Can established software giants — Microsoft, Apple, even Google — get “the social web”? From Microsoft, we have the ignored “social” tab on the Zune; from Google, the death of Wave (less than a year) and lackluster response to Buzz.

Apple joined the foray yesterday. I asked on Twitter if we really need a new social network, a niche one for music:

Read more…

There are many yardsticks to measure the health of a community: from disease burden to a free press to a shrunken digital divide. I want the MCDM to continue to ask important questions related to these measurement tools and contribute meaningfully to the conversation.

Case in point:  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has asked the MCDM to consider hosting TEDxChange, which will take place in NYC on September 20, with live streaming around the world. TEDxChange will look at the Millennium Development Goals in particular, which are currently one of the most well known—and well debated—measuring sticks when it comes to health indicators in the developing world.

This opportunity builds well off the MCDM’s successful TEDxSeattle in April of this year. To relive some of the energy from that magnificent day, here’s a recently completed “behind the scenes” look at TEDxSeattle, edited by Aaron Seeley and Terry Short. Footage shot by Michael Bean, Scott Macklin, Xurxo Martinez, Aaron Seeley, and Terry Short. The music is courtesy of Hanson Hosein.

This is right where the MCDM wants to be. Stay tuned for more details on TEDxChange as plans firm up and I hope, wherever you are in the world,  you’ll join the TEDxChange conversation come September 20.

It was widely reported this April that according to a report put out by the United Nations University, there are more cell phone subscriptions in India than sanitary toilets.

This fact speaks to India’s breathless proliferation of mobile telephony, contrasted by their staggering gaps in basic health services. Must one come at the expense of the other? What relationship exists between the two? What are the opportunities for connectivity to elevate one’s social or economic status?

Questions like these were raised in the course I taught at the MCDM last fall, “Emerging Markets in Digital Media.” The course content was informed by my work at the UW Department of Global Health, where I was based before moving to the north end of campus to join the MCDM full-time three weeks ago. I’ll be offering the course again this fall, as the inaugural class in the new MCDM “Emerging” academic pathway, which includes not only scholarship related to emerging markets, but emerging trends in digital media.

While strategic communication, storytelling, and leadership development are my background, I maintain a firm commitment to the value of global health scholarship and reporting, and work to see synergies in all of these fields. So when Journalism That Matters contacted the MCDM in early July about a survey they were designing with the global health thought leaders in this area, I was keen to share it broadly within the Department of Communication community. In a nutshell, they are collaborating to improve global health journalism in the Northwest, and see this survey as one of the first steps at crafting reporting that is relevant, accessible, and memorable.

Please take five minutes if you’re so inclined, and check out the JTM survey. They’d welcome responses in by July 31.

- Anita Verna Crofts

Related on Flip the Media:

• Mobile Phones in Developing Countries – Is Building Social Capital Enough?

Microsoft today launched Facebook integration for Outlook via a new social plug-in. See the story at Mashable.

What does this mean for you?

Your personal Facebook information and activity will be more closely tied to your business network. Period.

If you are “friends” with someone on Facebook and exchange email with them in Outlook, this plug-in will show that person’s Facebook activity in the Outlook experience. Even if you don’t have this plug-in on Outlook, your information will still appear in Outlook for anyone who has the Outlook plug-in and is your Facebook friend.

I unfortunately cannot provide a screenshot of my business inbox, but I can show you how I see Facebook status updates when I am composing mail to my boss, Kristen. Read more…

Being a social media strategist at Microsoft, by way of Projectline, involves much more than just tweeting and maintaining a Facebook page. It’s about building community. Our product, one in the educational sector, requires a lot of online networking. I work hard to establish and build trust with educators around the world. Microsoft is a behemoth of a company and while you’d think the MSFT name would give you a shoe-in to any community – it simply doesn’t.

Teachers want to know that you are just as passionate about education as you are about the product you are marketing. To show them this, I usually sign my name at the end of my tweets to help give them a personal touch. Many social strategists and community managers sign only with their initials in this fashion:  ^EB. I go the extra mile and sign: -eric. On Facebook, I will send them personal e-mails and comments with my own profile (Eric Burgess) as well with my Mouse Mischief profile. It’s absolutely crucial to be as reachable as possible to your customers. The old ways of conducting customer service through 800 numbers and expensive CMS e-mail software are on their way out. People want immediate access to you, so why not give it to them? It’s all a part of the community building I mentioned earlier. How can you build a community without making you and your product as transparent as possible? You can’t. Below are some important things to consider as you work to build your community.

1. Are you Tony Hsieh’ing it?

Tony Hsieh is the founder and CEO of Zappos.com. Hsieh inspired me to get into social media. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter and I was completely blown away by the amount of time he spent tweeting. He was so passionate about his customers that I consider him a social media pioneer: He used it to grow his business. And, he was reachable to everyone. I actually received a message from him when I responded to one of his tweets. What CEO does that? How could an online shoe business have nearly 1.7 million followers? Hsieh worked hard at growing his community. You’ve got to Hsieh it to stay in it. Read more…

Our two year-old recently had a meltdown because I took the iPod Touch out of her hands so that she could focus on eating her eggs and toast.

“I want the iPod!  I want the iPod” she said quite forcefully, along with a tear or two.

This incident might also bring a tear (of joy) to Steve Jobs and his usability team, but it sent a chill through my heart.  Our daughter’s greatest influence is…us.  And we have newspapers, smartphones, and sometimes laptops at the dining table.  We seem to be perpetually gorging on media, to the detriment of a balanced approach to real life.

“We have a crisis of attention,” announced a smart person at a digital media conference I attended in New York last week.  I don’t quite remember who said it, because, I along with the others in attendance, were half-listening, half keeping an eye on our various screens.  One another participant suggested we were now in a four screen world (TV, computer, mobile phone, and now iPad/slate), I saw whatever remained of my attention span shrivel up and die.

There’s even a new book on this subject, Hamlet’s Blackberry.  Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Review:

It convincingly argues that we’ve ceded too much of our existence to what he calls Digital Maximalism. Less scold and more philosopher, Mr. Powers certainly bemoans the spread of technology in our lives, but he also offers a compelling discussion of our dependence on contraptions and of the ways in which we might free ourselves from them. I buy it. I need quiet time.

At the same time, near-panic ensues on Facebook and Twitter as people rushed to declare that they were the first to own an iPhone 4, while others declared their despondency at being stuck with “older” technology.  I was compelled to send this cartoon to at least four of my Facebook friends to assuage their feelings of being Left Behind:

I’ve written about this before (see An Ode to Contemplation), but I’ve grown increasingly concerned about digital distraction — especially my own.  In our persistently connected state, are we really better off?  Stress and workload aside, what are we missing when are heads are bowed on deference to one of those four screens?  And why are we so captivated by the Bright Shiny New Thing?

So, my colleague Ron Krabill’s excellent TEDx Seattle talk, Beyond the Bright Shiny New Thing resonates even stronger with me, months later.  He argues that the newest technology isn’t always the best, especially as we seek to engage historically disenfranchised communities (i.e. the poor) with digital media.  It’s one reason why I’m suddenly “geeking out” — slowly turning away from OS X and Windows 7, and messing around with the wonderfully open, cheap (free) and lean Linux-based Ubuntu on a $300 netbook. [more props to the Apple design team, when my daughter saw me working on the smaller netbook, she started jabbing at the screen, hoping it was touch-enabled.]

But beyond simplifying my digital diet, I realize I desperately need to go on a media fast.  Clay Shirky celebrates our ability to collaborate more/produce more thanks to social media in his new book Cognitive Surplus (Yochai Benkler calls it excess capacity, enabling our ability to engage in “social production” — much like my time devoted to creating this post).  I think we sometimes need to take that time we once dedicated, as Shirky argues to living as a TV-fixated couch potato, to just be — and to focus on what matters most.  So to start, I’m pledging to keep my phone, computer and even newspapers far away from places of family communing, so that I can concentrate more…on family.

I love this video (yes, ironically shot with my persistently pocketable smartphone) of my daughter at nineteen months, ogling the “big iPod” in the window of the Apple Store.  Not because of her fascination with technology at such an early age (I joke that she’s beyond a “digital native” and started out as a “digital fetus”), but because ultimately what captivates her most is a yellow balloon.  Out of the mouths of babes…

Originally posted to Storyteller Uprising.

In case you missed it, May 31 was the first “Quit Facebook Day,” a day in which people committed to deleting – not just deactivating – their Facebook accounts. We’re talking about permanent deletion, a decision to forever forego the #1 social networking platform. By the time Quit Facebook Day finally arrived, over 30,000 people had made the pledge, though this number falls short of the average number of Facebook accounts started each day. So we’re not talking about a substantial incision into the Facebook population. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t dismiss the number so quickly, because the mere existence of Quit Facebook Day indicates a growing dissatisfaction with Facebook as the main social networking platform. And while this will make many guffaw, I’m going to go ahead and mark this year as the beginning of the end of Facebook. Read more…