Will posting Facebook status updates and Twitter messages supporting your favorite candidate help him or hurt him on election day? The answer may not be as simple as it seems.

If you missed last week’s debate and logged onto Facebook Wednesday morning looking to find out what you missed, your take on who won and what happened would have been come, by and large, from the partisan point of view of your friends:

That’s homophily, or the idea that we tend to cluster with like-minded people. By nature, our social networks are polarizing so such messages usually serve to reinforce our own point of view. Facebook, in other words, isn’t necessarily the place to go for a thoughtful exchange on differing points of view.

Sociologists and political scientists will be closely watching the 2012 presidential election, as it presents another data set in the young field of studying how social media impacts voting rates. The only clear message now is nothing is clear, and what you post on Facebook on election day may – or may not – play a role in the outcome. Continue Reading »

I first fell in love with HootSuite over a year ago as a way to manage multiple social media accounts and feeds. But in the past several months the company has become less-and-less focussed on its core product and more and more focussed on a monetization strategy that, in my opinion, is detracting attention from the thing it did best.

Here’s the latest sign that HootSuite is verging on unusable for me:

I went ahead and reenabled it – for now. If anyone knows of a good replacement (not TweetDeck, which shit the bed as soon as Twitter bought it) please let me know in comments.

And to find out how I got that nifty alert and more about protecting your privacy online, see my review of PrivacyFix.

First in an occassional series of public relations don’ts…

I get roughly 20-30 unsoliciated pitches from public relations people each day. I read them and then usually delete them. When someone clearly doesn’t know what I do for a living I ask them to remove me from their distribution list.

I don’t complain about them – a good P.R. person is not the nemesis or evil entity a lot of hack journalists pretend they are (while cowering at their teet when they need to). But I will say it’s very rare for me to consider an unsolicited pitch from a P.R. person I haven’t previously worked with.

Still, occasionally you get some that are so stupid/off-base/unethical you have to wonder what college they got their communication studies degree from. To combat this practice, I am going to occasionally post the worst of the worst.

Hi Dave,

I’m emailing on behalf of XXXXXXXX and we’ve identified ReadWriteWeb as crucial to the interests of our client. In appreciation for the content of your blog, we’d like to send you a gift. Could you please provide us with a mailing address for this? 

Thank you,

Meaghan

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

This is taken a ReadWriteWeb post I wrote for this morning in which I interviewed Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of CanvasPop, about the Facebook acquisition of Instagram. Salamunovic has studied the Instagram app closely and had a no-nonsense explanation on why Instagram photos look so good:

Continue Reading »