Dear Readers, I do apologise for my intermittent posting of late – you’ll understand why next week. In the meantime, accept my humble apologies with this edition of the Friday Social Media Roundup – everything that’s fit to blog from the last week and beyond…
February 20th:
1. Something that’s been coming up a lot lately is the phenomenon of people behaving badly via social media (aka “online disinhibition effect”). Apparently there’s a biological reason for it, according to this NY Times article. Now all we need is a pill to solve the problem for good.
February 19th
1. Researchers at the Center for Social Media at American University are undertaking a study to see how public radio stations in the U.S. are using social media, participation details available here.
2. Charlene Li is doing some research about “when and how companies can participate in Wikipedia while abiding by the guidelines and spirit of Wikipedia”. If you know of any companies who are struggling with this, please contact Charlene via her blog.
February 16th:
1. According to this article from the New York Times, DVR viewers actually only skip through about 30% of commercials, not the 70% generally reported by TiVO. BUT – their data may not be all that reliable, according to David Card, who works for competing firm Jupiter Research, Nielsen based their numbers on just 60 households with DVRs.
2. There has been much shoe-gazing in the blogosphere about what social media is and if we should even call it that. I’m not really into semantic arguments. Behaviour is changing, no doubt about that, and the right name for it will stick. Personally? If it ain’t “social media”, then we’ll rebrand as SMG.
February 12th:
1. MediaWeek says that eMarketer says that podcasting will generate $400 million in ad dollars by 2010. Which is nice, but still infinitesimal when you compare it to the $153.7 billion dollars that will likely be spent on advertising in the U.S. in 2007 (source: TNS Media Intelligence).
February 9th:
1. Cisco jumped into the social media game (in their first move toward courting big media, according to this article) with the acquisition of Five Across (not to be confused with Six Apart), an 11-person outfit in San Francisco that has developed software that allows firms to easily add social networking tools to their existing websites.
February 8th:
1. Pontiac is going social media wild, seeking to tap into their various communities of interest with the creation of Pontiac Underground (“Where a Passion for Pontiac is Driven By You”), an aggregator of site feeds about Pontiac products plus a number of other community tools.
February 7th:
1. This article describes nextgen online community Webjam as “social networking on steroids”. Their beta site is now open to the public and allows you to build your own community suite* by choosing from their vast array of modules (blogs, message boards, photo albums, audio & video players… etc.)
2. The Boston Herald reported that the IOC is considering allowing athletes to officially blog the Beijing Olympics – kind of ironic, given the press and Internet control policies of the host country, don’t you think?
February 6th:
1. My birthday.
February 4th:
1. Intel has hired a Social Media Evangelist. His name is Josh Bancroft and he’ll be working for Intel Software Network a community suite*,
…for developers using pretty much anything Intel related. There are blogs by Intel software folks, very active technical forums, a wiki, downloadable tools to help your apps rock harder, and even videos with application engineers and community managers, and more. There are some more defined communities that are focused on, like mobility and gaming, but the basic idea is that we want this to be your go to place for anything related to software development and Intel.
I hereby declare that Intel is a company that understands the power of tapping into their community of interest using social media. Well done, folks!
January 9th:
1. I think Edelman released a white paper called A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere: A New Model of Peer-To-Peer Communications (it’s hard to tell just when it was released – there’s no date on the document itself, but possibly one in the URL – try not to be disconcerted by the abrupt and angry page-turning sound effects). Among the numbers contained therein? 74% of Japanese read blogs, and while just 14% of Belgians do, 43% of them say they have taken action as a result of something they’ve read on a blog.
Have a great weekend!
*Official SMG Phrase of the Week