How Many People Can You Really Look After?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Feverbee/~3/8FIGfunQNos/how-many-people-can-you-really-look-after.html

Growing a community that’s too big for you to manage is dumb. Sadly, it’s the goal of most corporate communities.

1 community manager looking after 10,000 members isn’t efficient, it’s wasteful. You’re wasting the potential of thousands of members who would participate much more if they had more people responsible for getting them engaged and involved.

Past a certain size, your community becomes unmanageable. You can’t spend as much time with members. You give each member less. In turn, each member gives less.

The remedy is more help. You convert your most dedicated into volunteers. Volunteers take on groups of members (divide by interest/friendship groups. These volunteers take responsibility for clusters of members. They ensure they don’t leave.

Figure out how many members you, personally, can take responsibility for getting involved. It’s probably not many. 50? 200? Past this number, recruit volunteers to help. Keep your community strong and concentrated. Don’t let yourself be diluted by an unmanageable level of newcomers. Don’t be tempted by bigger numbers to report to your boss.

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The Dalai Lama Officially Joins Twitter


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The Dalai Lama Officially Joins Twitter

More and more celebrity holdouts are joining the Twitter bandwagon. First Bill Gates started tweeting, then yesterday rapper Lil Wayne joined the service. Today, another famous figure has his own Twitter presence: The Dalai Lama.

There has been an @DalaiLama account for some time. In fact, a fake Dalai Lama fooled the media and the twitterverse early last year, which was part of what spurred the creation of verified Twitter accounts.

This Dalai Lama is verified by Twitter, though — it is the real deal. Currently, the account is pulling albums and blog posts from his website and tweeting them via twitterfeed, though we bet you’ll see real engagement later on. He also only has about 600 followers, but as the media picks up on his new-found Twitter presence, that will grow as well.

Twitter is simply one of the best ways for well-known personalities to spread their message to thousands or millions of people, but it looks like a conversation between Ev and the Dalai Lama was enough of a push to get him to finally join.

We look forward to future tweets from His Holiness.


Reviews: Twitter, twitterfeed

Tags: Dalai Lama, trending, twitter

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Think There’s No Room for Social Media in the Workplace? Think Again!


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Think There’s No Room for Social Media in the Workplace? Think Again!

Working togetherOver the past few weeks I’ve had more and more clients ask me the same question: How can we learn from Facebook and Twitter to improve internal collaboration? I’ve been reflecting on this and have tried to translate some of our best loved social networking features into design patterns for consideration when building a collaborative intranet environment.


In this post I’ll look at some of the natural collaborative behaviours that occur in the workplace and briefly consider how to design services for them.


(1) People naturally gather around common points of interest


Projects, clients, work teams, specific assignments, specific contracts, sporting and social events — these are all natural points of interest. In our office environments there are various mechanisms which encourage or enforce us to work together and, in doing so, we’ll meet, talk and share our thinking. On Facebook these points of interest become groups or events, on Twitter they become trending hashtags. Depending on the richness of the website, these web workspaces can contain blogs, wikis, media sharing, calendars, etc.


(2) People like visuals


Facebook showed us the power of the profile pic and the photo album from the very beginning. LinkedIn finally caught on in 2007. Even Twitter — the king of text — recognises the power of a profile pic to quickly associate a tweet with a person. It’s only human that we naturally tend to find pictures more engaging than reams of text. In the workplace, particularly larger ones where often colleagues may not have met each other, this is an important way of visually separating the relevant from the irrelevant.


(3) People are increasingly able to use complex websites


Somehow, Amazon, eBay and the BBC have managed to make it intuitive to run through complex transactions and/or interpret incredibly large amounts of information. When designing for your intranet, use common design patterns that people are familiar with and recognise. Design for intuitiveness — develop user journeys around common transactions and work with users to model how they would work on the new platform. A service that is well used is more value than one with a quirky or funky design look.


(4) People want to be able to add their own content


One of the reasons the iPod trounced other MP3 players in the market was because it was the easiest to load up with music from your PC. It’s an important lesson — the more people can self-serve, the more they will self-serve. If you want to thwart people’s usage of your collaboration tools — make it so they have to request your IT function to create a new group, to post a blog entry or to upload some photos. That’ll stop ‘em every time...

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Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day


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Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day

New stats released today by Twitter reveal that users now send out more than 50 million tweets per day. That means every second, 600 tweets fly through Twitter’s network.

As we reported two weeks ago, Twitter saw more than 1.2 billion tweets in January, or around 39 million tweets per day. These numbers came from Royal Pingdom and not Twitter itself, though.

The new numbers blow past Pingdom’s stats. Some of the highlights:

- In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day.

- By 2008, the number grew to 300,000 tweets per day.

- By 2009, around 2.5 million tweets were sent through Twitter every single day.

- Tweet growth shot up by 1,400% in 2009, reaching 35 million tweets per day by the end of the year.

- As of now, Twitter sees 50 million tweets created per day.


These numbers are definitely noteworthy and provide evidence against the perception that Twitter is not growing

Tags: twitter



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Can E-readers and Tablets Save the News?


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Can E-readers and Tablets Save the News?

ipad news imageSales are robust for e-readers and there is no shortage of tablets yet to launch, including the new Apple iPad. But will strong sales translate into a boost for the media industry?

If media organizations do it right, the potential could be there for e-readers and tablets to become a viable revenue source. However, it may take a dramatic shift in the way publishers view digital content and their online business models.

Here’s a look at what media companies will likely need to do to make that happen.


The Potential of E-readers and Tablets


ipad side view image

“Right now, the e-reader and tablet are the most promising new potential source of revenue for newspapers,” said Roger Fidler, program director for Digital Publishing at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

While a Freedom Foundation Fellow at Columbia University from 1991 to 1992, Fidler created a conceptual electronic newspaper prototype with about 12 hyperlinked pages. In 1994, he adapted that prototype for the Tablet Newspaper video he and others produced at the Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab.

Fidler also coordinates the Digital Publishing Alliance, which includes news companies such as The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, and is focused on issues such as standards for content and ads on e-readers and tablets.

He told me that when he wrote Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media in 1997, he predicted e-readers would become commonplace in 2010. Not only have they arrived, but sales of e-readers are picking up. Sales of e-readers are ...

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Europeans Get a Taste of the Browser Choice Screen


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Europeans Get a Taste of the Browser Choice Screen

It might seem like a minor thing, but it isn’t.

Microsoft has been fined billions over browser choice (or lack thereof) in Windows, and the solution that finally satisfied EU regulators was a browser choice screen, which would let users choose a web browser rather then having Internet Explorer installed as the default.

Now, Microsoft has posted images of what the browser choice screen will probably look like.

Here’s how it will work: The user will be presented with five major browsers, randomly ordered. He will also be able to choose several additional browsers, which are also randomly ordered. Once you install a browser, you’ll get a shortcut of that browser on your desktop, while Internet Explorer will be unpinned from the taskbar.

Since Windows 7 has been available on the European market for quite a while now, one may ask why (and how) is this happening so late? Since Microsoft needed some time to implement the browser choice solution, it will now use Windows Update to provide the browser choice screen to European users who are using Internet Explorer as their default browser. Better late than never, huh?

More precisely, testing of the browser choice screen begins next week in the UK, Belgium and France, where users will be able to download the software update from Windows Update if they like. A phased rollout of the update will happen across Europe starting with March 1.

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Verslag Social Media Congres 2010


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Verslag Social Media Congres 2010

Afgelopen donderdag was ik te gast bij het Social Media Congres 2010 onder leiding van dagvoorzitter Ronald van der Aart. Een dag waarin het nog eens duidelijk werd dat social media geen hype is en de focus moet verschuiven van technologie (en het zoveelste tooltje om je netwerk uit te breiden) naar de relatie. Een boeiende dag met een aardige mix in het programma van strategisch niveau tot tactisch. Mijn highlights van de dag zet ik in dit artikel op een rijtje. Iets later dan verwacht maar ik wilde graag de presentaties erin opnemen en maar weinig events geven die nog dezelfde dag vrij. Hieronder het verslag met de presentaties: Lees meer over: Verslag Social Media Congres 2010.

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More Than One Billion Mobile Workers Worldwide by the End of 2010


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More Than One Billion Mobile Workers Worldwide by the End of 2010

More Than One Billion Mobile Workers Worldwide by the End of 2010According to a recent study by IDC, a global provider of IT market intelligence, the world’s mobile worker population will pass the one billion mark by the end of this year.


By 2013, the total of office-based, non-office-based and home-based mobile workers will grow to nearly 1.2 billion people, representing more than a third of the world’s workforce.


IDC foresees that the most significant gains will be in the emerging economies of Asia/Pacific, aside Japan, where a strong economic recovery, new interest in unified communications and a high demand in flexibility and mobility in work, will drive healthy growth in all aspects of mobility spending.


According to Sean Ryan, research analyst for Mobile Enterprise Software, there is vast opportunities for bringing a variety of mobile technologies to workforce worldwide, even outside the United States and Japan, where mobile worker population has reached its peak. Although there are still some barriers until we reach full-scale penetration of mobility solutions for the large worker populations across all region, the potential market is enormous.


Key findings from the Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2009-2013 Forecast include the following:



  • The United States and Japan have the highest percentage of mobile workers in their workforce. The 72.2% of the U.S. workers were mobile in 2008 and this percentage will grow to 75.5%, representing 119.7 million mobile workers, in 2013. The numbers are equally high for Japan, expecting to reach the 49.3 million mobile workers in 2013, representing 74.5% of its total workforce.

    • Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) leads the mobile workforce representing the largest total number of mobile workers worldwide, with 546.4 million mobile workers in 2008 growing to 734.5 million or 37.4% of the total workforce in 2013 .

      • Western Europe’s mobile workforce will total 129.5 million mobile workers (50.3% of the workforce) in 2013, surpassing the United States totals.

        • The rest of the world, meaning Canada,Latin America and the emerging market countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa will reach the 153.2 million mobile workers by 2013.

        • ...

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Google Energy: Google Can Now Buy and Sell Electricity

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/TAan4SRCMQY/

Google’s ever-expanding empire has added another branch: subsidiary Google Energy has been granted an order by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to buy and sell energy at market rates.

Does this mean Google is set to become your power company? Not yet — instead, Google wants more control over the high energy costs of its many data centers, and also aims to become carbon neutral. A Google spokesperson told CNET: “Right now, we can’t buy affordable, utility-scale, renewable energy in our markets. We want to buy the highest quality, most affordable renewable energy wherever we can and use the green credits.”

There’s the possibility, however, that Google might become an energy provider. The same spokesperson said to CNET in January: “We don’t have any concrete plans. We want the ability to buy and sell electricity in case it becomes part of our portfolio.”

[via Switched]


Reviews: Google

Tags: electricity, Google, google energy, power

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