Dismissal via Facebook

Being dismissed is never a nice experience. But how about getting dismissed via Facebook? This happened to a 16 year old British girl named Chelsea Taylor. She worked at a tearoom in Lancashire. The girl found the notice, which contained lots of spelling and grammar errors, on her Facebook page. According to the owner of the tearoom Chelsea lost ten pounds, that was the reason for the dismissal. Chelsea’s mother went to the papers to tell this shocking story. The owner of the tearoom did not want to react. As far as known, this is the first time in Great Britain that someone has been dismissed via Facebook.

More and more people use social media not only at home, but at work too. Is this the way we communicate with each other in the future? In my opinion, this goes too far. Organizations should create a pleasant and respectful environment for their employees. It is good to use social media, but people should be aware of the negative aspects of these communication tools. Communication should remain human and respectful. Let me know what your opinion is about this subject!

Soon it will be possible to compare trips with Google. The company announced an experiment that should improve travelers’ search experiences. In the experiment, some travelers get the option to mention the date of arrival and the length of stay, when searching for a hotel. Then Google shows the actual price for the stay. This option is new for a search engine like Google. Initially, this feature was only used in travel meta searchers like Kayak and Trivago. With this application, Google wants to regain market share.

Google maps is a popular tool for searching for instance hotels. This function could be expanded by more advanced search options, for instance searching with a maximum price or review grade. In my opinion, this is a good feature that many people would use. What do you think of this application? Do you think you would use Google to search for a hotel or to compare trips?

TweetMic

Imagine you’re at a festival and you hear a fantastic new band. You want to share this experience immediately with your friends. This is possible with the Twitter application for iPhone: TweetMic. With this application, it’s easy to make high-quality audio recordings and publish them on Twitter straight away. Advantages are that the recording time is unlimited and that it’s easy to install the application using your existing Twitter account. Furthermore, it’s possible to listen to your published audio recordings. There is a TweetMic lite version and a TweetMic pro version. With the TweetMic pro version, it’s also possible to mention your location and to send pictures to your Twitter page.

When you’re at that festival and you just want to share the pictures you made, that’s possible too. With TwitPic, it’s easy to upload pictures to your Twitter account. Everybody with a Twitter account can use TwitPic by logging in with their username and password. TwiPic starts in two seconds and is very fast. It’s also possible to add a text message to the picture.

Online election campaigns

A few days ago I received a Hyve message from a friend of mine. The message was about the local elections (my friend is a member of a local political party). My friend reminded the receivers of the massage that the poll was opened from 7.30 till 21.00. In the message, she made clear her points of view about the local policy.

Initially, local authorities weren’t very interested in using social media during their election campaigns, but last few weeks many local politicians used media like Twitter and Hyves. By means of sending “tweets” and “krabbels”, many voters can be reached directly. On the internet site: http://www.volgdeverkiezingen.nl/, it was possible to follow the local elections by following blogs and tweets of politicians. According to this site, the number of twittering politicians increased enormously since January: from 800 to 2200. The number of tweets increased too.

After the successful social media campaign of Barack Obama, people wondered about the success of social media campaigns in the Netherlands. Who twitters? How many voters follow political information on social media? What do people talk about in blogs? How successful were the social media campaigns during this electoral struggle? The analyses of use of social media will be published soon on http://www.volgdeverkiezingen.nl/.

Jeanou