MLM and Social Media

Multi-Level Marketing. What is it? I'm sure you have heard some bad rep from some people who have terrible experiences, and those are real and valid, but when you find a company that has a calling, a mission and actually cares about you as a person, that is something you can get behind.

I am a distributer for Young Living which is a MLM that has been around for over 25 years. We are best known for our essential oils, but we have all kinds of lifestyle products that have really impacted my life for the better. So I decided to do this business side of things with them.

Something that is awesome and I am in the learning process of is how to use social media to build my team. I recently (today) signed up my first person to start their wellness journey. I did this through sharing about my company and my experience on a "12 Days of Shopping" (click here to join if you would like!) Facebook group. I honestly didn't want to because of all the stress of finals and the end of the semester, but a woman from my church asked me so I thought, it can't hurt.

So what did I learn? I first started out by doing a live video in the group going over the products and the basic aspects of getting the products. This was great because I got to interact in real time with a bunch of people and I made connections! This is what it is all about in MLM, building relationships.

Then I posted a couple times a day with some information about the products that I tried and loved. The people who either commented, liked or viewed, I reached out to with a personal message and asked if there were any questions I could answer for them. These people became my prospects. I'm following up with them tomorrow!

With just a couple posts and a live video I had around 25 new prospects, 7-10 people (so far) reached back and said they were interested, I set up 3 different in person meetings, and I signed up one person without even needing to meet in person! This was just a couples hours work over the course of one week.

So how does this transfer over to other platforms? Facebook has the awesome feature of groups, so that you can't really duplicate on the other top platforms like Instagram and Twitter. But certainly the posts, live videos can all be incorporated easily on Instagram.

What I love about using social media for my business and growing team is that is it so much easier to connect with everyone. I am in a couple different groups for my business and some have 12,000 people in them. Talk about a wealth of information! I can have my questions answered at any time of the day! I can grab graphics that are ready made for my and inspiration for my posts. I love the progress thats being made and I can't wait to see where this journey takes me.

Can social media isolate you from the real world?

Npr News have stated that young adults are not actually experiencing social media at all. Young adults each user contain multiple social media outlets. But why for us we require to have multiples accounts instead of only having one form of communication. Yet researches were not terrible surprise about how many individuals would experience isolation.

For myself, it's important to connect in person so people understand the message more clearly. However, with the technological shift, most companies require online application limiting the reality to see if the employer is actually suitable for the job.

In a survey made of the article adults between the ages of 19 to 32 years old use at 11 social media apps Due to the feeling of isolation. In today's world, people spend at least three hours online Younger audiences tend to feel more comfortable having more opportunities. While older adults experience more isolation due to they're older models of communication.

relationship VS technology

                    

           As many of you have herd before relationships have taken a hard hit with technology playing such a huge role now a days, from cat fishing, to years and years of talking online and never meeting the other person in real life. It has created new ways for unfaithful people to cheat even easier. The list goes on and on, but I found an article that talks about all the affects that technology has had on relationships from the good to the bad. Because like all topics there are good and bad things that come along with this. Because technology has been great for military families, it has made it much easier for the people who have been deployed to actually be able to see their family members, and see and talk in real time with them! As well as long distance relationships in general, because they can FaceTime and talk and see each other in real time which is great but then the down falls come along with those as well. But like the article says some of the bad out way the goods here because the internet can be a dangerous place for kids or anyone for that matter, people can act like whoever they want to be, and lead people to unsafe situations very easily. That is the part that scares me, because children are getting phones at very young ages no a days and there is really nothing that you can do to protect them from these creepy online people because they can hack away the parent locks and look at anything on their phones. What do you think? Should kids be able to get phones at such young ages? Should there be more laws in place to try and stop cyber criminals? 

               

            Also what about families and kids at the dinner table, you see this time and time again families will be sitting at the dinner table whether it be at home or out at a restaurant they will all be on their phones not talking to one another, completely buried in their phones. This makes me so sad to see because I come from a family where we didn't get phones until high school and we certainly didn't get to use them at the table, we would get yelled at if we had our elbows on the table. It is crazy how much the family cultures have changed around here, and all over the world. 

The Effect of Technology On Relationships. (n.d.). 

Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-in-world/201006/the-effect-technology-relationships

Caught on Camera

Some of the Ottawa Senators players have gotten into some bad media coverage the other week. The seven star players were talking bad about the assistant coach and talking about the penalty kill on how bad it has been. You might be thinking what's wrong with that? Everyone talks about other people behind their backs and if you are reading this and say "that's false, I've never talked behind someones back." You are lying. Well how the professional hockey players got caught and this information came to the surface of attention was because it was filmed by the uber driver with out them knowing. The uber driver put the video up on youtube and then sent it out.
 The articles brings up how " The incident, they said, shines a light on the growing ambiguity between public and private spaces as well as the shortcomings of current laws and social practices." So how do we really know now what's really a private space anymore?
Scott Thompson who studies surveillance technologies says "The problem is that with the advance of technology, we’re seeing that it’s more and more difficult to identify spaces in this way,” Thinking you can talk about something but little do you know it is being recored without your permission. The idea of private and public has really changed in meaning.     

  

Different Names for the Same Thing

I don’t know about you, but I find the winter months to be rough. With daylight savings time come and gone, the reality of the season has truly set in. The sun barely shows its face for more than a few hours before we’re back into darkness before dinnertime. Some people cope with this through medication, blue lights or forcing themselves into winter sports. I’m trying to soothe away the SAD with music.

This week, the artist I’ve had on repeat is Death Cab for Cutie. I know – not exactly the epitome of cheer and sunshine, but it works for me. While browsing the reading assignments for this week’s class on copyright, I happened to have their track Different Names for the Same Thing playing in the background. As I took a break to brew some tea, I found myself humming along to that refrain. It dawned on me, in that moment, that I was singing a simplified description of the same material I was reading.

In her book, The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor spends an entire chapter talking about copyright, creation, remix culture, distribution and piracy. While making a lot of very important points, one that I found quite interesting was her explanation of the “free culture activists.” This party is against copyright laws and believe in the free sharing of all media content. Curiously, Taylor points out that the very companies who oppose this mindset also ask their audience to embody that exact same attitude. She writes that “tech companies encourage their users to imagine themselves as remixers and DJs, curators and mash-up artists…even as the same tech companies ferociously cling to their own intellectual property and jealously guard their trade secrets, snapping up patents at breakneck speed.”

Taylor goes on to make a potent observation: each side of the copyright argument, at one point or another, seems to mimic the attitudes of the other. Remixers, posed as opponents of copyright and corporate distribution companies, make their name on the curation of others’ work. They’re not makingtheir own original work, but instead benefitting from the work of others and what they choose to do with it. Can’t the same be said of content distributers like music labels and production companies? It’s not creation, but curation. Whether they’re fighting for the right to remix media content or suing for copyright infringement, they’re still trying to protect their right to benefit from someone else’s work. It’s different names for the same thing.

None of this makes it any easier to figure out the right answer to copyright issues. If anything, realizing the similarities between each side of the argument makes it appear less like a black and white issue. I do believe remixers should be allowed to remix, and I don’t think it’s a crime to want to profit from your creative work. However, should we be spending our time and resources protecting the right to remix existing work, or should we instead be encouraging new original work to be created? Is one art form more valuable than the other? Should we regulate who is allowed to profit from intellectual property, or for how long they can do so?

It’s complicated. It’s confusing. It’s not an easy issue to agree or legislate on. I’ll let you tell me what your thoughts are in the comments below. I’m going to go listen to that DCFC track again, for which only one version and exactly zero remixes exist. Sometimes I need a little simplicity.

Copyleft

As other blog posts have gone over copyright laws and issues, I decided to focus my attention on learning more about copyleft.  In its simplest form, copyleft is a general method for making a program or other works free, in the sense that if gives users freedom to change or modify it, and requires all modified and extended of the program to be free itself.  GNU Operating System has been very influential in promoting the use of copyleft.

Copyleft is very important for users who want to spread their content.  Individuals who make content and put it into public domain uncopyrighted seems like a good way to get around copyright laws.  But, if it’s uncopyrighted, anyone can modify and/or expand that content, and are allowed to sell it, and users who buy it do not have the same freedom to modify it.  This is where copyleft comes in.  As GNU explains, instead of putting software or content in public domain, the user will copyleft it.  In doing so, the content or software can spread.  Users who modify the program must pass along the same freedom to further modify or change the program to other users, and so forth.

Therefore, it appears copyleft may encourage more creativity since the content can be modified by anyone.  Programmers who want to contribute to improvements or changes are free to do so.  And it is still illegal under the law for users to make changes and then sell it for a profit. 

It is important to realize the copyright laws still exist under copyleft.  By copylefting content, however, users are able to decide how freely they want their content to spread.  I honestly like the idea of copyleft because it allows the creator to decide what he or she wants, while giving more freedom to users that pure copyright laws don’t.  But what are your thoughts?  Is copyleft the way to go as an alternative to copyrighting content?