Mediaboss Marketing

Near the end, when Alex Barker Permutt did not have the mental fortitude to get out of bed, he would open his laptop, log on to what was then the fledgling social network site Facebook, and scroll through his news feed.

He would see the successes of his friends from John Burroughs School and Amherst College, where he was hit hard by depression his sophomore year.

Friends smiling broadly in photos. Friends proudly announcing their acceptance into law school. Life moving on.

Three times Alex tried to get through his sophomore year at Amherst, where he had a girlfriend, wrote for the schools political journal and seemed to excel in an academic environment that complemented his love for the classics, science and mathematics.

But the illness kept holding him down. After five years of various forms of treatment, he took his life on Feb. 3, 2007.

He was 24.

Its a permanent wound in your heart, said his mother, Sally Barker.

But one she was not going to let destroy her.

So she set out with a group of Alexs friends to help break down the stigma that comes with suicide, and build a social network that could help connect young people struggling to find their way.

The result is known today as FeelingKindaBlue.com, a Facebook-like social networking site for those struggling with thoughts of suicide or other mental health issues. From Im having a bad day to I dont want to go on, the site allows young adults to share experiences, realize they are not alone, lean on one another.

Continued here:
After a suicide, a mother builds a social network

Advanced analytical technologies are an important part of a social media risk management strategy, an Accenture report says, but the technology must be balanced with training and procedures.

Social media training, a social media risk assessment plan, a social governance policy, and a risk-aware culture -- is all of this really necessary? Yes. For all the benefits social media have provided to financial service firms from marketing, referrals, and recruitment, the complexities and legal risks are still daunting, not to mention risks to reputation.

But going social cannot be avoided, according to a new Accenture paper, "A Comprehensive Approach to Managing Social Media Risk and Compliance." The number of social network users worldwide skyrocketed to 1.73 billion in 2013 and is expected to top 2.55 billion by 2017. In the US, people spend 16 minutes of every hour using social media. With momentum like this, "it is better to manage it effectively than try to stand in its way."

The legal and brand risks are understandably paralyzing, but at this stage, adopting social media is not a forward-thinking move. It's an obvious and inevitable strategy. Fortunately, early adopters have demonstrated that social media can be managed, and financial firms have yet to make headlines for a major accidental breach through social channels.

To keep it that way and manage the risks that social media present, Accenture has recommended a three-tiered strategy. Firms need clear guidelines to do this, policies, procedures, and policing on the background.

The first element of this strategy, risk governance structures, largely comes down to awareness of the risks from social media. For example, tweeting about a business trip may be nonmaterial and seemingly mundane information, but it could ultimately signal material information to interested outsiders. In this case, a savvy onlooker could notice many employees of a division are frequently traveling and piece together new business relationships, potential mergers, and so on. A burst of LinkedIn connections between two firms may indicate a partnership is forming before it's made public. Governance encourages policies and training, as well as defining "roles and accountabilities for specific types of social media risks."

Risk management process is also necessary to identify and manage risks and opportunities when they appear. "Processes will often look somewhat different in the social media world, in part because of the always-on nature of social networking platforms." the report said. Jonathan Narveson, a senior manager of Accenture Finance & Risk Services and one of the report's authors, says he is seeing firms set up social media command centers with dedicated individuals to track risks and opportunities across channels.

Finally, Accenture emphasizes advanced real-time monitoring technology to capture conversations about a company "from the standpoint of regulatory, business and brand risks."

The dependency on technology to monitor networks goes beyond knowing who is saying what and flagging overshares by employees (though that is important, too). Regulations require financial institutions to trace and report all customer complaints made via social media. That means every last grievance expressed through a tweet or Facebook post must be logged. Doing that manually is challenging, and the corresponding data storage is significant. Advanced tools will extract what tweets and posts are happening on individual social media sites, archive them appropriately, and aggregate for any reporting.

Financial firms are also leveraging big data tools and text analytic engines to mine meaningful patterns across the overwhelming amounts of unstructured data. Web crawlers and analytical engines can help track user sentiment and provide insights into the company's marketing strategies and risk exposure.

Originally posted here:
Managing Social Media Risk Strategy: Technology Can Only Go So Far

Film festival news conferences are generally friendly affairs, giving a movie's stars and director the chance to take a public victory lap. But when the cast of Jason Reitman's drama "Men, Women & Children" gathered at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, the promotional event took on an edgier tone.

The film explores the way the Internet is shaping (and warping) our lives and its themes incited a surprisingly sharp intergenerational debate about the virtues and evils of social media.

Ansel Elgort, at 20 one of the film's youngest stars, boasted that his 2 million Twitter followers gave him the ability to become his own news platform, while the movie's older cast members Jennifer Garner, 42, Adam Sandler, 48, and Rosemarie DeWitt, 39 looked on with expressions of befuddlement, if not horror.

"Is it Tinder or Tumblr that everyone's on?" Garner wondered aloud, echoing a confusion many non-millennials may feel. "I don't know the difference."

Weeks later, DeWitt was still struggling to understand Elgort's point of view. "It was an eye-opener," the actress said recently. "The younger people see [social media] as an opportunity to express themselves and connect. They've never known a world without it. But for the older adults in the room, we were just sitting there with our jaws on the ground. We just don't know what it is."

Social media is viewed both as a way to foster genuine connection while also fueling feelings of alienation, a way of amplifying communication and narcissism. Since the advent of social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram few of which existed when today's young movie audience was born the duality of social media has bedeviled academics, artists and everyday people alike, as long-held social norms established in an analog world have rapidly given way to a new age of selfies, likes and status updates.

Dave Eggers' 2013 novel, "The Circle," gave the world of social media an Orwellian spin. Comedian Louis C.K. ranted on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" last year about how smartphones were ruining our ability to be alone with ourselves ("I go, 'Oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write "hi" to, like, 50 people.'") In the Chainsmokers' recent song "#Selfie," the DJ duo sings about getting only "10 likes in the last five minutes" on an Instagram photo.

Now Hollywood is joining the conversation. "Men, Women & Children" is one of a number of recent films, including "Chef," "Boyhood" and "Birdman," that show filmmakers grappling with the same anxieties about this new reality as many of the rest of us and finding it just as hard to come up with a consensus on what it all means.

Many actors, meanwhile, are struggling with how much to share with their fans which, as a widespread nude photo leak recently demonstrated, is a choice that may no longer even be in their own hands. The same tools that can be used to aid a star's rise to fame can just as easily tear an actor down.

Stars are now routinely asked whether they're on Twitter and Facebook, with the assumption being that the answer reveals something essential about their character or even their level of stardom you have to be pretty confident of your box-office appeal to pull the plug on social media.

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Hollywood explores the virtues and evils of social media

Why Saif Ali Khan wont join social networking sites - BT
Why Saif Ali Khan won #39;t join social networking sites Saif Ali Khan recently revealed that he stays away from social networking sites because he fears that he...

By: The Times of India

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Why Saif Ali Khan wont join social networking sites - BT - Video

Why we need to think of Social Media as Social Networking - Peter Lunn - 10 October 2014
Peter Lunn of Cracking Media suggests to make social media work better for our business we need to understand it as social networking where we engage, listen and build relationships. This talk...

By: EDBN East Dorset Business Network

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Why we need to think of Social Media as Social Networking - Peter Lunn - 10 October 2014 - Video