Also, introversion/extroversion really has nothing to do with your ability to use social media. I think social media is the best thing to ever happen to introverts (and I speak as one of the biggest of all time.

In a surprise announcement over the weekend,
Maker’s Mark,
the Loretto, KY-based whisky producer, recanted their recent decision to water down their 90 proof bourbon in order to stretch supplies. It seems their devotees had quite a bit to say about this decision, and flooded Maker’s Mark’s social media channels to such an extent that their protestations could not be ignored.

In a Facebook post entitled
“You spoke. We listened.”
Maker’s Mark pours out a rather humble apology to their fans and urges them to continue to speak their minds. (The note even includes the direct email addresses of two executives at the family-run company). Evidance gathered from Twitter shows that they were right to swallow their pride: tweets of elation after yesterday’s announcement flooded in from the likes of Isaac from The Hansons, actress Patricia Heaton and actor/writer Andy Richter. If you are still searching for proof that social media is worth your business’s time/money, this is a prime example.

Had Maker’s Mark preempted their decision with an online explanation of their plan and reasoning, they doubtless would have saved significant time and money in preparing for the shift in production. Be sure that you do not make a similar mistake with your brand. If you have a well-established following of loyal fans engaging with you across social platforms, use them as a sounding board whenever possible. They say the customer is always right, after all.

Way more than you think. In this interview on Marketplace.org, WikiMedia Foundation Executive director Sue Gardner revealed some astonishing numbers. The WikiMedia Foundation uses a similar fund-raising model to that of public radio to support entities including Wikipedia, explains host @KaiRyssdal.

In its latest campaign, the site raised an astounding $2.7 million per day. I find it encouraging to hear that, despite the lack of academic validity and the overwhelming gender imbalance among its editors (nine out of ten male, says Gardner), Wikipedia is being acknowledged by investors as an information resource that should be sustained. Its clean, speedy, ad-free interface and wealth of useful factoids is worth every penny.

As a professional in the tech industry who happens to be blind, I am passionate about the technical devices that are fully accessible to me, and which therefore allow me to do my job efficiently.
Apple was the first company to build full accessibility for visually impaired users into their products when they added the
VoiceOver screen reading and Zoom screen magnification software to all Macs and iPhones. Because they continue to tweak and improve upon all of their accessibility elements with each new operating system update, I continue to be a loyal fan. They are true innovators in a field that, until now, has been virtually ignored by the main stream.

After reading my critical opinion on Ray, a new screen reader being built for Android, Marketplace reporter
Meg Cramer
came to interview me about mobile accessibility, and watched me use my iPhone as I packed my bags for a trip. The resulting story, which aired in time for the annual Consumer Electronics show this week, was heard on public radio stations nationwide on the Jan. 7 edition of Marketplace, from American Public Media. In case you missed it, you can still listen to and read the story
here. Special thanks goes out to Meg, for coming to me with such a great opportunity.

Before I parse this Twitter bio and tell you why it’s so deserving, I want you to read it, as I did, without any further information about the user to whom it belongs. So here it is:

Internet geologist. Health care gadfly. Community colleague. Currently reading: Oddly Normal by @jswatz

Why it is excellent

This bio
intrigued me from the beginning with the words “Internet geologist.” I am unfamiliar with this digital subset of geology and suspect that the user made it up, but it grabbed my attention and sounds like an awesome occupation. Actually,
Susannah Fox, author of this Twitter bio, is the Associate Director, Digital Strategy for the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, where she studies and blogs about the relationship between technology, the internet and health care. With such a long job title, Ms. Fox was smart to wordsmith it in such a clever and intriguing way. I admire the way this job title and later use of the word “gadfly” lend an almost playful tone to what might otherwise be a difficult occupation for strangers like me to comprehend.

Ms. Fox also includes a “currently reading” section which, she confirms via tweet, she keeps updated. This not only shows that she cares about maintaining her Twitter presence and keeping it current, but tells us more about where her interests lie. Plus, she took the time to check if the author of her current reading choice,
NYTimes reporter John Schwartz,
is on Twitter and gives him credit by referencing his handle.

All of the elements I’ve highlighted in @SusannahFox’s bio combine to promote an image of someone who is professional yet humorous, and who has quite the social media savvy; someone we can all learn from, perhaps.

We’ve reached that time of year when every source of media begins airing their year-in-review montages. Admittedly, I look forward to the year’s news highlights reel, because I am always appalled by how many stories I’ve forgotten or mistakenly archived in the more distant past. Well, now I have social highlights to review, as well.
Twitter, where I get much of the breaking news these days, set the bar pretty high this year by presenting two cool ways to view 2012.

On their designated
2012 page, Twitter has amassed the year’s biggest trending hash tags, the most tweeted about world events, and the most re-tweeted celebrity tweets, among other highlights. Arguably, the most celebrated tweet was
@BarackObama’s “Four more years” tweet, which garnered more than 810,000 re-tweets.

Twitter has also partnered with Vizify to bring its users a graphical representation of their individual activity on Twitter this year (or as I sarcastically call it, much to the protest of my followers, my “twactivity”). Unfortunately, Vizify only seems to work for those who are not incessant tweeters, so that users like @isalara, who has almost 37,000 tweets to her name, produced an info graphic that only showed her activity since September. Ah well, I suppose such imperfections mean that we can look forward to improvements in next year’s annual roundups.

What do you notice when you look back on your year on Twitter or other social media platforms? Did you have any success using Vizify and did you like what you saw? Let me know in the comments below or @Elizain140 on Twitter.

I relish this platform most, though, for its experimental soundscapes. NPR tried something bold and new this year when they crowdsourced listeners local city sounds through their
#NPRcities hash tag
on the service. Individual journalists like
Ben Sisario
are also submitting interesting soundscapes as a hobby. I look forward to the day when audio from SoundCloud users is featured in radio news updates, as YouTube videos have increasingly done.

If you like, you can
follow my progress as I begin my journey up into the SoundCloud.
And, be sure to share your SoundCloud in the comments below, so we can check out your sounds!

Thanks so much to Sree (@sree) for inviting me to write this guest post!

I have no real qualms with Google+ at all. It’s extremely easy to use both online and via its smartphone apps, and has an advantage over other networks with its seamless integration with all of Google’s other services that most of us already use. It is this advantage, in fact, that will be the key to its overpowering of Facebook, if such a defeat happens.

Why wouldn’t Google+ win? Because no one really wanted to deal with another social network. Sure, Facebook has gotten increasingly annoying, ad-heavy and cumbersome, but we’re all established there already. Who has the time to stop Facebook chatting with their friends long enough to customize their new “circles” of friends on Google+? And yet millions are already joining, because we’re all too attached to (and intrigued by) Google not to be curious about every move that it makes.

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts about Google+, and think these are worth checking out for those who are just getting into it. Here’s a good one on the potential benefits of Google+ for marketers and brands,
and here are two posts that focus more on user reactions and experience: one by Ryan Sholin, and one from my friends’ Two Laptops blog.

I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did, and feel free to share your favorites, as well!

The concept of influencer scores was popularized by Klout, who calculates your overall reach across social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to determine your influence, i.e., how likely your posts, tweets, etc. are to drive people to actions such as likes, re-tweets, or clicks. Here is Klout’s technical definition of what they do, which may be even more intimidating than was my above attempt to simplify the idea.

Your colleagues and friends can now boost your influence through a kind of “like” button on your posts. One cynic asserted on Twitter, though, that many of these influencers are concerned too much with raising the value of their score or broadcasting their opinions far and wide, and not concerned enough with the quality of their content. I wonder, have influence scores just become a game to most people?

Think about it: who’s really paying attention to your score other than you and a smattering of your associates who use social media, right? How much potential does the influencer score really have of becoming an object of interest to those outside of the industry?

On the other hand, the score is a good indicator of how well someone knows what they’re doing in the social media sphere, and of how well they are connected.

What Do You Think?

Have you looked at your Klout score? How much attention do you give to it? How useful are these scores? Please share your opinion in the comments below.