#HarryPotter and a New Dove Study

While watching the Harry Potter marathon on ABC Family Friday afternoon through Saturday night, I couldn't help but notice the words "#HarryPotter" in the top left corner during all of the movies. (Yes, I watched all of the movies this weekend that were on ABC Family...) When I saw the hashtag, it drew me to Twitter to look up what people would actually tweet about while watching the movie marathon. There were a ton of tweets! Some people were bashing the HP series, and others were sharing their love for the series. HP was a part of my childhood, and fans can now share the love on Twitter with people who are watching the same movies. This is just another cool way that social media is bringing all of us together when we sit in front of multiple screens.

Now on to some real social media news...

According to this article on Mashable, Dove recently conducted a study and discovered that 82% of women believe that social media is influencing how we define beauty. This is crazy, but I believe this number! We have stopped letting magazines tell us what beauty looks like, and women are taking control of their definition of beauty. Our friends our showing us what beauty, and the media on television is telling us less!

Take a few minutes to watch this video.

We see so many different definitions of beauty on social media, and we are able to see more natural, attainable beauty in our friends. No one else can tell us what it means to be beautiful especially when there are fewer magazines read that tell young girls how to dress and look. We are no longer seeing that you have to be a size 0 to be happy, but we are seeing the untouched pictures of our beautiful friends. Sure, we are still hearing one thing from our mothers who grew up seeing a different image of beauty in a magazine, but women on social media are hearing a different story about beauty online. We are all beautiful and can post that selfie for everyone to see!

It's time for women to determine for themselves what beauty really is by listening less to outside sources. Now is the time to stop letting others tell us what it means to be beautiful.

Super Bowl Ads Go Social

This blog is in response to Max Knoblauch's article "The Top 10 Most-Shared Super Bowl Ads of All Time" on Mashable. Click here to read the article

If you're anything like me, then you only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and it drives us nuts when the commercials are released earlier than that night. Knoblauch states that 60% of the most-shared videos were released before the game. I hope that most are saved for the game this year!

Do you all remember last year's Super Bowl ad that Coke created? I remember the ad because it allowed viewers to vote and share the video on Twitter... Yes, I HATE sharing what I do on social media. If I am going to vote for something, then I don't want to share it with all of my friends. It is unnecessary and makes me feel like I'm being held hostage. The ad made me feel a sort of connection because I had to see the ad during the Super Bowl in order to find out whether the group that I voted for had won during the Coke race. It was a pretty cool ad, and I hope that Coke will do something memorable with the $4 million that they will spend for only 30 seconds.

Source: YouTube.com

Knoblauch reminds us in his article that three of the most-shared ads of all time are video trailers, and two of those three are for the Fast and the Furious. This makes the Super Bowl a huge opportunity to show consumers what to expect in the upcoming months. There are over 100 million people that will be watching the game and millions more will see the ads through social media. Corporations need to step up their game and provide viewers with memorable commercials that will continue to be shared in the weeks following the Super Bowl.

Give me a break!

I'm serious (and not just asking for a Kit Kat...)! The celebrities on social media have got to learn from their peers' mistakes. The words that are used online within captions are terrifying, and we have all been around social media long enough to know what is right and wrong. While I was reading USA Today yesterday morning, I saw an article about Madonna's poor choice of words on Instagram.

Here is the link to the article:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/01/18/madonna-instagram-slur/4636491/

Madonna did come out and apologize for the use of a racial slur on Instagram, but ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!? She used the N-word in an Instagram showing her son boxing... The fact that this is news and that social media users have not figured out that social media is not private is appalling. We have seen how Paula Deen lost many of her endorsements for using the same word, and other celebrities are losing a lot of respect for similar problems. Social media is not the place to call someone a word that remains offensive to a large portion of the population and that our mothers would be ashamed to hear coming from our mouths. Celebrities and many of my "friends" on social have no control over themselves, and it needs to stop. We need to use Madonna and similar celebrities to show us what not to do.

When I post anything on social media, I like to think about who could possibly see my posts. Here are just a few important people who can read my posts: my grandmother, pastor, father, mother, aunts, uncles, brother, cousins, past teachers, past and present employers and many more. Do they want to see me having fun with my friends? YES. Do they want to read an offensive comment that will keep me from getting a job? NO.

It is time for all social media users to clean up their act before it's too late. Maybe one day our children will be able to see these "permanent" posts when they Google our names in the future. Anything is possible.

P.S. If you took the time to read this, thank you! This is my first blog post ever.