interactions with online applications are almost entirely in the hands of the dozens of social media platforms. Rather than take the time to go through a specific website, many people will just key in what they are looking for through their preferred apps. On one hand it can be engaging when interactivity is plentiful among posters and the public. Having said that, there are limitations.  School district presence is a bit checkered overall. Since I now have a niece and my oldest nephew in pre-kindergarten, I am often curious as to how their schools and apps like Facebook and Instagram will be updated with newer information and announcements. In my case, I have been looking at the social media accounts of the Farmingdale School District. To their credit, in particular with their Facebook accounts, FSD has regular updates and posts about events going on around the district. Often, the account will highlight a number of teachers who are doing exceptionall...

  Users of the World, Unite! What Kaplan & Haenlein Teach Us About Social Media Zoe Manalo (Post #3) For this week I wanted to focus on one of the readings. When we think of social media today, it may feel like it's been around for awhile. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and the list goes on. But back in 2010, Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein published an articled titled Users of the World, Unite! that helped define what social media is and why it matters. Now it's 2025 and their article still shapes how we think about online platforms.  Kaplan and Haenlein described social media as a group of Interned based applications built on the Web 2.0., where users create and share information. They don't just consume what they come across. This shift from doom scrolling, or passive to active participation is what makes social media a tool. Kaplan and Haenlein broke social media into six categories: collaborative projects, blogs and microblog, content communities, social network...

  Something that got me thinking this week was the “organizational risks” that companies face when they launch their brand on social media. Among the risks in question are the amplification of negative publicity and audience backlash. The concept of these risks is not novel—companies have always been subject to customer feedback whether they wanted it or not—what’s new about social media is the scale at which these risks now exist.  When the video of a passenger being violently removed from an United flight went viral, United’s stock dropped by $1.4 billion in market value. When Balenciaga’s problematic ad showing children holding bondage-gear-wearing teddy bears received public backlash, Balenciaga lost about 100,000 Instagram followers. When H&M posted an ad featuring a young Black boy wearing a hoodie with "Coolest Monkey in the Jungle" printed on it, their sales dropped significantly and some stores in South Africa saw demonstrations that trashed their locations ( sou...

  Stony Brook University has very unique social media platforms. The one I engage with the most is Instagram. They often post about school happenings, involvement around the school and their mascot, Wolfie. They post their students, staff and the gorgeous grounds of the University. There are several things I think they do best on Social Media. One being they involve students in their posts, real life students walking around campus, at events or in the classroom. Having people see this brings awareness that they actually care about the students attending. Next is they sometimes post throwback pictures. This is pretty interesting to see because you can see how much has changed since then. Something I think they can do better? Post more pictures taken by students of the campus or at an event. If they do this then students can see a different point of view instead of a front row seat at a football game. I attended Stony Brook University for my Undergrad in English. Their social media i...

  Monetization  on YouTube began in 2007 with the YouTube Partners Program, allowing anyone with a certain number of subscribers to make money by posting videos on the site. This would forever change how people interact with the social media site. As the YouTube landscape continued to change over the years monetization would remain in one form or another. As certain kinds of videos waxed and waned in popularity what was being made on the site would also change.  The ways in which people would seek monetization would change, in fact the very act of seeking monetization in of itself is a change. Another change is that now creators on YouTube who want to make the most of their monetization on the site do so by seeking out a higher view count on their videos. Prioritizing monetization on YouTube means  playing to the social media sites algorithm to maximize their viewership. This mentality will forever make the site different from the days before the YouTube Partners Pro...

  Social Media + Advertisements Everything in today's world is ad-free this or ad-free that, what happened to being on social networks ad-free? As we see everyday on our social media platforms, advertisements are everywhere. Scrolling on Instagram? Ads pop up. Scrolling on Facebook? Ads pop up. TikTok? YouTube? X? Advertisements. A basic definition for advertisements can be summarized as a public notice for others to see their products or what they are trying to sell you. Companies pay big money to social media platforms for their advertisements to be published. Is it annoying to some but helpful to others? Yes. The plus side for ads is you can find a product you have never heard of and try it out. This has happened to me a few times while I was scrolling on Instagram. But when is it too much? Sometimes when we research on Google or some other platform, an ad will pop up later for that same item you were researching. Companies take your data and try to post advertisements for what ...

 YouTube and Monetization   Zoe Manalo, Post 2 What does your YouTube page look like? Is it 5 am get ready with me vlogs? Funny cat videos? Like most social media platforms, it's not just a place to watch and share videos. You can earn money on these platforms. YouTube gets its money through advertising. Those ads you can't skip before and during the best part of the video goes to a creator. Influences and creators joined the YouTube Partner Program which means they can turn ads into revenue. The more views and subscribers, the more chances for ad money. However, monetization is not just ads. There are opportunities to let fans join a membership for exclusive content. Content creators can sponsor companies or products in their videos with affiliated links. But, a question or problem that arises from this is that not all ads are good ads. Some can be harmful to others. YouTube also takes a cut from the ads which could cause emotional tension for creators who love what they...

One of the biggest concerns amongst library professionals is mis- and disinformation, but did you know that the rest of the world is also freaking out about it? I’ve just read the most fascinating article from the World Economic Forum which, amongst other things, shares the results from the 2025 Global Risks Report, one that lists misinformation and disinformation as the most severe short-term global risk: Why are we talking about misinformation on a social media blog? Because platforms are notorious for spreading misinformation like wildfire. Monetization models based on selling user data to advertisers (so... the way that the most popular social media platforms make money) create financial incentives for platforms to design the algorithms to be more addicting. The longer we are scrolling, the more data they have to sell. And the more shocking or emotionally charged content is, the more users stay engaged… and what is more shocking or emotional than false information? This wouldn’t b...

 In the past week, a fair amount of attention has been given to the rise over the last 15 years of social media. In particular, the rise of young people using social media has allowed for their lives to be as if they were open books; a day-by-day account of their beliefs, comings and goings, and what they are watching or listening to. The literature and video lectures I saw from Dr. Jose van Dijck in 2013 and Dr. Danah Boyd in 2014 is both timely and yet seem to come from a different time. Perhaps it is due to the growing prevalence of social media as political outlet, which back a decade ago was part of the spectrum of ideas yet not the only spectrum. One could even say that social media has come of age in the past 5 years, since the pandemic and its aftermath. I take a look at many of these sites and applications, and I begin to notice some patterns that come about.  Facebook: This is one app that I use every so often. It is more an outlet for personal looks into family life...

 There are many forms of blogging especially in today's social media world. What started as the world wide web in 1991 turned into many other social media pages to be created. If we truly think about it, all of these social media platforms are different ways of blogging. X  (Twitter) is short blog posts, Facebook is daily updates blogging, Instagram is picture blogging and Zoom is video blogging. That is basically all that these social medias are about. Sharing news, updates in our lives or telling the world news. This world of social media has completely turned our online resources around. The problem is we cannot believe everything we read on the internet, especially with social media platforms. There are many outside sources or fake news that can spread very fast. Fact checking is a new thing now on Facebook. It says that this page was fact checked. But was it really? Social media is widely becoming a major tool in our lives. This does not mean it should consume us. In a wo...

  In the first chapter of his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations , Clay Shirky recounts the story of a lost Sidekick cell phone. In this story a woman, Ivanna, loses her phone in a cab and it’s found by a 16 year old girl, Sasha, who refuses to return the phone. Eventually, with the help of the internet's outcry,  Sasha is arrested and the phone is returned to Ivanna. Charges were never pressed on Sasha, but in the eyes of the internet, justice is served. This form of “Internet Justice” has always fascinated me and it is quite common especially in places like Reddit and 4Chan. Whether or not this form of “justice” is actually just, is almost completely inconsequential to the unnuanced mind of the internet. For this reason when I use the term “Internet Justice” this comes with zero moral judgment of any of the parties involved in these  sorts of scenarios. Many of the users of these two aforementioned social media sites are obsessed w...

Zoe Manalo Post 1 Instagram: Trends, News, and Ethics Trends on Instagram Do you remember the days when Instagram had those retro, nostalgic, older filters on Instagram? The heavy vignetting, heavy contrast and color saturation? We would just post pictures and comment, connecting with friends and family. Now it's all about Reels, keeping up with the micro-trend of the week, finding the best trendy audios. While Instagram is for fun, it's also where news around the world gets shared. Instead of watching the nightly news, we could scroll through carousel posts or follow journalists who give us quick facts in under a minute. The positive of this is that news feels accessible, but the negative is that misinformation can spread fast. This makes us question if we should repost that informative post before we double check the source? What about reposting someone else's posts without asking? There are ethical gray areas with social media. Another factor that makes me curious is the...

Danah Boyd’s talk, “It’s Complicated” left me with so many interesting thoughts this week. I think what was particularly fascinating is that this video was posted to YouTube in 2014, more than a decade ago, and a lot of the trends she mentions are trends that reflect my reality (because I was amongst the age group she was studying at the time) but also seem to reflect the reality of today's teenagers.  Boyd’s talk explored a few different outlets when discussing networked publics, but the one that stood out to me was when she touched on surveillance. Millennials and Gen Z grew up in a world where everything they did online was under heavy scrutiny and judgement by their peers and parents, and anything could be screenshotted, distributed, and saved for later. I’ve always heard this discussed mainly with regards to the fact that these generations are not taking as many risks when it comes to dating (since the social consequences for failure are so severe), but I loved how Boyd looked...