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causes geeky socialmedia

Why You should Follow Drew Carey on Twitter

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If you haven’t seen Drew Olanoff and Drew Carey on CNN, – watch it now.

LOS ANGELES - FEBRUARY 05: (L-R) Models Rachel...
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If you don’t have time to watch, here’s the short version:

  • Go to Twitter.
  • Follow DrewFromTV – Drew Carey of The Price Is Right, Whose Line is it Anyway, The Drew Carey Show, etc.
  • Drew Carey will donate $1 because you followed him. Ultimately he’s promised LiveStrong Foundation up to 1 Million Dollars – $1 for each Twitter Follower.

Just follow the guy, help reach a $1 Million donation. More info at http://www.milliondollardrew.com . If you don’t even have a Twitter account, this is a reason to get one.

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social media social networks socialmedia

The Four Hundred Words for “Friend”

In many social sites, such as Facebook, Hi5, and countless others, upon signing  up you’re encouraged to “add your friends.” confirm-requestsAs you use these sites, you get “friend requests” or “connection requests” to add more “friends.” Eventually, as you use these social tools, the concept of friend begins to blur. In fact, as the Inuit (we don’t call them Eskimos) were thought by popular culture to have 400 words for snow (it’s a myth), we’re approaching a place where we’ll soon actually need more words for friend.

I mentioned this at a conference, and I’m not sure I ever codified it properly. So, who is a friend?

you-have-1008-friendsAccording to Wikipedia, “Friendship is co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis.”

In Social Networks, a friend is someone who is willing to click “add this person” in a dialog box. We have very few ways of distinguishing other people’s true friends – the ones who share mutual affection or who would give service in a crisis – from their long time college acquaintances, neighborhood well wishers, elementary school reminiscences, and stalker ex-girlfriends. One early social network, Orkut from Google, actually allowed you to indicate how close you were to a person from “never met” to “best friend.” Today’s Facebook allows you to put friends into lists so you can ignore the ones you connected with but don’t really know, but that’s not the same thing.

The network that is most lacking in a way to distinguish levels of connection is LinkedIn. Since much of the intention behind the network is business networking and creating connections between friends, people often ask for referals to others. When you look for a way to make a connection to Bill, you may see that you’re connected by “John, Jane and 12 others.” Wouldn’t it be best if you were able to request the connection through John, who you know as well as 8 on a scale of 1-10 and who knows Bill as a 9 on the same scale? Instead you may ask Jane, who you also know as an 8, but who only knows Bill as a 2 – yet you may have no way of knowing this. This could lead to Jane awkwardly declining to make the connection, or having her request ignored.

I believe that as social networking services evolve, we’ll have more choices in how we distinguish our degrees of relationships, and how we expose that data to others. A project like the “Friend of a Friend Project” is doing so, and others such as Yahoo are attempting to start to use that data. Let’s hope we can somehow come up with words as descriptive as icy, powdery, slushy and packed to let us distinguish between our BFFs and our FOAFs.

Categories
blogging social media social networks socialmedia twitter

Social Media Productivity Boosters

A very, very comprehensive list of tools and techniques for boosting  your social media productivity. So comprehensive, in fact, that I’m blogging this mostly so I can read some of the links at a later time. There are just too many – it would, ironically, make me unproductive to try to follow all this advice at once. .

How To Boost Your Social Media Productivity – A Guide For Busy People

In this post, we’ve put together a comprehensive list of articles with great advice, tips and tools to help you be more productive and efficient when using social media. We also have some posts that offer up general online productivity insights.

And, don’t forget to read the comments on the post – a few people have given their own suggestions. 

Categories
marketing media social networks socialmedia

Clay on Why Small Payments won’t save Publishers

Clay spends a large portion of this article explaining how Micropayments, or small payments, won’t save large publishers. The real meat, to me, is in this almost-final paragraph:
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it’s an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I’m talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.

This is where my reality lies. I seem to get a huge volume of information daily, but the best information comes from my friends (and by friends, I mean both those who I really know and spend time with, and those who are in name-only on social networks).

Clay names this ‘superdistribution’ – the sharing of content from friend to friend. I’m more likely to learn about breaking news from @breakingnewson on Twitter or someone re-tweeting that than I am by reading NYTimes.com these days. And that, in a nutshell, is a big problem for the Times. It is not un-solvable. And I do believe people at NYT are thinking about it. It will be interesting to see how quickly that translates to action.

Categories
causes social capital exchange social media socialmedia

Paying a Charity in Exchange for your Attention

Lee Dryburgh has “called me out” to help in an effort to raise money for a shelter group in the Bay Area, the Shelter Network. In his blog he calls upon me, and a list of social media ‘gurus’ to promote his conference mailing list, and for each person who signs up to the eComms Conference list, they’ll donate fifty cents. There’s more about this in his article. (eComms is a conference about telecom and communication – so if you’re in that space and you can handle 4 emails a month, why not take a minutue to act?)

It is a bit of a bold strategy, calling on all of us to promote his conference in the context of helping a charity at the same time. I’m not sure I love the strategy, actually, but it is bold and it has the potential to be a new model:

  • Paying for mailing lists =”tired”
  • Paying a charity in exchange for people’s attention = “wired?”  (Or even Causewired?)

Lee’s article is below – go read it, sign up (and tell them where you found out about it, eh?).

Social Media: Can it Raise Just 5000.00 Dollars to Help 5 Year Olds? – Emerging Communications Blog

Let’s have a public test of the effectiveness of social media. Let’s do it with the aim of measuring the reach and usage of social media (and hopefully with some serendipity regarding the results). Let’s do it in a way that helps us understand the role and significance of social media on the emerging communications landscape.