Are You Ready for the Wave?
You’ve no doubt heard about “social media” and perhaps about how frivolous it seemingly is, what with Facebook and Twitter and internet addiction and all.
But all along there have been serious uses for social media, as the top blogs and wikis prove. And with the “track changes”-like annotation tools in YouTube and SoundWave, videographers and musicians can get feedback on drafts of their projects in ways that were, up to now, impossible.
I’m predicting social media is about to get truly serious, truly useful, and enabling of collaboration in as yet undiscovered ways. That’s because Google is about to enter the fray.
They’ve got what I think will be a killer social media ap, called Wave. On the surface, it’s just another way of doing email. But it isn’t email at all, at least not in the one-to-one or one-to-many way we think of it now. A Wave allows contributors to add new and edit existing content in real time. A Wave can be private and one to one, it can be private within a group, or a Wave can be posted to a blog and opened to the public.
Wave is in beta right now and probably won’t see a public release for at least a few months. But for some initial thoughts on how it might be used in research, check out this article about using Wave to, first, collaborate on a paper and, two, its use as a laboratory recording tool.
Re:Tweet
"Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter" - I'm not sure "scientifcally proven" is legit, but certainly "statistically valid," as the report purports to have examined 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets (I guess that'd be a long weekend's worth). The reslts are encouraging: "what I'm doing" status updates ("baking a cake") don't get retweeted and neither do (alleged) pearls of wisdom ("think a good thought every day to get rich"). Info- and link-rich tweets with good grammar and proper punctuation do get retweeted. In short: critical thinkers with inquiring minds and degrees in English win again!
Social Media Revolution
Top Ten Dirty Secrets of Social Media
Check out David Armano's post - unless, of course, you're experiencing social media burnout....
Is Twitter Replacing Blogging?
This is something I mention in my social media workshop for WSU faculty and staff: most blogs are abandonned after just a few posts. One culprit is perhaps Twitter - and here's a graphic representation of that.
Getting Audio and Video into Your WordPress Blog
It's actually super easy to add audio and video if you're using WP 2.5 or above (if you're not, you're a security risk!). But there are many customizable plugins that let you control the appearance of media players as well as play odd or old formats (like .wmv, which I have a lot of sitting around). Check out this article for more info and tons of links.
What's a Feed?
Shockingly few people understand RSS (or Atom, which, for better or worse, eXtension has adopted as a standard; curiously, eXtension's blog uses an RSS feed). It's shocking because syndication is an amazongly powerful way to share content between multiple sites. And sharing great content is what we're all about - especially in tough budget times! Here's an article that explain feeds in a straighforward way; and here's a video that takes another approach.
Who Uses WordPress?
From eBay to the NFL, and from the University of Florida to the University of California, bloggers are using WordPress.
Social Media workshop presentation
Here's the presentation I gave at the WSU Puyallup R&E Center on July 31, 2009.
Cool Stuff for Social Media Workshop Attendees
Thanks to all who attended the social media workshop at the WSU Puyallup R&E Center on July 31. This post’s for you! However, a disclaimer: the opinions on this site are my own, so proceed beyond this post at your own risk.
Basically, this is a (fairly random) collection of links to stuff I’ve found intriguing in the past couple of months.
Facebook is for photos of the kids, Twitter for blurting out pearls of marketing wisdom to his 613 followers, Linkedin for electronic schmoozing with potential business partners, Myspace for teenagers and rock bands.
– Winston Ross on examiner.com – via his blog
Designing a social media strategy – this is something I’ve tried to empashize as critically important in our workshop. For more information about designing media strategies, check out this article in the Harvard Business blog by David Armano. Armano is something of a visual thinking and business design guru. He write about social media, among other things, on his blog.
Your PC is a Web server? A Flickr server? Your own private YouTube? Outrageous! But possible with the new version of Opera. It’s called Unite and could change the way we think about running servers. I mean, do we really need expensive IT people telling us what we need? Then again, Unite might not anything at all for the simple reason that most people don’t even know there’s an alternative to Microsoft’s browser (there is! and it’s great!), much less an even cooler alternative called Opera.
Social bookmarking – I wonder if you’ve ever been in the jam I used to get myself into. I’m on the road with my personal laptop, and a site I really want to check out is bookmarked on my work machine. If only I could remember the URL…. Or, better, if only there were a way to save my bookmarks in a way that I could get at them from anywhere. This is old news, but there’s lots of cool, Web-based tools (free ones, at that) at your disposal for just such organizational tasks. I use delicious to keep my bookmarks organized, accessible from anywhere – and in a place where I can also share them with others. (In case you’re wondering, yes you can tag bookmarks as private with delicious, as you can with any other social bookmarking tool.)
Presentation design tools – my friend and colleague Jayme Jacobson, a smart and creative user of all sorts of social media, recently sent me this event invitation. I really like this piece, as it uses both marketing savvy and the technological medium of its intended audience to create an interactive piece that is as much fun as it is engaging and though provoking. The tool Jayme uses here is called Prezi – and you can use it, too, as it is a free, Web-based, social media presentation builder. I also like animoto, a free tool for making music videos from still images. Here’s a short piece I made in about five minutes, just so I could show you what animoto can do. I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t at least mention Flickr, pretty much the benchmark of photo sharing sites. Here’s mine and Karen’s photostream.
Multimedia storytelling – this is something I hear from folks in Extension all the time: I want to tell my story (”promote my program”) with video, with podcasts, with all these cool things. Help me, Brian! OK! Read this piece first, though, OK? The client-to-creative pro relationship demands a lot of both parties. That, I think, is contrary to a widespread belief which holds that the client can simply sit there and say, Not that…. until she’s satusfied. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way! Active engagement is needed from both parties, so check out the above link for a quick run down of what it takes to create a cool online experience using social media tools. And then let’s talk!
We don’t need no stinking professionals! Just in case I’ve empowered you so much that you feel you can take on anything, have a look at a these sites. They’re good reminders that creative professionals do indeed earn their money – and these sites are a hill o’ fun, too. Your Logo Makes Me Barf – I laugh every time I visit this site because, of course, we see stuff like this all the time. We also see Web site that suck pretty much everyday, too. And just to keep myself humble, here’s a site about Thomas Edison, clearly designed by pros, that really sux – it looks great, but is totally unusable.
I’ve been pretty hard on Twitter today, so last but not least, here is a blog post that collects some really creative things people have done with Twitter. Note that none of these things is really very Twitter like! And because I’m going to marry a gardner, here’s an application that let’s your plants send you a tweet when they need water. Go figure….
Brian Clark
 |
I started at working at WSU in February, 2005. I write for a number of publications and, along with my colleague Phil Cable, am also the Marketing and News Services Web, social and new media guy.
Before joining WSU, I owned and operated a marketing, design and publishing firm in San Francisco. In that capacity I served dozens of clients, from large retail firms such as Williams-Sonoma to small high-tech start-ups.
I hold a B.A. in Communication from U.C. San Diego and a Master's in English from the University of Idaho.
Over the years, I've also written and published hundreds of poems, a fistful of short stories and essays, and a novel titled Splitting. I maintain a couple of blogs, one on science and the other on sustainable design and building.
Podcasting
Info now available; includes instructions as well as links to audio-editing software and Creative Commons-licensed music and sound FX.