Jumo: Cause Curation or Engagement Engine?

Posted by Scot Wheeler on December 1, 2010 0 comments

Jumo, a new cause-driven social networking site launched in beta on Tuesday by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, shows some promise on first glance as a cause curator, wrapping a lot of information into a nice simple package. However, it is not immediately clear how the site will go beyond making introductions and providing information (worthy ends in their own right) to facilitate people’s engagement with the causes they care about.

The site has a simple “getting started” process, authenticating through Facebook, then offering a quick easy set of menus to select issues and projects. By default it posted that I’d joined to my FB Wall, but that’s okay, and under settings there’s an option to disable subsequent updates to FB. It also had me automatically follow any of my FB friends who were already in Jumo.

As is expected for a beta launch, there are definitely still some kinks in the site’s operation. Information Week reported outages today, and indeed I received quite a few internal server errors this morning and some strange page renderings on refreshes, and I expect the interface will undergo some redesign to more cleanly group and manage projects, people and issues as users’ lists of these grow beyond the sidebar real-estate they currently possess. Overall though, the site is very straightforward, with just three pages; homepage, profile and settings. » Read more…

Expectations for Oversight in the Age of Social Networks

Posted by Scot Wheeler on November 23, 2010 0 comments

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how a Harris Poll had been misrepresented as showing that young people were somehow gullible in their trust of advertising, and I promised to follow-up with an examination of the actually meaningful implications of that study. Quite opposite from being gullible, young Americans seem to recognize the new landscape for advertising; in a marketplace driven by information and social media, dishonest advertising has a much greater likelihood of exposure.

The most compelling insight in the Harris Poll was around who the respondents trusted to ensure that advertising was honest in its claims. Nearly half (48%) of the respondents trust neither government or self-regulation to ensure honesty in advertising. The other half was split between the 29% of respondents who trust government regulation, and the 23% who trust self-regulation. » Read more…

The Alliance of Geeks and Poets: Quantifying Culture

Posted by Scot Wheeler on November 16, 2010 0 comments

An “alliance of geeks and poets” is how Patricia Cohen describes the emergence of data-driven research in the humanities in her great piece in the New York Times.

Ms. Cohen ‘s article describes the rise of “digital humanities”. As she reports, “…researchers are digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to understand what role topography played in victory, using databases of thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced jazz, and searching through large numbers of scientific texts and textbooks to track where concepts first appeared and how they spread.”

The opportunities for new insight and understanding about culture, civilization and consciousness seem immense – but there are also important limitations to data analysis to be recognized here, challenges that measurement for business communications have been wrestling with for a while. Ms. Cohen quotes a Princeton professor for this perspective: » Read more…

Can you Trust the Tweets on the Study on Trust? Not With That Headline…

Posted by Scot Wheeler on November 8, 2010 0 comments

The headline writers of a recent Harris Poll “massaged” their reading of their own research, (unintentionally?) creating a perfect case for why people might lack trust in what they are told by anyone via any media (advertising included). All kinds of folks took the bait and posted and re-tweeted the creative reading of a Harris Poll report as indicating that “…90% of young people trust advertising claims…”

Such distortions of the findings in ready to re-tweet form show how Twitter can be either a catalyst for communication, or a culprit in the declining value of context.

The “trust” in this question is the belief that advertising is honest in its claims “at least sometimes”. Re-phrase the question and the big finding here is that only 10% of 18-34 year old Americans believe that advertising is never honest, sharing this view with 14% of respondents 35-44, and 16% of those 45-54, and 19%(!) of those 55+. It turns out that the very cynical among us are likely to be older… » Read more…

Hitting the Right Notes

Posted by Scot Wheeler on October 22, 2010 0 comments

Online influence can be classified into two primary types; the individual influence of mavens, salespeople and connectors who achieve visibility and credibility within social media networks, and the shared influence that comes from being part of a networked response to a common problem.  There is no symphony without the conductor, the orchestra, and the sheet-music.

Any community engagement strategy organized around harnessing or leveraging online influence must be clear about the type of influence involved; is it the borrowed or extended credibility of a few influential individuals (the conductors), or is it a credibility (or infamy) earned through the ongoing interactions with large numbers of individuals in a public environment (the players)? The methods for harnessing influence are different for each type, and it is a mistake to set out to achieve one when circumstances call for the other. » Read more…