High Five for Week Ending 7-Feb

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is about crowd power; for better or worse.

#5: Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

Categorizing this article as “crowd power” is a little bit of a stretch, but it had to be included in the High Five nonetheless.  In the wake of the iPad product announcement, this fascinating article describes in great detail how the mob-like corporate culture of Microsoft didn’t simple stifle innovation; it barbarically tore it limb from limb and left the pieces scattered across lobbies and conference rooms as a warning to the next group of would-be world changers.

Link: New York Times (Op-Ed)

#4: NFL.com aggregates Super Bowl tweets and pics

The National Football League has jumped into the social media gauntlet with both feet for Superbowl XLIV.  They’ve announced an “official” (doesn’t everything need to be the official “x” of event “y”?) Twitter hash tag (#SB44) and Flickr photo stream, both of which will be aggregated to a dedicated page on their site.

Link: Pro Football Talk on NBC Sports

#3: We’re turning comments off for a bit

This unfortunate announcement was made on the Engadget web site early this week because the environment “has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable.”  The situation illustrates one of the darker sides of social media and the tough decisions that must sometimes be made.  It’s a manageable task to moderate these forums unless and until they become a victim of their own success and simply grow too large.  I see this as the new job role for public relations professionals in the future – once they finally come to the realization that their current role of shaping messages is gone forever.

Link: Engadget

#2: Facebook COO: 175 Million People Log Into Facebook Every Day

While the total number of registered Facebook users (over 350 million) gets lots of press, this number is eye-popping for a couple of reasons.  First of all, the sheer size is obviously impressive.  That’s a lot of eyeballs.  Second, the adoption rate of 50% is astounding.  We heard just a few weeks ago that 70% of Twitter users are active more than once a week and 30% never post a single update.  This number is evidence that Facebook is not just growing at a break neck pace, it is retaining users and providing compelling reasons for them to log in every day.

Link: TechCrunch

#1: 20+ mind-blowing social media statistics revisited

Well, I’d certainly say “impressive” but can’t say that my mind was blown.  Notwithstanding the sensationalized and overstated title, this is a valuable page to bookmark for your next blog post or sales pitch for social media.

Link: Econsultancy

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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