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The first-of-its-kind longitudinal study by civic learning scholars of high school students' Internet use and civic engagement found that: For many youth, their interest in the Internet translates into engagement with civic and political issues. Contrary to popular belief, it is rare for individuals on the Internet to only be exposed to political perspectives with which they agree, but many youth are not exposed to political perspectives at all. Teaching new media literacies such as credibility assessment is essential for 21stcentury citizenship.

One of the issues facing social business and social CRM strategies is the issue of whether customers want to use social media as means for getting customer support. As of now, the phone is still the most common way to provide support. But would customers be willing to engage in other ways? An infographic from customer experience analytics firm ClickFox organizes research on the subject and finds that two in three customers would be willing to use social media for customer service if they understood the tools better. The infographic also breaks down the cost per interaction of various types of engagement, and finds website visits to be the cheapest by far.

The iMedia 25: Brands Redefining Social Media list recognizes the brands that have done the best job of engaging consumers through the myriad social media platforms. But beyond mere engagement, these brands have used big ideas, bold action, and smart thinking to leverage passionate online audiences in a channel that is still quite new. Collectively, these are the brands that move, shape, lead -- and listen to -- the conversations that define social media.

"In their newest study, they show that independent of the content of an article about a new technological development, the tone of comments posted by other readers can make a significant difference in the way new readers feel about the article's subject. The less civil the accompanying comments, the more risk readers attributed to the research described in the news story. "The day of reading a story and then turning the page to read another is over," Scheufele says. "Now each story is surrounded by numbers of Facebook likes and tweets and comments that color the way readers interpret even truly unbiased information. This will produce more and more unintended effects on readers, and unless we understand what those are and even capitalize on them, they will just cause more and more problems." If even some the for-profit media world and advocacy organizations are approaching the digital landscape from a marketing perspective, Brossard and Scheufele argue, scientists need to turn to more empirical communications research and engage in active discussions across disciplines of how to most effectively reach large audiences."

"The Pottstown (Pa.) Mercury is using a Pinterest board of wanted-criminal mugshots to engage readers and help police make arrests"

The White House loves Twitter, and Twitter loves the White House. How much? Last year, they grew their audience by over one-third, adding another 650,000+ followers to their 2M+ base.

Oreo's Dunk in the Dark Super Bowl viral tweet was 'a big win' but also 'a big failure' according to Mondelez VP of global media and consumer engagement, Bonin Bough.

crowdSPRING's blog about design, digital creativity, business strategy and more.

Businesses who focus on numbers can easily end up privileging short-term profits over long-term sustainability, employee productivity over engagement, and exploitation rather than innovation. These actions can end undermine the organizational strategy, and even the overall mission. Rather than serving as the ends-what the business is all about-the numbers (and qualitative metrics as well) need to be used as a means to measure of how well the organization is achieving both its short-term and long-term strategic goals, and ultimately how well the mission is being accomplished.

It's easy for early adopters and social media enthusiasts to get caught up in the latest and greatest tool available but many companies are still seeking a basic foundation. According to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, only 12 percent of companies surveyed felt their organizations were using social media effectively.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed nearly 200 years ago that American civic associations served as "schools of democracy" where members learned the skills of citizenship. A recent study by Indiana University faculty member Matthew Baggetta and several colleagues suggests that such organizations are more effective if they embrace that Tocquevillian role. The study found that associations that invest in recruiting, training and engaging volunteer leaders do a much better job than others of representing the interests and beliefs of their members -- even if they lack extensive resources for advocacy -- said Baggetta, assistant professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IU Bloomington.

Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it's something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford's Bandura put it, "People are proactive, aspiring organisms." Feedback taps into those aspirations. But maybe requiring people to do a little work-to stick accelerometers around their house or plug a device into a wall socket-is just enough of a nudge to get our brains engaged in the prospect for change.

We chose to highlight six drivers-big, disruptive shifts that are likely to reshape the landscape for organizations and workers. Although each driver is in itself important when thinking about the future, it is the confluence of several drivers working together that produces true disruptions. We then identified ten skills that we believe will be vital for success in the workforce: Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based Cross -cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

We spend a large percentage of our lives at the office, engaged in the drudgery of work. Although we obsess over the medical benefits of various leisure activities - should I do yoga? take long walks? not watch television? - the amount of time we might spend in downward facing dog pose pales in comparison to the amount of time we spend seated in our chair, staring at the computer screen, surrounded by co-workers. A new study led by Arie Shirom at Tel Aviv University reveals the powerful impact of the workplace on longevity. The researchers tracked 820 adults for twenty years, starting with a routine health examination in 1988. The subjects worked in various professions, from finance to manufacturing to health care. They were interviewed repeatedly about conditions at their workplace, from the behavior of the boss to the niceness of their colleagues. Over the ensuing decades, their health was closely monitored, allowing the scientists to control for various medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, smoking and depression.

The customer-centered company needs to make its products interactive, train its people for co-creative dialogue, redesign its physical places for two-way interactions, and open up the architecture of its digital sites to other processes and content that the company doesn't control. Nike puts a sensor in its shoes that lets runners track their runs and has a web platform where exchange data with others. Starbucks encourages a dialogue across all its stakeholders through the highly popular mystarbucksidea.com website. 3M invites its B2B customersto co-create new products with its R&D people live in their corporate labs. Apple invites third parties to develop new applications for its iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Companies are generally unprepared for this transformation to experience co-creation. Most product development groups continue to design non-interactive products. Company people in call centers and company stores still generally follow company narratives. Most corporate IT departments and suppliers are trained in one-way project-management techniques incompatible with true engagement-platform development. Herein lies the transformational challenge customer experience managers will face as they become customer-experience co-creators.

Here is a quick take on potential sources of high-quality digital learning media-which I'll define (for simplicity's sake) as age-appropriate, highly engaging, and efficacious for learning.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome. Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement.

Should you start Eric Decker or Demaryius Thomas? Those types of decisions, if made during the work day, could cost employers $6.5 billion in lost productivity, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

To get its employees on board with social media, FedEx's team "realized we needed to go a lot deeper" than just one hourlong workshop. So team members ended up developing an online curriculum with 17 courses. In about 18 months, more than 500 employees had completed the coursework, Horne said. "This is probably one of the best investments we could have ever made," she said. To convince leaders that investments in social media platforms made sense, Horne said she and her IT partners discovered some of the "hidden dollars" that departments were spending to build their own, ad-hoc technology to connect and seek out experts.