Latino Rebranded: Latinos and Social Media

Subtitle: WYB – Watch Your Back in social media!!!

As netizens connect and grow, so do more unsavory individuals look to take advantage of those communications.

Having a background in technology, I’ve seen many cases of users unknowingly causing computer problems which easily could of been prevented if they new more about the computer environment.

With this in mind, imagine what can happen to an individual who unknowing falls prey to a computer virus or a phishing attempt, that could of been prevented if the knowledge of the characteristics of such attacks could of been recognized.

Social Media Literacy (SML), permits us to identify such threats.

SML goes beyond the knowledge of  pushing your content through different social media channels; it involves the critique of received media.  If media literacy broadly applies to digital media,  then SML would be specific to social media platforms.

Tips

Here are some suggestions for Twitter:

- If you see many of your friends sharing the same strange new Twitter icon, or tweeting the same strange message, it’s probably a hoax, or they’ve already fell victim to one.

- Be weary of tweets that contain news or calls to action, without having links.  This may be a prank/hoax, and the joke may be on you.

Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!

- If tweet contains all CAPS or multiple symbols, take heed!

- “Think before you click.”  Is this too good to be true?  Do you know the user?

- Mouseover the link and make sure you can verify the link (enable status bar in most web browsers).  If you can’t see it, or the link looks like bad news (IP number, instead of URL), the WYB!

- Does the persons tweets have a lot of links in many of them?  They have an incessant need to get you somewhere.

I can count on one hand how many times I’ve used the ‘block’ feature on Twitter.  This is because, I spend so much time on the internet that I’ve developed a heightened awareness of what looks right and what looks suspect, so I don’t spend too much time blocking people from my feed…I just unfriend them.

If someone is trying to take advantage of others, and you want to take the extra step then, submit their name to Twitter Help for investigation.

Has anyone experienced, or have more suggestions for Twitter or any other site?

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Backup

I’ve worked in technology for 10 years, and have witnessed the pain of data loss many times over.  Most common is by mistakenly deleting a file/folder.  Next less often,  is a hard drive crash – oh, the horror!  Then we have the holy grail of data loss, via some local trauma that wipes out your whole system (in this case your backup is no longer called backup, but a ‘disaster recovery plan’).

The modern credo for any IT department is, “Your data is as good as your backups.” Many people (I myself), are guilty of  forgetting this step in our daily computer lives.  Worse, social media providers have wiped their hands from being responsible of backing up your data.  Users who are dependent on the large providers of social media will get a rude awakening if their data is lost forever, or their account has been locked.

Luckily, there is help:

Daily practices
Whatever your working on, get into the habit of saving often.  Most applications have an auto-save feature that can be used.

Twitter Backups
Tweetbackup – Free backup of your tweets.
TweetSaver – Offers more options and more streamlined than Tweetbackup at $20/yr.
LifeStream – In addition to backing up your tweets, LifeStream can do WordPress, Photobucket and more at $30/yr.  Now if your willing to roll up your sleeves and spend some time you can save a few bucks and back up Delicious, WP (see below), Twitter (see above), and PB (order backup CD/DVD or do it yourself).

FaceBook
We don’t usually think of backing up FB, but what if your account became disabled or hacked?  If you thrive off of your network this can be vital.

SocialSafe can make a nice local copy of your FB profile, pics and friends or all.

Blog
Blog Backup works with most blogs and delivers a free offsite backup and runs on auto.  Sweet.

Your computer
Personally, I sync most of my documents and pictures with a USB stick and a Maxtor drive. I also use Mozy to backup some vital documents for off-site retrieval.

Depending on how crazy you want to get, you can backup up your social media work with certain points of failure in mind.  Either you’ll perform basic backup methods or trace out an elaborate disaster recovery plan.

If this helps let me know, or if you feel I missed something feel free to add it in the comments.

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