When the Princess of Wales died I discovered this as I woke to the morning news. When John F. Kennedy died many discovered via the morning newspaper. When Michael Jackson died I discovered it via my Twitter feed.
In a Twitter world can family and friends have any time to grieve? In pass years the pressure of 24 TV news has made it increasingly difficult to delay the making of deeply personal announcement of a death by family and friends. Previously news channels would have speculated and had the helicopter flying over the home or hospital but in the age where gossip can travel around the world and back again in seconds the momentum of the speculation is now unstoppable.
At the time of Michael Jacksons death 15% of Tweets on Twitter were relating to the speculation over his death. Such was the demand for information Twitter became overloaded. Facebook status updates were dominated by the news along with bookmarking sites being bombarded by links to news pages about his death. Within minutes of confirmation of his death Michael Jackson’s Wikipedia page was updated.
Now any hospital worker; doctor, nurse or cleaner could break the news via social networks and controlling this is almost impossible. Even close family cannot be protected as those at the bedside dealing with their loss may not have had time to get in contact with those who are close.
Hospitals, Police and other emergency services (if they have not already) will need to tighten polices regarding the sharing of information together with providing support to the bereaved families who have lost the control of how they break the news.
We all need to question our own behaviour which seems similar to the traffic slowing at the scene of an accident.
In a world where everyone wants to be the first to break the news, could you be dead on Twitter before you actually stop breathing?
Filed under: Social Media and Search | 1 Comment
Tags: blogging, michael jackson, social media, twitter
My IBM launched
My IBM, a social network that adds to IBMs Developer Works community, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ has been launched
Described by them as ‘the place where you and your peers congregate to connect, share, and collaborate. Great content is just the beginning, and now it’s time for you to take the next step: Create your professional profile and your custom home page on My developerWorks. Then find and connect with like-minded peers, and invite them into your My developerWorks network to share expertise and build groups for further interaction and collaboration.’
The sign up to the service is open to anyone, though not exactly intuitive. The register button takes you to the sign in page when you then have to select the register button! If you make a mistake on any part of the form it lost most of your entries after the error was highlighted.
Similarly when selecting a screen name, which has to be unique, there is no way of checking if it is available prior to entering it together with the captcha field, so if it is not available you have to enter a new name and another captcha.
Once you have registered you can then edit your profile and they say ‘Search for contact information and organizational information about your colleagues. Locate expertise and build your own social network. Get access to the information your colleagues are collecting and publishing.’
On several occasions I got a ‘oops that didn’t work’ screen so clearly there are some glitches which have not been fixed prior to launch and I have yet to be able to either view my profile page or edit it.
You can search for people by keyword or by name.
In a users profile I found the following
Roles:
Skills:
Area of interest:
Goals:
Professional expertise:
Biography and interests:
With a large number of users already on this platform, IBM have already jumped the first hurdle of signing up users. Their challenge now is to get those already on the network to see a value of creating profiles. I will be also interested to see if the network grows to include the ability to add video and other features.
Filed under: Social Media and Search | Leave a Comment
Tags: developer works, ibm, social network
Follow to be followed on Twitter
A Hotspot report “State of the Twittersphere” (pdf) has revealed some interesting insight into the popular micro blogging site.
With massive growth in the last year (600% according to compete.com) 70% of users joined in the last year.
With 35% of Twitter users having 10 or fewer followers and 9% of Twitter users not following anyone at all, many of the new followers may not understand how social networking works.
Many attempting to access this rapidly growing network often seem to expect the masses come rushing to hear their messages, however this environment is not for one way discussion – to be successful you’ve got to either have some real hot property that twitter users are going to be eager to follow or actively engage with the community.
Some simple rules for starting with Twitter:
- Post at least a message a day to show people who visit your page you’re twitter account is active
- Find others who have similar interests and follow them (don’t follow just anyone)
- Only follow those who are active users – active users are more likely to follow you
- Follow others in small chunks, keeping the gap between followers and followed no more than 200
- Use friendorfollow to discover who you follow who does not follow you back
- Re-post messages of interest, giving credit to the originator
- to do this precede message with RT or Retweet ‘@theirtwittername’
- Reply to messages of interest
- to do this precede message with ‘@theirtwittername’
- Send messages to those who follow you thanking them for their follow*
- Follow those who follow you*
* Auto follow and auto notes to new followers can be done via SocialToo.
And of course follow my twitter (I promise to follow you)
Filed under: Social Media and Search | 1 Comment
Tags: businesses, comunity, Friend or follow, hotspot, micro blogging, retweet, social networking, socialtoo, twitter, twitter name, twittersphere
Social monitoring
With an every increasing number of people going online to blog and engage in social networks there is an increasing number of on-line tools available to enable individuals and organisations to monitor discussion about their brand.
These tools amalgamate results from several sources including technorati and google blog search.
Companies and organisations need to monitor these networks to measure the success of their social media campaigns together with working to minimise the impact of negative conversations about their brand.
You cannot, and should not attempt to, control what is said about your brand in social media, however by being aware of these conversations you can utilise what is said to help drive improvements in your organisation and through reasonable responses aim to mitigate their impact.
Filed under: Social Media and Search | Leave a Comment
Tags: blog, brand monitoring, samepoint, social media, social networks, socialmention, technorati
How was you told that the last person that you were very close to died?
When a work colleague died I remember receiving a group email, shocking but at least there were others around in the office to look to for support. In the age of social networking there is every possibility that you could discover that someone close died via a profile update. With the rapid growth of mobile internet you could be in the middle of a meeting, stood in the queue at the supermarket, out for a meal with friends or picking up the kids from school.
Whilst you could be in all these scenarios to discover the death of a friend via a telephone call, the ‘accidental’ impact of discovering of someones death from a wall post or status update on a social profile seems to have an added loneliness and depth of shock.
So what happens next?
Some friends may wish to post messages of their shock and sadness on the profile of the deceased. Others may feel this inappropriate, feel that such public displays of grief are inappropriate.
Who should decide if and when a profile is removed?
Should relatives be given control?
At funerals I have always disliked the saying ‘they would have wanted…’ said so many a time by people who have no idea what the deceased wanted at all.
A solution to this would be a ‘living will’ on social networks – a ‘death wishlist’ or ’social network after life’. At some point after signing up to a social network you should be given the option to select what you would like to happen to your account after you die. I would imagine that most will not bother, but for those of us who do not want others to speak in their name, this could be a way of securing that our wishes are met.
A ‘passed on’ option or ‘dead’, if you would prefer to be more blunt, could be useful – this would enable friends to stay friends but not have the deceased pop up every time an application wants you to choose friends to invite. Pre-programmable options after the ‘dead’ option is activated could include a series of status updates – spooky but could also provide some comfort (or hilarity).
In the absence of a ‘Facebook Death List’ I’d like to let my wishes be known:
- Post away on my profile after I’ve gone, for me death has traditionally been a social event. At least on-line there wont be any stale sandwiches
- My profile can stay, but if you’re a friend don’t feel embarrassed to delete me as a friend if seeing me in your friends list makes you feel uncomfortable
- Take photos at my funeral (no one ever does this which is a shame when everyone made such an effort to look good – and of course look gorgeous in black). A HD video stream would be even better.
- Make sure the coffin and later pictures of my gravestone are tagged just to make sure anyone who might stumble by my profile understands why I haven’t updated my status in a while.
- If someone can post messages each year to a newspaper on the anniversary of a death then I cant see why you can’t make it easier for people by keeping your profile open so they can post messages there.
Social networks have become such a major part of our lives, for me, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be a major part of death. I just hope that my last profile picture is a good one as I hopeit will be around for a lot longer than I was.
So what would you’re ‘Death Wish List’ be? Should Facebook let you decide what happens to your profile after you’re death or is this for you’re family to decide? Will last.fm discover new meaning? What happens to your last tweet when you are no longer able to twitter?
Filed under: Social Media and Search | 1 Comment
Tags: death, deceased, facebook, facebook death wish, facebook profile, last.fm, living will, my space profile, online profile, profile, social network, social network profile, social networking, twitter
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- Last.fm
- Vladimir Jurowski: London Philharmonic Orchestra – Tchaikovsky: Serenade For Strings In C, Op. 48 - 3. Elegia
- Vladimir Jurowski: London Philharmonic Orchestra – Tchaikovsky: Serenade For Strings In C, Op. 48 - 4. Finale: Tema Russo
- Sergei Rachmaninoff – Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 Mvt. I
- Sergei Rachmaninoff – Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 Mvt. I
- Duffy – Stop
- James Morrison – This Boy
- Adele – Daydreamer
- Mika – Mika - Relax, Take It Easy
- Black Eyed Peas – Out Of My Head
- Adele – Hometown Glory
- Facebook
- Christopher enjoyed doing the countdown for the fireworks at Clapham Common.
- Christopher have to wait in for a delivery today :(.
- Christopher off 2 bed after posting some poetry to the new wellbelove blog.
- Christopher doing reports - lots of reports - maybe I need a report of all the reports.
- Christopher On a conference call - which sounds as if it could go on for an hour but I only have nine more minutes!
Recent Entries
- No time to grieve – the death of Michael Jackson on Twitter
- My IBM launched
- Follow to be followed on Twitter
- Social monitoring
- Should Facebook have a Death Wish list?
- Applications come to Linked In
- Digital notes just got easier
- Twideas for Twitter
- Winning elections on-line
- Great Reasons to switch now to Google Chrome
- Google launches browser: Chrome
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