Lucy Waverman knows food: not only how to prepare it, but how to communicate to others about it. She has appeared on television and has written numerous cook books, magazine and newspaper articles, including the Globe and Mail. I was fortunate to get to know her when we both took informal Italian classes at Grano’s years ago. She’s delightful.
Recently Lucy has taken on a new challenge: using Twitter to talk about food, including the sharing of recipes. For example, here is the classic spaghetti carbonara recipe reduced to a demi-glaze of 140 characters:
Carbonara: 12 oz spaghetti cooked. Mix with 6 slices ch fried pancetta, 3 eggs, ¼C evo, 1C grated parm, S&P. Garnish ch parsley.
Impressive! I think this is another innovative example of what you can do with Twitter. Lucy writes about the experience here: globeandmail.com: Cooking on Twitter. I highly recommend it.
According to USAToday, quite alot. I think the headline says it all: Oprah effect: 43% jump in Twitter traffic
Even with Twitter’s exceptionally strong growth, this was alot.
More good stats can be found in the article.
CNN reports that Twitter, WordPress and other Web 2.0 executives are in Iraq to help country use new media.
It’s part of a mission led by the U.S. State department. Like many places in the world, Iraq doesn’t have alot of homes with Internet access (around 5%) but practically everyone there has a cell phone. That might seem like a serious limit for new media, but it is becoming less and less of a limitation, based on stories I have been reading concerning places with similar usages of technology.
For more on this story, see the article linked to above. I look forward to seeing more contributions from the people of Iraq, soon: perhaps I’ll get some Iraqi followers on twitter.
P.S. Not sure what Hillary Clinton is apparently “bogging”, though. I suspect she is “blogging”.
Chances are that you’ve heard of the difficult situation that Domino’s Pizza is in with regards to a YouTube video that some of its employees made. How Domino’s responds, and how it plays out, is going to be instructive for everyone.
At the TIME’s web site is a good article that not only summarizes what happened, but provides some advice on what Domino’s can do next (Domino’s YouTube Crisis: 5 Ways to Fight Back – TIME). While this may never happen to your company — and I hope it doesn’t — it is worthwhile reading about and considering. Likewise, the NYTimes.com web site had a good article on the story with the added benefit of highlight other recent examples of companies (like Amazon) that have suffered from problems as a result of social media. Read them both.
I have started to notice a backlash against Twitter. Some of the critiques are warranted, but others fault it for things that it is not and cannot be responsible for. But rather than dwell on the negative, I’d like to focus on the positive, specifically this article that Mashable has on the 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates. Even people who don’t use twitter will find it fascinating, I believe. As for people like me, who have been a part of the Twitter movement for some time now (4000+ updates and counting), well…I am happy to have been part of it the whole experience.
And how did I come across this article? Why, from someone else’s tweet, of course! 
NASA wanted to hold an online event to help name a part of the Space Station. Things went off course, in a way, when Stephen Colbert decided it should be named after him and had people swamp NASA with a write in of his name as the name that should be used. When I first heard this, I thought: oh oh.
But NASA has done some smart things here. First, they submitted 4 names of their own and had people vote on those. The suggestions, or write ins, are listed but seperate. (Colbert is #1.) These four names gives NASA the flexibility to say: Sorry, Stephen, but we have to go with one of the four.
The other smart thing they have done is capitalized on the publicity provided by Colbert. They have arranged to announce the winner on his show. This gives them alot of visibility and free publicity.
I think NASA has managed this well. Anyone looking for community participation could learn from them (even if you don’t get lucky enough to hook up with Stephen Colbert.)
For more on this, see Help NASA Name Node 3! or this AP article
Both our internal Social Networks Analysis community and Colleen Haikes (IBM External Relations) tipped me off to some absolutely fascinating research on the quantitative correlation between social networks and performance based on an analysis of IBM consultants. You can read the research summary and view the presentation, or read the research paper for all the details. Highlights and what I think about them:
- Structurally diverse networks with abundance of structural holes are associated with higher performance. Having diverse friends helps. The presentation gives more detail – it’s not about having a diverse personal network, but it’s about connecting to people who also have diverse networks. I suspect this is related to having connectors in your network.
- Betweenness is negatively correlated. Being a bridge between a lot of people is not helpful. The presentation clarified this by saying that the optimal team composition is not a team of connected superstars, but complementary team members with a few well-connected information keepers.
- Strong ties are positively correlated with performance for pre-sales teams, but negatively correlated with performance for consultants. Pre-sales teams need to build relationships, while consultants often need to solve a wide variety of challenges.
Look! Actual dollar values and significant differences! Wow. =)
Here’s another piece of research the totally awesome IBM researchers put together:
A separate IBM study, presented at the CHI conference in Boston this week, sheds light on why it’s easier said than done to add new, potentially valuable contacts to one’s social network in the workplace. The study looked at several types of automated “friend-recommender” engines on social networking sites. The recommender engines used algorithms that identified potential contacts based on common friends, common interests, and common hyperlinks listed on someone’s profile.
Although most people using social media for the workplace claimed to be open to finding previously unknown friends, they were most comfortable with the recommender engines that suggested “friends’ friends” — generally, people whom they already knew of. The friend-recommenders with the lowest acceptance rates were those that merely look at whether people have similar interests — although they were the most effective at identifying completely new, potentially valuable contacts. Friend-recommenders that took the greatest factors into account were deemed the most useful. (IBM’s Facebook-style social networking site, Beehive, uses this type of friend-recommender engine.)
Personally, I don’t use friend recommenders to connect to completely new people, but they’re great for reminding me about people I already know.
