A Cartoon History of Social Networking

PeopleBrowsr Presents A Brief Cartoon History of Social Networking 1930-2011

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5 ways social media will change your marketing plan

First published in iMedia Connection

Article Highlights:

• Campaign ideas will be deconstructed into smaller, more digestible messages
• Applications will continue to adapt to user behavior, leading to hyper-personalization
• User-generated content will influence marketing strategy

Reputation and relationship management skills are foundational to architecting an effective customer development strategy for both B2B and B2C enterprises; this will be acutely true in 2011. No longer just the responsibility of a community manager, social communication will be integrated into service and support experiences, product, point of sale, and commerce solutions. Because official spokespeople are no longer the sole purveyors of your company's message, social channels can be counted on to accelerate and amplify the conversation between customers and brands. Look for the following trends to drive changes to integrated marketing plans in the year ahead... read more here

Favorite Tweets Of The Holiday Weekend

@kenradio Why Bing "Likes" Facebook, Facebook should give Microsoft an edge against search rival Google -http://bit.ly/g6CJQ4

@bgershon Ad Execs Gaze Into 2011 Crystal Ball - Great overview.... http://tumblr.com/xsb16mkrnd

Social Media in 2011: Expect a Big Dose of STFUhttp://networkedblogs.com/cvGB1 from my pal @BigGuyD

Great article from @Jabaldaia to start the new year, Design Thinking and the courage to do things http://bit.ly/gTboJu

RT@quirkyinc The NY Times Pogies celebrates product features which are "clever twists that make life just a little bit better" http://qrky.co/hwMqe3

Facebook Friends, Sort Of

RT@peterpham Shldnt be this hard RT @joshelman: I think I got FB privacy set up right. I used 4 test accts to check from friend, fr of fr,nonfriend, etc.

All of us Facebook users by now have wrestled with the idea of who to "friend" and ignore, and now that the new privacy settings are live, it appears we are all doing it again. Although most of us have adapted to the notion that we had only two choices - confirm or ignore - we now have to adjust our thinking back to the idea that there are levels of friendship.

On the surface, privacy settings are an obvious evolution for Facebook, and these tools address a big concern that has potentially blocked some consumers from joining the juggernaut of social networks or adding more people to their networks. But for the more than 65 million of us existing users, users who have debated the 'confirm' or 'ignore' question with every invitation, it presents a bit of a quandary. With so many combinations of settings when there were so few before, will it be easy for me to remember who has access to what information anymore? Life was so simple when I knew if you were a friend or someone to ignore. The relationship between my content stream and my friends was clean. You saw it or you didn't.  But now there are tiers of disclosure. And that means more settings.

If you know me at all, you know I am a huge proponent of giving consumers control and choice. But adding tools like this seem to "complexify" what was a pretty simple, binary communication experience - we're friends, and we share.

I recently connected with my older brother on Facebook, who became my second family member to join my network. Both live and work in different cities, not where I live or where we grew up. And I don't know either of their friends at all. Their "friends of friends" network looks a lot like the category now called "everyone" to me, and so that distinction seems especially insufficient for publishing personal posts.  In turn, the things I communicate to my family about my day to day has changed dramatically over the years, especially since I moved away from home. The current privacy groupings fail to help address the special kinds of communications families share.

Update on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 10:13PM by Gearhead Gal

In case you haven't seen the timely follow up in today's Wall Street Journal by Julia Angwin, here's the link. I heard Jonathan Miller, Fox's CEO of Digital Media discuss the difference between Twitter and Facebook as being the difference between reciprocal relationships and broadcasting. It appears some of us are starting to think that maybe the two sites aren't that different.

"So I give up. Rather than fighting to keep my Facebook profile private, I plan to open it up to the public – removing the fiction of intimacy and friendship.

But I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn't want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You'd be smart to do the same.

We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends."

Hey, You, Get Off Of My Cloud

 Published: on Technorati.com November 21, 2009 at 10:55 pm

I don't know about you, but I feel like practicing good password-hygiene is getting harder and harder these days. The more places I have accounts, and the more ways I might want to connect to my stuff, and my stuff with my friends, the more unique passwords I need to have to keep my personal things secure.I have been told as a consumer I should have a unique user name and password combination for each service just in case a hacker gets one of them, he or she doesn't have access to my all my data.

I have also been cautious about allowing the linking of my identities across the various social networks, photo sharing sites, financial accounts and memberships I access. Every time Twitter or Facebook ask me if I wish to allow a new application to access my information, I feel my security lax.

But is my stuff where I really think it is? What's moving around between sites that "shake hands" isn't always clear to me, and I'm supposed to be a tech savvy buyer. Sure, there are privacy policies posted and I check the box on the page that says I've read them. But I'm going to admit right here and now that I haven't had the time or inclination to read them all. Lawyers often don't make entertaining writers. And some times, I'm in too much of a hurry buying that belated birthday gift that I don't even read the fine print about the return policy or back-order. So do I know who really has control of my content? Click here to read the rest of the post on Technorati.com.