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Mining Social Media Communities and Content

December 30, 2008

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Tim Finin, 1:20pm 30 December 2008

Akshay Java defended his PhD dissertation this fall on discovering communities in social media systems and the submitted version is now available online. Akshay is now a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs. The citation, link and abstract are below.

Akshay Java, Mining Social Media Communities and Content, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, December 1, 2008. Available at http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/429/Mining-Social-Media-Communities-and-Content.

Social Media is changing the way people find information, share knowledge and communicate with each other. The important factor contributing to the growth of these technologies is the ability to easily produce “user-generated content”. Blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube are just a few examples of Web 2.0 tools that are drastically changing the Internet landscape today. These platforms allow users to produce and annotate content and more importantly, empower them to share information with their social network. Friends can in turn, comment and interact with the producer of the original content and also with each other. Such social interactions foster communities in online, social media systems. User-generated content and the social graph are thus the two essential elements of any social media system.

Given the vast amount of user-generated content being produced each day and the easy access to the social graph, how can we analyze the structure and content of social media data to understand the nature of online communication and collaboration in social applications? This thesis presents a systematic study of the social media landscape through the combined analysis of its special properties, structure and content.

First, we have developed a framework for analyzing social media content effectively. The BlogVox opinion retrieval system is a large scale blog indexing and content analysis engine. For a given query term, the system retrieves and ranks blog posts expressing sentiments (either positive or negative) towards the query terms. Further, we have developed a framework to index and semantically analyze syndicated1 feeds from news websites. We use a sophisticated natural language processing system, OntoSem, to semantically analyze news stories and build a rich fact repository of knowledge extracted from real-time feeds. It enables other applications to benefit from such deep semantic analysis by exporting the text meaning representations in Semantic Web language, OWL.

Secondly, we describe novel algorithms that utilize the special structure and properties of social graphs to detect communities in social media. Communities are an essential element of social media systems and detecting their structure and membership is critical in several real-world applications. Many algorithms for community detection are computationally expensive and generally, do not scale well for large networks. In this work we present an approach that benefits from the scale-free distribution of node degrees to extract communities efficiently. Social media sites frequently allow users to provide additional meta-data about the shared resources, usually in the form of tags or folksonomies. We have developed a new community detection algorithm that can combine information from tags and the structural information obtained from the graphs to effectively detect communities. We demonstrate how structure and content analysis in social media can benefit from the availability of rich meta-data and special properties.

Finally, we study social media systems from the user perspective. In the first study we present an analysis of how a large population of users subscribes and organizes the blog feeds that they read. This study has revealed interesting properties and characteristics of the way we consume information. We are the first to present an approach to what is now known as the “feed distillation” task, which involves finding relevant feeds for a given query term. Based on our understanding of feed subscription patterns we have built a prototype system that provides recommendations for new feeds to subscribe and measures the readership based influence of blogs in different topics.

We are also the first to measure the usage and nature of communities in a relatively new phenomena called Microblogging. Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. In this study, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena and user intentions by studying the content, topological and geographical properties of such communities. We find that microblogging provides users with a more immediate form of communication to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information.

The course of this research has highlighted several challenges that processing social media data presents. This class of problems requires us to re-think our approach to text mining, community and graph analysis. Comprehensive understanding of social media systems allows us to validate theories from social sciences and psychology, but on a scale much larger than ever imagined. Ultimately this leads to a better understanding of how we communicate and interact with each other today and in future.

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How to use FriendFeed from Robert Scoble (Scoblizer)

December 29, 2008

Robert Scoble is said to be in the know when it comes to Social Media.  He really knows the pulse of the Social Media industry in Scilicon Valley and beyond.  In this video, Scobleizer shows you how to be a bigger FriendFeed Monster than Guy Kawasaki.

This is what Scoble covers in the video:

1. Why friendfeed?
2. Get inbound content with the aggregator.
3. Get inbound content via friends.
4. How friend-of-a-friend feature brings more inbound content.
5. Using the everyone tab to get more inbound content.
6. Using rooms to find inbound content.
7. Using “best of” feature to find more inbound content.
8. Using the “me” and “home” pages.
9. Using lists to do friend management.
10. Creating media in friendfeed.
11. Sharing media found on the web.
12. Creating media with email.
13. Deciding between Twitter and friendfeed.
14. Your outbound content, likes.
15. Your outbound content, comments.
16. Your outbound content, send to Twitter.
17. Your outbound content, your stuff.
18. Your outbound content, using rooms.
19. Using search.
20 Using real-time features.

Check out what else Robert had to say here:
20 ways to being a bigger friendfeed monster than Guy Kawasaki

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Tumblr Gets Money while Pownce Dies

December 13, 2008

Well the Social Media Landscape is ever changing, just like the skyline in Las Vegas.  It seems like there’s a change every year there. Something blown up or something goes up.  Such is the same with the Social Media Landscape.

The beginning of December, Pownce announced they will be closing their doors.  While I have an account on Pownce and the features are really pretty cool, 99% of all of my updates where done with Twhirl.  Basically I used Twhirl to post Tweets on Twitter, and it automatically posted them to Pownce too.

If you have a Pownce account, you can visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate an export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress. However, you should do this quickly, only a couple days left.

Pownce put up a blog post about exporting, you can check it out here: blog.pownce.com

Now on the other hand, Tumblr just closed it’s Series B round bringing in $4.5Million to leverage the outstanding first year results.  Tumblr now has an average of over 15Million unique visitors per month! Those are great results considering the social networking site started in 2007.

I’m sure the 22 year old founder, David Karp, is ecstatic with the latest happenings of the company. Mr. Karp stated, “I feel so fortunate to have investors who believe in us, and a growing worldwide community that is just as excited about this neat thing we’re building…”

Tumblr has plans for their first quarter in 2009. They are planning on launching a premium service which will represent the company’s first revenue generation. It will be followed by a revenue strategy that leverages both Tumblr’s publishing platform and community, while continuing the company’s focus on innovation and invention.

I can’t wait to see what becomes of Tumblr over the next year.

As for Pownce, Rest In Peace, such are the ways of the Social Media Landscape.

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What is Social Media?

December 11, 2008

That is a question that is asked quite often. What is Social Media?
It’s hard to define sometimes, but this slide show does a great job of tackling the answer.

This was created by Lee White from Durham, NC, who has a consulting business specializing in implementing Social Tools in the enterprise.

Social Media Is…

What do you think?
Did he answer the question or do you have a better definition?

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Why HR Should Care about Social Media

December 9, 2008

Published by Lord Yo December 9th, 2008

PDF Version: Why HR Should Care About Social Media

Social Media are tools allowing people to share, collaborate and publish content on the internet. Over the last couple of years, the availability of such tools has grown strongly and led to a cultural shift, connecting people who hadn’t been connected before, and allowing them to collaborate in ways that were not possible otherwise.

Prominent examples of social media are:

  • ­the collaboratively written encyclopedia Wikipedia, the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet, featuring over 10 million articles
  • ­the online auction service eBay, where more than 150 million people sell and bid for goods
  • ­the social network Facebook, allowing 120 million friends to stay in contact and update them on their activities
  • ­the microblogging service Twitter, where users can update others with short messages, and which played a crucial role emergency news reporting situations such as the recent Mumbai bombings

While social media are enabled by online tools, the culture shift triggered by them is not about technology: It is about the sudden ability of people to connect to each other, exchange information, and to create value together, mostly without monetary incentives. The value generated by these communities is higher than the sum of their members’ efforts.

This shift, which is changing the way people act, interact, and see the world, will have an impact on the workplace. For this reason, the human resources function needs to take it seriously.

1. Types of Social Media

There are many different uses for and types of social media. The most common types are:

  • ­Social Networks connect people to stay in contact with each other, often centered around the interests of their users (business networks, friends networks, taste in music, etc). Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn, last.fm
  • ­Blogs are (mostly individual) web sites with regular entries of commentary or description of events, which can be commented by readers. Many blogs have become a respected news sources in the fields of politics, science, technology, and entertainment. Examples: The Huffington Post, Gizmodo, LifeHacker
  • Wikis are collection of web pages designed to allow anyone who accesses them to add or modify their content. They are typically used to store the collective knowledge of communities. Examples: Wikipedia, Wikitravel
  • ­Evaluation communities provide collective evaluations (e.g. ratings) and comments on already existing web content or real-life products. Examples: Amazon customer reviews, digg.com
  • Tagging communities add categorizing keywords (“tags”) to existing online content, making it easier for other people to find and digest it. Examples: del.icio.us
  • Microblogs are a cross between blogs and instant messaging. Users can post short messages about updates, contribute to ongoing conversations, or share links to blogs, articles, or pictures. Example: Twitter
  • Social Media Aggregators are tools to display content from various sources - traditional news sources and news from the tools described above. This eliminates the need to visit many different websites to stay up-to-date. Examples: Google Reader, Friendfeed

2. What Social Media Mean for Human Resources

The cultural shift caused by the ubiquity of social media won’t stay in front of company gates, for several reasons:

  • ­Customers and consumers are already making use of these new community tools. This will influence business models and consequently the required employee skill sets to act in these markets
  • ­ Employees – especially, but not exclusively, those of younger generations – are using community tools in their leisure time and will expect the similar tools for their work
  • ­IT departments will introduce community features with new software versions, whether they intend it or not

Therefore, the question is not if social media will influence companies internally, but how. This impacts almost every aspect of the human resource function.

Staffing

Social media change the game for both job hunters and companies. For companies, it becomes very difficult to control their employer value proposition (EVP) by increasing the level of transparency: Online services such as Glassdoor.com let employees post opinions about their own companies. Wikipedia – often the first source for researchers – lets anyone edit descriptions of a company. It is almost impossible to counteract this new transparency through legal or traditional PR measures without damaging the company’s reputation.

Through social networks liked LinkedIn, candidates can position themselves on the market and approach company representatives directly without having to go through staffing functions (or search agencies); vice versa, staffing representatives can pre-screen candidates’s CVs and build relationships with prospective candidates – even build external talent pipelines for future hirings.

Furthermore, there is a growing expectancy of candidates that they will be able to use social media at work – both for work as well as for semi-private purposes. While the lack  of social media tools won’t be a reason for not joining a company, it still represents an aspect of a company’s culture; and for members of the “Generation Y” (born after 1977) who have begun to enter the talent market, strong social media tools might even constitute a strong plus for a company’s EVP. Generation Y is known as a population of “digital natives”. These graduates will have grown up in a world where it’s possible for them to have taken social media interaction, through blogs, podcasts, instant messaging, or their cell phones, for granted.

Finally, there is growing consent that “virtual worlds” – simulated online environments for collaborative games and social interaction – are a fertile breeding ground for junior leadership talent.  Harvard Business Review states that virtual gaming worlds such as Eve Online or World of Warcraft “in many ways resemble the coming environment, where a lot of work will be done by global teams – partly composed of people from outside the institution, over whom a leader has no formal authority – and thus open a window onto the future of real-world leadership”.

Talent Management

On the company-internal talent market, there is potential to leverage the same machanisms to find the right candidates as externally by introducing internal social networking applications. These tools help employees to not only set up their internal talent profiles, but also to network within the company. Barriers for online interaction are lower than those for traditional networking – especially for international interactions – which is beneficial to increase the diversity of the internal talent pool.

The work published by employees in wikis and blogs (along with their readership statistics) publically show the value an employee is creating for a company, opening new career tracks for them. For example, a Finance employee might publish highly valued Marketing insights on a blog, which could lead to him being considered for a Marketing position. Social networks in this context can be used to “validate” employees internal reputations - for example by writing recommendations on a person’s profile. This leads to a new way of internal referrals.

Social media furthermore allow and encourage self-organizing ad hoc project teams, for example to improve a cross-functional process or to implement a new new service. Similar effects – fueled by non-monetary rewards (increased exposure, improved reputation) - can be seen on the internet in the context of open source programming projects, which create freely available software applications for everyone to use (example: Sourceforge.net)

Finally, the same argument regarding the recruitment of “digital natives” is applicable for their retention: Employees might leave a company because their work environment’s does not provide the same quality of social media as the non-work related internet does.

Compensation

Increased transparency about companies’ compensation packages – fueled by anonymous reviews and shared salary data on services such as Glassdoor.com or SalaryScout – will lead to a more fluid compensation market. Companies will have to expect and negotiate with candidates better informed about those markets, both internally and externally.

Organizational Development and Culture

Social media have the potential to tackle traditional challenges of associated with corporate culture. Taking the Great Place to Work Institute’s model of employee engagement, social media can increase engagement in the areas of credibility, respect, pride and camaraderie:

  • ­Credibility: Social media can increase open and accessible leadership communications. Leadership blogs – which have to be written by the leaders themselves, not ghost writers – show leaders from a personal, authentic side. This increases their credibility. Social networking applications allow for informal connections between leaders and employees, making leaders more approachable to employees.
  • ­Respect: The use of comments in leadership blogs (a common feature) increases the possibilities for dialogue between leaders and employees, showing them a willingness to collaborate with employees in relevant decisions.
  • ­Pride: Social media gives employees simple, low-threshold channels to express their pride for their own, their team’s, and their company’s work. On the internet’s social media, many employees are already acting as informal ambassadors for their company’s brand.
  • ­Cameraderie: The informality and authenticity of social media helps employees to be themselves, to create a friendly and welcoming atmosphere, and creates a sense of family or team

In the area of change management, the new communication channels provided by social media can help to keep organizations up to date about (or even better: to involve them in) organizational change situations.

Employee Performance

Social media allow employees and teams to be more productive in a variety of ways:

The use of social media in general moves its users away from the often lamented “push”-based e-mail communication (“I think you might want to know this”) to “pull”-based communication (“you can look it up if you need it”). For example, a department blog could be used to post announcements and meeting updates instead of sending out memos. This helps employees to channel and filter their communications more effectively, reducing e-mail overload.

Blogs can also be used as exchange forums for locally separated teams, where members update each other by posting status updates, questions, and opinions, while others can comment on them.

Wikis allow the collaborative creation of documents (project plans, policies, marketing material) without the need for incessant review cycles via attachments. They can also be used as shared “knowledge repositories” for a department, which help to limit the brain-drain effects of turnover.

Social networks allow employees to keep their colleagues’ and acquaintances’ contact details close at hand, allowing to get in touch with another quicker. They furthermore raise awareness about the current status and activities of one’s network (simple example: a person in a social network might update her status as “away for lunch”, showing her network that they can’t contact her at the moment). As a network grows, productivity effects will grow as well.

From a broader organizational viewpoint, so-called “crowdsourcing” (the distribution of work onto loosely organized, non-hierarchical networks) will help solve big and small problems: Consider an internal expert network similar to the external service Ask Metafilter, where employees can ask questions about any topic they like, and “the crowd” will answer them. Similarly, internal evaluation and tagging communities would be able to structure the intranet from the bottom up and help to better and quicker find useful information on the intranet.

And, while it may sound like science fiction, some companies are also experiment with virtual worlds (see above) to host trainings, meetings, and conferences, thus saving resources spent on travel, while overcoming social barriers posed by telephone and video conferences.

3. An Example of Social Media at Work: Pfizer

Pfizer’s social media landscape includes a number of independent but connected tools for employees to use in their workplace:

  • ­A wiki called Pfizerpedia allows employees to create knowledge articles about any subject they deem useful, making it a company-internal Wikipedia. Pfizerpedia contains articles on products and projects, team-related documentations, and trainings – all written by employees.
  • ­The same wiki is used for social networking: Every employee has his or her own Pfizerpedia Profile page with a picture and description of one’s own skills and specialities.
  • ­Pfizer provides the possibility to create internal blogs for employees and teams, which can update themselves and comment on each other’s articles
  • ­For private collaborations, teams can also use eNoteBooks and Microsoft Sharepoint to track project progress and save relevant information for teamswhich only they have access to.
  • ­Pfizer employees can store their favorite links on an online application called “tags”, making it easy for them to manage and find them. All those links are accessible and searchable to other Pfizer colleagues.
  • ­Information updates from all mentioned applications above can be read on a Pfizer-internal feed reader, giving employees the freedom to pull the information they want instead of receiving e-mail alerts they might not need.

Most of these tools are lightweight, quick, and easy to learn without special training. (Source: dif-fer-en-ti-ate blog)

4. What Can HR Professionals Do?

If you are an HR Professional and are wondering what you can do to better navigate the a world changed by social media, here are a few ideas:

Try Social Media Out

  • ­Sign up for a profile on a social network such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or XING, and find out who of your friends and colleagues are already using it.
  • ­Go to Wikipedia, search for a topic you a lot know about, and edit the text to improve it.
  • ­The next time you come across a blog article you like (or dislike), post a comment. You might get into an interesting conversation.
  • ­Go to a tagging community like del.icio.us and search other people’s links for a topic you are interested in. You will be surprised how much more useful the search results will be than your typical Google search.

Ask Your Children

Social media are used by members of all generations, but more proficienly by younger people. Ask your own children - or your friends’ children - how they are using the internet to stay in touch with their friends.

Get in touch with Strategic Partners

Ask your colleagues from communications and IT what the current status on social media in the company is. Be aware that they could have different opinions on the topic.

Don’t trust the promise of enterprise-wide standard solutions

Any company will face the temptation to buy an off-the-shelf solution to fulfill all of their social media needs. The problem is: Such an approach represents the opposite of the social media revolution on the internet, where the landscape consists of a multitude of small, fast tools that talk to other small, fast tools. The only standardization in this landscape is the way the tools talk to each other. Many of those tools have been built by user communities to fulfill a specific user need, are offered for free - even for company-internal use. Enterprise-wide, monolithic, one-in-all solutions on the other hand are slower to react to user needs, are expensive to buy and maintain, and create lock-in situations with vendors. To allow for the bottom-up, user-driven effects seen on the internet to emerge in a company, the internal community should be allowed to use and build the tools they need.

Keep an open mind

Social media are here to stay, and they are changing our world. Some of the changes they introduce are unintuitive and may sound “dangerous”. Keep in mind that, while there is risk in any new way of doing things, there are also opportunity costs of not taking those new ways. And for ignoring social media, the opportunity costs can be very, very high. For this reason, keep an open mind, beware of knee-jerk reactions.

5. Further Reading

  • Grae Yohe: “The Web 2.0 Wave”. Human Resource Executive Online, http://cli.gs/11mrpg
  • D. Tapscott & A.D.Williams: “Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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Twitter friend inflation, the dynamics of influence, and why shifts in reciprocity are changing the social media landscape

December 8, 2008

Ross Dawson, December 8, 2008 2:17 PM US PT

Anyone who uses Twitter will be deeply familiar with the issue of who you follow and who you follow back. As Twitter continues to gather traction, popular Twitterers are gathering followers at an increasing pace. If you’re on Twitter, by default you get an email whenever someone follows you, giving you the option of looking at their profile and deciding whether you want to follow them back. If you know them, you’re likely to reciprocate, however if they are strangers, you go through a process of assessing whether you’d like to follow back.

There are seven basic strategies that Twitter users adopt:

1. Reciprocate any follows. This can be done manually, or automatically by using a service such as socialtoo.

2. Look at new followers and decide whether you want to follow them back. This is the most common strategy, which allows people to decide based on a range of factors whether to follow back.

3. Turn off follow notifications. High profile Twitterers simply follow people they know, and choose not to be notified who follows them (sometimes simply because their email inbox gets clogged by follow notifications).

4. Don’t reciprocate follows, but respond to and possibly follow @ messages. People can get attention not by following, but by messaging or responding to messages, and following those who seem interesting.

5. Follow people because they are interesting and/or likely to follow back. People follow Twitterers because they have something interesting to say, but they also usually factor in how likely they are to be followed back (judging by the person’s follower/ following ratio).

6. Indiscriminately follow others, and only continue following them if they follow back. This is used by people who want to gather a large number of followers.

7. Have a protected profile. This requires the Twitterer to respond to requests and give permission for people to follow them. In this case Twitter can be a true friend network rather than open broadcast.

All of this creates an environment of ‘asymmetrical follow’ that is fundamentally different from the symmetrical relationships of social networks such as Facebook, that require people to approve friend requests.

The critical issue that drives these strategies is the reality of limited human bandwidth. Once we follow more than a few hundred people, it is impossible to keep across the posts, let alone who is making them. Those who are able to spend a large proportion of their day in social media activity can be engaged in broad and diverse conversations – others can only dip in to the stream.

As such, underlying the strategies above is a choice: do you try to limit how many you follow, in order to follow your friends and/ or the most interesting people better? Or do you go for a full stream of Twitter, which you can manage in various ways, but still means you can only skim the surface?

MediaShift has published a very interesting article titled Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg, going into some of the strategies adopted for Twitter reciprocation. Perhaps more interesting in the article is the situation in Digg, where power Diggers need to rely on a core network who are likely to reciprocate their Diggs.

Neal Rodriguez, an SEO specialist for Nielsen Business Media, has managed to propel 179 submissions onto Digg’s front page as of this writing. In a recent phone interview, he told me that it isn’t the number of friends you have that helps get content to the front page, but rather the number of active reciprocal friends. Digg, he said, only allows you to send “shout outs” (messages that push your submissions) to a very limited number of friends, making it essential to weed out the non-responsive, inactive Diggers.

“When you push the ’share’ button there’s a selection that says ’shout to all’ and it’ll allow you to shout to everybody,” Rodriguez said. “But the end result is it only shouts to a small proportion of that whole list that’s available for you to share with. If you look at your recent activity — and if you shouted to all — if you have about 200 friends it only went out to 50 people, or only 26 people.”

So it’s imperative that the power Digger maximize the chances that those 26 or 50 people are ones that will be sure to Digg content shouted to them. This means that you have to choose your friends carefully, looking for tell-tale signs that they are more than just casual users. When Rodriguez first started on Digg, it was a matter of observing the other power Diggers and pinpointing which of his friends were most consistently Digging his submissions.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post on Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion, which looked at research on how a small number of people are very prominent in submitting the top stories on social content sites such as Digg and Delicious. The changing dynamics of reciprocity in messaging are shifting this process. However it remains absolutely embedded in reciprocity – top Diggers are top Diggers less because of the stories they submit than because of their network, who implicitly support each others submissions, giving them critical mass and visibility.

What we are seeing in the rise of Twitter and the changing dynamics of social content sites today is the critical role of reciprocity and the rise of asymmetry. Analyzing how reciprocity is changing will give great insights into how the social media landscape will change over the coming year and more.

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Burger King Virgins Missing the Boat?

December 5, 2008

I’m not one to sit and watch TV but I recently had a nice stay (not really) in the hospital where it was all I could do, besides trying to get better.

There’s a new add on TV from Burger King about Whopper Virgins

It’s a short ad with a high budget. It’s done very well actually. The concept is great and if it’s all true, must have been a great project to be a part of.

The ad is a teaser for an upcoming “documentary” Burger King created about people, who have never tried a Whopper or Big Mac and the results of the taste taste.

The possibility of this to be blasted across the Social Media Landscape is there. This could start a lot of conversations all over about it but come on BK! It’s already biased! YOU are the only one promoting YOUR “movie” which obviously benefits you from the results of YOUR taste test!

We KNOW what the results are before we even see the documentary.  You’re trying to tease us with something that’s supposed to be cool, but why would we go to the results when we know who they will be in favor of.

You really missed the boat here BK.  There is such potential here and it is very unfortunate that you didn’t capitalize on the possibilities. I’m a filmmaker, social media geek, and internet marketer, and while you got the filming right, the rest is sorely lacking.

If you want to get people talking about something, name it Burger Virgins with a similar domain name. Don’t brand it as your own. Let people create the conversation.

Pay the money to put the ads on TV and market them on specific Social Networks. Create the conversation or hire a firm to create it for you. Do it the right way!

Is there a way to salvage this, possibly but now the conversation is not going to be what you want it to be. You can’t stop a groundswell as Motrin recently found out the hard way.

Will it happen here, I guess we’ll see.

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Building your personal brand on the Social Media Landscape

November 4, 2008

Gary Vaynerchuk talks about building your personal brand on the Social Media Landscape.  He’s the perfect one to speak of this.  His vision and forethought on Social Media makes him one to listen to.

This video does contain some language which may not be appropriate for a younger audience.  However, this is really a must see!

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Social Networking Directory

October 29, 2008

If you’ve been on the Social Media Landscape, then you know there are hundreds, even thousands of great sites out there.  Social Media is about connecting with people.  That connection is important when you’re trying to engage in conversation.

There are so many places on the Social Media Landscape to engage in conversation, it’s hard to figure out where to go.  Well not any longer.  Here’s a “Yellow Pages” type book out there that lists over 3,000 social networking sites.

You may get it for free, by clicking here or by clicking the image of the book.  All you’ll have to do is register then login to download the mega book.  Social Networking Directory imageIt has over 500 pages, if you can believe that! It’s also, NOT a bunch of links either.  So many of these books are just a bunch of links, but that’s not the case here. Each entry has a short description of the site.

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Digg Experiment Results!

September 12, 2008


DIGG is a social media platform on the web in which individuals share information from other web sites.  These are the results of a three day experiment done by Bob Guinto.

social networks

PHOTO by mandy maarten

One of the most important goals in communicating is to be able to reach the intended audience.  The web provider DIGG I have found to be a place to find and distribute information.  DIGG For those of you not familiar with DIGG the simple explanation is that it is a social media platform on the web in which individuals share information from other web sites.  To get a better understanding of human nature in communicating I conducted a three day experiment with multiple posts of information.

1.    I found that 35% of individuals relate to information as if a drone.  They will take the same steps they always do when a piece of information shows up.  I confirmed this by specifically asking for an opposite reaction that one would only have done if they read the request first.

2.    I found that 70% of individuals only share what is within the DIGG community already and rarely post original content them selves.

3.    I found that it is necessary to have 51%-75% of the individuals promoting a persons post need to not be mutual friends.  The result is a sight that promotes not associating in public.  It compels a sub society to communicate.

4.    I found that the number of comments increases the likelihood of more people to read the posts.

5.    I found the automatic tracking by mutual friends of the posts could make it harder for posts to become popular because if the mutual friend shows they liked it, it makes it even harder to become popular.

6.    I found promoting posts of information is only best if not done by you.

7.    I found that the DIGG site evolved from seeking friends base on topic area or communities into a grouping of associates whom cross promote.  Thus, the selection of mutual friends is more about keeping them distinct from others.  Common bonds are looked upon with negative reinforcement.  Thus, the importance of sharing information with like minds directly results in a negative action.

8.    I found that separate from the need to understand the need to ignore the stated intent of the web site DIGG, that the title and description of a post can either make or break the information from going popular.

·    The key areas of success are in the many areas of entertainment.

·    Negative information is more successful than positive information.

In closing here a little advice in promoting your cause.

·    Have an eye catching title

·    If it is about being popular keep close friends limited and play the field

·    If it is about promoting a specific place of information or cause and not so much about making it big then have lots of close friends and upcoming information your promoting will get more views

·    Diversity among your audience in a social, geographic and time period will provide a weighted influence on the level of success of the communication

·    The more time you spend promoting the more likely you will find the right options and preferred methods for communicating to the audience you want to reach.

Nonprofits need to adopt their means of communicating on the web.

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