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By Geena MartinezNewsWest 9

ODESSA - 2013 was a busy year for Odessa Animal Control and it didn't come without controversy.

The city service has been criticized on social media for how they operate. In the day and age of social media, issues can spread like wildfire, but when it comes to theOdessa Animal Control, officials are saying not so fast.

"A lot of the misconceptions that've been coming from Facebook simply aren't true," Cpl. Steve LeSueur, with the Odessa Police Department, said.

Recently, Animal Control has been getting a bad rap online about how the service operates and the number of dogs that are put down.

But Lt. Jerry Harvell says animal control is just that; animal control, meaning they're not only working with domestic cats and dogs.

"That's from snakes, coyotes, feral cats, feral dogs that run in packs, bobcats," Harvell said.

In 2013, animal control officers responded to more than 12,000 calls in the city and county. Nearly 6,000 animals were put down.

"Most of these animals that are brought in are either determined to be aggressive, they're sick, they're injured or they're wild," LeSueursaid.

We're told nearly 400 of the animals euthanized in 2013 were cleared for adoption but there's just not enough space at the shelter.

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Odessa Animal Control Speaking Out After Online Scrutiny

Dr. Anderson Uvie-Emegbo | credits: File copy

In giving approval to its corporate communications department to officially open a presence on social networking platforms, an executive management team made it clear that they did not want their corporate social media pages to be overtaken by complaints from customers.

And they had good reasons to be worried the organisation was still struggling with customer complaints arising from interactions with its brick and mortar offices.

Though the organisation had started making changes to some of the processes that customers complained about, a significant number of customers still perceived the pace of change as slow.

The organisation was also in the process of retraining its frontline staff nationwide on customer service. At times the service transformation programme seemed to be taking one step forward and two steps backwards.

The corporate communication director certainly had his hands full. Later on in this article, we would explore how he mitigated this risk.

It is not surprising that when war is declared, truth is the first casualty. Social media is a battleground and sparks are bound to fly. Organisations would be unduly optimistic not to expect disgruntled customers to vent their frustrations using social media.

The very fact that misunderstandings can occur between the organisation and its customers only makes social media even more likely to be used by customers who regard this medium (social media) as a genuine customer touch point or as a channel to get back at the organisation.

Some organisations have also been known to manipulate these channels to de-market their competitors. Social media is a double-edged sword especially for corporate organisations.

The love garnered within a short time can be dissipated over some real or frivolous issues. Several heads of corporate communication, public relations and social media functions have had their fingers burnt from their brands misadventure on social media.

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Protecting your corporate voice across social media channels

TUESDAY, Jan. 7, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Although social networking sites let users keep in touch with a wide group of acquaintances, new research shows that people still put most of their efforts into communicating with a small group of friends or family members.

To maintain a manageable group of close contacts, people often institute an unconscious "one in, one out" rule, the study found. As friendships evolve or new friends are made, old friends may be cast out of the inner circle, the researchers said.

"Although social communication is now easier than ever, it seems that our capacity for maintaining emotionally close relationships is finite," study author Felix Reed-Tsochas, a lecturer in complex systems at the Said Business School of the University of Oxford, in England, said in a university news release.

"While this number varies from person to person, what holds true in all cases is that at any point individuals are able to keep up close relationships with only a small number of people, so new friendships come at the expense of 'relegating' existing friends," he said.

The study, published online Dec. 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved survey data and mobile phone call records. The researchers used this information to identify changes in the communication networks of 24 students in the United Kingdom.

Over the course of the 18-month study, the students were transitioning from school to college or a job. When the study began, the researchers assessed the emotional closeness of each student's network of friends and family. In each case, a small, close group of people was called much more often than anyone else.

Although the people in the participants' social networks changed as they made a major life transition, they still made the same number of calls to the same number of people depending on their "emotional closeness" ranking, said Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford.

"As new network members are added, some old network members are either replaced or receive fewer calls," Dunbar said in the news release. "This is probably due to a combination of limited time available for communication and the great [mental] and emotional effort required to sustain close relationships."

Even with the efficiency of devices such as cell phones, people's communication patterns appear too deeply set to change, she said.

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Acquaintances in social networks may find themselves 'replaced'

(01-08 15:23)

Health officials in the US state of Texas confirmed that at least 20 people have died from flu, mostly H1N1 influenza, the US media reported. The tally was made by health departments in Dallas County, Denton County and Tarrant County, all in north Texas, local media KHOU reported. Hospitals confirm eight deaths in Dallas County, and another nine positive flu cases have been logged by the medical examiner's office. Denton County reported two deaths. Tarrant County has had one death linked to the flu. All of the Dallas victims were adults while a child was among the two victims in Denton. Hospitals across north Texas have been seeing a rapidly" increasing number of patients with flu-related cases, according to the report. Health officials are advising people to take vaccines and keeping a close eye on the flu cases. Adult flu-related deaths are being tracked locally for the first time in Dallas. Previously, only pediatric flu deaths were reported to local, state and federal authorities. In Houston, Texas' largest city, at least 13 people have died from H1N1 virus as of late December. The Lone Star State issued a state wide influenza health alert. Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and New York remain hotbeds for flu. The biggest concern is the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, which swept through many countries previously. The flu pandemic in the United States began in the spring of 2009.--Xinhua

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Child among 20 dead in Texas as killer swine flu virus spreads

With Nuance's voice print technology onboard, ZTE's Car Mode app will be able to recognize who is speaking and what he or she wants without the driver lifting a finger.

Phone manufacturer ZTE and Nuance Communications, provider of a wide range of voice recognition software, are teaming up at CES 2014 to announce an updated and enhanced Car Mode application for ZTE's Android devices.

The ZTE Car Mode app will provide an eye-free, hands-free way to interact with these phones on the go. Nuance is providing new voice biometrics tech for the screen unlock, enabling the hardware to recognize a voice command from a specific person's voiceprint to activate and access different functions and modes without physical contact.

For example, as part of a new feature called Music Barge-In, a driver listening to music could say, "Play next song," or "Pause," and the ZTE Android device would recognize that it is, in fact, the driver talking and then execute the command.

I get very annoyed when passengers won't stop talking while I'm issuing a voice command to a smartphone or navigation system; it confuses most simple systems. If Nuance's voice print and biometrics technology can help these devices to differentiate my commands from those of my mouthy passengers, it will be a welcome addition to the cockpit.

Additionally, Nuance's Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tech makes an appearance, allowing the driver to speak to the system with natural questions and commands, rather than memorizing and following a list of expected prompts. You could ask the phone, "Where is Union Square?" or say, "Take me to the post office" and the Car Mode app will search for the nearest matching destination and provide spoken directions from Google Maps.

Many smartphone owners are already used to the idea of talking to their phones as they would a human being thanks to the rapid evolution of voice search services like Google Now and Siri (video). Nuance and ZTE's partnership should take this concept a step further by removing the need to touch or look at the phone when behind the wheel.

ZTE has already implemented some of Nuance's technologies in the Car Mode app available on its current Android devices. When we should expect that app to be updated with the new voice biometrics technology and Music Barge-In has not been announced.

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ZTE, Nuance partner for eyes-free, hands-free voice command