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How to talk about tragedy online
Dec 15, 2012 | Community
Time out, people. In the past 24 hours we have been have been inspired, informed, comforted and mobilized by the unfolding conversation on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. But it's clear that we have also had moments of feeling attached, horrified, angered and shamed....
The trouble with resilience
Dec 14, 2012 | Community
Today's shooting is one of those moments when time, and our hearts, break. How can we go on? How will life ever feel the same? What should shock us is not only the moment of tragedy, but how quickly tragedy fades. I remember with icy-hot clarity the morning of 9/11,...
Using the Internet to find empathy in solitude
Dec 12, 2012 | Relationships
Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually agreed to allow residence inside my brain. So writes Adam Brault in a very thoughtful blog post, I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly...
ShopStyle: Diary of an online shopping addiction
Dec 10, 2012 | Self
Update: If you visit shopstyle.com from outside the U.S, you may be taken to an international site -- which in the case of the Canadian site has far fewer results. To access the U,S. site, visit this URL (and bookmark it). You'll be taken to the. women's clothes...
2×2: Filtering your Facebook friends
Nov 26, 2012 | Relationships
How do you decide to view or relate to different friends on Facebook? As with all things in life, this can be described by a 2x2 matrix: Love this person Not so much Entertaining Facebooker Add to my "A1 pals" list, which is the news feed I look at most of the time...
What to tell your kids about dating before the Internet
Nov 20, 2012 | Family, Research and insight, Relationships
Hey, old people! By which I mean: hey, people my age! If you've been wondering what dating wisdom you can usefully impart to your teenage or soon-to-be teenage kids, you should read Stephanie Martin's thoughtful post on Dating in the Social Media Age. Stephanie...
Don’t blame the Internet for infidelity
Nov 19, 2012 | Relationships
The Petraeus drama reflects the enticements and betrayals of our new, disembodied modes of discourse. The come-ons, the flirtations, the stalking, the alleged harassment: all were abetted by the deceptive cloak of cyberspace, and all were immortalized there. It’s a...
Smartphones have transported us from an offline third place
Nov 16, 2012 | Community
Public transit used to be a version of what Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place”: a neutral space, neither work nor home, in which conversation and community can unfold. Have smartphones changed that?
6 ways to speed up your social media response times
Nov 14, 2012 | Career, Top Career Posts, Vision Critical
Speed is essential to developing the right social media campaign, response or update. In my last post, I looked at how the right kind of market research program can support faster and more responsive social media management, inspired by The Quick and the Dead, a new...
Why the speed of research matters in social media
Nov 13, 2012 | Vision Critical, Career
How quickly do you have to reply to a critical tweet? How long does it take for the right video to go viral? How often do you have to update your company's Facebook page? Speed is at the heart of many of the questions that come up over and over again in social media....