Valdis Krebs just wrote a great blog post about his strategy of maximizing his Twitter network efficiency. We all know, the more people you are following on Twitter, the more difficult it gets to keep in touch with all of them. Most often you are reducing your network size by selectively reading about and replying […]
Which companies are using social media like blogs, social communities, internet forums or video/picture sharing for their marketing efforts? The first lists of case studies are being published right now on various blogs: Peter Kim has a long list with over 300 brands’ social media efforts. Then there are many case studies if you take […]
In 1952 Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn published their seminal work “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions”. They provided a systematic overview of 164 definitions of this anthropological key concept. I did not find as much definitions of social media and furthermore the differences between definitions social media are far smaller than the […]
There is some kind of a social media bubble. Not as much in a financial sense as in a conceptual sense. If you’re (over)using Friendfeed, Twitter, WordPress, Wikipedia etc. you slowly begin to believe that this is the world. Maybe a bit larger than Silicon Valley, but no more than a global village. Many Startup […]
Ben Parr is asking on Mashable: “Are social media jobs a fad or are they here to stay?” My answer would be: yes and no (that’s a quite common way for sociologists to answer complex questions like this). Why yes? Because social media managers, analysts etc. are on the right side of the current change […]
The crucial difference between old mass media and new social media lies in the network magic, services like Friendfeed are able to perform. One thing should immediately be evident if you’re using the FFSixDegree tool I coded yesterday: the real power of Friendfeed as a communication infrastructure is its network effect. Even if you are […]
Usually we think it’s this way: We are the users and we’re using social media like blogs, Wikipedia, Friendfeed or Twitter. But what if we put it exactly the other way round? Sometimes reversing the perspective gives a clearer view. So, I propose that in addition to us using social media, social media is using […]
Niklas Luhmann, the famous German sociologist who popularized sociological systems theory, distinguished mass media from other media by the fact that there is no interaction among the participants. This interaction is more or less explicitely locked out by technical means. And in the few cases, where there really is this kind of interaction – think […]