Technology Review: Radical Opacity In shadows: Christopher Poole is the creator of 4chan, an online message board where anonymity reigns. Christopher Poole is 22 years old, and as is often true for men his age, his mental life has been punctuated by a series of passing enthusiasms: video games, online chat rooms, Japanese animation. Currently he seems to be going through a Robert Moses phase. Like many people, Poole thinks there are better ways than Moses’s to manage the tangled social, cultural, and infrastructural needs of a community of millions. Visited mostly by young men in their late teens and early 20s, 4chan is loosely organized by topics of interest–music, games, TV, animation (Japanese and otherwise). By no coincidence, 4chan stands out not only for the content its users generate but for the way they generate it: with a degree of anonymity almost unheard-of in the online world.
How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity Excited about your new Facebook page but don’t know what’s next? What does a truly advanced company look like in social business? They can say yes to seven or more of these ten criteria. We’ve been interviewing the most sophisticated brands in the world when it comes to social business for our upcoming report on “Enterprise Social Strategists Role”. How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business MaturityCorporations that have these and other following elements in place, may truly be sophisticated when it comes to social business: Clear understanding of customers’ socialgraphics. We’ve done research on the roadmap for companies to reach these 10 levels of nirvana, but have found few companies that have done a few, or even a majority of them.
The Evolving Role Of Community And Social Media Managers Community management is not new. People have been managing communities since communities and user groups were first created. Someone has always had to make sure that the community or user group is humming along like a well-oiled machine. The fast spread of social media has changed the role of a community manager, and has created a profession of a social media manager (or social media director - I use the two interchangeably). So... what's the difference between a community and social media manager? Everyone has his / her own definition of a community manager vs. social media manager, and there are as many answers as people blogging and speaking about this (just see my recent Twitter exchange below) Here's how I see the two intersecting and diverging. A community manager is mostly concerned with building and growth of a community, he / she may or may not use social media, as the community may be on Ning, custom branded community or external outposts like Twitter and Facebook.
Mark Greenfield - Higher Education Web Consulting » The Fate of Communications Services in Universities I rarely allow guest posts on this blog but today I am making an exception. Pat Lynch is someone who I have followed for many years and someone I deeply respect. His book “Web Style Guide”, co-authored with Sarah Horton, was one of the first web books I ever purchased and I still refer to it on a regular basis. Pat has shared with me his thoughts on the recent conversations on the future of higher education web development (see “When the Axe Man Cometh” on uwebd). His historical perspective on the future of university web services departments provides sage advice for us all. I spent most of my 39-year career (so far) at Yale as a manager and director of various kinds of internal communications services, including science graphics, medical illustration, video production, biomedical and general photography, computer graphics and slides film-recording (back in the 1980s), desktop publishing, web design, print and reprographics services, and web design.
How I Sold a Blog for $20,000 in 8 Months | Blog Tyrant Last Update 12th June, 2015 So you want to sell a blog? In my first year of University I sold my blog for almost $20,000 after only eight months work. It was then that I realized that making money online was something I really wanted to give a shot. In this post I am going to show you what I did in those eight months and how you can create a blog that someone might just want to pay big money for. I am going to divide this post into three sections: The pre-blogging stageBuilding a blog worth some moneySelling your blog Nothing in this post is particularly insightful or new, if you know where to look. The pre-blogging stage Photo: johnonolan This section is about all those little things you need to do before you start your professional blog. 1. Firstly, if you spend eight months working on something you don’t believe in or something that disagrees with your personal morals then you are going to end up hating yourself for wasting that precious time. 2. Let me give you an example. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2.
The Science of Sharing In 2001, grad student Jonah Peretti accidentally created an Internet sensation when e-mails of his attempts to put "sweatshop" on sneakers customized with Nike ID went viral. In 2005, he set out to repeat his unexpected success with far different content: Black People Love Us, a parody site of a quintessentially white couple's efforts to ingratiate themselves with African Americans. It also became a viral hit. This convinced Peretti that the "mysterious" world of viral content can be broken down and made somewhat predictable. He went on to found content-sharing platform BuzzFeed in 2006 on the proposition that science can be applied to content creation to up the chances of viral appeal. "There's an underlying human impulse to share ideas and experiences," said Peretti. Now, BuzzFeed and other Web-sharing platforms such as StumbleUpon, Digg and even Twitter and Facebook are providing advertisers with an entrée into the stream of shared content by posting brand content on their sites.
Understanding How and Why Facebook Users Interact with Brands This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. While much of finding what works for your business on social media sites is a process of trial and error, recent stats from e-mail marketing firm ExactTarget (which recently acquired social CRM platform CoTweet) shed some light on how the Facebook population uses the site, and specifically, how it interacts with brands. First, the good news: Based on its study of 1,500 Facebook users, ExactTarget concluded that 38% of online U.S. consumers “Like” (formerly “Fan”) a brand on the social networking site. The news that presents a challenge to businesses looking to benefit from Facebook, however, is that just because someone has Liked you doesn’t mean they’re ready to see your promotional messages. Fortunately, ExactTarget didn’t stop there, and did some research into what motivates users to Like companies on Facebook.
Page-view PR It’s no secret that information is exploding, but just how much may shock you. Americans consume 100,500 words a day, according to a study by the University of California at San Diego – and that doesn’t include any information at work. What’s worse, as more content is digested digitally, we now scan and skim. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that on the average web page users read at most 28% of the words. While both of these studies focus only on the US, the “Attention Crash” is a global problem – and it’s not going to get any better. The good news is that we’re not alone. However, the media, more so than the PR industry, is successfully coping with these changes by increasingly turning to traffic-generating search engine optimization tactics. Writers and editors at Hearst Media, for example, use a tool that suggests relevant Google-friendly keywords. With this in mind, here are three simple tips to help you implement a more traffic-friendly PR campaign. Write web-friendly copy
What to Consider When Building an In-House Social Media Team The Social Media Marketing Series is supported by Webtrends Apps, which lets you quickly create and publish Facebook, iPhone, iPad and Android apps. Learn more about it here or keep up with all Webtrends Social products by following its blog. Building any kind of team is a challenge, but pulling together the people who are going to represent your company in the social media arena is a particularly tricky task. What is the ultimate purpose of your social media team? We talked to professionals who have gone through the process — from big global businesses to small companies — to try and find some answers to these questions. Have a read of their advice and let us know any useful experiences you've had in the comments below. 1. Before you consider the question of who, you need to have already established the answer to why? Hrabovsky also points out that your social media team members will also need to be able to help customers — they may be the point of call that connected consumers head to.
Interrupt Users to Increase their Adoption and Engagement You want someone to use your product, then get in their face and force them to. I’ve made this argument before. One of the biggest challenges for any startup is engagement – acquiring users is hard, keeping them is usually much harder. Generally people are enthusiastic and interested in trying new things, but they’re also lazy, comfortable, scared of change, and unmotivated. Try interrupting users. It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot at Year One Labs with our startups. Put another way: Your web application is going to require either a change of behavior or the creation of an entirely new behavior. There are some feedback loops that are effective. Drill down into the use cases you think are right for your application.