10 Rules That Govern Groups PsyBlog. What most groups of people have in common. Much of our lives are spent in groups with other people: we form groups to socialise, earn money, play sport, make music, even to change the world. But although groups are diverse, many of the psychological processes involved are remarkably similar.
Here are 10 insightful studies that give a flavour of what has been discovered about the dynamics of group psychology. 1. Groups can arise from almost nothing The desire to form and join social groups is extremely powerful and built into our nature. Just how readily people form and join groups is demonstrated by Tajfel et al. (1971) in the so-called ‘minimal groups paradigm‘. 2. Existing groups don’t let others join for free: the cost is sometimes monetary, sometimes intellectual, sometimes physical—but usually there is an initiation rite, even if it’s well disguised. Aronson and Mills (1959) tested the effect of initiation rites by making one group of women read passages from sexually explicit novels.
Find Creative Commons images with Image Se. Let's say you're a blogger. You've just returned from a trip to New York City, and you're writing a post on New York landmarks. You want to illustrate your travel guide with an image — as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It's easy to find images of New York online. But you want to make sure that you don't use images without the permission of their owners, and you can't afford licensing fees for professional photographers. Today, we're launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify.
This feature also helps artists who want their images to be discovered and reused across the web — on their own terms. There's some fine print, of course. Practical Traveler - Having a Travel Problem? Share It on Twitte. IF you’re not protesting an election or promoting a product, , the microblogging site that has been getting so much attention these days, can be easy to dismiss. It’s been described as an ego-stroker for those who want to broadcast the minutiae of their lives in 140 characters or less. It’s a virtual popularity contest to see who can rack up the most followers. And it’s yet another way to procrastinate on the Web. But after signing up for my own Twitter account earlier this year (www.twitter.com/michellehiggins) — and being guilty of all of the above — I can now attest to at least one practical use for travelers: complaining.
As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service. Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in . Mr. JetBlue puts a more positive spin on it. Half of Communicators Think Twitter's a Fad. More than half (54%) of professional communicators think Twitter is a fad and believe that the burgeoning number of users and tweets will eventually reach a plateau and likely decline, according to a poll by Ragan Communications and PollStream (via MarketingCharts).
This division in sentiment represents a split in the corporate communications field as to whether Twitter is a viable business and communications tool with staying power, or a flash-in-the pan novelty that will eventually give way to something new. Among respondents, 28% report their companies currently employ microblogging as part of their communications activities. Those who tweet credit Twitter with increasing employee engagement, improving customer service and reputation with customers, and boosting website traffic - among other benefits, Ragan said. Another 40% of suvey respondents say they have no microblogging plan in place - either by choice or because they don't have the resources.
Communicators Remain Divided. Getting to 'Wow': Consumers Describe What Makes a Grea. Paula Courtney found “wow” when she took her daughter to the employee washroom at her local grocery store. A sign by the door instructed workers to remain physically by the side of any customer experiencing a problem until that problem was resolved. Later, when Courtney was in the checkout line, the cashier noticed Courtney’s blueberries were squishy. The cashier insisted on walking back to the produce section to find a fresh box. For Courtney, chief executive of The Verde Group, a Toronto retail research and consulting firm, that was a “wow” shopping experience. New Wharton research finds that 35% of shoppers have had an extraordinary — or wow — retail experience in the past six months.
But in order to hit that mark, retailers must deliver on as many as 10 different elements of the shopping experience simultaneously. Wharton’s Jay H. Engagement: being polite, genuinely caring and interested in helping, acknowledging and listening. Pulling It All Together. Why agencies' social media use doesn't matter - iMedia. Does your ad agency need to have its own regularly updated Twitter account in order to be competent in social media? That seems to be what this Ad Age article suggests as it looks at the Twitter feeds of a wide variety of agencies. And while folks like me at small, independent agencies often find it amusing to poke fun at big holding company agencies, I found the article to be mean-spirited and unfair.
But before we get to what this piece got wrong, let's talk for a bit about what it got right. After skewering Euro RSCG for failing to update its Twitter feed, the piece by Rupal Parekh goes on to identify several marketers -- including C-level executives at Best Buy, Zappos, and Express -- as Twitter users who utilize the channel successfully to "boost brand awareness and interact with their consumers. " I think praising the marketers who have been able to figure Twitter out and who are using it to build their businesses is the right thing to do.
This shouldn't be a surprise. How to Whitelist in Gmail. Gmail has a fantastic built-in spam filter, but no spam filter is absolutely perfect. Sometimes, we might run into a situation where a much-anticipated email actually ends up in the spam folder. Why build a whitelist If you’ve ever been anxiously waiting to receive an email from a potential new flame, or potential job offer, you want to make very sure the important message is not going to be banished as spam.
To avoid messages you do want to receive from being send straight to spam is the one and most important reason to have a so-called ‘whitelist’. 2 ways to whitelist in Gmail: 1. Adding senders to your contact list When you receive an email, and you want to make sure you keep receiving messages from the same person in the future, you can do this by adding the sender to your contact list: 2. This method can be used to add one individual sender (for example, John@peopleyoulike.com), or all senders from a particular server (for example, everyone sending mail from @peopleyoulike.com). Hate Facebook's new look? You'll like it soon enough. Do you hate Facebook's new design? Do you find the home page too noisy, with important updates from your friends getting buried under a stream of banal comments from high-school classmates and other people you pity-friended? I bet you think the site's confusing, too.
It used to be easy to get to people's photos and notes, but now you've got to click around to find anything. Are you at your wit's end? Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough. Follow I've got news for you: You'll get over it soon enough. Though Facebook will probably tweak its new layout over the next few weeks—sites always tweak new designs—the giant social network is unlikely to revert to its former self. For readers who aren't among the angry horde, here's the back story: Over the last couple of weeks, Facebook revamped members' home pages in an effort to let people "share more information about what is happening with them," as founder Mark Zuckerberg put it.
Strange Attractor Blog Archive Why is social media importan. Posted by Suw Charman-Anderson And another draft section! This is basically the introduction, explaining why this is all important. It is not the executive summary. Again, comments welcome. I’m getting a bit ‘word blind’ on this report now, so there’s bound to be not just typos but also various conceptual repetitions. Hopefully I can smooth out the rough edges once I start editing the report as a single piece, instead of lots of sections.
Building Civil Society 2.0 In their report, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics[1], Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide describe how “Multiplatform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature of truly democratic public life from here on in.” Replace “public media 2.0” with “civil society 2.0” and the sentence holds just as true. Clark and Aufderheide describe the landscape we now inhabit: The combination of a fragmented media and a decrease in trust suggest that the future may not be so rosy for civil society.
10 Things We're Dying to Know About Chrome OS. How to spot a social media snake oil salesman | Blog | Econsulta. It's inevitable: when opportunity pops up on the internet, there are plenty of snake oil salesmen waiting to take advantage of it. The field of SEO provides the perfect example. While there are plenty of reputable guns for hire and firms providing SEO services, there are also plenty of snake oil salesmen promising the moon but delivering a bag full of sand. Unfortunately, the rise of social media has created another internet opportunity that is ripe for snake oil salesmen. And boy have they taken advantage of it. There are more social media 'experts' hawking their wares than can be counted. While many of them are reputable, competent and interested in helping their clients, many aren't. A questionable background. While being a capable social media consultant probably doesn't require a Ph.D., there are an awful lot of social media 'experts' whose backgrounds raise questions.
More talk than work. Personal social media prolificacy as proof. An unrealistic approach. A lack of professionalism. Facebook does not even makes minimum wage! 25 Incredible TED Talks for Educators - Learn-gasm. By Jill Gordon A non-profit dedicated to bringing “Ideas Worth Sharing” to the world, TED offers some of the best and brightest sharing their perspectives on technology, entertainment, and design. Many of those who speak at TED discuss topics relevant to education. The following talks include thoughts on creativity, play, technology, the future of entire countries through their children, projects to nurture learning in at-risk students, and much more.
Educators from all backgrounds will find something of value from these incredible TED talks. Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Not Yet, But Maybe Som. It's hard to imagine anything more far out than the suggestion that the founders of Twitter be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, especially since the people who invented the internet never were.
But that's what Deputy National Security Advisor, Mark Pfeifle, argues this week in The Christian Science Monitor, because of the company's role in supporting the ongoing uprising in Iran. Pfeifle isn't the only one making this argument, either. MG Siegler found Pfeifle's editorial and reported on it; he seems to think it's funny - and it is. I think the idea is also serious enough, though, to warrant some closer consideration.
I think those little narcissistic bites of information and the platform people publish them on are serious enough to warrant taking this opportunity to consider what it all really means. You might assume that these most recent platitudes are just about Twitter's celebrated role in Iran - but in fact there's a lot more going on. Why Do People Care? What Is It, Really? Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) The 10 Twitter Commandments | Blog. Conceptis addict: Wife Carrying World Championships 2009. Finland put an end to Estonia's 11-year reign and took gold and bronze on Saturday at the annual Wife-Carrying World Championships held in Sonkajärvi, central Finland. Wife carrying (Finnish eukonkanto) is a sport in which male competitors race while each carrying a female team mate. The objective is for the male to carry the female through a special obstacle track in the fastest time.
The winner gets the weight of the carried wife in beer. Several types of carry may be practised: piggyback, fireman's carry (over the shoulder), or Estonian-style (the wife hangs upside-down with her legs around the husband's shoulders, holding onto his waist). More info and the rules you can find here The idea of the Wife Carrying Competition is Sonkajärvi’s own and it has roots in the local history. In the late 1800’s there was a brigand called Rosvo-Ronkainen,and according to the legend he had accepted in this troops only those men who proved their worth on a challenging track. 1. 5 mistakes to avoid when launching a viral campaign - iMediaConn. The myth of "viral" feels like a brass ring everyone reaches for, but few can touch. What you really want to create as a brand manager is the best possible environment for campaign efforts to go viral. This is where so many of yesterday's processes are failing today's needs for success.
From our experience, here are the five most frequent mistakes brands make in creating campaigns that invite sharing between friends and across networks: Mistake #1: OverplanningPeople see it all the time in sports when the team is behind: lots of strikeouts while everyone is swinging for the fences. In digital campaigns, the viral goal is often so lofty that it seems to drive entire teams to hit for power -- trying to come up with the big idea that covers every possible use scenario, irrational liability, and endless strings of meeting results. The reality is that many of the most successful viral campaigns are simple, solitary ideas. The business benefits are two-fold: That was only half of the campaign. Top 20 Countries for SocNet Engagement. Of the 1.1 billion people ages 15+ worldwide who accessed the internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month, a penetration of 65%, according to data from the comScore World Metrix service.
Among 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Russia has the world's most engaged social networking audience, with the average online Russian spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per month. Brazil ranked close behind Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours), MarketingCharts writes.
The US ranked at #9 in terms of social network engagement, with an average of 4.2 average hours and 477 pages consumed per visitor. "Social networking has become a popular online pastime not only in mature internet markets like North America, but also in developing, high-growth internet markets such as Russia," said Mike Read, SVP & managing director, comScore Europe. Sharing by Twittering - Scout Labs. Maybe Twitter Trends Shouldn't Be Entirely Automated? 20+ Ready to Use Auto Completion Scripts |Dzine Blog. It's Here! iTwitter: The First Twitter App to do Push. BbPress bbPress 1.0 final, finally released. BlueTunes: Music In The Cloud Comes To Your Desktop. Half of Twitter's Never Tweeted. 3 easy ways to personalize video messages. Restoring accidentally suspended accounts.
SUSPENDED. Future Exploration Blog | Top Twitterers: US, Canada, Norway, Au. Business plans, business models. Louisgray.com: TweetDeck Marks One Year Anniversary: The Journey. America’s Secret Innovation Weapon: Immigration. Organizations without a 2.0 strategy risk failure. Firefox 3.5 patch coming soon as Mozilla cranks up downloads • T.
Tips for Sorting Through the Social Networks. Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next. Twitter Needs a Spam Filter? No, We Need a Marketer Filter. Twittering from the tractor: smartphones sprout on the farm - CN. The Value of Twitter Followers: Quality Over Quantity. Rupert Murdoch: Facebook is Just a Directory. iPhone 4.0 OS: event based modes, intellingent and scheduled com. A Growing Acceptance of Social Networking in the Workplace. Faviki's Social Bookmarking Tool Makes Semantic Tagging Eve. In Defense of Social Media (At Least Some Of It) - O'Reilly. Facebook Says It Wants You to Be Less Private - But Why? Facebook for iPhone 3.0 Coming Soon - Preview and Details.