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"The process of involvement in the United Nations has one unfortunate property: that it politicizes everything," Cerf told Walden. "All the considerations that are made, whether it's in the ITU or elsewhere, are taken and colored by national interests. As a long-standing participant in the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, where we check our guns at the door, and we have technical discussions about how best to improve the operation of the Internet, to color that with other national disputes which are not relevant to the technology, is a very dangerous precedent. That's one of the reasons I worry so much about the ITU's intervention in this space."

“The whole phenomenon of cocreation is the most important change in what’s going on right now. You get the best, most authentic communication if you cocreate your messaging by consulting with employees and by engaging them in a dialogue.” By fostering what amounts to an open-source approach to content generation, leaders can inspire “employees to proselytize, to ‘own’ what they talk about, to advocate enthusiastically for their company,”

inclusive leaders know that bringing non-sales employees into the sales process can offer a low-cost, high-impact way to generate interest in their company’s latest offering. Word of mouth, ideally, starts at home.

letting employees join the fray of organizational conversation means letting go--letting go of the eminently understandable impulse to monitor and restrict what people say on company-sponsored communication channels. The advent of social media raises a particular challenge for leaders: Should they seek to impose rules on a medium that appears to be as unruly as it is powerful? But there, too, inclusive leadership requires a willingness to give up the need for control, together with a faith in employees’ ability to control themselves.

Conversational inclusion fosters employee passion.

Passion of that kind, in turn, helps fuel greater innovation, faster execution, and other ingredients of improved organizational performance. “The goal is to have engaged employees,” says Larry Solomon, of AT&T. “If you’re an engaged employee, you’re going to score high on your commitment to customers, your loyalty to the company, your overall happiness as an employee. You’re going to stick around, and you’re going to act as an ambassador for the company when you’re talking to your friends and family. And one of the key factors in having an engaged workforce is creating an environment where people feel like they’re being listened to.”

Choosing well-researched and tested vocabularies can support an intuitive user experience, but may also require some guidance—instructional content on the administrative interface, for example—for content authors and managers. They may be used to using the organization’s internal terms, not the terms site visitors are using when looking for information, to define content.

on each book’s page, you can see a “Genres” callout showing how readers most often classified the book. You can also follow the “See top shelves” link for the full list of shelf names. Whether you prefer to find popular books by broad category or dig into unique, quirky lists made by other users, Goodreads provides ample opportunity to do both.

Whether you call it “folksonomy” or “social tagging,” your role as a content strategist is to provide the context to empower your users to make the best decisions about tagging your content

Tags or categories? Open taxonomy or closed vocabulary? How deep should your hierarchies go? Your content strategy should help drive which type of taxonomy to use when. If your organization’s strategy is to build a collaborative community in which engaged users are creating content, then a closed taxonomy with a limited vocabulary may send the wrong message. If you plan on creating content about the same subjects for the foreseeable future, then relating content through taxonomy can work well. But if the subjects will change often, then relating specific pieces or types of content to each other rather than linking them via taxonomy may work better.

You may also decide to limit your use of taxonomy, for example, if your organization is highly risk-averse and leaves nothing to chance. Relying on taxonomy-driven dynamic relationships, rather than manually creating the relationships between pieces of content, may not be the right content strategy for you, since you lose control over exactly what displays where. When a database, rather than a human being, is creating content relationships, the results may be humorous or even inappropriate.

25 bloggers were arrested and charged with sedition

What explains his rage is that, had it not been for social media, the government would likely have succeeded in hiding the protests from many Turks. Turkey is a country that jails more journalists than Iran, and it is hardly surprising that the mainstream Turkish media, which has been additionally co-opted by the authorities through financial measures, broadcast pictures of beauty contests and cooking shows for several days while parts of Istanbul and other cities were blanketed with tear gas.

While international news organizations and some alternative outlets in Turkey played a role in breaking the media’s silence, social media took the lead.

Besides arresting and intimidating bloggers, the authorities made several attempts to choke access to Facebook and Twitter, as well as blocking cell phone communications (which your correspondent experienced on June 1 in Istanbul). The deputy prime minister ominously cautioned that “It's possible to shut it [Internet] all down," much in the same manner as the Egyptian government had done two years earlier.

Agile content development is best executed by a partner that has strategy, production, and analytics under one roof, combining what agencies traditionally do best with what production companies traditionally do best.

When strategy, creative, and production teams can sit side by side and collaborate fluidly, agile content is the by-product.

A perfect example of this is Red Bull, which has even gone a step further to combine brand, agency, and production company into one. No one would argue that they are not one of the most successful agile content marketers on the planet.

The most important part of setting your brand’s agile content strategy is having a clear idea of why your brand is creating content to begin with.

Next, your responsibility is to make sure that the content you’re creating is meeting your brand’s overall objectives. Your selected content partner should be responsible for making sure the content you create is something that your target consumer actually wants to see.

Once your brand’s content strategy is set, it should be seen as a living framework that should evolve over time. Recognize that your brand and content both live in a dynamic world that changes constantly.

Many consider these to be vanity metrics: measures which are easy to understand but on their own explain little about the actionable effect.  They are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter. More actionable metrics are argued to be active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits

Talking about Twitter specifically, Adi Avnit de-emphasizes the importance of followers due to the fact some users follow back others simply because of etiquette. His ‘million follower fallacy’ entails that this etiquette is leveraged by some users to elevate their follower count. The theory is not without evidence. Cha et al. (2010) measured user influence in Twitter and found that retweets and mentions showed great overlap, while followers gained… not so much. However, Kwak et al. (2010) in contrast found followers and page rank to be similar, while ranking by retweets differed.

investigated to what extent consumers engaged on brand tweets based on 4 dimensions:  amplification (retweets), reach (followers), conversations (mentions) and attitude (sentiment).

Popular measures are the 3F’s (friends, fans & followers).

following a great amount of people primarily affects a brand’s follower count. It doesn’t correlate with the other, more actionable, metrics. In fact, those brands perform worse on the other measures. Ergo, brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics

All interactions, whether it be likes, shares or wallposts, increase the EdgeRank which in turn exposes more fans to your content.

As the number of fans grew, so did the number of engaged fans (the interactions per mille stayed about the same). These two elements act as a positive spiral constantly growing the other.

I pose that the amount of fans, followers or friends is a relevant metric, considering it as the potential interaction userbase. Taking in consideration that your goal is to increase the number of engaged users.

Reach, amplification, conversations and sentiment appear to measure the same kind of digital influence. Brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics. Increase your user base – as your fans grow, so will the number of engaged fans

Where does this ultimately lead? We’re not there yet, but I suspect it’s predictive modeling, with internal social and content opportunity routing based on artificial intelligence and enterprise knowledge mapping. If we know the specific areas of expertise of each employee and can store that in a relational database, and we can also know via presence detection who is online and/or what their historical response times have been, we can use natural language processing (a la Netbase) to proactively triage and assign social interactions to the best possible resource in the organization.

Twitter — despite the different services that it has launched to increase engagement like Twitter Music other discovery services; and despite the increased attention around its IPO — has only grown by two percentage points to 18%. Hot on its heels is Instagram at 17%. Google+ does not make it into the top-five mix — not because of its lack of popularity; but because Pew says it did not include it in its survey questions.

when it comes to frequency of use, the rankings change. Facebook continues to remain at the top in the daily rankings, with 63% of people accessing it on a daily basis. Instagram — last in the general rankings — is not far off and in second place, with a 57% daily use. Similarly, its weekly and “less often” rates are also close, respectively at 22%/20% and 14%/22%. (

Twitter may overall be seeing less usage in general than Pinterest but those who are on it appear more engaged: some 46% of Twitter users are on it daily for their quick fix of quips made and received. Pinterest, in contrast, has a fairly low rate of daily usage, with 23% of its users visiting on a daily basis. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also are generating a significant amount of mulitple-times-per-day use, with 40% at Facebook, 35% at Instagram and 29% at Twitter, Pew says. LinkedIn, meanwhile, has a lot of work to do, with only 13% of its users going there daily.

Pew notes that for now it looks like Facebook is partly winning because of how it has managed to appeal to a wide range of users — a pretty impressive turn for widening its reach, considering that it started out as a network restricted only to university networks. The demographic data for other networks stands in contrast to this: Pinterest “holds particular appeal to female users”, with women four times more likely as men to be Pinterest users; LinkedIn is “especially” popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Twitter and Instagram resonate with urbanites and younger adults, and non-whites. (Facebook has over 70% usage among whites, Hispanics and black users, Pew notes.) All of them, excepting LinkedIn, has its highest proportion of users in the 18-29 age bracket; LinkedIn is more popular with the 30-49 group. Among those who say they use only one social networking site, Facebook is a clear winner with 84% selecting it as their sole site, with the others lagging behind by a very far stretch: 8% solely use LinkedIn, 4% solely use Pinterest, and Instagram and Twitter each picked up only 2%