Category Archives: Social Media

First SNCR Fellows Conf Call – and the Digital Impact Conference in May in NY

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SncrlogoToday marked the first of what will now be quarterly conference calls for the new Fellows of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) (to which I was recently added). It was an enjoyable call hearing about the backgrounds of the various Fellows and also getting to hear from some of the other current SNCR Fellows (including friend and FIR co-host Shel Holtz). We also discussed the research we’ll each be doing, the SNCR code of conduct and the calendar of activities for 2011.

One of the more interesting pieces of news was that there will not be a “New Communications Forum” event this year (a.k.a. the “New Comm Forum”), but instead SNCR is partnering with the PR Society of America (PRSA) to have a track at the PRSA “Digital Impact Conference” on May 5-6 in New York City:

Digital Impact Conference Social Media and Digital PR Marketing and Communication Strategies PRSA

Not being a PRSA member, I hadn’t honestly paid attention to this conference, but upon taking a look it does indeed seem like a great event! Not sure if my schedule will allow me to get down there… but I’m definitely thinking about it.

Again, it was good to be starting to connect with the rest of the SNCR Fellows and I look forward to working with them all over the next few years!

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Slides: “Social Media Overview” by Lou Kerner

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One of the slide shows that I’ve seen circulated lately on Twitter is this “Social Media Overview” deck by Lou Kerner. It’s a great set of statistics and slides about social media. I’d be curious to hear Lou give it at some point, but in the meantime, the slides are quite interesting:

Social Media Overview

View more presentations from Lou Kerner.

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Video: Donna Papacosta on Curating Twitter with Paper.li

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While I haven’t yet found that using Paper.li to “read Twitter and Facebook as a daily newspaper” fits within my daily workflow, I know that a good number of friends and colleagues use the service… and Donna Papacosta recently published this video explaining how to get started:

Why doesn’t it work for me? Mainly because I already have a whole system in place using TweetDeck for monitoring Twitter that I check regularly… and for the “browsing” that you can do with Paper.li, I’m a big user of FlipBoard on my iPad.

Still, I can understand the value in getting a daily email summary that can highlight some of the things you may have missed. It’s good to see these kind of tools being developed. The whole issue of curating the insane volume of content out there is a topic that will consume us all for quite some time, I’d say…

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Chosen as a 2011 Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR)

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SncrlogoI was very pleased recently to receive word that I was chosen as one of the 2011-2012 Fellows of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR).

SNCR is a global nonprofit foundation and think tank “dedicated to the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect on traditional media and business models, communications, culture and society.” The organization sponsors a range of research and publications all focused around researching and communicating the changes going on all around us.

In a news release today, SNCR announced the 2011-2012 Fellows, including:

The new class of SNCR Fellows includes: Jeffrey Edlund, CTO Communications and Media Solutions, HP; Jennifer Edwards, assistant professor of communication studies, Tarleton State University; Atanu Garai, consultant for India’s Population Council; Egle Kvieskaite, EU project manager, Vilnius Pedagogical University and director of the Lithuanian College of Democracy; Alicia Nieva-Woodgate, managing director, ANW Networks, LLC; Ingrid Sturgis, assistant professor, Howard University; and Dan York, director of conversations, Voxeo Corporation.

We join a rather impressive list of existing Fellows that consists of, as the news release says…

more than 100 Founding Fellows, Senior Fellows and alumni who are business leaders, scholars, professional communicators, members of the media, futurists and technologists from around the globe. The SNCR Fellows collaborate on research initiatives, educational offerings, and the establishment of standards and best practices focused on the advanced study of emerging trends and developments in media and communications, and their effect on business, media, culture and society.

Given that the SNCR Fellows program is highly competitive with only a small percentage of applicants being accepted each year, I am both humbled and pleased to be joining the ranks. I look forward to working with the other SNCR Fellows and continuing to tell the story of how both the ways in which we communicate and the tools we use are all changing.

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BlogWorld and New Media Expo Coming To New York May 24-26, 2011

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BlogworldNews out today is that BlogWorld & New Media Expo is coming to New York this May, finally bringing one of their events to the East Coast of the US. Interestingly it is being co-located with “Book Expo” and they offered this explanation:

Two year’s ago at BlogWorld Leo Laporte said during his talk “We are not new media anymore. Now we are just THE MEDIA”. While we all believe that to be true, many in the traditional media are not convinced yet. Since our inception we have had a couple of Big Hairy Audacious Goals. One of them is to foster and accelerate the convergence of traditional and new media. We can’t think of a single better opportunity to help us accomplish that goal. New York City is the center of the traditional media universe. For four days Book Expo America is the center of the traditional publishing universe. By locating BlogWorld and Book Expo side by side we are bringing the best and brightest from both communities together for the first time anywhere. By the way the folks at Book Expo are just as excited about this as we are.

It will be interesting to see how the program evolves. You can follow @blogworldexpo on Twitter and watch the website at http://www.blogworldexpo.com/2011-nyc/. They note in the blog post that they are looking for speakers.

Kudos to the BlogWorld team for bringing their event to New York and I look forward to seeing how it works out!

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The Greatest Gift You Can Give This Season

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payattention.jpg

Credit: jenrab

There is one gift that we all can give this season that is far, far, far greater than anything else. It is a simple gift to give… yet it is by far one of the hardest to give.

That gift is very simply…

our presence.

Not “presents”… “presence”.

The act of being there, in the moment…

… with whomever we are with.

We live in an age of distraction.

There are so many new tools (or toys)… there are so many channels of communication… there are so many things going on. There are status updates to post, tweets to read… Oh, look, there’s a butterfly….

We live in an age of “busy”.

We all have busy lives. We work hard and long hours. We play hard. We have zillions of events going on for school or work or church or community groups or sports or friends or charities or nonprofit orgs or … or … or ..

We have deadlines at work and “to do” lists that can never be completed. Projects abound that take all of our “work” time and carry over into our “personal” time… we are always thinking about them.

Short Attention Span Theater

Credit: jurvetson

We live in an age of “multi-tasking”.

Our ubiquitous mobile phones are always within reach.

Always tempting us.

Always available for us to “just check one more email message”… or to scan our Facebook NewsFeed… or to reply to a tweet… or see what friends have checked in nearby on FourSquare.

We email while we drive… and check web sites while we are ostensibly in a meeting with other people.

We live in an age of continuous partial attention.

Always on. Always connected.

We don’t want to miss whatever comes next. Whether or not it matters whether we miss that or not is a different question.

We are plugged in … connected… wired…

… and almost never giving anyone our full attention.

And yet… in this attention-starved world, that is in fact the greatest gift we can give each other.

To be there.

In the moment.

Right then.

Paying attention to what others are saying or doing.

It is insanely hard to do, for all those reasons listed above.

I definitely struggle with it… beyond all those reasons above, as a writer, my head is always exploding with new ideas, and it often involves a substantial effort to consciously park those ideas to remain present.

Yet, if we can do it, that is the greatest gift we can give.

The presents will fade. The toys will break. The clothes will be outgrown. The jewelry will be replaced. The electronics will become outdated.

But our presence – or lack thereof – will linger.

Will you give that gift this year?

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Great Content Matters! – The Atlantic on the Unknown Blogger Who Helped Explain WikiLeaks

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WikiLeaks.jpgThe Atlantic has a great story out on “The Unknown Blogger Who Changed WikiLeaks Coverage“. The Atlantic’s article is a profile of Aaron Bady and his lengthy piece, ‘Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”‘, that did do much in explaining the underlying motivation of Julian Assange.

I remember reading Bady’s piece back in the midst of everything going on and viewing it as one of the more intellectual and useful analyses of the underlying thinking behind WikiLeaks. Like I’m sure most readers, I had no clue who was behind the actual article – nor did I take the time right then to go learn more about who he was.

Given that the Atlantic piece is rather short, I won’t steal their thunder and leave it to you all to read more. But I will quote this one bit:

And we should all be thankful that good writing can be recognized and quickly disseminated.

That is indeed the beauty of this new world we are in… anyone can publish their thoughts online, without the gatekeepers of the traditional media…. and maybe, just maybe, they, too, can wind up having the global impact that this one “unknown blogger” had.

Kudos to the Atlantic for getting the rest of the story.

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The Content Creator’s Creed

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Loved this tweet from Ron Ploof last week:

contentcreatorscreed.jpg

The content creators’ creed:

We have an obligation to be interesting.

Ron said in a subsequent reply back: ‘It came from a customer considering a company blog. He said, “So you’re saying we have an obligation to be interesting?”‘

We don’t, of course, truly have that obligation.

We are free to go ahead and create the most boring, useless, trivial, mundane, unreadable and unviewable content.

We have that freedom.

There are no set “rules” that dictate what kind of content we must create online.

But…

IF we want people to read, view or listen to our content…

IF we want people to share our content to others…

IF we want people to take action based on our content (visiting a site, downloading something, buying an item, signing up, etc., etc.)…

IF we want people to choose our content amidst the insane amount of content being created each day…

THEN… I agree with Ron…

We have an obligation to be interesting!

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Congrats to C.C. Chapman on the launch of his new book, “Content Rules”!

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cc_chapman.jpgA big congratulations to my friend C.C. Chapman and his co-author Ann Handley on the launch of their new book, Content Rules. As C.C. wrote about yesterday, he’s rather excited… and understandably so!

I first met C.C. way back in the early days of podcasting when a bunch of us in the Boston area went to events like PodCamp Boston and other great events like that. We’ve all had a “New England Podcasting” mailing list that has kept a good number of us in touch over the years. I’ve long admired his incredible passion, enthusiasm and just generally insanely high level of energy!

And of course… the incredible amount of content he creates online!

Which, naturally, makes him the perfect author for a book called “Content Rules”!

I haven’t read the book yet… my copy is being delivered soon… but judging from the reviews on Amazon so far I’m looking forward to reading what C.C. and Ann wrote.

They also recorded a great interview with Shel Holtz which you can listen to.

Congrats, again, to both C.C. and Ann!

P.S. And to those of you going to the Boston book launch party on Friday, December 10th, I’ll see you there! 😉

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My Report into the FIR podcast – November 29, 2010

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fir_100x100.gif

Sent in my regular weekly 5-minute report this morning for today’s “For Immediate Release” podcast episode. In today’s report I discussed:

The episode will be available for your listening pleasure from the FIR web site later today.

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