It's been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent.
Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.
Pandora is one of the Internet's slow and steady success stories.
After years of work and more than $20 million dollars invested, the company is finally looking at the light of the end of the tunnel: Turning a profit. In this exclusive interview with founder Tim Westergren after a town hall meetup in Richmond, Virginia, we discuss the company's close call with bankruptcy in 2007, their ad-based revenue model, their roadmap for adding new features and an open API, and their incorporation into a variety of hardware devices.
At Social Media Camp last week in New York City, the real-world value of social media was a hot topic for attendees. Questions about ROI (that's return on investment for all you vehemently anti-corporate and possibly broke folks) abounded, and true experts were on hand to answer.
One such expert, Howard Greenstein, has a mile-long rap sheet in social media and web work that reaches back into the mid-nineties. He is known for his unique blend of experience and enthusiam, both of which he brings to this video conversation about how businesses and brands can use social media.
Ayelet Noff, a.k.a. Blonde 2.0, has been a well-regarded, world-traveling social media strategist for more than ten years and is part of Chris Heuer's AdHocnium unagency, as well. While attending Social Media Camp 2009 in New York City, she took some time to talk with us about the mistakes and misunderstandings she's seen countless brands encounter when working with social media.
"Companies in general don't value social media marketing as much as they should," said Noff. "They're afraid of it; they don't understand it; and therefore, they just don't do it. Yet it's the most cost-efficient way of marketing there is."
As the sun set behind Manhattan's skyline, the Internet Oldtimers worked their way through a healthy number of vodka tonics on the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel. These guys had nothing to prove: They'd earned their stripes over ten to fifteen years each of online money-making.
Here, we caught up with John C. Havens of BlogTalkRadio, and he shared insights from his recently released book, Tactical Transparency. Sometimes, a filter on honest sharing in social media can benefit everyone involved, particularly where brands are concerned.
In New York City, on the 16th floor of the Roger Smith Hotel, we caught up with social media superhero Baratunde Thurston, web editor for The Onion.
Thurston started getting into this whole "Internet" thing in simpler times when the social web was called Usenet. He now carves out his niche at the overlap of the Venn diagram of comedy, politics, and tech. As an official Internet old-timer who makes it his business to stay relevant, Thurston has particularly useful insights on the business of curating applicable content with great efficiency and timeliness.
By now, we are all familiar with Mark Zuckerberg's success story. The explosive international growth of Facebook to over 200 million users continues to land the young founder and CEO in top news stories worldwide. Recently, Time Magazine named Zuckerberg one of the world's most influential people of 2008, and Fast Company named Facebook number 15 in its list of the world's 50 most innovative companies of 2009. At just 23 years of age, Zuckerberg even briefly made Forbes' 400 richest Americans list, temporarily giving him the title of World's Youngest Billionaire.
However we have heard very few stories about Zuckerberg and the inspiration behind Facebook during the period prior to February 4th, 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. In this post we tell that story.
Tim O'Reilly, co-founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, gave a short address on the 5th anniversary of that event at tonight's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and offered some thoughts on what's going to come next. He discussed five applications that he believes point the way.
Two themes stood out: sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web and Moore's Law will need to be applied to humanity's greatest problems.
Last week at the TED conference, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur held an informal interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay), whisking him away to a bathroom to learn more about this forward thinking company and the man social media experts are calling the master of customer experience.
We've embedded the video at the end of this post, but these are a few of the highlights.
This post is the first in a two-part series about 1) the African mobile marketplace and how Africans utilize their mobile phones; and 2) how organizations are using social marketing to reach this highly mobile population for social change.
The series is based on a conversation I had with Gustav Praekelt, a mobile entrepreneur located in South Africa. Part 2 is here.
