Social Media — is it a social success?

I am starting to wonder how effective social media is in society.

I am divided, and yes a little bit confused.

Simply because, every time we have a moment of downtime, we head online and login into our various social media platforms. This is where, I feel, social media works well and hard to get messages out to the public. The simple "like" and "share" and "repost" button is so conveniently located, it takes someone no more than one second to share a photo, an event, or a comment. It is that easy.

But as I read on (particularly this book that I am currently sucked into "Contagious" by Jonah Berger), I cannot help but agree that social media make situations seem like publicity messages are going out effectively to the masses and generating a strong presence for brands, when in fact they aren't. The reason being that the general masses have now turned immune to social media because there is simply too much information shared on the internet that people have zoned out of it. Thus, not everything shared and liked on social media translates to an affirmative brand-building or message-spreading success. It could just be a false front.

This is where I am finding I am finding traditional methods of actual tangible physical interaction from brands with customers most reliable, along with the traditional word-of-mouth recommendation. As much as we are always connected on the internet, we spend a good three quater of the time offline. This suddenly brings to mind a personal situation that recently just occurred. I believe I have just conspired another string of word-of-mouth "advertising".

Just yesterday I bought a portable hard drive. My HDD needed to meet the following criteria:

Resonably Priced
Brand Reputation
Connectivity : USB 3.0, optional thunderbolt, and firewire
PC & MAC compatible (need to consider that I might have ancients still working on PC)


With all the factors stated above, my choices narrowed down to the following:

Toshiba — cheapest, but I have no clue about it's reputation in HDD
Seagate — ranking right in the middle, have heard about Seagate's reliability
Western Digital — most expensive, am currently using a desktop external HDD and am extremely satisfied with it
(strange unheard of Chinese brands were immediately crossed out of the list)

After much deliberation, I picked up the Seagate's portable plus back up.

A pretty decent choice, I thought, after all it's price was reasonable for a 500GB HDD, it gave me the option for a thunderbolt and firewire connectivity, and it's MAC and PC compatible.

I am now an officially proud owner of a sleek looking Seagate portable drive which I named Brains Jr. (because my grand 1TB desktop HDD is called Brains, this little one automatically adopted "Jr" into its title). I am so proud of "Brains Jr." until I found out the complimentary "Nero Cloud Storage" was only compatible for PC users. Immediately, I shared this unfortunate news with my boyfriend, asking him to keep clear of Seagate drives and stayed on-board with Western Digital HDD instead.

Bottom line: I am still satisfied and mildly happy with Brains Jr., and glad to have it on board my digital family but my happiness diluted when the complimentary feature was not made available to me a MAC user. I feel segregated and forgotten.

I, Lilia, have started a potential chain-message of "Seagate being MAC-unfriendly", which I hope isn't true and lied in the fault of me the consumer who didn't understand the product.

The power and unforgivable face of Word of Mouth advertising as said by an angry HDD owner.