Plans For Social Media Week?
by Jerry Battiste · 0 comments
What Are Your Plans?
Monday starts the fourth annual “Social Media Week” and cities around the world are preparing to host thousands of visitors, hundreds of discussions and events and generally immerse themselves in the topic.
This year there are 12 host cities for “Social Media Week“: New York, Miami, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Hong Kong, Hamburg, Paris, London, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo and Toronto.
The idea is engage as many people as possible in discussions about social media: how to make it better; new innovations; new ideas and new conversations about what we have now and what we might get tomorrow; and new companies and sites. You can expect a fair amount of conversations to be about the privacy policy at ‘Path‘ and the surge of interest in ‘Pinterest‘ but I would imagine there will be plenty of time to talk about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
By holding these events for one week out of every year, the founders of “Social Media Week“, New York-based strategy firm Crowdcentric, takes what is normally sequestered in an online format and drags it into the brick and mortar world. It’s like social networking in the real world, for lack of a better term. It’s a great way to get connected, stay connected and learn how social media is being used by people all around the globe.
Business2Community.com is using the event to monitor how the social media world reacts to each particular city involved; who is doing the best job of touting their locale and events, creating the best online buzz and using social media to their fullest advantage. They will be tracking the events as they unfold throughout the week and have already gathered enough pre-buzz data to create a graph. You can check that out here.
So, are any of you planning any big events for “Social Media Week” or participating in any? Tell us all about it in the comments below.
Reflecting the global impact of social media – and its role as a catalyst in driving cultural, economic, political and social change in developed and emerging markets – Social Media Week is one of the world’s most unique global platforms, offering a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries.
In just under three years, Social Media Week has expanded to 21 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Sao Paulo, Rio De Janeiro, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Istanbul, London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Glasgow, Berlin, Moscow, Beirut and Hong Kong. Starting in 2012, SMW is adding Tokyo, Singapore, DC and Miami.
Annually, SMW attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile.
Click here to read more about “Social Media Week”.
Being “Nice” On Social Media Makes A Difference
by Jerry Battiste · 6 comments
Being Good Helps You Fit In (Online)
A new Pew Research poll is out which says that 85 percent of adults view the people they meet on social media as being, well, “nice.” This is good news for every company, brand and individual who has gone out of their way to be nice through their social media network, even when the recipient of their kindness might not have deserved it.
Blocked commenters and “Unfriended” individuals aside, it really says something that more than half, heck, more than three quarters of people using social media think of it as a nice place. I can’t recall there being any polls about the Internet in general when it first came out, but as someone who was among the first to venture forth I can tell you, it was like wandering into a deep, dark woods, alone, at night, blindfolded, with raw meat strapped around you.
The Social Web is decidedly different from Web 2.0 or the original Internet. It is a friendly place, perhaps because people cannot so easily hide behind their shield of anonymity. There is a factor of accountability built into social media that forces people (mostly) to behave themselves. This is part of what makes social media a good place for businesses to interact with clients, customers and potential clients and customers. There is freedom to speak your mind, yes, but you have to be sure of what you say and have the facts to back yourself up. You can’t just spout off at the mouth, complain without reason and expect that complaint to go unanswered. People are listening and they respond (you do listen and respond, right?)
We all know that social media marketing is relationship marketing and most of us take that to heart. We strive to be good friends with the people we encounter on the Social Web because that pays big dividends. As a side benefit, it is also making the online world a much nicer place for everyone to visit, which is a good thing.
The overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites (SNS) is a very positive one where adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters. A nationally representative phone survey of American adults finds that:
85% of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation.
Click here to read more of the Pew Research poll.
Path: Once A ‘Darling’, Now Derided
by Jerry Battiste · 3 comments
Walking The Wrong Path?
Path. No doubt you’ve already heard of the up-and-coming social network ‘Path’ created by Dave Morin, a former senior platform manager at Facebook. It was touted as the “anti-Facebook” (before the term became cool) because it offered a social network for people who only wanted to connect with a chosen few users–not thousands. In fact, the number of connections on Path is limited to just 50 people, which Morin claims is the optimum number of people for you to connect with online.
Regardless of how you feel about the limitation on the number of people you can connect with via your social media network, Path was doing splendidly, growing fast and earning kudos left and right.
Until today. Today word has been spreading that Path not only violated the policies of the Apple App Store where it was once a popular download, they also violated their own policies about sharing personal information not to mention violating the trust of its users.
What did they do? Well, according to one developer (whose find was quickly confirmed by others) when users downloaded Path the app uploaded their entire address book to Path servers.
In the social media world privacy is paramount. Facebook regularly takes it on the chin for playing fast and loose with the personal information they collect from their 800+ million users. As the “anti-Facebook” it was assumed Path would not walk in their footsteps, however it now appears that assumption was wrong, or at least, misguided.
Morin has been responding to users personally trying to explain there were technical reasons for the uploading of information and that he was looking into the entire situation to see how they could do better. But it looks a little like closing the barn door after the horse runs off, the cows die and the pigs are served for breakfast. Already angry users are deleting the app and slamming Path in comments at the Apple App Store.
For users of the social network Path, a recent discovery is causing a lot of concern about privacy. A developer working on a Mac OS X version of the mobile app found out that Path, once installed, will send a user’s entire address book to Path’s servers — without telling the user.
Like many privacy issues, the news spread quickly over the Internet. Path CEO Dave Morin replied to the developer, Arun Thampi, saying that the issue was “an important conversation” that Path took very seriously. The contact information that’s uploaded to the company’s servers is only used to help a user find friends and family quickly, Morin said.
He further explained that Path has an opt-in for its Android app, and that one would be added to the iOS version as soon as Apple approves it.
Click here to read more about the Path debacle.
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