Expand Your Mind: Social and You
by Miki Saxon
Several studies caught my eye recently; some interesting and others cautionary.
On the interesting side…
The Price of Typos really blew me away. Somehow I thought I was one of a tiny minority of people who get annoyed at the misspellings and incorrect word usage that is rampant on the Net. Turns out the stuff that drives me nuts (‘loose’ instead of ‘lose’) has as much if not more impact on companies’ the bottom line.
“Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales,” said a BBC headline last week. The article cited an analysis of British Web figures that suggested that a single spelling mistake on an e-commerce site can hurt credibility so much that online revenues fall by half.
Do you feel ignored when the emails you send aren’t answered? More importantly, are you guilty of ignoring the emails you receive? And how do you rationalize when the response to both these questions is ‘yes‘?
Though it would comfort us to think that these long silences are the product of technical failure or mishap, the more likely culprits are lack of courtesy and passive aggression.
Depending on whom you are and how you see teen life, especially if you’re a parent, will decide whether the next article is more interesting or cautionary. It’s all about teen fame.
Online fame is becoming just another aspect of teenage life for a generation raised on reality television and the perpetual flurry of status updates that ping across their smartphones, tablets and computer screens.
The final two definitely fall in the cautionary category…
Have you ever been given a personality test as part of a job interview? In the future you may not have to if you have a Facebook page.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Maryland predicted a person’s score on a personality test to within 10 percentage points by using words posted on Facebook. …“Lots of organizations make their employees take personality tests,” said Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor of computer science and information studies at the University of Maryland. “If you can guess someone’s personality pretty well on the Web, you don’t need them to take the test.”
Last but not least is proof positive that companies really are taking your online information as seriously as your credit score and background checks.
A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.
Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.
Enjoy!
Image credit: MykReeve on flickr
