You’d be lacking all sorts of native reason if you accepted a friend request from your boss on Facebook, but what happens when you like your company’s Facebook page?

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May hate Google for taking away Google Reader, but I love Twitter and its ability to allow me to connect to people much cooler and more famous than me:

I’m hanging out at Social Media Weekend in New York City today and will try to post updates of interesting tidbits throughout the day. Also follow #smwknd (https://mobile.twitter.com/search/?q=%23smwknd&s=typd) on Twitter for tons of updates by people a lot smarter than me.

Tweets about “#smwknd”

If you were a Facebook user over the age of 18 in the United States, there was only a one in 50 chance that you did not see some sort of election-related messages if you logged in on Election Day. Did those messages influence the results?

Well, that depends on who you ask. The Atlantic’s Rebecca J. Rosen seems to think the increase in turnout among younger voters is evidence that the Facebook messages did influence voter behavior, while TechCrunch’s Gregory Fernstein is being accused of link-baiting for his takedown of Rosen’s piece (that’s the usual response anyone who questions the power of technology tends to be hit with when they write anything that suggests there is a limit to how radically said technology is transforming all aspects of life).

Which one is right? Which one is wrong? In my mind, they both are. Because a person’s decision to vote, and the influence that decision carries within online and offline social networks, is far too complex to be understood less than one week after an election and explained in a blog post. Social media is like every other technological advance of communication since the telephone: people debate its impact, taking strong stands on two distinct sides: dismissal and grandiose pronouncements. In the end, the technology evolves to a point of acceptance and the reality falls somewhere in between the two initial stands of the entrenched camps in the debate. Continue Reading »

Tech journalist Dave Copeland leads a panel on social discovery best practices and future trend featuring executives from StumbleUpon, Gigya, Inside Facebook and other leading firm at the Social Discovery Conference in San Francisco on Aug. 6, 2012

There are tons of services out there aimed at helping you time tweets for when your followers are most likely to be online and, as a result, most likely to interact with your message, either by clicking on a link, retweeting or responding.

The best I have seen is also the most expensive. For about $100 a month, SocialFlow will not only time your tweets to when your users are online, but when they also appear to be active on Twitter and talking about whatever it is you’re tweeting about. When I wrote about them for ReadWriteWeb in February, just after their launch, they were boasting click-through rate improvements of up to 60%.

That’s great if you have the budget, but most of us don’t. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have that kind of budget and have, until recently, had to rely on manually scheduling tweets to time with what any of the wide range of free analytics services have told us is the best time to tweet.

Here’s a simple fix using my new favorite social media scheduling service (Buffer) and my favorite Social Media Analytics Service (SocialBro).
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I’m looking to for leading experts, executives and VC’s in the social discovery space to speak on a panel predicting the “next big thing” in social discovery. This is for a panel I’m moderating at the Social Discovery Conference being held Aug. 6-7 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, so I’d prefer to work with people already in the Bay Area.

I may also ask the panel to look at a tangental idea about how social discovery essentially helps us find and connect with “loose connections” that are so crucial in the traditional social networking model.

Interested? Shoot me an email.

OnlineUniversities.com came out with an optimistic infographic last week about how college classrooms are going digital.

But as someone who makes as much as a quarter of his income from teaching college classes in any given year, and who also spends a good amount of time speaking at conferences trying to help professors incorporate technology and social media into their curriculum, the view from the trenches is very different than the iPad-in-every-backpack proponents would have you believe.

This is not to say that tech isn’t changing the way we teach and the way students learn: it most certainly is. But probably not as fast as some people outside of higher ed think it is.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb.

A lot of journalists are going to conferences and being told to use Storify, a site that lets you curate loads of social media on a given topic and present them in a narrative or timeline: you can, for example, pull tweets and YouTube videos, urls and Facebook posts.

That is generally a good thing, providing they do it right. But, unfortunately, like a lot of things related to social media, people end up doing it just to say they’re doing it and don’t spend too much time thinking about how to do it well.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb.

I’ve been making a conscious effort over the past few months to start curating and organizing my Twitter followers into lists. There are a lot of reasons to do this, but most of all, it just helps me quickly scan people who tend to talk about certain subjects I’m interested in without having to wade through my main feed and skim over the tweets I may not be interested in on a given day.

A lot of my lists are work specific, but then again, a lot of work-related people stop by here. And a lot of my work is general interest, so here are some lists I keep that may be of interest. Feel free to follow any of these lists or pick through them to find people to follow. Because remember, no matter how many people you follow on Twitter, it’s not enough.

• Politics: Includes all of the major presidential candidates and any of their campaign staffers who tweet regularly. Also includes loads of journalists and commentators who are covering the 2012 election.
• Journalism: People who practice and/or tweet about the black art.
• Twitter Stuff: Every expanding list of people who tweet about Twitter (which I cover for ReadWriteWeb). Includes lots of Twitter employees as well as third-party developers.
• Restaurants: One of my newest lists so it’s fairly thin. Mostly Boston-area restaurants although I am traveling extensively this year and will add restaurants I like. And that’s the key: I only put restaurants on this list that I have been too and actually enjoyed.
• Social Media/Blogging: Just what it sounds like. People who tweet about better practices for using social media and blogs.
• Bridgewater State: Students, alumni, faculty and campus groups at Bridgewater State University who use Twitter.