Tag Archive for 'Social Media'

Pioneers and such

Published on April 27, 2009 in Other. Closed Tags: Internet, Josh Harris, Movie, Ondi Timoner, Privacy, Social Media, We Live In Public.

The keywords Facebook and Twitter in the short movie abstract caught my attention and made me pick “We Live In Public” as one film I wanted to see out of the great program at the IFF Boston last weekend.

The documentary is a portrait about Josh Harris, a visionary maniac so to say (cf. luvvy) and possibly

the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.

Having made millions of dollars in the dot.com bubble, he created and funded eccentric art projects like Quiet: We Live in Public, a colony with 100 people living under 24-hour surveillance in a bunker in New York City.

People want 15 min of fame, every day.

The master tapes filmed in the bunker must be a paradise for psychologists and sociologists and probably deserve a place in a university library. The bunker is a very brutal, exaggerated and compressed picture of the effects of sacrificing privacy and sharing your life with literally everybody. That part of the documentary raises the question for me why do we want to share our personal information on commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace. What do we get in return? Targeted advertising and hundreds of connections to people you barely know, is that it?

I especially like the quote

Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That we own.

of Josh Harris. A principle of the bunker in 1999, but I guess it still can be easily applied to many Web 2.0 business models nowadays.

“We Live In Public” is a truly fascinating documentary and clearly one of my movie recommendations for 2009. Go watch it!

Stuck on Facebook

Published on January 3, 2008 in Tech. Closed Tags: Facebook, Marketing, Privacy, Social Media, Web 2.0.

How cool is that?

Facebook asks you to import contact data from almost any popular email provider. As for the other direction, getting your contact data out of Facebook again, they aren’t quite as liberal as tech geek blogging celebrity Robert Scoble found out:

Why do this?

I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

2008 will bring us a lot more superb stories about social networks I guess. Monetizing the social graph has just begun. Personally I’ve observed myself withdraw information and increase privacy settings on some services. Until it becomes clearer what social network marketers have in mind, I’ll be more careful with personal information.

We are hip!

Published on July 16, 2007 in Geotech and Other. Closed Tags: Bobo, GeoRSS, LBS, Mapping, Places, Social Media, Tupalo, Vienna, Web 2.0.

Today I’ve found a solution how to stay up to date where all the young hip people are going out in Vienna: it’s easy, just follow the “bobo” tag on Tupalo!

Tupalo is a Vienna based mapping-”Stuff in your Neighborhood”-start-up, a social networking site where people can easily pin-point their favorite spots on a map, rate and review them and share experiences. I started liking it mainly because it reminded me of a couple of nice places I went once, but for some reasons forgot about them and never came back again. So Tupalo is responsible for my quite long wanna-go-again list.

Among other features users can subscribe to all kinds of feeds on Tupalo. What I did to catch up with the local hip crowd is to subscribe to the bobo-RSS-feed. Since Tupalo is a mapping application, the RSS feed is of course GeoRSS flavored and can be placed immediately on a map. Each time a new hot bobo venue pops up in Vienna, I’ll get informed what and where it is right away! Great!

Experimental politics

Published on April 22, 2007 in Other. Closed Tags: Austria, ÖVP, ÖVPParteitag07, Blogging, Marketing, Politics, PR, Salzburg, Social Media, Web 2.0.

Austria’s conservative peoples party invited a handful bloggers to cover the annually party convention. Obviously not more than a PR experiment, but an interesting one, and, frankly, one I wouldn’t have expected from that side of the political landscape.

Besides inviting bloggers, the party will be posting videos on YouTube and photos to Flickr, making friends on MySpace and even is represented in Second Life. Seems like they got some social media budget to play with.

Politicians writing blogs, doing podcast, vlogs or generally participating personally in Web 2.0 (to name the buzzword) are nothing new. As one could observe during US elections those are quite powerful methods to create awareness. At the same time it must be handled carefully. Social media is controlled by the people, beyond the influence of PR departments or press agencies. Once the wrong message is out it can’t be controlled any more and, as we know, bad news are spreading fast, much faster than good news.

Since social media popularity in Europa isn’t as high as in the US, there is still some room for (safe) experiments left, like this one of the peoples party. Blogs surely offer a clever possiblity to reach certain audiences, still a small but increasing target group (as far as I know blogs are currently read by bloggers in the first place) and partly acting as multiplicators.

So what does it mean to invite known and rather popular bloggers instead of advising the own press department to set up and maintain a blog?

The invited bloggers can’t be said to be conservative or traditional peoples party followers. They simply had the opportunity to watch the convention, presentations and speeches (from the best press table btw) and blog about it, or not, don’t if they were asked to write at least a minimum of words on their blogs.

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
(Brendan Behan)

The result of that experiment is mainly a controversial discussion about the party, speeches, concepts, etc. in the blogosphere. Even a post titled “7 reasons why I will not vote for this party” from one of the invited bloggers showed up.

Inviting guest bloggers were in that case quite a good option: the posts are not directly seen as marketing activity and therefore leave a more honest impression than other initiatives. It doesn’t really matter if the posts are positive or negative. Suddenly blog readers receive an entire stream of posts about the peoples party. Posts which trigger follow-ups (like this post), lead to discussions within the blogosphere and create even more awareness about the party. Hey, otherwise I never ever would’ve thought about or even mentioned the party convention.

After all, I think it was a very clever move.