Video on Anthropology, YouTube & other Social Media

I’ve been meaning to post this up for a few months now, but somehow it got sidetracked until now. It’s a video by Mike Wesch, who is an anthropology professor at Kansas State University. I watched it for the second time today and realized that EVERYONE interested in social media, from any perspective (marketing, technology, sociology, law, etc…) should watch this.

 

Anthropology, sociology and the psychology of humans, have all been subjects that fascinated me ever since I can remember. While I may have gotten my degree in business, most of my private reading revolved around these topics. Perhaps that’s why I’m so passionate about social media and how we can use it to improve government and society. Videos like this remind me why I write this blog, why I am involved in this community, and why I love spreading this viral knowledge to others. We are in the process of re-constructing the very nature of human social interaction and community building.  This goes way beyond technology. In fact, as I often mention in my workshops, technology is simply the enabler. Anyone can use this stuff, not just the geek next door. Technology is no longer a barrier. It will be interesting to see how all of this evolves as we begin to be overwhelmed with content and the need to filter based on relevancy. Will we slowly regress back to controlled dissemination of content? 

How Matthew Harding engaged the world…

Who is Matthew Harding? If you haven’t come across him yet online, you probably soon will. Building on the social concept of the Free Hugs video, Matthew has danced his way around the world, and then some. After posting his original Where the hell is Matt? video on YouTube in 2005 (viewed by millions), Matthew garnered the attention a major sponsor, Stride gum who then helped him release this new video (filmed in HD). Once you finish watching it, be sure to view his presentation explaining how he did it. Note the use of social media.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

My July Social Media Digest

Rather than continue letting my list of “things to blog about” grow this month, I have decided to compile everything into a single blog post.  Some items are new, others are old but still relevant. Here they are in absolutely no order:

• Facebook Lexicon: This is a great tool to follow language trends on Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers. Play around with it, it’s a great tool to add to your social media monitoring. When I compared “Harper” and “Dion” to gauge for political discussion popularity, this is what I got:

• Microdonations – GlobalGiving: I’m sure the concept of microdoantions is familiar to most of you by now, especially with the recent success of Barack Obama using this approach for fundraising. That being said, the non-political , social activism world has adopted the concept of microdonations with tremendous success as well. The GlobalGiving website lets individuals easily choose their cause and immediately make a small donation directly to the source.
• Rapleaf: Great tool for determining someone’s online reputation. I have thought about creating something like this for a while now, but it looks like they beat me to it. It’s far from perfect at this point, but I think the main idea is to be able to come up with an overall reputation score based on an individual’s online activity (where privacy settings are turned off). Standardization is going to be a big challenge of course.
• YouTube Annotations: A YouTube has added a feature that allows its users to add interactive commentary to their videos during playback. Very neat feature with lots of potential for 2-way public sector/non-profit marketing tactics. For example, imagine a MADD drunk driving video or second hand smoking effects video, where users choose how the story proceeds through multiple choices. This way the desired target audience can be a part of the message and actually think about how they would act in a similar situation.
• Google Lively: A neat little mini-3d world application where you can create your own 3d virtual environment in seconds. I have embedded my room , which is pretty abysmal , however I did spend about 30 seconds on it. That being said, the applicability of this in our industry will eventually be significant. Browse around some of the other rooms created on the site and notice the amount of visitors at any given moment on the more popular ones. You can mash-up items and integrate rss feeds into your room. Have a look at the Latinos Del Mundo Room, which has a plasma screen with user-specified YouTube videos playing on it. Once all the technology barriers are eliminated, this sort of thing will eventually be the website of the future. It already is for many organizations on SecondLife.

• AideRSS: This tool is simply brilliant. When RSS feed readers/news aggregators first came out, I considered them a godsend. Everything nicely came into one spot and I even managed to eliminate a good chunk of my email newsletters! The only problem was that over time , my list of rss feeds became quite large. As a result, keeping up with my favourite blogs and news sites became harder to do each day. Along comes AideRSS, a tool that analyzes the feeds you subscribe to and lists individual posts in order of popularity rather than in reverse chronological order. What does this mean? Basically, it allows you to focus your reading time on only the most important posts that came out since your last check. After all, the 80/20 rule applies to blog posts as well!
• Recent Economist Intelligence Unit Report: This 2007 study looks at the most recent Web 2.0 trends amongst major businesses and industries. The chart below shows how mash-ups have moved into first-place in terms of business applicability.

Ok, well that about clears up my little yellow Windows Vista Sidebar widget that I use to make notes. More coming soon…