While most people are attempting to figure out social media for fun and profit (they never will), the Internet has become an ultimate fish bowl for human behavior. Everything that used to happen offline is happening online, except it comes with a trackable truth meter for anyone who happens to look for the truth.
The five best fresh picks all share a small slice of the human condition. People air their offline laundry in public, attempt to control information, steal ideas from others, mistake buzz for branding, and struggle to distinguish amateur from professional as both roads might lead to the same destination. All of it makes you realize that when people ask what happened on the Web today, the only real answer is that everything offline happened online today. It's just like any other day.
Best Fresh Content In Review, Week of March 8
• For Many Families, Facebook Is The Real World Web.
Louis Gray paints an interesting picture of how family connections on Facebook mirror offline relationships, even in his own family. He presents both the good (the ability to disrupt separation in between gatherings) and the bad (when an in-law unfriended everyone on the other side of the family). All of it is presented with sparkling transparency in an accidental life stream.
• A Challenge To Open Democracy – Bloggers Excluded From Council’s Twitter Accreditation.
A few weeks I ago, I mentioned how for every leap forward in setting communication free, new measures are made to control and manipulate it just as fast. Carl Haggerty captures one such move north of England, where the Devon County Council applies a rule that only allows accredited journalists to "tweet" live within council meetings. Apparently, accountability is a dangerous thing.
• Attribution is the Sincerest Form of Flattery.
On the flip side of the information free-flow control, Ike Pigott shares a cutting case study of how information shared across the Web tends to lose its original source. Sure, sometimes people come up with similar concepts. Other times, the disintegration of attribution is accidental. This time, it's hard to mistake the obvious. One blogger cherry picked content and then promoted it as their own, creating the illusion that they were the original source.
• How Much Buzz Do The Top 10 Global Brands Generate On Social Media?
There has always been a big difference between buzz and brand and Jeff Bullas found a clever way to convey it. By tracking the online buzz of top global brands, he verifies that top brands do not necessarily generate the top buzz, which is why Toyota finished much higher than its brand value for the all the wrong reasons. Where is the lesson? Our takeaway is common sense: events generate buzz; brand value is earned.
• BBC News - Music Stars 'Still Need Labels.'
While most fresh picks are linked toward original content, this story by Ian Youngs (BBC News) as featured on Jeremy Meyers' "posterous" blog was too good to dismiss. Meyers also offers up his own take on the piece, saying that the music biz remains in denial. Our takeaway is a bit different. Much like daily newspapers, the industry still needs to find a model to make managed artists manageable. Eventually, they'll find it. Expect it to be different.
