Predicting Postpartum Changes in Emotion and Behavior via Social Media | Follow the Crowd

Analysis  of Twitter posts predicted postpartum depression with up to  80% accuracy using a mathematical model based on factors such as volume of activity, ego-centric network characteristics, emotion, and linguistic styles.

(via ibmsocialbiz)

Startups Bet Audio Is the Next Frontier for Social Media

There’s no shortage of apps and websites to help us share our lives through videos, pictures and text messages, but we’ve moved farther and farther away from what was once the central means of communicating: the sound of our own voice. Now, a couple startups are trying to change that. Dubbler, an app that quietly launched in beta on iPhone and Android in December, offers a simple way to record up to 60 seconds of audio and share them to Facebook, Twitter and the Dubbler community. You can add playful sound filters (similar to photo filters on Instagram) and a cover photo from your phone’s camera if you want, or you can let the soundbite speak for itself.

Avoid Oklahoma! Social-media map warns of flu hotspots | CNET

Track the germy spread of influenza with a social-media map of tweets and videos complaining of symptoms and outbreaks.

7 Social Media Trends for Consumers New Research | Social Media Examiner Here are seven key findings from that report. #1: More Time Invested in Mobile The survey found that consumers are increasingly looking to their smartphones and tablets to access social media. While the PC is still the most widely used device when it comes to social media consumption, the study found that time spent on mobile apps and mobile websites accounted for a 63% increase (compared to 2011) in total time spent. Additionally, 43% of users said they use smartphones to access social media, while 16% connect using a tablet.

IBM Voices

on IBM.com is a simple expression of a sophisticated system — a view of all the registered social media accounts, feeds, videos, images — built on the Social Media Aggregator platform.

As IBM’s Ethan McCarty describes it: “It’s where we have begun to experiment with a data service that combines our ‘official channels’ with those of some of IBM’s subject matter experts.” 

The Appification Of Everything Will Transform The World’s 360 Million Web Sites - Forbes

There is a seismic shift underway in the digital world that within a decade will completely transform the web into an App-o-verse. Several simultaneous trends are stacking up to change how we consume and create digital content, and platform companies are positioning themselves to enable the process.

What we are seeing are the early stages of what I call, “The Appification of Everything.” This is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium. Instead of thinking about the web as a hierarchical tree of documents—a Wikipedia of Wikipedias—we need to start thinking about all of that content as an underlying service layer for application-based interfaces.

New Foursquare graphic tells the story of Sandy’s devastation of Lower Manhattan

(via courtenaybird)

  IBM Has Become a Publisher. Is It Any Good?

IBM has about 433,000 employees. To put things in perspective, that’s more than four times the amount of Microsoft’s workforce and 400,000 more than Google’s. It’s also about 427,000 more than The New York Times Co. has. If you believe that a substantial minority of the public can write reasonably well, then Big Blue has a fair shot at putting out a decent product.

The company has been testing that theory since 2005 or so. At the time, Twitter didn’t yet exist and Facebook was for college kids, so social media was synonymous with blogging. It turned out that many IBMers had the itch to write, which of course was a blessing and a curse to the company. A blessing because — free content! A curse because who knew exactly what these employees were going to actually write? Would consumers take their thoughts as word from IBM on high?

IBM decided on a sort of middle road: It encouraged employees to blog to their heart’s content, but it issues blogging guidelines, so they’d know what they couldn’t blog about. The guidelines, crowdsourced by IBM employees thanks to a wiki created by James Snell, a member of IBM’s software standards strategy group, and Ed Brill, a Lotus exec, draw on common sense (“Don’t pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes,” etc.) and are general enough to be adopted by other companies.

Since 2005, micro-blogging platforms like Facebook and Twitter have changed the medium in which IBM often communicates, but the company remains committed to blogging and is an especially enthusiastic user of Tumblr, though you can find IBMers on Instagram, Pinterest and any other up-and-coming social media site. “We have coverage across all of the social media platforms,” says John Rooney, program manager for innovation and collaboration at IBM. “We are a large content creator. What we are becoming very much is a social media publisher.” Indeed, the company now claims some 32,000 individual blogs from IBMers.

ibmsocialbiz:

Employees should be externally engaged in a manner that maximizes the benefits of becoming a social business.

Don’t depend on community managers. Employees know the company the best, they have vested interest in good outcomes for the organization, and they’re the most scalable resource the company has directly in hand.

Via Dion Hinchcliffe, How To Accelerate Social Business Using Employee Advocates 

State of the News Media 2012 - Pew Research Center

This year’s study also includes special reports on the impact of mobile technology and social media on news. Those reports, which feature new survey data, finds that rather than replacing media consumption on digital devices, people who go mobile are getting news on all their devices. They also appear to be getting it more often, and reading for longer periods of time. For example, about a third, 34%, of desktop/laptop news consumers now also get news on a smartphone. About a quarter, 27%, of smartphone news consumers also get news on a tablet. These digital news omnivores are also a large percentage of the smart phone/tablet population. And most of those individuals (78%) still get news on the desktop or laptop as well.

A PEJ survey of more than 3,000 adults also finds that the reputation or brand of a news organization, a very traditional idea, is the most important factor in determining where consumers go for news, and that is even truer on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops. Indeed, despite the explosion in social media use through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, recommendations from friends are not a major factor yet in steering news consumption.

In the post-PC present, we have news up the ying, exploding out of all our devices like volcanic magma. But the Pew verbiage about who profits misses an essential point — typified by the ‘news consumption’ viewpoint they still espouse — we have moved away from audience-centered media to experience-centered media. The experience is what matters, so that’s why the value shifts to the tools we use to use information shaped by the news form factor. Using information is not equivalent to ‘consuming media’, but the media companies don’t get it.

The new media folks desperately want to write for some hypothetical audience, one they can find the center of. They are like border collies, wired to herd sheep and frantic if they can’t find any.

Read the full report.

(via underpaidgenius)