February 23 2010
February 23 2010
This past weekend is the first time in a longtime when I did not twitter, facebook, email, touch a computer, or even use my cell phone. I did things like go to dinner with friends, venture into a dueling piano bar, ice skating, in other words; being social without social media.
Don’t get me wrong I’m all for social media. Its helped me to stay connected in ways I didn’t think possible, as well as gather information quickly without the legwork. However, without it, I felt more inspired, observant, and attentive. Maybe it life was better before we had useful distractions like twitter and facebook. Luckily, there’s actually a device to cure you of social media. Within an hour the web 2.0 suicide machine disconnects you from all your social media avatars. So far 3,109 people have used the machine, totaling 229,651 friends unfriended and 391,125 tweets untweeted. Maybe this is a bit extreme but there is something to be said about becoming “anti-social”.
February 6 2010
A few of us from Plaid attended Mashable’s “The New Journalist” event at the 92YTribeca this week. It was a great talk about how social media is changing the way journalists work–most notably shifting the role of ‘reputation branding’ from the media (i.e., I work for The New York Times and therefore my work is validated) to the individual (i.e. I am John or Jane Doe and I am asking you, the public, to validate my work by following me on Twitter, etc).
What got my attention the most, however, was the opening act: Pepsi Refresh. We have written about the Pepsi Refresh in our blog before, as fans. Essentially, it is an ideas marketplace, whereby Pepsi is giving away up to $1.3 million dollars a month to people, organizations and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact.
The new twist, however, is learning where the money is coming from to fund this effort: its Super Bowl budget. That means that instead of investing $3million dollars for every 30 second spot, Pepsi has decided instead to invest in things like urban farming, building schools, creating new art spaces, etc.
In the first 15 days of launching its Refresh social media campaign, Pepsi received more than 1,000 ideas like this, many if which will be funded (the first set of winners will be announced in early March).
Pepsi has been a standing Super Bowl advertiser for 23 years, so this is no small departure for the company. The Super Bowl has been the grand stage for the ongoing dual between Pepsi and “the real thing” Coke.
Personally, I think Pepsi’s project feels like ‘the real’ real thing. That’s refreshing.
February 5 2010
Twitter, YouTube, SMS and facebook have played a crucial role in enabling fast, easy, communication when we need it most.
Venezuela
In the last couple of weeks Venezulean’s have seen their government slide nearer and nearer towards totalitarian rule. As the last radio and TV stations that give voice to the opposition are shut, social media outlets remain the only viable option for students to correspond and conduct their protest plans. #freevenezuela has been one of this weeks largest trending topics on twitter forcing Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to label Twitter an ‘enemy of the state’ and ‘a tool of Terrorism’.
Haiti
Minutes after the earthquake, as phone lines collapsed, Haitians tried to discover the fate of relatives and friends by using the web and social networks.
Project Ushahidi was a system set-up to map twitter and text reports sent by people in Haiti. Ushahidi made an agreement with local mobile phone operator Digicel and created a short code to which people could text their message. Ushahidi first operated this system in the violent aftermath of the Kenyan elections in 2007. “We saw that it worked and thought that, if it worked in Africa, it would work elsewhere,” said Mr Hersman.
The American Red Cross utlized SMS text to create the fastest financial donation method ever seen. $5,000,000 plus was raised in just two days of the horrific devastation in Haiti.
Iran
In June last year we saw Twitter and YouTube become the only form of communication left to the Iranian people to spread information on protests and communicate their situation to millions of concerned people worldwide.
In fact, so much was recorded via social media that large news organizations such as the BBC, found it was their only way to understand the progression of events.
