Nuancing the social in the online world

Thank you to makeitwork.com for this image.

Staying in touch with friends - how nuanced is the online and mobile world becoming and will this become something like the "splinternet" in acquisition of information and social conformity?

Read an observation at Yeah! - ..."digital identity is beginning to define who we are offline (or at least it's becoming a symbol or identification). It's how we're known to friends (real and digital) and strangers alike. Non-users of pervasive technology platforms will quickly find that they're the odd man out. The person who can't be counted or included."

Awareness and Personal Branding

I have been reading a book by Harrison Monarth called "Executive Presence, The Art of Commanding Respect Like a CEO" [on Amazon] and decided to Google him to see what comes up - afterall, he says you should be good at branding yourself!

Well, he is good. I found a lot of ways to learn more about him and his skills. I think one of the best ways to brand yourself is to write a book about how to do something well in the current business environment. I like it when someone thinks innovatively, and Monarth seems to combine common sense with new ideas.

With my Google of Monarth, I found an interesting person who has written a book, too. Dan Schawbel of Millineal Branding, published "Me 2.0". He interviewed Monarth for his blog, and I will give you one sentence to ponder and then visit Schawbel's blog for an interesting interview - "knowing the impact of how you come across is most critical." I agree that awareness is important. I haven't read Me 2.0, but it looks interesting!

In Monarth's book, he tells CEOs, or CEO wannabes, that they should utilize all social media to enhance their brands. I agree that communicating your ideas in various forums is good, and building relationships in a 2.0 world is important.

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."