by By Lexi Naone, Iyanna Soltero, Mary Osborne, and Ryan Robledo
Tuesday’s class introduced Dave Markowitz (@davemarkowitz31), assistant professor at UO and former Stanford and Cornell alum, as the guest speaker for our Strategic Social Media course. His discussion revolved around the idea of the words we use on social media platforms and the weight that they hold.
He first asked us to partner up with a classmate and briefly browse their Facebook profile and try to guess three questions: what is their political affiliation; do they use drugs; and were their parents together at the age of 21? Sure enough, at least two correct answers out of three was the most popular result. Conversations on Twitter included a majority of people who were worried or embarrassed about the ‘likes’ that appear on their profiles. Most people claimed to have ‘liked’ those pages a long, long time ago.
Following our ‘get to know each other’ via Facebook, Lexi Naone (@lexi_naone) tweeted asking classmates how private they thought their Facebook profiles actually were. A response from a classmate mentioned that her profile was private to keep out nosey family members, while in class responses said otherwise. Looking at privacy and what can be found online, it seems that many people nowadays prefer to keep profiles under lock and key unless you are friends on the specific social media platform.
Next, he went into a deeper look into our profiles — ‘what do your words say about you?’ he asked. According to the results of a Twitter poll by Iyanna Soltero (@_isoltero), 67% of people are most nervous about employers viewing their profiles; 22% crushes; and 11% parents or family members. Markowitz introduced us to a social intelligence company, Frrole, that “redefines ‘intelligence’ when it comes to social data analytics,” and has built a platform entitled
Markowitz talked about the real-life applications of programs that can analyze personal data, the biggest being advertising. Mary Osborne (@maryobornee) tweeted an article about how Target uses algorithms to predict customers’ buying habits (and can tell if you’re pregnant!).
One of the most intriguing studies Markowitz covered was about how words used in college admissions essays can predict academic success. Those with higher grades had a greater article and preposition use, while those with lower grades used more auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions. Mary tweeted a link to the full-length study full-length study which got 457 impressions and 12 total engagements.
Often times, people don’t realize how much they put or say online can be easily researchable and analyzed. Markowitz discussed with the class the many different ways that your data can be analyzed and one of the ways he showed us was through his own research tool,
commPAIR allows a person to analyze someone’s tweets with another person’s tweets and determine which one of you has more leadership qualities, which one of you tends to be more dishonest, who shows more emotions, and who tends to be more “verbally upbeat.” This lead to a class discussion about whether any of us are comfortable with all of our online information being so easily accessible and can be easily analyzed.
With the majority of people saying in class that they’re going to be more cautious before they post something online, we are only left with a quote by Dave Markowitz to remember in the back of our minds, “Everything you’ve done online is identifiable” – Dave Markowitz.
I really enjoyed your recap on Dave’s lecture. DeeperSense and CommPAIR both were slightly unsettling to me even though I am not ashamed of anything specific I have posted. I think the example about the verbiage in college application essays was interesting as well. I would love to go back and see what my essays predict in terms of academic success. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Lexi, I loved this blog post regarding Dave Markowitz’s lecture the other day. I think a lot of people, myself included, don’t fully realize or understand the importance of our words. Even if one’s profile is private, the content they are posting will probably be seen by more people than they think. Nowadays with technology, it is incredible how much information and access people can have. I love how you talked about his platform DeeperSense and elaborated on its capabilities. I found this site extremely fascinating since it analyzes one’s identity through their social media alone. I agree with what you stated about how what people say online can be easily reachable and this really makes me more cautious about my own online profile.