Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - January 18, 2010
As widely discussed by privacy advocates and blogs, Facebook recently changed some of its privacy settings. Users are no longer able to limit the viewing of their profile photos, home towns, and friends lists to only approved friends. Those are all public now by default. Moreover, Facebook’s new default settings “recommend” that dynamic content such as status messages and photos be made public. While the blogosphere still closely scrutinizes these changes and is aghast at Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘privacy is over’ claims made at the Crunchies awards (he didn’t actually say it verbatim but his statements more or less implied it), I have to admit I was surprised that all this stirred such an uproar. Facebook is only reacting to a larger social trend as it strives to become an asymmetrical and therefore more growth-enabled network (or communications platform) – like Twitter. Privacy, at least a more traditional notion thereof, is the collateral damage of this strategic agenda. With the value of reciprocity (narrowcasting) succumbing to the prospect of exponentiality (broadcasting), privacy is no longer commercially exploitable. “No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of ‘free,’” writes social networking researcher Danah Boyd in a blog post in which she otherwise harshly criticizes Facebook’s move. The age of privacy as we know it might be over indeed. Is it worth fighting for?
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - December 26, 2009
Describing itself as "a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies," Lift is definitely one of the best conference networks out there. Laurent Haug, Lift founder and curator, is a wonderful host and has managed to maintain a strong sense of community despite continued growth. In addition to numerous satellite events with partners, Lift organizes conferences in France and Korea, as well as the annual Lift conference in Switzerland as its main hub.
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - November 15, 2009
If you only see one slide show about the State of the Internet in 2009, "Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)" by David Gillespie, an Account Director at Maclaren McCann, Toronto, is a good choice: a mesmerizing 256 slide manifesto on the Intention Economy with Data (as the bank) and Meaning (as the currency).
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - October 23, 2009
Gary Hayes little flash application shows how active the social web is. Hayes built the application based on data he pulled from a range of social media sources, which he compiled at the end of September 2009. You can download his Social Media Count here.
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - October 6, 2009
Coinciding with the launch of the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Fast Company.com today published a by-lined article produced by frog:
The Future of Health Care is Social
“In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog's ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies.”
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - September 30, 2009
It was just a matter of time: “With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf,” I wrote in early July.
And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction business model (a portal for public-facing aggregated customer support) into the broader realm of brand management. It aggregates the aggregation, if you will, and centralizes what Modernista, Skittles, and Crispin Porter Bogusky did on their own sites.
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - September 25, 2009
Hubspot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella has examined 5 million tweets and 40 million re-tweets over the course of nine months and just published his study on the factors of re-tweeting success: What does/does not get re-tweeted, and for what reasons?
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - August 17, 2009
The Socialnomics-Social Media Blog has compiled a comprehensive list of stats from all kinds of sources to prove that "Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think."
"Welcome to the Social Media Revolution."
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - July 30, 2009
After participating in frog's first Digital Brand Think Tank in Munich a couple of weeks ago (a lively discussion with 20 marketing executives from Audi, BMW, Google, Continental, and other top-tier brands), I must admit that I’m a bit tired of having to evangelize (or even justify) the value of brands using social media. It is astonishing to me that companies still ask for evidence when the tweet is on the wall. The event showed that there is a new Digital Divide that cuts straight through the ranks of the marketing industry – some executives get the Social Web, some don’t. No one has figured it out yet. Most would admit that they need to catch up and keep learning.
Blog Elektroniker
By Tim Leberecht - May 13, 2009
I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums. This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).
