A thoughtful slide program on how to use Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn in your business, Donston-Miller, June 20, 2012. One finding, only use as many platforms as you can manage well. You have to have a "there" (i.e., relevant, timely content) in order to send people there for it to have value.

Interesting blog post by Debra Donston-Miller on importance of social media metrics, April 4, 2012 1. Quality of fans/followers (organically targeting connections as followers react, reveal interests) 2. Social demographics (language, countries, age...) 3. Most popular pages, posts, and tweets 4. Page views and click-throughs (what gets read and shared) 5. Conversion (buy something, sign up for something, consume something

Interesting working paper by Annie Feighery, on Participatory Epidemiology website, asserting primary value of Facebook and Twitter. Note this example of virtual penetration for mobile phones below. Does this threshold hold true for social media use? "Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, now has a majority of countries with populations whose mobile phone market is at the level of virtual total penetration. Virtual total penetration is reached when more than half of potential mobile phone owners have a mobile phone. "

Interesting study on social media users by Pew Internet and American Life Project, December 2012, released February 2013, by Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner Summary Twitter attracted 16% of all internet users. They were more likely to be younger (18-29), African American, or Hispanic, and urban. Pinterest attracted 15% of all internet users. They were five times as likely to be women as men, more likely to be wealthier, and rural. Instagram users make up 13% of all internet users. They are more likely to be younger, African-American, Hispanic, and urban. Facebook has 67% of all internet users participating. They are more likely to be younger and more urban. Tumblr has only 6% of all internet users. They are 4x more likely to be younger than older.

Good information on who's using social media by age group and gender, and race/ethnicity. Looks like Facebook at 67% is the highest (and at its prime?). Pew Internet and American Life Project. December 2012.

Very interesting assessment of Twitter users in comparison to general public. They seem to be younger, more Democratic (redundant?) than general population. . . but only 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages. So there is a small saturation rate. " In the Pew Research Center's 2012 biennial news consumption survey, just 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages; only 3% said they regularly or sometimes tweet or retweet news or news headlines on Twitter. Twitter users are not representative of the public. Most notably, Twitter users are considerably younger than the general public and more likely to be Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party. In the 2012 news consumption survey, half (50%) of adults who said they posted news on Twitter were younger than 30, compared with 23% of all adults. And 57% of those who posted news on Twitter were either Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared with 46% of the general public. (Another recent Pew Research Center survey provides even more detail on who uses Twitter and other social media.)"

recommended Pinterest Boards to follow for your career, by Brie Weiler Reynolds, March 2013. Inside Jobs CareerBliss BrazenCareerist Careerrealism Splash Resumes Working Mother Workshifting

blog post on using LinkedIn for career development Tips 1. create a keyword-heavy profile title 2. Join your college alumni groups 3. Never send LinkedIn invites unedited--always customize 4. Do "small goods" for your LinkedIn contacts

blog post on Mashable on how to create your online identity 5 tips 1. Google your name--see who you are competing against in terms of name recognition 2. Own your name--get LinkedIn profile and pictures to show up first by creating a name specific URL at LinkedIn 3. Block and tackle on social networks such as Facebook to only share certain info with the public or limit Facebook content to friends only. 4. Advance the ball forward--create some great content in the first page of results; some apps help with that--Brandyourself 5. Make your own plays--showcase your expertise in a blog post, answer a question on Quora or comment on an article.

Very interesting graphics for categorizing MOOC participants (lurkers, drop-ins, passive participants, and active participants) and for no-shows at end of week 1 (almost 90%)

Word Cloud tools

Richard Byrne's take on best web tools on Slideshare--has ID VoicePipe, Tag my Doc, etc.

This is Khan's version of a dashboard of topics to master.

Great post by Beth Kanter on infographs, rationale for using them to array and understand data, how to construct them, and tools that can help simplify the process. Feb. 27. 2013

Newsletter by Ann Mehl, a life coach, 1.26.13. Justifies Studio's raison d'etre. Excerpts: "The workplace has changed enormously in recent years. Gone are the days when some benevolent company would direct and manage your career for you, while you dozed off at the wheel. Now more than ever, it is incumbent upon every employee to proactively manage his own career. We have become in essence, a nation of free agents. A company of one. And all successful "companies" must identify and set their priorities in such a way that our goals can be achieved. In the humdrum of work, it's often easy to find yourself adrift, floating aimlessly downstream without clear intent or destination. The days blur into each other, until you have no idea where you are going, or what it was you hoped to achieve. But ask yourself this question: if you're not steering the ship, then who is?" ..."Are there any personal development classes that would make certain parts of my job easier? Should I be speaking with other industry peers in my field so that I remain current? Is there anybody I can identify who might be willing to mentor me while I navigate this tricky next phase of my career?"

Article by Kerry Hannon, Forbes, 1.25.13 This author asserts that older workers will become more valued by employers even though they aren't making special efforts to hire or retain them now and do not want to pay for the cost of training/retraining them. These trends suggest that taking charge of one's own learning with a PLP, PLN, etc. and taking advantage of all the free opportunities will be valuable skills to have. This author only looks to community colleges for retraining and does not reference any of the online options that we know about from the work on the directory. Should we draft a comment back to Kerry Hannon on this website? "1. Who is going to pay for that training? Most labor market experts I have interviewed say the government and private employers need to ramp up more training programs for older workers and create workplaces that make it easier for them to do their jobs. Employers don't want to spend for it. They've already cut to the bone to stay competitive globally in recent years and this kind of spending is a tough sell. Conceivably, as I discussed as a panel member at a recent Federal Reserve Workforce Development conference, one way to provide the needed training is through the community college system. The coursework could be offered at an affordable cost for the worker. Depending on who foots the bill, employers or employeees could receive tax incentives to ease the tuition bill. (Please continue to next page.) "

article on women's career transitions clubs in Forbes, 2.22.13 ID by Bevan Rogel.

Interesting explanation of business model for how nonprofit and forprofit MOOC partners--edX, Coursera, and Udacity--will make money along with the universities. Implications for other, smaller online learning partnerships? Excerpt on two models (large-scale efforts) According to Mr. Agarwal, edX offers its university affiliates a choice of two partnership models. Both models give universities the opportunity to make money from their edX MOOCs-but only after edX gets paid. Related Content What You Need to Know About MOOCs Document: The Revenue-Sharing Models Between edX and University Partners The first, called the "university self-service model," essentially allows a participating university to use edX's platform as a free learning-management system for a course on the condition that part of any revenue generated by the course flow to edX. The courses developed under that model will be created by "individual faculty members without course-production assistance from edX," and will be branded separately in the edX catalog as "edge" courses until they pass a quality-review process, according to a standard agreement provided to The Chronicle by edX. Once a self-service course goes live on the edX Web site, edX will collect the first $50,000 generated by the course, or $10,000 for each recurring course. The organization and the university partner will each get 50 percent of all revenue beyond that threshold. The second model, called the "edX-supported model," casts the organization in the role of consultant and design partner, offering "production assistance" to universities for their MOOCs. The organization charges a base rate of $250,000 for each new course, plus $50,000 for each time a course is offered for an additional term, according to the standard agreement. Although the edX-supported model requires cash upfront, the potential returns for the university are high if a course ends up making money. The university gets 70 percent of any revenue gen

A community of adjuncts for adjunct teaching at colleges that uses crowdsourcing to collect data for the field, research issues, and get and give advice. Something like this could be adapted to provide value for other part-time workers be they professional or not, such as baby boomers shifting into retirement (what would such a site or community be called?), contractors, etc.

interesting article in NYT on February 24, 2013 on how adults long out of high school in some cases cobbled together learning experiences--formal academic work, open courseware, and experiential--to receive college degrees from Thomas Edison in New Jersey without ever having arrived on campus or borrowed money to pay for their degrees