Guest post by Cathy Brooks: Follow her on Twitter | Read her blog Source Imagine this scenario. It’s election time and you find yourself engaged in a heated debate with someone about a particular candidate. Fairly foaming at the mouth, this individual rails on about lousy legislators. Then you find out this person is eligible to be but is not registered to vote. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m of a mind that if you don’t register to…
Size Matters: Job Seekers Measure the Size of Your Social Graph
Source Employers are seeking candidates with established relationships in social networks, complete with a portfolio of individual and career defining social content – in the form of blog posts, videos, comments, and thoughtful updates. In some cases, size matters. Electronics retailer Best Buy recently posted a job opening for Senior Manager-Emerging Media Marketing. The role was described as, “the primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing & media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create…
Why Authenticity Matters
Guest post by Jeremy Toeman: Follow him on Twitter | Read his blog Source There’s a blog post on MobileCrunch regarding a PR firm having their employees/interns put up fake product reviews on behalf of their clients. For the younger folk in the industry, let me make sure it’s clear that these techniques are nothing new. The difference is in today’s world the risks associated with such a move are so much higher, as you are more likely to get…
Who Owns Social Media?
I had a fantastic conversation with Frank Eliason (@comcastcares), Duncan Riley, and Chris Brogan last night during the Microsoft Windows Mobile Developer event (@WMDev) at Chapel in Seattle. We explored the drivers that propel companies into social labyrinths and how they participate, react and in turn, strategically plan (or should) once they’ve arrived. The common motives are spurred through innovation (rare) and urgency (more common). It’s Aha vs. Uh-oh… However, the debate from within will eventually arise, questioning who owns…
Listening Literacy For Nonprofits
Guest post by Beth Kanter, Read her blog | Follow her on Twitter Credit I am an early adopter of social media and set up my listening post 5 years ago to scan for people, trends, and ideas related to social media and nonprofits. Listening and engaging with people has been critical to any success I’ve achieved as a social media practitioner – whether I’m blogging or fundraising for Cambodian children. For the past five years, I’ve been teaching social…
Newsflash: There are more men than women speaking about tech
Guest post by Cathy Brooks, read her blog | follow her on Twitter There are more men than women in the tech and new media sectors… I know. Shocking. Joking aside, I thought it was time to take a slightly different whack at the conversational kerfuffle that’s percolated yet again in recent weeks. Yes, that seemingly unsinkable subject – the lack of women on the tech industry speaking circuit. So when Brian Solis graciously offered me the opportunity to guest…
The State and Future of Communications: An Interview with Kara Swisher
This week, I was invited to speak at the Girls in Tech event in San Francisco as part of its evening discussing and exploring the nuances and opportunities defining and fueling Journalism 2.0. I’ve supported GIT founder Adriana Gascoigne since the beginning and will always help the chapters that now exist around the world. It’s an important organization. The evening was hosted at the San Francisco HQ of MySpace in the city’s South Beach district, which prior to their arrival,…
Building Bridges Between Knowledge and Aspiration
Image Credit: Jeremy Ginsberg There’s no shortage of businesses, and more specifically, the individuals who represent them, seeking insight, answers and direction to simplify, organize, and elucidate the intimidating and confusing social media landscape. Likewise, social media experts, gurus, and ninjas are seemingly ubiquitous. Far too many of us expect others to build bridges that connect disparate communities rife with individuals starving for logical and defensible insight and direction directly to us. In the end however, it’s our sole responsibility…
Making Whuffie With Julia Allison
Guest Post by Dr. Mark Drapeau – read his blog, follow him on Twitter You can’t eat whuffie, but it’s getting harder to eat without it, as Tara Hunt says in The Whuffie Factor. For the uninitiated, think of whuffie as an alternative to money – a reputation-based currency that started as a concept in a science fiction novel, now being applied to online business. Hunt’s interesting central thesis is that in order to successfully change social capital into market…
Are Facebook and Twitter on a Collision Course?
Image credit For years, Facebook and Twitter have maintained a friendly coopetition of sorts, with neither one taking a firm stance against the other. However, if you believe that Mark Zuckerberg does not actively contemplate strategies for either acquiring Twitter or rendering it obsolete, please think about the landscape and monetization drivers that aren’t yet readily apparent to us as everyday consumers. This may seem like the “Social Media Summer of Love,” but in the end, there are billions of…