Yelp Reviews

 Like many people, I’m not a stranger to Yelp. If you’ve been active in the social media sphere for any amount of time, it’s hard not to know about it. As a service, it combines the two things that brings people together online: buying products and leaving bad reviews. Sure, Yelp is a good idea in theory--it’s important to give the customer a voice, and it’s nice when someone gives your business four stars or whatever rating system it has (last time I checked, they were using stars as a unit of measurement--I have no idea if they still do). Problem is, a lot of users don’t leave positive reviews on Yelp for whatever reason. It makes sense, in a way--businesses are supposed to run smoothly, so if I’m at King Kullen and have an average shopping experience there, it doesn’t motivate me to go online and write something like “yeah, it was alright.” If a cashier is rude to me or I see rats running around in the meat aisle, you can bet that I’ll suddenly be motivated to sit down and furiously type out an angry Yelp review.

This can be a problem, though--if people are only motivated to leave negative Yelp reviews, how can they be motivated to leave positive Yelp reviews? I’ve thought about this, and it seems like an unsolvable dilemma. Yeah, you can bribe people to give positive reviews by sending them free perks and gifts, but people see through that kind of stuff all the time. You can try giving your customers a magical experience at your shop, but that’s pretty unrealistic. Besides that, sometimes the problem isn’t the shop or business itself--the customer isn’t always right, after all--so how can you fix something that you have no control over? It’s an issue that doesn’t have an easy solution, and if there is one, it’s probably entirely out of our control.

Using Social Media To Connect to Missing Users

     The library I work at is lovely, but we have a major problem. We have a LARGE gap in our user group base. We have families and children that come visit the library, and we have a large adult/senior population. But we are failing to reach and serve the teen/young adult community. One of the reasons that I feel we have such a gap is the type of services we offer and the way that we are marketing these services. 

    We tend to focus on programs for the more responsive users that we currently have, and have not really used any social media outlets to share our services. Prior to my investigation, we have relied on an OUTDATED website, the town newspaper and fliers on our bulletin board. No Facebook events, or Instagram posts. Now that I have come into a position where I have more control on what goes on in the library, I am hoping that incorporating the use of social media and increasing our presence may broaden our reach. We are even talking about *attempting* to make a TikTok account! It is difficult with a smaller library (we have 12 staff members) and two of us are under the age of 65. But steps are being made to expand the way that we share information with patrons.

Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace has been a feature of the popular social networking site since 2016. With the ability to buy, sell, and advertise items and services both to people local to you as well as anyone within shipping distance, this flexible service provides easy to use e-commerce tools for people selling just a few items or to businesses selling goods and services online either exclusively or in support of in-person commerce.

As Facebook itself was originally about person-to-person connections within a shared collegiate community, it seems fitting that the expansion to Facebook Marketplace allows for individuals to sell items to one another one to one. Similar to the For Sale section of a local Craigslist page, users can create sales that are intended to be conducted in person and simply facilitated or advertised by Facebook. These sales work well for items that are not easily shipped -- oversized items such as furniture and cars; delicate items such as dried flowers or glassware; items of primarily local interest such as resale of a gift certificate to a local restaurant, to name a few examples. They also work well for advertising services that cannot be shipped -- DJ services for weddings, landscaping services, and the like. There is even a category for listing apartments and real estate for rent or sale. Additionally, some sellers do not want to be bothered with trying to ship something even if it is feasible and are willing to limit their market to anyone local enough to bother to drive to their arranged meeting location in exchange for less work involved in the sale.

Items can also be listed as available for shipping. This opens up a much larger pool of potential buyers for these items, and even with the extra work involved in having to ship the item to the buyer, can still be worth it. These can be one-off items, such as the resale of clothing items or decor items, or can be used as an e-commerce advertising option for a business. Additionally, listings do not have to be exclusively for local pickup or shipped; sellers can make both available to buyers, ensuring maximum reach to potential buyers. This means that things that have a more limited pool of potential buyers, such as reselling wedding dresses, have a much better chance of being sold. People running small businesses can also expand their potential market reach by putting up listings on Facebook Marketplace. With minimal costs to list and the ability to link to their business page for interested potential buyers, Facebook Marketplace allows these small businesses to inexpensively advertise their services to new people, including those who may accidentally stumble upon their services through simple browsing activities or from a search for a related service.

Facebook Marketplace is a popular addition to the already expansive umbrella of services under the Facebook name. With the ability to shop and sell unneeded items or even to promote your business, it is no wonder why so many people choose to use this tool.

My Favorite ARG

ARGs—or Alternate Reality Games—are interactive “games” or events that cross different types of media for the players to use, investigate, and ultimately “solve.” It’s kind of like a puzzle that you and dozens of other people are trying to solve at the same time. The other players are both your competition and your allies as you try to unravel the ARG. A lot of times, there’s a sort of mystery at the center, and you’re following clues to find whatever it’s leading you towards. It’s kind of like a treasure map, which I think is funny when you remember that ARG is both what the game is called and a famous pirate exclamation.

 

My favorite example of an ARG is one I didn’t participate in but kept loose tabs on. In the summer of 2016, a kid’s cartoon called “Gravity Falls” had its series finale. Gravity Falls was a supernatural mystery show set in the Pacific Northwest absolutely riddled with codes and cyphers, and at the very end, the bad guy (an evil magic triangle named “Bill Cipher”) got turned into a statue and left in a forest. One of the final shots was an actual, very large statue of the bad guy in a real forest. Soon after, the creator of the show announced a “treasure hunt” to find the real-life statue, with the promise of some real “treasure” to those who found it. There were thirteen clues hidden around the world that led to the next clue. It’s worth noting that while Gravity Falls was a kids’ cartoon, the mysterious nature of the show had broad appeal and had a large adult fan-base.

 

The hunt started in late July of 2016. I won’t go into too much detail, but the clues were in cyphers and themed after the show. Most clues had some form of writing or were items with writing on them. Invisible ink was involved. One was even a two thousand puzzle pieces with the phrase “I hope you like puzzles” written in code included on a separate piece of paper. The first clue was in a Russian cathedral, the second in a shrine in Japan, then one in the American state of Georgia, then Rhode Island, and then after that the rest of the clues were up and down the west coast several times over. All the clues were shared online after being discovered and deciphered so that anyone could participate. To my knowledge some people really did travel back and forth to clues once they started popping up on the west coast and were somewhat near each other.

 

The hunt ended when players found the statue and hidden treasure in early August of that year. Some players found the statue and tweeted out pictures of it, half buried in the woods of Oregon where the show took place, while another group dug up the buried treasure, which included Russian and Japanese money, some plastic coins and gems, a blacklight used to find invisible ink, a plastic crown and sash and a lot of memorabilia from the show, including another (though, much smaller) statue of the bad guy. The statue was left where it was found to commemorate the show and the treasure hunt, while the players who found the treasure chest got to keep it’s contents.

Libraries and Video Games

    There were two types of people early in the pandemic, ones who were able to purchase gaming consoles and ones who could not. It is an absolutely trivial aspect of the times, but was a big deal for some trying to purchase consoles like the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch Lite. These devices, due to production shortages as well as astronomical demand, were extremely hard to come by. With children and adults stuck inside, some turned to video games to pass the time and entertain themselves. 

    Oh how I wish I had access to our means of promotion at this time last year... Our library has video game consoles and games that can be checked out, but many patrons are unaware of this service! Video games are a great way for people to interact, and many times have aspects of social media intertwined in their use. 

    In March of 2020 when the pandemic first hit the United States hard and the shut down began, a highly anticipated video game newly rereleased for the switch came out: Animal Crossing. I was obsessed and played for hours at a time. I joined Facebook groups where other users across the country would visit each others islands, trade goods and tips. 

   Hindsight is 20/20, but oh how I wish that the library worked to organize a video game "club" of sorts during the pandemic. Even a platform where patrons could borrow games and talk about them with other patrons. The combination of a fun interactive game and talking to other people about their experiences with the game was fun and therapeutic. We have recently purchased 5 Switch games as well as a few consoles, and I think that creating a video game club would be a really fun program for all ages. Either in person or on a social media platform, the interactions and discussions would be fun for all. 

Social TV

 (I accidentally mixed up the topics for this learning unit, so I’m just going to blog about what I should’ve blogged about last week).

Social TV is something that I theoretically “get” as a concept, but also don’t get at the same time. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fuddy-duddy who’s not “with it” when it comes to technology? On the one hand, I can see the appeal if you, as the viewer, are able to interact with other people while watching the program, such as joining a streaming site that allows you to watch a show alongside your online friends; in that way, you’re able to recreate the experience of watching a show with your friends. However, what if the site you use doesn’t allow that sort of interactivity? If that’s the case, why bother even using it at all, seeing as it takes the “social” out of “social TV?” In my opinion, it’s a concept that’s at its best when it gives users a way to interact with each other.

New Feature Alert! Auto-Captioning on TikTok

The social networking app TikTok announced a new feature today that will make strides forwards towards accessibility and inclusivity on the platform: an autocaptioning feature for videos, as reported on the tech website Gizmodo as well as others. Creators can now choose to have their videos autocaptioned by the app using a captioning algorithm, either when creating the video or after it has posted -- a great boon for creators who want to make their back catalog of content also accessible. Creators will also have the option to make small edits to the captions easily on the site, a helpful feature particularly for things such as as proper nouns or slang, which the captioning algorithm might not have in its library of knowledge. Creators can also choose to turn off the feature in the app's settings. Captioning is only initially available in American English and Japanese, but Gizmodo writer Shoshana Wodinsky notes that the company plans to add additional languages in "the coming months."

The press release from TikTok itself highlighted a few other changes they were making to promote accessibility within their app. Additional changes to the app up until this point have included making thumbnails animated instead of static images; a warning that pops up to notify creators if they are making a video with effects that might trigger photosensitive epilepsy in their viewers; a setting that allows a viewer to skip content that has been identified as containing photosensitive effects, which is important for people with photosensitive epilepsy; and a text-to-speech feature that converts written text into an audio effect.

Before this change, users were able to manually add text and captions to their videos. This was somewhat tedious, as they would need to place each text box and type in the text throughout the video, but it did give them the option to make their videos more accessible. This Distractify tutorial on how to manually add captions notes that videos with captions are more likely to go viral, which is an incentive for some creators to go that extra step. For those who wanted accessibility (or just a chance at having their video go viral,) there are some companies such as Rev.com or third-party apps such as CaptionExpert that would caption videos for them, usually for a fee.

I think this is a fantastic addition to the app. By making it so that inclusive, accessible content is easier to produce and publish, it will hopefully become the norm within the culture of TikTok to make accessible content. There are many reasons why someone might prefer captions on the TikToks they watch -- they may be deaf or hard of hearing, they may have an auditory processing disorder, they might be watching videos somewhere where it is noisy or where it would be rude or inappropriate to have audio playing, just to name a few -- and this change makes it so that so much more of the content on the app can be available to them.