SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

The tact of social media monitoring

In context of ongoing commentary about social media and branding, Adrian Chan observed on Twitter that “metrics analyze individ[ual] tweets for brand mentions and sentiment, losing context of talk and user’s relationships.” Follow-on conversation with Thomas Vander Wal and Chris Baum focused on opportunities for network conversation analysis to elicit valuable information about the social context of brand mentions. The challenge for marketers lies in how to use this information in a way tha...

Social media, converging streams?

One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It's a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do.A piece by Tim Leberecht reminded me of Canetti this morning. Got me thinking about...

Social Interaction Design: Ratings

I had other things in mind for this morning until a client sent me an article in today's Wall Street Journal about online ratings. She, like many others running review and ratings-based sites, is "suffering" from excessively generous end user ratings. The article, which surveys a number of online properties, cites the tendency to 4.3: On the Internet, Everyone's a Critic But They're Not Very Critical. Offering up a number of anecdotes as reasons for the broken state of online ratings, the articl...

Twitter, Google Wave, and Online Talk

This post is a reflection on some questions raised by Adina Levin in a post on Google Wave dated July. I haven't myself used the product, so this is not a product review but is instead a continuation of some of the thoughts Adina raised around Wave's social models. I'll speak here more to the ongoing innovation in conversation tools rather than attempt even educated guesses as to Wave itself. I should also say that this post is un-premeditated and off the cuff.Wave is a communication tool. In th...

Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews

Foursquare and Yelp are each sites that capitalize on user-contributed reviews and recommendations. Users contribute their favorite places and things to do, spotlighting best-kept secrets and customer favorites. Users get visibility and even some amount of notoriety for their contributions. Their enthusiasm for, or against, a merchant can have substantial repercussions for businesses. In the age of social media, might sometimes makes right, whether the customer is "right" or not.Social interacti...