Lists – for everything
Posted on | November 16, 2009 | Comments Off on Lists – for everything
Some people love to make lists. Some people love to read them. Some people are just plain afraid of them. They probably know something I don’t. Personally I make lists everyday because it is the only way that I remember anything. Really.
When I was a kid I liked to spend rainy days wandering around the library, nibbling at one book and then another, always finding something interesting.
Now there are sites on the net that are great at organizing lists of things that can save you a lot of time compared to what you might spend searching for the same quality of sites yourself. Conversely you may find that browsing through these lists and wandering through the internet tubes from one ‘best of’ to another can shoot quite a bit of time right in the… you know what, more time than you save. But finding that one jewel can make it all worth it.
I am just going to mention one wonderful place this time around, mashable.com’s megalist pages, my current Fire Swamp. I have never made it all the way through any of these lists without running way out of time.
Have fun and don’t forget to watch out for the ROUSes.
ken
Huh? No Really. When Tweets aren’t just tweets.
Posted on | November 5, 2009 | Comments Off on Huh? No Really. When Tweets aren’t just tweets.
I get so busy that sometimes I miss some really fun(ny) things that are happening on some of the Social Media sites. In this case I am thinking of Twitter which has a very open attitude about sharing it’s innards, known in the industry as an API – application programming interface. Basically this allows other folks to develop ways of connecting their software ideas to twitter. It is great.
Share files with one or many fellow tweeters.
http://www.twitdoc.com/
http://www.filetwt.com/
http://filesocial.com/
Play Games
http://playspymaster.com/
http://snods.com/
http://www.tweefight.com/
http://140mafia.com/account/register?msg=
http://ajaxorized.com/twitbrain/
http://www.140blood.com/
Share Videos/Pictures
http://www.tweetube.com/
http://twitpic.com/
http://www.twitxr.com/
http://blog.flickr.net/2009/06/30/twitter-your-flickr/
http://posterous.com/
http://12seconds.tv/12mail (for your iphone)
http://vidly.com/?twitvid
Training? Support? Funny?
http://screenr.com/
Walk a mile in someone else’s tweets
http://ctwittlike.appspot.com/
Job Hunting
http://www.twitterjobsearch.com/
Find the twitter job feeds that are relevant for your search – you could start here
http://jobmob.co.il/blog/twitter-job-openings-postings-leads/#axzz0W2yA7DXc
Some Local Puget Sound job tweeters
@NewTacomaJobs
@SeattleJobTech
@WriterJobsSea
…
So the list goes on and on. I will work up some new ideas for another blog. Send me any ideas you have…
Thanks,
ken
Jungian Archetypes and social media
Posted on | November 2, 2009 | Comments Off on Jungian Archetypes and social media
People involved in online social media are certainly not that different from people involved in any other group activity. We are each a unique individual but we still tend to statistically fall into a few loosely defined categories. Understanding some of these categories can benefit us in effectively designing our approach to integrating social media into our lives or businesses.
I am going to describe what I consider to be (and I am supported by various surveys) these loosely defined groups. I say loosely because most of us will exhibit traits from more than one of the groups but our activity will gravitate more towards one particular group. We do tend to be a pretty complicated species so generalizing about our behavior runs the risk of being too simplistic, but you have to start somewhere.
1. People that create content. Blog, articles, podcasts, videos, etc. The percentage of folks in this category is not real high but I would insist that their influence greatly outweighs their numbers. Producers – in the US about 18%
2. People that respond to, comment on, media being produced online. Commenters – In US about 25%
3. People that collect, organize, and rank all the diverse media that is available. These folks are important even though there are few of them. THere is this huge amount of data that for most of us is way to daunting to sift through to find what we want or need. These folks, the Gatherers, are the librarians of our online media. About 12% of users in the US.
4. People that join the social networks and sites like Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, etc. These folks are active but tend not to produce or organize content. I think of them as folks that just like to come to the party and actually they add an important element, dynamic energy. Joiners – 25% in the US
5. People that come by to watch the show. Some folks call them lurkers but I don’t like the connotations of that word and I prefer observer or watcher. These folks comprise the largest number of Social Media users. It is fun to watch and watchers are important because they read the posts, watch the videos, etc. Observers – in the US 48%
6. People that are not really doing anything with their account(s) on social media networks or sites. Sadly the second largest number in our groupings. Inactives/Sleepers – In the US 46%.
Of course these numbers are different in different parts of the world and are also subject to the changing landscape of this very young and vibrant neighborhood of the internet.
ken
Shift Happens
Posted on | October 19, 2009 | Comments Off on Shift Happens
Just reading about the the 3rd annual Media Convergance Conference in New York in beginning tomorrow and running through the 21st of Oct, 2009. This is being hosted by The Economist Magazine. This would be wonderful to attend, there are going to be some very exciting speakers and I can imagine that there will be some very interesting discussions taking place.
The surge of new technologies and social media innovations in today’s environment is significantly altering the future media landscape for marketers. Consumer behaviour is changing and the way marketers reach their audience must also change. Marketers are searching for new ways to not only reach their customers, but to understand them, to peer inside their minds. As the level of consumer understanding increases, so can the knowledge of how best to reach them. However the plethora of tools at a marketers disposal is not easy to navigate and real learning comes from a real understanding of the future of media convergence.
What led me to The Economist was reading The Fischbowl, which is a development blog for Arapahoe High School.
Karl Fisch has produced some amazing videos over the years, and along with Scott McLeod, Laura Bestler, and XPLANE, is well known for the ‘Did You Know?/Shift Happens’ series. If I remember correctly these videos as a group (there are several differnet versions) have been viewed well over 20 million times.
I am including one of them here…Definately worth watching. One of my favorite bits of information is the fact that Dell Computers directly attributes selling over $3,000,000 (3 million) dollars worth of computers from their Twitter.com/dellOutlet presence.
Make sure you check out the Fischbowl blog, info on the latest version of “Did You Know/Shift Happens” (the 4.0 version I have here as of Oct 2009), Scott McLeod, XPLANE, and Laura Bestler.
Tipping Point
Posted on | October 19, 2009 | Comments Off on Tipping Point
Just read an interesting post on the digital version of “Federal Computer Week”. The title is ‘Social media in government: Welcome to the tipping point’.
What I took away from this was not just the fact that three of the ten most accessed stories were about social media but more importantly the very appropriate (in my opinion) conclusion on the part of the author, Steve Kelman.
the question is not whether government should embrace social networking technologies, but how most productively to use them — inside agencies (to build social capital, as tools for communities of practice, and so forth) and between agencies and the public — to promote higher-quality government. “How,” of course, includes dealing with cybersecurity, loafing on the job, and other issues that worry many in government. But that dialogue has to be in the context of how, not whether. The time for debating whether to embrace social media should be past.
I feel that this conclusion is germane to any disscussion of Social Media in business as well. Comments?
Do you think Social media is a fad?
Posted on | October 15, 2009 | Comments Off on Do you think Social media is a fad?
I stumbled (literally in a digital sense anyways) across this video and have to share it.
Some of the numbers you will see are either frightening or enlightening – it all depends on how you feel about the question and your relationship with social media.
In the near future I think that companies will come to enjoy social media as an extension of their interface with their potential and current customers, no different than we now see telephones or offices. As you see the trends outlined in the video you may remember back to when this same question was being asked about computers (are they just toys) and then a little later about the importance of the internet.
My Dad used to tell me that ‘Word of Mouth’ was the best form of advertising. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube – these are the places where digital word of mouth lives. One of the important differences between analog word of mouth and digital word of mouth that needs to be carefully addressed by us all is longevity of what is said. We are used to our (for most of us) spoken words fading quickly. That is not true of the digital spoken word. It is going to hang around and have impact for a much longer period of time.
But enough of me, watch this video – grab a pencil and paper – jot down some of the numbers. There are some important trends to note.
Let me know what you think.
Twitter users “consume more news”
Posted on | October 13, 2009 | Comments Off on Twitter users “consume more news”
Since I am on the subject of statistics, here is another interesting bit of data about the current age range of online adult Twitter users.
In its first look at Twitter, the Pew Internet & American Life Project discovers that Twitter users tend to be younger and more mobile than the general Internet population, but they also consume more news through the Internet and tend to engage in social activities online differently than everyone else.
Pew says that the average Twitter user is “overwhelmingly young,” though the average age of a Twitter user is slightly higher than most other social networking services. Twitter’s median age is 31, while Facebook’s is 26 and MySpace’s is 27. Because of their youth, however, Twitter users are more likely to come from lower-income households (older Internet users tend to make more than younger users), and they’re more likely to live in urban areas than the general Internet population.
The Arstechnica article has some additional information that is worth reading.
Mobile Internet access has jumped 34 percent
Posted on | October 13, 2009 | Comments Off on Mobile Internet access has jumped 34 percent
I was wandering through Mobile Crunch the other day and read this article claiming that most new mobile internet users are women, teens and seniors.
Embattled ratings company Nielsen has published some Internet findings that may interest you. (If not, go make a sandwich or something.) The big finding is that mobile access to the Internet has jumped 34 percent compared to last year, and it looks like women, teens and, yes, seniors make up the bulk of that increase. The mobile Internet: not just a place for 20-something men anymore. Darn.
I have also heard that the majority of new computer/internet users will be ‘mobile’ on a worldwide basis. The correct formatting of information is going to become even more important as these small screen internet users increase in numbers.
Online Seminars and training opportunities
Posted on | October 13, 2009 | Comments Off on Online Seminars and training opportunities
As I find online tutorials or ‘eSeminars’ I will try and post information in a timely manner. This looks good though this is pretty short notice. This Thursday, the 15th, at 11am from Federal Computer Week and Adobe.
Embracing the culture of collaboration
Federal Computer Week will present Steve Ressler, founder of GovLoop.com, at 11 a.m. Thurs., Oct. 15, where he will discuss how government can create successful social-media initiatives.
Despite the social networks, blogs and crowd-sourcing platforms that comprise it, social media is not about tools and technology. Rather, it’s about the cultural shift catalyzed by social-media tools and technologies – a shift from a broadcast society to a collaboration society.
During the eSeminar, attendees will learn about:
- The importance of understanding social media;
- The principles of a collaborative culture; and
- The unique cultural and technological barriers and challenges facing government agencies.
Social Media
Posted on | October 12, 2009 | Comments Off on Social Media
I am sure I will revisit this discussion many times in the posts to come but since this blog claims to explore the entanglement of social media in all (ok not really all but many) aspects of our lives I think it is a good idea to begin by defining the term itself.
Here is the opening of Wikipedia’s article describing Social Media
“Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).
Social media can be said to have three components;
- Concept (art, information, or meme).
- Media (physical, electronic, or verbal).
- Social interface (intimate direct, community engagement, social viral, electronic broadcast or syndication, or other physical media such as print).”
When I use the words “Social Media” I recognize what they describe in the same respect that I understand what the word ‘consciousness’ means. I have a pretty good idea of what it is when I experience it but I just can’t point at one thing and say there it is, consciousness. Heck, I can barely spell it. It seems to me like the edges of the concept become more diffuse the harder I look at it. Our very own Heisenberg’s principal of uncertainty as applied to the English language. But then again I still live in an analog world where it is ok to have blurred edges and I am not trying to serve up an absolute adamantine definition, just a good working understanding to enable a reasonable discussion.
So, in order to try and come to that informal agreement, over the next couple of posts I will investigate more closely the Wikipedia definition of Social Media. Some of the words, like ‘meme’, are very interesting, fairly new, and deserving of our attention.
Then I will begin to ferret out some common misunderstandings surrounding the hazards and benefits of using social media in a business environment.
ken
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