November 24, 2009

The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

New Media Lab brings together nonprofits, citizen journalists, social media experts

I‘m at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I’ve never seen before.

I’m jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists from the Bay Area, Miami and Finland — that I’ve come across in recent years.

Above is the presentation I gave at this gathering, organized by a group of nonprofits in a project called the New Media Lab (there’s no public presence yet, just a private wiki). And while its focus is squarely on the role that journalist/media producers will play in our project, it can also be applied to the new roles that journalists should be expected to take up in an age of social media if you work for a startup, whether it’s for-profit or nonprofit.

Called Doing Good 2.0: The next-generation’s impact on communication, media, mobile & civic engagement, it looks at the forces driving Web 2.0 and the next-generation Internet, the role of mobile, the new cultural norms that social media is ushering in, and the role of the New Journalist: how we need to still tell compelling stories about people and causes but how we also need to expand our repertoire in this new arena by wearing multiple hats:

• entrepreneur
• conversation facilitator
• social marketer
• futurist
• metrics & research nerd
• journalist/storyteller

Here are some of the questions we’ve just begun to tackle:

Should nonprofits create their own media?

What should be the business model for social cause organizations in the future?

Continue reading →

July 24, 2009

Survival Guide Chapter 3: RSS feeds & blogs

Here is part 3 of the series I will post over the next few months based on chapters from my new book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization.

This book is meant to be a guide to building an optimized foundation in the Social Web for beginners and advanced users alike.

Chapter 3, the longest chapter in the book, is about RSS feeds and blogs. This chapter is packed with information and useful tips about content preparation, feed readers, optimization, and much more to ensure maximum exposure in the Social Web.

The following excerpts are from A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization:

Chapter 3: RSS Feeds and Blogs

Optimizing Your Blog And RSS Feed

Your RSS feed or blog will do you little good if nobody knows about it or cannot subscribe to it. This section highlights ways for you to optimize and promote your feed. Most of these tips are for both blogs and RSS
feeds, but some of them only apply to blogs. It is made clear if something only applies to blogs….

Continue reading →

July 16, 2009

Survival Guide Chapter 2 Overview

Here is part 2 of the series I will post over the next few months based on chapters from my book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization.

This book is meant to be a guide to building an optimized foundation in the Social Web for beginners and advanced users alike.

Chapter 2 of the book is about preparing the content you will need to implement your Social Web strategy. It will assist you in preparing and gathering content as well as optimizing it for maximum exposure and mileage in the Social Web.

The following excerpts are from A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization:

Chapter 2: Preparation

Once your strategy is in place, use it to prepare the content you will need for implementation. Try to resist the urge to just “wing it.” Proper preparation of your descriptions, biographies, and other blurbs will greatly increase your exposure in the Social Web. …

Continue reading →

February 27, 2009

Toward a Facebook bill of rights

After last week’s user rebellion that upended Facebook’s attempt to change its terms of service to grant itself a perpetual license to all photos, videos and copyrighted material posted by its members — somehow, Terms of Use Rebellion doesn’t have the same historical ring as Whiskey Rebellion — the company is angling to turn the incident into a net positive by calling on its users to help formulate a “bill of rights” to govern the social-networking giant.

It’s a bold, gutsy and unprecedented move, the kind of envelope-pushing move we’ve seen in the past from founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The proposed Facebook Principles cover topics such as the “freedom to share and connect,” privacy rights, “fundamental equality” and “ownership and control of information.” Facebook users — there are about 175 million of us around the globe — are being invited to review, comment on and ultimately vote on the proposals in “a virtual town hall” over the next 30 days.

If more than 7,000 users comment on any proposed change, it would go to a vote. Trouble is, they’ve intentionally set the bar impossibly high. The measures would be binding to Facebook only if more than 30 percent of active users vote. Based on Facebook’s current size, that would be nearly 53 million people. By comparison, a group created to protest Facebook’s new terms has roughly 139,600 members. (I’m one of them.)
Continue reading →

January 28, 2009

Streamlining your social Web presence in 6 steps

Following the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts, you have established your own blog and joined a number of social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Upcoming.org, among others. Now, the experts say you must add content to each of these accounts regularly to keep them dynamic. So, how’s this supposed to make your life easier?

Relax. With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.

To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I’ll start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:

A WordPress Blog
A Facebook Profile
A Facebook Page
A MySpace Page
A YouTube Account
A Flickr Account
A Twitter Account
An Upcoming.org Account
A GoodReads Account

Continue reading →