Overview: Social Web

"On Monday, at almost the exact same moment as tens of thousands of people — including dozens of professional journalists — were checking the SCOTUSblog site to see whether new decisions by the country’s top court had been posted, the site itself was being denied a press pass" - Senate press gallery ignores the evolution of journalism, denies SCO…

"Gallup's State of the American Consumer ... appears flawed on multiple levels... based on surveys performed back in December 2012 and January 2013... a virtual lifetime ago... [moreover] "You don't poll consumers whether advertisements or marketing make them buy stuff. People will always say, 'No, I am not influenced... It's not an objective in…

More coverage of the non-scoop of the century ... "companies are desperate to reach consumers, and with hundreds off millions of them visiting social media sites every day, marketers feel like they simply have to be there too, so they are-to the tune of more than $5 billion last year in the U.S. alone... Evidently, they're wasting their money…

"1. Expert credibility comes from having knowledge others do not. People want experts they can understand and trust, especially when trying to understand complex or ambiguous topics like new technology, engineering, advanced science, or law... 2. Harness hierarchical credibility 3. Seek referent credibility 4. Take advantage of associative credib…

New data supporting old news: "According to Gallup ... of 18,000 consumers surveyed, 62 percent said social media had no influence on their buying decisions. Among millennials, 48 percent said social media didn't make a difference... Many social media advertisers have ... neglected the essence, and potential, of social media: people talking to …

Excellent article. Would implement it all if I wasn't so busy ;) "How many hours we work every day is barely important any more in today’s creative economy. Instead, “Manage your energy, not your time ... we have 4 different types of energies to manage every day: - physical energy – how healthy are you? - emotional energy – how happy are you? - …

"steering the storyline between a brand and its consumers must create programs that remember the code, deploy many different types of content at the correct time and inject humanity and purpose into every story..."

Good example of CMS innovations emerging from newsrooms - wish I'd added to my recent weekly LinkedIn tour: "a multi-faceted piece of newsroom infrastructure, a set of building blocks that will allow organizations to turn on or turn off various engagement features with relative ease ... a bunch of parts that you can assemble and reassemble ... …

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…

"These numbers are even more striking when you consider engagement is significantly down even though brands are almost certainly spending more money to promote their posts to combat plummeting organic reach. Facebook’s ad revenue reached $2.27 billion in Q1 2014, up 82 percent from Q1 2013" - New Report Reveals Just How Drastically Brand Engageme…

No fremium model - minimum price $19/m - but it looks worth it: "Meshfire turns Twitter into a dashboard of tasks... The tasks can be to reply to different tweets, or to block someone or follow someone. Every twitter account is a mission inside Meshfire, and every mission has a goal. You define the mission ... a virtual assistant inside Meshfire…

Thoughtful post from @steveology. Reminding me of Rule #2 of "10 things the EU should probably know about social media", but adds to it. "in house staff, or primarily outsource to an agency? ... neither model works very well, but a hybrid works extremely well... The advantage of a comms agency is that their staff work for "a dozen or two comp…

"You can now run a promotion without using a third party app. There are still rules though, and not everything can be done... a good option in some instances, or a very poor one in others." - Why Promoting on the Facebook Timeline is Good and Bad - Jeffbullas's Blog

"the Insights module will show you several metrics relating to your competition’s Facebook activity, including the number of posts by page admins, number of fan interactions and a leaderboard of the five top-performing posts across all watched pages." - How 'Pages to Watch' from Facebook Can be a Source of Competitive Insight | Social Media Exami…

Jeff Bullas reminds me why I do EU communications - so I don’t waste my life producing this sort of sh*t, for these sorts of companies.

"Influencers come in many forms — celebrities, connectors, thought leaders, aggregators, CEOs and journalists — and need to be identified and targeted based on your vertical market. The following tools are avenues to help you define who you should target as an influencer through 2014 and beyond." - Influencer Marketing Tools That Will Power Yo…

How's (y)our LinkedIn strategy? "Bob runs a local business and was fired by a new customer... The customer had decided to review the LinkedIn profiles of Bob and his staff. As it turns out, there were mixed messages being presented and the nature and quality of Bob’s business came into question." - A Story About How LinkedIn Can Hurt Your B…

Apparently we are all now "little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data", according to a searing indictment of Google's anti-anonymity policy specifically. This is required reading for anyone interested in a balanced view of anonymity, privacy and public discourse: "The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be descr…

"A single +1 from an authoritative Google+ account can propel a brand new site to a top 10 ranking with no other promotional activity involved, as long as the site being promoted is in the same niche as the Google+ account" - 8 Reasons Why You Need to Establish Authority on Google+

"Huffington Post’s U.S. site and mobile apps will shift to using only Facebook comments, CTO Otto Toth announced. “This is far from an an end to conversation; it’s the start of conversation where you want to have it — and where you’ve been having it already,” he wrote. Readers are having a Facebook conversation under Toth’s post, but many of the…

"We’ve been on Livefyre comments for a little under a year now, and while we weren’t the biggest fans of Facebook Comments* while we were using them, we’ve since realized that there is no perfect solution for commenting. And Facebook Comments, as troubled as they can be, are actually not that bad. ... until someone invents a perfect solution... w…

" a buggy Livefyre launch, with lots of you using it and breaking it, is still better than Facebook Comments." - Commenters, We Want You Back | TechCrunch

Since trying and half-rejecting Google+ and Tumblr, I've been accepted as a LinkedIn blogger. At least I never bothered with Facebook.

"Though the political conversation about Europe has gained in importance everywhere in recent years, the truth is that Europeans are not having the same conversation. That is a serious problem for Europe’s leaders: the electoral earthquake is big enough for them to feel compelled to respond to their citizens’ economic and political discontent; but…

"a team of 13 social-media and advertising specialists up to 45 days to plan, create, approve, and publish a corporate social-media post." Which did f*all online. It's when I see tweets like that - 45 days, 2 Faves, no RTs - that I'm thankful I'm not 'communicating' cars, 'engaging' consumers on soap powder or even tweeting about cheese. - Huge …

"Getting the bloggers to review and publish content about you is not going to be a walk in the park. It is not about you, it is about them. So you need to offer something of value to them." - 3 Social Media Tools to Identify Influential Bloggers - Jeffbullas's Blog

oor-er, they animated it. That makes it better.

Latest post on my shiny new LinkedIn blog. Read it, and resolve to stand out of the herd ;)

Over 70% of EU voters did not vote for the EU. Where now?

As Michael Silverman puts it, "a brilliant online community has more potential than your current social networking strategy", and he isn't even talking about EU communications. The only downside, not mentioned, is that convening a community requires: - web publishing technologies which do not date from the previous millennium - real online commu…