I visited my MySpace profile the other day, purely to grab a photo I knew I'd uploaded there once. Anyway, whilst I was there I had a quick look around at my MySpace friend's profile and realised that all of them were abandoned 2+ years ago - all of them. How did MySpace get it so wrong? Or perhaps the better question is how did Facebook creep up fish MySpace on t ad nd steal all their users? Essentially the two services at that stage were very similar, they were vying for numbers on a very equal scale with Facebook the junior, then poof what seemed like overnight, we ALL abandoned MySpace.
Could a similar fate befall Facebook one day? I think it is unlikely astoo many people have too much tied up in Facebook's success and are using it to interact with their world. However watch out for the likes of Tumblr and Stumbleupon adding different social propositions beyond the FB offering thus adding depth and texture and gaining traction...
Tuesday 10 January 2012
Tuesday 20 September 2011
At Granny's knee
Here are some interesting thoughts I found and thought were worth sharing:
Social Media - Social Etiquette the old fashioned way, what can we learn from the manners our Grandparents lived by...?
1. Mind your manners. Social media is still social. Even though we are interacting in a virtual space, the same traditional social rules, laws, and faux pas still apply. If you act like a jerk, don’t expect many friends.
2. Tuck in your shirt. How you present yourself is just as important in the virtual world as it is in the real world. Make sure you are always aware of how you appear to others.
3. Send a thank you card. People still appreciate being appreciated. It really doesn’t take much to convert an acquaintance to a friend, which will offer exponentially more value. A simple thank you, or any genuinely human interaction of gratitude goes a long way towards this goal.
4. Keep your elbows off the table. Acting respectfully in front of others proves that you value them, which will usually make them value you more. And in social media, it’s all about value.
5. Turn your music down. Don’t contribute to the noise. Listen to whatever you want in your own personal space, but when your personal preferences start to become a distraction to others, people will tune you out.
6. Finish what you started. Any way you look at it, engagement is a commitment. When you make an effort to become part of a community, it’s not only up to you when or how often you interact with other members. If you put yourself out there as a friend, be prepared to be there when people reach out to you.
7. Finish your vegetables. There are some aspects of social media that aren’t sexy. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t important to your growth and health. Make sure you are keeping up with the essentials, and not just chasing that buzz you get from a social sugar high.
8. Whatever happened to a good old fashioned…? Sometimes all these new gadgets and thingamabobs aren’t as important or effective as we make them out to be. Sometimes a good old fashioned email, phone call, or even in person “get-together” can accomplish things that social media can’t.
9. A man is only as good as his word. The currency of social media is trust (or social capital). And if people can’t trust you, you have no value to them.
10. Think twice before you speak. You can always say something, but you can never take it back. Especially in social media where everything you say can be heard by anyone, forever, there are just too many “finites” to not reconsider everything you say before you say it.
Social Media - Social Etiquette the old fashioned way, what can we learn from the manners our Grandparents lived by...?
1. Mind your manners. Social media is still social. Even though we are interacting in a virtual space, the same traditional social rules, laws, and faux pas still apply. If you act like a jerk, don’t expect many friends.
2. Tuck in your shirt. How you present yourself is just as important in the virtual world as it is in the real world. Make sure you are always aware of how you appear to others.
3. Send a thank you card. People still appreciate being appreciated. It really doesn’t take much to convert an acquaintance to a friend, which will offer exponentially more value. A simple thank you, or any genuinely human interaction of gratitude goes a long way towards this goal.
4. Keep your elbows off the table. Acting respectfully in front of others proves that you value them, which will usually make them value you more. And in social media, it’s all about value.
5. Turn your music down. Don’t contribute to the noise. Listen to whatever you want in your own personal space, but when your personal preferences start to become a distraction to others, people will tune you out.
6. Finish what you started. Any way you look at it, engagement is a commitment. When you make an effort to become part of a community, it’s not only up to you when or how often you interact with other members. If you put yourself out there as a friend, be prepared to be there when people reach out to you.
7. Finish your vegetables. There are some aspects of social media that aren’t sexy. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t important to your growth and health. Make sure you are keeping up with the essentials, and not just chasing that buzz you get from a social sugar high.
8. Whatever happened to a good old fashioned…? Sometimes all these new gadgets and thingamabobs aren’t as important or effective as we make them out to be. Sometimes a good old fashioned email, phone call, or even in person “get-together” can accomplish things that social media can’t.
9. A man is only as good as his word. The currency of social media is trust (or social capital). And if people can’t trust you, you have no value to them.
10. Think twice before you speak. You can always say something, but you can never take it back. Especially in social media where everything you say can be heard by anyone, forever, there are just too many “finites” to not reconsider everything you say before you say it.
Friday 26 August 2011
Nothing new under the Sun
So, Twitter love it or hate it, the micro-blogging site looks like it is here to stay. But in that very sentence is evidence of why many people, usually people over 40 who have never actually been near it, 'hate it'.
Any new club likes to have its own secret language which makes it members feel important part of their own society, set apart from everyone else. Trouble is if you are not part of the clique the secret language makes you feel left out, alienated. The non-cliquees then snipe at the club they do not belong to and that is exactly what has happenned with Twitter, I have lost count of the number of times I heard people attack it saying things like "I've no desire to see what people had for breakfast or when their last bowel movement was!"
I suspect that will be the normal part of the life-cycle of any new form of communication. When mobile phones first came into use they were dismissed by the many as playthings of the idiot rich now they are ubiquitous!
Anyway it looks like Twitter is here to stay, for a while at least, so we had better get used to it and, if you like me work in the communication business, work out how to harness its undoubted 'cut through to the committed' strengths to engage audiences more effectively.
This article is a good starter for ten!
Any new club likes to have its own secret language which makes it members feel important part of their own society, set apart from everyone else. Trouble is if you are not part of the clique the secret language makes you feel left out, alienated. The non-cliquees then snipe at the club they do not belong to and that is exactly what has happenned with Twitter, I have lost count of the number of times I heard people attack it saying things like "I've no desire to see what people had for breakfast or when their last bowel movement was!"
I suspect that will be the normal part of the life-cycle of any new form of communication. When mobile phones first came into use they were dismissed by the many as playthings of the idiot rich now they are ubiquitous!
Anyway it looks like Twitter is here to stay, for a while at least, so we had better get used to it and, if you like me work in the communication business, work out how to harness its undoubted 'cut through to the committed' strengths to engage audiences more effectively.
This article is a good starter for ten!
Friday 8 April 2011
Tuesday 25 May 2010
Prescience
What do Hugh Laurie, Tim Roth, Joseph Fiennes, Stephen Moyer, Dominic West, Cat Deeley and Marianne Jean-Baptiste all have in common?
They are all British and they all star in american hit TV series all (with the noble exception of Cat Deeley's proud Brummie) with flawless american accents. In fact I suspect that the vast majority of americans do not even know that they are not US natives.
In 1982 Collin Welland on picking up his Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Chariots of Fire" proclaimed "The British are coming!" at the time we all thought he was a bit over excited, possibly overlunched and definitely talking rot! Now it seems like he was just a little bit ahead of his time.
It is not only british actors finding favour, or should that be favor, in the US, british producers are doing rather well too. Simon Cowell and his associated shows are a phenomenon, but there are plenty of other examples of British originated shows transferring with huge success stateside. "Strictly Come Dancing" for instance has become "Dancing with the Stars" beating all comers and apparently the UK's latest export "Undercover Boss" from channel 4 debuted on CBS with more than 38m viewers – the highest for any US series opener since 1987 and for the whole season has been the sixth-highest rated show of all time.
Who knows how long it can continue but it must be doing an awful lot for the UK television industry which despite constant pleas of poverty and imminent extinction is still one of the world's largest and most successful.
Of course switching from television to politics there was someone else who displayed remarkable prescience: when back in 1981 a boyish leader of the Liberal Party David Steel proclaimed "Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!" David Steel's Speech Excerpt
Maybe Sir Clive Sinclair was right and there is hope for the C5 yet?
They are all British and they all star in american hit TV series all (with the noble exception of Cat Deeley's proud Brummie) with flawless american accents. In fact I suspect that the vast majority of americans do not even know that they are not US natives.
In 1982 Collin Welland on picking up his Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Chariots of Fire" proclaimed "The British are coming!" at the time we all thought he was a bit over excited, possibly overlunched and definitely talking rot! Now it seems like he was just a little bit ahead of his time.
It is not only british actors finding favour, or should that be favor, in the US, british producers are doing rather well too. Simon Cowell and his associated shows are a phenomenon, but there are plenty of other examples of British originated shows transferring with huge success stateside. "Strictly Come Dancing" for instance has become "Dancing with the Stars" beating all comers and apparently the UK's latest export "Undercover Boss" from channel 4 debuted on CBS with more than 38m viewers – the highest for any US series opener since 1987 and for the whole season has been the sixth-highest rated show of all time.
Who knows how long it can continue but it must be doing an awful lot for the UK television industry which despite constant pleas of poverty and imminent extinction is still one of the world's largest and most successful.
Of course switching from television to politics there was someone else who displayed remarkable prescience: when back in 1981 a boyish leader of the Liberal Party David Steel proclaimed "Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!" David Steel's Speech Excerpt
Maybe Sir Clive Sinclair was right and there is hope for the C5 yet?
Friday 26 March 2010
Web Junk
I was reading the other day that apparently there are 110,000 bits of space junk orbiting the Earth, which made me wonder just how many bits of 'web junk' are there out there? Online bits and bobs abandonned by their owners never to be revisited.
There must be millions of social network pages for people who have gone and died or less dramatically lost their passwords to, or simply forgotten about. For instance when did you last check your Friends Reunited Page or even your MySpace profile? By the way, if you do revisit either of those sites, you will be gobsmacked at how much they both now look like Facebook, talk about 'closing the stable door' guys?!?
Then there are the yahoo, google etc mail accounts that have been created and abandonned - I think that I personally have around a dozen or so accounts that I've created over the years for various reasons then entirely forgotten about.
Now where is my Compuserve login?
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