The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.
The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don’t mean to imply they’re all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I’d rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.
Most people won’t, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of “normal” is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.
Source: christmasgorilla
I want to make love to this website.
Fucking awesome. Or… should I say: “This website amplifies my motivation to leverage my social currency within various audience-driven communities, through word of mouth which it- itself- is maximized via viral buzz, targeting specific influencers and superusers, thereby enhancing my top line overview which is: world domination.”
Source: soupsoup
The local merchant wins because they’re able to get exposure in a very cost-effective way,” Braccia says. “The consumer obviously wins with a great deal. And Groupon wins as the intermediary. There are very few businesses where everyone wins like that.
The West Coast Really Is Happier
[This] map of U.S. Twitter users’ average moods at noon and 11 pm, created by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his team of researchers and based on three years of work studying 300 million tweets. (…) The West Coast is indisputably more prone to using positive language than the East Coast. And those of us in New York, apparently, are always kind of pissed. (Or, at least, we’re throwing words like “rape” and “suicide” around more often.) Read more about the study here.
EpicWin, Turning A Todo List App Into a Role Playing Game
(thx @praveensharma / via Laughing Squid)
Ten Things Social Media Can’t Do
furth: (via pop17 / adamiss / taitran )
Ten Things Social Media Can’t Do
A Healthy Reminder for Setting Expectations
Social media can’t:
- Substitute for marketing strategy.
A Twitter campaign or a Facebook page that announces your weekly specials is not a marketing strategy.- Succeed without top management buy-in.
Social media requires a way of thinking that includes willingness to listen to customers, make changes based on feedback and trust employees to talk to customers.The culture of fear (of job loss, of losing message control, of change) is ingrained in corporate cultures. Top management has to want to change.
- Be viewed as a short-term project.
Social media is not a one-shot deal. It’s a long-term commitment to openness, experimentation and change that requires time to bear fruit.- Produce meaningful, measurable results quickly.
One of the complaints about social media is that it can’t be measured. But there are many things that can be measured, including engagement, sentiment and whether increased traffic leads to sales.Those results can’t be produced or measured in the short term. Like PR, social media marketing often produces its best results in the second and third year.
- Be done in-house by the vast majority of companies.
A successful social-media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content and contests into online marketing.You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience — a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.
- Provide a quick fix to the bottom line or a tarnished reputation.
Social media can sometimes provide quick results for a company that’s already a star. When a well-loved company like Zappos or Google employs social media, its loyal fans and followers pay attention.However, there’s a lot of desperation in a lot of corporate suites these days, and many companies seem been convinced that a social-media campaign can provide a quick fix to sagging sales or reputation issues. Sorry, nuh, uh.
- Be done without a realistic budget.
Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing.Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce and creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.
- Guarantee sales or influence.
Unless your effort can pass the “who cares” test — and most simply can’t — your social media efforts will fall flat.And unless you know how to drive traffic to your contest, video, blog, event, etc., you’ll have little more than an expensive field of dreams.
- Be done by “kids” who “understand social innately”
You can climb Mount Kilaminjaro without a sherpa guide, but why would you? Experience and perspective can make the trip easier, or even save your life.Companies trying to run social media without experienced consultants waste time, money and reputation on their efforts. And then, sadly, many decide that this new-fangled approach doesn’t work.
- Replace PR.
No matter how great your website, video contest, blog, Twitter strategy, etc., you still need publicity. Or you may end up with a tree falling in the forest and nobody hearing it.http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=140128
Big ups to #10. Maybe I’m biased, but the key to a good social media campaign is integration with other forms of promotion, through PR and paid media. We face this issue with clients (and sometimes colleagues) who think that Social Media can drive a campaign. It all has to work together. It can be tough to pull off, but when it does, it’s a beautiful thing.
Source: taitran
The 20th century was about who you know, but the future is about how fluidly you can find out who knows the things- or the people- that you need to know.
Social network literacy is not about how many connections you have, but how well you use them to navigate your life.
From a Wired article in 2004 - “Is Friendster changing our friendships”
WE DID IT!!!!!!!
Wow, Nielson can only *dream* of having analytics as telling as this.
Source: gracenmichelle
On foursquare, cheating, and claiming mayorships from your couch...
Hey all -
Some of you may have noticed that we rolled out the first version of our “cheater code” - an attempt to catch some of the folks that are checking in from their couches to steal mayorships. Since last summer, this has been one of our most requested features and has been one of the…
I held out on this app for a long time … but, *man* am I addicted to it now … oh, @radicalmedia mayorship- one day, you will be MINE.
Source: foursquare
Stunted Gorilla Marketing for Sweet Valley Movie?
The gang from Sweet Valley High is (was?) on Twitter! In character and referencing story lines I had not thought of in … 12 years?
While scouting around for details on the upcoming Diablo Cody-directed “Sweet Valley High” movie, we stumbled across some surprising information (…) the whole gang from Sweet Valley, Calif., is there, tweeting back and forth.
There’s a lot of @diablocody going on, so maybe this is some kind of viral marketing for the movie? Who cares, we’re hitting follow! Some sample tweets from the Sweet Valley teens below.
Check out (now dormant) twitter feeds of Elisabeth, Jessica, Todd, Lila …
Loading Mashable means 10 other “read me later” tabs within minutes.
Good thing lunchtime is here: reading break!
Interactive Conference Calling? Sign up at www.one.org for more info.
Join Melinda Gates and Melanne Verveer, the first-ever U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, for a fresh look at the fight against global poverty in an interactive conference call next week.
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