Vocus is hosting a free webinar tomorrow 2 pm (ET) on the evolving Social Media Release.
Social Media
Do you create a data cloud?
I often refer to ‘social media resume‘ as a collection of online and offline activities we all engage in because of what we do, how we work, whom we link to, what we publish, and what conversations we have using social media.
The concept of the data cloud captures some of this, because we are talking of a reputation system that we deliberately create (in ‘about us’ pages, social networks, Wikipedia entries etc) or accidentally inherit (others linking to us, search engine spiders indexing us etc) based on digital information. These bits of data can be tagged and indexed to create a cloud.
There’s a very good discussion of this in a post by lexicographer Orin Hargraves, at the Visual Thesaurus. If you haven’t already come across this brilliant interactive thesaurus, I highly recommend it –yes it works in the form of a data cloud! It’s not free, but for under twenty bucks, fully worth it.
Hargraves goes on to say that we should think of the data cloud “as something other than a pretty, fluffy white thing that scuds across the horizon on a summer afternoon. The data cloud is home to a lot of curious things: bots, spiders, crawlers, gophers, and other critters that work tirelessly by night and day, sifting, indexing, collecting, comparing, and no doubt, drawing conclusions.”
The cloud does not just happen. We build it, color it, reshape it every time we interact socially in our analog and digital worlds. Like our resumes, we “put things into it and take things out of it” as we move ahead in life. Could we manage our cloud better? Definitely. Just as we would unsubscribe to data coming at us, “de-friending” people from our Facebook pages, we could and should clean up our data cloud periodically, because ultimately this is what our resumes will include. No bullet points, no overblown adjectives, no references, but an interactive data stream.
Just like a visual thesaurus.
Anne Thompson on the environment
I am a huge fan of NBC Nightly News, as you may tell from my many references to Brian William’s different approach to the anchor’s role.
So it was great to meet Anne Thompson last week, as she covered ASU on her new environment beat. What’s an environmental beat? It’s intersting how until about six months ago, there were only three pillars to this category: Going Green, Climate Change, and Al Gore.
Anne does not frame it in the limited ‘climate change’ box as so many conveniently do, and was excited to hear how sustainability (the fourth part in this category) is such a hot (or is it cool?) major here. She was not interested in the hit-and-run questions that, say, Fox would go after (You know: “New at six, why some college students are not recycling their plastic bottles and pizza boxes…“) but the deep ones about what it means to a desert state, and what kind of new “scientists” are coming through the system to meet the sustainability challenges.
Appropriately, some of the interviews were at the Decision Theater, not just a backdrop to the topic, but a place where we confront these issues, as part of the Global Institute of Sustainability.
Stay tuned!
Quotes for the week ending 29 Feb, 2008
“The whole 19th-century model of scarce distribution and abundant attention has been flipped on its head.”
Tony Quinn, in OMMA, on why we should change our behaviors, not our messages in a web 2.0 world.
“The right successor to the DVD is not Blu-ray or anything else. It’s the web.”
The Economist, 23 February 2008.
“The issue is no longer whether or not social media should be used. That genie is out of the bottle …The stress point has now moved to how the enterprise will use social media..”
Shel Israel, on there being two camps in social media. Camp #1 tends to ruin it for everyone else. It is run by marketing people who use social media simply for brand awareness.
“The authority factor over-weights (sic) poor writing skills”
ProBlogger Daniel Scocco, one of the top 100 blogs on Technorati, answering the question if poor writing skills overshadow good content.
“This election year, anyone can be a Henry.”
Lee Gomes, in The Wall Street Journal, on how a reader called Henry, commenting on the ABC News web site, thought to be a staffer at a presidential campaign, turned out to be a high school teacher.
IABC Phoenix – Social Media Presentation
If you attended the Writers’ Group workshop on social media and blogging, here is the presentation. Thank you to the IABC, and Suzanne McCormick, for inviting me to speak.
I realize we sped through a lot of material, so please feel to contact me if you have any follow up questions.
Incidentally, if you are interested, my colleague Dan Wool spoke about the same topic on Wednesday at the PRSA luncheon. Dan has a wonderful perspective of social media. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the RSS feed of ValleyPRBlog.
Social network for decison makers
It’s YASN –Yet Another Social Network. It’s called Kluster.
But this one caught my interest not only because it’s in the realm of decision making, but because it’s more about productivity and collaboration, and less about befriending people.
Besides sounding flaky (“What is our business model? don’t worry we are not like the others… we actually have one, we promise.”) they have thought the process through with “phases” (that are deliverables,) “sparks,” (solutions and ideas) and “amps” which refine the imperfect sparks. The network has its own currency, measured (or rather awarded) in “watts.”
Will Kluster be a lot different from, say, Innocentive, the “open innovation” community? Today is a defining moment, since Kluster is officially launching the company at the TED conference.
Workshop: Writers, blogs and social media
I am conducting an workshop on blogging for the IABC Phoenix Writer’s Support Group this week. The topic’s called Brave new, annoying new media. (Or why aren’t you blogging yet?)
This is not to say that every writer should have a blog, but I am a firm believer that every writer could make his/her content more blog-like. If you’re a “content creator,” (considering how newsletters, annual reports, presentations, press releases, white papers and books have analog AND digital lives) you’re probably feeling the pull of this whole web 2.0 world. It’s never too late, and there is no such thing as a dumb question*.
New tools, new formats and some cool new hacks are making it much easier now. If the technology has scared you off, I plan to keep this session 100% free of geek-speak.
This IABC Phoenix workshop is free.
Topic: Brave New, Annoying Social Media (Or Why Aren’t You Blogging Yet?)
Venue: Cisco Learning Institute. 1661 E. Camelback Road, Phoenix
When: Thursday Feb 28th
Time: 6.00 – 7.00 pm
* Fellow ValleyPRBlogger Dan Wool talks on just this topic this Wed, at a PRSA meeting.
Will Lawrence Lessig run for Congress?
Interesting grass roots campaign to persuade Larry Lessig, Stanford law professor, author, and founder of Creative Commons, to run for Congress. It includes a Facebook group and a web site called Draft Lessig.
Run, Larry, run!
Should Obama brush off plagiarism, or “turn the page?”
Maybe Barack Obama did “borrow” words from Massachusetts governor. It brings up two interesting questions:
- How much of what we use in communication should we attribute?
- How fast should we come back and apologize?
He called it “too big of a deal,” but as recent history has shown us, plagiarism has been quite a deal. From Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code) to Kaavya Viswanathan (How Opal Mehtha got kissed…) to journalists who inadvertently use material without attribution.
“Certainly plagiarism can have degrees,” notes Steve Buttry. And in case you’re looking for attribution,it’s a quote from the American Press Institutes‘s web site, in an article “When does sloppy attribution become plagiarism.” He goes on to say, “For the most part, sloppy attribution is to plagiarism as manslaughter is to murder.
As Plagiarism.org suggests, it’s good to attribute:
- whenever you use quotes
- whenever you paraphrase
- whenever you use an idea that someone else has already expressed
- whenever you make specific reference to the work of another
- whenever someone else’s work has been critical in developing your own ideas.
That the accusation comes from the Clinton campaign, makes sense. She is running out of brand differentiation, and will turn to the department of dirty tricks –even though she has lifted lines from Obama such as “Yes we will!” that echoes his “Yes we can!“The ‘academic’ rebuttal -explaining the circumstances of the borrowed words– is never good enough. Considering how anything you say in an election campaign can and will be mashed up, Youtubed and turned into a Swiftboat attack, this could be grave stuff.
Just apologize, and let’s “turn the page,” no matter who strung those three words first!
What did we learn from the Writers’ Strike?
No matter what you write, or where you publish, your content is going to migrate online.
The long and winding road of the Writers Guild of America has now come to a yield sign. They signed a contract with the studios on the basis of residuals that will be paid to them, some of which only begin after 2010. But they did have a qualified win.
Interestingly, this week, another group is negotiating how their “work” might be remunerated. Faculty members at Harvard University are voting on on a proposal that will allow the university to push their scholarship through online distribution methods online for the princely sum of … free! They could opt-out, of course.
And also this week, BurrellesLuce has called for a a copyright compliance standard for PR firms that may otherwise unwittingly violate intellectual property rights when they distributes publishers’ content. It calls for charging “a small royalty” for delivering the online and print stories it selects for clients.
If we have learned something from the Writers’ strike, it’s the value of (and price we should put on) content. We have sipped the “information wants to be free” cocktail too long and have never questioned what the real price of “free” is.
OK, so YouTube wants to be free, and the New York Times online wants to be free, but writers need to be paid and nurtured, and have a motivation to go after or craft the content that needs brainstorming, travel, teamwork and publishers who appreciate their endeavor. It depends on the definition of “small royalty,” but and it ought to be settled across a table not a picket line.
If not, everything from research to sitcoms will be diluted –to refill our freebie cocktails, maybe.
Hoipolloireport 