 I thoroughly enjoyed watching Clint Eastwood’s recent homage to Johnny Mercer, fellow Southerner and one of the few men to attend Woodberry Forest School near my home town in Virginia and not graduate to go work in his daddy’s textile or insurance firm. After the show, which premiered on the TCM channel last week, I downloaded tons of Mercer material, including the Ella Fitzgerald cover of "Something's Gotta Give." Mercer's lyrics are every bit as clever as Cole Porter's, if less complex, and this song begins with the paradox of physics that states that "when an irresistible force meets an immovable object … something’s got to give." So with this song on constant replay in my brain, I attended Sage Software’s user conference last week in Atlanta to meet some of the Sage folk and to hear Brent Leary, our Blogger in Residence for TheSocialCustomer.com and fellow Georgian, speak about Social CRM. To put icing on the cake, Brent and I traveled together to New York to host the following day his interview with Jim Goldfinger (it was a big week for popular song lyrics) Founder and Senior Director, CRM Customer Value Network at SAP, who talked to an audience of CPG ... read more >>
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Sandwiched between her flight from Madrid and for Hong Kong, Clara Shih CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of The Facebook Era, Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff, took a few moments to be interviewed by Social Media Today. I was interested to speak to Clara after having heard her keynote at a recent Conference Board meeting in New York; since that time she has keynoted Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco and no doubt will continue to lead the charge in our understanding of how facebook — and other social networks like twitter and LinkedIn — will evolve as a business tool. ----------------------------------------
Listen now: ---------------------------------------- What’s really different about the facebook era? According to Clara, “In previous technology revolutions these originated in the workplace, then pervaded consumers; in social media the reverse is true. The power is in the people, it’s in individuals.” And it’s so easy to use that that’s why “technophobic people like my mother are on facebook.”... read more >>
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An experiment by students at MIT has shown that they were able to ’successfully’ predict the sexuality of people based on their friends on Facebook. The so-called ‘Project Gaydar’* showed that by looking at information that a person’s friends share online (in this case, their gender and sexual preferences) they were able to learn something about an individual themselves, even if their profile had high levels of privacy. On one hand this may not be ground-breaking research – people tend to be friends with people who have similar interests to them and so it might be expected that gay men are likely to have a higher than average proportion of gay male friends. However, the research does highlight, again, the privacy issues that people need to think about when using social networks, and when sharing information online. The ongoing growth of social networks and online communities is actually the tale of the ongoing growth of people sharing information online. This is a good thing. People are connecting with friends old and new, and are engaging with people and organisations who have similar interests, face similar challenges or are ... read more >>
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Revenge is a dish best served via status updates. When you look in the rearview mirror, you realize the greed and comparative savvy of the leadership of uber-successful online startups has ramifications on us all. What if Myspace hadn’t sold to Fox? What if Yahoo had sold to Microsoft? What if Google hadn’t purchased YouTube? In each instance, the online world would be different today. The same is true with the burgeoning fight between Facebook and Twitter. As you may remember, Facebook tried to purchase the plucky, 140-character interloper a while back for a reported $500 million. Not bad to be sure, but far less than YouTube’s $1.65 billion, or MySpace’s $580 million (in 2005 dollars). Regardless of the soundness of their perceived self-worth, Twitter rejected Facebook like a cheerleader asked to dance by the marching band tuba player. So, like any spurned suitor, Facebook vowed revenge. Whether they actually said “I will crush you” in a thick Russian accent is immaterial. Their subsequent actions speak plenty loud. @putyououtofbusiness There are three recent Facebook developments that should have Twitter sweating like Dom Deluise in a full-length mink: 1. Facebook as . ... read more >>
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You don't have to be a believer in wacko conspiracy theories to suspect that Big Brother really is watching you. From the NSA to Walmart and the Boy Scouts of America, the illusive all-powerful combine we call THEY has taken an unhealthy interest in our daily habits. Where we go, what we eat, who we see, what we do, what we buy--massive amounts of this kind of information is collected electronically every day and entered into gigantic data warehouses where it can be mined and analyzed to predict almost anything, from whether we are the kind of person who might buy Whitney's latest comeback CD to a person likely to sign up for a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. More and more, our lives have become a series of binary numbers protected only by the limitations of the software (which is getting smarter all the time) and the human beings (who don't appear to be) that try to make sense of it. The dimensions to which all this intrudes on our daily socialization is unclear but my sense is that Donald Rumsfeld was right, at least about one thing: we really don't know what we don't know. Not all of this is inherently evil, of course. Since 9/11 many ... read more >>
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SGV Tribune posted an article on how a missing person search was established by private citizens (not police) using Facebook. A young man named Vincent Giovanazzi went missing and unfortunately he ended his life before he could be located. A family friend of Giovanazzi’s parents set up a missing person Facebook page for Vincent. The Facebook page popularity caught on and a large number of people (200+) turned out to look for Vincent Giovanazzi. The search was successful and Vincent Giovanazzi’s body was recovered. Subsequently, the Facebook page for Vincent Giovanazzi was turned into a memorial page with information about the young man’s memorial service and funeral. Why didn’t police create the missing person Facebook page? Police applauded the use of a Facebook page as a missing person tool, but they also commented that pages like this could get out of control if used in an attempt to solve criminal cases. I am not sure I agree with Glendora Police Department, Lt. Tim Staab’s statement regarding the use of Facebook pages by citizens to solve crimes. If police are not going to use these tools then citizens should and have the right of free speech to do so. I am not ... read more >>
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Guest Post by Dr. Mark Drapeau – read his blog, follow him on Twitter 
Source: Shutterstock Images
Publishing “top 10″ lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers’ eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: “Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans.” For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed by the Marine Corps, Army, CDC, State Department, NASA, NASA JPL, Library of Congress, Air Force, and Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations to all these hard-working agencies. But what exactly are we celebrating here? The fact that government agencies are embracing new technologies that the citizens they serve actually use? That’s nice I suppose, but everyone from Papa John’s Pizza to America’s Next Top Model (200,000 more fans than the White House, cough) to someone I met once at a party during Internet Week has a Facebook “Fan Page” now, so surely we are not celebrating the mere presence of them. In fact, when everyone in my social circle’s social circle asks me ... read more >>
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People often describe Twitter as “Facebook reduced only to the status update”. I always found this a poor description, as there was always a significant difference between my Twitter updates and Facebook statuses. With Facebook I can only tell people about me; with Twitter, I can include other people and other topics in the conversation. This is what @ replies do on Twitter – they let me include other people in my updates and associate it with them as much as it is associated with me. Using @ replies in Twitter is a way to share and connect through content. I can write, for example, about my colleague @cosmond, and include him in the post. That post will then appear on my wall and on Charlie’s. People who follow me or who follow Charlie will then see that I wrote about him. This is a small but important piece of functionality. It changes my updates from being informational and for my friends and connections only, to being connectors. They organise information based on the people mentioned and connect me with the people I include (and them with me). We move from a situation where I connect with friends and distribute my content, to one where I ... read more >>
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First they offered vanity URLs, then they purchased Friendfeed, and now they are offering @ replies. I would wager the ability to “favorite” a Facebook Status is probablyright around the corner. It’s pretty obvious that Facebook is performing a hostile takeover of Twitter, and they’re doing it right. Facebook might have come before Twitter, but it only really snowballed into the social media juggernaut that it is in the past year or so— right about the same time that Twitter was starting its meteoricclimb to popularity. Until recently the two sites really had twodifferent purposes - you meet new people on Twitter, you stay connected with people you already know on Facebook. But it appears early on this year Facebook started getting pretty envious of Twitter’s popularity. First they adopted Twitter’s very attractive concept of the abilityto offer vanity URLs. And people loved them because, well, people arevain. It was a nice start, but that in and off itself wasn’t enough tomake it look like Facebook was gunning for Twitter. It actually lookedkind of desperate and sad, like a balding 40-something trying to wearEd Hardy (sorry Jon). And then ... read more >>
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In an attempt to get government agencies more involved on Facebook, the social network has launched a new page, Facebook and Government. While the page is still new and largely devoid of content, it’s easy to see how this page could soon become a great resource for many agencies that use Facebook to communicate with citizens. Could this hub be using the White House’s ambitious Facebook page as an example? When that page launched in the spring (it now has over 350,000 fans), it was followed shortly afterwards with a Facebook App, White House Live, which streams live events right in Facebook and allows for live comments from citizens. It’s too early to tell how exactly this page will be used. But it does have an “Other Pages” tab, which includes popular agency pages like the State Department, EPA, NASA and Coast Guard. All readers of this blog should become a fan of Facebook and Government — it will be interesting to see what’s coming. Could other social networks follow Facebook and create a similar portal? In March, I wrote about best practices for government communication on Facebook. 
Link to original post ... read more >>
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