ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Presentation: What is social media now?

Props to @mjcarty for pointing to this. Interesting case studies and stats, well worth flicking through.

What the F**k is Social Media NOW?

View more presentations from Marta Kagan.

Flipboard: now that's what I call a magazine

Collaboration key to Old Spice success

A post on Read Write Web explains how Old Spice created its very successful Youtube (not forgetting all the other other networks) content.

The man in charge of the project, Ian Tait, at Old Spice's marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy put the success down to good collaboration between tech pros, social media pros and the creative team.

The idea is simple but the use of social media networks was very well thought out and executed. It is good fun too, which helps.

How Google works

Thanks to Avinio for this.

Infographic by PPC Blog

Internal communications - the employer landscape

The Watson Wyatt Worldwide report on Capitalizing on Effective Communication [pdf] is essential reading for internal communications professionals. Here are the key findings:

1. Effective employee communication is a leading indicator of financial performance and a driver of employee engagement. Companies that are highly effective communicators had 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators.
2. Despite all of the organizational and benefit changes employers have been making in response to challenging economic conditions, only 14 percent of the survey participants are explaining the terms of the new employee value proposition (EVP) to their employees.
3. The best invest in helping leaders and managers communicate with employees. While only three out of 10 organizations are training managers to deal openly with resistance to change, highly effective communicators are more than three times as likely to do this as the least effective communicators.
4. Despite the increased use of social media, companies are still struggling to measure the return on their investment in these tools. Highly effective communicators are more likely than the least effective communicators to report their social media tools are cost-effective (37 percent vs. 14 percent).
5. Measurement is critical. Companies that are less-effective communicators are three times as likely as highly effective communicators to report having no formal measurements of communication effectiveness.

Video: chatting in Orkut

Offline and online social networks

This is a very interesting presentation from Paul Adams who works for Google in its user experience team. He has carried out a lot of research into how people create networks offline and how they create networks online.

Paul makes a great point about the fact that online problems around social networking are ones of social science and not technology. In other words, it's all about motivation and why people use new technologies. Understanding this is the key to making them work well. Looking at how we create and use offline networks is really important to how we network online.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.