Digital Frontiers

When that annoying, loud, flashy advertisement pops up in your browser while you’re trying to look up the score of the basketball game you missed or reading the latest celebrity gossip, you automatically X out of the box, because you’re sure that ad isn’t about anything worth knowing about, right? If that’s the case, then why is it that, when your friends Tweet about their new favorite accessory or the hottest new company that they think you should check out, you don’t usually think they’re just trying to scam you into some fad?

The two presentations that were posted online supported the idea that people tend to be skeptical about “interruptive” advertisements, but they usually will follow a recommendation from a friend. So what does this mean for today’s businesses? Companies need to start using the same media that everyday people use in order to reach out to the consumers; they need to enter the world of social media. The presentations also showed that things that are “technologically boring” are “socially interesting”. I feel as if this is very true; while technology that is way too advanced for the average person may look or sound interesting, not many consumers will actually buy or use it because of how complex it appears.

By using both of these concepts in this class, we are going to help UF Young Entrepreneurs for Leadership and Sustainability (YELS) come up with a successful strategy for advertising and making itself known in the business world. I think this is going to be a great opportunity because, not only do we get to help a real business, we also have the chance to gain real experience doing something that we’ll most likely be doing with our future employers after college.

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Hey guys, my name is Kendal Farwell. I’m a first year exploratory major. I want to declare before the end of this semester; I’m pretty sure I’ll be going into finance, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m in Kappa Kappa Gamma here, and I’m really into sports, music, and art. I used to play volleyball in highschool, and I was going to play on an intramural team this past semester, but my bad knee started acting up again right as the season started… Needless to say, that failed miserably. But there’s always next season, right?

I like to think I’m good with technology in that average everyday use type of way (definitely no programming or anything intense like that; that stuff just confuses me), but trying to figure out this blogging assignment is making me start to think otherwise… Anyways. I can usually figure out how to use knew technology pretty quickly, but my knowledge is fairly basic. I’ll admit, I’m addicted to my BlackBerry, and you’ll almost never see me walking around without my iPod.

I have a Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/kendal.farwell?ref=profile), and despite everyone in class hating on Twitter, I have one of those, too (http://twitter.com/michendal). I used to think it was so stupid, but now I actually Tweet fairly often. It’s one of those things that all my friends in highschool did/are doing, so we all use it as a way to see what’s going on in everyone’s lives. Plus, some of the things that celebrities post are so entertaining.

I really hope this class will help me become more profficient in the new techonologies of today. I really want to learn how to use all of this stuff to my advantage, so once I go out into the real world, I’ll know what I’m getting myself into. I know businesses are using more and more technology every day, and I feel like this class will be a great opportunity for me to figure all of that stuff out.

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