Mediaboss Marketing

Its that special time of year again. Bell ringers are outside the supermarket collecting spare change and volunteer groups are organizing drives to collect presents for needy families. Thanks to the ever-widening reach of social networking, organizations are finding ways to tap into the collective goodwill of people who want to give back during the holiday season from the comfort of their homes. Social giving has burst on the scene as the next big thing in charitable contributions.

Social giving, also known as peer-to-peer fundraising, has become a popular way to gather money for causes, missions, and philanthropic campaigns. Sites like Indiegogo and GiveForward are increasingly instrumental in helping individuals and families raise money for special circumstances like medical bills or memorial funds.

The personal touch

Crowdfunding offers a way for people to support meaningful causes while knowing the money they give will go directly into the hands of those that need it. Its much more personal that writing a check to a large charity group and mailing it to an office 500 miles away.

Social giving also helps people see the direct impact their donation has on the lives of others. Brad Damphousse, CEO of crowd funding website GoFundMesays, Given a choice, the average person would likely choose to give to someone they know personally over a charity.

The ability to connect with others on an intimate level makes asking for contributions a much more comfortable experience for those in need. Most personal fundraising websites offer tools that help recipients explain their situation in detail and provide ongoing updates on how much money has been collected and how its being used and some even offer a way for the beneficiaries to exchange gifts or services in kind as a way to thank donors.

Generosity is infectious

Studies suggest that watching others give of themselves sets off a domino-effect of generosity as friends, relatives, and co-workers feel compelled to do the same. The idea of Paying it forward is making a big comeback thanks to the surge in social giving.

It also appears that social giving sites might be boosting overall generosity toward our fellow man. A recent American Red Cross survey revealed 71 percent of social network users have donated to a charity within the past year. 70 percent say they would be motivated to take some kind of action in response to a friend posting a story on social media about making a charitable donation.

Social networking does a lot of wonderful things. It keeps us connected to friends and loved ones, helps customers engage with brands, and exposes us to the larger world around us. Perhaps the greatest gift social media has to offer, however, is the power of social giving.

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Power of social giving

One Monday my cousin was sipping coffee against the foliage of New York Central Park done up in autumn glory. A friend, on the other hand, got engaged to her high school sweetheart and took to Facebook in what appeared to be a personal bid to crash the social networking site with uploading pictures. I scroll, I click like, I dispense admiration and envy in equal parts. Someone getting promoted, someone having a baby, someone who just launched his own business Social networking sites are full of someones whose lives inevitably appear to be multilayers of filters better than yours.

It is a near-crippling handicapbeing afflicted with social media envy. Beyond consuming so much time thumbing through other peoples online lives, comparing them against yours (and consequently judging your own woefully lacking), it begets a learned helplessness that easily ferments into resignation.

Stuck in traffic in the armpits of Manila, I scroll through a virtual laundry list of all the things I didnt get to do, and places that are yet cutouts stuck on my desk. I see someone getting accepted into the MBA school of their dreams and, like a familiar poison, I taste in the back of my mouth again the bitterness of what am I doing with my life, omigod, I am never going anywhere, literally and figuratively.

How easy it is to surrender to the inevitable mediocrity of ones life, and embrace instead with firsthand regret the safety of the ordinary. Our society is slowly but surely being taken over by millennial overachievers, anyway: a segment of the population that has come to maturity amid securing employment in a competitive job market and enjoying the spotlight as superstars of the work-life balance. These people have built for themselves an impressive reputation on the strength of their academic achievements, viciously cool lifestyle, and a seemingly limitless pool of resources steadily propelling them to the top of the food chain. And all of them seem to be our friends on Facebook.

Its an aggravated case of the grass is greener on the other side; in this case, one appears to be sitting on a dung heap while all around stretches an emerald blanket of better living on which your other friends are grazing. They have cooler vacations, better-paying jobs, more well-behaved children, and 50-shades-of-sweet boyfriends, splashed across your feed.

The result? A self-sustaining community of green-eyed netizens with a bad case of the Fomo (fear of missing out). Its harmless enough when youre sighing over someone elses promotion at work, but when that kind of behavior degenerates into snarky sour grapes, its time to put an end to the cycle of social media envy.

Comparing yourself to others is a natural human progression. What you have and dont have will always be in reference to what others do or dont, and ones personal achievements are given appropriate weight and acclaim based on peer evaluation. But from deciding by virtue of comparison, for example, that your scholastic achievements are noteworthy when judged against your peers academic achievements, its a slippery slope to being focused solely on beating others just to come up on top.

But since when did beating others count as winning?

At the root of social media envy is the belief that only by trumping other people can one be considered a success. I myself was reared on a strict childhood diet of beatingothers. All the way up to high school, we were judged not on the basis of our scholastic grades alone, but how we stacked up versus the other kids. It didnt matter if you got a 97 in the math test if another kid got a 98; you were shuffled off to the side and given a runner-up ribbon. There was only one first honors awarded every year, and it went to the kid who was smarter, more mentally agile, and more fiercely determined than all the others. The psychological trauma of my childhood, stage-mom fighting, and a suspicious case of food poisoning aside, I and most of my friends were raised to believe that it was not enough to be good; others had to be stomped to the ground.

It was only when I entered college that a less polarizing grading system was made known to me: where, in order to garner first or second honors, you had to hurdle certain QPI/GPA requirements based purely on individual merit and an impartial institutional grading system. What a strangely terrifying and liberating time that was, where my only true competition was myself. Stripped of external foes, I had myself and my own intellectual barriers to beat, where the real hurdles to accomplishments were how fast I could learn and how well I could adapt to challenges.

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#NoFilter: Getting over social media envy

Albany

Facebook can be addictive.

If you're one of the 1.35 billion active users of the social media site, you may have joked about that.

Julia Hormes means it. The University at Albany psychologist conducted a study published in the December issue of the journal Addiction that not only concluded that excessive online social networking is addictive, but that it also can be associated with other disorders involving impulse control, including substance abuse.

Hormes studied 292 undergraduate students, 18 years and older.

Participants were evaluated on criteria commonly used to assess alcohol addiction.

Questions were modified to measure addiction-like symptoms related to excessive Facebook use. "How good does Facebook make you feel?" was one example.

Nearly 90 percent of respondents had an active Facebook page, spending on average one-third of their online browsing time on the social networking site.

Sixty-seven percent received Facebook push notifications on their smartphones.

About 10 percent of users experienced what Hormes classified as "disordered social networking use."

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One-tenth of Facebook users in study reported addictive behavior

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