A chance to firm up Wikipedia page on social media marketing

It looks like social media marketing has made the Wikipedia. Check it out, the page is asking for citations and verification! It is amazing how quickly these tools have been incorporated into traditional PR and marketing activities - now the standard.

"Social media marketing is a term that describes the act of using social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other collaborative Internet form of media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g. the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees)."

Check it out. Thanks to mashable for the image.

When it's mobile, brands will have to choose

There is a lot of conversation going on about social media, and most of us have adopted rudimentary, or sophisticated for that matter, plans on how to use this to our organization's benefit. As time goes on, we will need to rely on some experts to help us learn more about mobile technology and how it is going to affect our public relations efforts. Mobile expert Conrad Lisco takes a look at the complexities of the technology in his blog called ThumbJockey. The image comes from buymeaniphone.

"As the number of operating systems and platforms grow, so too will complications for brands looking to go mobile. Brands are asking not only how they can get consumers engaged via mobile, they're asking how to get the engaged on iPhones in particular. Why? Because the iPhone-wielding public represent an opportunity for rich, meaningful brand engagement. How do we plan for a more open, seamless mobile experience? Because developing for handset-specific applications, browsers and optimizations isn't going to be cheap. And it isn't sustainable. We have to move past this walled garden approach to mobile started by carriers years and years ago."

Creativity or Just Plain Dedicated Effort?

Fast Company's Linda Tischler covers a conference on making ideas happen.

She blogs, "The Behance "99%" conference wound up on a high note with Pentagram designer Michael Bierut offering five sane and simple principles for maximum productivity. Given his track record--hundreds of design awards, work at MOMA, a faculty appointment at Yale, a hugely popular blog, and a book or two, (I'm exhausted just listing all his accomplishments!)--his was advice with instant cred. "

So from this conference Bierut offers tips - here is #13 of 13, but you should read them all.

"13. Nothing trumps hard work. Many successful people don't want to talk about how hard they work. Even when you've made it, you've got to keep working."

Science & the Public Eye Follows Journalism's Change

I am following Janet Raloff's Science News blog. She is covering science journalism today and changes that public relations professionals are also following and adjusting to new realities.

Here are some of her recent blogs. Janet says: "Indeed, a number of scientists are now blogging with news of their work — or comments/analyses of interesting research by others. One problem, these often aren’t really written for the general public. A bigger obstacle: These science portals can be hard to find in a Web populated by gazillions of bloggers (and with millions more coming online each minute — or so it seems). For people with dial-up service (yes, there still are many such Internet users), flitting from site to site to reach each site can be cumbersome."

Science & the Public : Science reporting: Evolving before our eyes

Science & the Public : More Signs of Endangered Journalism
Science & the Public : Real News: An Endangered Species
Science & the Public : Bloggers Need News Too
Science & the Public : CNN downsizes science team

What the Web Has Done for Us

There is no doubt that proposing the World Wide Web has had greater impact than just about anything in the past 20 years. Really, this marks the day the world changed for communicators. Thanks for the image from American Heritage.com.

And, consider how technology has changed since this day and the impact it is having on culture now and what it holds for the future [visit Singularity at SciAm].

Says Larry Greenemeier at Scientific American, "Twenty years ago this month, a software consultant named Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) hatched a plan for an open computer network to keep track of research at the particle physics laboratory in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee's modestly titled "Information Management: A Proposal," which he submitted to get a CERN grant, would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web."

Read more on the web site! "What surprised Tim most is that for years people were so much more interested in simply browsing for and reading content rather than in creating it. His very first browser—WorldWideWeb—was actually both a browser and an editor. It let you write your own pages, post them online, and edit pages posted by others. But the commercial browsers didn't offer editing capabilities. This frustrated him for a number of years. The whole point of the Web, to him, was not to just see information but to publish it, too. This didn't really happen until blogs emerged, followed by sites like Facebook, where people can easily post content."

Wisdom from the Basics, a thumbjockey Truism

I like to find straightforward words of wisdom for communicators, and a new blog on thumbjockey caught my eye: Back to basic - here is the essence, or visit thumbjockey for the full blog. Photo credit: Yoga with Richard James Allen.

"I took a "basics" yoga class for the first time in a while and it felt really good. It reminded of the importance of solid fundamentals - the principles that everything else is predicated upon. A good yoga practice is nothing if you can't first nail the basics.Then it got me thinking about marketing and how many of the same principles apply. So I thought I'd share:

Get power from your core.

Be Flexible.

Be present.

Let go of control.

It's called "practice" for a reason."

Tangled up in Green - Innovation

I decided to borrow from my personal blog, The Sky Badge Project today.

Sometimes I cover innovation on this blog, and usually more from a creativity side of things. Today I am sharing this business story because it is really a wake-up call for how complicated the legal side of innovation is becoming. Photo credit: from this web site. Funny, green meant money for a long time, now it mean the environment and healthy eating.

Here is the scoop: Newsweek's Michael Heller covers the troubles in "Innovation Gridlock- Today's inventors need to put together many bits of intellectual property. Too bad they are all patented." Newsweek writes, the first decade of the 21st Century has seen startling advances in biology. Scientists have cracked the genomes of humans and many plants, animals and microbes.
They've uncovered new cellular processes affecting inheritance of diseases. Likewise, investment in biotech research and development has been steadily increasing. So what happened to all the lifesaving cures that were supposed to come our way as a result? Read this story.

Print News Cedes to the Internet

There is no doubt that we are on fast-track change with the internet now. Especially with recent reports of newspapers limiting print product and going online only.

The latest change comes with the sale of the Seattle Post-Intellegencer - if it does not sell in 60 days it goes online only, and then it might fold anyway. Not sure what it means when we do not have major market thought leaders in print, this leaves broadcast and internet a job to fill.

A Pew Internet & American Life Project report recently says:

A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves. They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.

Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.

The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.