This week’s #Socialmedia Tweetchat topic: Twitter What’s Happened and What’s Coming!

Posted on January 25, 2010 by marc meyer

Twitterville It is not often that a technology comes along and changes the world. That is the case with Twitter. Started in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter is a micro-messaging platform used to communicate via the web or mobile 160 characters at a time. In only a few short years the service, both widely acclaimed and widely criticized, has certainly had it’s impact across all corners of the globe.

The impact varies as much as the individuals who use it. Some things Twitter has been used for includes:

Reporting News – the first news and pictures of the Hudson plane crash were sent out on Twitter before any major media was on the scene.
Civil Unrest– like the twitterscope (microscope that Twitter creates, yeah I just made that up!) around the Iranian presidential elections of 2009. The world gained insight into the civil dissention surrounding the election proceedures with detail like nothing ever witnessed before.
Education – grade school teachers turning to Twitter to help in class projects and providing global experiences.
US Politics– most notably, President Barack Obama used Twitter daily to connect with supporters pre-inauguration.
New Business – small companies using Twitter to scale like Threadless and others use it to pick up incremental business like Tony & Alba.
Public Relations – many companies are lifting the corporate communications veil and using Twitter to humanize the organization like Kodak’s CMO. Government agencies are also using Twitter to communicate better

Need more examples? Well, this week’s moderator actually wrote the book on Twitter case studies from over a hundred interviews he completed. Now he wants your story. Shel Israel has a storied career in the social media space helping companies, from start-up to grown-up, better utilize digital communications to grow their businesses. This week’s #socialmedia chat will take a look at how Twitter is affecting all of us and where Twitter’s value will lie in the future. As one of the industry’s most respected thought leaders, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to “hang out” with Shel Israel for an hour.

Topic: Twitterville – What’s Happened, What’s Coming

Q1: How did Twitter change you business in 2009?

Q2: How will Twitter change in 2010?

Notice anything different here? This week we will focus on only two questions (compared with the usual 3). Please join us Tuesday 01/26 at 12 noon EST and follow along at #sm44

via hashtagsocialmedia.com

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The relationship viewed as transactional

Posted on January 18, 2010 by marc meyer

As January 2010 slowly slips away I’m struck by thwo things I’ve read today, actually 3. Lets back up a week to add some context to what I’m about to say. On January 8th Mark Zuckerberg the founder and CEO of Facebook made the following comment:

If he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private…

Here is the full blown article as found on ReadWriteWeb: Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Following that admission, Shel Israel and I had an exchange on Twitter that started with this from Shell…

At which point I said:

@shelisrael Agree. I know I’m pigeonholing here but millenials have a different notion of what privacy is or should be..

To which Shell responded”

@Marc_Meyer I don’t know if you’ve asked Millenials how they feel about privacy. I think you should ask them b4 making a blanket statement.

and…

Would you see it the same, if FB also started posting street addresses? phone #s? SSN? How about photos of kids? Does he decide? 10:38 AM Jan

and…

It would depress me greatly to think an entire generation had lost a sense of privacy. That would be Orwellian.

My point in all of this? Mark Zuckerberg comes from a different place, he operates in a different space. Millenials treat privacy differently and so does he. I’m not making a blanket statement as much as I’m referring to Zuckerberg, who is a millenial, and who has created a completely different notion of what privacy is and should be. Relationships and privacy mean different things to Zuckerberg.

Now lets take danah boyd who says:

Publicity has value and, more importantly, folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.”

Yes, but here is why I titled this post the relationship viewed as transactional. As danah has so accurately stated, publicity has value. As a society we have always been attracted by and to celebrity, be it as tragedy, comedy or otherwise. Our society devours celebrities as three squares a day. Because of this, and because of the social web, that potential for celebrity exists at every turn. But it comes at a cost in 2 forms. One form is what we hope to gain from that transaction and the other comes in the form of what we give up or are willing to part with. Look at it as a deal with the devil if you will.

We like our privacy but we love our 15 minutes of fame. In fact we love it so much that Josh Harris, of internet shooting star fame stated:

Andy Warhol said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” Harris told me. “But I think he misunderstood what was happening. I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That’s where we’re heading, whether we like it or not.”

Relationships as transactions. We might not admit it, but what the social web has created is an unstated platform for every social interaction to have the potential to catapult one at best, into a cult of personality. In fact I would venture that though most might not admit, but part of their social strategy is to be “found” or to create a connection that results in…yep you guessed it, some type of transaction..Disingenuous? It depends on who you ask.

The upside/ 15 minutes of fame. The downside you may lose control of your privacy.

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10 social sites, posts and tools worth checking out

Posted on December 10, 2009 by marc meyer

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. My Twitter stream is my RSS. Below is a compilation of sites that make me better at what I do. They cover the gamut of posts, tools and resources that someone new to social media or not, should investigate and bookmark and then share with others who might benefit.

1) This first post title 30 top blogs for social media updates is pretty good, simply because there were a few blogs (not many) that I did not know about. As well, the post also contained some links to other worthy posts.

2) If You Care About Search, You Must Care About Social Media and I do. This post rocks it contains video interviews with Vanessa Fox-pay attention to her video, she brings up a lot of solid valid points about search and social- As well as Lee Odden who stresses that you cannot ignore the intersection of search and social.

3) Check out the rankings of the Big Money Facebook 50 of the best brands utilizing Facebook. How many are you fans of?

4) A couple of weeks ago Shel Israel did an interview with E-consultancy promoting his new book Twitterville. If you don’t know who Shel is, Google his name. Pay attention to the examples Shel mentions in the interview.

5) Neoformix is a cool data visualization site, which for me helps in dumbing things down for yours truly so that I can sometimes understand them better.

6) Check out the 11 players in this post on the brief history of social network enterprise collaboration tools How many did you know about?

7) Sally Falkow is really a smart person, she recently cranked a pretty sweet slide deck

8. I’m a big fan of the Inbound Marketing University (IMU) they offer free marketing retraining programs for marketing professionals—as well as marketers between jobs—looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.

9) Here’s a quick one, How popular is your website in the web 2.0 world?

10) Lastly I thought this was cool, monitor Twitter lists for keywords with Listimonkey

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9 posts/sites that are required reading

Posted on August 29, 2008 by marc meyer

I read so much that my eyes water sometimes. When I get home and walk in the door and set my laptop bag down, it’s nice to say-I’m home, time to take a break. Except, after about an hour or two and I’m finally settled in, what do I do? I fire up the laptop and read some more. I’m an information junkie and I suspect a lot of you are too. So since we have a 3 day weekend coming up. Here are some blog posts and websites for you to ponder over and check out.

Shel Israel has some interesting thoughts on the future fo social meda, don’t worry Shel is all about brevity but it’s still good.

Here’s a really interesting post from Veronica Giggey at Social Media Group, why? because she’s a project manager there and she’s looking for an internal collaboration tool. This struck me as odd, yet honest. Hit her up and see if you can help her!

I guess the big Yahoo Mash experiment is over. Actually I didn’t know it was just an “experiment”. Maybe that’s what you call something that doesn’t work.

This absolutely boggles my mind about Facebook and I’m still catching hell about this post I made on Social Media Today

Check out these numbers on how associations are using social technologies, over at Chris Carfi’s site, they’re actually higher than I would have thought!

Why do you exist?

How uber cool is this? meglobe

Valeria Maltoni asks what’s beyond the conversation, because she never thought it was just about the conversation itself. It’s a great piece.

And lastly, the socialization of your personal brand part III

Social Media Visualization Part III:10 Wordles of your peers, do they fit?

Posted on August 15, 2008 by marc meyer

In deference to Hermann Rorschach, I give you 10 Wordles from some of the more popular or notable people in the social media, marketing, and internet space that we swim in. Interestingly enough, what makes them unique, is what makes them different, yet similar. Lets check them out and come up with a few words that might describe each of their blogs.

For the uninitiated, Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

Our first Wordle belongs to Jeremiah Owyang, the notable Forrester analyst:

What sticks out? Content, brands, social, personal, chanel, community and Youtube. All of which, in one way or the other, speak to what he writes about on a day to day basis. The one that is the real head scratcher is Ronald. Jeremiah?

Next up is Toby Bloomberg’s wonderful blog, Diva marketing Blog

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Toby is all about blogging, blogger relations, business strategy, marketing and social media. Your thoughts? How did I do?

Next up is Todd Defren’s Why is the McCain reference so prominent? Todd’s wordle appears to look like it’s been tagged by some of Boston’s best graffiti artists. But PR does jump out of the mix, thank goodness.

Well, lets bring in Chris Brogan, the very prolific, as of late, Chris Brogan

Actually Chris’s wordle is very much like him as of late, all over the place. Lots of words. I mean lots. but Speech and Post certainly reveal what Chris is all about-in a good way of course. But so does email?

With that being said, Lets look at the wordle of Brian Solis

As you can see, the word information was cut off, but was essentially alone at the bottom. I find that odd for someone with this type of blogsite. As if there is some sort of disconnect between PR and the conversation and information? The wordle does reveal the things that Brian blogs about, are dead on with his passion. PR and social media.

Did someone mention Hugh Macleod?

Given the nature and style of Hugh’s blog, its interesting and appropriate to see the word prominence falling on…of all things, people! But companies and organizations fall in behind the term along with thought and know.

The next few people are certainly people we all know about, so lets see how their wordles compare. The first being David Armano’s Check out how prominent Twitter is, and like people, as well as media, talking, social and brand.