Posts Tagged ‘Social Times’

I don’t know about any of you, but I think it’s time for some lunch. Before you go, glance over the headlines below. For the golfers out there, take a look at David Cohen’s CBSSports.com and Masters.com Tee Up Masters Live for information regarding one of the PGA’s biggest tournaments of the season. Also, if you think protests have been getting a little crazy lately, click on Amanda Cosco’s article More Than Just A Like? Canadians Petition Facebook for a “Love” Button to see what Canadians are doing to reach out to Facebook developers.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Don’t worry, your weekly round-up is back.If you’re debating on whether or not you should date a blogger, take a look at Tom Johansmeyer’s article Five Tips for Successfully Dating a Blogger for some advice. Afterwards, learn How To Use Quora: A Comprehensive Guide with Kelsey Blair for anyone who is looking to learn from [...]

The first week of the New Year has brought us a batch of engaging stories to report to you all. With over 84 million monthly active users, CityVille topped FarmVille as the largest Facebook game of all time. Netflix announced that most of the world’s largest remote manufactures have agreed to put a Netflix button their latest remote models. A viral video changed the life of a homeless man from Columbus, Ohio. LinkIn plans to go public in the New Year.

Start Tweeting the news: According to the Social Business Report study from marketing database outfit NetProspex, New York is the top Twitter city — which NetProspex defines as cities with the most active businesspeople on the microblogging site, based on employee presence and average numbers of Tweets, followers, and profiles followed — reports Katie Kindelan from sister blog Social Times.

Please see Social Times for much more on the Social Business Report from NetProspex, but here are the rest of the top 10 cities following the Big Apple: San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Sacramento, Calif.; Phoenix; Denver; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Cincinnati; and Wilmington, Del.

Over the last year, Social Times has been undergoing quite the transformation: We’ve grown our roster of contributors to 10 talented writers, we’ve made updates to our statistics technology and we’ve welcomed an unprecedented number of new readers. With this continued success, we’ve refined our goals and one of our main goals is to deliver [...]

I’m Neil Glassman and my beats for Social Times include social media marketing and advertising tools, techniques and success stories. Sometimes my posts go off on a tangent, focusing on small business social media issues or research with broader implications. How did I get the gig? Well, I certainly did not tell Nick O’Neill the [...]

Hi, I’m Megan O’Neill and I’m the resident web video enthusiast here at Social Times. You’ll find me posting about everything from the latest viral videos to breaking news about online video sites like YouTube and Hulu, the future of the online video industry, and tips to help you create and promote your own online [...]

I’ve been working on designing and developing a platform for the Social Times that will embrace and support entrepreneurial communities. The more I think about the concept, the more I realize that the platform is ultimately open-source entrepreneurship. What do I mean by that? No single person can build an entrepreneurial community. Also, no single system can theoretically be designed by a group of two or three people that will effectively build the community.

For proof of that go read this PDF on “Building Entrepreneurial Communities: the Appropriate Role of Enterprise Development Activities.” This is a study that spanned twenty years, close to one thousand entrepreneurs and more than one hundred entrepreneurship assistance providers. I highly recommend taking the time to read it if you want to learn more about building these communities.

In the report, one paragraph stood out to me because I felt it most accurately described the flaw with having a centralized entrepreneurial platform.

We have repeatedly observed ambitious public entrepreneurs who take on these assignments with the primary goal of establishing model programs that would bring accolades to themselves and their sponsors. These initiatives then become competitions for attention, fueled by a talent for publicity, not performance. In these situations, such individuals act alone, under the belief that they can do it better than and without the help of anyone else in the community and under the need to do so in order to garner all the glory.

If anybody is concerned that this is what will result from the Social Times, I can assure you this won’t happen. The new tools that we will be adding to this site enables “the community” to build content that helps everybody. We will also be highlighting the community members and their content on a regular basis. It is our job to help find and support the superstars in the community and help them to leverage social technology to achieve success beyond our own.

We will also be creating programs that help to support those enterprising individuals that want to host events or create other programs that support the community. We want to help the community, not compete with it. We will start by adding a community directory as well as a business directory organized by metropolitan area. The first area will of course be D.C. but we will be expanding rapidly.

I hope to have these two directories up within a week but as you probably know, estimating when a project will be complete is more of an art then science. Is there anything that you would like to see us add to the site? Any other thoughts?

The future of D.C. technology meme has spread across all of the D.C. blogs and discussion is taking place in all the comments and on Twitter. One thing is for sure, there is a strong presence of social media professionals in D.C. I would argue that this segment will continue to grow naturally and doesn’t necessarily need management, unless of course you group it with the entrepreneurs which appears to have naturally occurred.

For those of you not in D.C. I’m sorry for continuing to talk about this so much but trust me when I say that it has future implications for your city as well. The supposed lack of funding and the inefficiently organized entrepreneurial community is something taking place around the country. If everybody was blogging and Twitter I think we’d all be good to go but unfortunately that’s not the way it is.

The Social Times will be launching a new platform over the coming weeks to enhance the community and help things grow. We have already seen a disconnected set of services online and events offline. What many have discussed is an “overreaching organization.” I don’t think this requires significant management by the participants, it simply requires one central location that can be referred to when anything is taking place.

Additionally, when entrepreneurs are in need of investors, or new startups are in need of lawyer or an number of other circumstances that take place in an entrepreneurial community, all the participants can reference one location. What I’d like to see happen is this D.C. technology meme end and we all simply become participants. Not just in D.C. but in entrepreneurial communities around the country. D.C. is just the first place where we prove that such a system can be developed.

Over the past few weeks I have been browsing around, calling people and attending events to find out what already exists in the community that we believe does not already exist. Additionally, I’ve been looking for services that actually don’t exist. What I found was a number of resources that most people simply didn’t know about. With this in mind I ended up revising the vision of the Social Times to “leveraging social technology to build local entrepreneurship communities.”

My theory is that most of the resources already exist we just need to make them more accessible to the community. That’s why I am working to build a platform that will help build this community. I’m hoping that others can help build it and benefit from it. My goal is not to promote our services but instead promote the members of the community. All for free. This will take place in a matter of weeks, not months.

I also believe that providing valuable media about leveraging social technology for entrepreneurship is important and as such we will continue to produce articles on a daily basis. You will see a number of new media channels on this site and new services to accomplish these goals. Media is no longer one-way, it is participatory and as such I believe the Social Times can succeed at accomplishing its goals.

I will give out details about the features of the platform in the near future but look for the services to be rolled out quickly. What features would you like to see? Is there something bigger that you think I’m missing here?