Soc Media

Chris Nerney over at our sister blog WebNewser was inspired by Mashable's article on community managers to draft his own summary of the qualities that make a good social media manager.

Perhaps the most fundamental, but probably least understood:

You understand technology, but you love people. Social media technology is a means to an end, that end generally being to communicate effectively, build trust and foster community. The quiet geek in the corner who wears a reddit t-shirt, knows how to use any Twitter application ever invented, but never interacts with co-workers, probably isn't the right person for the job.

We'd add that this also encapsulates why a lot of journalists have a hard time using social media effectively. Not because they're technology-loving geeks. But because they're news-loving geeks who are used to delivering a one-way broadcast of their findings and get a bit squeamish when they actually have to talk to, much less listen to, their readers.

(This isn't an original thought, btw. It was first expressed to us about a year ago by Guardian (UK) blogs editor Kevin Anderson who told us during an interview for a mediabistro.com article on new media use by journalists during the election that: "One of the problems that the mainstream media has had in [adopting] social media is that they just think it's about putting content out there on the Web. They don't realize that people expect a conversation.")

Read the rest of Nerney's piece at: 5 Qualities of a Good Social Media Manager

Forget reconfigured cars or later hours on New Year's Eve. BART has jumped aboard the social-media train (it's electric), partnering with location-based social-networking site Foursquare to encourage ridership.

The basis of Foursquare is that users earn points for checking in from various locations, eventually earning merit badges. (If you go someplace more than anyone else, you become the "Mayor" of that place.) It's essentially Eagle Scouting for the socially active digital set.

BART has gotten in on the action, offering its own badge to regular riders (who can become mayors of each of the system's 43 stations). For three months starting in November, it will randomly award $25 tickets to riders who have logged Foursquare check-ins from BART stations.

No knot-tying required.

From Tom Fishburne, The Management Cartoonist

Traditional print magazines might be imploding, but Wikia thinks there's opportunity in a new magazine-related arena: letting online communities create print-on-demand magazines from their collective work.

A new partnership with HP's MagCloud print-on-demand service, says Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales, will allow communities to "produce print magazines of higher quality, and of a more timely and customized nature than traditional print magazines can."

The idea diverges markedly from the conventional notion of what a magazine is. Wikia/MagCloud magazines aren't monthly publications distributed by publishing houses. Instead, the system allows Wikia users to create their own glossy, full-color magazines for personal use or mass distribution.

In a post on his personal blog, Wales says he's not sure how popular the Wikia MagCloud magazines will be, but he says he believes the potential is "huge."

"The traditional magazine has not kept pace with the needs of readers or advertisers," he writes. "It isn't that reading is going out of style... [and] it isn't that people don't care about quality.... The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster."

More, after the jump.

continued...

What's the best response when when someone uses a Bay Area company (Twitter) to spread false rumors about your untimely death?

Take to another Bay Area company's servers (YouTube) to counter.

Seems that someone mocked up a fake CNN page (see it here), which somehow got traction when it was seen and distributed via Twitter. (The page's creator, Chris Laganella, insists that he wasn't the one who put it out there.)

The best way to counter rumors of your demise: Make a legitimately funny video in which you refute it (and call Chris Laganella a douchebag).

Thanks, Zach Braff.

September Internet numbers are out, and it seems that nobody knows what to do with them.

Computerworld tells us that Twitter and Facebook "keep soaring," based on a year-over-year growth of 1,170 percent for Twitter over September '08, and an increase of 194 percent for Facebook over the same period. Twitter's market share jumped from .15 percent to 1.84 percent, while Facebook accounted fro 58.59 perecnt of all U.S. social network visits.

But then there's Mashable, who brings us a headlined story called "Facebook and Twitter's Growth Flattens."

Their point: Both sites have grown exponentially over the last year, but Twitter's expansion pretty much stopped in June. What might have been attributed to a slow summer hasn't picked up in September. Last month, Facebook's unique users grew by 1.96 percent, while Twitter's unique users fell by 0.17 percent. "Over the last three months," reports Mashable, "it has grown approximately three times less than in May alone."

What do all these numbers mean?

Probably that social media is still in its infancy, and that people can use the same statistics to deliver any message they want. Is Twitter over? Who knows? (Save, of course, for Miley Cyrus.) To judge by the amount of attention it gets in the blogosphere, however (a figure that's decidedly unscientific), it's just getting started.

One of the things we love about new technology is how it forces legal systems to suddenly confront entirely new situations.

Take this case, for example. According to the Tennessean, a 36-year-old woman apparently landed in jail for using Facebook to "poke" another woman who had some kind of restraining order against the first. According to the Sumner County General Sessions Court, that poke constituted a violation of an "order of protection," which had said "no telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner."

We are currently booking tickets for Henderson Hendersonville, TN, so we can have front row seats to watch the prosecutor and defense attorney debate whether a "poke" constitutes a means of contact or communication. We also want to see what kind of 13-year-old girls they bring in as expert witnesses.

(Via Mashable)

People really, really like Twitter. Most companies really, really don't.

A new study based on interviews with 1,400 CIOs reports that 54 percent of U.S. companies have banned workers from Twitter and other social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. Sixteen percent allow limited personal use, and 10 percent let employees do whatever the heck they want.

The number that's certain to change is the 19 percent of companies that allow social networking for business purposes. As more businesses discover the power of positive feedback, that number will undoubtedly climb.

The remaining 1 percent is either a rounding error or there are actually a handful of CIOs out there who still don't know what social media is.

Computerworld contrasts those numbers with a July study in which employee productivity was found to drop 1.5 percent at employess that allow unfettered access to Facebook -- which isn't so bad, really, considering that the same study said that 77 percent of those who have a Facebook account use it during business hours (up to two hours per day; one in 33 said they only access Facebook at work).

H/t DigiDave

BayNewser is reporting from the 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco.

Social media expert and president of the Social Media Group (and Bay Area resident) JD Lasica does a video interview with YouTube News chief (and "Video Free-for-All" panelist) Olivia Ma in between ONA09 sessions.