Category: Social Media

Headlines with questions?

Betteridge’s law of headlines (Davis’ law or the journalistic principle)

If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no.’ Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’. 

Marr, Andrew (2004). My Trade: a short history of British journalism.

Source – Wikipedia

The 1-9-90 rule of online participation

“As many of you may already know, there is this thing called a 1-9-90 rule of online participation. In any given online community, about 1% of the participants produce most of the content, another 9% participate regularly by editing (e.g., on a wiki), commenting (on blogs and articles), occasionally producing new content (in forums, etc), and the remaining 90% are ‘lurkers’ who do not publicly participate but only read (though these days, many of them participate a little more publicly, if not creatively, by “Liking”, tweeting, and otherwise sharing the content in ways that are visible to others, but without adding any thoughts of their own).”

“Some of those 9% of readers, instead of commenting on the post (at least a brief “Nice post, thank you”) are now sharing the link elsewhere and perhaps discussing it elsewhere, without the author of the original article ever being able to see that discussion. […] most of the good, nice, constructive commenters may have gone silent and taken their discussions of your blog elsewhere, but the remaining few commenters are essentially trolls.”

Source – Commenting threads: good, bad, or not at all, Bora Zivkovic

‘Dark Social’

“The sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the ‘social’ iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it’s easy to measure. But most sharing is done via dark social means like email and IM that are difficult to measure.

According to new data on many media sites, 69% of social referrals came from dark social. 20% came from Facebook.

Facebook and Twitter do shift the paradigm from private sharing to public publishing. They structure, archive, and monetize your publications.”

Source – Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong, Alexis C. Madrigal

The new media franchise: Transmedia

Source – Transmedia Storytelling

The ‘Social Era’

The value that rules…

  1. Industrial era – Institutions
  2. Information age – Data
  3. Social era – Value creation

“[…] while in the industrial era, organizations became more powerful by being bigger, in the Social Era, companies can also be powerful by working with others. While the industrial era was about making a lot of stuff and convincing enough buyers to consume it, the Social Era is about the power of communities, of collaboration and co-creation. In the industrial era, power was from holding what we valued closed and separate; in the Social Era, there is another framework for how we engage one another — an open one.”

Source – Traditional strategy is dead. Welcome to #SocialEra (The #SocialEra ebook)

Businesses socially networked: In & Out

“The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information. Additional value can be realized through faster, more efficient, more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises.”

Source – The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

“[…] we’re witnessing how web-based collaboration and social tools have dramatically changed the way people connect. Whether you’re across the street or across the world, you can hold face-to-face meetings, share updates with colleagues and friends and work on a presentation together in real time. Like Google Apps, we think Google+ can help colleagues collaborate more easily and get things done—and get to know each other along the way.”

Source – Bringing Google+ to work

Blogging in Asia vs doing it in Western countries

“In emerging markets, particularly in China, online users report a larger proportion of social media accounts are devoted to microblogging (75 percent) and blogging (66 percent) than in other countries. In Asia, people blog to stay connected to friends and family; consequently, a blog’s range of influence tends to be relatively small, typically less than 11 people. In Western countries, however, blogging is viewed as a form of publishing, intended for larger audiences, which may also explain why fewer people in these geographies do it.”

And a couple of interesting facts about social media globally:

Why users use social media and networking sites

Why users interact with brands in social sites

Source – From Social Media to Social CRM. February, 2011. IBM