Bloggasm

For an article on The Next Web, I interviewed Jeffrey Harris, the social media director for The Aspen Ideas Festival, about how he optimized the conference events for wide online distribution:

As conference attendees become more digitally connected, news emerges from an event at a faster and faster rate. A word has hardly escaped Steve Jobs’ mouth during one of his keynote addresses before it’s tweeted out or live-blogged for the millions of readers who are following along at home. Panelists are no longer speaking to a small, select group, but can now have their speeches dissected in real time by people thousands of miles away.

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LinkedIn recently admitted in a public offering document that most its users don’t actually regularly log into its site. This isn’t entirely surprising, as it’s primarily a business networking tool and therefor would only be used when you’re looking for a new job or working on business development.

To try to become more relevant for its most casual users, LinkedIn will attempt to dive into social news aggregation, becoming essentially the “Wall Street Journal of social news.” Though we haven’t yet seen how this model would work, I’m guessing that it will create an algorithm that detects the most-shared news within certain business networks, so if you work within the catering industry then news shared by others within your industry will make its way toward you.

It’ll be an interesting experiment, though I really question how many aggregators the market will sustain. I already follow people within my business network on Twitter and Facebook, and as one of those casual users of LinkedIn, my network there is much weaker.

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If he did, he’d be in the minority with his peers. According to a new study by the blog UberCEO.com, an extremely low number of CEOs have much of a social networking presence. Only two were on Twitter, 81% weren’t on Facebook and about 13 had LinkedIn accounts.

CEOs Are Social Media Slackers: Study

Not one Fortune 100 CEO had a blog. [Reuters CEO Tom Glocer has a blog and a Facebook presence.]

“It’s shocking that the top CEOs can appear to be so disconnected from the way their own customers are communicating. They’re giving the impression that they’re disconnected, disengaged and disinterested,” said Sharon Barclay, editor at UberCEO.com who runs executive PR firm Blue Trumpet Group.

“No doubt regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Reg-FD make CEOs cautious about communicating freely, but they’re missing a fabulous opportunity to connect with their target audience and raise their company’s visibility,” Barclay said, referring to financial reporting regulations aimed at protecting investors.

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That’s the only logical conclusion we can reach after seeing that parents are willing to take on the voices of their speechless illiterate newly-borns in the social networking realm; talk about living vicariously through your children.

Why on earth is MSNBC teaming up with Myspace? Didn’t they get the memo that Myspace is dead?

This is my first Sunday that I have almost completely to myself (most weekends I travel to see my girlfriend an hour away) and I’ve taken the opportunity to do some house cleaning, both figuratively and literally. Part of that house cleaning involves shooing these media-related links out the door.

1. Have you ever wondered the difference between marketing, advertising, PR, and branding? Well, now you have this hilarious illustration to spell it out for you.

2. For weeks now, Tor Books has been giving away free ebooks of its print titles. Every week a new ebook is sent out to their mailing list. What’s most interesting (to me) about these mailings is that some of the authors are posting updates on their book sales and how giving away free ebooks affected their print sales. Tobias Buckell, whose novel Crystal Rain was recently given away in the mailing, posts graphs that show a recent spike in sales after the giveaway.

3. On a slightly related note, remember how Google has completely fucked me over in its recent indexing? Well, to find my Bloggasm article linked above about Tor’s ebooks, I Googled the words “Bloggasm” and “tor books” assuming that that post would come up first. I ended up having to skip through two or three pages of search results before I found it. Fucking ridiculous. And you know what showed up first in the search results before the actual article? All the dozens of blog posts that linked to the article.

4. This article makes me extremely jealous. It’s about a newspaper media critic who took a buyout and now runs a media website full time. My pipe dreams have become this guy’s reality.

5. More and more social networking scandals are breaking every week, these sites are likely going to create a whole new field of study for sociologists. This week’s scandal comes to us via New York, an article about school systems struggling to respond to libelous teacher attacks on Facebook.

6. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries his hand at satire by summarizing a recent AP profile on Attorney General Michael Mukasey.