Another week has flown by in social-media land, which means, you--and I--have missed a lot of developments, new products, etc. Most of them, of course, don't matter, but these Week in Review posts (March 12; March 5; February 26; February 19) are meant to help you catch up with the ones that do. Wherever I can, I insert Twitter handles so you'll have some new folks to follow. Each week, you can help by posting links in the comments section or e-mailing me or tweeting with @sree or #sreetips.
First stop: Mashable's 46 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed by Charlie White (@Charlie_White) is where I go to catch up with the best of what that site posted during the week. Several among them are worth saving for later, including:
- New Facebook App Suite Turns Brand Pages Into Crowdsourcing Hubs
- The 16 Best iPad Photo Editing Apps
- Ethics and Social Media: Where Should You Draw The Line?
Burning bridges at Goldman Sachs: The very public resignation of a Goldman Sachs veteran lit up Twitter and Facebook. A good collection of the responses is in this Storify (a social-media compilation tool) by WSJ's Emily Steel (@EmilySteel). In addition to all the serious commentary, there were plenty of parodies. My favorite two were a letter from Darth Vader resigning from the Empire and Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein announcing the bank will be replacing the departed exec with Joseph Kony (who was a new media star last week). "For those unfamiliar with Mr. Kony's resume, let me assure you that he has the character and moral standards you have come to expect from Goldman, and like the rest of us here at the bank, he has dedicated his life to doing the Lord's work," read the letter that had somehow been obtained by humorist Andy Borowitz (@BorowitzReport).
Mike Daisey's fabrication: Last Friday, all the social media tech traffic was about the launch of the new iPad, but suddenly I saw my streams turn to another Apple-connected conversation. Turns out that Mike Daisey (@MDaisey), creator of the highly-acclaimed one-man play, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," had fabricated portions of his story and, more importantly, lied about them to Ira Glass and the public-radio show "This American Life."
The play, about the deadly consequences of the way Apple products are made in China, had been featured on what became one of the most popular episodes of TAL. Thanks to the enterprising on-the-ground reporting by Rob Schmitz (@Rob_Schmitz), a China reporter for "Marketplace," another public-radio show, Daisey's lies were exposed. The classy way that Glass and TAL handled the entire crisis--on the air and in digital media--is a model for other media organizations. Be sure to listen to "Retraction," the hour-long TAL episode on the episode, so to speak.
I spoke about the messy situation to a group of college journalists yesterday and one of them, Charlene Divino (@CDivino), tweeted: "So I'm here at #nyc2012 and @sree said @rob_schmitz is a hero and we should follow him. Done and done :)"
Pining for Pinterest--or not: After months of hesitation, I plunged into the popular social network Pinterest and wrote last week about six things I learned from six days using it. Think of it as an easy way to share more visual materials--photos, recipes, gift ideas, etc.
I had underestimated its power, but also its copyright issues and had to add two more items I learned to the mix. I will report back about any progress I make--or the lack thereof. My favorite response was on my Facebook wall, by Stanley Mieses, who wrote: "Thank god there's yet another way to stay home and marvel at other peoples' stuff rather than actual people."
Infographics Week in Review: I am a big fan of smart infographics and the best of them get a lot of play on social media. Here are three I noticed this week.
- How to train your employees to handle social media: Tips on getting more then your social media manager involved in social media; created by ColumnFiveMedia.
- The risks and costs of senior fall injuries: Visualizing the costs of falls by the elderly; created by Bay Area Medical.
- How to maximize your apartment space: Some good ideas on making more space in your home, no matter where you live; created by ForRent.
LinkedIn Week in Review: Thanks to a roundup of the most-shared stories on LinkedIn by Daniel Roth (@DanRoth), we get a glimpse of what people have been reading there. This week, the top stories were:
- Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs (NYT)
- The Magic of Doing One Thing at A Time (HBR)
- How to Be Creative (WSJ)
- Low Cost Ways to Show Your Employees They are Highly Valued (Fast Company)
- Why I Left Google (Microsoft)
YouTube Week in Review: I'm going to try to highlight some videos each week, looking through the YouTube Trends Blog. The popular video I picked involves a cat, like a lot of YouTube videos do, but at this is an animated one.
If you want to catch up with all the videos you've likely missed, the YouTube Charts page is your one-stop shop--you can sort by most viewed/discussed/liked across categories and across time periods (week/month/all time).
Poynter Week in Review: Here are the top five most popular stories this week on the journalism site Poynter.org, shared by Julie Moos (@JulieMMoos), the site's director (a particularly depressing roundup this time--journalists love reading bad news):
- This American Life retracts Mike Daisey story about Apple factory
- Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News lose 45 journalists to buyouts, layoffs as Guild fights back
- Alt-weeklies in Atlanta, Chicago, D.C. to be sold, but first paycuts
- ABC station tweets unfortunate typo about suicide
- Newspaper advertising was down 7.3 percent, almost $2 billion, in 2011
My top three: Each week, I post screenshots of my tweets that got the most attention the previous week. I am hoping that, together, we can learn what works and what doesn't on Twitter. I use a free tool called Crowdbooster to identify these. By looking through these, you will also get some ideas of some new people to follow.
The tweet with the most impressions (i.e., the total possible number of times someone could have seen a tweet--the sum of my followers and the followers of my retweeters) was a More magazine (@MoreMag) profile by Nina Burleigh (@NinaBurleigh) of Jill Abramson (@JillAbramson), the first female executive editor of the New York Times:
The tweet with the most retweets was about the announcement that the Encyclopedia Britannica (@Britannica) would not issue any more print editions:
Another tweet with a lot of retweets and impressions was about tips on getting more followers, by Liz Borod Wright (@Travelogged):
READERS: What did I miss? Post your thoughts in the comments below, please, or e-mail me or tweet me at @sree or #sreetips on Twitter.