Blogs | Social Signal

Alex posted yesterday about YouTube views as a proxy for the relative support for political candidates. According to this piece at TechPresident, the same may be true of the relative support for new and old(er) media:

You've just pruned the comments in your company's blog for comment spam, libel, hate speech, pornography and other abuse. But just as you're about to close the laptop, you spot one last comment.

It isn't abusive - but it's sharply critical of your organization, and touches a nerve. How easy it would be to just reeeeeeach over and click the "delete" link...

We're often asked how organizations can measure the return on investment from social media. Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times effectively uses YouTube views as a proxy for the overall success of the Obama and Clinton campaigns in tapping the power of the web:

I'm hunkering down for a massive April Fools Day.

OK, make that a Massive April Fools Day.

Yesterday I Googled each of our kids for the first time, in the form "John Smith".

Today in the Globe & Mail, TBWA President Andrea Southcott features our tips for reflected glory marketing. As Andrea puts it:

My last post talked about how open systems teach us that we can, in fact, self-organize and find solutions, in a world that so often seems to be telling us to be passive and compliant.

In my case, the solution cleared a traffic jam... with more than half the cars already on their merry way by the time the police arrived.

You're looking at how an online community can work, and save you a lot of aggravation.

This is a traffic jam curing itself: an entire block of downtown Vancouver traffic a few days ago, with every car, van and truck in reverse. They're inching their way backwards, in concert, away from a stopped truck that had jammed Hamilton Street from Davie to Helmcken. (The Google Map's right here.) And all without police intervention.

This episode finds Alex and Rob with some company in bed: the kids. (Parental discretion advised: contains explicit sounds of complaining toddler.) We talk about what happens when your favourite online community members participate just a little too much... and what you can do about it.