What's app groups.

A new WhatsApp update means users will no longer be added to group chats without their consent.The latest feature for Android and iOS devices allow users to decide who, if anyone, can add them to new groups. It can be enabled through the messaging app's privacy settings, with three options now available for who is authorised to add to groups: 'Everyone',

'My Contacts', or 'My Contacts Except...'. My Contacts” means only users you have in your address book can add you to groups and “My Contacts Except” provides additional control for who among your contacts can add you to a group.The final option allows users to blacklist certain contacts, who will be forced to send any group chat invites through private chats. Users will then have three days to decide whether or not to accept the invite.


It is the latest in a string of recent updates to the world's most popular messaging app, which is used by around 300 million people each day.


Earlier this week the Facebook-owned app introduced an update that allows users to watch Netflix videos within the app.The feature, which is currently limited to the iPhone version of the app, means WhatsApp users no longer need to leave the app to preview content, similar to the way videos from Instagram and YouTube can already be viewed within WhatsApp.

Other recent updates include biometric security support that allows Android users to secure WhatsApp with a fingerprint to prevent people from snooping on their messages.
WhatsApp is also expected to introduce potentially the biggest update in its history over the coming months, with the introduction of support for Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency. No official date has been set for Libra and various regulatory hurdles need to be overcome before its launch, though once it is ready it will allow people to send funds across Facebook's stable of apps, including Instagram and Messenger.

Here are some top tips group admins should consider:
1) Regularly post community guidelines and notes about the 'reply' functionality. Whether a new group or an established one it never hurts to post community/group guidelines and names of group admins in case people have questions. Larger and more socially-focussed groups especially benefit from doing this (especially reminding people about 'reply' functionality) as it can help topics stay on track and members know when to dip in and out and avoid self-promotional posts.

2) Create a recognised post type for important information. The content contained will vary from group to group but if you create a post that is easily recognisable (image, emoji, ASCII) people are more likely to spot the post in more active groups (plus it's easy to search for).

3) Figure out what works (or what's missing) by using a tool like WhatsAnalyzer or ChatVisualizer (check terms and conditions first). A handy tool that completes data visualisation on your exported chats. Use the data to determine when to post, topics to post about and members you might want to contact to be more active or ask if anything different needs to be done.

4) Get quick feedback using Google Forms and Doodle. Ask a question or 20 using Google Forms or schedule a meet-up easily with a quick link from Doodle both make running large groups more manageable and fairer. Using bit.ly can also add an extra layer of measurement for WhatsApp group admins (and users).
5) Schedule discussions. It may sound strange but one of the best WhatsApp groups I am in schedules specific times to discuss topics (similar to Twitter chats or AMA on Reddit). One group even goes further and gets members to help create a Google Doc on the subject that is then edited by admins and then sent to everyone. This is unlikely to work for every group but it could be a good way to limit endless rivers of updates and create something usable faster.

Social Media Marketing:Hospitality

Virtually every sector is affected by the growth of digital platforms, and the shift to mobiledevice use. However, the hospitality and travel sector has been one of the most significantly impacted, due to major shifts in how people research, plan, and subsequently purchase their travel-related needs. The landscape is evolving, and as such, hospitality marketers need to understand those changing behaviors, and update their planning in step.

From a managerial perspective, marketers of hotel brands‘ pages first need to be aware of their members‘ characteristics and understand who their members are before developing strategies for successful social media pages. In addition, these benefits attract potential consumers to join the hotel brands‘pages. 

Hotel firms should provide communication devices with diverse formats (e.g., realtime synchronous or asynchronous communication technologies such as chat or bulletin boards, virtual product presentations) that enable members to exchange information about hotel properties/services, provide critiques of ambiance, and share service experiences.

Information gathering through brand pages is the most influential element to attract potential consumers to join hotel brands‘ online pages and to encourage current members to frequently visit the page. Valuable information for the firm can be collected from the communication among consumers. By analyzing the information, hotels may gain new insights into consumer trends, needs, and experiences that affect (dis)satisfaction.

Hotel firms should consider data-mining software to monitor the content of information posted by their members. This would enable marketers to analyze the success of current marketing activities and create opportunities to refine strategies, which in turn enhance business performance. Through monitoring, marketers may provide ongoing updates to brand-related information in order to satisfy the current needs of its members. Satisfying members’ information needs is important, because efficient and convenient information gathering is a primary purpose of hotel brands‘ page members.

Hotels should enhance opportunities that help members identify like-minded consumers who are seeking similar hotel services (e.g., in-room hotel technologies such as touch screen tablets or Wi-Fi). It is the nature of an online community that individuals gather based on similar interests and purposes. On a hotel brand‘s page, individuals may form a variety of sub-groups based on similar or specific needs for hotel services. Marketers need to identify these potential sub-groups and provide more specialized and personalized services to each group.

In addition to categorizing sub-groups, marketers need to incorporate a variety of tools in order to facilitate the hedonic nature of their brand pages. For example, hotels may use a gaming platform (e.g., simple poll, online flash, online puzzles) for notifications of new services. Adding videos related to new brand information and virtual tour devices gives members enjoyable experiences during their visit to the hotel brands‘ pages. New technologies including RFID (Radio-frequency identification) can be employed to allow members to carry out community activities (e.g., photos taken at a hotel are automatically posted on its brand Facebook page and tagged on members‘ own pages) without the presence of a computer or smart-phone during their stay. 

With these features, hotel brands can enhance member engagement by increasing the hedonic experiences of being a member of the hotel brands‘ pages and directly influence the positive impression of brands. Therefore, it is critical that marketers implement various features that enable members to enjoy all of the content on the brands‘ pages

Interactions and communication among consumers do not appear to help hotel brands develop consumer commitment. Marketers may need to devise methods that depend on business-to-consumer activities rather than facilitating interaction among consumers in order to build consumer commitment towards the brand. For example, direct communication via online chat features between consumer service and consumers when making reservations may be an effective approach to build consumer commitment. Through this process, hotel staff could directly identify consumer preferences (e.g., the type of pillow or room they prefer) and special requests (e.g., particular room temperature and particular newspaper they want to be delivered). Based on the information collected through this chat feature, hotels may provide personalized service that underlines the value of staying at the hotel brand. This may enhance consumer commitment toward a hotel brand and produce loyal customers.

Social media is an innovative tool by which hotel brands can take a proactive approach to manage brand relationships with their consumers. Hotel marketers can identify the most important attributes of their brands (e.g., rooms, front desk, breakfast, room rates, and cleanliness) by analyzing the consumers’ posts on the brand pages. Following this analysis, marketers can take immediate actions based on both complimentary reviews and complaints about service. Particularly for uncomplimentary reviews, marketers can mitigate their potential harmful effects by effectively responding to consumers’ comments. All of these efforts can assist hotel brands in creating favorable brand images and building strong relationships with their members.

Facebook: Personal Digitized Health Care Tools

Facebook, the social media giant is launching a tool called Preventive Health to prompt its users to get regular checkups and connect them to service providers.The architect of the new service is Dr. Freddy Abnousi, the head of the company’s healthcare research, who was previously linked to an earlier skunk works initiative that would collect anonymous hospital data and use a technique called “hashing” to match the data to individuals that exist in both data sets for research.

Working with the American Cancer Society; the  American College of Cardiology; the  American Heart Association; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Facebook is developing a series of digital prompts that will encourage users to get a standard battery of tests that’s important to ensure health for populations of a certain age.

The company’s initial focus is on the top two leading causes of death in the world: heart disease and cancer along with the flu, which affects millions of people around the world each.

Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women around the world and in many cases it is 100% preventable. By incorporating prevention reminders into social platforms people are accessing every day, Facebook is giving people the tools they need to be proactive about their heart health.

Users who want to access Facebook  Preventive Health tools can search in the company’s mobile app to find which checkups are recommended by the company’s partner organizations based on the age and gender of a user.The tool allows users to mark when the tests are completed, set reminders to scheduled future tests and tell people in their social network about the tool.

Facebook will even direct users to resources on where to have the tests. One thing that the company will not do, Facebook assures potential users, is collect the results of any test.

“Health is particularly personal, so we took privacy and safety into account from the beginning. For example, Preventive Health allows you to set reminders for your future checkups and mark them as done, but it doesn’t provide us, or the health organizations we’re working with, access to your actual test results,” the company wrote in a statement.

Personal information about your activity in Preventive Health is and should not be shared with third parties, such as health organizations or insurance companies. Therefore it can’t be used for purposes like insurance eligibility.

The company said that people can also use the new health tool to find locations that administer flu shots.

“Flu vaccines can have wide-ranging benefits beyond just preventing the disease, such as reducing the risk of hospitalization, preventing serious medical events for some people with chronic diseases, and protecting women during and after pregnancy,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, Director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC, in a statement.

These new tools will empower users with instant access to information and resources they need to become a flu fighter in their own communities. This type of Social media marketing for health care used by Facebook provides unprecedented opportunities for educating patients, increasing outreach, and recruiting a new generation of health care professionals. The virtual aspect of social media enhances communications by creating a comfortable, often anonymous, environment for engaging and exchanging health information. Some may share a health goal to generate support or engage in a patient community to interact with other patients

Consent: A Thin Line

Sexual Consent has become an issue of discussion among the millennial due to the increased number of rape cases as the years progress. The first step is understanding the true meaning of sexual consent since more often than not is confused with neither saying yes nor no.

That means if you want to do something sexual with someone, you need to ask first. If you don’t ask first before you touch, kiss, or do anything sexual with someone, and they don’t say yes, then you don’t have that person’s consent, and what you’re doing to them may be sexual assault. That is why consent matters. 

Consent is:  

Freely given. It’s not okay to pressure, trick, or threaten someone into saying yes. And you can’t give consent if you’re drunk, high, or passed out.

Reversible. It’s okay to say yes and then change your mind — at any time! Even if you’ve done it before, and even if you’re both naked in bed.

Informed. You can only consent to something if you have all the facts.

Enthusiastic. When it comes to sex, you should do stuff you WANT to do, not things people expect you to do. If someone doesn’t seem enthusiastic (meaning happy, excited, or energized), stop and check in.

Specific. Saying yes to one thing (like going to the bedroom to make out) doesn’t mean you’re saying yes to other things (like having sex).

Did you know there are laws about who is able to consent? If the person you are with is:

• Drunk or high
• Asleep or passed out
• Below the legal age of consent or much younger than you
• Disabled in a way that affects their ability to understand you then they can’t consent, and it’s not okay for you to do anything sexual with them.
• Giving consent for one activity, one time, does not mean giving consent for increased or recurring sexual contact.

 These are facts that many people are not familiar with. Assumptions made about consent contribute to a rape culture where victims of rape are not aware that they are a victims themselves due to the lack of a clear understanding of what consent really means.

Social marketing campaigns can be used to shape social norms around sexual violence.

These campaigns are designed to change the long-term behavior of a target audience. Social marketing is founded on the idea that marketing techniques can be used not only to sell goods and services but to promote ideas, attitudes and behaviors. Social marketing campaigns operate using the analogies that lie within “Four Ps.” 

• The first P is the product which is not necessarily a physical object but a service, practice or idea. In order to sell or promote the product, individuals must believe that there is a problem and that the product is a part of the solution. Within sexual assault prevention, the product might be consent or bystander intervention.
• The second P is price. The price may not be a monetary cost of a product but rather an intangible social or emotional cost. Consuming a product may cost time or risk social disapproval from others. For this reason, the product must be marketed as being worth the price. For sexual assault campaigns this could mean emphasizing the cost of not intervening by promoting testimonials from survivors. 
• The third P is place which refers to the way in which a product is distributed. This includes considering dissemination of information and accessibility. For sexual violence social marketing campaigns this may mean posters, training, social media, etc.
• The fourth P is promotion which refers to promoting and sustaining a demand for the product itself. For sexual violence programming this may refer to awareness campaigns. Social marketing campaigns must thoroughly understand their target audiences. It is important that messages be designed to address the specific needs of particular populations. 

To provide a few examples, “Consent is so frat” is an organization marketing the importance of consent to members of Greek Life, “Men can stop rape” is a campaign designed to engage men on issues of sexual violence understanding their role in prevention efforts. Several programs have been designed specifically for student athletes to address the rates of sexual assault perpetration by collegiate athletes. Each of these campaigns are designed to market specifically to their target audience engaging those with substantial social influence in their communities. 

To me, consent in this regard is fundamental to an understanding of ethics: Take into account all those who are affected by a decision, and what they care about. Yes, that is clearly important in the sexual realm, because people care about that. It is important as a general approach to dealing with other people and in every domain of life. Seeking consent is necessary to be a kind, compassionate and ethical person. I care about it strongly, and I hope you do too.