Looking into a murky crystal ball - social media

I’m finding myself more and more using the murky crystal ball as a metaphor for trying to peek into the [foreseeable] future – to predict breakout social-media names that might pose some sort of a threat to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. I think for many, particular those who own and/or are responsible for managing the marketing over the social media.

I think what is becoming obvious is the threat to companies that don’t fully commit to using the better known social-media platform and holdout for the next next new thing.

It doesn’t matter if we are running a restaurant, a recruitment company, or a law firm; we have to become good at [using] the platforms our customers are using, our employees are using, and what other people in related sectors are using. For restaurants for example, I think Twitter is probably the best platform positioned to drive traffic to their website and other social channels.  It’s much more timely and good for current events and conversations.

Potential guests are broadcasting their thoughts and crowd-sourcing their dining decisions more than ever before. 
Paul Barron, founder and chief executive of the Miami-based DigitalCoCo agency, which produces the Restaurant Social Media Index says Twitter is getting better at verticals and can potentially become more real-time for restaurants, like chatter boards, feedback systems and maybe even reservations. So restaurant brands are still figuring out how to leverage Twitter to its fullest.

And according to BTC Revolutions, a social-media consultancy restaurateurs are looking at the ratio of followers they have on Twitter versus fans they have on Facebook and see Facebook as the stronger tool to reach their audience when, in most cases, the reality is there are more people ‘Talking About’ or mentioning their brand on Twitter that they can directly reach in real time than they can on Facebook.”



As an example, on Facebook a brand can only “tag” or reply back to someone who has come to the page and left a comment. However, the brand can search Twitter for comments and engage any Twitter poster that has mentioned the brand.

Twitter allows you to have a two-way conversation with anyone, not just those that reach out to you.

LMG

Recently I received a text message which included the initialism LOL. Thankfully I’d encountered an LOL previously and understood the gesture :). Initialisms are of course formed from the initial letter or letters of several words or parts of words, but which is itself pronounced letter by letter. A good example is BBC for British Broadcasting Corporation.

SIC means "Latin sicut (just as) - apparent mistake

The use of initialisms has been popularized with the emergence of Short Message Systems (SMS). To fit messages into the 160-character limit of SMS or the 140 character limit of Twitter initialisms such as "LOL" have been popularized into the mainstream.

The use of  Initialisms is not necessarily a new fad. They were were used in Rome before the Christian era. For example, the official name for the Roman Empire, and the Republic before it, was abbreviated as SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). Inscriptions dating from antiquity, both on stone and on coins, use a lot of abbreviation and initialism to save room and work.

By the way it turns out the LMG stands for "Let Me Guess" and an Internet slang.

Titanic goes down on Twitter

Jack Dikian

April 2012

Titanic goes down on Twitter

As we know on the morning of April 15, 1912, the sinking of the Titanic the previous night shocked the world. That year was full of promise and the maiden voyage of the Titanic was a symbol of the advances mankind had made in the last few years. The ship was considered to have been so well constructed it was believed she could sustain any amount of damage and still remain afloat. Late on the night of April 14, 1912, the sinking of the Titanic proved this idea wrong in a horribly tragic way.

One hundred years on (this week) April 14, 2012, bells will toll from the three churches – St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica, St. Paul’s Anglican Church and St. George’s Round Church. These are the same churches whose bells first rang out when the first death ship returned to Canada on April 30, 1912. In Cape Race, Nfld., the closest landmass to the Titanic, emergency flares will be set off and a moment of silence held at 12:27 a.m. to mark the last time a distress call was received by the Marconi wireless system.

Also, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic will broadcast the Titanic’s original wireless transmissions in real time on Twitter. The hash tag for the 2012 real time account on Twitter is #TitanicMMA and communications will be tweeted from 11.55pm Newfoundland Standard Time on April 14 (12.55pm April 15 Sydney time) to mimic the time of communications.

Our Digital Legacy

Jack Dikian

July 2011

I was an early user of the Internet – only back in the dusty computer and physics labs of Sydney University the term Internet wasn’t yet invented. It was all about having UUCP access so that we can jump on the Usenet and look at newsgroups.

Newsgroups contained a great deal of content, albeit mostly of a technical nature and mostly text. Even from back then it occurred to me that much of what we were posting would have a presence, linger on servers distributed all over the world.

We are, after all, the first people in the history of the world to create vast online records of our lives. I say our lives because since the rise of the Internet (some 25 years) and more recent advent of social media (7 years) the internet has become seamlessly integrated with all our experiences, and more and more of our everyday life is being documented online.

For example, a quick look at Facebook’s stats tells us there are more than 750 million active users, 50% of them log on to Facebook in any given day and have 130 friends on average. Our lives, relationships, thoughts and opinions will surely fascinate future historians, sociologists, archaeologists and anthropologists studying the dawn of the digital age. The individual worth or contribution might be relatively small, but collectively, as a result of years of Internet activity, this becomes a significant.

At the same time people are beginning to think about their digital legacy. Those digital or virtual assets in the form of photographs, music, blogs, information, and other data that may be typically overlooked in terms of financial or monetary worth. Digital Legacy has been described as ‘the birth of a new industry' as new companies are being created to hold secure encrypted access to digital assets, to be released upon the proof of a users death.

In contrast to the legal, finical and officious aspects of digital legacy I’ve been wondering about what will happen to our Internet presence once we are gone. This is particularly true when we consider the rise of the phenomenon of social networking especially amongst the over 50’s is creating millions of personal archives.

So should someone notify our friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other services after our death. Would we want somebody to remove our material from those services, or to leave it there as a memorial? More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone.

Importantly, how long will our blogs, tweets and other material remain on the net if nobody removes them? History shows that even the most prominent technology companies can be rapidly overtaken by competitors or deserted by customers. It’s possible that some of our material might disappear along with the demise of our favorite platform. I grew up believing IBM would permeate our personal and professional lives for example.

Twitter

Whislt Twitter’s search only goes back a few days, every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. So there is a very good chance our tweets will be archived for many many years.