Book-Review - PR im Social Web: Das Handbuch für Kommunikationsprofis

All in all i can say it's a pretty good read for everybody wants to, or maybe has to, get to now more about this gigantic field of social media and web 2.0 .

It's, as mentioned in the title, told from the PR point of view, but thats somehow understandable. After all beeing active in social media you are trying to sell something. And in online behaviour there's not too much difference in whatever that is, a product or yourself.

That said this book is interesting for everyone who's open-minded and interested.
It starts out by explaining the very basics of social media. What it is, where it came from, and after all, what it means for our community as a whole. The authors continue with describeing why especially today it's important to show presence in social media as well as to get in contact with customers. They show that the days of companys being aloof giants are numbered and that today you have to show solidity and listen to customers needs.

Tieing in with that the book continues by in-depth explaining the most important subareas of PR in the social web. Some of these are Social Media Mmonitoring, Employer Branding, Product-PR, Event-PR, Corporate Publishing, Customer Service and Support. Followed by these topics theres even a whole chapter about all the judical aspects you might come across online, which gives you a pretty good overview about what to expect or to look out for.

Although "PR im Social Web" is using some technical terminology it's the congenial language and its way to explain everything easily understandable what makes it really enjoyable to read.
Beeing what people call a digital native the fist part didn't contain lots of news for me, but nevertheless it made me rethink the basics of what i percive as some kind of second natural habitat.

So to come to a conclusion i would recommend this book to everyone who's not completely shutting himself up from our online world, but especiallt to everyone workin with or interested in PR.

Crowdsourcing

...is pretty neat.

I love the idea behind it.
Plus it shows what possibilities accompany all this technological progress.

Sure, better technology can make you run better apps, maybe in the cloud, and whatnot...
But i'm talking social possibilities here.

If you don't know what croudsourcing is, hit up wikipedia to get a pretty good overview. I'm not going to rephrase the article here.

Go anhead and srearch for some examples, i think it's amazing what new ways to use communication provided by the internet peaople think of and make happen to pursue their dreams.
As you might have read in a previous post im a huge fan of Kickstarter. It's such an inspiring place. Full of innovation, creativity and this spirit that cathes you immediately. You just wanna take part in it. At least thats how i feel.


Another field that profits a lot by the possibilities to reach a huge audience over the world wide web is one thats of high personal interest for me.

Arts.

May it be sketching, painting, photography, film, comedy, music, whatever you can think of.
It's a new and awesome way to get your work out there andy maybe get noticed. With countless number of different sites theres the perfect one for everybody.
It feels like i spend hours daily searching for and consuming art on the internet. Mainly by unknown but incredibly taleted artists.


Now go ahead and help someone whose work you like reach their dream.

I know i will...

"Every move you make, every step you take..."

...is a line from the lyrics of a song we propably all know.
But obove that, its what online services nowadays are recording about you on the internet.

Facebook i. e. collects all your status updates, you pictures, relationships, everything... it knows what, when and where you do something.And thanks to the social side, what the world thinks about you doing whatever you did.
But fb's not the only one. The most popular and present for sure is Google.
Now with uniting all it's services, the "Big G" got you all covered, and can provide you with the best online experience imaginable. Or does it?

Or maybe, just maybe, it's some smart move to collect even more of it's users data, combining it into one significant personality profile, to serve you all the advertising you so desperatly long for. But that could just be the delusion talking...



But how you take all that, and how to react to it you have to know for yourself.

After all, out there it's every man for himself...

How social media can make history...

...is a TED-Talk video that i can really recommend.
Go ahead and watch it here.

Clay Shirky, the guy talking in the video, has a good point there. Furthermore he's a good speaker. Which makes you listen and really soak up the message, i think.

If you still didn't watch it, i still recommend you do so. You could really spend these 15 Minutes worse.

So he's starting out by explaining the biggest revolution in our media landscape so far. The Internet of course. Sure, every new form of publishing media sort of revolutionised the way we percieved information, but this for sure is the greatest. For the first time in history people are able to take part in the publishing process. They can put out their own content, or react to someone elses.
Quoting Shirky here, it's as if have a book with a printing press built in, or you get a radio that incloudes your own radio station. If you put it that way it really makes it clear what he means.

But people from my generation tend to oversee this revolution and take what we have for granted. We grew up with all these possibilities already existing or just coming up with us, so it doesn't appear to be that new to us. I guess it doesn't hurt to take some time to think about these things, and maybe even put them to better use than some of us are doing today.

I personally think the most interesting part of the video is the second half, where he goes into how people today are able to publish and spread news faster via Twitter than any newsreporter will ever be. These storys are the raw and unfiltered truth, spreading news in a way we didn't dream of just a couple of years ago. But this type of rawness and the lack to censor information is what got twitter banned from china. What sounds unbelievable to us is everyday life for the chinese.

I've been to china during my practical semester and it's true. It's a own world, seperated from others through the government. I really hope that the public pressure through social media can enter a new chapter of history making by giving these people their freedom of speech rather sooner than later.

Kickstarter...

...is great!

I've known it for about a year or two now. I first heard about it on the popular tech-blog engadget.com's category "insert coin" where they present promising projects in need of funding.
Not quite sure wich project it was though...

I love browsing the site. It's always interesting to see what cool stuff peaople thought about and now want to make reality. It's an inspiring place spreading some kind of "anything's possible" mood.

I even backed some projects myself, so i'm proud to be an active part of it. The Cosmonaut and the Gilf are ones that come to my head right now...

Furthermore over time i found a countless number of great projects, but you can't get in on everything, can you? Some of my favorites i came across during time were:Capture Camera Clip System Coffee Joulies – your coffee, just rightTouchFire: The Screen-Top Keyboard for iPad50-Dollar Follow FocusEscapeCapsule - Waterproof iPhone 4 CaseManifold Clock: Telling time in 3DBiochemies DNA Molecule Plush Dolls  let that be just a small number of projects that come to my mind right now, only a fraction of all the great ones i saw. Check them out if you like, or leave ones you know in the comments.


Always excited to find new ones...

eLearning

In class we heard quite something about the possibilities of eLearning. But it wasn't the first time this term crossed my path. Sure, i may have heard it somewhere, sometime before already, but there was this one time it started to become something real.

That time was around early 2010.
It was the beginning of our second semester at university. Me and a couple of fellow students, or friends, how i like to call them, were working at the Usability Engineering Center (UEC) of the university as studen research assistant, and we had quite a cool project going on.
We were doing a collaborative project with a team of russian design students from St. Petersburg. That were also living in russia, of course. So we had to think of new ways to communicate progress, ideas and discussions concerning the project.

eLeraning? Maybe. But it's still not the point.

In order not to bore you to death i'll cut right to the chase:

Due to our boss at the UEC socialising with professionals on her last job-related visit in Ethiopia early 2010, we got invited to present our project at barcamp.
Barcamp Ethiopia is a sort of open conference, welcoming everyone who'd like to participate and share some of his ideas, knowlege or whatever one has to offer, all hovering over the one big topic:
eLearning.

Thats when it really hit me.

So we went on to finish the project, to finally travel to Africa, germans and russians all together, to present our work and the ways we learned how to communicate over geographical as well as language barriers.
After three days of inspiring conference in Addis Abeba we set up two two-day workshops to teach the local eLearning professionals something about our ways of designing and displaying educational content in multimedia based form. It was a great vibe, and we could all learn from one another.

Over all this trip was one of the greatest experiences so far, and it tought me a lot about new ways to learn and percieve things. Be it medial, or cultural...

Ok, but seriously...

...i'm not a huge fan of Social Network Games.
But we'll get to that.

I actually have played something compareable once. And it was quite fun!

Our tale begins in the early ages of the internet...
Or at least what they were for us. I't was around the time all the kids in the neighbourhood, inclouding myself, finally got connected to the outside world from their home computers.

And with this new connectivity came a whole new age of procrastination. Wasting time on the internet became a serious part of our lifes, and sadly, it still is...
...but it's fun as well. I bet millions of cat-video-watchers can second that!

But thats not the point, got a little off track there...
Well, my friend started out playing some text-based browser game called "Inselkampf", or Island War, roughly translated. What sounds pretty lame soon got us all addicted. And similar in fashion to todays network games, to keep up and get better you'd have to come back every couple of hours to give new orders.
In the game every player started out with one island, where he could start to build a civilisation, supply food and rough goods, and so on. Once you got that rolling you can start building ships and prepare for war. Aim was it, to invade other players, conquor more and more islands and expand your territory. Once destroyed you would always have to start over again, so after some time it got pretty tough for newcomers.
We didn't care since we were big enough already.

But then somehow came the time it got out of hand. Players got huge and formed alliances with other big players. It consumed more and more of our time, and nevertheless the day came whey 20 players simultaneously attacked you to literally destroy all your efforts.



did you get that point right there? that was the point my online gaming carreer died.


sure i tried out some mini games, but nothing serious from that point on.

But thats not the reason i hate social network games. After all it was fun while it lasted...



The real, one and only reason is people spamming your newsfeeds and even your private wall with countless posts. once and for all:

I won't adopt the bird and im sure as f*** not gonna help you in your mafia war.

Social network games...

...piss me off!



- period!

Web 2.0 vs. Social Media

Both are terms we've all heard hundreds of times. Although it seems one is beeing a lot more present nowadays, almost burying the other one. Sure, it had it's high times as well, but these days are officially over.
Can you guess which one i think is ruling now?

Tell ya what, you dont have to.
Just have a look down there...

As you can see "Web 2.0" has had it high times in 2007. I myself remember it becoming more and more popular. Everybody was talking about it, few knowing what it meant.
I've never been a big fan.
Sure, it's somehow got its eligibility, for setting sails shipping into a new are of the world wide web. But sill, it's just such a missleading term. Sounds like you have to update some software.

- hey, did you hear about this new web 2.0 ?
- sure, already got it!

sounds about right to me, makes no sense in reality.



and i suppose i don't have to go all "social media" on you. you've propably googled it already...

Creative Commons

Well, i guess almost everybody in our generation, called the digital natives, has seen, heard or read "creative commons" before. If not anywhere else at least in wikipedia the last couple of years.

Although the term wasn't new to me i'll have to admit i never quite knew what it meant.

So, to clarify all that mystery, or at least to reflect what i think it means...
i'll just go ahead and spill it out, short and simple:

The Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organisation seeking reglementation for usage of copyright material put on the internet. There are different types of cc licencing, allowing different ways of usage.
The most commonly known, even if not by name, is the simple Attribution CC. Its allowing you to use said material an nearly all ways imaginable, from publishing to remixing, even for commercial use, as long as the original creator gets mentioned as he desired.
Other licensing options are use only for non profit purposes or display and distribution only of non derivative works, so no remixing or similar.

Of course there are a lot more possible CC licences, but i think this is enough to give you a bit of an understanding what it's all about.
If you'r interested in a more detailed explanation hit up this link to get to the Creative Commons Homepage.

Podcasts

Personally i am a big fan of podcasts. I liked the idea behind it since i first heard about them.
So at that time, about two or three years ago, i went up to iTunes to download myself some podcasts. Since then i regularly watched different podcasts from all kinds of topics.

Due to personal interest i'm a big fan of action-sports Podcasts, Skateboarding and Snowboarding to be specific. There are a couple i can really recommend.
On the skateboarding side Thrasher Skateboard Magazine Podcast, Flip Skateboards Podcast and DVS Skate Podcast are a good watch to keep up with the skateboard world, learn new tricks and most of all be entertained. (Unfortunatley Thrasher isn't available in german iTunes anymore, so the Link goes to the website, equally informative nevertheless)
METHOD.TV Snowboarding Podcast on the other hand is great to stay op to date with what's happening in snowboarding.

Furthermore for anyone interested in newest developments in technology, web and media in general, what sort of fits our field of study quite well, i'd like to name The Engadget Show. Always entertaining to watch and full of news, definitly no waste of time.

Last of all one for the guys who can need some usefull handyman advice, covering all topics of everyday life, and don't mind some - let's say - "appealing visuals", can head over to EyeHandy.
We all know what sells here, but be sure that listening to the content could really teach you something.


so long, cheers...
 

Rethinking Education

So, i just watched the video "Rethinking Education". Go ahead and watch it, you can find it here.


So, i thought this is a pretty inspiring video. It gets you thinking about stuff my generation sees as normal, cause were used to it, but also about how education right now isn't at the same state the youth is at. In most schools the form of education is still pretty "oldschool" (no pun intended). The video shows that there are ways and possibilitys to use modern technology to communicate knowlege better and to reach the students through the digital environment they're already used to navigate in.

Well, but there were also some minor points i didn't like. I thought the way the video was mapped into the classroom, especially at the beginning, looked really out of place and therefor was distracting from the content of the video. At least thats how i felt.
And with another thing i'll have to agree with what someone mentioned in the comments. It's beeing talked about music and work of all kinds are accessible on the internet, but forgets that many might be copyright protected, and so either not freely accessible or infringing the rights of its owner.

But these are, as mentioned, just minor points and shouldn't be given too much weight. After all ist a great video that reaches out to the viewer and manages to inspire.

Auf los geht's los...

Hallo miteinander!
Hier ist also der erste, anfängliche, wie immer nichts sagende, Anfangs-Alibi-Post, den man wohl in jedem Blog finden kann. Und das ist ja an sich nichts schlimmes, lockert die Stimmung und beschafft einen mehr, oder meist weniger, galanten Einstieg zu den eigentlichen Inhalten.
Um dann auch zu eben diesen zu kommen: dieser Blog wird sich hauptsächlich den Inhalten der SocialWeb Vorlesung widmen.

So, Schluss mit dem Gelaber... in diesem Sinne:

- peace