Social Media Social Revolution

Social media have proven to be especially good for making connections whether horizontally, between friends, or vertically, between advertisers and consumers and the like.

But social media seem to have the reputation of being a little fluffy; probably because the dominant uses of them thus far have been social in the lightest sense of the term.

However, social media have proven themselves to be a powerful platform for disseminating messages; marketing becomes highly effective when targeted at specific groups using information inputted through social media networks.

And let’s not forget about blogs and forums; often used for information sharing and collaboration.

The Death of the Wave

Google has announced that it will no longer be developing it’s Wave web application. RIP. The technology was incredibly innovative, with tools such as context linked spell-check, that could truly begin to revolutionise the way that web applications, and/or browsers work.

Real-time collaboration seemed to be such a wonderful idea. When I first heard about wave from an incredibly excited Rhodes Computer Science Honours student I imaged groups of people, all sitting at their own computer in their own spaces, in their own time-zones working on long and interesting documents – perhaps environmental policies, or proposals for projects to liberate women – but it seems that the reality isn’t as rosy.

Downsides to Doing it Digitally

The average human being will most likely scoff at the idea of having a virtual relationship which isn’t in some way routed in the real world. When we think of the word ‘relationship’ we think of a coffee-date, movies-on-your-night-off, come-to-my-place-for-dinner real world thing. 

We understand the difference between the relationships we have with our parents, our friends, our lovers and our teachers or work colleagues (at least, most of the time). But most of us, and I’m including myself in this, can’t fathom an online only relationship. It makes no sense that something starts and ends in a virtual space.

Who’s Social in the Media?

Humans are inherently social beings according to Frances Moore Lappe’s underlying thesis. But we don’t have to buy the book to understand that. History is littered with the attempts that humans make to breach the gullies we create through travel technology. From smoke signals to high speed internet access, communication technologies are about making a connection. What humans are good at is creating a distance problem and then solving it with communication tools.

Since this is a social media blog (yes, I realise the irony) it seems appropriate to talk about the ways we like to make connections via social media. At least communication technologies are aptly named – ‘telephone’ was a particularly sweet attempt to hide the need for human interaction inherent in the device, ‘far voice’ – and give you a sense of what to expect from them.

New Age Word of Mouth

I can’t say that I was particularly interested in digital marketing until very recently, being that I consider myself to be a journalism purist. However, learning Social Media Optimization seems to be part and parcel of new media and so I thought I might dedicate yet another post to the idea.

Long before Twitter began its sponsored tweets, I received unsolicited messages about various (American) products from companies that obviously search tweets looking for key words to react to. (This has sharply decreased since Twitter introduced the Geographical location tool.)

The Way we See the World

For the last week or so I have been conducting informal empirical research into the ways in which various organisations use social networking to spread their messages. It's been an interesting and exhausting experience, attending the SEACC and ACCESS Habitable Planet Workshop at Rhodes University.



The idea behind the workshop is to provide the delegates with knowledge of Earth Systems Science and a basic introduction to climate change and the various representations thereof.

Human nature in the socialsphere

Sometimes it’s a good idea to reflect on why something has worked. If it’s a commercial venture, say, social networks like Twitter and Facebook, you may have to start thinking about the human psyche.

In order to begin any sojourn into the values of human nature we have only to look at the most recent ‘hit’ in the media. On the third of May, Emmanuel (Lolly) Jackson was murdered by a business associate. This was fairly big news because controversial people tend to be more interesting to us humans; but beyond the event itself, was the news event and corresponding media frenzy.

Privacy Problems Part 3

Even though Facebook appears to have conducted the change to it's privacy settings in a bit of an underhanded way, at least we can appreciate that the internet is the biggest, and indeed the most profitable platform for making money today.

It was ironic then that on the 5^th of May, TechCrunch posted an article on how Facebook’s privacy options could be manipulated so you could see your friend’s chats. TechCrunch alerted the people at Facebook who promptly changed it so that by the time I tried it at around 2pm, chat was down and they had fixed it within a couple of hours.

Privacy Problems Part 2

In my last blog I talked about privacy on the internet and how social networks and other kinds of web-based applications allow their users to effectively hide who they are. I asked whether the fact that we construct our identities online and so shouldn’t be concerned about privacy issues wasn’t too simplistic a conclusion.

Well, this was all brought on by Facebook’s new privacy settings which essentially seem to be encouraging us all to share far more information than we would ordinarily. I won’t go into the details of the privacy changes, as Electronic Frontier Foundation covers all the changes.

Privacy Problems Part 1

Privacy is a sticky subject when it comes to social media. Ever since the ordinary internet user began to be able to connect themselves to a potential audience of thousands, the problem of privacy has become a leading debate around new media.

There is a blurry line between public and private on the World Wide Web – especially when it comes to social networks. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube make it easy for Joe from down the road to consider himself very famous thanks to his hundreds of followers.

Twitter in the marketplace

In an earlier blog post I talked about how business are not taking advantage of social media platforms for marketing their products and services. Twitter has recently announced that it is building a new campaign for advertising on Twitter.

There are pros and cons to the new Promoted Tweets monetisation scheme.

Social media make legends

Human beings have always found a way to rally and discuss issues in society. In the days of the town crier, people would gather around and listen to the news of their world and then stand around and discuss ideas.

Coffee shops became a masculine place for minds to meet and ideas to circulate; washing areas were where women got together to add to the debates. It’s not inconceivable that society’s first intellectuals gathered around some communal space and began debating. It is from these spaces that great things begin to happen in society.

Social Networking Anonymous

How attached are you to your phone?

Social networking is becoming an addiction. A company released a new Gadgetology report which drew some interesting conclusions from a relatively small study in the US. The most disturbing results were from users who don’t mind being interrupted by social messaging. 18% said that they check electronic messages during sex.

Over half of those surveyed check their social networks, like Facebook and Twitter as soon as they wake up in the morning. They also found that 26% of people do so before they get out of bed. In fact, nearly a third of iPhone users check their social networks while they are still in bed in the morning.

The survey found that while 86% of social media users don’t need to check their Facebook accounts everyday; about 29% can’t go for more than a few hours without logging on to Facebook.

SA Businesses ignore Facebook

2.6 million South Africans use Facebook, and study released by MWeb early in 2010 shows that social networking has become conventional in South Africa. Despite South Africa’s growing love affair with sites like Facebook, businesses are not yet taking advantage of the new platforms.  

Friendship 2.0 looked at sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as applications like MSN Messenger and found a reasonably large number of South Africans are quite well versed in using these sites. So, local business are then missing out on a captive audience. Although 84% use the internet for work related activities, only 16% use social platforms to promote their businesses. This is remarkably low considering how well business and social networks go together in countries like the states.