Meg Kerr - Mosaic

Name: Meg Kerr
Company: Mosaic

Meg Kerr is the Social Media Integration Manager at Mosaic. She's worked at Mosaic since 2006 in various roles. She attended university at Western, as well as Fanshawe college for Broadcast Journalism. She has been interested in social media for a long time, and even created the position at Mosiac to cater to clients' growing need to be active on social media platforms.

Meg describes social media as any network that allows you to share content easily, e.g., YouTube, social bookmarking (Digg), Facebook, even blogs. She went on to explain that social media has shifted the way we interact with each other and businesses. People trust peer to peer interaction more than advertisements.

The bulk of her talk consisted of describing 4 trends that she sees happening in social media today.

1. Real Time + Mobile = Gamechanger

Mobile is like traditional word of mouth, but on steroids, and the volume and velocity of infosharing will continue to accelerate. More than 30% of Canadians own a smartphone and more than 50% of all web searches today are made from mobile devices.

Meg also drew on her broadcast journalism background and talked about how news organizations will never again be the first to "break" a story. Regular people can share pictures and comments about news, as it happens, via Twitter. While this information may not always be the most accurate or unbiased, its speed cannot be underestimated.


2. Location-based services and geotagging

Today's smartphones are GPS-enabled, which has allowed for the creation of location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla, and extensions for Yelp, Facebook and Twitter. With Facebook and Twitter jumping on the bandwagon, this location information has become mainstream.


3. Privacy

There have been continued conversations about Facebook and privacy issues. Facebook needs to provide users with control over their information without hurting their business model - they need access to personal information because that's how they make money.

Facebook isn't the only network with privacy issues. Meg showed us a story about Twitter and how there are people who have posted their vacation plans and then been robbed because the information was made public. In light of this, there have been some tongue-in-cheek websites created to bring attention to this problem of over-sharing.


4. Social media getting less social

With people's social networks growing large, and hard to control, there will be an increase in new, niche social networks that are much smaller. They can be interest-based or invitation-only. Even Facebook and Twitter have rolled out "list" services, allowing users to narrow down their friends.

Sheridan Athletic Therapy Centre

On Friday, December 2nd our classes attended the Sheridan Athletic Therapy Centre at the Brampton campus. We spent the day there to learn about keeping up our physical health, especially as we work in an industry where we are sitting all day.

Some of the injuries that are commonly found in people working in web design include: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, eye strain and Sciatic Nerve Irritation. Some symptoms of these injuries to watch for:

• Tightness and ache in forearms
• Tightness or knots in shoulders and neck
• Tension headaches
• Tingling and/or numbness (intermittent or prolonged)
• Pain that cannot be relieved with stretching
• Decreased range of motion in neck, shoulders, wrists or lower back
  

In order to prevent these injuries from happening, some of the students at the Therapy Centre taught us some stretches that we should do for 5 to 10 minutes every hour.

Hand and Forearm Stretch:
With your hand open and facing down, gently bend wrist from side to side, as far as possible. Hold for 3 to 5 seconds. Repeat 3 times.

Neck and Shoulders Stretch:
Drop your head slowly to the left, trying to touch your left ear to your left shoulder. Repeat on the right side. Slowly drop your chin to your chest, turn your head all the way to the left, then turn all the way to the right.

Back, Side and Legs Stretch:
Grasp your shin. Lift the leg off the floor. Bend forward (curling your back), and reach your nose to your knee. Repeat with the other leg.

The best part of the trip was getting individual assessments from the Athletic Therapy students. We each got to have some ailment looked at. Personally, I've been having pains in my lower back, so that's what I had looked at. The student that worked with me gave me some stretches to do to loosen up my back, and I can do those along with the other stretches we learned.

Overall, it was good to spend some time thinking about our bodies and being active. I will definitely continue to stretch every hour or so, and hopefully I will continue to be pain-free in my neck, shoulders and wrists.