Checking out visual.ly to track the rise and fall of #linsanity – with Obama as top influencer. Great way to see the wax and wane of a topic on Twitter.
Category: General
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Serendipitous convergence
The day after the Berkman Center convened news thinkers to talk truthiness and Alan Rusbridger spoke of the impact of open journalism, KONY 2012 broke all records for viral video.
All the right ingredients for the perfect social case study of discerning “truth” after the narrative spreads like wildfire. The Guardian asks “What’s the real story?” while Kristof that this scrutiny obscures the key point about the devastation. As the competing narratives unfold, am looking at people quantitatively analyzing the impact to understand more about the inherent risks and opportunities in social news’ accelerated spread.
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Rusbridger on open journalism
How can we harness this [digital] revolution we’re living through to provide a better account of the world around us?
Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian speaking last night on open journalism at the 2012 Goldsmith Awards. See also their contemporary take on the Three Little Pigs…
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Content & design practices from HBO Go
AllThingsD interviewed Allison Moore, SVP digital platforms at HBO. HBO Go is one of my favorite apps, and provides, just as she describes “an incredible digital experience for our customers…just like they have with our content…wherever consumers expect us to be.” The “wherever they expect us to be” part is pretty impressive, with existing or planned content distribution partnerships with Roku XBOX, and more …
Another point she raises about how the app design “not only brings in some kind of immersiveness and color and zap… but also gets out of the way.” In web and app design, this is the biggest tension – knowing how to convene users with your brand content, and how to support that convening, and then judging when to get the hell out of the way. Not as easy as it looks.
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Google+ today: From sausage fest to ghost town
Throughout 2011, it was clear that Google+ was mostly a male bastion. Mashable reported that if you were to throw a dart at Google+, it would be more than twice as likely to land on a man’s profile as a woman’s profile. Ensue hue and cry.This week, the Wall Street Journal puts Google+ on ghost town watch, pointing out that users spend a mere three minutes a month on site versus six-seven hours on Facebook. Meanwhile, Pinterest is soaring, with growth driven largely by women. Think about it, guys.
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Everything is a remix
We live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, we need them now, we need them to spread fast. The common good is a meme that was overwhelmed by intellectual property. It needs to spread again. If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms, our society, they all transform.
That’s social evolution and it’s not up to governments or corporations or lawyers… it’s up to us.
Everything is a remix [web video series]
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Brand democracy is not brand anarchy.
Just read The Role of Brand in the Nonprofit Sector which pointed to the emerging acceptance of brand as strategic asset that goes beyond tactical fundraising tool.There’s an interesting tension between the rise of individual voices through social media, and a dated perception that messaging hierarchies mandate institutional lockstep. This is definitely a top FAQ: “why bother with any kind of communications coordination in the age of social media?” For me, the answer is that social presents an opportunity to reinvigorate brand messaging – to listen and to reach out to constituents (be they employees, supporters, alumni) to understand more about your brand’s resonance — and then to use that understanding to craft messages that stick.
The authors said it best: democracy != anarchy. Working with nonprofit brands serves up an opportunity to learn and engage with social to refine brand positioning.
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Welcome to the age of big data
It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.
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What new leadership looks like
Last week I was lucky to hear two fascinating talks: from Bill George, HBS prof and author of True North, and Wael Ghonim, the Google employee and internet activist who energized pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt just over a year ago.
The theme that emerged for me was distributed leadership. George spoke about IBM’s collaborative organizational structure and shifting definition of leadership. In a workforce of 440,000 employees, he described IBM as cultivating 40,000 of them for some kind of leadership role. Ghonim focused on current and future challenges for Egypt and pointed to the importance of the many “ordinary” young Egyptians in the uprising — while disavowing narratives that position him as the movement’s hierarchical leader. (Good NPR review of his book, Revolution 2.)
The point about the death of command-and-control and emergence of new, global organizational models is not a new one. What was striking to me was two such different men with vastly different life experiences, both underscoring the imperative of reaching that conclusion.