Category: Facebook

Friday Five: places to go, people to see

It’s Friday Five time:

  1. As reported here earlier, Elizabeth Allen (@lizallen on Twitter) is now blogging. Huzzah! Liz’s blog is called Adaptivate, and it should be on everybody’s blogroll, RSS feed, delicious faves, whatever you use to manage your required reading resources. Liz is associate director of alumni relations at the Caltech Alumni Association and is one of the best around when it comes to integrating social media tools with traditional alumni relations practices. Her blog may be new, but Liz is no stranger to the craft of blogging. She’s guest-posted here a couple of times — first, about her lessons learned from a CASE conference we attended in April 2008, and more recently some good insights about working with unofficial Facebook groups.
  2. Another newcomer to the higher ed blog scene is Davina Gould (@davinagould), who started her graduate/professional school marketing blog in August. Davina is a marketer at a law school somewhere in Florida, and her blog (so far) offers practical and thoughtful insights on such topics as promoting social media on your campus, using Google Documents as a productivity tool and handling the death of a campus public figure. Welcome aboard, Davina!
  3. Have you tested Facebook Lite yet? It’s got a third less sidebar gunk than the regular Facebook. Great taste, less filling. Here’s a review of the new interface.
  4. The CASE website has a new look. The site also provides a nifty section to guide you through the changes.
  5. Remember what happened on this date eight years ago. Here’s a video to help you remember: 9/11: Stories of Survival and Loss, from the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Or if music’s more your thing, listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Into the Fire, from his album in memory of 9/11, The Rising. I think I may listen to that entire album today.

Friday Five: blog of the beast edition

I was originally going to title this post “Friday five: of Twitter and teens, robots and brands.” Then I found out that today’s post is number 666 for this blog. Oooh. Scary. I thought about conjuring up some frightening doomsday posts, but in this economy, things are scary enough. Plus, I already had this stuff in the hopper, even before Thursday’s big Twitter/Facebook meltdown, which was apparently a huge denial-of-service attack aimed at bringing down one socially networked guy in the Republic of Georgia. Talk about overkill, scorched earth, using the atom bomb to kill a fly, etc.

Anyway, on to the five, which is just some interesting stuff I gleaned from the web, Twitter, etc., earlier in the week.

  1. Teens don’t tweet, eh? Earlier this week, Mashable reported that the percentage of the under-25 age group in the United States using Twitter is only 16 percent. This despite the fact that that age group makes up 25 percent of Internet users in the U.S., and everyone knows that that age group is the most tech-savvy of them al, or so goes conventional wisdoml. But what the Mashable story and the other headlines miss is the apparent healthy growth in the number of young tweeters since January (see chart; click it to enlarge). It looks like the better question may be, What is behind the apparent growth of twittering teens? (P.S. – When the news of this study broke on Wednesday, it became a trending topic on Twitter, and apparently plenty of the people tweeting about it were, in fact, the under-25 group.
  2. You’ve read the book. Now see the slidedeck. One of the essential elements of The Cluetrain Manifesto — a must-read book for anyone involved in online communications — is its 95 theses. Now they are available as a slideshow. (Thanks to @markgr for the link.)
  3. 10 Facebook marketing resources, via @EMGonline (Educational Marketing Group’s Twitter feed).
  4. Gah! Robots! They’re in Twitter! They’re on Facebook! Gahhh!
  5. A more social definition of brand. “For years I’ve thought of a brand as the image of a company in its customer’s mind. … [T]oday, thinking about the new corporate communications landscape, it struck me that a brand is more like the ongoing contact between company and customer.” A thoughtful and thought-provoking post from Engaging Experience (via @mStonerblog).

Have an enjoyable weekend. I’ll see you around on Twitter or possibly Facebook — unless they get hit again. If so, then maybe on the blogosphere. They can’t get every blog, can they?