Comments by Josh Cunningham Subscribe

On Social Media Today: Demanding Credibility in Authorship

The waters are so murky these days, it seems. If I write poorly and have someone else re-write and edit, who gets the credit? If I write an outline and someone puts it together, who owns that? If I cut and paste a 1000 word post and add a 100 words to that as commentary, did I do anything?

"Generating content" is so critical for online companies that the content itself has become a completely disposable commodity in so many cases. And yet, there are people writing great things, sharing important ideas, and taking the time to write something great. If those folks aren't getting credit, it's a shame.

Thanks for the responsible curation and for taking a public stand!

On How to Be a Frighteningly Brilliant Content Marketer

I love that you highlighted that Flickr page. Those are some of the best photos on the web, in my opinion. I found that one a month ago and laughed until I cried. Such a great idea, I barely care what they're looking at!

On Don't Look Silly on Your Facebook Page: Share, Don't Like

@Mike: Someone pointed that out on the original post as well [edit: looks like that was you :) ]. I think they're trying to save space but, in my mind, that's a pretty key functionality missing. That still doesn't give you a good excuse to Like :)

@Joel: It is funny, isn't it? I saw this mostly with team-managed Facebook pages. One admin would post a link and the next would come along and Like it. I don't think they noticed that this was happening. It does look silly but the worst part is that it doesn't actually do anything or reach any more people!

On Big Step

Thanks Wedge, I appreciate that! I'd love to start something like what you guys have going on eventually...

On 10 Pitfalls to Avoid in Social Media Marketing

Very good post Mitch, great points here.

I actually am just commenting to say I remember, vivdly, that game. Anyone else? :)

On 7 Or 9 Tips On How Many Tips You Need To Bait Your Writer's Hook

Thanks for putting this together, John!

I thought I'd add a little insight from our own analytics regarding posts containing a number. I aggregated all the posts with an actual digit in their title and looked at the ones that got 1,000 views or more in the last year.

Most commonly used numbers:

1. "5" (used in 33 posts)
2. "10" (used in 30 posts)
3. "7" (used in 13 posts)

Numbers in the most-viewed 5 posts:

1. "18"
2. "10"
3. "10"
4. "10"
5. "40"

Numbers with the highest average number of views (only including numbers with 3 or more posts):

1. "11"
2. "12"
3. "10"

Interesting that, while not completely in-sync, the fact that "10" comes up over and over is interesting when seen in the light of your preference data.

On Where Social Media Measurement Falls Short

Thanks for the link, Zoe... downloading and reading later.

I would love to see what might come from a collaboration between language academics and social media data analysts. We might not get very far automating this analysis but we might learn some very interesting things about ourselves and how we express ourselves online.

On Where Social Media Measurement Falls Short

Great post, Zoe, very well put (so good, in fact, we posted it on Facebook)! Everything you're saying is right on point, in my opinion. I'm a big number cruncher and I love data but, at a certain point, it starts to go the wrong direction and lead to poor decisions instead of informing the correct one.

If I could add one more point... the one thing I would add to this list is "automated sentiment analysis." I've used several products that try to suss out what the general consensus is on a subject and they all fall short... very short. It starts to become creepy when it's correct and terribly misleading when it isn't. It's head hard enough to analyze what my finace meant over IM, how is an application have any chance?

Thanks again!

On How Web 3.0 Will Impact Social Media and PR

Thanks for posting this video; I found it fascinating. I just recently went to a meetup that talked about the semantic web so this is very timely.

What's so interesting about this concept is how closely it mimics how our brain functions. To deal with new information, we categorize it, tag it, relate it to other things, and, involuntarily, create a sort of ontology in our own heads. We stereotype and generalize and create similes to help us process new information. The semantic web is simply making the web function more like our own brains.

But the important difference, and the reason why this is going to be a long, hard road if not completely impossible, is how that categories are applied. In our brain, we instantaneously (for all intents and purposes) create relationships not unlike the triples used in semantic relationships. There is no time or effort involved, it happens whether we know it or not and whether we'd like it to happen or not. It's hard/impossible to get people to NOT do this.

On the web, these semantic relationships would have to be almost effortless to create or else the only relationships that would be expressed would be ones surrounding the organizations that have the resources and the motivation to create these links, i.e. businesses that benefit from, say, the SEO improvement or organizations that did it just because it's the right thing to do. The rest, blythely making connections, creating content, and generally adding to the web (just like right now) would not be bothered. Most of the examples of strong efforts in semantics shared in the meetup were commercial: Best Buy and Facebook come to mind. (more http://rdfa.info/)

Unless these relationships are created mostly automatically, built into how we already create content, or made so easy and fast then I can't imagine how this kind of system would become widespread, let alone universal. That doesn't mean I don't love the idea, though!

On How to Import Twitter Favorites to Your Facebook Page

Great tip, Ching! Posted this on Facebook as well:

Pro-tip: Since Facebook only allows one incoming feed, combine several and finlter (if needed) using Yahoo Pipes!

On R.I.P. Twitter as a Marketing Platform

Great conversation here and over on Facebook. I was surprised to see how many people agreed over there. Of course, I guess you can consider it a biased audience in a way...

http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=18797601233&share_id=121986164490799&comments=1

On The Confounding Variable of the Retweet

Great post, Tom.

What is so confounding for social media practitioners, particularly ones that do some kind of listening and monitoring, is that the stuff that is easy to track - number of tweets including the word "Chicago" to use your example - is the stuff that doesn't really help them do their job any better. It's the tough stuff - like did those tweets result in visits, physical or electronic - that we need to understand in order to do effective monitoring.