Perry

Hewitt

Tag: social

  • Digital Problem Solving at the Berkman Center

    One of the best parts about working in digital strategy is that you’re surrounded by compelling and unsolved problems.

    [tl;dr for current Harvard students: we want to figure some out — sign up here.]

    social network adoption by age

    The commercial web and email have been widely adopted for only about 20 years, so individuals and organizations are still figuring out ways to be and to interact online. In organizational settings from higher ed to corporate, digital natives are learning and working on teams with digital immigrants. We’re nearing an inflection point for a new organizational understanding of the role that digital, social, and mobile technologies play in community members’ lives.

    The rise of social media, in particular, adds a new kind of complexity. Today, 72% of online adults use social networking sites. Facebook is only a decade old and has 1.15B users. Twitter is a significant enough news platform that it gets hacked right along with the New York Times. LinkedIn is a major content company, soon to admit teenagers to the professional fray. Music, travel, and fitness are just a few of previously private activities that now often reside in social shared spaces online. Given all these changes wrought by our new digital/social/mobile world, how do we think about new understandings of privacy on social networks and how expectations of privacy jibe with people’s organizational roles?

    All these changes create new and interesting problems to be considered and solved about how organizations and their constituents interact. At Harvard we have myriad organizational social accounts, and of course students, faculty, and staff have their own. What are the new social norms for interaction?

    Luckily Harvard’s Berkman Center has pulled together a pilot initiative around these digital problems and more. We are looking for current Harvard students to help define the questions we should be asking and develop some initial hypotheses. Please join me, along with faculty members including Misiek Piskorski and Joe Blitzstein and Harvard College senior and entrepreneur Zach Hamed. Read our guiding principles, and sign up here.

    Source: Pew Internet

  • Friday 5 — 08.16.2013

    Friday 5 — 08.16.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. User generated content as hypnotic and addictive: watch and listen to Wikipedia being edited. According to the creators’ blog, the sounds indicate addition to (bells) or subtraction from (strings) a Wikipedia articles, and the pitch changes according to the size of the edit.
    2. Facebook is not quite over yet — Pew finds that 94% of teens have Facebook accounts, and 81% report it’s the profile they use most often. Facebook’s deep integration via API and login mean that this traditionally fickle demographic may find it hard to detach from the mothership (even if their mothers are on it).
    3. Millennial news outlet Policy Mic gets kudos for its viral success, driven by smart adoption of behavioral analytics. Policy Mic understands that serious content can still be shareable, and the difference between optimizing for social and search.
    4. The role of social channels as a significant content distribution vehicle was underscored when a site outage compelled the New York Times to publish breaking news on Cairo via Facebook. If your organization is still treating “traditional” digital and social as different beasts, now’s a good time to rethink your approach.
    5. Ready for the weekend yet? I’ve previously covered the banana slicer, but Amazon has compiled a most excellent list of its funniest product reviews.

  • Friday 5 — 08.09.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Anyone who has ever clicked on a search result only to land on an article stub generated by a content farm will be glad to see this latest Google tweak. This update highlights up to three in-depth articles in the right column, pointing users toward deeper content (and perhaps directing their eyes toward the ads). Big opportunity for publishers of high-value, evergreen content.
    2. 72% of U.S. online adults now use social networks, according to Pew. Breakdowns include slightly more women than men, and Hispanics represented more than African-Americans more than white, non-Hispanic. Retailers take note: adoption rates for adults 65 and older have tripled over the past four years.
    3. A good example of how great content strategy combined with optimizing an existing technology can yield significant returns: Zach Seward on Quartz’s email strategy just as their daily brief expands to weekends.
    4. Boston’s Here and Now covered Silicon Valley-funded Watsi, a startup crowdfunding medical care. This approach raises ethical questions, as well as potential positive implications for nonprofits looking to put a face on unrestricted giving.
    5. In yet another take on mobile, visual storytelling, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen launched the Mixbit video app for iOS. There’s a collaborative element to the storytelling and some solid UX to make recording and editing less daunting.
  • How to staff an effective social team

    How to staff an effective social team

    Good post from Jerry Kane on the difference between strategic and procedural social media practitioners. The former group understands your business and its vision, and the latter are the digital natives, expert in the tactical usage and what’s next on the horizon. The strategic team members have experiential business knowledge; the procedural pros have the digital muscle memory that informs both gestures and interface expectations. Clearly, age serves as a useful proxy for this divide.

    Social media can enhance the status quo, or disrupt and advance business goals. If your organization’s social media is only a vehicle for news releases, a procedural approach can inform choices of the best technical tools, hashtag usage, and posting times. But if you want to use social media to change what you are doing alongside how you are doing it, cultivate strategic capabilities for your social team as well.

    gratuitous dog photoA concrete example: if you are a high-end pet care company, you can amplify your communications with a procedural approach to going social. Develop an Instagram program that posts your pet grooming success stories, and ride or create a hashtag for people to share similar photos. Create and actively curate a Facebook page with a system of recognition and prizes, and empower local moderators for that page.

    But if your pet care company vision is growth into new revenue streams, you may want to take a more strategic approach to social. Think about offering your customers a sponsored sharing marketplace for your customer community to exchange good and services from crate exchanges to cat-sitting. In return for advancing a “collaborative economy” community, your company gains access to new, younger markets, and intelligence into demand for emerging products and services. This is a uniquely social opportunity, tied to your overall business vision.

    As Kane points out from his teaching, “Classes that include both types of students are often more effective than either one taught separately.” The power of the mixed-capability team holds true in a business setting as well. Build a social team with procedural and strategic capabilities combined to avoid the pitfalls of silos and hierarchies. You’ll end up with a social-enabled organization that’s less reliant on a SWAT team and more aligned with your business goals.

  • Try it: Make the movie of your personal data

    We’re all posting, tweeting, and sharing more than ever. How might all this micro-content we publish on the social web be boiled up into a story? I came across two interesting services that make a movie from your shared content: Vizify for Twitter, and Foursquare time machine.

    First, Vizify for Twitter lets you create what they’re calling an animated portrait of your Twitter activity — kind of a greatest hits reel for your account. Here’s mine and here’s where to make your own. You authenticate through Twitter, then Vizify finds the  tweets that have resonated the most, and creates an animation with audio. There’s a degree of customization — within the categories of photo, text, and video you can switch up the selection or delete an item. There are different soundtracks you can choose from based on a semi-cryptic set of icons.

    foursquare visualizedNext, Foursquare time machine (co-branded with Samsung Galaxy 4) offers a slick fast-motion visualization of all your checkins. Rather than a highlights reel approach, this app tells you the full story. I had some trouble getting the stats to render, which might be a good thing as the restaurant:gym ratio over the past four years seemed problematic. Some of the motion is fun — your travel across geographic distances is rendered via plane or occasionally flying saucer. This application is positioned as a set up for The Next Big Thing, which is improved predictions of where you would like to go next. Foursquare has amassed a significant urban data layer without a clear revenue growth model — useful predictions might be one path to monetize that data.

    There are many important concerns about, as The New Yorker puts it, the way we are all pole dancing on the internet. And as the Guardian pointed out last week, even just your online metadata tell a revealing story. Nonetheless it’s fascinating to see the kinds of movie-scrapbooks we can create today with the content we’ve explicitly produced and have opted in to share.

  • The perils of context collapse

    Social scientists call this “context collapse.” A joke that you make among friends would not be understood if you made the same joke among, well, everyone else. And even when you say things to a group of like-minded people — say, at an obscure conference where attendees might be tweeting or taking video — you can no longer assume that the thought will stay in that context.

    — Mike Rosenwald in an interesting Washington Post opinion piece, Will the Twitter Police make Twitter boring? This article garnered some backlash as well as thoughtful dissent from Alex Howard on the value of Twitter as social media watchdog.

    free speech area
    It can be easier to spot relevant context in the physical world

    It’s worth pausing on this idea of context collapse, especially as we interact online in more decontextualized, default-public settings. It’s not only the distant nature of all internet interaction, but the way social networks have over the past decade have created quasi-intimate settings (Look! Another baby picture!) while simultaneously removing physical context of your current social sphere (I’m wearing a suit, in an office.). Today, social networks are places where you can interact from the palm of your hand with your boss, your brother, and your barista — all at once, 24 hours a day. It’s a new normal for both communications and context.

    While Facebook  privacy settings and Google+ circles exist, the reality is that few use them to a significant level of granularity, and Twitter defaults to public. As content creators we’re charged with figuring out the new social norms that apply — and as consumers we’re learning to strike the balance between appropriate call-outs for bad behavior and online vigilantism.

    Photo credit: arbyreed

  • Digital afterlife data policy

    Beyond the variability among states and companies, it’s worth asking if access to data post-mortem should extend beyond family members and enter some kind of publicly accessible data repository, which data scientists and presumably anyone else could explore. In presenting this concept, Brubaker used the word “donate,” not unlike a person permitting organ donations after death.

    – Jordan Novet, Dealing with data after death ain’t easy. Here’s why.

  • Friday 5 – 05.31.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. If you click one link this week, let it be the Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends slides. It’s a terrific state of the internet summary, with insights into mobile upside (still!), wearables, and the hockeystick rise of digital, tagged content like photos, video, sound, and data.
    2. Security’s not sexy, but it’s essential as we store more and more info online. Kudos to Evernote for their recent adds of two-step verification, authorized apps, and access history.
    3. Speaking of verification, Facebook finally offers verified pages for brands so users know the pages are legitimate. It’s a gradual rollout — more info here.
    4. If you manage a content management system as an admin, work as a content strategist, or just post information to the internet, check out Karen McGrane’s terrific DrupalCon keynote. It’s a great balance of evangelism and understanding the messy content world we live in.
    5. Do women and men use social media differently? RWW reports on some Microsoft-sponsored research with some interesting observations about gender. Women report more social media use for collaboration on work products, and men report more use for professional networking.

  • Digital afterlife

    Who gets the photographs and the e-mail stored online, the contents of a Facebook account, or that digital sword won in an online game?…“There can be painful legal and emotional issues for relatives unless you decide how to handle your electronic possessions in your estate planning.”

    — Anne Eisenberg in yet another useful piece on practical estate planning for digital assets post-mortem. As we all accumulate more and more curated digital assets like blogs, social accounts, and photos, how do we pass them along?

  • Friday 5 – 05.24.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. There’s a new Pew Internet/Berkman Center report on teens and privacy. The report confirms that sharing on social is up overall; more teens are on Twitter; and enthusiasm for Facebook and its drama may be waning. 
    2. Those mobile-savvy teens eschewing Facebook in favor of Tumblr now find themselves on Yahoo, as the 1.1B purchase was finalized this week. With a mixed track record for acquisitions, can Yahoo keep its promise not to screw it up?
    3. Storify and Typekit team up to help brands customize their stories. As the world becomes more real-time and social, Storify is a canny curatorial end run against enterprise CMS; offering better customization options for paying customers is a smart move.
    4. Over 2 million Oklahoma tornado tweets have been automatically processed. As citizens have solidified their presence as social media news sources in recent events including Oklahoma, Boston, and London, automating analysis using algorithms will be essential to separate news from noise.
    5. Finally, NPR reports from the future on the use of bots in therapeutic settings. As we begin to narrow what falls into the uncanny valley of creepy, human-like interaction, I predict these kinds of bots will turn up in a wide range of interactions from caregiving to news reading.