Reno Social Media Think Tank

One thing all podcasters and producers will need to keep in mind is a lesson to be learned from traditional media … always plan for the next thing.

Want to quickly make your friends feel cheap and less than human? Start using automated responders to thank them for what they do or share!

If I choose to connect with someone, it requires an explicit action on my part. I know I'm doing this. It's the same for the person who chooses to connect back with me. Because I see this immediately as a status update or similar notice, I don't need an additional, automated response saying something like, "Hey, Dave, thanks for following me! I look forward to hearing from you!" C'mon

The unchecked use of auto responders undermines this trust, just as questionable claims and pitchmen undermined the credibility of advertising.

Now Skittles.com has gone one better by turning its entire site into a massive social media experiment. It is possibly the bravest move I have yet seen, in terms of a global brand getting into bed with social media and social networks.

Skittles hasn’t bothered to filter the results in any way, so swearing is acceptable, and there’s no moderation.

Econsultancy’s experiment was based around the hunch that most of the social media activity relating to our brand was positive, and in some way reinforces our credibility.

The results are dramatic: most online video viewers watch mere seconds, rather than minutes, of a video.

For starters, it is clear that post-roll ads are of limited effectiveness.

The most common way viewers find a video (45.13% of all views our sample) is direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and running a search or clicking around the featured or related videos).

To those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, perhaps this gives some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video's meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.

They make me laugh or provide useful information

Someone who is consistently informative 23.0% - Someone who is consistently funny

28.7% - They tweet too much

But for those who hold dear the notion that information on the Web will forever want to be free, it's early yet. Keep your eyes peeled for publications whose Web sites are sprouting nonbrowser apps, refining their content, experimenting with new reading devices, bulking up their databases, and above all, publications that are listening to the man from Google

It doesn't understand what users want in order to give them what they need.

Is the iPhone App Store software as content or content as software?

Looking inside of those numbers, it’s not surprising that the bulk of content creators are simply social networking users that do things like post photos or links, but there’s also a quickly-growing number of people participating in more involved activities like blogging or uploading their own videos.

As you can see in the above chart, 71 million people created content on social networks last year, while 21 million posted blogs, 15 million uploaded videos, and more than 11 million participated in virtual worlds. Overall, eMarketer arrives at the 82 million number – which counts everyone who generated content at least monthly - by accounting for the overlap within the respective categories measured.

Papandreou called for an end to "state, federal, and local land use policies that are literally forcing people to have to drive" and told Wired.com we're on the cusp of an inevitable "mode shift" away from individual car ownership toward a greater reliance on mass transit and sustainable transport.

"cars have a right to housing and people don't."

It's brought us to the point where most Americans consider automobile ownership an essential key to a productive, fulfilling life.

Customer care and PR are blending as consumers use social media to demand service

The media is in a constant state of reinvention as it transitions from atoms to bits

Gorging on media is out. Selective ignorance and friends as filters are in

"That's the biggest scam in the Bay Area," John said. "It totally felt like a blackmail deal. I think they're doing anything to make a sale."

Other notable findings from March 2008 include: 73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. 84.8 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer). 47.7 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (8.4 videos per viewer). The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes. The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.

So here’s the observation. If you manage a brand online, get ready for people to leverage it — both professional and personal — for their own gain.The big question is whether to grease the skids and enable it, stand by and watch it happen, or send in the clowns and get all legal. The question is this: should I be giving product to bloggers and twitter users to activate this sort of self-managed promotion/contest or am I on shaky legal/ethical ground? I did rip into the “Blog Slut” phenomenon and don’t want to demean the Lenovo brand name by getting into any kind of payola arrangements. That aside, @moon has pounded the word Lenovo and gotten other people to Tweet it far more than the usual organic flow of the conversation would have. So should I shut up and be happy for the free branding?