social media

Tonight, I'm watching the Oscars. And I'm watching it in a way I haven't in the past several years: live. I DVR everything - I DVR'ed the Olympics, I record baseball and I couldn't even tell you what night my favorite show airs. But tonight, I'm sitting through what seems like hours of commercials for one reason - Twitter. For me, to watch the Oscars on a delay would mean turning of Twitter and Facebook for the night - the humanity!

Broadcast networks have taken Twitter integration to different levels. For Fox, it involved invasive "live tweets" from show stars. For NBC, it's apparently a token integration to appease both their audience and the athletes taking part in this year's Winter Olympics.

I read a recent post by Alan Wolk, and his conclusion really stood out to me:

"I’ll leave you with this quote from a smart young guy named Matt Daniels 'Marketing has a bell curve–most companies create average marketing and achieve average results.' Why did we think social media was going to be any different?"

Today, museums, organizations, visitors and enthusiasts around the world celebrated the first #followamuseum day. Organized by Jim Richardson of the blog Museum Marketing (UK), the campaign asked Twitter users to share their favorite museums to follow and discover new ones as well.

Social media is about conversation, relationships and transparency. Where traditional media broadcasts, new media interacts. Yet, there are several foundational elements these two forms of marketing have in common. One of those is design.

I've been taking part in the Social Media Challenge for just over a week. During that time, other participants have shared interesting blogs and intriguing posts, and my Google Reader reading list has doubled.

"Have the intern do it" - it's a phrase often uttered in nonprofits, and is perfectly fine in most cases. However, those 5 words should never be associated with your organization's social media campaign, and here's why:

In one of my earlier posts, I discussed social media strategy. Nonprofits, corporations, professionals, students - no matter who you are, you need to have a goal for your interactions on social media and a path to reach them. As a nonprofit, your goal could be to increase awareness, grow local event attendance or create issue advocates.

Facebook is somewhat infamous for its ever changing privacy policies. Facebook's inconsistent approach to privacy has made life difficult for professionals and students looking to monitor their online reputation. In addition, this social networking giant has found itself at a crossroads - moving forward with new features vs.

Twitter Lists. They were introduced (slowly) a few weeks back, and, largely, confusion still reigns. Do I make a list? Whose lists am I on? What exactly are these darned things for? I can't answer all the questions, but I have found out a few things about Twitter Lists that I'd like to share: