Too busy preparing for the holidays to have heard of l’Affaire Sacco? Buzzfeed has a useful summary of how one woman’s tweet took over the Twittersphere last weekend, and took down a career — at least temporarily. Five quick takeaways: The interplay between social and traditional media has never been greater, so what happens on …
Friday 5 — 11.22.2013
Spotify closes another $250M in funding at a >$4B valuation. The streaming music service enabling instant listening now has more than 6 million paid and 24 million active free users. Is it inciting generational warfare to imply that the youngs shape the direction of technology differently and more significantly than the olds? Mathew Ingram makes the …
How to manage your bandwidth — for social
I’ve long been a believer in the rocks, gravel, sand analogy popularized by Steven Covey when it comes to task management. You have to make sure you get the big rocks in — that presentation due Wednesday, that project plan review for Friday — before you are pecked to death by ducks, a.k.a. email. It’s …
Friday 5 — 11.15.2013
So, lots of talk this week about Snapchat turning down a 3B acquisition offer from Facebook. Was this a shrewd move, or an example of millennial entitlement run amok? Facebook’s 2012 purchase of Instagram for 1B is starting to look like it was a pretty good deal for a company concerned about its waning teen …
Friday 5 — 10.25.2013
For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation. In an …
Tale of a social media meme
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a social media account will eventually have a regrettable public post. Certainly, that’s the assumption of 59% of teen social media users who have deleted or edited something they posted in the past. Adults are not immune to social media remorse: 74% of …
Friday 5 — 10.11.2013
How do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network. …
Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive
In the past 7.5 years Twitter has gone from novelty to newsmaker. Today, Twitter boasts 200M monthly users and over 170B tweets sent with particularly strong growth in the coveted 18-29 demographic. If you’re a Twitter user and curious to delve into your past (even though you may regret some of what you’ve shared), Twitter allows …
Two must-read pieces on social media
This month, two articles explored real-life examples of some of the unintended consequences of popular social media services and the kinds of behaviors they engender. What does it mean for the presentation of self in everyday life if the technology ensures the public audience is getting larger, and everyone is tuned in? First, in Vanity …
Friday 5 — 09.13.2013
So, the iPhone 5C/5S launched and turned out to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Is Apple more about fashion than electronics these days? Infographics are everywhere, and their stepchildren “snackables” are likely clogging your social media stream. “Get me an infographic” has replaced “Make me a viral video” as the new top-down, digital/social mandate. Here …