CS408-03 Assignment 3A Claire Barstow

Hi everyone! My very first blog post, this is exciting. A topic around computers I find very interesting is social media and advertising. It's absolutely fascinating how companies are marketing to us constantly and with the explosion of social media within the past decade it's to no ones surprise that advertisers are using this new medium to sell products to us. I think the hashtag may have been the most ingenious invention of the 21st century because now just like that we are able to click on a hashtag and see who else is the world is tweeting, blogging, or instagraming the same thing that you are, or are interested in. Companies use this to pull you into looking at their pages and get you interested in what they want you to buy. For example, I was watching the Olympics the other night and Geico insurance commercial came on with the little gecko dancing to a song about philly cheese steaks and of course appears in little lettering #CheeseSteakShuffle. Geico is trying to get people tweeting #CheeseSteakShuffle so they will get more publicity and using this silly gecko dance. I looked it up on twitter and found that hundreds of people were tweeting with that hashtag therefore their marketing strategy is working. Companies know so much about us from the things we search and constantly are showing us things we might want to buy based on that knowledge. I've been really into a certain band recently and on the Facebook side bar I keep seeing ads to buy their newest CD. Computers have changed the way advertisers market to us in a monumental way which I'm sure we will continue to see progress over time.