the week in social media: a beginning
Lindsey Weber
social media lead : New York
topics: Social Media, Technology Industry, Internet Culture, and Internet Culture
filed under: Social Media, Internet Culture, Internet Culture, and Viral Marketing
http://tbg.cm/ifzJ41
Playing with social media is fun, but reading about social media can be a bore! How do you remedy? More Facebook, less…real book. Or just less tech blogs. Don’t worry. My name’s Lindsey and I’m new here. I’m ready to take all that social media anxiety and pair it down into a few quick weekly links (which, warning, may or may not also include my own thoughts) that you can choose to read or not-read because I will also provide tl;dr (that’s: too long; didn’t read) summaries.
The Now-You-See-It Restaurant by Frank Bruni for New York Times
- Bruni discusses an emerging breed of crowdsourced restaurants. Owners of Dovetail (along with other owners/chefs, I assume) know that it’s easy to fail with new restaurant ventures so they have been starting to use social media (heeeyyyyyyy) to do things like solicit contributions via Kickstarter or take pre-paid online reservations for meals. Check out the specific place mentioned in the article, a pop-up restaurant called What Happens When. (Ooh, It’s in Soho! Let the rest of us know how it goes if you decide to make a reservation.)
You might’ve noticed that Apple launched their Mac App Store this week—which is basically iPhone/iPad apps for your (Mac) computer. They’ve got lots of goodies, from Tweetie 2 to The Incident (a super fun game, that I highly recommend.) This is definitely more incentive for iPhone developers and those developing products for the iPhone/iPad. Seems like a natural progression, although the creeping growth of Android and the Android app store might be fueling this announcement… Some people like it. Some hate it. Check it out.
In your weekly Facebook news, some girl you knew from middle school just got engaged! j/k, here’s some actually useful Facebook-related news.
- You may or may not know that Goldman Sachs recently invested a cool $450 million in Facebook. This could mean many things. The most important being that now Facebook is “worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner.” Eek! There are a bunch of other things too that I won’t bore you with but if you care you can read about them here & here.
- Thanks to the always-on-top-of-it Earned Media team, this cool use of the new Facebook profile came my way. Check out how Schweppes caused a stir by creating an app that interacts with it.
- Also, an unofficial Facebook-for-iPad app (there is no official Facebook for iPad app just yet) hit 1.5 million downloads this week. Stuff for iPads: in demand. (Although I’ve been hearing reports from CES that Android’s “iPad killer” isn’t far behind. It’s called Honeycomb and if you wanna see what it looks like, click here.)
This piece by Paul Ford called ‘The Web is a Customer Service Medium’ is a long read, but definitely worth saving/printing/Instapaper. Here’s the idea: The web is great at emulating all things: TV, newspapers, books, radio, etc. Therefore everyone working in those mediums sees the web like they see their medium. But the web is truly it’s own thing, not a carbon copy of these other things. And the web’s main question is: “Why wasn’t I consulted?” The author abbreviates it to WWIC and we realize that WWIC = the internet commenter/the internet CUSTOMER!
“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.”
And finally, because I come to you from Urlesque.com, my favorite viral video the week.
(Get ready to have your heart shatter into a million pieces when the little girl lip-sync whistles.)
(Get ready to have your heart shatter into a million pieces when the little girl lip-sync whistles.)
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