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Ethics is a highly important part of social media, in order to build sufficient and trusting relationships between brands and their clients, ethical issues must be addressed.

There are no laws as of yet with who owns what in the social media cyberspace, but this is becoming an increasingly important issue, that the government must act on. I have chosen to focus on The Body Shop as they are renowned for their feelings towards ethics with their products, and I was interested to see if they had the same feelings towards this with social media. Through doing a quick search on Twitter, I was able to find their UK Twitter page. It is clear to see that their Twitter page is being used to communicate their products with customers, but it is also being used to promote its ethical feelings too, with their last tweet focusing on Earth Hour. Twitter is increasingly being used by companies as a “way of staying connected, especially with the use of apps and mobile technology” (Krishnamurthy, Gill and Arlitt 2008).

Realising their ethical focus within social media, I decided to look at their website, and find out what their feelings were on the ethical issues of data mining and dataveillance. Their privacy policy has a specific section relating to matters on the internet; here they openly say that their website uses cookies however you can choose to decline cookies, however having had a play around on the website, it is not straightforward and easy to do this.

Public Sphere

The public sphere is a place for people to express the views and opinions, and the internet carves a path in order for people to be able to do this. However how easy is it really? We live in a country with freedom of speech, but many countries around the world are unable to freely express themselves as they wish, with governments able to oppress any opinions that they do not agree with.

Take Iran for example; in 2009 the government blocked any access to facebook, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/24/facebook-banned-iran . Should the government really be allowed to do this? The internet opens up many doors for people to find others that share their views with; Habermas describes the public sphere as “bourgeois” (1962), although the concept of the public sphere does not take into account the masses, and only applies to the elitists.

The public sphere can be incredibly useful though, it helped to arrange the student protests of November 2010; http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2010/nov/10/demo-2010-student-protests-live. Before the internet big protests would have taken a lot longer to organise and nowhere near as many people would have been able to have access to the information and arrange their own ways there. There was a lot of negative press coverage from these protests unfortunately, and again the public sphere was there for people to voice their concerns over the “youth of today”.

Whether the public sphere has a positive or negative impact on society is left to be seen, but it is a place for people to share their thoughts with like – minded individuals.

Addicted to eBay?

This weeks’ lecture was on eBay; I found it very interesting. The part that I found of particular interest to me was how everyday people are becoming addicted to eBay and bidding/purchasing things that they do not originally have the desire or intent to buy.

EBay creates or as Denegri-Knott (2011) states it “ignites the desire. It can trigger dormant, unfulfilled wishes”. She says later that this can sometimes be related back to a toy that was wanted or was had as a child.

The next step that is mentioned is the acceleration of desire, and this is through three key things. Firstly is; quick acquisition of items. It is very easy and simple to find certain things on eBay. Secondly is the removal of moral consequences, and finally temporary ownership of digital virtual representations. E.g. the possibility of owning a pink stretch limo.

3^rd stage of the cycle is re-igniting desire; which is the realisation that that there are new objects. E.g. Linda buying the Sindy house but then discovering there is a horse and swimming pool too.

The final stage of the cycle is exiting desire. Sometimes the desire can be fed quickly and then the desire can be fed quickly and then the desire is no longer there, however it also depends on the persons’ nature as to whether they will become addicted to the eBay world.

SEO and Google AdWords

This week’s lecture I found to be a fairly dry subject consisting of, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and Search Engine Optimization.

In 2006, advertisers spent US$9.4bn on search engines, in North America alone, and with this amount of money being poured into it, search engines are an important strategic tool for many organisations in directing traffic to a particular company’s website, however it is still a relatively new phenomenon.

The definition of search engine marketing is “a form of marketing on the Internet that business and organisations seek to gain visibility on SERPs through paid of non-paid means” (Moran and Hunt 2005 cited Pan et al 2010, p8).

According to Pan et al., (2010), in 2008, Google was the search engine of choice with 63% of people using it, with 73% of users only scrolling down the first page. This is why it is more beneficial for the companies to pay Google to become a “sponsored link”; this way they are in the premium location for the people searching Google, and therefore they are more likely to be clicked on.

We also looked at the use of short tail and long tail keywords, and what is more effective in natural searching. The longer the tail searches, the easier it is to rank, and this is a much easier way of getting people to visit a company’s particular website.

Searching for “Benefit Cosmetics” on Google, this is a short tail search, and the first listing in Google was in the pink highlighted box, and so it is clear that Benefit has paid to be a sponsored link; with the hope that more people will visit their website.