The Mommy Bloggers vs. Motrin

Here's something I think you'll find interesting. When asked the question, "What is social media?" several people responded by saying it was a quick and efficient way for companies to "broadcast their messages" to the masses. This is true but it's only half of the story.

My response to one post was the following: "Before social media, communication from corporations was developed by the PR department and doled out as they saw fit. Now with social media, we can all talk back--not only to companies, but to all of our friends about these corporations--sometimes in a negative way (Bad customer service, the company has unfair practices, etc.). Do you recall the story of the mommy bloggers taking Motrin to task?

Check it out. It will help to demonstrate the power of social media. It is two-way communication that can't be ignored--or shouldn't be ignored! Oh, and if you google "mommy bloggers" and "Motrin" you will find many other versions.

Can you think of other examples where social media made a big impact?

Social Media & Government

As you know from my introduction, I'm very interested in communication in the public sector. The GovFresh blog from this week's course readings provides a pretty deep resource for learning about how Social Media is being used by governments and other public agencies, but it may be overwhelming at first.

For those looking for a shorter, quicker primer on why governments are interested in social media, check out this post from dotgov. The site also has some other interesting articles, including one on how City Councils can use Facebook.

Definitions of Social Media

By now most, if not all, have posted their thoughts on the definition of social media. It's worth noting that even "the experts" disagree on what its actual definition is. This article from Mashable gives a very interesting description.

Wikipedia offers this definition of social media.

About.com offers their own definition as well.

Once you have taken a look at these pieces, has it changed your own definition of social media? Has it brought up more questions? Please feel free to comment on this blog. We're very interested in what you have to say about it.

Social Media, Yelp, and User Generated Content

One of the students this week brought up Yelp as an example of social media, and it's a good one. Yelp is a review site where the users contribute reviews of businesses. It is especially used for restaurant reviews, but also other retail stores and entertainment venues.

One downside of user-generated content, however, is that there is no telling what will actually be said. Comments sections in newspaper's online versions, for example, are notorious for having off topic and often controversial comments. Yelp, concerned that reviews might be compromised by a rabid reviewer with a grudge or an establishment owner reviewing themselves under a false name, developed a mechanism to give greater weight to some reviews. By "featuring" a review, some user generated content rose to the top. The reverse also became true, for as good reviews rose to the top, negative ones sunk towards the bottom, sometimes being a number of clicks deep, making them less likely to be read. Sometimes, these reviews would just disappear completely.

This resulted in a lawsuit from companies reviewed on Yelp, claiming that Yelp was engaging in extortion. The allegation was that Yelp advertising representatives offered to feature good reviews (and bury bad ones) in exchange for advertisement.

This week Yelp announced that it will scrap its "featured review" mechanism entirely.

While this means that allegations of extortion will no longer be able to be made, at the same time it also means that reviews that may be in some way bogus will see the light of day. As with all things in social media, there's been a trade off.

Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google What?

Yes, sometimes the world of Social Media really can seem a bit... confusing. Time Magazine's online cartoonist, Odd Todd, takes a humorous look at Google's latest slough of social media tools:



Kidding aside, Google does offer some powerful online tools with social media elements to them. Google Reader, for example, lets you follow (or be followed) by people, so that you can share items from your RSS feeds. Speaking of Reader, all of you should be using it by now to follow this blog along with other blogs that you find interesting.

Social Media Gone Physical?

Today one of our students mentioned the idea of museum kiosks as social media. While not as connecting as social media, there certainly are aspects of this notion that relate to the future of social media. Recently, on GovFresh, Kevin Curry talked about the digital divide and how it limits the impacts of social media on the transparency of government. He mentioned some similar "Real World" social media outlets as a possible solution:

The basic idea is to place LED signs at heavily trafficked locations. These signs would display information about the city in which people are most interested. Some of this content would be generated the city and some of the content would be generated by citizens. Information, especially that generated by citizens, would vary somewhat by neighborhood.

On the participation side of the conversation the minimum barrier to entry would be a mobile phone. Anyone who can send a text message can contribute. Of course, there would be other ways to contribute. On the information side of the equation would be these message boards. This would be a way for people to simultaneously tell their city what they want and to see what the city is getting by way of feedback.

For more on this fascinating idea, see the original post here.

Posting to discussions on ANGEL

Hello class!

We had a minor error in the settings on the ANGEL online discussion board that prevented students from posting replies or new posts. That is now fixed!

Week One Assignments

Here are the assignments for Week 1 of our course (April 5th – April 11th) — these all need to be completed in Week 1 (so by Sunday April 11th). We have posted the assignments in this blog so that you can see how blog posts work, and become familiar with navigating a basic blog structure.

Click on the linked items below to complete. We recommend you complete them in the order listed below.

FIRST: Please introduce yourself in our Introduction Discussion Folder in the Week 1 Folder on our Angel course site.

NEXT: There are 3 questions posed in this week’s discussion forum on our Angel course site. Please read the questions and respond to them and other students’ responses throughout the week. The assignments below will help inform our discussion, but you do not need to complete the assignments first. For maximum learning, the discussion should occur throughout the course of the week. Thanks!

LEARNING ACTIVITIES & ASSIGNMENTS:

1) Watch “Think Before You Post” (short YouTube video)
2) Learn about RSS (short video from CommonCraft)
3) Create a Google account if you don’t already have one.
4) Using Google Reader, RSS this course blog and both instructors’ blogs within Google Reader. Feel free to RSS anything else you’d like as well! (Let us know if you need help!)

• Alex’s Blog: civics21.org
• Joanne’s Blog: Book Publicity Central

5) Join Facebook (if you haven’t already) and then “Friend” Alex and Joanne there. (After the course is over, we may all “un-friend” each other as desired.)

• Optional: Become friends on Facebook with other people in our course (again, this is totally optional and up to each member of the course whom to accept Friend Requests from.)


• Optional: Become a “Fan” of Marylhurst University’s Facebook page and the Shoen Library Facebook page.

6) Complete Course Readings (which are really course “browsings”):

• Howard Rheingold’s video in which he talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.
• Digital Ethnography
• Top 50 Social Media blogs
• New Comm Bizz: Social Media and the Future of Business.
• Social Media Marketing for Business
• Social Media Influence
• Tagging / bookmarking (a short CommonCraft video)
• GovFresh -- Gov 2.0
• Anything else that you find to answer Week One’s questions (and by all means, please share any links with the class in the Discussion Forum in Angel)