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Is Email Dead in the Era of Facebook, Twitter & the iPhone?

Clara Shih, author of "The Facebook Era," examines the question is email dead in the era of Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone? With eight billion minutes being spent on Facebook a day, people are not only logging in, they are engaged and communicating actively there. So what role does email play going forward? Watch this BNET video to learn more:

Also, be sure to take BNET's poll: What’s the Etiquette for Social Media and the Workplace? Give them your insight.

Twitter By the 100s - Information Is Beautiful

David McCandless, a London-based author, writer, designer and "visual & data journalist" has a fantastic post today with More Truth About Twitter.

McCandless, author of the blog, Information is Beautiful, takes a look at what would Twitter look like if the Twitter community was made up of 100 people. It's fascinating and provides interesting perspective.

Given our hectic day to day lives, I'm not sure I agree with the term for those who haven't tweeted in the last week as "lazy," but I love all the rest, particularly the "loud mouths."

I was also surprised at first to see the sexes broken down -- 55 female to 45 male within this community of 100.

The average 100 tweets are also a real tweet (eh hem, I mean treat):

 


Check out Information is Beautiful for more great visual data, graphs, charts and concepts. His work provides a visual perspective beyond the numbers and arrows. Well done!

Social Media - Fad or A Revolution?

Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics (the blog and the book) covers the latest trends in social media. Socialnomics, the book, looks at how social media transforms our lives and the way we do business.

In a recent post, Qualman reports Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think.

Citing over 30 statistics, Qualman reports:

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
   
   
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
   
   
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
   
   
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
   
   
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
   
   
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
   
   
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
   
   
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
   
   
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
   
   
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%

Check out this great video for more:

The Listener Is As Important As the Sender in Social Media

I stumbled upon a great article this weekend written in 2006 that tells the story of a man, John Francis, PhD, who "gave up speaking" and realized how much he hadn't been listening.

When I read this article it really made me think about where we are in the era of Social Media. Like any rush to be a part of something new, the push has been to PARTICIPATE, but I don't think there has been an equal push to honestly LISTEN. We are in an age of processing information, sending out information that can be syndicated to multiple sources, pushing "our words" out to the masses.

There's communication that spins off of that, even tremendous action, which can influence local and even global groundswells.

But, yesterday, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, as I read this article, the message for Social Media has been to  PARTICIPATE, CONVERSE, INTERACT, ENGAGE, but it strikes me that the passive notion of LISTENING has been under-valued. 

Francis, author of Planetwalker, said - "sometimes we forget that the listener is as important as the person sending the message. Communication is a shared responsibility."

In 2009, three years later, when there are so many ways to communicate via post, tweet, status, DM, text message and feed - we may need to take a step back and LISTEN.

In social media it is important to PARTICIPATE, but it is also our "shared responsibility" to LISTEN.

How can you LISTEN better on Twitter, on Facebook in your blog circles? You'll be surprised what you hear and how much clearer your response is when you really can really see what's being said.

"It's not so much that we get to where we're going, it's that we're on our way there." - John Francis

Being Proactive & Prepared for Response in Social Media - U.S. Air Force

There is an excellent business process workflow map published by the U.S. Air Force Public Affairs Agency - Emerging Technology Division addressing their standard of operations for reputation management and response in social media.

It's simple, clear and addresses the way in which the U.S. Air Force Public Affairs intends to engage online. For any organization assessing their level of engagement -- what it is or will be, this visual decision map may help create a framework for discussion and planning.

Special thanks to Joey deVilla for sharing this at Global Nerdy.

eGov 2.0: Bi-Directional Engagement

It's interesting that this morning we see a lot of news about the Social Security Administration's move towards facilitating boomers to apply online for social security at socialsecurity.gov. According to an article on NewsDay today, "Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said Americans are becoming eligible for retirement at a rate of 10,000 a day for the next 20 years."

Providing the service and streamlining access is foundational for most eGov initiatives, but in the age of Social Media, it's interesting to see where government needs to focus, apply and adapt how these online services and the Gov-Citizen relationship evolves online.

When it comes to government and social media, there is amazing opportunity and responsibility to evaluate, plan and incorporate a deeper level of engagement into their online strategies. In an exceptional article by Mark Drapeau, he addresses this more specifically, related to Government 2.0: How Social Media Could Transform Gov PR.

Reading both these articles back to back, it's interesting to see where the SSA is focused now and where they'll be headed in the future. The idea of streamlining the application process online is in today's realm, necessary. Looking at how social media can facilitate, expedite and improve the process collaboratively as well as creating extensive reach and a more personal connection is fascinating and hopefully on the horizon.

In a recent post we took a look at an interesting documentary addressing how mass collaboration online will completely transform the way institutional organizations, like government can/will operate.

In a great video excerpt from the documentary US Now, there is a great video that addresses Governments Getting with the Internet with Alan Cox.

When it comes to government and social media, there is amazing opportunity and responsibility to evaluate, plan and incorporate "collaboration" into their online strategies. It's exciting to be a part of this evolution with many exceptional state agencies and we look forward to the realization of true bi-directional engagement in the future.

Understanding Millennials - A Vision of Students Today

Staffing, enriching diversity in the workplace, millennials working side-by-side with baby boomers on the heals of retirement. These are all common issues in our day-to-day consultation when working on projects with cross-functional work teams. The project lifecycle, the critical thinking, the process leading to the end product or  solution is all tied to the diverse perspective and learned / skilled approach engaging our client teams.

This extraordinary video is from a project by professor Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and 200 of his students. It is a fascinating look specifically at what millennials are experiencing today - in how they learn, what they do within the learning process, what is expected and how they operate in the day-to-day.

This video, A Vision of Students Today, gave me goose bumps. There's so much to understand here that for "good or bad," the millennials expectations is a complex experience of participation, evaluation, response, collaboration in real-time "hyper-speed" environments. There's multi-tasking and hyper-tasking, but has technology helped or stripped millennials of time spent taking "deep dives" in creativity, analysis and interpretation. It's a profound look at what faces millennials today. I'll be interested in seeing what comes next when they go back to the "chalkboard."

Awesome!

US Now | Mass Collaboration Online Can Transform

There is an exciting new British documentary that just debuted in London on December 3, 2008 at the RSA. The film, US Now explores how mass collaboration, the internet and its power to transform society has extraordinary potential to transform institutional structures, like government, broaden citizen participation and, "deepen" democracy. Each perspective included in this film constructively looks at simply, "the potential" of what lies ahead. With that, includes the challenges and some of the structural barriers to date, but given the timeliness of this documentary, there is also the sense, that the time is now to leverage and utilize what we have used, learned, built, and participate in to take such institutions like "government," go beyond "e-government" and create a richer, more interactive, participatory democratic government. The film looks at the potential and the opportunity to "unbundling and reconstituting" the institutional ways to create greater access and broaden the participatory role of the citizen. It's an interesting and extremely timely exploration in these new time ahead.

Us Now tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the existing notion of hierarchy, such as Wikipedia, Facebook and others.  For the first time, this film brings together leading-edge visionaries in the field of participative governance to describe the future of government. Us Now follows the stories of the people that are redefining what is an institution. The film explores common organizational structures plotting the fate of a football club owned and run by its fans, a bank in which everyone is the manager, a global network whose members share their homes with strangers and asks politicians and thinkers what all this means for society.

"There's a whole new model emerging where we become part of the government," says film contributor, Don Tapscott.

There are great clips available online now and will culminate in an hour long documentary to be released publicly in January 2009.

View some of these clips now to see how exciting the dialogue and critical thinking is.

Governments Getting with the Internet

Social Networking

Organizations & Democracy

Models For Government

iMediaConnection: The art of self defense against brand-jacking

As a follow up to our earlier post today, we came across another good article further emphasizing the need to actively monitor and protect your brand.

Tim Lynch, senior experience design specialist at Molecular, explores the concept of brand-jacking. "If your brand is online, it's susceptible to consumer influence -- both benign and malicious. See what steps your company can take to mitigate the risks."

Read More >>

Economist: Companies & Social Networks - Losing Face

The Economist tells a cautionary tale of companies who find out after the fact that their employees are revealing or misrepresenting their employers' brand online with their own posted indiscretions, gossip or exchanges on community sites like myspace, Facebook and Twitter.

It's a must read for organizations who currently have not addressed social networks usage policies - not only "at work" usage policies, but also "general usage guidelines" that are highly recommended to manage your brand and online reputation.  The article has three important recommendations to consider:

• [Create] and reiterate online guidelines frequently
• Monitor online activity closely to ensure that rules are respected
• Frequent “online watering holes” where people exchange gossip and views [to be fully aware of what is being posted directly by employees or through their affiliation with the organization].

Read on>>