Perry

Hewitt

Tag: social

  • Facebook intent by age cohort

    Many commented on a recent Pew report finding that 61% of all Facebook users admitted to taking a break from the popular and addictive social networking site at some time in the past. Reasons included everything from avoiding too much drama and gossip to fasting or observing Lent. The chart below from the same report caught my attention:

    Pew on plans for spending time on Facebook

    According to Pew, 1% or fewer of 18-29 year olds see themselves spending more time on Facebook in the coming year. Is this accurately depicting a trend borne of the frustration with issues like privacy concerns and monetization plans (like dreaded autoplay video in the news feed) for the site? Or is it, like the 2010 media hype over the anti-Facebook Diaspora project, more wishful thinking about the behavior we would like to show versus what is likely? Either way, the prediction of declining usage by age above tells a story.

  • Social media strategy for leadership

    Six social media skillsToday large organizations face a pervasive gap in social media competency among their ranks. A recent Stanford GSB report highlights that executives are aware of social media opportunities and risks, but that few have put into place the kind of systemic practices that advance an organization. As a result, there’s a lack of understanding of and preparedness for the rapidly changing terms of communications and engagement. Leadership risks being well equipped for fighting the last war.

    McKinsey Quarterly makes a similar argument, and identifies six social media skills every leader needs [free registration required]. The six skills are divided into Personal Level (Producer, Distributor, and Recipient) and Strategic/organizational Level (Adviser, Architect, Analyst.) Using GE as a case study, the article describes each role in detail and how strong execution can have an impact on culture and outcomes.

    The role of the social media leader as architect and enabler across the organization is particularly powerful. The word is out on the social media revolution: with their parents on Facebook and their kids on Snapchat, employees are by and large eager to get on board with new technologies. Leaders who develop an organizational culture that celebrates and empowers rather than censors and condones social media adoption will identify more loyal champions and idea generators among its ranks.

  • Visualize your city with Foursquare checkins

    Cambridge through Foursquare check-insLast week an analyst firm predicted that Foursquare will fail in 2013, citing (among other issues) low revenues despite 3 billion check-ins to date. As an early adopter, I agree that there’s a need to create value for the user, with more concrete benefit either in content (à la Yelp) or deals (for people other than Amex users). Other apps now make me more aware of others’ physical locations and favorite venues, so I’m more likely to relegate Foursquare to the second screen of my mobile.

    In a perhaps not-entirely-unrelated event, Foursquare has released a map what Quartz calls marvelous footprints of world cities revealed via Foursquare check-ins. Above is a map of Cambridge — you can see Harvard Square lit up, and even a burst of activity at the Harvard i-lab.

     

  • How are arts orgs wrangling digital?

    How is the digital explosion affecting arts organizations? Last week, a Pew Internet report revealed the current digital focus of arts orgs, and what they identify as emerging opportunities and costs. Unsurprisingly, 99% have a web presence and many struggle with the time and expertise cost of social media. A few other findings that leapt out:

    • a full 97% have a presence on social networks and 45% post at least once a day
    • the “brand champion” strategy of having patrons help manage negative comments on social media is working for many
    • widely varied audience use cases (e.g., older/younger patrons divide on social media) creates need to support traditional alongside new media outreach
    • 20% have reprimanded employees over content shared online, which speaks to tensions between employees’ right to freedom of expression and the organizational needs for confidentiality and appropriate, public behavior (if this isa tension in publicly-funded arts orgs, what does this look like for banking?)

    One opportunity that stood out was the sizeable gap between adoption of websites (99%) and social presences (97%) and that of mobile apps (24%).

    Certainly, not every arts org needs a native application, but if I were working on a low-cost SaaS mobile solution with ecommerce baked in, arts organizations would be on my target list.

     

  • 5 apps for self-improvement in 2013

    Having survived the near-miss apocalypse, today we’re all turning our calendars over to 2013. Many are pausing for a natural moment of reflection and resolution — all those things we were yesterday will henceforth cease to be, and today we begin again as our newer, better selves. At least until we remember where we hid the cookies.

    Here are five apps useful to those looking to track time, create new habits, or merely keep a firmer grip on their to-do lists in 2013. I recently read The Power of Habit, which underscored the importance of documenting what you intend to do in order to actually get the damn thing done. The social overlay is powerful in these aspirational apps — it’s one thing to tell oneself in the mirror of one’s intention to walk five miles a day, and quite another to tell a couple hundred Facebook friends. These apps promote behavior change by understanding the importance of social capital, and that “‘individual’ health behaviors are actually complex network phenomena” which play a part in spreading conditions like happiness to obesity.

    1. Wunderlist 2 :: Ideal for the task management obsessed, this app has elegant list making and sharing. Am still muddling through its recent (Christmas Eve!) upgrade and attendant syncing problems, but a really lovely user interface.
    2. Evernote :: This is my go-to productivity app, and Evernote 5 delivers a raft of useful, new features. It always makes me feel vaguely guilty — am I Evernoting to my full potential? — but features like the page camera and the audio are killer.
    3. Lift :: Think of Lift as cleanly-designed reminders to be that better person in 2013. Pre-set options include “Unclutter” (4,190 participants); “Go to gym” (10,867 participants); and “Tell my wife I love her” (3,426 participants — presumably the husbands are already hearing this, or the wives just can’t be bothered?). The social network feels like a big benefit here: if that many other people can unclutter a cabinet, why shouldn’t I?
    4. Everest :: Everest captures your long and short term goals and allows you break them into small steps. It’s designed to be a lush, photo-rich experience. As the name implies, much of the user content seems more focused on long-term goals rather than the banal day-to-day. (h/t Eric Kuhn for prompting me to check this out.)
    5. Timer :: If you’re anything like me, a task can expand to fill any amount of time allotted to it. There’s no hidden, killer feature — it’s set of lovely, clean programmable buttons that prompt you to keep yourself on track and on time.

  • 7 tips for digital and social event strategy

    eventThere’s a lot of apt criticism of social media snake oil salesmen — including this terrific Onion video (embedded in a good sendup of TED). But social media does deliver news, shape opinion, and forge connections in important ways.

    In the forging connections department, in-person events remain vital. As much as digital platforms enable you to listen to and share ideas, the value of face-to-face connections has not been eradicated. Facebook was supposed to kill reunions — in many cases, social networking has whetted appetites for the in-person kind.

    So, how do you set the stage for online social media to support a well-orchestrated offline event? A few thoughts:

    1. Clarify the ground rules. Is your event on the record, or off the record? If it’s not specifically stated to be the former, some would-be tweeters or instagrammers might think keyboarding or holding up a camera are out-of-bounds.
    2. Form your social strategy based on your event goals (and yes, that means clarifying your event goals). Is it networking? Then you’re going to make your attendee list public early, and shout out to as many people as possible. Thought leadership? Then you’ll select and link to as many relevant resources (in-house and third party) to put whatever content you’re serving up into context.
    3. Create a concise and relevant hashtag. Character counts are tight, so don’t insert your organizational brand if it doesn’t make sense.
    4. Define your non-attendee strategy. What can or should the experience be for those who are interested in the event, but who can’t attend?
    5. Before: communicate the hashtag to registered attendees and seed it with content. A week or so prior, thank registered attendees, remind people of speaker bios, and point to related news items as appropriate.
    6. During: provide additional value — and this requires a quick and content-savvy resource on the ground. Did your speaker just mention the marshmallow experiment? Make sure attendees get the reference. Where possible, get advance copies of prepared remarks, and pre-select supplemental content.
    7. After: follow up with any wrap-ups (generated by you or any prolific attendees), and any photos/video from the event. Find ways to aggregate and publish the content created by attendees (tweets, posts, photos, video – maybe a Storify?). Thank guests for attending.
    There’s nothing like hosting an in-person event that makes you appreciate the hard work that goes into one. The digital and social elements are now a core component — and an increasingly important competency for event planners and managers.

    Photo credit: Zach Hamed

  • Death in the social era

    Today marks the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Antietam, whose 23,000 casualties marked the bloodiest single day in American military history. The American Experience film on Death and the Civil War (based on Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering) focuses on the scale of the death, and the corresponding lack of societal structures to manage death logistics and communications. It seems hard to believe but before the Civil War, there was no national cemetery system, no federally recognized system for identifying the dead, and no means of informing family members. The federal government would, by the end of the war, have constructed “a new bureaucracy of death.”

    A then-emerging new technology played a part in people’s perception of death. Mathew Brady’s October 1862 photography exposition in New York shocked viewers with what was for many the first graphic photography of death. While it’s unlikely viewers in New York would have known the subjects, it brought home an understanding of the loss in a way that both augmented and circumvented newspaper accounts.

    The public photography in the Brady show marked a paradigmatic change. Over the next century and a half the death business gets routinized and bureaucratized, with funeral homes, death notices, $25 caskets, and online guest books. In the late 2000s, widespread adoption of social media immeasurably quickens and widens the notification process. Like its disruptive effects in other industries, social media “debureaucratizes” death communications in a new and interesting way.

    The public nature of the way we broadcast our lives through social networks today necessarily transforms how we communicate death. New technology enables us to share the mundane to an astonishing level, with applications like Instagram transforming the way we experience the mid-day meals of others. Documenting the birth and times of our babies is so ubiquitous that if you want to block those images, there’s an app for that. But there are few apps, and no established social protocols for announcing death through social media. Twitter is rife with death rumors for public figures, but what are the rights and responsibilities of next-of-kin of a regular person, suddenly deceased?

    A terse Wikipedia entry of “death and the Internet” tells you the facts: Gmail will pass on your email to next of kin while Yahoo declines; Facebook will, with proper documentation, allow you to create a memorial for the deceased. Last month an app called If I die launched aimed at the pre-dead — it allows people to leave video and text messages in the event of their own sudden demise. There’s a growing need, but the both the structures (what happens to email accounts?) and the practices (how do I announce a death on Facebook?) are not yet mature.

    150 years after Antietam, the military’s notification teams are skilled in the delivery of bad news and corresponding support structures — but now struggle to stay ahead of social networks to inform families. Even without a sudden catalytic event of a war destroying 2% of the population to prompt the shift, social norms around online communication are forced to adapt for death as they have for life.

  • Is that social account legit?

    The GSA announced the launch of an official registry of government social media accounts.  Their goals were to help users understand which accounts are legitimate in an era of phishing; offer a series of APIs for agencies to pull data back out of these burgeoning social accounts; and make the registry itself available to agencies, reducing duplication and error.

    We launched a modest version of this directory idea at Harvard back in 2011 — a manually created directory of “official” social accounts at Harvard. Tweets had already been cleverly aggregated by David Malan and his CS50 crew, but there’s the problem of account creep and authentication. Is someone producing a HarvardTweet as a current faculty member or student? What happens when students graduate? When staff leave? How loose or tight should the definition of a HarvardTweet be?

    Social media policies at most institutions address egregious misuse of accounts — sharing confidential information or harassment — but the question of affiliation is murkier, especially in an academic institution with 375,000 alumni worldwide. Perhaps the best approach is to divide into “endorsed” (departments, schools) versus “affiliated” (alumni, past and present staff) — and create useful APIs for both.

  • What will gamification look like in 2020?

    Pew Internet recently issued a report featuring divergent opinions on gamification, and asked respondents to consider how gamification might fit into people’s day-to-day digital lives by 2020. I agreed more with the statement that it would be “implemented in many new ways for education, health, work, and other aspects of human connection.”

    My take is that gamification will play a central role because it can capture existing offline behaviors for personal and professional behaviors and make them visible in compelling new ways, as the Quantified Self community does. Digital can take the near-universal human instinct to measure and improve and make it visible for the benefit of individuals (“how’s my running routine really going?”) and institutions (“how can we motivate and empower lower performers?”).

    Susan Crawford points out important risks in blindly following a game-driven approach: “if everything was a game, no one would have a reason to invent; any metric corrupts, as people shape their behavior to ensure that they come out on top. There have to be other routes to excellence in work, health, and education…” This is an important corollary to Michael Sandel’s recent thinking about the moral limits of markets — there are distinct hidden costs to a society wholly driven by price-tag or gamified points systems.

    Both individuals and institutions have interest in some level of gamification to achieve badly-needed improved outcomes in health or learning. The need for effective approaches within both longstanding entities like the Department of Health and Human Services and new educational initiatives like edX is too great not to consider gamification as a meaningful part of the solution.

  • What makes a video go viral?

    When people starting calling/texting/emailing me on Monday about Harvard baseball’s inspired version of “Call Me, Maybe,” I had a sense it might captivate people – but I didn’t predict how much. The video’s been picked up everywhere from Good Morning America to New York Daily News to Mashable, with views closing in on 880,000 at the time of posting. It’s hard to predict what catches people’s imagination, but there are a few elements of this video that makes it ripe for sharing:

    • Harvard as a brand captures people’s attention. Harvard in a online headline will dramatically increase page views, as journalists who cover education know. This video featured Harvard prominently but plays against Harvard stereotypes as well — it’s a bunch of guys on a decidedly unglamorous road trip, lipsyncing to pop music. They’re all wearing Harvard caps, but these are regular guys you might have gone to high school with, having a good time.
    • There’s a lot that’s visually unexpected in this video. It’s shot driving along a highway; there’s a seeming incongruity of the sise of the guys and the size of the van, and more of them keep popping up, Keystone cops-style.
    • Good God, this song is an earworm.
    • It’s funny, really funny. From the guy sacked out in the back left throughout to the use of a phone prop to the player with his head thrown back at 2:28 (“Baaaaby!”), this is hilarious choreography. Well done, Conner Hulse and crew.