We all know the age-old “If a tree falls in the woods…” question, but in the age of social media an equally important question is now being asked by the masses: If you’re in a relationship and it’s not documented on Facebook, does it even count?
We all have friends who record their entire relationship through social media channels—whether through constant tweets proclaiming their love for their romantic partner, frequent wall post declarations of love, or pictures posted of flowers or [...]

For seven months now, we’ve been discussing, in “The Week in Social Media,” several concepts about what “social” means. Since it’s back-to-school time, let’s review them with a potpourri of the best links I gathered this summer.
Social is…
…conversation and contribution:

Consumers Want Brands to Interact with Facebook and Twitter, on WebProNews
Conversations Key to Establishing Brand on Twitter, on Read Write Start
40 Useful Things You Can Share [...]

By now most of you have seen the truly epic slide show of a young woman quitting her job through a series of messages on a dry-erase board. If you haven’t, you can find it here.
She quit on Monday. On Tuesday morning, the resignation photo essay hit the Internet. By lunchtime, the link to it had been tweeted and retweeted thousands of times. Nearing the end of the business day on Tuesday, the link was still being tweeted at a [...]

I would prefer not to tweet today.
Though I am a bit nervous saying this on a website devoted to social media, I have to admit I’m probably more ambivalent about my agency’s rabpid embrace of Twitter than many of my colleagues.
I’m far from a social media skeptic. In fact, I’ve seen the powerful impact that blogs, forums, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter can have on brands and causes.
But it’s been difficult to adjust to all this constant tweeting. I bungee back [...]

“Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.” —José Ortega y Gasset (Spanish philosopher and humanist, 1883-1955)
 
In the current revolution, everyone has become a broadcaster. A simple tweet or a video shot with a cell phone can be spread everywhere in the world at high speed. With such an unlimited amount of data, where the finest can be overwhelmed by mediocrity, wondering about the fact that the [...]

After 20 years of leading indicators (prosumers) telling us they want companies and brands to be more honest and transparent, finally they have the way to ensure it happens: social media.
As businesses and brands experiment in this new terrain, let’s first agree that social media is wreaking havoc inside traditionally structured brands and businesses. As it should.
For decades, businesses have sought control over four conversations: the company and the market (corporate communications/media relations); the brand and consumer (sales, marketing and [...]

The announcements last week at F8 (Facebook’s developers conference) got me thinking about how the nuances of what we do in the online world. For most people, whether you become a “fan” of something or a “follower”—or you “like” something instead of “become a fan,” per Facebook’s latest update—doesn’t play a big part in your decision to click. The action is often automatic.
But there is something deeper going on here, I think—a new form of consumerism, if you will. For decades since [...]

Twitter finally announced its business model, with a major innovation: the “promoted tweet.” Tweets can be purchased by a brand and then appear on search pages as sponsored. This will no doubt change the way brands use Twitter. I believe it’s as revolutionary as the Google AdWords launch. Speaking of Google, its platforms, such as YouTube and Google Maps, can be used in some pretty creative interactive ways, as you’ll see if you click on the second link below.
But what [...]

As I was pulling together a white paper about social media I came across an article that Adweek published about me in 1996, when my role as head of TBWA’s Department of the Future took me to Amsterdam. Having already been central in setting up the agency’s efforts to use new media tools for market research, I moved to the Netherlands to develop interactive research capabilities for the agency’s European offices.
Around the same time, I worked on a campaign strategy [...]