Jul 26 2011

Timberlake To Gaga: Hollywood Courts Social Media

by Beyond-TV • Social Media 0

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When you think of Bono or Lady Gaga, the term “Silicon Valley entrepreneur” hardly springs to mind.

For now, at least. The U2 frontman and pop sensation join Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher among the growing ranks of celebrities who, rather than employ their star power to hawk consumer products, are increasingly driving high-tech investments.

Hollywood has always held a certain fascination for the monied elite, from Wall Street bankers to Middle Eastern oil sheiks. Now, it seems Hollywood is returning the favor and dabbling in a bit of capital resource-allocation of its own.

Timberlake made waves in late June when he bought a stake in ailing social network Myspace alongside digital advertising company Specific Media. The actor-singer will play a crucial role in revitalizing the web company.

“We live in a world of brands,” said Howard Bragman, a public relations executive and founder of the strategic media agency Fifteen Minutes. “A handful of smart celebrities and their reps realize that all the areas where they can flex their marketing muscle are financial opportunities.”

Savvy celebs are trying to fuse entertainment and social networking, closing the gap between performer and fan. That may well be the key to future success, according to Bragman.

Lady Gaga — perhaps the most visible star on the social web — teamed up with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures to invest in Backplane, slated to launch in the last week of August. Backplane — a sort of social network for rabid fans of everything from football to, yes, pop music — has raised over $1 million in funding.

“Celebrities, above all others, have to understand the importance of new media in order to survive. Social media platforms, in particular, are where celebrity careers either thrive or decline,” said Johanna Blakley, managing director at the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center.

“Timberlake’s bet on Myspace is a risky one, but it signals an acknowledgment that buying into the entertainment business these days means buying into new media, not old media.”

BEST AND WORST

Gaga has a double-digit percent slice of Backplane and a seat on the board, according to CEO and Founder Matthew Michelsen, who says he represents the pop diva in her Silicon Valley tech ventures.

The best way to understand Backplane is to look to football fans Michelsen calls facepainters — the ones in the stands. The site goes beta in late August among Gaga’s fans, whom she calls “little monsters,” according to Michelsen.

“You don’t know if those people are the president of a Fortune 500 company or the UPS man,” Michelsen said. “We want to provide a platform for them to interact around their love. It could be their favorite football team. It could be the little monsters. It could be Harley Davidson riders.”

Timberlake has been active in start-ups like Apple iPhone gaming app developer Tapulous and Particle, which develops micro-video application Robo.tv, through the digital investment wing of his business empire, Tennman Digital.

With Myspace, however, the former ‘N Sync member is not just putting his face on a product or bankrolling a venture. He gets an office, a staff of six, and a leadership role, according to Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook.

Timberlake isn’t the only Hollywood royalty either making a serious push into technology.

Ashton Kutcher, who got his start in “Dude, Where’s My car?”, has made a string of seemingly savvy investments from location-based social web Foursquare to Flipboard apps for the iPad. Most recently, his investment in Airbnb — a website that matches travelers looking for a cheap room with homeowners looking to rent out — won endorsement when venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led a $112 million round of financing for the fast-growing company.

But while some celebrities may be eager to develop their brand by demonstrating boardroom savvy, critics say a few investments may have been misplaced.

There “arguably might be another tech bubble,” said Christopher Smith, director of USC’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. “Once your shoe-shine person starts talking about stock deals, it’s time to sell.”

Irish rocker Bono of U2 fame is one of five co-founders of Elevation Partners, alongside former Apple CFO Fred Anderson and Silver Lake Partners co-founder Roger McNamee. He has an undisclosed amount of his own money invested in the fund.

But in 2010, Bono was dubbed the “worst investor in America” by blog 24/7 Wall St, and his firm’s investments in Palm — since taken over by Hewlett Packard — Forbes Inc and Move.com have been roundly panned.

“Not every association works, but in the best cases they raise the profiles of the projects they are involved with, entice other investors and inspire consumers,” Bragman said.

“The key is authenticity. They have to choose associations that are credible and organic if they wish to succeed.”

Source: Reuters

Jun 14 2011

How Twitter’s #Hashtag Is Changing Communication

by Beyond-TV • Social Media 0

Charlie Sheen’s meltdown took many forms: a cocaine-fueled rampage in a New York hotel room, an erratic radio rant, a vulgar one-man comedy tour. But his biggest contribution to current culture may have been more subtle.

With a simple Twitter phrase, #winning, known in the parlance of social media as a hashtag, Sheen underscored one of the newest ways technology has changed how we communicate.

Hashtags, words or phrases preceded by the # symbol, have been popularized on Twitter as a way for users to organize and search messages. So, for instance, people tweeting about Rep. Anthony D.

Weiner might add the hashtag #Weinergate to their messages, and those curious about the latest developments in the scandal could simply search for #Weinergate. Or Justin Bieber fans might use #Bieber to find fellow Beliebers.

But already, hashtags have transcended the 140-characters-or-less microblogging platform and have become a new cultural shorthand, finding their way into chat windows, email and face-to-face conversations.

This year on Super Bowl Sunday, Audi broadcast a new commercial featuring a hashtag, #ProgressIs, that flashed on the screen and urged viewers to complete the “Progress Is” prompt on Twitter for the chance to win a prize. Then, in Canada’s English-language federal election debate in April, Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party, set the Canadian Twitterverse aflame when he attacked Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s crime policies, calling them “a hashtag fail.”

And when Chris Messina, a developer advocate at Google, wanted to introduce two friends over email, he wrote #Introduction in the subject line. No need, he explained, for a long preamble when a quick, to-the-point hashtag would do.

Then again, Messina is no ordinary Twitter user. The self-described “hash godfather,” he officially invented the Twitter hashtag in August 2007, when he sent out a Twitter message suggesting that the pound symbol be used for organizing groups on Twitter. (For example, if attendees at the South by Southwest music and technology conference all add #sxsw to their messages, they can more easily search and sort themselves on Twitter.) Though the idea took awhile to catch on, it quickly snowballed – on Twitter and offline.

“At first, people who weren’t using Twitter were saying: ‘What’s this pound sign? Why am I seeing it?’ ” said Ginger Wilcox, a founder of the Social Media Marketing Institute. “I would say 2010 was really the year of the hashtag.”

Soon, people began using hashtags to add humor, context and interior monologues to their messages – and everyday conversation. As Susan Orlean wrote in a New Yorker blog post titled “Hash,” the symbol can be “a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.”

“Because you have a hashtag embedded in a short message with real language, it starts exhibiting other characteristics of natural language, which means basically that people start playing with it and manipulating it,” said Jacob Eisenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in computational linguistics. “You’ll see them used as humor, as sort of meta-commentary, where you’ll write a message and maybe you don’t really believe it, and what you really think is in the hashtag.”

So, for instance, a messages that reads “3 hour delay on Amtrak #StimulusDollarsAtWork,” likely implies that the user does not, in fact, think that their stimulus dollars are hard at work.

Hashtags then began popping up outside of Twitter, in emails, chat windows and text messages. When Adam Sharp was hired as Twitter’s Washington liaison, he said he received a number of emails wishing him well – and, of course, #congrats.

In a time-crunched world, the hashtag proved itself a useful shorthand. “If Twitter is a compression of ideas and a compression of expression, then hashtags are just an extension of that, so of course it bleeds over into other forms of communication , because our time is compressed, our thoughts are compressed and our space is compressed,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. “In Washington, it’s a very happy extension of an acronym-happy culture.”

Using a hashtag is also a way for someone to convey that they’re part of a certain scene. “You kind of have to be in-the-know,” Messina said. “So it’s one of those jokes where you’re like, ‘Oh, I see what you did there, because you’re on Twitter and I’m on Twitter.’ ”

To deftly deploy a hashtag, after all, you need to understand the culture, said Susan Herring, a professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University-Bloomington.

“It’s initially used self-consciously in a way that says, ‘I’m on Twitter, I’m cool, I know that this is used on Twitter so I’m using this someplace else,’ so it’s conveying a meta-message that you are a Twitter-savvy person,” Herring said, adding that it’s “almost as if there are air quotes around it.”

This is not your father’s social media, hashtags seem to say. “If I was talking to my grandmother, I wouldn’t say, ‘I’m having a hashtag bad day’ because she wouldn’t understand,” said Matt Graves, a Twitter spokesman. “She’d be like, ‘Why is there a number there?’ My mom would be like, ‘I’m number winning.’ If my mom was trying to be hip, that’s the kind of thing that would happen.”

Hashtags have also made their way into the vernacular.

“Because of the use of hashtags, you can use one word to describe something, and it’s kind of a mental hashtag,” Wilcox said. “So it’s like, ‘Awkward!’ or ”Winning!’ And yes, definitely ‘Fail.’ For that one I often hear ‘Pound fail.’ ”

Jane Olson, the senior vice president of marketing and brand strategy for Oxygen Media, said her network began using hashtags in their advertising in late 2010. “It’s a nod to ‘we know you, and we live in your world,’ but it’s also a way to get a conversation started in our advertising,” she said, adding, “The other funny thing that’s been happening is that people around the office have started to talk in hashtags – ‘Hashtag sorry I’m late,’ or ‘Hashtag bad day.’ ”

There is also the unofficial Hashtag Mafia, people who flash one another the hashtag sign – crossing their index and middle finger of one hand over the same two fingers of their other hand to create a physical hashtag. #IronicGesture #WeHope

“I have pictures of people actually using the actual hashtag symbol, and it’s like they’re flashing a gang sign, but they’re doing a hashtag,” Wilcox said. “That gets really geeky.”

Messina takes a more philosophical, albeit lighthearted, view. “The great thing about hashtags is that anyone can join the Hashtag Mafia by using hashtags,” he said. “You’re not really in the mafia unless you do air hashtags.”

May 26 2011

Does Your Social Networking Profile Say Too Much?

by Beyond-TV • Social Media 0

Research reveals what personal information Facebook users disclose, and who discloses the most.

When communicating over the internet people don’t feel the same pull towards social conformity as elsewhere. Online, people cast aside their inhibitions, worry less about the consequences of their actions and let it all hang out. Sometimes literally.

Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect and its upshot can be seen everywhere.

For example, in online support groups people find they can discuss issues they would never broach face-to-face.
In blog posts and comments people spew invective on matters political, religious and personal. On social networking sites they list home numbers, friends, even add pictures of themselves blind drunk. Yet, meet them in person and they’d be reluctant to volunteer their own name.

For good or ill, people act more freely online.

Since 700 million people worldwide are now on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, what does this mean for our privacy, safety and for how we are viewed online?

What people disclose on Facebook

To make a start at answering these emerging questions, we examined how much Facebook users disclose and what types of people are likely to disclose the most.

The researchers examined a sample of 400 randomly selected Facebook users to see what types of information people displayed to all comers. Here are the percentages of people who disclosed information in some of the categories:

Poke: 99%
Mini-feed: 98%
Profile picture: 92% (although not always just of themselves)
Friends viewable: 88% (i.e. visitors can see who someone’s friends are)
Birthday: 88%
Wall: 83%
Photo albums: 70%
Relationship status: 63%
Sexual orientation: 55%
Favourite movies: 50%
…and from the bottom half of the table:

Email address: 43%
Favourite books: 41%
Job: 33%
About me: 31%
Degree: 9%
Mobile phone number: 5%
Former name: 5%
Home address: 4%
Land phone: 2%

Who discloses the most?

When the researchers analysed the demographics, they found that top of the online disclosing leagues were single people, who disclosed more sensitive information than those in a relationship or those who didn’t specify their relationship status.

This ties in with the finding that compared to face-to-face daters, online daters disclose more personal information, more quickly. The online disinhibition effect seems to accelerate disclosure between people.

They also found that younger people tended to disclose more online while older people were more cautious, as might be expected.

Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, men and women did not differ in the amount disclosed online. The research generally finds that women disclose freely to each other while men keep schtum about their private lives. Online, though, perhaps men feel less pressure to conform to social norms.

Privacy issues

The fact that people disclose so much information about themselves on Facebook shows the online disinhibition effect in action. What this research reveals is that young people and those looking for connections online are likely to disclose the most information.

Despite these debates often being couched in terms of fear of others and transgressions of privacy, what’s often forgotten is the simple fact that self-disclosure is the first step towards intimacy, something we all need. Still, it’s a potential vulnerability that relationship seekers might bear in mind.

Source: Psyblog

May 12 2011

Facebook Etiquette

by Beyond-TV • Social Media 0

An Updated Guide To Keeping Things Classy in Cyberspace.

We can all use some some common sense and courteousness to maintain decorum (avoid drama) and generally keep things classy.

1. When a friend has tagged you in a status, it is customary to like it, regardless of whether it’s actually funny or not.

2. It is unacceptable to like one’s own status or photo, unless a) one is trying to be ironic, or b) one is trying to look like a self-important douche.

3. If you choose to have a long conversation with one or more persons on a status, be prepared for everyone who liked said status or commented on it in passing to hate you forever.

4. It is impolite to wait more than 24 hours to reply to a wall post or message; if one waits longer than that in order to create the illusion of having a life, keep in mind that no one is buying it (no one else has a life, either).

5. Since Facebook’s founding, poking has evolved from meaning “Hey there, you!” to “I just got a facebook and I’m probably old; aren’t I hip?” Therefore, if one wants to be friendly or flirtatious over Facebook, poking is no longer the best option to attract the attention of your heart’s desire.

6. It is perfectly acceptable to link one’s Facebook account to one’s Tumblr. However, keep in mind that posting 6,000 things a day to Tumblr and thus blowing up all your friends’ news feeds is grounds for de-friending.

7. Remember: your status box is not your therapy couch.

8. It’s only when one doesn’t own up one’s Facebook creeping that one is creepy.

9. Do not reply “Yes” to an Event RSVP unless you are abolsutely 100% positive you will be attending. However, if an event even seems mildly interesting, it is acceptable to reply “Maybe”.

10. Pick and choose your song lyric statuses. Pick and choose

Note: Remember, watch what you say about yourself online, you never know who’s taking notes.

Source: NYULocal

May 3 2011

Facebook: 7 Highly Effective Habits

by Beyond-TV • Social Media Comments Off

Love it or loathe it, Facebook is everywhere, and will continue to be everywhere as the film describing its genesis—The Social Network

To help you cope, here are 7 research-based tips for total Facebook domination. If you don’t use it, these should at least help you pepper Facebook-related conversations with compelling observations from the psychological research.

1. Get between 100 and 300 friends

It doesn’t look good to have too many Facebook friends, or too few.

It has been suggested that humans can maintain relationships with 150 people. Facebooker’s social attractiveness peaked at around this number. Go much above 300 or below 100 and social attractiveness starts to drop.

2. Court attractive friends

Make sure your friends, or the people who post on your ‘wall’, are good-looking. Attractive friends boosted the perceived attractiveness of participant’s profiles.

Keep the uggos away, unlike the offline world, it won’t make you look better in comparison.

3. Understand the 7 motivations

If you need to lure more people in as Facebook friends, it’s handy to understand its attraction.

The basic motivations for using Facebook:

• Connecting with old or distant friends.
• Social surveillance (see what old friends are up to, but without talking to them).
• Looking up people met offline.
• Virtual people watching.
• Status updating and content.

4. Don’t let your partner use Facebook

Users who spent more time on Facebook were more jealous of their partners. This is probably because they are finding out things about their partner—who they know and where they’ve been—which, in the days before social networking, could have been kept quiet.

So, don’t let your partner see your Facebook profile. Unless you want them to be jealous. In which case, carry on.

5. Guard your privacy

Privacy is a big, controversial topic on Facebook because many people’s social networking profiles do say too much.

Young, single people were particularly likely to disclose sensitive information about themselves. It’s the online disinhibition effect writ large. But, according to Boyd (2010), more young people are using the privacy settings than a year ago, so the message is getting through.

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: watch what you say about yourself online, you never know who’s taking notes.

6. Display your real self

Remarkably, you can often trust Facebook profiles; Facebook profiles generally reflected their owner’s actual rather than idealised selves.

Facebook users may not personally know all their Facebook friends but they probably do like the movies, books and bands they claim to like.

7. Use Facebook to get a job

Because we move huge distances nowadays, away from home towns and old friends, it’s easy to lose contact with people who might be able to give us a leg up in life. Facebook to the rescue…

Facebook users had higher levels of ‘social capital’. In other words: people are using their Facebook contacts to get jobs or other opportunities.

See, Facebookers aren’t just surfing for photos of people they know and people they’d like to know, they’re building social capital.

At least, that’s the excuse I’ll be using from now on.

Source: PsyBlog

May 3 2011

How Schools Can Use Facebook to Build an Online Community

by Beyond-TV • Social Media 0

How Schools Can Use Facebook to Build an Online Community.

Apr 20 2011

Twitter: 10 Psychological Insights

by Beyond-TV • Social Media 2

Psychological research on Twitter reveals who tweets, how much, what they talk about and why.

There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves.

So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions?

Since Twitter didn’t exist until 2006, psychologists have had little chance to explore it, but some of the early research suggests a social network unlike those that came before.

Here are 10 favourite insights from this research, some less obvious than others.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a cross between a social network and a blog. The blog part is that users read and write 140 character ‘tweets’ which are largely public. The social network part is that people ‘follow’ each other then become part of each other’s Twitter conversations, they can also ‘retweet’ or retransmit other people’s messages to their own followers.

1. Twitter is like a game of broken telephone

Because messages are short and can be broadcast quickly and easily, Twitter can feel to its users like a fast-paced conversation. The difference from a normal conversation is that people are taking part in a whole range of different interactions. It’s like being at a party and talking to 10 different groups at the same time.

All sorts of processes that you would recognise from conversations are also going on in Twitter: much information is simply repeated (retweeted) but messages are corrupted over time, like a game of broken telephone (UK: Chinese whispers), as people re-evaluate, re-interpret or misinterpret the meaning of the original tweet.

But Twitter doesn’t always feel like a conversation as people use it in different ways. In the same way that talking isn’t always conversation, sometimes it’s a command, an expression of surprise or an aid to thought. In other words, Twitter isn’t just social, it has a big informational component, which we’ll come on to.

2. People join Twitter to follow their friends

Network analysis of Twitter users in the early days by Java et al. (2007) suggested that people join because their friends are already using it. The networks resembled those seen in the analysis of cell phone networks.

The huge number of users is just what we’ve come to expect from the internet: people can easily conform to the technological norm because services are often free, and it’s well-known that free is a special price we can’t resist. The number of users is less interesting than what people are using it for and why.

3. Most tweets are babble

While not academic research, some insight into what people are talking about on Twitter comes from an analytics company who categorised 2,000 tweets collected over one week. They fell into six categories:

Pointless babble: 41%
Conversational: 38%
Pass-along value: 9%
Self-promotion: 6%
Spam: 4%
News: 4%
What they call ‘pointless babble’ might better be called social pleasantries, social grooming or at least just babble. Like when someone says “How are you?” and you say “Fine.” It may be low-level, but it’s not pointless.

4. The average age is 31

The average (median) age for a Twitter user is 31, older than the median MySpace user who is 26, but younger than Facebook which is now 33. LinkedIn has the oldest users with the median being 39. Predictably the strongest growth in Twitter use is amongst those aged 18-24.

5. Men are Twitter leaders

Some suggestions of sex differences come from Heil & Piskorski (2009). They found that there were slightly more women than men on Twitter (55% women), but that, on average, men had 15% more followers than women, with men twice as likely to follow another man as they were a woman, and women 25% more likely to follow men. Both men and women, however, were found to tweet at the same rate.

This finding is unusual given that it’s normally women who are the focus of attention on social networks, from both other men and other women.

I’m always cautious about reporting sex differences and keen to point out that psychologically men and women are very similar. But perhaps there’s something about Twitter that, on average, fits slightly more with men.

6. 20 per cent are ‘informers’, 80 per cent are ‘meformers’

After examining 350 messages collected from Twitter, Naaman (2010) found two different types of user:

Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other users
Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about themselves.
Informers tended to have larger social networks, perhaps because they passed on more interesting things and weren’t talking about themselves all the time.

This split hints at the different ways that people use Twitter. It also suggests that the conversational aspects of Twitter may have been overstated. If 80% of users don’t reply to others then it’s not that social.

7. Trends are one-time and short-lived

Tweets on a particular topic (Twitter trends) rarely last longer than a week and usually no more than a few days. Most topics only trend once, then die, usually never to return. 85% of these trends are news-related.

Perhaps the reason for this is that trends, which are attached to the use of particular words or phrases, are often very specific.

8. Average tweet frequency is 1

The average (median) lifetime number of tweets for a Twitter user is 1 (Heil & Piskorski, 2009). This means most people who sign up are just following others or don’t use it at all. Once again, the power of ‘free’ and very low barriers to entry.

At the other end of the scale 10% of Twitter users contribute 90% of the tweets. This finding is unusual compared to other social networks where the use isn’t nearly so top-heavy. Heil & Piskorski note that in this respect Twitter is more like Wikipedia, which has a similar rate of top-heavy usage. Many but not all of the most-followed Twitter users are, unsurprisingly, celebrities.

This top-heavy usage reflects the fact that being interesting is a talent that not everyone can acquire (without relying on the halo effect of being famous that is). Occasionally, though, some manage the trick of being famous and quite interesting, e.g. Stephen Fry.

9. Existential angst can motivate users

Twitter is often uncharitably said to be perfect for our narcissistic age. It enables people to gather followers, talk about themselves, all without having to listen to anyone else.

A small study conducted by Qiu et al. (2010) has suggested that amongst the extroverted it really is existential angst that motivates tweeting. The same wasn’t found, though, for those who weren’t so extroverted.

Twitter is simply a fun toy that’s easy to use. It’s much easier than blogging, you can mess around, you don’t have to say much and it makes the web a little more homely. At the same time it’s not as obsessed as Facebook and other social networks with gathering and displaying huge amounts of information about you. It’s less social than Facebook, which people seem to like.

10. Twitter is less social and more informational

Support for the idea that Twitter is more informational and less social than other social networks comes from Johnson and Yang (2009) who found that people treat other Twitter users primarily as interesting information sources.

In this study people also gained the most gratification from information they had found through Twitter. The social aspect of it, however, participants didn’t find particularly gratifying, despite a positive expectation.

Network analysis also tends to play down the social aspects of the site. Twitter shows relatively low levels of reciprocity compared with other social networking sites. Only 22% of Twitter users have reciprocal links between them, compared with 68% on Flickr and 84% on Yahoo! 360.

Kwak et al. (2010) found that the average path length is 4.12 with 93.5% of people within 5 or fewer hops of everyone else. This is mostly because Twitter is dominated by a small number of celebrities, making many more big nodes than would be expected in a social network.

Future Twitter

Of course these are only the first insights emerging from the research and people are evolving new and interesting ways of using and analysing Twitter all the time.

Hughes and Palen (2009) looked at the use of Twitter in mass and emergency events. Tweets during two hurricanes and two political conventions suggested that people are increasingly using Twitter to share information with each other.

Here’s another way in which the informational nature of Twitter has come to the fore. Twitter is perfect for a crisis when information needs to be moved quickly and efficiently around social networks. Indeed researchers can detect emergency events like earthquakes by monitoring Twitter (Sakaki et al., 2010).

Twitter has also been used to measure the mood of the nation. Alan Mislove and colleagues collected 300 million tweets from the US, analysed their emotional content, and produced a ‘mood of the nation’ video. It shows how the emotional content of people’s tweets changes over the day (red is negative and green positive):

Interestingly their Twitter analysis backs up a finding covered previously that Monday is not the most depressing day of the week using a radically different method.

Twitter is even starting to be used by researchers as a health intervention (e.g. Young, 2009).

Source: PsyBlog