Well, here we are at Thursday and already the Thanksgiving leftovers are piling up. I hope you enjoyed the holiday last week, if you celebrated it. For those of you outside of the U.S., I hope you were able to get some work done thanks to some peace and quiet emanating from the U.S. workplace on Thursday and Friday.
So that gets us to this week's installment of Social Media Takeaways.
Blog Nothing DayFor one day - Monday, November 26, 2007 - we were asked to put down our keyboards and support the ongoing writers strike by not blogging. I'm happy to say I did my part, and then some. This is my first post since last Friday. But was this really an effective statement? Can you really prove a negative?
- SMT: To me, it smacked of the urban legend about boycotting gas for a day. I think a much more beneficial approach would have been to ask people to write about the strike or link to a site supporting the Writers' Guild.
Where to begin? Through its new program, Facebook is putting some of your online purchase history into its newsfeed. If you want a nice recap and implications on this move, check out what Geoff Livingston has to say or what Matt Dickman wrote and recorded. But I have to question the degree of uproar this is causing. After all, we opted into the network; we're willingly sacrificing some privacy (hat-tip to Sarah Wurrey) for the sake of a free service. As Jeremiah clearly states, "...for every free services people rush to use, they forget that they are the ones entering the data."
- SMT: Facebook needs to listen to its community and take some action to make it more universally embraced.
'C' Is For Cookie (or, That's Not Good Enough for Me)According to an excellent blog post by Toby Bloomberg, Pepperidge Farms has come up with a half-baked idea of a social media strategy called Pepperidge Farms Connections. The site, rather than encouraging people to connect and share information there, or hosting a contest, or anything else creative, for that matter - is simply a collection of tips on how to connect online. What a crummy idea. Toby makes some very worthwhile suggestions that can be used as the foundation of a social media strategy by any company.
- SMT: Instead of being a how-to site, why not give them the tools yourself? There are plenty of bad ideas floating around out there, so take the time to study them, understand them, and avoid this yourself. Will Pepperidge Farms remember?
Jeff Pulver has been making the social media rounds in Boston recently, connecting with lots of folks in person and connecting us with each other. Today, he stepped out of his Social Media Living Room to host a Social Media Breakfast at the S & S Restaurant & Deli in Cambridge (Full disclosure: I have an impeccable reputation for picking good eating spots, so Bryan Person asked for my recommendation for the breakfast. The S & S was it). Jeff instituted a neat little practice of having everyone wear a name tag with their tagline on it, coupled with little stickers everyone can use to physically tag each other.
- SMT: Boston, in addition to being the Hub of the Universe, is a social media hub. I like to think that outside of Silicon Valley, it's got one of the most active and well connected communities in the new media space. And Jeff's insistence upon getting us out from behind the computer screens is making us better for it.
Image credit: andynash (Flickr)
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