Hello all. The name’s Nikki and I’ve just started interning at Ammo North. I feel lucky to be starting at a company with established clients and thriving divisions, it’s a great opportunity. Influencer marketing wasn’t a category I knew too much about, but I was intrigued and excited to see the potential it held. Before starting here I knew very little about blogs and RSS feeds. I was on Facebook and msn, but I’ve recently discovered they are just the tip of the iceberg that is the social media universe.

I felt like I’d arrived on a different planet, new lingo, new references and far too many acronyms. Can you say overwhelming? Besides coworkers counsel two applications helped to guide me through the vast never ending universe of social media; Delicious and Twitter. Apart from standing on my chair and yelling, “What’s going on?” I’m able to quickly find out what’s new, exciting and most important relevant.

Before starting at Ammo delicious was just an adjective I used to describe something yummy. I now appreciate its awesome potential for organizing bookmarks (organizing is kind of a weird passion of mine). Categories, subcategories, links, tags…I get excited thinking of all the endless organizing possibilities. Delicious lets me to spend my time reading interesting articles rather than searching for them. Reviewing the bookmarks coworkers have tagged has probably been the most insightful. It’s a great way of discovering the latest news and finding out what interests them.

My “following” list on Twitter is growing. I’m taking the cautious approach, reading each bio and weighing their posts as relevant to my information quest. I’ve been following people who are influencers in social media; through their posts I’m able to find interesting articles and opinions that are relevant to my new job. It seems that every time I log in there’s a new Twitter service available. Do I understand how to utilize most of them? Not yet, but that’s what Twitter applications are for; explaining other Twitter applications. The lingo has been the biggest struggle, but I’m sure there’s an application for that too. So now I have just one question; is it normal to think of your life in the context of your next post? Find me on Twitter here: twitter.com/nshik

One article at a time I’ve become addicted to finding out what’s going on, who’s doing what, and I can’t seem to get it fast enough. I’d love to hear about your initial encounter with social media or any insights you have now that you are a practiced social mediator (let me know about the correct term for that too).

I found a great article on New Scientist the other day by Michael Bond, How Your Friends’ Friend Affect YOur Mood

Here are some excerpts:

“Christakis … found that a person’s happiness is dependent not only on the happiness of an immediate friend but - to a lesser degree - on the happiness of their friend’s friend, and their friend’s friend’s friend. Furthermore, someone’s chances of being happy increase the better connected they are to happy people, and for that matter the better connected their friends and family.”

“Two factors appear crucial: the frequency of social contact, and the strength of the relationship. This is not too surprising: we know that emotional contagion requires physical proximity. It is also likely that the closer we feel to someone, the more empathetic we are towards them, and the more likely we are to catch their emotional state. However, how these two factors play out in day-to-day interactions is uncertain. What is also unclear - because it has never been properly tested - is the extent to which emotions can propagate through virtual networks, where the opportunity for physiological mimicry is much reduced.”

Networks of Influence: New Scientist

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… but apparently not always at work…

Forget six degrees of separation. How about three degrees of happiness? Researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego have mapped the relationships of happy people and found that happiness is a collective phenomenon that spreads like a virus through social networks - affecting even strangers three times removed from each other. Here is the article.

The theory builds on the notion of emotional contagion, the process at work when a person smiles back at someone who smiles at him. Human emotions appear in clusters, behaving like stampeding animals, says study co-author Nicholas Christakis.

“You would never think to ask a particular buffalo in a herd, ‘Why are you running to the left?’ ” says the Harvard Medical School sociology professor. “The whole herd is running to the left.”

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