For the record, I like Speak Up Wpg’s use of social media. The opportunity it presents to speak to policymakers makes me feel like I come from a very with-it city. Their case study provides a jumping off point for talking about transparency. Go Peg.
Speak Up Winnipeg, a social media-driven public consultation city planning initiative here in the Peg, has just released its first report along with participation numbers. The blog/vlog-driven site boasts 535 registered users with over 1,600 posted comments. For a city of three quarters of a million, 535 users sounds low, but the quantity of comments of this vocal few speaks of passionate participation. The subject matter—the future of our city—is one of those contentious cans of worms that can make for great, if heated, public discourse, seemingly perfect for the social media milieu. More on that later.
On the participation side of things, I was dismayed initially that the the site required registration to comment, and indeed found login laziness to be an insurmountable barrier when I later lost my password. I’d recommend opening up comments; metrics could still be obtained from IP addresses. I realize misbehaviour rises in direct proportion with anonymity, but all conversational roadblocks should be removed if Speak Up is to “grow the number of people involved” as Mayor Sam Katz requests. Read the rest of this entry »
Metrics—the ability to definitively measure the performance of your online endeavours (while peeking under the hood to see how many people are suffering on dialup with Internet Explorer, kill me)—are the funnest part of using and making new media. (If you’re working with a web marketing company and they don’t start out the strategic planning by determining your business goals and devising metrics to show how you’re going to meet them, run for the hills.)
You can imagine my delight to learn from my Google Analytics that some troubled, loser spirit reached my site by searching “pain of unfriending”. I hope my red-faced confession eased your suffering just a little, my socially awkward visitor!
Gird yourself for a mortifying tale of techno treachery, friends. Girded?
Ok. In my weekly perusal of Facebook friend’s friends to see who I might be missing being friends with (it’s an orgy of friendship up in here), I came across an ex-coworker who I just adore. We’ve been Facebook friends forever, since that first blissful wave of friendings back in the 1980′s. I thought “I shall be sociable and leave him a wall howdy!”, and scrolled through my friend list to find him. How nice of me, spreading wall sunshine. Scroll scroll. Wait. What the heck. He. Wasn’t. There.
Like dropping your laptop in the bathtub (both personally dismaying and electrically imprudent), a cold shock of disbelief rippled through my being. It appeared, I cringed, that I had been UNFRIENDED.
Ouch.
Now, I could have assimilated the sting of rejection and got on with my life had this been your run of the mill Facebook-friend-you-don’t-really-know-but-they-know-your-other-friend-and-you-met-them-once-outside-Starbucks kind of thing, but this was an actual capital-F Friend. Someone I like! Someone whose positivity and energy shines through their status updates like the glint off a unicorn’s horn! What went so very wrong that he couldn’t at least just “hide” me? Read the rest of this entry »
Mmmk, I don’t think I fully grasped what social search meant for brands when I first wrote about it. A recent Altimeter post by Charlene Li, who I had the pleasure of seeing at last year’s SXSWi, really broke it down for me. It’s ok to be confused about this, because it’s a big jui jitsu match right now between the web’s sweatiest heavyweights, and when the dust settles the web will be fundamentally different.
So, while the eventual goal will be search results that are local and profile-based to some extent (your friends talking about what you’re interested in), the first deals between Twitter, Facebook, Bing* and Google will focus on real time trending topics and authority, meaning someone with a lot of followers (or fans, or friends, presumably) will come in at the top of the results, and people’s interactions with brands (good and bad) will spread like so much melted Cheez Whiz**.
For brands, companies, and organizations, this means less direct control over messaging than ever. Your own site pages will not necessarily be the most important results when the real-time web is elevated to equal status with the “brochure web”. The opinions tweeted by your customers/users/whoever wants to say anything about you will be very visible when people search you. Customer service is your new brand experience and the resulting word-of-mouth is your new advertising.
A moment to ponder Heather Locklear, here.
So what’s a poor org to do? How do we “make sure” people are saying nice things about us? Read the rest of this entry »
Doesn't he just look like he can barely contain his brilliant tweet?
There’s a tweet in there somewhere! If you need a lovely blue bird to illustrate a pithy blog post you’re writing about Twitter, or something, feel free to download a big version of this illustration here.
Do you start your work day with Facebook and a coffee? Drop a tweet or two after lunch? You should. And your boss should eagerly foot the bill, because your social life lines can (positively!) affect his/her bottom line.
A recent study found that nearly 2/3 of employees hang out on social sites during work hours. These “time wasters” are thought to cost billions ($2.45 billion CDN, it has somehow been determined) in lost wages or revenue. Well over half (and some count it up to 70%) of employers block social network use at work, presumably to stymie these loafing time bandits.
Were they out? Lazy? Afraid of H1N1? Trying to encourage H1N1? Photo by Winnipegger & social networking star Ken Bond.
Did anyone else have, like, a really communal experience on Halloween? Not being a religious or family-get-together-heavy holiday (ie one parent at least has to stay home and be on candy duty), a lot of my social network were online. In the days of yore when we lived with our extended families and knew all our neighbours, that might not have mattered so much (and also would have been impossible, because the days of yore didn’t have the internet). But the solo urban existence we’ve got going now can be kind of isolating. Facebook broke down that barrier for me this year. Read the rest of this entry »
Nice to meet you
Thanks for the comments & the kind words. Best place to get my immediate attention is Twitter, but you could also email me.
For the record, I like Speak Up Wpg’s use of social media. The opportunity it presents to speak to policymakers makes me feel like I come from a very with-it city. Their case study provides a jumping off point for talking about transparency. Go Peg.
