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Contact

By: Tateru Nino

Anecdotally, the more useful a platform is for holding a conversation, the less likely people are to accept friend-requests or return follows.

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Conversationally speaking

By: Tateru Nino

Somehow, businesses have gotten the notion that ‘having a conversation with your market’ is about using media to talk more.

Last I looked, that was called PR.

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Social richness

By: Tateru Nino

Isn’t the point of social media to be able to connect and listen to people who are beyond or outside the group that is defined by your existing relationships, blood ties, marriages, workplace, and whatever assorted dark pacts?

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Talking about your brand

By: Tateru Nino

The most important statements people are making about your brand, especially in social media like Twitter, Plurk and Facebook don’t mention your brand by name. It might be mentioned before, or after, but the key points that you really want to be hearing rarely have your brand-name in them.

Unless you’re already a part of the conversation, you’re missing the most important statements that your market is making about you.

Social networking narcissism

By: Tateru Nino

The WSJ carries a piece called How Facebook Ruins Friendships. The author writes,

Like many people, I’m experiencing Facebook Fatigue. I’m tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes, posting quirky, sometimes nonsensical one-liners or tweeting their latest whereabouts. (“Anyone know a good restaurant in Berlin?”)

It’s attributed to narcissism, and they wish our friends would stop boring us all with this trivial stuff.

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A number of virtual environments are fighting for mainstream acceptance and popularity. Yet those same environments often select names for their users that then need explaining and encourage the mainstream to look askance.

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Whether it’s an open-source project, crowdsourcing, or distributed computing efforts like BOINC, there’s basically one golden rule for success. Break that rule, and – at best – the results will be substandard. Usually the project will fail entirely.

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Marketing intelligence firm Pear Analytics found that 40% of the tweets flowing on the site were about someone eating a sandwich or some other “pointless babble,” and 37% were parts of conversations.“ – Information Week.

Well, wake up and smell the culture. Twitter, virtual environments, television, radio, water-cooler conversations, blogs, Facebook walls … this is who we are, honey. That’s the susurration of culture, the sounds of our societies being themselves.

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Expressive media

By: Tateru Nino

Social media is, fundamentally, expressive media, although expressive media includes things that aren’t social media per-se (like virtual environments, for example).

Expressive media is interesting, because it shows us who we are (for good or ill), as a species.

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