Some Thoughts on Social Media

I’ve been talking about Social Media for some time and believe it is going to have a huge impact on culture, society and business over the next 5 to 10 years. Anyway, I thought I’d dig up all my favorite posts about the topic and try to expose some of the chronology of what i’ve been learning. In many ways since I started this blog 6 years ago I’m documenting a long learning curve that I’ve gone through since starting my MBA program back then. Kind of interesting as Experience Curve is a term that actually relates to how organizations learn and become more efficient with new technology. Anyway, lots of these are old, written without the benefit of hindsight, but I found them very interesting to explore. If you have old articles on social media please link to them in the comments or write up your own post and send me a track back, i’ll gather other links in updates at the end of the post.

Supernova Conference Co-Creation TitBits
Jun 24, 2006 – From what I can tell this is the first time I mention social media as a descriptor, although I was still enamored with the term “co-creation” which was my particular focus in 2006. I even started a podcast called The Co-Creative Business Show (not supported, has probably been hacked, not responsible for content) and I put out 5 decent episodes but the production overhead was too much. Great experience though and talked to some great people about some seriously interesting topics.

The Audience Is Dead But The Show Must Go On
Jul 7, 2006 – I think this is one of my fav blog titles, bummer no one commented and I linked to some other bloggers

Why Social Media Kills The Competition – Yelp.com Case
Aug 1, 2006 – This is hands down one of my favorite case studies that I wrote from participating in a community, yelp is an extraordinary example of a social media business model. If they fail it will not be due to a lack of a powerful business model, it will be a lack of executing and scaling that business model.

3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing – What Every CMO Needs To Know
Aug 11, 2006 – Another post I really like and I’ve got great feedback on, really looks at how to manage creative projects differently in a social media environment.

Beyond Viral Marketing – Engagement, Narrative, & Passion
Sep 12, 2006 – This is my first post about “big games” or “alternate reality games”, I have a great belief in these being powerful examples of motivated user generated experiences (I still can’t think of a term to sum this up, but the power of these games to inspire participation are extraordinary). Check out Area/Code, a company specializing in big games. It’s also something that Nokia has pioneered with it’s Nokia Games that it’s been doing since 1999

Book: Outside Innovation – How Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
Sep 28, 2006 – What this book is about is what social media is good for and enables. It enables you to engage customers in your innovation process. Amazingly to me, and a wonderful example of eating your own dog food, 3 years on the blog that Patricia started to talk about this book is still going strong.

What’s The Role Of Social Media In The Next Election?
Sep 29, 2006 – Wow, this is still 2006, another one with no comments, wow, I was relentless.

Putting the Fun In Functional – Game Mechanics and Social Media
Dec 18, 2006 – This is a critical presentation to look at if you need to do any work with social networks. Basically it lays out the game mechanics that are built into social networks that drive behavior, this is the heart of what makes social networks tickle the very reptilian area of the brain and can make them very addictive.

Social Media Is Dead – So Says Steve Rubel
Dec 28, 2006 – Well this one got some comments I actually tagged some people in the post that I wanted to respond to the post, I should do that more.

What is Social Media
Feb 19, 2007 – Well this seems like an ideal post to end this post on, as this is my first blog interaction with Stowe Boyd, who I have actually recently come to know as a friend, and who continues to blog at /message about social computing and at /ground on issues of localism and sustainability.

What is Web 2.0 Feb 20th, 2007

Ning.com – Roll Your Own Social Network – The Rise Of The Social Niche-Work Mar 2, 2007