LB's Rambles

Impressing the Boss via Social Media

What should be the role of social media inside most companies? Is there room for employees to use sites such as Twitter and Facebook to benefit the company and themselves? Scot Herrrick thinks so, and, at his CubeRules site, he offers five suggestions for becoming a star employee in social media.

Hat tip: IAB SmartBrief

Dash It All

Privacy advocates have long been engaged in a battle against what they perceive to be invasion of user privacy by websites. They object to the collection of data by sites - particularly the big sites, such as Google - which could allow advertisers to target users with what could be relevant ads. It's a topic and a complaint which has flared repeatedly over the years.

So it's worth noting that Google is now making a kind of privacy dashboard available to users, to let them know what different Google apps may be collecting about individual users (or groups, for that matter). According to Mashable, it's a good way to create in one convenient place a one-stop report on everything the communications giant may know about you. You'll find instructions at the link that will take you to your own Dashboad page, where you may also choose to alter some of the settings to limit the amount of shared information.

I've Got a Little List...

...or several people have a lot of large lists of the people they're following on Twitter. The mini-blogging service now has a built-in feature which lets you group the people you follow into lists, so that if, say, there are several people you find reliable talking about your brand, you can easily group them and stay current with their contributions.

David Berkowitz of 360i writes at the Social Media Insider blog that this is going to be a very useful feature, even though, as he says, there will undoubtedly be some users who try to game the system to improve their own standings (or followers). Whatever. He has some very practical suggestions about ways that Twitter lists can be useful to businesses - well, to be honest, can be useful to anyone.

One of his best suggestions, by the way, is to monitor the lists that you yourself are on. Follow the link above for instructions.

"The Longer Bodies"

Murder most British is on tap this week, as our "Classic Mysteries" podcast reviews "The Longer Bodies," by Gladys Mitchell. This novel, which first appeared in 1930, features the detective work of Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, a psychiatrist who helps the police - and who is sufficiently eccentric in her appearance and her behavior to be one of the more memorable detectives in fiction. You can listen to the full review here.

The plot is complex, but it begins with an old woman's plan to choose an heir for her rather considerable fortune by encouraging her grandnephews to train for the Olympics. Her idea is to award her estate to the first grandnephew to win an Olympic medal for Britain. If that sounds odd, let me stress that it is only the beginning of a most remarkable book that incorporates murder and a bit of madness as well.

If you are fond of mysteries from the golden age, or of other classic mysteries both before and after that era, I hope you'll come visit www.classicmysteries.net - that's where we continue our discussions about these fine vintage mysteries. Come on over and join the conversation!

Interesting Comparison

At FreelanceWritingGigs, Poster "Deb" makes an interesting comparison between free-lance writing and Halloween - and comes up with six remarkable similarities. Really.

Hat tip: Sree Sreenivasan via Facebook and @sreenet on Twitter

Happy Birthday, Internet!

Okay, so we're a day late. But PCWorld reminds us that the Internet came into being on October 29, 1969, with an attempt (only partially successful) to send a message from one computer to another at Stanford Research Institute. Details at the link. Computers don't eat birthday cake, but wouldn't cookies be appropriate?

Hat tip: IAB SmartBrief

Fandom of the Opera

If you enjoy opera, and you're curious about the technologies involved in producing and distributing the Metropolitan Opera to television, movie theaters and mobile devices, you would have enjoyed a breakfast this morning featuring Mark Schubin. He's a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) and also the engineer in charge of the Met's media department.

Schubin was the featured speaker at one of Bill Sobel's SobelMedia breakfasts at the Samsung Experience in NYC, presenting a lively talk and slideshow called "Fandom of the Opera." If you think that opera occupies a relatively small and obscure niche in our culture, Schubin will disabuse you of that notion. Some of those live broadcasts have reached as high as #11 at the box office in the weekly movie attendance figures - and that's impressive (not to mention lucrative). Super Bowl popularity? No. But pretty impressive all the same.

Schubin's presentation has some pretty amazing statistics - and you can see most of his slides here, courtesy of his website. Some of the material is pretty amazing; you wouldn't believe the amount of work involved, not only in producing a show using up to 16 HD cameras, but providing simultaneous titling translations in a variety of languages.  I also wasn't aware of the important role opera has played over a span of more than a century and a half, in terms of media development - most of the important inventions were foreshadowed by operatic experiments. Interesting - and highly entertaining - stuff.

Project Valour-IT

We interrupt our usual flow of communications-related posts to ask you to consider a special kind of communication, coming from wounded American soldiers. Project Valour-IT provides special technology to help wounded soldiers communicate and recover. It's important work. They're in a fund-raiser now through Veterans' Day - you can get full details at the above link. I hope you'll consider a contribution.

Hat tip: The Kitchen Dispatch and Instapundit

"The Widening Stain"

This week's podcast review on Classic Mysteries comes with the due weight, solemnity and overall gravitas one would expect to find at a prestigious Ivy League university. Or maybe not. The goings-on in Morris Bishop's "The Widening Stain" were sufficiently irreverent and offbeat for Bishop, a Cornell University professor and later the school's provost, to hide behind the unlikely pseudonym of "W. Bolingbroke Johnson," which may have been a good career move. 

The book is marked by a significant number of funny limericks, some unfortunate professorial behavior, and a couple of murders, including a quite-well-done impossible crime. The Rue Morgue Press has brought this 1942 comic mystery back from relative obscurity - which is a fine thing for classic mystery readers.

And let me put in my weekly plug: for those of you who enjoy good mysteries, come visit me at www.classicmysteries.net and let's talk about them!

What's gone and what's past help: Shakespeare on Facebook

That's our old friend, Bill Shakespeare, of course, and it appears that Bill the Bard has been growing active in social media. Last week, Daphne Gray-Grant posted "William Shakespeare's 5 best copywriting tips" on ragan.com . I thought it was pretty funny (and insightful), and figured we ought to make a game of it: can you come up with five Shakespearean quotes that can be applied to some aspect of social media?

Here's an opening entry - mine - to give you some ideas.

1. To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Here, Shakespeare is commenting on the tricky question (perhaps more of a problem on Twitter than on Facebook) of identifying the "real" writer of a given status report. It is too easy to put up a false personality on line; it's not nice to try to fool the bard.

2. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

True, Bill. I have learned all kinds of things on Facebook, thanks to the insights from my friends.

3. My words fly up, my thoughts remain below

Haven't we all had that experience of hitting the "send" key before we have really had a chance to think through what we really wanted to say? The web can be most unforgiving when we say the wrong thing, or say it in such a way as to hurt a friend.

4. Done to death by slanderous tongue
Was the Hero that here lies

Sadly, we've also had enough examples of malicious gossip, often false, put online to hurt - and it has been effective.

5. Lord, what fools these mortals be

My reaction exactly when I see friends posting all kinds of silly polls, games and scores. Harmless, for the most part, but some of them certainly strike us as foolish. Bill's got it right.

See how the game is played? Find yourself some Shakespearean quotes - this is a good place to start - and have at it, varlet!

Nigeria Wants Its Good Name Back

At any rate, that's the lesson I take away from reading that Nigeria is fed up with the scammers who have made "Nigerian Scam" an unfortunate, if generally accurate, phrase. According to Ars Technica, not only has Nigeria shut down hundreds of scams, it has actually arrested some of the perpetrators.

Well, good. I don't know about you, but my spam filters have been catching several would-be scammers daily - some presumably from Nigeria, others from elsewhere in Africa and around the world. The pitch generally doesn't vary much, and I apparently have lost the opportunity to get millions of dollars deposited directly to my bank account in exchange for acting as a financial agent for a transaction I know nothing about.

The article speaks of how the scammers have bilked millions of dollars from victims worldwide, which makes me worry about the general level of gullibility around me. The news from Nigeria of a crackdown is both welcome and long overdue.

Measuring Success

We have all seen lots of articles about the importance of measurement in social media (and, for that matter, in most other areas of business). There's a lot of debate over what kind of statistics are really important - which ones are meaningful and which are a waste of time and effort. This morning, eMarketer tells us what kinds of stats people are actually using to measure the success of their campaigns and their messages.

According to the study, from King Fish Media, the #1 success metric is the number of new customers acquired, followed closely by leads generated. The study also found the corporate website is the most effective way to communicate with prospects, just barely edging out social media.

Interesting stuff.

More Than Five Billion Served

It really is starting to sound like those signs you see outside McDonalds - "billions and billions sold." It seems that Twitter has now surpassed five billion tweets. That's a lot of 140-character messages, and it's still expanding at a phenomenal rate. According to the Telegraph article, Twitter only reached its 1-billionth tweet last November, and was only up to 1.6 billion in April - so an astounding 3.4 billion tweets have been sent in roughly the last six months. Pretty amazing numbers.

Hat tip: MediaPost's Around the Net in Online Media

Every nook and Kindle

Barnes & Noble has introduced what it hopes will be its Kindle-killer in the ebook competition. It's called the nook, and it's roughly the size of a paperback - about five inches by eight inches. According to the report online from Crain's New York Business, you'll be able to use it wirelessly in B&N's stores so that you can check out the hard-copy version of your book before you order it. Plus there will be a huge selection online; the report says B&N will offer about one million books for downloading to the nook.

Competition is good: the nook sells for $259 and has already forced Amazon to cut its Kindle price to match. Sony will have a new reader out soon as well.

As for me, well, I'm still kind of old-fashioned. Most of my books are the traditional ink-on-paper variety, although I do have a Sony eBook reader. Trouble is, many of the books I read are not available in any format - they are out of print. Maybe the move toward ebook readers will start making it possible for publishers to get these books back into circulation. I can hope.

"The House Without the Door"

Our "Classic Mysteries" podcast this week takes us back to New York in the 1940s, in "The House Without the Door," by Elizabeth Daly. A criminal jury has acquitted a woman of the charge of murdering her husband. But public opinion believes she did it - and somebody may be trying to murder her as well. Enter Daly's sleuth, Henry Gamadge, a professional expert in rare books who also has made a name for himself investigating difficult criminal cases. If you don't know Elizabeth Daly's books, this is a good place to start. You can hear my full review here. And, as always, I invite you to join the conversation at www.classicmysteries.net.