Tag: Social Media

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News You Can Use: 9/12/2018

The Source: Avoiding Deadlines

  • 44 Percent of Americans 18-27 Have Deleted the Facebook App This Year, Poll Finds

    According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of Facebook users ages 18 and older have adjusted their privacy settings in the wake of revelations that Facebook repeatedly failed to protect consumer data as it was shared and abused by a myriad of Facebook partners, including political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.

    The study also notes that around 42 percent of Facebook users have chosen to take a break from the social platform of several weeks or more, with a quarter of users choosing to delete the Facebook app from their phones entirely in the last year.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3q5nk/44-percent-of-americans-18-27-have-deleted-the-facebook-app-this-year-poll-finds

  • When should you take a mental health day?

    It is generally not a good idea to take a mental health day spontaneously. That is, if you wake up in the morning and dread going to work, don’t use that feeling as a reason to call in sick. Stress and anxiety are emotional experiences you have when there is something in your world you are trying to avoid. If you call in sick when you feel this way, you are laying down a memory that can start to create a habit to respond to stress and anxiety by actually avoiding work that may need to be done. You don’t want your go-to response to stress to be to run away from it.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90225167/when-is-it-ok-to-take-a-mental-health-day

  • 3 steps to money mastery: Would you rather have freedom or stuff?
  • Confessions of a young ad agency staffer: ‘If you leave for lunch, you get that side-eye’

    In the ad agency world, people who are very young stress themselves until they get sick because they want so badly to be perfect. Everyone I know who is young who works in this business is like, ‘I have to be amazing, I have to get promoted.’ Everyone who is older is so jaded. They just don’t want to work anymore. My boss works from home twice a week and takes calls from home.

    Do you feel like multiple people should be doing your job?

    I handle seven different parts of our client’s business. It’s crazy. I feel like there should be a manager and someone to assist them for every piece of business I work on. They don’t hire enough people. When someone goes on vacation, we have to sit down and train everybody on what we’re doing. It’s very inefficient. I think that to save money they try to cram as many of us onto as many clients and campaigns as possible.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-young-ad-agency-staffer-leave-lunch-get-side-eye/

  • Not all popular YouTubers are raking in cash for their videos

    Marshall says his decision to use “real music” you’d hear on the radio severely cuts into the actual profit turned by his channel. Where the profits for a monetized video that uses music in the public domain would be split between the creator and YouTube, the record labels that own the top-40 tracks take “all of the money, and we are left with zero.” These videos can still be profitable if the YouTuber and the label can reach an agreement; otherwise, monetizing videos with copyrighted music is virtually out of the question. “Out of … 147 videos, we are monetizing 11,” he says in a video explaining his earnings. “That’s 7 percent. We are monetizing 7 percent of the content that we put out.”

    According to Marshall, the only way the team is able to continue making videos is through people buying merch, tickets to their tour (roughly $30 a ticket for general admission, according to a recent sale), or by buying a $4.99 channel membership for special perks. (This model is similar to the one employed by mid-range musicians, who also rely on merch and ticket sales, and independent writers and artists through platforms like Patreon.) “You’re supporting us. Just you buying a shirt, it’s silly … but it’s what allows us to keep doing this,” he explains.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17822822/youtube-youtubers-influencers-video-ad-revenue-subscribers-fitness-marshall

Photo by Chad Peltola on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 8/8/2018

The Source: Communication Complications: Joey Lombardi

  • Are we losing the art of telephone conversation?

    The number of calls made dropped for the first time in 2017. It’s not a huge drop – 1.7% – and the figure may be misleading since calls made on WhatsApp and Facebook weren’t counted. Three-quarters of people still believe that voice calls are important. But that’s not as many – 92% – as the number who value their phones mainly for internet access.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/03/phone-calls-becoming-lost-art

  • What James Gunn’s firing says about the rising stakes of social media

    Gunn’s tweets were up to a decade in the past, while Barr’s tweet reflected her current thinking and displayed actual racism, as opposed to tasteless humor. Nonetheless, there is a lesson to be learned from similarities between the two, namely: If you want to keep your job, don’t tweet anything that could possibly be construed as controversial. In the case of both Barr and Gunn, their employers’ response was, essentially, “Shut This Down Immediately, Sort Out The Details Later,” with the emphasis on damage control over details. (The details were taken care of eventually; ABC later backtracked on canceling Roseanne, announcing the replacement series The Conners in late June, and similarly, there are now reports that Marvel might consider rehiring Gunn.)

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/1/17639430/james-gunn-disney-mike-cernovich-firing-social-media-guardians-of-the-galaxy

  • Elon Musk is fulfilling Thomas Edison’s energy dreams | Michio Kaku
  • How Robot Hands Are Evolving to Do What Ours Can

    Inside OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence lab founded by Elon Musk and several other big Silicon Valley names, you will find a robotic hand called Dactyl. It looks a lot like Luke Skywalker’s mechanical prosthetic in the latest Star Wars film: mechanical digits that bend and straighten like a human hand.

    If you give Dactyl an alphabet block and ask it to show you particular letters — let’s say the red O, the orange P and the blue I — it will show them to you and spin, twist and flip the toy in nimble ways.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/30/technology/robot-hands.html

  • Steven Pinker, Author of Bill Gates’s Favorite Book, Says Entrepreneurs Should Trust Stats, Not Their Intuition

    The thesis of Pinker’s book ultimately boils down to, that while you might think that the world is doomed — considering the news we read and see — if you measure health, wealth, safety, knowledge and quality of life generally, humanity overall is better off than ever.

    “For all the flaws in human nature,” Pinker writes, “it contains the seeds of its own improvement, as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/317386

Photo by Ye Fung Tchen on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 5/16/2018

  • At Nike, Revolt Led by Women Leads to Exodus of Male Executives

    On March 5, the packet of completed questionnaires landed on the desk of Mark Parker, Nike’s chief executive. Over the next several weeks, at least six top male executives left or said they were planning to leave the company, including Trevor Edwards, president of the Nike brand, who was widely viewed as a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Parker, and Jayme Martin, Mr. Edwards’s lieutenant, who oversaw much of Nike’s global business.

    Others who have departed include the head of diversity and inclusion, a vice president in footwear and a senior director for Nike’s basketball division.

    It is a humbling setback for a company that is famous worldwide and has built its brand around the inspirational slogan “Just Do It.” While the #MeToo movement has led to the downfall of individual men, the kind of sweeping overhaul that is occurring at Nike is rare in the corporate world, and illustrates how internal pressure from employees is forcing even huge companies to quickly address workplace problems.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/business/nike-women.html

  • Here’s why Gibson is bankrupt—no, it’s not because rock is dead

    So far, so good, but Gibson also sells studio monitors, headphones, turntables, and other musical instruments, and that’s where the problems started:

    1. In 2012, it bought a stake in consumer audio company Onkyo.
    2. In 2013, it purchased stereo maker TEAC in 2013 for $53 million.
    3. The spending spree continued in 2014, when Gibson paid $135 million to acquire Royal Phillips’s home-entertainment systems, in a bid to become “the largest music and sound technology company in the world,” per its CEO. That acquisition put the company in a lot of debt

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40566146/heres-why-gibson-is-bankrupt-no-its-not-because-rock-is-dead

  • Is Airbnb ruining cities?
  • Why Social Media Discretion Is Increasingly Important to Your Brand

    A majority of the estimated 80 percent of small-business owners using Facebook are posting every day. According to CareerBuilder, “70 percent of employers use social media to screen candidates” prior to hiring. It’s wise to assume potential clients are exercising the same due diligence when they consider doing business with you.

    Trying to maintain a separation between personal and business is fruitless. Social media has connected us all to each other. Friends read your business posts and clients follow your personal posts, which means your business brand is your personal brand. It’s what you signed up for when you became an entrepreneur.

    As you post, you should assume that every bit of information you put out adds to, or takes from, the value of your personal brand. The temptation is in volunteering too much information. Nobody wants to know about your ingrown toenail.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/312814

  • Here’s how we plan to be GDPR compliant

    However, we do use some of Google’s tools for analysis purposes which, in turn, might mean Google is hoovering up personal data for its purposes. I say ‘might’ because Google hasn’t exactly been as transparent as everyone would like. Indeed, media groups have been sharply critical of Google’s approach to this thorny problem.

    Google’s problems can quickly become our problem so we’re monitoring the situation and will tweak what we do as events unfold.

    https://diginomica.com/2018/05/07/plan-gdpr-compliant/
    This topic continues to confuse me on a personal live since I don’t advertise but I do use mail lists. More to come…

Photo by Rapha Alves on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 4/11/2018

The world can be crazy, we should try to be reasonable

  • China will ban people with poor ‘social credit’ from planes and trains

    With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low “scores” have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place.

    Previously, the Chinese government had focused on restricting the travel of people with massive amounts of debt, like LeEco and Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting, who made the Supreme People’s Court blacklist late last year.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/16/17130366/china-social-credit-travel-plane-train-tickets
    This is literally right out of Black Mirror:

  • Marques Brownlee, ‘the best technology reviewer on the planet,’ talks about the past four years and his plans beyond YouTube

    So, one of the biggest things about YouTube versus any other platform is the built-in audience and discovery tools. Before this was even a business for me, it was always kind of a fun hobby. People don’t think about SEO and keyword optimization and things like that as a hobby, but it was kind of fun for me to see how I can focus on making a better YouTube channel, and just get better at that personally.

    Now that it’s a business, obviously it’s expanded and it still grows as a YouTube channel, but yeah, we’ve gotten to the point where we think about other platforms, or other ways to own our own content. I think YouTube has been awesome for the years we’ve been on it, but we’re starting to think about other things now.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/marques-brownlee-mkbhd-youtube-interview-2018-3
    I am a big fan of MKBHD and I don’t normally get to mention him on my “professional” blogging.

  • Kids on the Internet: Why parenting must keep up with the digital revolution
  • Sheryl Sandberg defends Facebook’s data-hungry business model

    In the past, Facebook has faced criticism for product updates that alienated some users. But in each case, that criticism eventually dissipated. This time around, the company is under scrutiny for the fundamentals of its business model–which Sandberg resolutely defended. “We believe that we can operate our service with our current business model, continue to provide a free service all around the world, and protect people’s data, but we are going to have to earn that trust,” she said.

    Sandberg also had a message for her Wall Street viewers, whose increasingly negative outlook on the company had erased $50 billion in market value earlier in the week. “We’ve already said that we’re going to significantly impact our profitability, and we mean it,” she said. “And if we need to do more, we continue to do more. … We will make any investment we need to make.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40548425/sheryl-sandberg-defends-facebooks-data-hungry-business-model

  • Agile: Myths and Reality

    Agile development is elegantly simple and many agile fundamentals are spreading from engineering to marketing, sales, and finance teams, transformational consultants Sol Sender and Ben Edwards write in a Quartz at Work article. But, they caution, “much can and does go wrong at every level of the organization, from the individual team member all the way up to the CEO. Which is why most companies, despite their intentions to adopt agile methods, often end up working in a way that doesn’t look much like true agile at all.”

    Top executives have to be willing to cut through cultural barriers and unbind their teams from restraints that deter them from new achievements. They must accept that a successful transformation is a journey that may not always run smoothly.

    https://www.cio.com/article/3264466/leadership-management/agile-myths-and-reality.html

Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 3/28/2018

  • Facebook asks users: should we allow men to ask teenagers for images?

    On Sunday, the social network ran a survey for some users asking how they thought the company should handle grooming behaviour. “There are a wide range of topics and behaviours that appear on Facebook,” one question began. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

    The options available to respondents ranged from “this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it” to “this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it”.
    **
    In neither survey question did Facebook allow users to indicate that law enforcement or child protection should be involved in the situation: the strictest option allowed involved turning to the social network as arbiter.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/05/facebook-men-children-sexual-images
    I called out Facebook on SourceCast 106 for “outsourcing” policy to users instead of doing it themselves. This survey is even worse. Facebook needs to decide what kind of community it wants to be. Users will come and go as a result. Also – Facebook should not be trying to attract children and teens, so this line of question is problematic on a whole other level.

  • For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

    On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

    There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

    Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

  • What Happens In One Lifetime?
  • Another new survey underscores that skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want

    According to feedback from more than 1,005 workforce hiring decision-makers conducted on Upwork’s behalf by the company Inavaro, skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want and employers will come to them. The reason: companies say they are struggling to find talent, with the average position open for 36 days and some engineering jobs vacant for up to 45 days.

    In fact, though the majority of organizations surveyed — 57 percent — don’t support a work-from-home policy, those that do say they’ve become increasingly inclusive of people who work outside the office, and five times as many hiring managers expect more of their team to work remotely in the next decade than expect less. Put simply, they say the most skilled person for the job outweighs that person’s ability to work in the same location as the rest of the team.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/another-new-survey-underscores-that-skilled-workers-can-pretty-much-live-wherever-they-want/?ncid=rss

  • United Airlines’ Bonus Lottery Was Doomed to Fail. Don’t Make the Same Mistake With Your Team.

    If you want to know what your employers need or want, try asking them what they’d change about the culture of your workplace. I doubt the answer will be, “We need a Ping-Pong table” or, “I’d love to have my name picked out of a hat for a bonus” but instead, “I don’t understand what I need to do to get promoted or a raise,” “I’d love to be able to attend a conference to learn more about our industry” or, “I would love a mentor who could help guide me.”

    If your employees want to play the lottery, they have that option outside of work. Adults don’t want to play games at work, and United Arilines found that out the hard way. We don’t need toys; we want job satisfaction. And most importantly, employees want predictability.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309984

Photo: Joshua Earle