Saturday, March 12, 2011

Just Getting Into the Books

After just getting started and reading the introductions of our books for class, I'm getting more excited about taking this class. Like Aggie said, the books read much less like normal boring textbooks. I'm not sure if this is because I am more interested in the subject than in other classes or not.

I found Engage, by Brian Solis, to be pretty interesting because it gives the business perspective and usage of social media, opposed to just when people use social media sites to keep in touch and post about updates in their lives. I think this book is going to be a great resource for my internship this coming fall for the Ada Chamber of Commerce as a Social Media Strategist. Reading the first two chapters has given me a greater insight of just how huge the impact is from social media websites. I was a little surprised to find out the number of millions of users for each site and how vastly these sites have grown in just a few short years.

One thing that I noticed about the book's writing, though, is that I think some of the facts and numbers that Solis is telling us about could be better portrayed in a chart or graph. I hate reading paragraphs or pages stating nothing more than this percentage of people thought this, but this percentage of people thought that. I think that is so boring and makes reading harder to do because I just want to get the information but I can't stay focused on the material when it basically says the same words over and over, only changing which fact is being stated. If the author would have put that information in a pie chart, perhaps, or even a bar graph, I think it would be much easier to see what is being demonstrated and get the same effect without being so wordy.

1 comment:

  1. I admit I don't actually have this book yet but I think it'll be interesting to read more about social media from a business perspective as opposed to something more informal, in conjunction with our own (or my own really) perspective of how the majority of people use a social media outlet, like Twitter.

    But anyway! Your internship this summer sounds really cool too, good luck!

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