Reno Social Media Think Tank

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

The company combed through its popular instant-messaging service – responsible for roughly half of the world’s IMs – and found that even its most distant users are pretty well connected. With 30 billion instant messages sent by 180 million people in June 2006, Microsoft found that the average social chain between two strangers is only 6.6 steps. And 78 percent of pairs connected within 7 degrees or fewer.

ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.

Content isn't king: culture is. The reason we go to the movies is to have something to talk about. If I sent you to a desert island and told you to choose between your records and your friends, you'd be a sociopath if you chose the music.

Because if copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow, it would be the end of culture on the Internet too.

If culture loses the copyright wars, the reason for copyright dies with it.

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.

This will create a huge influx of unfiltered material, and create a significant demand for filters and editors who can find/sort/select and recommend contextual quality content within verticals.

the core resource required to building a high-quality curated experience is not capital, but knowledge.

Apple has created a safe, trusted micro-payment economy around iTunes and the fact that only software that is tested gets into their iTunes systems is evidence that the Curation Economy is at play here too.

is such an unusual magnet for consumer attention and recall that it is worth every penny.

Consumers want to see the ads; they're akin to entertainment.

In my six years of monitoring game spots, there's been no question that brands that "prime the pump" around their Super Bowl spots get far bigger buzz dividends than brands that don't.

Strategy Analytics said fourth-quarter handset sales were off 10.5 percent compared to the same period a year ago -- dropping from to 329 million to 295 million.

But it's easy to forget that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) fans represent only a sliver of worldwide mobile phone users -- and they can't offset a larger decline.

"We have been seeing a consolidation by users down to one device rather than multi-devices for e-mail and voice in the enterprise segment," Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, told InternetNews.com

I’ve been devoting much of my time of late to exploring Web 2.0 possibilities in the last few weeks… services, sites, widgets and ways to integrate them. Now that we all have profiles all over the place (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube and countless others) keeping them all relevant can be pretty time consuming. Fortunately developers appear to be aware of this and are doing something about it. Here’s a cute little example of my most recent Web 2.0 chain reaction (websites updating other websites and profiles automatically)

This is a pretty neat development, and can be handy both socially and professionally.

In this case, my goal was to proliferate my online video, and share the awareness of it as broadly as possible.

What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

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?

It’s the software equivalent of Home Depot.

We wanted people to have the opportunity to create their own social networks and to make them whatever and whomever they wanted them to be. As a result, it didn’t make sense to build anything less than a platform.

MySpace is not a platform. MySpace doesn’t let you program it. MySpace doesn’t give you APIs.

Essentially, media in Habari is about unifying all of your media sources inside your blog software so that you don't have to go running from place to place to assemble a post. In other words, making it easy for the user. I have a pretty common scenario that I use when I start into my diatribe about Habari media.

I am really excited about the progress we've made on the silos in the past week or two. I've managed to finally connect uploading to the simple file silo so that you can upload photos to your own server. With the back-end worked out, the Flickr upload should come very quickly next, and then shortly afterward, the Viddler embedded recording functionality.

simply by selecting the appropriate template in a drop-down menu

The Movable Type Community Solution is a complete, out-of-the-box social media solution that lets site owners deploy community-oriented web sites, including forums, community blogs, and user-generated content communities, with just a few clicks.

Group Members does it all for you. Group Members will build, host, moderate, and manage your platform and community as your dedicated outsourced new media consultants.

Meanwhile, some travel suppliers are providing social networking products, and others plan to later this year.

it is launching Buzznet 2.0

Buzznet 2.0 was built from the ground up

The company also announced an exclusive partnership with event promoter Goldenvoice to create an interactive site for attendees of the 2006 Coachella Valley Music Festival. Leading up to, during and after the festival, event attendees will be able to post and share photos, video and stories at Buzznet.com by tagging their content 'Coachella'. This content will be available in real-time on their Coachella community site on Buzznet.com.