As part of the exciting offerings Social Media Club is going to roll out in 2007, we’d like to introduce the Social Media Now feature. The goal of Social Media Now is to provide brief highlights of some of the important and interesting Social Media ideas, items and events happening on a regular basis. Expect to see Social Media Now about two times a week, with hopes of making it a regular weekday feature in the near future. As always, we’d love your comments, thoughts and feedback, so please, jump right in!

/Message: Looking Ahead: 10 Thoughts for 2007. One of the more interesting items on Stowe Boyd’s list was his expectation that social awareness will greatly rise this year, for example with more and more people keeping in touch with each other throughout the day through tools like Twitter and Jaiku.  In fact, I first heard about a recent earthquake in California through Twitter – much faster than I did through traditional news or other forms of what we consider Social Media. But let’s be smart about using these tools. Last week I read this Twitter post: “at work. gettin ready to dodge out the door at 3pm. seriously, dodge-unseen, hopefully.” Remember, if it’s online it’s public. 

The Viral Garden: Revenge of the ‘Z-Lister’. Mack Collier has always taken a strong public stance against the idea that the number of inbound links by themselves determine a blog’s authority. His meme resonated wildly among many bloggers and resulted in raising the Technorati rankings of these blogs, as  well as leading to additional Z-type lists or Z-mutations, as Mindblob called them. So what can we learn from this? Everyone wants to feel they have a voice, and no one wants to be told that their voice doesn’t count. Sure there’s such a thing as “authority” (how that’s defined in the ultimate question), but the minute people feel they’re being excluded or not sufficiently heard, they’ll try to set the system on its head.

Placeblogger and Outside.in. With its official launch, Placeblogger formalized the increased focus on locally-based blogs. The site helps you find and subscribe to local placeblogs, which “are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives.” Outside.in, another new site that aggregates information by neighborhood (it currently tracks 55 cities and 3236 neighborhoods), supports the trend of greater importance being placed on locally-based information and activities. Increased engagement and involvement will likely lead to a greater sense of responsibility for a community, which in turn will lead to more engagement and involvement – a good cycle.

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview. The survey is a quick and worthwhile read in its entirety, but here are some of the key findings: Fifty-five percent of all American teens ages 12-17 use social networking sites; MySpace is the single most used social networking site among teens who have created online profiles; 66% of teens with online profile say they’ve limited access to it; in terms of frequency of visitation, 22% of teens visit social networking sites several times a day, 48% visit them daily or more often, and 26% visit them once a day; girls 15-17 use social networking sites more frequently than their male counterparts; and most teens use social networking sites to maintain existing friendships, with about half of the surveyed teens saying they use the sites to make new friends. So why should any of this matter? While there regularly seems to be some debate surrounding the type of adult that spends a lot of time online (e.g. whether these are simply hard core techies, or real-world socially challenged individuals, or ones who are geographically isolated), the Pew/Internet survey suggests that for teens, online engagement is an integral part of their lives. There’s no reason to assume that their involvement will decrease as they get older, which means that the new generation of adults will be even more connected than before. Perhaps this will put to rest the debate about online vs. offline lives, with the future focus being more holistic.

Web Worker Daily: Why Instant Messaging Is Better For Collaboration Than Email. In summary, the argument is that IM fosters collaboration because it moves so fast that overthinking and overjudging don’t occur, IM avoids many of the “cover your arse” issues of e-mail, and misunderstandings are minimized because there’s instant feedback. On all points I agree – as compared to e-mail. But even then, there’s an inherent risk in written-only based collaboration. I’ve seen many examples of even IM communications going astray because someone made some statement not accompanied by an emoticon, and was then misconstrued. Does this mean IM isn’t an effective tool? Heck no, and I rely on it quite a bit (I also use Skype, both the chat and the voice functions). It just means we need to be aware of the potential risks and pitfalls inherent in each tool and choose accordingly.

I Speak of Dreams: It’s National DeLurking Week 2007! Liz Ditz reminds us that last year blogger Sheryl of Paper Napkin  designated the second week of January as National De-Lurking Week to encourage individuals who are readers of a blog, but haven’t commented on it, to “come out” and introduce themselves. The idea of designating a particular period as prime de-lurking time is excellent – it gives people who have perhaps felt somewhat shy about engaging online a reason to do so. It also encourages people like me, who read a lot of blogs but haven’t identified themselves as a reader on every one, the opportunity to say hello. National De-Lurking Week emphasizes the importance of participating in conversations and exchanging idea, not simply absorbing information in a uni-directional way.

bbc.co.uk: Parisian neighbours meet online (via Simon Wakeman). Peuplade is a social networking site that helps Parisians meet residents of different backgrounds in the offline world. Originally created for the 17th arrondissement of Paris, it’s now spreading to the entire city. What’s interesting about this concept is the recognition that online and offline is not mutually exclusive, and that one can help facilitate the other. It seems that too often we get stuck in an online vs. offline debate when the discussion should be about something entirely different, namely the derived value.

 
Social Media Now is written by Andrea Weckerle, New Millennium PR.