Facebook COO Thinks E-mail is ‘Probably Going Away’

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg created a stir this week when she boldly said, “"E-mail—I can't imagine life without it—is probably going away.” Speaking at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference on Tuesday, Sandberg said only 11 percent of teens use e-mail daily and instead use SMS and social networking. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she said, “you look at what teenagers are … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: BP Commercial Spoofs

British Petroleum's (BP's) failure to adequately enlist social media in the communications battle over the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill made picking a single video clip of the month too difficult. So I've chosen two BP commercial spoofs, both highlighting BP's growing credibility gap as it desperately tries to control information and ignores the new (social media era) communication rules: collaboration, openness, transparency, and timeliness. While BP is … [Read more...]

Exciting or Scary? Rise of Social Media Swarms

Today, we are on the verge of a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action. Social media is creating a new kind of communications fluidity, a fully immersive experience enabling conversations to be hijacked in ways unimaginable in decades past. Up until the 1980s, totalitarian governments, superpowers, media cartels, and leading brands had dominant control over national and even global dialogues because of superior resources and a monopoly … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: Chris Brogan Interview

My May 2010 video clip of the month is an interview Chris Brogan gave for the LikeMinds conference in the United Kingdom. Brogan, arguably one of the top social media experts in the world, discusses his vision for social media's future.  Here's the YouTube video: … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: Social Media for Good Causes

My April 2010 video clip of the month features Beth Kanter giving a 40-minute presentation on how non-profits can use social media to promote their causes and raise funds. Kanter is the author of Beth’s Blog, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for non-profits. Here's the YouTube video: … [Read more...]

Pentagon Uses Twitter to Announce Policy Change

Breaking with tradition, the Pentagon used Twitter Friday to announce major changes in its social media policy. Under the new policy, military personnel can Tweet, blog, and update their Facebook pages on the U.S. military's non-classified computer networks. More than a dozen social media sites the Pentagon blocked in May 2007 will now be unblocked. Price Floyd, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, broke the news of the … [Read more...]

Twitter Code Swarm: A Mesmerizing Video

One of the things I love about Web 2.0 is all the creativity and collaboration it creates in the high tech community. Today, I want to share with you a Vimeo video from Ben Sandofsky, a team member of the new Twitter Engineering blog, which visualises Twitter's commits history in a beautiful and mesmerizing way. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to a software's code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. The video … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: Social Media ROI

My February 2010 video clip of the month is a video by Erik Qualman, author of the Socialnomics - Social Media Blog, on social media return on investment (ROI). The video showcases several social media ROI examples along with other highly successful social media strategies.  Here's the YouTube video: … [Read more...]

Twitter: Pornography & Spam vs. Quality Contacts

I lost about a hundred Twitter followers over the holidays. "Alice" was on Christmas break, and I didn't have time to review my new followers to decide if I wanted to follow them back. I check every Twitter profile before I manually follow back, making it is easy for me to fall behind. I definitely do lose a few contacts that way. Some new Twitter followers will unfollow you in as a little as two days if you don't return the follow. Of course, some of these can … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: Serendipity Engine

My January 2010 video clip of the month features a valuable talk Chris Brogan gave at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. Brogan is arguably one of the top social media experts in the world and his blog is rated number 0ne by Advertising Age magazine. Here's the YouTube video: … [Read more...]

Your Brand: Taking Social Media Seriously

Now that Google has added live results from Twitter into searches, you need to face the fact once and for all that you can no longer control your organization's online reputation. Negative comments on blogs, Facebook, or Twitter have the power to tarnish your brand overnight in ways unimaginable a few years back. Even a small business should take social media seriously and try to influence conversations about its brand. A common concern, however, is managing … [Read more...]

Your Brand: 10-Minute Social Media Monitoring

Google is adding live results from Twitter into searches this week, forever changing the nature of brand management. Now more than ever, you need to monitor your organization's social media presence.  You need to know right away if the live Tweet results include "worst service" or "sucks," so you can diffuse these conversations and "push down" negative tweet search results. A common concern, however, is that monitoring social media takes too much time, especially … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: Muppets on Social Media

The Muppets Studio produced a cute clip about social media. Here's a link to the video on YouTube: … [Read more...]

Social Media Campaign Sets Guinness Record

The Atlanta-based social media marketing agency Everywhere set a Guinness World Record October 16 to 17, 2009, for the most widespread social network message in a 24-hour period with 209,771 mentions on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. In fact, the massive viral effort was so successful that #beatcancer, the campaign's trending topic, became the top one on Twitter. Incredibly, Everywhere conceptualized and executed the one-day pro-bono campaign in one week. It ended … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: Google Wave

Naomi Williams of www.DigitalFanGirl.com and fellow DC Web Women member was kind enough to give me a Google Wave invite. Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. I'll keep you posted on how my eventuring with Google Wave … [Read more...]