Social Media Lunchbox #2 – Recap

Written by: Mahdi Gharavi

We had our second biweekly “Social Media Lunchbox” today. The theme this time was twofold: Blogging, and Social Media’s Impact and its Makeup.

Blogging

I recall my first interaction with blogs (those were the days, back when the millennium was but a wee infant). It was all the rage. You weren’t quite cool enough unless you had a giant “Join my Xanga!” at the bottom of your AIM profile. And why wouldn’t we want to follow the exciting life of high school and college age kids, updating us on their life’s minute-by-minute details, like how they accidentally brushed their teeth twice this morning.

But it wasn’t long before this impression wore off. Over time, I realized the value of some blogs, and it hit me: “this whole Social Media thing didn’t die two years ago when I said it would.” I now find myself following several blogs, for politics, tech news, sports, current events, eLearning (both the subject and the activity), design insights/inspiration, entertainment, and yes, even keeping up with my friends’ lives.

Tech Crunch is one of the web’s leading technology news blogs

Web Designer Depot is one of the largest and fastest growing design blogs

So with all the value that blogs can bring into our lives, it’s a natural progression for the corporate to enter the blogosphere.

Corporate blogging

What is corporate blogging? If blogs are a way to provide news, information, entertainment, and (the bottom line) value to its readers, then a corporate blog does just that, while helping the entity reach its organizational goals. Very often, corporate blogs are written by a group of authors rather than only one (you are viewing a prime example in this blog).

Like personal blogs, the assets of a corporate blog include the authors’ opinions, points of view, voices, and personalities. In a corporate setting, however, there are many serious implications one must be aware of. After all, there is more at stake. There is always the matter of confidential information, and content that is sensitive, or just inadvisable to post, due to the potential it may have for negatively impacting the organization, its members, partners, or clients. To combat this, when many bloggers wish to recall an incident, they have taken the path of posting without specificity. They opt instead to give the readers the general gist of what took place, without releasing any sensitive details. It is generally best to refrain from specificity whenever one is dealing with clients, products, security risks, and touchy issues.

Some organizations set up corporate blogging policies to prevent catastrophes. Policies, however, need enforcement. But with internet content, enforcement is nearly impossible. Once material gets out, there is no telling how far it can go, even if the organization removes the sensitive information. It is most effective for organizations to set up blogging guidelines, and to make sure to communicate those guidelines to everyone responsible for posting on the blog. Said communication needs to convey the importance of the guidelines as well.

Social Media’s Impact and its Makeup

Impact

So we all know the power of social media to make the world a smaller place (see “Concepts covered” and video). In this meeting, we continued on that theme and covered a few more topics:

• Before/After Social Media

Before: When you bought software, you are buying into a brand, buying into the company that produced it.

Now: When you buy software (or download it for free, in the case of most open source software), you are buying into a community.

This video from Common Craft illustrates this principle quite well-not to mention, it’s a great intro into what social media is all about:

• Citizen Journalism:

Social media is giving everyone a shot at being a journalist. While people in the social media and Web 2.0 world had been talking about this for quite a while, citizen journalism came to the forefront of national attention when it became the most reliable form of information in breaking the Hudson river plane landing.

• Strength of Weak Ties

It is usually the people we know with three degrees of separation that can add the most potential to our lives. This is independent of social media, but by being cognizant of this rule and applying it to social media, one can reap significant rewards.

To give a good segue from the impact of social media (and Web 2.0)  into its makeup, take a look at this video (which in a way covers both) by Dr. Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University:

Makeup of Social Media

How did social come about? It really happened when the old computer model was broken, and a new, more dynamic and interactive model came about. The video above highlights this point pretty well. This video will also show the technological breakthroughs that led to what we call the new media, or social media, or web 2.0.

The last part of our (un)meeting consisted of a demonstration on the components of social media (technology, multimedia, blogs, microblogs, wikis, forums, etc.). Todd Pitt, our Social Media Manager presented an experiential map that broke each down into a description, and examples. It is much more extensive than anything that I can put into one post. Perhaps if you ask him nicely…

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