The Socializers | social media observations

SOCIAL TV: Fiction is seducing Fact, Reality is becoming a Dream

admin March 17, 2011 No Comments

The blurring of author + audience: Whose story is it?

LIVING STORIES: Living stories are upon us. Imagine a cinema or films full of viewers/participants guiding a film’s course. Imagine a celebrity submitting to his/her fan’s socially communicated desires and vice versa. Imagine the fan-guided star, the film packed with alternate directions that viewers can guide via a mobile app. We are in the age of choose your own adventure sensibility and the tech to support it is here.

How is this trotted out in hard cold steps? How can I apply the possibility above NOW?

1. READ CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: Go buy a choose your own adventure book: http://amzn.to/the_cave_of_time

2. WRITE: Write out a series of possibilities for your life. That’s with a pen and a piece of paper OR on your computer.

3. A NETWORK OF IDENTITIES: Create a network of identities in the social web, each based around one of these possibilities.

a. Name each possibility

b. Set up a Twitter account for each name

c. Aggregate key influencers related to that name, that concept. Use Listorious to do this. Follow ALL of these influencers and study who they follow. Use Research.ly to gain insight into what is trending and other useful information from your focused Interest Graph.

d. Create a FB account for this name. Populate the account with images, video, text and links derived from the focused Twitter account.

e. Schedule 60 days of tweets using SocialOomph.

f. Now go into Quora and ask questions that arise for you related to this identity. Source tweets, blog posts, image searches, video creation, music selection and other content from answers to these questions.

g. Now go into YouTube via a Gmail account set up for a specific identity and create a branded account. Create channels of content full of favorited videos. Create videos of your own where you narrate stories related to a series of images or a live journey you take (POV).

h. Now go to Flickr via Yahoo and create a series of Sets or Galleries full of images associated with this identity.

i. If you are wanting to really expand, go to KnowEm and populate hundreds of properties with various types of content.

4. CURATION: By this time, you have curated a body of resources and individuals/groups around these identities. And you have produced your own content based upon your observation and initial participation in those blended graphs of Interest and Social connection. The content is all source material for your choose your own adventure social media/socialTV project.
More on curation.

5. Fund it.

A NEW LIFE: A movie IS a community waiting live that story. In the past, one would go to a movie, watch it and walk out with something within. But now when we walk into a cinema, we have the potential to walk into a completely new life…into something that is done vs. watched. Movies can now be an active experience for the user and the community. And truly life-changing.

CASTING OFF FLESH: Consider what Ibn Sina Avicenna, a Persian philosopher-scientist who lived between 980 and 1037 A.D, wrote:

“These bodily members are, as it were, no more than garments; which, because they have been attached to us for a long time, we think are us, or parts of us [and] the cause of this is the long period of adherence: we are accustomed to remove clothes and to throw them down, which we are entirely unaccustomed to do with our bodily members.”

Consider that through social networks, apps, PCs and mobile devices, we are casting off our bodily limbs, and beginning to wear our spirits.

Good Social Tech works on multiple dimensions

admin November 27, 2010 No Comments

Social technology has caused an acceleration in the evolution of human consciousness and spirituality. In realizing that more connections are available than one person can possibly take advantage of in a lifetime, the individual is presented with the choice of complexity or simplicity. Simplicity could be stated as essence, or realization, or self-actualization. Social technology precipitates simplicity. Why? Because good social tech takes away excessive boundaries and obstacles to connection. When I can connect to my bliss, to my passion, all else fades away. Good social tech facilitates swift connection to passion and methodologies for remaining in touch with and deepening that passion.

A great example of this is the work that our tech now does in showing us similar items to those we like – in music, film, photography, literature, travel and relationships. I can buy a song on iTunes and receive a focused list of other songs that those similar to myself also like. This results in swift creation of a tribe and an interest graph. Our interest graph is the passionate group surrounding similar interests. Those faces form a different kind of affinity, which grows in volume very easily due to social tech. And once one has tasted leadership within a tribe of passion, there really is no going back. Why? Because then one has found a path of discovery that attaches to the heart, the single most important physical and spiritual muscle!

Leonardo da Vinci has said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Good social tech creates sophisticated humans, who are in touch with both physical AND spiritual gratification.

Six Ways To Be Likeable in Social Networks

admin November 20, 2010 No Comments

(Adapted from How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie)

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Follow them on Twitter and DM them on what they tweet.
• Become their friend on Facebook and comment positively on their wall posts.
• Subscribe to their YouTube or Vimeo channel. Like, Share and positively comment on their uploaded video content
• Follow their blog via RSS and positively comment, share their posts with your community via Twitter, FB and your blog.
• Follow their Slideshare account and share their presentations.
• Get connected on LinkedIn and connect them to individuals and LinkedIn groups that are helpful and specific to their industry.
• Share their photos from Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket, along with positive comments.

2. Smile.
• Like others content and be positive in your comments.
• Share uplifting content that brightens others days.
• Share a variety of uplifting content, including music, video, photos, blogposts, product reviews, events, good news, tweets and others’ FB posts.

3. Remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the English language.
• When you connect with others use their first name in the body of your messages!
• When you share another’s content, use their full name and share their weblink, YouTube channel, Twitter handle or FB link.

4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
• Send others private messages with questions that are not nosey but helpful.
• Let your comments show that you listened to what they said and in their post, Tweet, video, photo or music share.
• RSVP on events you are invited to.
• Share other’s posts on your wall or Re-Tweet them, furthering dialogue on their content.

5. Talk in terms of the other man’s interest.
• Identify what was important to the other in what they posted and orient your comment around that. This will foster friendship AND engender further conversation that is positive and helpful.
• Ask questions about the other’s posting in a way that is kind and identifies their post as an asset to you and others.

6. Make people feel important, and do it sincerely.
• Comment when it comes form your heart and gut. That’s usually a good sign that you are being sincere.
• Elevate the person by speaking about them in your content.
• If you don’t have anything to say, then don’t comment!

Customer Intelligence in a real-time social eco-system

admin November 18, 2010 No Comments

The pressing need in customer intelligence is a solution related to a real-time eco-system. One deeper philosophical issue in this space relates to variable velocity, to quote Lee Bryant. Tools like PeerIndex and Recorded Future do a good job of segmenting and defining the truly staggering flow of data AND audiences interacting with that data. Datasift (http://datasift.net/) is a leader in architecting methodologies for analyzing the complex fabric of the social Internet.

For an important new study on Customer Intelligence Trends 2011, see the following Forrester Report: ‎”At the same time, the demand for insight — not just data — in real time creates a challenge but also a huge opportunity to extend the value of Customer Intelligence throughout the enterprise. Leading CI professionals who evolve and adapt to these trends will quickly find themselves at the nexus of the business.” ~from Customer Intelligence Trends To Watch In 2011 (http://bit.ly/customer_intelligence_trends_2011)

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: DEFINITIONS
(Some basic info below)

Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence is done by gathering, analyzing and disseminating information with or without support from technology and applications, and focuses on all-source information and data (unstructured or structured), mostly external, but also internal to a company, to support decision making. (SOURCE)

The global business intelligence (BI) software market is projected to reach $12.4 billion by the year 2015, driven by the growing need to empower all stakeholders of businesses with right information at the appropriate time.

Uncertain economic conditions, intense competition and increasing volumes of organizational information are forcing enterprises to seek efficient means of deriving value from information for improving the overall efficiency of business processes. In this regard, BI technology is emerging as an essential tool for identifying new revenue-generation opportunities as well as to control unproductive expenditures. BI offers tools, processes and applications for facilitating organizations to analyze and consolidate data gathered from various sources for optimizing operational performance and for improving business decision-making. BI and analytics software helps organizations to analyze the information built up over the years, which resides in the enterprise systems. (Source)