My September 2010 video clip of the month features Conan O’Brien revealing the name of his new TBS series using a Sharpie and some white paper in a YouTube video. I picked the video because it shows how social media is changing the way major announcements are made. For most of the last century, major public statements were made through press releases and press conferences for the media. Today, press releases aren’t just for journalists anymore, and they are … [Read more...]
How Crowdsourcing Helped Iranians Beat the Censor
August 16, 2010 by
I read a fascinating article in Newsweek today about a 25-year-old computer programmer who created crowdsourcing software that broke the grip of Iran's censors after the disputed 2009 election. The programmer, Austin Heap of San Francisco, developed the software, called Haystack, to open up social networking sites the Iranian government was blocking, such as Twitter and Facebook, to allow people on the ground in Iran to organize inside the country and communicate … [Read more...]
Newspapers & News Sites ‘Like’ New Tweet Button
August 14, 2010 by
Newspapers and news sites played an important role in Tuesday's launch of Twitter's new new “Tweet” button. More than 30 large websites secretly changed their designs overnight to begin using the new button on its launch day. Among those sporting the “Tweet” button Tuesday morning were: Arizona Republic/azcentral.com CBS Interactive CNN.com Detroit Free Press HuffingtonPost.com SFGate.com Sky News The Cincinnati Enquirer The Des Moines … [Read more...]
30 Tweet Gems from Emergency Social Data Summit
August 13, 2010 by
You might remember one of the good news stories to come out of January's Haiti earthquake. A Canadian woman trapped in rubble sent a text message to Canadian foreign ministry officials thousands of kilometers away. The message was relayed back to Canadian authorities in Haiti who were able to find and rescue her. With people increasingly using text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and other new media tools to seek help in a disaster, the American Red Cross sponsored … [Read more...]
Google Says ‘Good-Bye’ to Google Wave
August 6, 2010 by
After a little more than a year, Google is waving "good-bye" to Google Wave. Google Wave was supposed to be the hot new social networking platform and for a time you were considered special if you had been one of the lucky ones to receive an invite. The only thing is many people, including me, couldn't find a pratical "real work" use for it. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking … [Read more...]
Video Clip of the Month: ‘Guy Walks Across America’
August 2, 2010 by
My August 2010 video clip of the month is "Guy Walks Across America," a viral video on YouTube illustrating how social media is changing advertising. The video, funded by Levi's jeans (which is featured prominently at the end of the clip), has racked up more than a million viewers since its debut on YouTube July 20. It features actor/model Michael Johnson wearing Levi's jeans and a plain T-shirt on a 14-day cross country trip past American landmarks both major … [Read more...]
A Match Made in Twitter? Discovering Who to Follow
July 31, 2010 by
Twitter is rolling out a great new feature called "Who to Follow" that offers users personalized recommendations for people to follow on the microblogging service. If you're one of the Twitter users selected early for the roll out (like me!), you'll find the new feature on the top right of your homepage at Twitter.com (when you're logged into an account). Twitter introduced the new "Who to Follow" feature in a blog post yesterday: The algorithms in this feature, … [Read more...]
Facebook Stories & Statistics: A Huge Impact
July 17, 2010 by
I am still in awe of the latest Facebook statistics: More than 141 million unique visitors in the United States in June 2010. More than 500 million users worldwide. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. 50 percent of mobile Internet traffic in the United Kingdom is on Facebook. Facebook tops Google for weekly U.S. Internet traffic. If those statistics and my July 2010 video clip of the month, Social Media … [Read more...]
‘Special Sauce’ for Online Contest Success
July 15, 2010 by
The special recipe networked nonprofits use to win online contests was revealed in a video the Case Foundation posted on its website last week. The video features Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, authors of The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Changet, with research on the successful social media strategies of contest winners. It also features Scott Beale from the Atlas Service Corps, a nonprofit which has won five online competitions and … [Read more...]
Video Clip of the Month: Social Media Revolution 2
July 2, 2010 by
My July 2010 video clip of the month is a recently updated video by Erik Qualman, author of the Socialnomics – Social Media Blog, demonstrating social media’s explosive growth in recent years. The video is a follow-up piece to his original social media revolution video from last summer. While some of the information is similar to last year’s version, Qualman has updated the data and included new figures for the first time. A few of the highlights include: If … [Read more...]
What Bad Web 2.0 Customer Service Looks Like
June 30, 2010 by
After my Verizon e-mail went down for several hours yesterday, I checked the Web 2.0 "newspaper": Twitter. I quickly discovered many tweets and even a few blog posts, such as Verizon Email Outage: Twitter and Central for Webmail, about the outage, which appeared to be national in scope. To my surprise, however, @Verizon, the official Verizon corporate Twitter account, and @VerizonSupport, the official Verizon customer service Twitter account, weren't … [Read more...]
World Cup, NBA Fans Break Twitter Record
June 22, 2010 by
Two major sporting events this week created tweet tsunamis that helped Twitter reach all-time records for tweets. After the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament started two weeks ago, the social networking site began seeing huge traffic whenever a big goal was scored. Though Twitter normally sees about 750 tweets per second on an average day, a record was set Monday when tweets were sent at a rate of 2,940 per second just 30 seconds after Japan scored against … [Read more...]
Facebook COO Thinks E-mail is ‘Probably Going Away’
June 18, 2010 by
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg created a stir this week when she boldly said, “"E-mail—I can't imagine life without it—is probably going away.” Speaking at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference on Tuesday, Sandberg said only 11 percent of teens use e-mail daily and instead use SMS and social networking. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she said, “you look at what teenagers are … [Read more...]
Video Clip of the Month: BP Commercial Spoofs
June 2, 2010 by
British Petroleum's (BP's) failure to adequately enlist social media in the communications battle over the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill made picking a single video clip of the month too difficult. So I've chosen two BP commercial spoofs, both highlighting BP's growing credibility gap as it desperately tries to control information and ignores the new (social media era) communication rules: collaboration, openness, transparency, and timeliness. While BP is … [Read more...]
Exciting or Scary? Rise of Social Media Swarms
May 24, 2010 by
Today, we are on the verge of a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action. Social media is creating a new kind of communications fluidity, a fully immersive experience enabling conversations to be hijacked in ways unimaginable in decades past. Up until the 1980s, totalitarian governments, superpowers, media cartels, and leading brands had dominant control over national and even global dialogues because of superior resources and a monopoly … [Read more...]
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