Identify the risks and benefits of engaging with a public audience in a media space. What are the risks for a public figure or person in a position of trust (educator, lawyer, government official)?
There are numerous benefits and risks to engaging with a public audience within the social media space. In the interview with Jody Vance, she pointed out the greatest benefit too engaging with a public audience is being able to build trust, openness, increase mutual understanding and reliability. Due to Covid-19 we have experienced how difficult it can be not being face to face. Creating trust with your followers can create opportunities for openness as well as professional opportunities. Having the reputation for being trustworthy will keep other users coming to check out your PLN for sources of information. An example is with the Global News Twitter Page. I trust this source and have even put notification settings on for this page to be notified when a new tweet is posted. Being trustworthy and reliable will build the public figures following base.
Risks that occur when engaging with a public audience in a media space is not being able to have a real in person connection, and look into the individual’s eyes. When it comes to social media, everything you put out there can be twisted and put into a negative view. Once your digital footprint is put out there, it can be very difficult to redeem yourself and build trust with your audience. Being a public figure brings many benefits, the user just needs to remember to stay true to themselves, and not make detrimental decisions that could ruin their career.
How to best address negative replies and critiques reflective of your personal values and employer social media policy?
Addressing negative reflectives of your personal life can be a very difficult task to do. Especially when individuals who don’t even know you, question your characters. In the interview with Jody Vance she states “prepare yourself for a degree of pushback”. Not everyone you come across in this lifetime, either in your professional or personal life is going to agree with you. Everyone has different perspectives, and will see things differently than you will. It is important to not dwell too much on the negative comment. Remembering that the person hiding behind the screen is more miserable than you are after you read their comment. The saying “kill them with kindness” is one of the most powerful tools that can be used to respond to negativity.
How do notable individuals use social media?
Individuals use social media for a variety of purposes. Hirst (2018) identifies 5 main uses for social media:
1. To trade gossip, videos, news, images, personal information. Individuals do this through using apps such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Email, Snapchat, etc.
2. To play online games/video games with other users around the globe
3. For professional use. Using platforms like LinkedIn and Zoom
4. For dating purposes. Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Plenty of Fish, and Grind’r
5.Lastly, to keep up with news networks. Watching live broadcasts, blog posts, reading news tweets, and live streams on Instagram, Tiktok and Youtube (p. 125)
Author Martin Hirst points out numerous reasons that individuals engage in the use of social media. Social Media allows people to connect to those not physically around them. It provides you with opportunities to facetime a loved one around the world, establish a romantic connection on a dating site, and it even allows you to shop online and get groceries delivered to your door.
What are the benefits of being in the public eye and having a PLN?
An additional benefit of being in the public eye that wasn’t stated above, is being able to have more networking opportunities. Being known by others provides you the opportunity to go out to more events, meetings, etc. This builds your connections, trust with others, and your own professional network.
Building community with online tools provided by the employer can be limiting, what are the perceived restrictions and benefits?
A restriction on using the online tool provided by an employer can limit conversations. Many online tools provided employers with the feature to read over the conversations happening between the workers. Not providing employees with a more secure and protected online tool can harm the business. As this can stop workers from not wanting to express all their creative and new ideas. A benefit to using the online tool provided by the employer is giving the workers a direct platform to communicate on. They don’t have to have numerous different conversations over text, emails, facebook messenger etc. Having this direct media space will keep things organized for both the employee and employer.
Delivering information in a connected society requires verifiable resources, how to build a PLN to rely on?
It is definitely important to build a PLN that people trust and come to for reliable information. As the user of the account you need to have a great reputation. This can be done through building your credibility and trustworthiness. These two aspects will not only build your following base but gain followers’ trust to share information with you, gain consistency in views /likes, and be talked about in a positive light.
How do those, who are veteran storytellers, minimize risk in sharing information?
Those who are veteran storytellers, can minimize risk in sharing information by making the story personal to them. If storytellers share information that fits in with their lives and tells their experiences, this can minimize the risk. It would be very awful for an individual to steal a veteran’s real story and claim it as their own. Since social media is widely used across the world, this has made it become more difficult for individuals to plagiarize. Social media users pay close attention to details and the word will spread quickly if you claim someone else’s work as your own.
I interacted with Liding Wang and Foster Laycraft’s blog post this week:
Liding’s Blog:
Foster’s Blog:
Work Cited
Hirst, Martin. Navigating Social Journalism. 1st ed., routledge, 2018, pp. 142-143
Miller, Jesse. (2021, June 6). Jody Vance – Media Voices. YouTube.
October 22, 2021 at 9:04 pm
Hey Kyla! Regarding what you said about the risks to social media usage, I definitely agree with you that it can be difficult to redeem yourself after receiving backlash on something you posted. I believe this goes hand in hand with cancel culture, which is very prevalent these days. Once a negative opinion is made on someone on social media, it is very difficult to change potentially thousands or millions of people’s opinions afterwards. This then leads to possible mental health issues which opens up another can of worms. Great post!
Caitlin
November 8, 2021 at 4:40 pm
Hi Caitlin!
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my blog post during this week! Great point on connecting backlash to cancel culture. This is defiantly a concept that has been extremely prevalent in today’s social media world!
October 27, 2021 at 4:56 pm
Hi Kyla, I liked that you took COVID-19 into account when talking about social media presence. A lot of people relied on social media during the pandemic because we weren’t able to meet face-to-face. Whether it’s through instagram lives or twitter interactions, people were engaging with public audiences even more during COVID, building trust and loyalty.
November 8, 2021 at 4:50 pm
Hi Tanvir!
Thank you for taking time out of your week to provide me with positive feedback on my blog! I totally agree with you that people relied even further on social media during the pandemic!