Learning while social hiking

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Map from ShareYourAdventure.

WE SPENT THE DAY making and sharing rich media points of interests while creating a public map at ShareYourAdventure.com.

We learned some things about geotagging while watching tweets, photos, audio clips, and Foursquare check-ins populate our public map. Not all social networks have precise geolocation capabilities. Specifically, Twitter's GPS functionality spoofs easily (annotated as "bogus point" on the screenshot) while Flickr's machine intelligence appears rock-solid. After all, Flickr has been doing geolocated photo services for the past decade.

After six hours of walking through a variety of places that should complement a campus tour, I've started to think it might be more worthwhile to focus on snapping well-composed photographs accompanied by informative captions. The captions could serve as microblog posts. The images could be saved in a curated and syndicated set. They could be shared later as embeddable content.

I plan to interview several people who created parts of the social hiking map to learn techniques they refined in making the project work.

Thanks for Sharing Adventures

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Social hiking is part of the creative multimedia programme taught at the Limerick Institute of Technology. This blog post was created in the field and sent mail -to-blog from my Nokia Lumia 820.

Bonus Link: SocialHiking on Twitter.

Twitter v Facebook or Not

I SPEND TIME in both Twitter and Facebook but have discovered the real world constrains deep engagement in both.

Every year that I teach creative multimedia to college students, I test awareness of several different social networks. Most students dive in for a semester but two years later, I see different patterns of engagement. The pressures of academic work constrains how far students can spread themselves. They cut back on public posts and leverage direct channels effectively.

In practical terms, this often means I will see people sharing tips late at night in Facebook groups. Twitter's direct messaging also proves handy when trying to get things done.

During academic lectures, I point out how some companies and government agencies block access to social media, so it is important to have more than one lazy web channel if you depend upon collaboration. I also explain that when people chatter away in the open, some supervisors think it is unproductive.

Since showing my first students how to discover free online tutorials in 1995, much has changed. Twenty years from now, when I'm retired, I'll be interested in seeing what my son and daughter use for online collaboration.

Google Plus Engagements

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Photo from G+.

I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND why Google+ gets dismissed as a place for meaningful online activity. Just looking at brands, I see there are 30 brands above the million follower mark on G+ compared to 33 on Twitter.

There are real social followers in both places--and that's the point--provided the brands offer something interesting (or they dump a load of money into advertising).

I listen to dismissive attitudes about Google Plus in Ireland and think it's really down to people preferring to hang out in familiar settings with friends. During my six years on Twitter, I've followed and later met up with really interesting people. The same is happening for me inside Google Plus.

G+ Second Most Popular But Not By Babble

Bernie Goldbach in Limerick | Screenshot from Forbes.

 

STATISTICIANS BELIEVE G+ is the second most-used social network on the planet. But drawing that conclusion is down to how you measure "use".

I can only speak anecdotally when I watch scores of college students use Facebook's log-in features to access other parts of the internet. And I know the howls of disbelief that come from Facebook marketing experts who claim you cannot count the presence of the G+ numbering system in someone's Gmail as a use of Google Plus. And in the most authentic version of my real virtual life, none of my immediate family use G+ to share photos, check-ins, or Community discussions. And only a small blip of Irish Twitterspace has the time to swim in the waters of Google Plus. So "activity" is a relative term then. And the "activity" mentioned in this relatively obscure marketing analysis has not been cross-validated by notes provided to investment analysts by Google.

Five Highlighted Burcher Passages

WE COMBINE READING about Nick Burcher's view of paid, owned and earned media with in-class discussions about the most-highlighted passages of Burcher's book for discussion.

-- The brand effects of Adwords. A 59% increase in unaided awareness occurs when users visit the promoted website.

-- Engagement today isn't just pouring a message on their head and hoping they get wet. It really is understanding that you must be present on a conversation when they want to have it, not when you want to.

-- Owned media has the most control but smallest reach, followed by paid, and them earned, which has the least control bit the highest potential reach.

-- Designed cleverly enough, market research surveys will answer any question you can think up. But they can't tell you what you never thought to ask.

-- Robert Cialdini posits six principles of influence, including "social proof" about following others. Social proof can be used to stimulate a person's compliance with a request by informing him or get that many other individuals, perhaps some who are role models, are of have observed this behavior. Social proof is most influential under two conditions-- uncertainty (when people don't know what to do they will look to follow others) and similarity (people will follow those who they believe are similar to themselves).

We look at these common highlighted passages in the Web Analytics module during the creative multimedia degree programme in the Limerick Institute of Technology.

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Nick Burcher -- Paid Owned Earned: Maximising Marketing Returns in a Socially Connected World ISBN 074946562X

A Consistent Conversation

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Screenshot from Statcounter.

I HAVE A BLOG that I am using to show creative multimedia students lessons in consistent viewership.

A lot of things have changed since 2002 on my blog. The biggest change is fragmentation in readership. When I started a daily online journal on 1997, I didn't track the analytics on my stuff but a small snippet of code from Radio Userland told me I got at least 100 visitors a day. When I switched over to MovableType in 2001, daily views climbed over 500. And when I joined the Typepad community in 2003, I had more than 1000 page views every day. Things have gone back to the days of MovableType for me because there are so many ways of grabbing a peek at my blog now and those methods don't involve an actual visit.

On an average day, 735 people read my blog in a newsreader. They get a textual experience with an image but not the sidebar, comments or banner image.

Most of the comments for my blog appear as cross-talk on Twitter. And depending on how I share a post, I get meaningful commentary from Facebook and Google Plus.

But there are ways of defining a set point for minimum page views and then executing a strategy to deliver on that goal.

That is what I'm discussing with creative multimedia students who ate completing assignments as part of this level modules involving an exhibition, social media for business and web analytics.

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Bernie Goldbach teaches web analytics as part of a creative multimedia degreee programme in LIT-Clonmel.

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Facebook for Art

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Photo by Nicola Corboy.

ALONG WITH 35 creative multimedia students, I have embarked on marketing our annual artistic exhibition through Facebook, Google Local and standard media channels.

We have a standard Facebook page for Pen & Pixel but its Facebook Insights show serious shortcomings in its promotion. It needs engaging, succinctly edited activity on its timeline and regular posting of high-quality images. This kind of content suits our student cohort well.

During the next 10 weeks, we will develop the Pen & Pixel brand through illustrated stories. We will share our Insights and our work flow. I think we will have a case study that would benefit anyone trying to promote the arts through Facebook.

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Bonus Link: Facebook for Art (31 slides of our first steps).

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Flickr's Long Tail

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Screenshot from Flickr Irisheyes Stats.

 

ALTHOUGH FLICKR'S NEW iOS app has rejuvenated interest in its venerable photo-sharing service, liking and sharing photos happens most often with Facebook. However, Flickr's long tail remains very potent.

Sociolinguistics and Twitter

ACRES OF IRISH newsprint cover the current debate over the tone of voice often heard coursing through Twitter and Facebook. I believe the discussions would about the nature of online engagement would improve if viewed through the lens of sociolinguistics.

Local politician Tom Hayes plans to co-ordinate a consultation document that solicits opinion about whether places like Facebook and Twitter should be monitored and even constrained by Irish law. Barristers who have reviewed the issue point to existing statutes on libel, defamation and harassment. If someone feels hard done by the tone of online discourse they can use the law to get their day in court.

But I believe another dimension of this debate deserves careful scrutiny in an academic context. Some of the language I read on the public Twitter timeline cannot be streamed onto whiteboards in Irish schools because it is crude or racist or sexist. And yet it passes for friendly banter among mates. Moreover, it is also pasted onto public Facebook walls and into the cut and thrust of spirited debates on Twitter. Sometimes the invective and downright hostile comments can reduce a reader to tears. I've seen that while the promulgator just shrugs and wanders off to another conversation.

There are clear sociolinguistic reasons why this kind of online demeanour deserves the illumination of academic discussion. And that is what we are doing this semester as part of a critical and contextual analysis of online social media.

[Bernie Goldbach has actively run online discussion fora since 1992 and he lectures at the Limerick Institute of Technology in http://www.lit.ie/Courses/LC517 ]

Wishing for a Social Web

Bernie Goldbach in Cahir, Ireland. | Image frozen from 2007.

I HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED to see the evolution of internet content change since I first started an online journal in 1997. Along with Anil Dash, I believe a lot of the social dimension of our web has been eroded.

That conclusion probably surprises a lot of people who read the title of this blog post in their Twitterstreams. Why if you've got an account on The Twitter Machine and you've friends on The Facebook, aren't you happy with your place in the social web? Most are. But as Anil so clearly articulates, most don't know how company valuations and monetisation models have changed the underlying architecture of the social web.

If you're like Anil Dash and you "know your shit," you know the history of the social side of the internet. Unfortunately, most of the connected class knows the social web only through their apps or their handheld touchscreens. They don't know how the plumbing has been turned off, broken and realigned to benefit closed ecosystems that deliver a consistent experience.

I wish we had a truly social web, not the version that has evolved in the early part of the 21st century. And as I suggest in the audio clip below, I think I'll live to see a social networking platform evolve out of the shadow of the current dominant players who have attracted the billions of investment on the heels of the billions of online interactions that occur in a social world defined by silos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, and Google Plus.

Wishing for a Social Web

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Inspired by Anil Dash -- "The Web We Lost", on his blog, December 13, 2012. Photo shot with the gear I was using just before the iPhone launched in Ireland.

 

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