Attention, Abbreviated
Our attention spans are shorter than ever—mere seconds—as social media rewires our brains

In just a decade’s time, the average attention span has plummeted from 12 minutes to five seconds; considering that the average office worker checks his email inbox 30 to 40 times an hour, we can see why. Social media looks to be “drastically changing” the way our brains work, resulting in folks who are more impatient, forgetful, self-centered and, in some cases, distracted to a dangerous [...]

Early Second Acts
How everything old (well, not so old) is new again in the land of tech

It’s tough to retire when you haven’t even had a midlife crisis yet—but that’s what numerous tech companies and/or the bigwigs who started them are embarking on lately. Witness the founders of YouTube, who sold their little online video site to Google for $1.65 billion and are now trying to resuscitate Delicious, a social bookmarking site that never made it to the mainstream [...]

We’ll start this week’s post with some very big news: Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The question is: Why? Well, Skype is an innovative service that has seen exponential growth since its launch. The company rules the roost in online video calling—when your brand name becomes the word people use to describe your service, you know you’re on to something (many people say they’re going to “Skype” when they mean they’re going to video chat). So it seems [...]

We Like to Watch
For TV, content might still be king, but the medium is becoming ever more important as viewing increasingly goes mobile—and social

In terms of high-profile tech acquisitions, Yahoo’s buying the social-viewing service IntoNow for somewhere between $20 mil and $30 mil is noteworthy for more than just the purchase price (which is impressive when you realize that IntoNow launched only about 12 weeks ago). It’s a clear indicator that Yahoo is thinking seriously about the social-viewing space—an [...]

…Moving from drawing people to a brand destination to bringing the brand to them wherever they are
The following article was originally published on ClickZ.asia.
Conventional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focused on using various simple and not-so-simple techniques to optimize the Web pages of one’s website(s) so that when folks searched on Google and other search engines, the brand’s websites came up high enough in the rankings for people to notice and click through to from the results.
This was great, but [...]

Let’s start with Twitter this week instead of my usual (Facebook).
During the last few weeks there were some management changes at the top of the micro-blogging service (which is now worth more than $5 billion, by the way). And I recently found different stories about how it was started. For one version, Business Insider’s article called “The real history of Twitter” is a very interesting read.
How do I get people to watch my video and to talk about it? I [...]

Let’s start this week’s blog post with “happy” news—at least for the Germans (like me). According to a study, Germany is the happiest country on Twitter. Alex Davies, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, analyzed the tweets of 25 countries (countries where there was enough tweeting to make the rating possible). The parameter to determine the levels of happiness was the high-level correlations between words and emoticons like or . By the way, the saddest [...]

Did you know there are more grandparents than high school students on Facebook?
Yeah, right—my grandmother’s not on Facebook (is she?)… was my reaction, too, except I heard it straight from the mouth of Twist Image president Mitch Joel, who was dubbed “Rock Star of Digital Marketing” and “one of North America’s leading digital visionaries” by Marketing Magazine.
Well, if he said so I guess it must be true. This was just one of the many “SoMe myths” I heard at the [...]

Active Participation
Social media has changed the way activists operate, and now some platforms are changing the way they operate because of activists

Though Malcolm Gladwell still won’t change his stance regarding the impact of social media on political movements, most of the rest of us have no doubt that social media has been a boon to socially conscious behavior. In the Middle East, the long list of revolutions that have been triggered by or fueled with SoMe continues; in Bahrain, [...]

The email to me cautioned “Be careful what you tweet” and linked to Chrysler’s recent snafu, in which an employee of an agency hired by the automaker mistakenly posted an obscene tweet to Chrysler’s official Twitter feed. The employee was stuck in traffic and meant to send it to his personal account. Instead, it went to Chrysler’s Twitter feed and cost him his job and his agency the Chrysler account.
That story, and a few others that have made the news [...]