Why Social Media is Inherently Good [#SOCIALGOODDAY] September 23, 2010

Question of the Day: Can social media make the world a better place? (photo: Point Mugu, Malibu, CA)

On this Social Good Day, the question posed to us by Mashable and (RED) is this: Can social media make the world a better place?In my view it already does, simply by its very existence.

Even if you’ve never studied the law of attraction, or you write it off as “voodoo” science as my father likes to call it, I suspect you already live your life accordingly.

Wherever you want change, that is where you focus your energy. Putting positive energy toward whatever goal you have in mind inevitably attracts results. That’s how your thoughts create your reality, provided you have the emotional motivation and necessary action to back it up.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS INHERENTLY GOOD

1) Social media has the power to amplify the law of attraction a million times over. Social Good Day is a perfect example. Last week I’d never heard of (RED) and AIDS in Africa was the furthest thing from my mind. Today, hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) are all focused on trying to solve this problem together. Without social media, how in the world could that be possible?

2) Social media is a channel for expressing our thoughts into permanent written and visual form, which only serves to increase the energy behind these thoughts that have the power to manifest anything we want. Instead of having an idea that we let slip away, social media offers a quick, convenient means of sharing the very ideas that, collectively, can build upon one another to make a big difference.

3) Social media is a doorway for welcoming into our lives friends old and new whose thoughts and goals are mutually beneficial to us all. We follow and friend people who share our interests and backgrounds. As a result, the ideas we share with one another are bound to be met with a great deal of engagement and support, increasing the likelihood of achieving the momentum necessary to realize our goals.

Every day is Social Good Day, but here is Mashable’s list of ideas for how to spend this one:

• Sign up to attend or organize your own Social Good Day meetup on Mashable’s Meetup Everywhere page.
• Tweet about what your solution is using the #socialgood hashtag. We’d love to hear your solutions @mashable & @joinred. (RED) will host a stream of tweets including the hashtag on its website.
• Share your solution in the comments below.
• Write a blog post and share it.
• Post to Facebook about what you or your company is doing.
• Record a video about your solution and upload it to YouTubeYouTube with the #socialgood tag
• Join (RED) on Facebook and Twitter to share your ideas on how to help fight AIDS in Africa using social media.
• Get inspired by watching the 30-minute Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs documentary The Lazarus
  Effect on YouTube. Presented by (RED) and HBO, the film follows the story of HIV-positive people in
  Africa who undergo a remarkable transformation in as few as 40 days thanks to access to treatment.

More about social media and the law of attraction.

With gratitude,

Meredith Simonds, Social Media Reviewer, Blogger and Consultant

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OC Register Makes News for Social Media Day July 2, 2010

The Orange County Register hosted one of the largest Meetups in the world in celebration of the 1st Annual Social Media Day on June 30, 2010.

Every day I marvel at the insanity of L.A. traffic, so the idea of fighting my way down to Santa Ana for a Social Media Day event was less than appealing. Fortunately, the very thing that changed my mind turned out to be the best part of the event — its location at The Orange County Register.

Social Media Day on June 30 was founded by Mashable, the must-read blog on anything and everything social media. Through Meetup.com, Mashable encouraged social media enthusiasts like me to do with our online connections what ultimately has the potential for yielding the most success — connecting offline, where networking will always have its greatest strength.

Though the name has changed more than once, The Orange County Register was founded in 1905. So it’s an important part of history, especially for those of us immersed in social media.

During her speaking segment entitled “Putting a personal touch behind your social media efforts,” Rochelle Veturis noted the irony of a newspaper hosting  Social Media Day. After all, it’s bloggers, Twitter, YouTube and other social media outlets that are presenting such a challenge to the traditional newspaper industry. And that is precisely what is so brilliant about the Register‘s decision to host those of us most passionate about social media. What better way to bring attention to the paper’s aggressive pursuit of a fine balance between social media and traditional news?

What a lovely irony that a newspaper steeped in such rich tradition was the site of the 4th largest Social Media Day event in the world.

As we learned during a tour of the pressroom, The Orange County Register recently updated the look of its website where news is posted online before it makes it way into print. Insider Coordinator Jacqie Mardian explained that some of the most-read stories online are the ones printed in the paper the next day. In other words, the readers themselves are helping to determine the news — the very essence of social media.

The Register is doing something especially innovative with its Twitter page. A number of people post to the account, but on a rotating basis. As that rotation changes, so does the avatar associated with the account (i.e., the picture of the current tweeter). It would be nice to see this concept go one step further, tweaking the bio (or “twio” as Rochelle calls it) to reflect the name of the current tweeter as well. Though the pictures and names of those posting to the account are displayed in the Twitter background, the computer screen I’m working on right now (for example) cuts off the majority of them. In other words, I see the avatar of the person tweeting but I don’t know his name.

Beyond that, the Register has a good following/follower ratio on Twitter, they post frequently and the level of engagement is strong. They are utilizing the lists too, but there is definite room for growth there. What a great way to share with readers lists of ways to get involved in the community, from restaurants, to shops, to local non-profits.

On our tour of The Orange County Register, Jacqie Mardian showed us this linotype machine, the original printing press used by the paper from 1905 to 1976.

As for Facebook, the Register‘s FB page is stellar! They post a wide variety of updates, sharing stories and asking questions, which are super-effective at generating comments. The RSS feed button is prominent and there’s a tab for other Facebook pages, as the Register has a number of them.

I am surprised to see that I can’t find a YouTube channel for The Orange County Register. In search results, the Register does turn up, but they are videos posted by other users. The paper could really benefit from having its own presence there, not only as a means of driving traffic from direct click-throughs to the website, but also for the SEO benefits associated with YouTube.

As speaker Morgan Brown noted yesterday during his “Leveraging online video” presentation, people are increasingly using YouTube as their primary search engine, as it is second only to Google in the number of online searches. And, a YouTube video is 50 times more likely than a text page to show up on Google’s first page search results!

Overall, the Register is a social media star, and will no doubt move forward in all the right online directions. But as Jacqie made clear during the tour, the Register is equally committed to preserving the newspaper tradition.

None of my pictures do justice to the impressive printing press The Orange County Register has been using since 1976. The recycled paper roll weighing one ton starts here and makes its way through a long line of presses, one behind the other, that look just like this one.

The paper opened in 1905, using the same printing press for the next 70 years — a linotype machine that took 15 minutes to create just one newspaper column. They replaced the linotype in 1976 and have been using the same printing press without a hitch ever since. It uses recycled paper rolls weighing one ton each and, at its fastest, the press can print 1,000 pages a minute.

What a lovely irony that a newspaper steeped in such rich tradition was the site of the 4th largest Social Media Day event in the world, at least in terms of Meetup RSVPs. Though I didn’t follow the Register‘s promotion of the event on its website or in its newspaper, perhaps the impressive turnout (which it was) suggests traditional media still has an impressive level of influence after all.

With gratitude,

Meredith Simonds, Social Media Reviewer, Blogger and Consultant

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Following World Peace: Nikola Tesla, Social Media and the Law of Attraction March 21, 2010

As Nikola Tesla suggested, the key to avoiding conflict is eliminating the distance that divides us, in all its forms. Social media may serve to bridge that gap, with the help of the law of attraction.

For a new project, I’ve been researching Nikola Tesla, a 19th and 20th century inventor and engineer. I’m interested in his work with scalar energy but beyond that he’s considered one of the main contributors to the development of electricity as we use it today. In reading Tesla’s autobiography, My Inventions, I came across the following passage that brought the benefits of social media to mind. Though Tesla is speaking specifically about war, his point can apply to human conflict in all its forms.

TESLA WRITES OF WORLD PEACE

“War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live.

“Only thru annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies, and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations.

“What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth.”

Then today I saw this @mashable: Social Networking Usage Surges Globally. Based on statistics collected by the Nielsen Company, there are 314.5 million active social networking users around the world, with each person using these networks an average of 6 hours per month. It seems to me this is the kind of progress Tesla envisioned — an “annihilation of distance” for the “conveyance of intelligence” and “transmission of energy” for “permanency of friendly relations.”

Still, I hesitated to blog about the connection, as I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch on the concept of war. Per the law of attraction, focusing on what you don’t want will only attract it to you. And, in fact, that is precisely what happened. I was debating about this blog in the living room today. The TV was on and I thought it may distract me but I decided to leave it on anyway. While reading over this passage in which Tesla references war, the local newscaster announced “Hollywood turned out today to protest the war in Iraq.” Turns out today is the 7-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion.

Synchronicity spoke (i.e., I attracted it to me). Indeed, this is a timely topic worthy of a blog post.

ATTRACTING PEACE THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

To the heart of the issue, can social media bridge the gap that divides us? Not just among nations, but organizations, political parties, families and individuals? Maybe the answer lies in application of the law of attraction. If we approach social networking as an opportunity to connect with people on shared points of interest, our differences will come to pale in comparison to our similarities. When looking for friends or followers online, focus on those whose interests you are attracted to. Your expressed interest in them will return the favor.

For instance, when I’m deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter, I put a great deal of weight on the content of their bio. If they state religious or political views different from mine, I look for something else that can bring us together. Maybe they are an environmentalist, like me. Or they’re a vegetarian, like me. Or they’re a writer, like me. Then their tweets that reflect our shared point of interest (i.e., attraction) are the ones I retweet. And vice versa.

In other words, instead of using social media sites to focus on the differences among us that create conflict, we can focus instead on the similarities. And ideally these similarities are made immediately evident in a quick scan of a profile page. So to that end, include in your bio all the descriptives you can to present all the versions of you.  Imagine 314.5 million of us doing this on a regular basis — a number that is only going to dramatically grow larger. One day we could all be connected via social media, preferably on points of interest that ultimately promote the shared interest of peace.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonynetone/3717759677/

With gratitude,

Meredith Simonds, Social Media Reviewer, Blogger and Consultant

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Speaking the Truth of Your Attraction to a Political View January 2, 2010

As a Mashable addict, I’ve had their Social Media Guide for Small Businesses on my radar of to-read’s since it was published last month. This is my first in a series of posts applying the Law of Attraction to this collection of social media tips from the best in the biz.

In Social Media 101: How to Avoid Alienating Your Customers, Mashable Editor-in-Chief Adam Ostrow shares the following story:

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal to shine a spotlight on the “generous healthcare plan” he offers his employees. He went one step further though, sharing in this piece his opinions on healthcare reform that tens of thousands of Whole Foods customers adamantly disagree with, publicly and virally so via Facebook where Boycott Whole Foods today has more than 33,000 members.

Looking to give Mashable readers something to learn from this, Adam Ostrow writes:

“It’s clear that when you’re the face of your company, offering public opinions on controversial issues is most likely not a good idea. Even if you’ve set up separate personal and business accounts for blogs, Twitter, and other social media channels — as you should — people will associate what you publish with your business and may make judgments based on it. “

In response, Fanminder comments on Ostrow’s post:

“I’m not sure I agree with your fundamental premise. Small business owners and their business are inseparable from each other. Social media is about people not companies right? It stands to reason that injecting your personality into social media is what makes it work well as opposed to staid corporate blather.

“But you’ll argue: stay away from controversy. And I’d say: wade in. Do it with respect for others’ opinions. But do it…. The world, especially social media, needs more truth, authenticity, and directness.“

Now from my own Law of Attraction perspective:

You are attracted to things for a reason, political views included. If that attraction rings true to the core of who you are, and your expression of those views has the potential to influence an outcome you strongly believe in, do it! Just be aware of the potential consequences to your business when you express personal views on controversial issues — consequences that may include current and potential customers or clients publicly disagreeing with you.

There are many things more important than furthering a professional agenda, including policies that shape and define the quality of our everyday lives. But look deeply into the heart of who you are before delving into political conversations in any arena, be it online or otherwise.

Far too many people publicly support political agendas simply because they’re popular and could attract a new customer base. Or they express a controversial political opinion simply for shock value to garner themselves some attention.  (Not to suggest John Mackey was doing either.)

When it comes to social media and the Law of Attraction, speak your truth in all its forms and you will attract the kind of like-minded people you want and need to support you. Yes, there will be those who disagree, some louder than others. But as the old saying goes, any publicity is good publicity, provided you throw in a three-point social media-savvy twist — 1) acknowledge the opinions of your critics, 2) further expound on your own views and, 3) agree to disagree, respectfully.

With gratitude,

Meredith Simonds, Social Media Reviewer, Blogger and Consultant

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