Last week, we of the ‘Web Strategies for Storytelling’ course were to blog a few thoughts on social media as stimulated by a couple of notable posts (haha, looks like I’m late to the party!). One was the brilliant Clay Shirky TED presentation from some weeks ago, where he uses the example of the effect of tweeting during and immediately after the Sichuan province earthquake of May 2008 to illustrate the power of social media in organizing and finding ways to supersede old media and government during major events of great social impact. The second was a c|net post about the scaling-back of the failed Microsoft video sharing site Soapbox (now just MSN Video).
Posts Tagged ‘social media’
Hanson Hosein and Independent America – Rising From Ruins: The Social Media Strategy
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Client: Hanson Hosein and Independent America – Rising From Ruins
The following post contains the final social media strategy to promote the recently released independent feature film, Rising From Ruins, part of the Independent America documentary series produced by HRHMedia.
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Hanson Hosein and Independent America – Rising From Ruins: discovery and tools deliverable for client
Thursday, May 7th, 2009Client: Hanson Hosein and Independent America – Rising From Ruins
The following contains a proposal, amended for discovery and including useful tools, for a social media strategy to promote the upcoming independent feature film, Rising From Ruins, part of the Independent America documentary series produced by HRHMedia.
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Social Media Strategy Proposal for Independent America: Rising From Ruins
Monday, April 27th, 2009The following is a proposal for a social media strategy for promoting the upcoming independent feature film, Rising From Ruins, part of the Independent America documentary series produced by HRHMedia.
About Independent America: Rising From Ruins
Independent America: Rising From Ruins is the 2008 follow-up to 2005′s Independent America: The Two-Lane Search For Mom & Pop. Both feature-length documentaries are directed by Hanson Hosein, former CBC and MSNBC reporter and current director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media at the University of Washington. As a series, Independent America focuses on the struggles and challenges faced by small businesses and business owners, as well as those communities such businesses occupy. 2005′s Mom & Pop took the documentarian road-tripping across the United States, capturing stories of hardship and determination in the face of growing mega-corporate encroachment. Unfortunately, August 2005 brought devastation to one location the filmmakers were unable to visit until much later. 2008′s Rising From Ruins returned to the scenes of post-Katrina New Orleans to document the growing struggles faced by NOLA residents and small business owners as both government and big business attempt to execute a difficult and controversial recovery – one that hardly includes ‘mom and pop’.
Hulu + YouTube = Funny Or Die, or how to solve YouTube’s revenue problem
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
Say What?
They say YouTube isn’t making any money. Its bread and butter is user-generated content, although it has managed to draw partnerships with some major Hollywood content providers, such as Fox and Warner Bros. Nevertheless, the money is supposed to be sparse. Then you have Hulu, which got started with content from some of the major players, like NBC Universal and Fox, right off the bat. Hulu is, according to the word on the street, doing very well. And so what we’re looking at is two models, UGC and content from mass media. In other words, a site catering to social media vs. a site catering to mass media (or, instead of simply saying “mass media”, we mean the lumbering, late arrival of mass media content providers to the social media space).
California’s Prop 8, Mormons, Twitter, and the wisdom of crowds
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008Last week or so I was fortunate enough to get a quick email interview together with Internet personality Drew Curtis of FARK.com, which I posted to both my blog and Flip The Media. One thing Drew touched upon was, as he put it, the “bogus media creation of the ‘wisdom of crowds’.” This was also brought up again during Hanson Hosein’s latest lecture in our COM529 Research 2.0 course. The question is, essentially, is the sharing, collaboration, and collective action facilitated by social media always focused upon achieving a wise purpose? As Drew put it, crowds are “stupid, horny, and hungry”. There is an echo of this sentiment in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody; he asks the question: who decides which cause is right? As old media gives way to new, this becomes an increasingly important question. Like your mother always told you, just because everyone else is doing it, or in this case saying it, doesn’t mean it’s right.
Photo used from the Stranger Blog
So, I come to a matter of personal importance, which I have been following closely since last week’s historic election. In California, bellwether state of the nation, the electorate voted roughly 52% to 48% to remove the rights of gays to marry in their state. Some proponents of Prop 8, a constitutional amendment, argued that they were protecting the traditional definition of marriage. Many of the “Yes on 8″ supporters were of religious persuasion, and may have felt to ban gay marriage perhaps largely for religious reasons. Detractors of Prop 8, on the other hand, may have felt that the amendment was discriminatory towards gays and represented an affront to civil rights. It appears many of these detractors have pointed to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, typically called “Mormons”, as a primary factor in the measure’s passing. I know that many individual members of the LDS church, acting as citizens, campaigned for and contributed, individually, sometimes large sums of cash to the “Yes on 8″ cause. But, the legal entity that is “the church” did not. Notwithstanding, leaders of the church state that they exercised their rights in encouraging these activities from the pulpit. These efforts and the money raised, it’s alleged, directly led to the 53% win. I don’t wish to necessarily debate the rights or wrongs of such broad-based assumptions, of the ballot measure itself, the outcome, or the issues of religion or homosexuality in general here, but I do wish to highlight some of the interesting, and perhaps disconcerting things I have seen in the “crowd’s” response to the measure’s passing. Twitter, in particular, seems to be a social media tool contributing to the fervor and organization of the response from some of those individuals and groups that are opposed to the amendment, but there is no guarantee that what is found on Twitter is ever certifiable fact.
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