Country Stars Tweet Prayers

OFFSTAGE: Country Stars Tweet Prayers
August 15, 2011; Written by Alison Bonaguro

When it comes to the power of prayer, I think social media works wonders. When the country artists we know and love tweet that they are praying for the people of Indiana after the tragic stage collapse prior to a Sugarland concert on Saturday night (Aug. 13), their followers may join them in that prayer. It’s a ripple effect, in the best way. Here are some of the recent tweets I read that made me pray a little harder:

Dierks Bentley: “man… my heart goes out to all the country fans at the Indiana state fair. praying for you all…. #fb”

Little Big Town: “Our hearts are heavy this morning for the people of Indiana and for our dear friends in Sugarland. Our thoughts & prayers are with you. J”

David Nail: “Huge knot in stomach, feeling completely sick watching/reading about Indy! All of us in Idaho are praying for ya!”

Blake Shelton: “My prayers to the people at the Sugarland concert in Indianapolis…. Absolutely shocking and hard to comprehend… Beyond belief…”

Martina McBride: “So sad to hear about the State Fair in Indianapolis. Our prayers are with Sugarland, their fans, and all the personnel working there. And most importantly, our prayers are with the families of the injured and the families of the four people who were killed.”

Rascal Flatts’ Jay DeMarcus: “All thoughts and prayers go to the folks in Indy and Sugarlands camp tonight… What an awful tragedy…”

Jake Owen: “Every guy in our crew has thoughts and prayers going out to folks at Indiana State Fair and our friends @Sugarlandmusic”

Brad Paisley: “Really sad about the sugarland stage collapse. What a tragedy.”

Keith Urban: “I just saw the footage from Indiana State Fair tonight on youtube and am absolutely in shock. We send our prayers and thoughts to each and every one of you who were there and your families and loved ones as well. God bless you all.”

Reba: “What happened in Indianapolis tonight is what promoters, artists, crews and fans pray never happens. From my band, crew and the entire Starstruck organization, we send our thoughts and prayers to the 4 people who lost their lives tonight and to everyone who was at the concert. Jennifer and Kristian, I love you both.”

Holy social media, Batman! Video rentals come to Facebook

Posted by JP Mangalindan, Writer-Reporter
March 8, 2011 2:44 PM

Facebook users can now watch The Dark Knight right on the website. It won’t be the last time content providers come to where the users are.

Would you watch movies on Facebook? That’s what Warner Brothers, a division of Time Warner (parent company of Fortune), wants to know by offering up The Dark Knight for viewing on the movie’s Facebook fan page. 3.9 million fans have already “Liked” it and they and other Facebook users can rent it for 48 hours for 30 Facebook Credits, the equivalent of $3. There are some caveats though: it’s only available in the United States, only streams in Standard Definition, and sharing remains limited to posting the activity to the NewsFeed, “Liking,” or Tweeting it. Pretty barebones at this point, considering the wealth of features Facebook currently offers.

But the move is less notable for what it’s lacking and more for what it means for content programming going forward. Recently, Warner Brothers also dabbled with other unorthodox distribution methods, by creating iPad, iPhone, and iPod apps specifically for The Dark Knight and Inception. Not an ideal solution — who wants to download an iOS app for each and every movie? –but it does show that the studio wants to reach as many markets as possible. Its movie apps reach 35 worldwide markets, more than the 23 that iTunes covers. With Facebook, Warner Brothers has the potential to one day reach some 600 million users in more than 200 countries, from Jordan and Senegal to Botswana and Martinique. In doing so, it becomes the first studio to offer movie content within a social network. No outside links or shuttling to third-party web sites.

It might all sound pretty strange at first. Because when users signed up for Facebook, they envisioned using it for connecting with friends and acquaintances, and in some cases, people they’re dying to date. Watching movies probably didn’t register. After all, there are better, dedicated services like Netflix to handle that, right?

But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Facebook’s userbase spends an average of 55 minutes a day, 6.5 hours a week, or 1.2 days a month on the site, a significant chunk of time only rivaled by email usage, and one that will grow even further as Facebook matures and introduces more time-sucking features. Rather than force Facebookers to leave the network to some external service or site, a huge barrier of entry in and of itself, content providers are bringing programming to where the users are.

“It’s a great opportunity to bring a shared viewing experience back to folks who have gotten geographically dispersed,” says David Raycroft, VP of Product Strategy for Milyoni, the social commerce platform used for the Dark Knight-Facebook viewing and ecommerce app. Development of such projects can take as little as three days, though in this case, The Dark Knight app took 30 days to develop.

While it’s a solid first step — the user interface is simple and responsive — it also raises several thorny issues. Once the whole trend of Facebook movie streaming takes off, and I firmly believe it will eventually, there’s the issue of fragmentation. Will users be forced to seek out movie fan pages to watch that particular flick? How will they know when a particular new movie becomes available for viewing?

A content streaming hub will become vital as more studios bring content over to the social network, not only to aggregate and highlight content in one central location, but also to update users. Of course, in doing so, it brings Facebook one step closer to being even more integral to your daily life, which, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, is a good thing.

23 percent of our online time is spent on social networking sites, versus 8.3 percent on email

Social Media Devours Our Time Online, Says Nielsen Study
If data from Nielsen is to be believed, checking e-mail is no longer the primary pastime of the online user.
Ed Oswald, Technologizer
Aug 2, 2010 1:20 pm

Checking e-mail has long been considered the primary pastime of the online user. However, if data from Nielsen is to be believed, that’s no longer the case. The firm found that on average, about 23 percent of our online time is spent on social networking sites, versus 8.3 percent on email.

This was a much wider spread than last year, when it was 15.8 and 11.5 percent respectively. The changes could be explained by the fact that social networking sites are the primary method of communication between friends these days, which makes sending an e-mail much less necessary.

Facebook is dominating this space, with an 85 percent share of social networking use. MySpace comes in a very distant second with a five percent share, and Twitter only a single percentage point.

Our third most popular activity online is playing games, which on average takes up about 10 percent of our time. Again, highlighting the power of social networking, Zynga is one of the biggest companies in the space.

Zynga is creator of the popular game Farmville, which has seen a majority of its success as a result of the success of Facebook itself.

For more smart takes on technology, visit Technologizer.com. Story copyright © 2010, Technologizer. All rights reserved.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/202383/social_media_devours_our_time_online_says_nielsen_study.html?tk=hp_new

Mayo Clinic’s New Center for Social Media

By Katherine Hobson

Mayo Clinic has been taking advantage of social media — including Facebook, Twitter and patient and employee blogs — for several years.

Today Mayo announced the launch of a Center for Social Media, which it says will expand social media tools beyond the traditional P.R. and marketing functions to use by staff, physicians and patients. We chatted by phone with Lee Aase, currently manager of syndications and social media at Mayo, who will be one of the center’s leaders.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

What does this involve?

The real focus is looking for ways to increase the use of social media throughout the practice at Mayo — to provide in-depth information for patients in a much more comprehensive way, and to create connections between researchers, physicians and staff. Up until now we’ve had the equivalent of a person and a half working through the P.R. department, and we want to take that same model to the whole enterprise at Mayo. We’ll have the equivalent of about eight full-time employees, including a medical director.

Why would a busy doctor want to spend the time to learn how to use YouTube?

This is building on the interest that we’ve already had. There is immense interest from clinical departments — they want to be able to harness these tools to do their business. We want to create a curriculum that’s scalable and enables us to provide them with training when they want it.

Can you give me an example?

We’ve done an introduction video for the head of our dental specialties department, Dr. Sreenivas Koka, with some background information — where he’s from, his history. And it talks about the things patients are looking to fix, and asks what’s most important for them. The idea is that it will make the consultations more efficient by getting the preliminaries out of the way. What Dr. Koka has found is that the patients feel they know him a little bit before they come. We want to study the impact of that — so far we’ve sent it out to a few dozen patients but we want to study it [more formally].

And you’d also offer this to other institutions, advocacy groups and other organizations?

We’ve informally been consulting and providing advice to other medical providers and organizations; now there’s a formal relationship we can have with other hospitals. We’ll charge nominal fees to cover the cost of the center. We’re planning to create a blogging platform, for example, that we may offer to other hospitals or to patient foundations.

What’s the goal?

To help patients. Sometimes that means providing information directly to them, and sometimes it means disseminating information more rapidly to the medical community.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/07/27/health-blog-qa-mayo-clinics-new-center-for-social-media/

Social media to communicate information in an entertaining way

Timmons&Company, a creative marketing firm focusing on business to business marketing and advertising, has recently established itself as a serious player in the world of social media.

Rich Timmons, Founder of Timmons&Company, said “by engaging in social media, the company will now be able to connect with their current and prospective clients online. Our social media will serve as a resource of entertaining and educational information through sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our blog.”

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/07/prweb4292944.htm

Old Spice Videos leverage Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc, and it worked!

This is a great example of using technology, social media and micro-blogging to create the content, the distribution, and the marketing. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_internet.php

My sister, Liz Dubelman, posted this link on her Facebook site. Thanks Liz!

“I believe FaceBook is a once in a century communication tool” Paul Dunay

Paul Dunay:

Sorkin Facebook

Aaron Sorkin really has the right idea. He is able to break down the wall between the audience and the author is a paragraph. He is a genius.

Welcome. I’m Aaron Sorkin. I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name–which I find more flattering than creepy–but this is me. I don’t know how I can prove that but feel free to test me.

I’ve just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I’ve started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she’s been dead for 33 years.)

Some of you might be familiar with some things I’ve written. I’m the author of two Broadway plays–A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention, five feature films–A Few Good Men, The American President, Malice, Charlie Wilson’s War and The Trial of the Chicago 7 which is in pre-production, and three television series–Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and the first four seasons of The West Wing.

I honestly don’t know how this works, which is why I’m here. If anyone has any questions I’d be happy to answer them as best I can. If anyone has any comments I’m glad to listen. And if anyone has any Facebook stories I think they might be helpful.

That’s all. I’ll try to get better at this as I get more practice.

Aaron

* I feel about this introduction the way I felt about Sophie’s Choice–It could have been funnier.

Dan Dubelman wrote
at 10:53am
You possess an innate understanding of how to use this medium. You have already created an alternate reality with a trusted voice. This is not surprising at all. Good job!

http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=33807262256&ref=mf