Articles by: KimChou
About: KimChou
Kim Chou is a writer living in New York. She writes for and edits the ThinkSocial blog.
Q&A Chris Hughes, The Future #Promise panelist
We’re thrilled that Chris Hughes — co-founder of Facebook, director of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and founder of Jumo — will be part of Fast Company’s The Future #Promise panel at the #Promise conference this Thursday. Here’s a quick Q&A with Hughes to preview Thursday’s conversation.
Can you give ThinkSocial readers a few hints on what topics will be explored during the panel discussion? And in your opinion, over the last few years, what have been the biggest shifts or changes in the way we think about the business landscape?
By 2010, this should be a cliche: as their consumers gain increasing power to speak their mind, businesses have increasingly less control over their brand. As a result, ensuring that the product (whatever it may be) is quality and the customer is satisfied are more important than ever.
In addition to all this, there’s new opportunity to provide goods and services to the long tail. Because the costs of starting a business have plummeted (most importantly, the cost of reaching relevant customers), anyone can literally start a business and have access to a market that they previously wouldn’t have had. Example A: Etsy.
And what are the reasons for these changes? What technologies, in particular, do you think are most responsible?
Any technology that (a) makes it easier for individuals to create information (think review, reference, original content that touches a business) and (b) ensures that people who are likely to be interested in it can find it more efficiently is contributing to this fundamental shift.
What are some of the greatest challenges in the changing business landscape today?
Sadly, businesses seem like they have a hard time listening. The biggest challenge for any business that exists today is developing a dynamic, responsive system to gauge customer satisfaction that goes past the traditional post-experience survey.
Can you give a best, perhaps unexpected “lesson learned” in your experience with Facebook and Jumo?
Relieve a painpoint and make it easy.
Posted in: Interviews, Uncategorized | Tagged: Chris Hughes, facebook, Fast Company, Jumo, My.BarackObama.com, the #promise, The Future #Promise
How the rise of Millenials explains the new business landscape
Millenials. They’re everywhere these days including in an in-flight magazine preview of Lynne C. Lancaster’s and David Stillman‘s new book The M-Factor, recently out by HarperCollins.
While browsing the seatback magazines on a flight to Detroit, I came across a piece by Lancaster and Stillman in Delta’s SKY publication. According to the authors, The members of the Millenial Generation are here, bringing their energy, innovation and ever-present search for meaning to the workplace.
The 76-million strong Millenial Generation — of which I am part — includes those born between 1982 and 2000. The piece is written from a decidedly non-M point of view; a sample, from the story’s lead: We see them on the street, in the malls, in school, in our living rooms and at times in our faces. We watch as they text-message, surf the Internet, microwave a snack, listen to iTunes and download a favorite TV show all at the same time. We wonder if the Milennials can truly do it all and if they’ll actually do it a little better than we did.
Lancaster and Stillman’s main concern is how this generation will act, want and need in the workplace, now that more of its members are entering the work force. Here are highlights from the authors’ exploration of the Millenial search for meaning” — and how we can relate this to the greater cultural emphasis on corporate policies and commitments that aim to better consumers, communities and the planet.
Posted in: Thinking, Trends | Tagged: #Promise, corporate social responsibility, M-factor, Millenial Generation, mobile technology, social media
Publishing print magazines, with Twitter as vehicle
Who says print is dead? Â For readers fretting over the quick-hit blogs, online videos and various newfangled, e-reading devices that are making us forget all about print products, here are some folks that show there’s hope yet for printed literary substance.
Up first, here’s the very new 48 Hour magazine. 
It’s self-described as “a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase medias old limits,” an actual print product that was put together by its editors and writers over a 48-hour period last weekend. Here were the editors instructions before launch:
Issue Zero begins May 7th. We’ll unveil a theme and you’ll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We’ll take the next 24 to snip, mash and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. We promise it will be insane. Better yet, it might even work.
And guess what? They did it! Some 1,500 contributions poured in after the theme — “hustle” — was announced. But you can judge for yourself whether the content “works” when the issue drops, which should be sometime next week. Follow @48Hourmag for specifics.
48 Hour magazine is the creation of San Franciscans Alexis Madrigal, Sarah Rich, and Mat Honan, birthed, more or less, in the Mother Jones office. It features contributions from artists and scribes whose bylines can be found in Rolling Stone, Wired, GOOD, Lapham’s Quarterly and The Rumpus, among other publications.
What do you think of using Twitter and other social media tools to put together a print product? (Note: I worked one summer in a newspaper office where everyone communicated by MSN messenger — even though we were all physically in the same room.) Would 48 Hour make more sense as a digital magazine?
Let us know if you get a copy.
. . . . . . . . . .
Quarterly journal Electric Literature, just under a year old, is run by Andy Hunter and Scott Lindebaum, two young guys who should know a thing or two about making it — and making something — the publishing scene: They met as students in the Brooklyn College MFA writing program, where they worked with author Michael Cunningham.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: 48 Hour Magazine, death of the printed word, Electric Literature, eReaders, hard-copies, Kindle, publishing today
Not your Granddad’s GOP? Republicans and social media
From PBS NewsHour
The Democratic party’s use of new and social media has been well-documented — there have been essays, books and panel discussions on the success of My.BarackObama.com alone. And the Republicans? Well, they’re still seen to be a few steps behind.
But former Speaker of the House New Gingrich says this is all changing! Check out the above PBS NewsHour piece on Republican politicians and organizers using social media, after the Democrats “killed [them]” with it during the 2008 elections.
What do you think? Twitter is “a little bit strident, a little bit choppy,” says Gingrich, a fervent Twitterer with 1.3 million followers, “but nonetheless a real conversation.”
Posted in: News | Tagged: Newt Gingrich, PBS Newshour, Republican Party, twitter
Ceasefire Liberia: Providing Liberians a voice around the world
“Scars and Stripes” from Ceasefire Liberia
Ceasefire Liberia provides a voice to Liberians affected and displaced by years of civil war — in Liberia and in the Liberian diaspora  in the form of blog posts, videos and photos.
Currently featured on the Ceasefire Liberia is a blog post by Saki Golafale about mob violence currently going on in Liberia, accompanied by unnerving photographs at the very end. The editor’s note preceding the post reads, Saki sent along images of the men who were murdered  they are horrific but they are also the reality in today’s Liberia.
Another featured piece on the site is video about a young refugee from Sierra Leone (a neighbor country to Liberia) living in Staten Island who has become a Golden Gloves boxer; the video is by a Liberian named Garretson Sherman who mentored the young boxer, Skip, at the African Refuge and Youth Center. Wrote Sherman in the intro to the video:Â I am a Liberian and Skip is from Sierra Leone. Liberia and Sierra Leone are like sister countries because the war in Liberia spilled over to Sierra Leone. So we understand each other.
The multi-media platform is the brainchild of journalist Ruthie Ackerman. What inspired this former art school graduate student to become a writer, and specifically one committed to telling the stories of post-war Liberia and its diaspora?
Posted in: Interviews | Tagged: Blogging, Ceasefire Liberia, gendered digital divide, GlobalVoices, multi-media, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Ruthie Ackerman
Using social media as activist tools: Is it still news?
Nick Judd wrote this excellent piece over at techPresident about social media as an activist tool. He examines the use of Facebook to organize May Day rallies to protest the immigration bill in Arizona, and efforts to raise an activist Latino community on the social networking site.
“The idea that people are using Facebook and Twitter to do activism is no longer interesting on its own. How exactly they’re using it and to what extent  is,” writes Judd.
How much affect can organizing or community building on Facebook have in the real world? Judd writes about Cu’ntame, a Brave New Foundation initiative to develop a Latino community on Facebook but right now, as he says, it exists only on Facebook.
I find Judd’s thesis that activists’ use of social media is no longer news by itself especially interesting. For the most part, mainstream media are still reporting on the use.
Posted in: News, Uncategorized | Tagged: Arizona, facebook, immigration bill, Nick Judd, organizing, social media, techPresident, twitter
“Anti-social Networking”: Are young people more or less “in touch”?
A story from the New York Times this weekend says some parents are all a twitter, er, titter, about their kids’ friendships. Young people are spending so much time using social media and mobile phones to connect with friends that they’re having a hard time with face-to-face meetings.
From the piece, stats via Pew:
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis.
Posted in: News | Tagged: childhood behaviors, digital natives, facebook, millenials, New York Times, panicked parents, social interactions, social media, social networking, texting, twitter
C’mon get happy: An interview with author Gretchen Rubin
In advance of New York for Acumen’s (NYfA) spring benefit for Acumen Fund, *spark! Igniting change in an interconnected world, Think Social interviewed writer Gretchen Rubin, who will be speaking at the event.
Rubin is the author of “The Happiness Project,” a book — and accompanying blog — about her efforts to live a happier life. We talked to her about how technology relates to happiness, the splendid truths to happiness, and how social media fits into “The Happiness Project.”
Posted in: Events, Interviews | Tagged: Acumen Fund, facebook, Gretchen Rubin, happiness, social media, technology, The Happiness Project, twitter
If you’re up early Monday morning …
Listen to us discuss the use of social media as an organizing tool on AM 1600 WWRL, on New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis’s morning radio show. We’ll talk about last week’s New Jersey school walk-outs, specifically; we’ll go on at about 6:35 a.m.
And if you’re not in the New York City area, you can listen to a live stream on WWRL’s web site.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged:
TechCrunch to readers: Let’s crowd-source justice!
After a hacking incident in January, TechCrunch — thanks to the Ireland’s national police, Garda, and the U.S. Secret Service — seems to have finally found a culprit.
But is the tech site going to press charges? They’re leaving that part up to you. TechCrunch is asking its readers what to do, putting up a poll on its web site at the end of a post that includes “pretty entertaining” chats where the suspect brags to a friend about the hacks as they are happening.
Go here to vote. Right now it’s about 80% for pressing charges, %20 against.
What do you think? As Gawker’s Adrien Chen puts it, “This has a real fun, frontier justice air about it.”
Posted in: News | Tagged: crowd-sourcing, hacking, techcrunch
