Derek E. Baird :: Barking Robot

The Power of Community: Disney Reaches 100 Million Page Likes on Facebook [Video]

via www.youtube.com

Introducing the New Facebook Profile Pages

Tonight on 60 Minutes, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talks about the booming social networking site, the movie 'The Social Network' and announces the launch of new Facebook profile pages.

Watch how the new Facebook profile makes it easier for you to tell your story and learn about your friends. It now has more room for your photos and experiences, and it includes new ways to share the things you care about most.

 

Alongside a general move towards putting your photos front and center, key changes in the new Facebook profile page include:

• A new introduction – Facebook have put photos of you front and centre.
• Featured friends – make your most important relationships clear.
• Experience sharing - this appears to be an effort to encourage people to share experiences and highlight the most important ones.
• Improved browsing of your social graph - helping you navigate friends of friends and build more connections.

You can read more at the Facebook Blog which covers the profile page update. To get the new profile, or learn more about the new features, visit http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/.

Trend Watch: Why Indonesians Love Twitter

A study by internet analysts ComScore has found that Indonesians are the most prolific users of Twitter on the planet: 20.8% of internet users aged over 15 tweet (Brazil ranks second with 20.5%). In the US, where the largest number of tweets still originate, the figure is just 11.9%.

Twitter suits Indonesia for a number of reasons. For a start, mobile phones are cheap. There is already a strong sense of community.

And English is widely spoken, particularly on the nation's most populous and tech-savvy island, Java. Even for those who prefer to tweet in their native tongue, Bahasa Indonesia and other regional languages use an internet-friendly Roman script.

But Indonesia is diverse and varied: while President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono may be a steady, if not prolific, tweeter, millions of people living on islands distant from the capital's digital epicentre have never even used a computer.

via www.guardian.co.uk

A Parents' Guide to Facebook

This guide is designed to help you understand what Facebook is and how to use it safely. With it, you will be better informed and able to communicate with young Facebook users in your life more effectively.

That's important because: 1) if something goes wrong, we want our children to come to us and 2) as the Internet becomes increasingly social and mobile, a parent’s guidance and support are ever more key to young people’s well-being in social media and technology.

The guidebook is published by Connect Safely in partnership with the iKeepSafe Coalition. A Parents' Guide to Facebook

Related: Recommended Facebook Safety Settings for Teens [Chart]

Infographic: Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

 A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.

 

This animate was adapted from a talk given at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.

The (Very) Unofficial Facebook Privacy Manual

Like Facebook, but wish your information wasn't so public?

Time to lock your settings down. Facebook doesn't make this easy, however; features are constantly added and the default for each new one seems to favor transparency instead of privacy.

The result: there are hundreds of little changes you need to make to truly control where your information goes.

The (Very) Unofficial Facebook Privacy Manual

This handy guide outlines everything you could ever want to know about locking down your privacy on Facebook, and a few things you probably didn't even know you wanted to know.

This guide outlines a variety of things regarding Facebook privacy, including:

• Making sure a comment meant for your friends isn’t seen by co-workers
• Understanding what it means to upload content to Facebook
• Control whether others can check you in to certain locations
• Keeping your Facebook page off Google’s search results
• Blocking unwanted users from seeing your page

Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

According to a study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced.

In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.

A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Henry Jenkins: Participatory Culture & Media Education

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship.

Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.

"It Gets Better Project" Delivers Digital Hope and Shows the Power of Social Media

“It gets better… It gets so much better… I promise, it gets so much better.”

These are the promises of participants in the It Gets Better Project, founded by advice columnist Dan Savage. In September 2010, following a rash of suicides by gay teens bullied by their peers, Savage created a YouTube channel to offer hope to those in similar situations.

The goal was to showcase the positive and fulfilling lives led by Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer adults, and to give LGBTQ young people something to hold on to when they saw only misery in their futures. Savage encouraged adult members of the queer community to upload their own videos describing how life “got better” for them after high school.

The response was enormous. Savage received 3,000 emails about the project in its first 24 hours. Over 200 videos were uploaded in the first week, and the limit of 650 videos for a single YouTube channel was reached a week after that. Savage set up a website to help direct users to the many new videos being uploaded every day to other channels.

Hollywood stepped in as well, with videos uploaded by celebrities such as Tim Gunn (Project Runway), Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) and President Barack Obama. 

Though the star power helped bring visibility to the campaign, Savage emphasized a focus on average, everyday LGBTQ adults. He wanted to show kids that you don’t have to be rich and famous to be happy and find love, whatever form of love that may be.

"It Gets Better" is a good message for all bullied teenagers, no matter the reason for being bullied.

Online buzz spiked when news of American Idol contestant Adam Lambert’s contribution to the project hit Twitter. A GLAAD campaign to “wear purple”on October 20 to raise awareness of anti-gay bullying gained traction on Facebook and Twitter.  

Some participants even reported wearing purple despite not knowing the reason why – they simply saw it in their feeds and wanted to fit in with their friends (who quickly told them about the campaign).  

The power of social media over behavior can be staggering.

via www.nmincite.com

Study: Millennial Moms Prefer Digital Communication

Mothers of all ages are ahead of the curve when it comes to internet and digital usage. eMarketer estimates 90.3% of women in the US with children under 18 in the house are online, compared with 76.3% of all adult females.

Moms' penchant for social networking and other social media usage—such as maintaining and reading blogs—is also well known.

Research from WhyMomsRule indicates that the youngest moms in particular have now moved more than half of their family communications outside the realm of face-to-face talking.

Gen Y moms polled said they conducted an average of 48% of communication with their immediate family in person. Talking on the phone was second, followed by texting.

Taken together, Gen Y moms used email or Facebook for 17% of all immediate-family communications—especially notable considering immediate family was defined as people living in the same household.

via www.emarketer.com

Global ‘Digital Life’ research project reveals major changes in online behavior

The largest ever global research project into people’s online activities and behaviour – Digital Life – was launched earlier this week by TNS, the world’s biggest custom research company.

Covering nearly 90 per cent of the world’s online population through 50,000 interviews with consumers in 46 countries, the study reveals major changes in the world’s online behaviour.

Among the key findings of the study are:

• Globally, people who have on-line access have digital sources as their number one media channel. 61% of online users use the internet daily against 54% for TV, 36% for Radio and 32% for Newspapers.

• Online consumers in rapid growth markets have overtaken mature markets in terms of engaging with digital activities. When looking at behaviour online, rapid growth markets such as Egypt (56%) and China (54%) have much higher levels of digital engagement than mature markets such as Japan (20%), Denmark (25%) or Finland (26%). This is despite mature markets usually having a more advanced internet infrastructure.

• Activities such as blogging and social networking are gaining momentum at huge speed in rapid growth markets. The research shows four out of five online users in China (88%) and over half of those in Brazil (51%) have written their own blog or forum entry, compared to only 32% in the US.

• The Internet has also become the default option for photo sharing among online users in rapid growth markets, particularly in Asia. The number of online consumers who have ever uploaded photos to social networks or photo sharing sites is 92% in Thailand, 88% in Malaysia and 87% in Vietnam, whilst developed markets are more conservative. Less than a third of online consumers in Japan (28%) and under half of those in Germany (48%) have uploaded photos to such sites.

TNS Digital Life: Drivers of Online Behaviour

• Growth in social networking has been fuelled by the transition from PC to mobile. Mobile users spend on average 3.1 hours per week on social networking sites compared to just 2.2 hours on email. The drive to mobile is driven by the increased need for instant gratification and the ability of social networks to offer multiple messaging formats, including the instant message or update function.

• The digital landscape will change in the future. Research shows that consumers expect their use of social networking on mobiles to increase more than use through PC. In the US, for example, a quarter (26%) of online consumers expect their use of social networking on a PC to increase in the next 12 months compared to over a third (36%) who will be looking to their mobile to increase usage. In Australia the figures are 26% and 44% respectively, and in Sweden they are 28% and 53%.

TNS Digital Life: The North American Digital Landscape  

• Online consumers are spending more time on social networking sites such as Facebook. In rapid growth markets such as Latin America, the Middle East and China, the average time spent, per week, on social networking is 5.2 hours compared to only 4 hours on email.

• Online consumers in mature markets remain more reliant on email, spending 5.1 hours checking their inboxes compared to just 3.8 hours on social networking. The heaviest users of social networking are in Malaysia (9 hours per week), Russia (8.1 hours per week) and Turkey (7.7 hours per week).

• When it comes to who has more friends, online consumers in Malaysia tops the list with an average of 233 friends in their social network, closely followed by Brazilians with 231. The least social are the Japanese with just 29 friends and Tanzanians have, on average, 38 in their circle of friends. Surprisingly, Chinese consumers only have an average of 68 friends in their networks despite being heavy users of social networking sites, indicating a culture that embraces fewer but closer friendships.

Study: Social Networking Makes You Happier

A new global report by the British Computer Society (BCS), titled "The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You Happier", claims the use of social networking communities like Facebook have a positive impact on life satisfaction.

"Social networking makes us happier. Given the immediate uplift in life satisfaction that people experience when using these sites, teaching people about how to use services like Facebook could be a more effective way of bridging the digital divide and getting people online." -Paul Flatters, Trajectory Partnership

Why Social Networking Makes You Happy

In contrast to the stereotype that social computing causes social isolation, the research reveals that the biggest positive contribution that IT access makes to the newly connected is the additional social contact with family and friends.

Related: Study Finds Facebook Enhances the Positive Relationships Kids Already Have

Social Identity, Knowledge Management & Member Roles in Online Communities

“The basic idea of the Web is that an information space through which people can communicate, but communicate in a special way: communicate by sharing their knowledge in a pool.

The idea was not just that it should be a big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out.”    ~Tim Berners-Lee

As a community manager or social designer, it's vital to remember that there is a social identity within an group that is both individual and collective.

Community managers should let this process happen naturally to allow for the most meaningful communication to occur between peers and give members time to discover their role in the community.

Social Design in Community Spaces

 In their book, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business Press, 2009), Wenger, McDermott and Snyder outline the key strategies required to build a functioning, vibrant and healthy online community:

• Design Your Community to Evolve: You can't dictate strict design constraints, but must leave it open so new members can shape and contribute to the culture.

• Include Insiders and Welcome Outsiders: You need insiders who know the purpose for the community and how it works. Yet at the same time, you need new members and their ideas to keep the community vital.

• Plan for Different Levels of Participation: I'll dig deeper on this point later in this post, but the key takeaway is to remember that only a small 'core group' (10%-15%) will be actively involved in the day-to-day functions of the group.

• Plan for Private and Public Community Spaces: Creating "private" spaces for one-on-one focused interactions or private meetings should be a key element of your social design. Public spaces are equally important as they give members to engage, share knowledge and draw new members to join the community.

• Create Value: Online communities and groups must generate value for their participants. Solicit feedback from members and find out what you can to improve it.

• Combine the Old and the New: Communities need membership continuity to foster their shared identies and preserve their knowledge.

• Community Rhythm: There will be periods of greater and lesser activity--this is normal and desirable. Groups will naturally formulate their own culture and patterns of interaction.

Member Roles in Online Communities/Social Networks

Each group member wil bring a unique set of experiences, sources of information and level of participation in the community. For example, there will be some members who naturally become the group organizers because of their ability to keep track of details. Those who have artistic abilities will find their personal identity as they offer creative input.

The exchange of knowledge and experience transforms a group of people into a community as members begin to appreciate the expertise and perspective of each member.

As members interact, they develop relationships, shared values and interests.

View 'Member Roles Chart' Large

 

Summary

When designing for an online community, groups must be given time to build an identity. Each community is unique because of the individuality of its members.

Because of this distinctiveness members within a group must have an opportunity to discover what their contribution will be and which role they will play by interacting socially with one another. Allowing a community to create a sense of identity is a critical.

Finally, it's important to remember that a community built around a shared practice is a living entity that is always evolving. In other words, a well-designed social space should provide users with the tools and leave it to them to construct their own meaning and level of interaction within the community.

Related: Supporting Informed Participation, Social Engagement & Collaboration in Online Communities

Supporting Informed Participation, Social Engagement & Collaboration in Online Communities

“Supporting informed participation requires processes that integrate individual and group knowledge through collaborative constructions” -Arias

To what extent users participate in an online community is largely determined by the structure of the digital environment and its ability to provide the user with activities that will allow them to fulfill their dual identity as both an individual and as member within a community.

“If people have the sense of autonomy, they are more likely to be motivated by things that are personally important to them, and less likely to be motivated by externally imposed rewards or threats (Sharp, Pocklington, Weindling 2002).”

Community Engagement: Managing Communities Across Digital Embassies

View more presentations from Edelman Digital.

The community manager must manage a carefully balanced mix of activities and content, which will foster motivation and social engagement, while at the same time, provide users with access to the information and knowledge that motivated them to initially join the community.

In short, users not only need to know the right steps to be successful in the collaboration process but must also discover their own motivations and feel confident in their own understanding to be a successful citizen of an online community.

Social Learning: Teachers Using Facebook Groups to Connect With Parents

When it comes to classroom management and keeping parents informed, a lot of teachers are now using Facebook Group as an effective tool for classroom management. In the past they might have sent home a flyer with students', but it usually got lost or vanished in thin air.

Now, since most parents are one of the 500 million people on Facebook, teachers are finding Facebook Groups to be an effective and engaging way to get parents more involved in their kids' classroom.

In this news clip from CNN, teachers in Nebraska explain how they use Facebook in their classroom to help keep both parents informed and kids engaged in the curriculum. There are some really great ideas here, well worth checking out.

 

Related: Facebook and Social Media in Schools

Trend Watch: People Are Online What They Are Offline--Divided, and Slow to Build Bridges

IN 2007 Danah Boyd heard a white American teenager describe MySpace, the social network, as “like ghetto or whatever.” At the time, Facebook was stealing members from MySpace, but most people thought it was just a fad: teenagers tired of networks, the theory went, just as they tired of shoes.

But after hearing that youngster, Ms Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, felt that something more than whimsy might be at work. “Ghetto” in American speech suggests poor, unsophisticated and black. That led to her sad conclusion: in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world—separation by class and race.

A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect groups separated in the real world. The internet was supposed to transcend colour, social identity and national borders. But research suggests that the internet is not so radical. People are online what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges.

via www.economist.com