Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up is discussion about the connected customer and what that means for brands and media; why it’s good to use social media as part of crisis communications; Timeline tips for power users; how Facebook “likes” are similar to e-mail opt-in; and why you should pay social media interns.

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In my last two posts here, I drew from experiences I had as a guest speaker to journalism, mass media and public relations classes at Central Michigan University.

This post will touch again on those experiences, but will look at a common question I was asked by students in many of the classes I spoke to.

In every class I spoke to, there was one student who always asked the same question: How can I get a job in social media?

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This week I’ve been speaking to classes at Central Michigan University about social media and how it relates to mass communications and journalism.

At the end of my lecture, I took questions from the audience.

A recurring theme among the students has been a level of skepticism that social media is here to stay, or if it will fade out and be replaced with something else.

Their skepticism surprised me because they were the last group of people I expected to hear something like that from.

Students asked if there’s something new on the horizon that will off-set Facebook, Twitter and so on.

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Whether we label ourselves as “curators” or not, we all do it: reference each other’s blog posts, news articles, tweets, photos. We republish excerpts others’ content and mix in our own thoughts. We find inspiration in one person’s writing that prompts us to write our own manifestos. Those who are Internet-savvy and attribution-conscious know that the best practice is to link back the original sources often, but a “best practice” isn’t a standard, and there’s not a consistent way for publishers across the ‘net to attribute.

Enter: The Curator’s Code. This is one of the curation/aggregation projects out of SXSW that aims to standardize the act of attributing content across the web. The project, launched by Brain Pickings’  Maria Popova, seeks to “Keep the rabbit hole of the Internet open by honoring discovery.”

Standards exist for literary citation, image attribution, and scientific reference, but beyond hyperlinking, there’s no standardized way to denote the “attribution of discovery” in our information economy. That’s what Popova and crew want to change with the Curator’s Code.

So how does it work? There are two symbols to use when blogging, Tweeting or other online publishing:

1. ᔥ A sideways “S” figure, which represents an original source (think of it as the the equivalent as a retweet or “via” on Twitter)
2. ↬ A looped arrow, which represents a “hat tip” (as in, “here’s the source who alerted me to this thing I’m linking to” or “here’s the original inspiration for this spinoff idea I had”)

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Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up is discussion about ways businesses can make effective use of the new Facebook Timeline; whether geography should play a role in social media strategy; how to know when it’s time for a social media assessment; and the risks involved with not having community management.

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