With the sun rising on 2009, all of us at Livingston Communications wish you a happy, prosperous New Year.
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Geoff Livingston Embraces and Changes Personal Brand for 2009
December 22, 2008 – 6:29 pm
After much thinking and several conversations with the LComm team, I’ve decided to embrace the personal brand marketing theory. And, based on that theory it is evident that I need a new image for 2009. I mean, who needs value?
Thanks for the great year of interaction and discussion on the Buzz Bin. From all of us at Livingston Communications have a fantastic holiday season, and we’ll see you in 2009.
Posted in Digital Marketing
Tagged 2009, Geoff Livingston, mike meyers, personal brand, SNL, sprocket
Comments (31)
Work Ethic 1.0: Good Stewardship
December 22, 2008 – 1:08 am
The recent “web 2.0″ boom of the past few years has changed the dynamic of the workplace, in many ways for the better. At the same time, it has brought an era of dramatic privilege, a sense that employees should do what they want, whenever they want, and that employers should work to fulfill those desires if they want to keep said employees. And in my opinion, that change in work ethic proves the point that some things don’t change for the better.
Nothing typifies this more than the crazed directions the personal branding phenomena has branched into. While many purists debate with me about semantics — feeling that personal brands really mean an individual’s reputation — it’s clear that the movement has become something much more akin to Internet fame and rock stardom.
Lately, you’re not hearing that attitude so much. Millenials are now realizing their first economic downturn, and a more sober attitude seems to be arising from the general web 2.0 crowd towards works. The common statements of the day are “I’m grateful we’re busy,” or “I’m happy to have a job.”
That’s not to say that some of those gains should be turned away. In a world where you move from job to job or project to project in periods of years and months (rather than decades), it’s only natural to seek work in areas of interest. But being satisfied with a non-fulfilling job — even just for today — is OK, too.
One almost surefire result of America’s most difficult economic time since the Great Depression will be a return to old fashioned work ethic. This ethos, something that got drilled into me by my father and mentors in my twenties, revolves around good stewardship. While the nature of jobs have changed dramatically within a much shorter window of time, the principles of good stewardship still apply.
Good Stewardship
For the purpose of this discussion, let’s define stewardship as the successful execution of the management another’s property or financial affairs; one who successfully administers anything as the agent of another or others. So when someone pays you to do something — a.k.a. a job — they are financially compensating you for acting as their steward (Image: Working Class Hero by Jurek D.).
You don’t see fulfillment or building personal brands in this definition. Far from it really. What is evident is an underlying attitude of service. Rather than preach, it seems best to put down ten of the standards I try to apply to my own activities past and present:
1) I am responsible for my actions.
2) As part of my job (either full time or as part of a consultancy) I am paid to perform a service. I will do this, even if I only intend to stay for a year (or the project is for a couple of months).
3) Sacrifice is required at times. I make those sacrifices, even when it affects me personally. I did this before I owned my own company, too.
4) That’s because a job is not about accepting status quo, instead taking the baton and moving it further.
5) Success means passing the baton on so the next guy can take it and run, with a real opportunity to do even better than me.
6) By being a good steward, I will build a good personal reputation as well as benefit the larger brand. But selfish motives in day-to-day activity will actually reap the opposite reward.
7) In that vein, I succeed when my boss/client/company looks good as a result of actions taken.
8) Agreement with my company/client is not something I need to perform my responsibilities. If I voiced my concerns and I’m told to do something a different way, then so be it. I’ll do such activity with the best attitude possible.
9) When I make mistakes, I try to own them and when appropriate make amends
10) Perfection is not possible, but progress is. Therefore, I seek to evaluate, analyze, explore weaknesses, and build. More progress is always attainable.
I’m interested in your thoughts about shifting work ethic attitudes. Here’s another thought from Bonnie Parrish-Kell.
Posted in Digital Marketing
Tagged attitude, millenials, recssession, stewarship, work ethic
Comments (13)
Dec
19
2008
Talking Digital Media with The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
December 19, 2008 – 10:00 am
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy seeks to improve the lives and future prospects of children and families. The organization strives to ensure that these children are born into stable homes and raised by two-parent families. The National Campaign’s goal is to reduce the teen pregnancy rate and unplanned pregnancy among young adults.
Lawrence Swiader is the Director of Digital Media at The National Campaign and relays responsible values and messages to obtain their goal by using social media, games, mobile devices and the Web. Prior to The National Campaign, Lawrence worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for ten years where he established an award-winning Web presence for the Museum.
BB: What was your biggest achievement on the social media front in 2008?
LS: Having just joined The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy in October, 2008, my biggest achievements would have to be described as working on the small things. This included making sure that our blog, Pregnant Pause , was listed on all the right directories and that my colleagues felt ownership for writing into the blog. In addition, a presence for The National Campaign was created in Twitter , Facebook , Delicious , YouTube and other important Web destinations.
BB: Tell us about your organization’s marketing/communications strategy for 2009.
LS: The National Campaign’s marketing strategy for 2009 emphasizes new outreach to young adults, 18 – 30, to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Over half of all pregnancies in this age group are unplanned. This is a big problem and a large, national group. We believe that the way to reach our audience is to invest some time in a destination site, yes, but also to create small products (there are a lot of group producers out there) that can be marketed effectively via social networks.
BB: What big hairy audacious social media goals will help you achieve your objectives next year?
LS: Our biggest social media goals next year will be to leverage the tools to create an audience from scratch around some new audio and video series. In addition, with a new administration, a big goal would be to affect new the health policy by including family planning issues. Social networks can be used to bring some awareness to the issue.
Social media will also allow us to bring people together around sexual health and birth planning issues to allow the newly-formed community to learn from one another.
Bad reaction to a form of birth control? Tell the community. Someone has had that problem before.
You’re not alone. What’s even better is that once people start sharing information, we can feed aggregate information back to the community to help it make better choices.
This kind of information sharing and data mining is why people like Facebook and how Google predicts when the flu might hit your area. There is no telling what insights await us of we can just gain access to the information and think creatively about it.
BB: How do you plan to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing mix (e.g., direct mail, email marketing, mobile, media relations, etc.)?
LS: The little things help us to integrate our social media efforts with everything else we do. For example, including a “follow me” link to our Twitter account on all correspondences, inviting partners to guest blog, and doing stories in print and online publications about The National Campaign’s social media work are ways to “shuffle the deck.” Instead of building a landing page where, in the past, we would have accepted comments via an invitation sent via an electronic newsletter, we will invite people to comment into a blog thereby raising awareness to that outlet and avoiding reinventing the wheel.
BB: What is one challenge you face when executing new, social and/or digital media strategy? How are you overcoming this hurdle?
LS: The main hurdle I see is that many people still don’t understand social technology though they believe we have to be involved in some way. Social networking activities are not hard but they are complex and time consuming. To post a good Tweet or blog entry, one has to be a decent writer, know the topic, and study what others say on the Internet. Making the case for dedicated staff to “do social media” is not easy and needs to be done time and again.
BB: What will be the final measure of success for your digital plans?
LS: For The National Campaign, there will be various levels of success. On one level, it will be measured in terms of eyeballs and ears as the first big challenge is to raise awareness. A higher level will have us evaluating whether some information is imparted and kept via the various online initiatives. Last, we aim to reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies in young adults through better sex education, raising people’s ability to have good relationships, a commitment to personal responsibility, and good state and federal policies regarding family planning.
BB: Do you foresee any particularly enticing opportunities that can help nonprofits/causes reach their social media goals in 2009? Any advice for how to take advantage of related trends?
LS: For nonprofits, the opportunities abound. Never before has it been so easy, without the help of a development team and/or the media gatekeepers, to get your message out and create a network of people that care about your issue. A good example is Today’s Meet . Excellent for back channel conversations, it can be set up in seconds and serve as a space for conversations that two years ago just were not possible.
Posted in Digital Marketing
Tagged Lawrence Swiader, National Campaign to Prevent Teen & Unplanned Pregn, Pregnant Pause
Comments (2)
Dec
18
2008
Top 25 Ways to Tell if Your Social Media Expert Is a Carpetbagger
December 18, 2008 – 4:47 pm
by Beth Harte and Geoff Livingston
The bad economy has brought to bear one unwelcome change. With a desire to use more cost effective communication forms, companies are looking to social media. As a result, there are many, many companies, agencies and consultants rushing to offer social media services. Unfortunately, they don’t know what they’re doing (Image: Rifle Expert by Randy son of Robert).
Companies need to turn a discerning eye onto their potential social media partners. Here’s a quick list of some ways to vet potential social media experts.
1) When asked about listening, gives you a blank stare.
2) Converses at people instead of with them on social networks
3) No tangible past experience delivering return on investment either for themselves or others
4) Doesn’t understand how social media integrates into larger corporate communications or business strategy
5) First recommendation is to blog
6) Believes in delivering messages
7) Will ghostwrite blog posts and other social content for you
8) Is willing to impersonate you online in social networks
9) Trots in “social media expert” for sales meeting
10) Their blog is less than six months old or has no comments
11) Blog only has links to traditional 1.0 media sites
12) Cannot host conversation without constantly interjecting self into said conversation
13) Talks about cultivating your personal brand
14) Will not allow employees to participate in larger conversation
15) Will guarantee results without any prior experiences
16) Just added new social media department
17) Recommends Facebook Group as first tactic
18) Defines social media as only tools (Facebook, blogs, Flickr <INSERT SHINY OBJECT HERE>) as opposed to conversations with communities
19) First campaign involves a contest without a strategy
20) Doesn’t know what Technorati is
21) Talks about applying mass communications theory
22) Posts less than five times a month on their blog
23) Thinks social media is about creating content
24) Suggests publishing promotional copy as social content
25) Believes social media is the sole terrain of either PR or advertising
What would you add to this list?
12/20 Update: Andrew Vascellari shot an absolutely hilarious video version of this post on his blog. Check out Andrew’s riffing on the 25:
Posted in Digital Marketing
Tagged beth harte, carpetbagger. snake oil, expert, social media
Comments (269)
Connecting GlobalGiving to Online Media
December 18, 2008 – 10:00 am
GlobalGiving connects you to the causes and community-based projects you care about through their online marketplace. Joan Ochi, the Director of Marketing Communications and Robert Dubois, a Marketing Associate who provides support to the organizations online social media strategy, share how GlobalGiving uses direct marketing to encourage people to donate to the causes they support.
Both Joan and Robert have experience in marketing-communications. Prior to GlobalGiving, Joan provided marketing support for clients such as Fannie Mae and HP. Robert worked at Burns Marketing, Colorado’s fifth-largest marketing-communications agency.
BB: What was your biggest achievement on the social media front in 2008?
GG: Being a part of America’s Giving Challenge – an initiative spearheaded by the Case Foundation earlier this year. The objective of America’s Giving Challenge was to inspire Americans to use online tools such as widgets to participate in a fundraising for a cause – either a project on GlobalGiving or an organization on Network for Good. The Challenge ran for about 6 weeks and attracted over 130 “fundraisers,” more than 13,000 donors, and generated approximately $364,000 in donations. Interestingly, many of the top fundraisers who participated in the Challenge relied not just on social media tools such as widgets and blogs, but used traditional outreach vehicles such as phone calls and email messages as well.
We continued to experiment with other social media tools (Facebook, our own blog, Second Life, etc) as well, and learned that every tools is not right for every organization. Participating in and maintaining a presence on social networks is time consuming and resource intensive, and we found that merely having a presence on social networks has for the most part not been effective in developing online communities or building relationships with new or potential donors.
BB: Tell us about your organization’s marketing/communications strategy for 2009.
GG: Going forward, we are focusing on both acquisition and retention by creating a more engaging website experience – one that will motivate people to return regularly to take advantage of and participate in the more community-oriented features on GlobalGiving. Some of the functionality under development include fundraising tools (which would allow individuals to come together to raise funds for a project in which they have a common interest), tell-a-friend features that enable viral marketing, online discussions between donors and project leaders, and enhanced donor profiles.
BB: What big hairy audacious social media goals will help you achieve your objectives next year?
GG: Once again, we feel that community – oriented features – the ability for donors to connect and interact with project leaders, as well as with other donors – are becoming increasingly important. For example, if I can see what projects my friends support, I might be more likely to support those projects, too. We want our donors to feel connected – with projects and the people that run them, with other donors, and with the broader GlobalGiving community in general. Today, we enable donors to add comments to reports posted by progress leaders – we’re working to make this more dynamic and hopefully turn this “back and forth” into interesting, lively, and educational conversations. And of course, we’ll continue to promote widgets and integrate more video and audio (e.g. podcasts) into our site.
BB: How do you plan to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing mix (e.g., direct mail, email marketing, mobile, media relations, etc.)?
GG: We typically use email communications to encourage individuals to visit gg.com and engage on our site. Traditional media/public relations also tends to be very effective in driving qualified visitors to our site. Our goal is to create a unified/consistent user experience, so we employ landing pages that are customized based on where the person may be coming from – e.g. if we place an ad, we’ll direct viewers of that ad to a specific landing page that might leverage the same look/feel/messaging, etc.
BB: What is one challenge you face when executing new, social and/or digital media strategy? How are you overcoming this hurdle?
GG: Being a small organization, we have limited resources and therefore a very long wish list of desired features and enhancements – and of course, we can never get these features in as quickly as we’d like – so prioritization is especially important. In addition, it’s hard to evaluate how much time and resources to put into a new (and perhaps unproven) social media tool. We have to ask ourselves “is this the next best thing, or something that may fizzle within the next six months?”
BB: What will be the final measure of success for your digital plans?
GG: Put simply – meeting and exceeding our goals, usually around donation volume as well as other more standard web metrics such as conversion, bounce rate, repeat visitors, etc. As we expand our community, we will implement goals related to community participation and engagement, referrals, etc.
BB: Do you foresee any particularly enticing opportunities that can help nonprofits/causes reach their social media goals in 2009? Any advice for how to take advantage of related trends?
GG: There’s so much out there that it’s tricky to stay on top of all the latest developments. Reading blogs like this one :-) and taking advantage of the myriad of opportunities out there – from Google applications and seminars, to resources like Progressive Exchange, Net Squared, TechSoup – and you’d be amazed of the tips we get from Twitter, too! It’s important not to try to use every social media tool at once – figure out what your organization’s needs are, and then identify the tools that you think would best meet your specific needs.
PS. Could 2009 be the year that mobile actually breaks through as a social media tool in the US in a big way???
Posted in Digital Marketing
Tagged GlobalGiving, Joan Ochi, nonprofit, Robert Dubois, Social Cause
Comments (1)
Dec
17
2008
Blog Last
December 17, 2008 – 11:50 am
Because of the nature of our work, I get to see lots of curriculum for training sessions as well as partake in many conversations about social media communications best practices. Unfortunately, blog first, then engaging in social networks remains one of the most prevalent trends one finds. This ironically is probably the worst thing a company can do (Image: Walk of Fame by Mot the Barber).
If you do not participate in a community, if you are not engaged, pushing one way content at people will more than likely fail. It also flies in the face of what many of the best bloggers teach. Great social media begins with research and listening, then participation. Only then do you determine how to create content (see open source social media content process on Now Is Gone).
Look, starting a corporate blog was a big deal three or four years ago, but now it’s anything but a big deal. In fact, what most people are interested companies that can participate in the community and provide meaningful interactions that impact their lives. Not publish canned BS on a “new” platform called a weblog.
If anything, what last week’s blog discussion showed is that many, many companies are failing at blogging. And there are some very tangible reasons why: The marketplace has become inundated with social media content, and most of it is lousy. Regardless of what Blog Council PR Rep Michael Rubin says, 86 percent fail because they cannot dedicate themselves to the effort and produce meaningful content regularly.
Like David Armano said, blogging requires a ton of hard work:
If you’re scratching your head wondering why your social media initiatives aren’t the bright and shiny object you were sold—it’s time to realize that there is a truth here that goes beyond social media all together. The fact is that it’s hard work to produce something of value. It’s really tough to do something that gets people talking (in a good way), and no amount of strategy can produce trust. Trust comes with time, interactions and has to be proven.
Unlike most agencies and consultants, I don’t think it’s a good idea for people to start with a blog. This was something that Rohit Bhargarva also said when we interviewed him for the Network Solutions Solutions Stars video conference. And an 86 percent failure rate means a company really needs to understand the time and valuable thought leadership commitments blogging takes before engaging. I’ve seen several clients really struggle with these commitments over the past couple of years.
So in my mind, blog last! It’s a recession and many companies needs successful pilot programs to show social media will work. To do that first figure out where you can play, participate, maybe guest blog or provide some other valuable contribution, and learn your community. After a few months a company will know whether blogging can really offer a meaningful way to regularly participate.
Strong Criticism for the Blog Council
When the Blog Council launched, I voiced my reticence. One year later, I see very little value in this organization’s efforts.
My feeling on the Blog Council is that it’s an overpriced, exclusive networking group for big companies. These guys pay tens of thousands of dollars to talk in private about, umm, blogging and social media best practices. Right.
Every time I talk to a member, they say the find value in it. I ask them what’s the value. They say access to other corporate social media types in big companies. OK, so other than providing high dollar networking, what does the Council actually do? Publish basic guidelines and flack on behalf of big blogs?
Last week, when the Forrester report came out Blog Council Staffer Michael Rubin proceeded to comment on my One Dimensional Corporate Social Media Sucks post in a rather interesting fashion, and of course, we had a nice back and forth (starting here). His primary argument is that people won’t trust corporations no matter what they do.
I disagree. Like Armano I think their communications stink, and there is no reason to trust them until they do a much better job of engaging stakeholders on a consistent basis. Since then, I’ve been told by several folks that the Rubin-cited Rubbermaid case study is in actuality a good one (see Josh Bernoff write up).
Sorry, as someone who makes recommendations to people on how to spend their marketing budgets, I see 10, 20 or even 30K for participation in this group as a waste. I’ve told several folks who were considering the Blog Council this, too. Anyone can network with these accessible social media types (I do and so can you). I want to see much more public value from the Blog Council before it merits anything but a thumbs down from me.
How FortiusOne Uses the Social Web to Maximize ROI
December 17, 2008 – 10:00 am
Disclosure: FortiusOne is a client of Livingston Communications.
FortiusOne’s CEO Sean Gorman, Ph.D. discusses how the company uses social media to share advanced geospatial technologies to the market. Sean is a recognized expert in geospatial analysis and virtualization and was honored this year with Bisnow’s Top 35 under 35. FortiusOne was also recognized as one of the 100 “Most Promising” companies driving the future of technology.
FortiusOne spun out of George Mason University in 2005 to provide next generation location intelligence. How? By connecting the powerful analysis of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with the open and intuitive GeoWeb. In other words, we provide the ability to make better decisions based on statistical data using an easy, fun interface similar to Google Maps. In fact, it is our mission to bring geographic data and analysis to the mass market. Traditionally such tools and data have been bottled up in proprietary desktop software that requires a trained professional to utilize.
One of the big challenges in achieving our mission and helping enterprises make better decisions with geospatial data is education. The value proposition of geospatial data requires an understanding of the ease with which data can be visualized and analyzed. This provided a great opportunity for the company to leverage the Web for direct marketing to achieve our objectives. To accomplish this we utilized two big assets: Our blog (Off the Map) and our public technology demonstration site, GeoCommons.com.
GeoCommons is a crowdsourced repository of geospatial data where anyone can quickly make a map and add their own data on top of it. There are over 6,000 datasets with 200,000 attributes to map ranging from IED attacks in Afghanistan to the census of India to carbon emissions in Florida. Within the GeoCommons destination we offer Finder! for locating and organizing geospatial data and Maker! for creating interactive visualizations of the data on maps.
The GeoCommons site serves three primary functions.
- A tool to collect geospatial data around the globe
- A Web scale demonstration of the technology
- An application to generate leads and educate the market on our capabilities and value proposition.
In order to maximize the power of the GeoCommons site we leverage our blog to drive traffic and generate leads within target verticals. We do this through two different angles:
- Breaking news stories; and
- Use cases for verticals we are selling into.
Most news stories have a geospatial aspect to them, so as stories break we find relevant data and post up maps providing new insights on the event. For instance, during Hurricane Ike we generated maps illustrating the potential impact on oil wells in the Gulf and refineries on shore. The Discovery Channel and ABC News picked up on the work and used the data for their broadcasts.
The second way we leverage the blog is to convey uses cases relevant to validate our target markets and generate feedback from the market. For example, we’ve been investigating financial services as a possible target market and generated a use case showing the impact of the Wells Fargo-Wachovia merger. This not only generates leads for us but helps the team validate a new market and test the viability of technology and feature set for it. Further, it builds a growing library of uses cases and value propositions that we can refer customers and prospects to as the company grows.
As the Social Web evolves there are ever expanding opportunities to tie viral direct marketing into your operations. For instance we recently added GetSatisfaction.com to our tool set so we could collect and organize feedback on our products more effectively. Now we have a live and growing repository of bugs and positive accolades about GeoCommons. While all these tools are effective it takes a solid integrated strategy for them to succeed, otherwise organizations run the risk of wasting resources without a solid return on investment. It also critical to keep your strategy nimble, so you can adapt to rapidly evolving technologies. Definitely don’t be afraid to scrap something if it is not working or requires lots of resources. One of the beauties of Web 2.0 is the speed with which services can be set up and taken down, so never feel locked in to one way of accomplishing a task.
If you would like to learn more about GeoCommons (great for mapping out your customer demographics and direct marketing efforts) and the services provided by FortiusOne, check out http://www.geocommons.com and http://www.fortiusone.com.
Posted in Digital Marketing
Tagged Finder!, FortiusOne, GeoCommons, George Mason University, Geospatial, GeoWeb, GIS, Hurricane Ike, Maker!, Off the Map, Sean Gorman, Wells Fargo-Wachovia
Comments (0)
Dec
16
2008
Goodness Gracious, Great Blogs of Fire!
December 16, 2008 – 1:20 pm
Louis Gray takes a deeper look at ten new 2008 web services, and considers where they’ll be in 2009. Louis says, “Finding out what your friends were reading and sharing were key facets of most of the new products that gained my attention this year.” Visit LouisGray.com for details on Summize, BackType, TweetDeck, SocialToo, Gnip and more, and see what the future holds for these services. Also offer your favorites of 2008.
Charlene Li makes her predictions for 2009 on her blog, The Altimeter. Charlene predicts a trend towards new age activism and exclusivity. She also predicts that Facebook’s SocialRank algorithms will become influential, and that frontline workers will becoming more active online. Charlene also says that Google, Yahoo! and MSN will compete with a more open strategy, and that there will be a trend for “personal CPMs,” where “Each person’s profile will command a different, personal CPM based on a trilogy of their behavior, influence, and market demand.”
Nathaniel Whittemore Social Entrepreneurship takes a deeper look at what you need to consider when making your “holiday giving decisions.” In the first post of his series, Nathan considers how someone can find out if a charity is making quality, empowering decision with their money. Do you have any ideas?
Shannon Paul says, “There has been a lot of back-and-forth discussion on whether paid-for posts are ethical or not, but I think this misses the larger point.” Shannon feels that there is a philosophical difference between old media and new. Social media tools allow individual ideas to become more important than institutional forced ideas. Read Shannon Pual’s Very Official Blog and find out if she thinks full disclosure is enough to foster a trusting relationship, and why.
Mitch Joel of TwistImage offers a glimpse into a new book on the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington shares insight into how the Huffington Post has become the number one ranked blog in Technorati. Mitch says, “Arianna’s introduction for The Huffington Post Complete Guide To Blogging really resonates with the passion and power of Blogging.” Visit Mitch’s post and share why you think blogging matters.
Pew/Internet’s Future: A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep
December 16, 2008 – 8:13 am
Pew/Internet released its third Future of the Internet study this past Sunday. Really the study is a benchmark survey of thought leaders in the business and reveals some very obvious brush strokes as well as a startling thought or two.
Some general thoughts on the report before diving into specific findings… It’s a highly subjective data set, relying on opinions of “internet leaders, activists and analysts.” I would have liked to have seen some stats on technology diffusion as well. It may have prevented some technologies like motion detection (a la Wii and other game platforms) from being excluded.
At the same time, reading some of the quotes offered by said Internet authorities was great. Some very insightful people participated, which does relieve some of my worries about the report’s legitimacy (that and they did poll 1,000 of them).
Lastly, it is a wide sweeping survey in scope, but not depth, leaving me wanting more. A mile wide and an inch deep, Future of the Internet III created room for future research. Here are three examples, all coupled with a choice quote from one of the survey participants:
Big Takeaway: Social Betterment Lacking
Humanitarian do-gooders using social media to create social good (Humanitarian Image by Kretyen)? Not here said 55 percent of the thought leaders. According to Pew/Internet, “The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.”
This was the most disappointing benchmark revealed by the report. Yet recent events throughout the online world, from the mob mentality on Twitter to Arrington’s continued, ridiculously obnoxious self righteousness lead me to believe that significant progress in human nature needs to occur to achieve good online through transparency.
It’s the human plight, I suppose. Online media, while providing great opportunities to make a difference, is also exposing our ugly sides, from the need to place self first in some of the most ridiculous ways to pack mentalities to boorish treatment of others.
Here on the Buzz Bin, our own social good posts receive approximately 25- 33 percent of the readers our normal posts do, confirming this trend. That doesn’t stop us though. We’re committed!
As to the 55 percent of respondents who did not believe in the power of the Internet to change the world, well, we may have a long road, but if we don’t start somewhere we can never move forward. And now thanks to online transparency, we have a basis to begin that journey.
Our natural inclinations are to become more tolerant when we learn more about others. Especially, if the world grows more prosperous. Note also that most of our myths—movies and such—preach messages of tolerance and admiration of eccentricity. –David Brin, futurist and author.
Input Methods
After the shocking revelation that mobile would be the world’s primary access device, 67 percent of the thought leaders told us, “Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.” iPhone users I suppose.
But what about motion detection and other technologies crucial for virtual realities (Guitar Hero image by Joe Shlabotnik)? Facial recognition and other yet to be developed technologies can lead us to a new, new Internet that will really shake things up. Because keyboards and even touch input are still very physical and may limit our ability to interact in three dimensions. I see more progress here.
The use of the keyboard may disappear. –Julian Hopkins, social scientist and Ph.D. candidate at Monash University, Malaysia
The Third Dimension Goes Online
If corporate social media is one dimensional, then good social media is primarily two dimensional. Second Life seems to have petered out, leaving most of us wanting for a good virtual reality experience.
In my favorite finding, 56 percent of respondents felt, “In 2020, virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality are popular network formats, thanks to the rapid evolution of natural, intuitive technology interfaces and personalized information overlays. To be fully connected, advanced organizations and individuals must have a presence in the ‘metaverse’ and/or the ‘geoWeb.’”
Ironically, while the “adults” duke it out on blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the rise of virtual reality is already occurring. It just doesn’t look like our reality.
World of Warcraft already boasts 11 million users! Yeah, it’s a game, but its a virtual, online experience. So are man of the other popular online games.
People always ask me what’s the next big thing. Today, beyond mobile and video, I tell them it’s virtual reality. As bandwidth increases, input devices evolve, and computing technology continues to accelerate, it’s only natural to expect better and better virtual experiences. Second Life blew their opportunity by not continuing to upgrade their clunky user experience. But their will be Third and Fourth lives.
It seems unclear to lump together augmented reality and mirror worlds. They can have very different contexts, uses, points of interaction, and expectations. The geoWeb will be a powerful force, and may increase the sense of physical place. The metaverse will have to deeply increase sensory experience, wayfinding, and orientation—so it may ride on the back of situated augmentation, but not necessarily be coupled with it. –Duane Degler, user-centered designer and strategist for Design for Context
What do you think of the future?
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The BuzzLine – Week 4 – Blanched, Broiled or Fried?: