Perry

Hewitt

Tag: social

  • 5 lessons from Justine Sacco

    5 lessons from Justine Sacco

    Justine Sacco tweetsToo 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:

    1. The interplay between social and traditional media has never been greater, so what happens on Twitter is quickly served up with breakfast on Good Morning, America. 68,000 tweets referenced Justine Sacco — and about 120,000 tweets referenced #hasJustineLandedYet hashtag. All this social content fed the traditonal media on a quiet weekend, and stoked the firestorm.
    2. The reach of social media is more than matched by the speed of the spread. People are already correlating the speed of viral content with its accuracy — see, If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating. No one is claiming this was a hacked Twitter account, but people’s mean-spirited thoughts or attempts at sarcasm now quickly become their one sentence bio.
    3. There’s increased murkiness between your public presence as an individual and your employer’s reputation. This is amplified if you are ostensibly a public relations professional or business leader. Clear hate speech likely violates most terms of employment, but personal views that hit the media will be fodder for interesting employment disputes in the future.
    4. There’s a lot of pressure for brands to participate in realtime, but there’s also attendant risk. The opportunity is highlighted in this Altimeter report about Real-time Marketing: The Agility to Leverage ‘Now’. Brands can jump on — but need to have the right people at the helm to make thoughtful, quick decisions. I may be the only marketer who admits to having had a pang of terror at the famous (and brilliant!) dunk in the dark Oreo moment during the SuperBowl blackout. Tweets re Justine Sacco hashtag from sbarro (now deleted) and Gogo were a big miss, and brands need to re-evaluate who has the social media car keys on a Friday night.
    5. There’s more you can do as an individual than participate in what The Nation called a meme for jeering global flagellation. Thanks to Nick Kristof and others who weighed in with reminders for people to support the cause rather than join the fray. People supported Aid for Africa (via an inspired domain redirect from justinesacco.com!), and donated to other AIDS related charities via the modest page that Nate Matias and I put together to shift the conversation from trial by social media.
  • Friday 5 — 11.22.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.22.2013

    1. 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.
    2. 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 case.
    3. Last year I read Thinking Fast and Slow, a thought-provoking book about the different systems of thinking and their applicability to life and work. Recently Sonya Song wrote in Nieman Lab about how these two modes of thinking, fast and slow, attract two different types of attention. Interesting implications for individuals and organizations sharing content to social.
    4. Most people frustrated by carrying a phone and a wallet everywhere they go were pleased by the widely-publicized launch of Coin. The digital all-in-one credit card last week met a $50K crowdfunding goal in 40 minutes. This week, Coin is answering criticisms about security and design flaws.
    5. Wondering how to plan for and execute a redesign of a  highly-trafficked digital property? You could do worse than read Brad Frost’s write-up of how he and his colleagues achieved the Techcrunch redesign. The part about development being part of the design process is key — the days of designers throwing PhotoShop files over the transom to front-end developers are long gone.

    Weekend fun: I’m sure you’ve seen Jean-Claude Van Damme in his brilliant self-parody for Volvo already. Instead, in honor of Harvard-Yale weekend, how about some Harvard students giving fake tours of Yale (“if I hit the floor, you do the same”)?

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • How to manage your bandwidth — for social

    pebbles ajrI’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 easy for small tasks to prevent focus, so be aggressive about putting holds in your calendar for the big ones.

    Reading The Mistake Busy People Make a few months back was a similar turning point for me. The article urges a shift in focus: manage your bandwidth, not your time. And it caused me to reflect — calendar apps I’ve seen allow us to book only the hours something take to complete, but not assign a level of cognitive effort. That additional lens would make a lot of sense: a meeting on concept design for a new product eats up significantly more mental bandwidth than a standing budget meeting. There are ways to color code, but it would be amazing to have a heuristic feature that could learn and assign bandwidth consumed during different kinds of work activities. As a result, you could manage your calendar more effectively.

    Where does time spent filtering, listening, and publishing social media fit into all this? The concern I hear from most executives contemplating personal social media stems from legitimate fears about where social media activity can fit into an already overcommitted calendar. I’ve written before about my own time management hacks for social. This article about bandwidth has prompted a few new thoughts:

    • Social can fuel some of your low-bandwidth research consumption. Remember the trades? With smart filtering in place, you can use social to get a terrifically well-informed stream of ideas about your industry. This is a great activity to sandwich in between high-bandwidth events.
    • Social has both high- and low- bandwidth activities. Interaction is high bandwidth, but bursty — no one ever gets angry (except this guy) if you drop the thread in a Twitter conversation. Re-sharing is low bandwidth — it’s finding two-three interesting pieces (I do this after dinner) and teeing them up for the next day.
    • Social provides opportunities for listening, engagement, and content syndication. In any kind of senior role, you’re creating good content. That content may be mired in a PowerPoint or an email chain, but social provides a way to share those ideas (low-bandwidth), and benefit from feedback of a broader forum (high-bandwidth).

    No one can help you with the only-24-hours-in-a-day problem. Factoring for bandwidth as well as time can help you prioritize and balance your efforts — and enable you to add meaningful social media to the mix.

     Photo credit: fragment.fi

  • Friday 5 — 11.15.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.15.2013

    1. snapchatSo, 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 audience. And Google snapping up YouTube for 1.65B in stock back in 2006 now seems like a steal.
    2. Where are those teens who are eluding Facebook? A lot of them are immersed in messaging apps like What’s App or Kik. The line between messaging and more traditional social is starting to blur as messaging apps add features like gaming and music. Also unclear: Will these services grow on their own, or be snapped up by the tech giants?
    3. Wondering how much effort to put into optimizing your news site for social? 30% of U.S. adults get news on Facebook. And people who get news through social networking sites are more likely to get their news on mobile, underscoring the mobile mandate for publishers.
    4. Dropbox announces 200M users and a total revamp of its platform for the relaunch of Dropbox for Business. Which they should totally just call “Dropbox for Business that You Can Admit to Using” because it’s already pervasive in the enterprise in a clunkier and less secure version.
    5. How much does employee co-location matter when you’re building a company? According to Automattic’s recent 1B valuation, not a whole heck of a lot. The money quote from Matt Mullenweg: “if you give people autonomy to execute on something meaningful, and bias the environment to moving quickly, amazing things can happen.”

    Weekend fun: Want to see something cool, even if it makes you (OK, me) regret your own slacker parenting? Check out Dinovember.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 10.25.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.25.2013

    1. 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.
    2. In an entirely related vote of confidence for the visual web, Pinterest has raised another $225 million. Pinterest is developing a global strategy, with more than a dozen country managers slated to be hired this year.
    3. LinkedIn is going long on the mobile use case, rolling out a new iPad app and the compelling LinkedIn intro email feature. LinkedIn intro aims to provide color and context to your mobile email by surfacing relevant LinkedIn info about the sender.
    4. Facebook is home to the accidental news consumer — most users come for other reasons, but many end up seeing the news. An important finding is that younger people who are far less intentional about going to news outlets are consuming news via the social network.
    5. Wikipedia remains an invaluable news source — but how is it developing and replenishing its stable of editors? Unlike the rest of the web, which has become more global and female content creators, Wikipedia’s skew toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter has persisted. Does this limited pool ensure Wikipedia’s decline?

    Weekend fun: Eight million people have already watched this toddler in his Halloween costume, but in case you’d like some inspiration for your own …

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • 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 18-34 year olds claim to have removed social media posts for fear of career detriment. Privacy settings may mitigate the risk, but don’t eradicate it entirely.

    In the spirit of the Roving Typist’s I Am An Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything, I offer up a personal story of a Facebook post gone viral.

    Nearly a year ago, my then-18-year-old son went on a three-month backpacking trip with NOLS. Upon his return to Wyoming, he shared this unfortunate selfie of his newly hirsute self on Facebook:

    beard reddit

    I couldn’t resist commenting, “Shave, or we’re changing the locks. Love, Mom.” A friend of his quickly shared both the photo and the exchange to Reddit. Sure, the names were lightly redacted, but the profile photo matches mine on Twitter. Within a couple of hours, an enterprising Harvard College junior — let’s call him Zach, because that’s his name — posted this:

    beard tweet

    So, less than a day for a theoretically private comment to travel from Facebook to Reddit to Twitter. I posted quickly on Reddit to implore the Redditors with pitchforks not to show up at the door, and assumed it would be an amusing anecdote about social media and the futility of privacy settings for a couple of weeks.

    unconditional loveTen months later, it’s a minor meme that wouldn’t die. Cheezburger. Fark. Failbook. Runt of the Web. New captions emerge: “Positive Family Interaction,” “On Facebook, Sometimes You Win and Sometimes You Lose,” or, my personal favorite, “A Mom’s Unconditional Love.” The beard meme surfaces often enough that in the past month it’s surfaced at a staff meeting and a nonprofit event in D.C.

    So, what lessons can we learn from all this? Like the recent New York Times article on mugshot extortion and editorial on revenge porn, it’s a vivid reminder that images uploaded in any context can persist on the web, and take on nefarious or amusing lives of their own. Secondly, nothing you post to a social network is truly private whatever your settings, so always presume a scenario where your post turns up on your boss’ desk. And finally, parenting is all about compromise:

    goatee

     

  • Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    1. Social media study word cloudHow 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.
    2. Direct messaging, long the neglected stepchild of the Twitter user experience, are about to get a lift with experimental new feature @eventparrot. Follow the account and it will direct message you with personalized breaking news, defined as news items noticed by the people you pay attention to.
    3. GigaOm posits why app-based tablet magazines are a failure, despite a few notable exceptions. Paid individual magazines titles continue to draw only a very small market. The desire to create the bespoke apps seems to stem, as one commenter put it, from an obsessive need for control of font and layout rather than a more sensible embrace of the messy, social open web.
    4. Perhaps the other end of the continuum of perfection and permanence is analog and ephemeral, like the live performances of Pop Up Magazine. As many of us relentlessly record and document, a new niche emerges for a live 100-minute show, where nothing goes online or is recorded.
    5. 91% of US adults own a cell phone today, and 41% of them use it to watch video. Pew’s latest report on online video shows continued growth not only in consumption, where comedy and education videos lead the pack, but an increase in adults posting video online to 31% from 14% in 2009. A full 35% of those video posters harbor hopes of their video going viral.

    Weekend fun: fancy a little telekinetic rage with your coffee?

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive

    Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive

    Twitter users age over timeIn 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 users to download all past tweets. To access your own Twitter archive, go to the gear icon top right, click on settings, and scroll to the bottom of the page. A link will be emailed to you where you can download the zip file, but note that Twitter prevents you from downloading too frequently.

    [tweetable hashtags=”#twitter”]Three things to try with your Twitter archive [/tweetable]:

    1. Twitter archiveView tweet volume and navigate by month. For me, tweet frequency corresponds with conference attendance and making new connections. My archive shows the year I skipped SXSW with a far lower tweet volume in March. Click through tweets by month to see what’s going on in your high or low volume outliers.
    2. Search for the terms you mention in your bio. Unless you’re wonderfully creative, your Twitter bio is probably the best indicator to followers of what you tweet about. My bio references social and mobile technology and Arsenal Football Club. A search of my Twitter archive shows 659 references of social, 361 mentions of mobile, yet only 65 mentions of Arsenal, showing that there’s room to grow as a fan!
    3. Play with the data in the csv. In addition to the clean interface you get when clicking on index.html in the zip file, Twitter provides both JSON and csv files. A non-technical user can download the csv and sort the data in a variety of ways. One way to visualize the topics you tweet about is to download the csv, pull the text of all your tweets, and then plug them into Wordle, as I have below:

    twitter text

  • Two must-read pieces on social media

    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 Fair, Nancy Jo Sales reports on how pervasive social media contributes to a problematic culture of Friends Without Benefits:

    Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and new dating apps like Tinder, Grindr, and Blendr have increasingly become key players in social interactions, both online and IRL (in real life). Combined with unprecedented easy access to the unreal world of Internet porn, the result is a situation that has drastically affected gender roles for young people.

    In The Awl, a writer reflects on how a city park writing performance led to internet infamy in I Am an Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything:

    As a member of the first generation to freely and gladly share my pictures, videos and thoughts online, I’d always—until now, anyway—adopted a “What’s the worst that could happen?” attitude, mixed with an “Everyone else is doing it!” mentality towards my online presence. Many of the best things in my life couldn’t have happened without sharing these pieces of myself online—meeting favorite authors at bars thanks to Twitter, getting another chance at a lost crush thanks to Facebook. And yet, I still felt thrown when I was presented with an image of myself that I couldn’t control.

     

  • Friday 5 — 09.13.2013

    Friday 5 — 09.13.2013

    1. So, the iPhone 5C/5S launched and turned out to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Is Apple more about fashion than electronics these days?
    2. 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 are five questions executives should answer before requesting an infographic.
    3. The best way to make compelling and shareable content has been a battle between two camps: the automated and optimized for search crew versus the heavily human editorial approach. Here’s how Techmeme is striving for the right mix by having humans power the headlines.
    4. How are adult smartphone users using location services? According to Pew 74% of them are lost like me, and use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location. While more users report activating location as part of their mobile social posts, fewer are using explicit geosocial services like Foursquare to check in.
    5. If you were planning to tweet your way to the top, a position with a social media title may not be the right path. Turns out social media jobs have slowed because social is everyone’s job now. A savvy digital team will turn to empowering the enterprise rather than hoarding the know-how.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.