This is pretty cool because now you can see how your contacts are connected. But how else can data visualisation help us?

Location:

I have been trying to track keywords and events based on location via social media tools for a long time. The issue with social sites like Twitter is that people don’t set their location correctly. For instance if a Twitter user enters Jamaica as their location then it assumes Jamaica, New York, USA, not the country. Also people use other terms like jamdown, jamrock, or just cities like Kingston or Montego Bay. When trying to find tweets from a specific area even if the person matches the keywords the location may be off.

So I first considered creating a list of Jamaican twitter users, however how will this be updated (migration etc.)? Then I thought of tracking interactions and then flagging users as Jamaican, but once again that would require alot of human interaction. Ideally I want something automated and dynamic. InMaps gave me a potential answer. Track interactions between users and then group them into subsets just like InMaps. Couple that with a metrics system, where a user with properly filled out Location or listed under multiple twitter lists with specific keywords or Klout has a higher metric than others. When users are associated with other users with higher metrics it helps to create focal points for the network.

Online communities are associated by content, relation (friends, family, groups, alumni) or location. By establishing the link between individuals online we can create a dynamic social mapping tool more accurate than what currently exists, even more accurate than what the user them-self knows. This would allow analysis of keywords by social-location-grouping or possibly by profession, education, and more.

What are your views?

Foursquare Swarm Badge

At 8:44pm I felt like I had caught my unicorn when I unlocked the Swarm Badge on Foursquare. This is the most prized badge I have and am proud to now have it since I started promoting Foursquare use in Jamaica months ago. This is not the first event I have been to where I expected to unlock the badge. Originally I expected it to be unlocked at Monster, a party at Chilitos Mexican, however even though over 50 foursquare users attended, they were not all checked in at the same time. The Fiction Lounge also tried to unlock it at one of their events, with no success.

So without further adieu, congratulations to Jamaica Pegasus for hosting the first Foursquare flashmob in Jamaica. Keep on innovating!

This competition is different from a standard one because of the additional publicity social media garners. Not only do participants purchase Smirnoff products to be featured in the photos, but they also encourage their friends to “like” the page in order to vote, which increases Smirnoff Jamaica’s online fan base. Also most voters will scroll through photos and other content on the page giving maximum return for the branding effort. So far 3 of my friends have entered and through social media I know they have reached out to thousands of Jamaicans to vote for their photos.

Below are some of the entries:

Photo by Michelle Hamilton

Photo by Brittney Hughes

Click on the photos to view them on Facebook, or view the whole album here. Remember to click “Like” for your favourites!

Know of any other cool social media marketing initiatives in Jamaica? shoot me an email pr@dmitridawkins.com thanks!

What grades your social media efforts are interactions, how useful your tweets or facebook posts are, how it helps people, how it relates to others. Social media is building a relationship, with your friends, other personalities and brands. If your social media efforts do not help, or build relationships, then why bother? Now some people will add that hey, they are just trying to broadcast information  useful to their followers, this is also building a relationship because your followers then begin to trust you for quality content and in some cases understand you may not be able to reply specifically to them. The fact is trust, in social media people trust you for your content (opinions, blogposts, videos, photos, news, etc,). Changing or adjusting your content for better rankings or seo is not the aim, the community is the aim, build your community, word of mouth is a better recommendation than any search engine.

In all of your efforts, reporting, etc remember people first, ask yourself, are you helping someone or are you just pushing out useless content on a daily basis? It doesn’t matter if you have x amount of followers if they are bots, or you have no interaction, find your niche and provide for it.

….The question soon came up: What do we do about his Facebook profile? We had never really thought about this before in such a personal way. Obviously, we wanted to be able to model people’s relationships on Facebook, but how do you deal with an interaction with someone who is no longer able to log on? When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of “memorialized” profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed. We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it’s important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized. For instance, just last week, we introduced new types of Suggestions that appear on the right-hand side of the home page and remind people to take actions with friends who need help on Facebook. By memorializing the account of someone who has passed away, people will no longer see that person appear in their Suggestions. When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. We try to protect the deceased’s privacy by removing sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance……

The form for reporting a deceased friend on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=deceased Twitter handles it similarly by requesting that you email them, but they close down the account:

If we are notified that a Twitter user has passed away, we can remove their account or assist family members in saving a backup of their public Tweets. Please contact us with the following information:

1. Your full name, contact information (including email address), and your relationship to the deceased user.
2. The username of the Twitter account, or a link to the profile page of the Twitter account.
3. A link to a public obituary or news article.

You can contact us at privacy@twitter.com, or by mail or fax: Twitter Inc., c/o: Trust & Safety 795 Folsom Street, Suite 600 San Francisco, CA 94107 Fax: 415-222-9958 We will respond by email with any additional information we might need. Please note that we cannot allow access to the account or disclose other non-public information regarding the account.

Now that I know what I need to do, I just need to face the music and submit as necessary R.I.P.

Since then people have been killed, injured and kidnapped in Egypt as demonstrations continue.

Earlier today Kenneth Cole, a popular clothing brand released this tweet:

Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KCless than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Kenneth Cole
KennethCole

Here is an image just in case the tweet is removed:

I will put this in my books as what not to do for social media marketing. What do you think?

Update! Kenneth Cole has tweeted this in response to the uproar on twitter:

Re Egypt tweet: we weren’t intending to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment -KCless than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Kenneth Cole
KennethCole

I am not sure if that counts as an apology, is there any way for them to recover from this blunder?

Update 2! A fake account has been created on twitter: @kennethcolepr which is tweeting more scenarios that Kenneth Cole tweets could disregard history. The smoke is building, will this go viral? 2700 followers in 2 hours.

Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

This new addition just adds to the company’s mission by integrating more social interactions into their products. Google has several social products, like Orkut which has been dwarfed by rivals Facebook and Myspace. They even tried microblogging with Google Buzz. However none of their social products have been dominant in their categories so far. With the addition of mobile check-ins Google will be rivalling Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places and other social apps that have jumped on to the check-in train.

Unfortunately Google has launched the service in their Android Application only, leaving Iphone and Blackberry users waiting to test it out. Another flaw is that users cannot add venues from the mobile app, which negates it’s effectiveness in poorly mapped areas. Additionally Google Latitude doesn’t allow you to share your location with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. Hey Google, this is 2011, people like sharing content between social networks!

The good thing is that Latitude will support automatic checkins, well sort of, it will pickup your proximity to venues and automatically prompt you to check in. Never forget to check-in again! Also Google has learned from their Buzz privacy issues and have integrated some key privacy options from the get-go which seem to be very customisable.

Overall I think it is too early to tell if this is a hit or miss, with 10 million Latitude users, Google will have a large customer base to try out this new service, even if it is currently limited to Android users only. Let’s see how this will change the geolocation market and how other services will adapt to stay ahead.

What is Wikileaks?

WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists. We publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices. – Wikileaks website

The Problem

For weeks now, there has been more and more press about Wikileaks and “Cablegate” especially the fact that they have been blacklisted by several major companies. Since Wikileaks announced that it was planning to release over two hundred and 50 thousand (>250,000) documents they have experienced the most difficult circumstances the organisation has ever faced. They have been barred or suspended by Amazon, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, EveryDNS.net and few companies have been willing to do business with them since.

I am not going to get into the politics of it, who is attacking who, or any conspiracy of the sort. I really could write many pages about the Wikileaks case. The point of this article is to show that the battle between Wikileaks, Julian Assange and the US Government is way bigger than releasing secret documents. Let’s go back to 1971, when The New York Times won a Supreme Court case against The U.S. Government allowing it to print classified information:

New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), was a United States Supreme Court per curiam decision. The ruling made it possible for the New York Times and Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censure.

President Richard Nixon had claimed executive authority to force the Times to suspend publication of classified information in its possession. The question before the court was whether the constitutional freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, was subordinate to a claimed need of the executive branch of government to maintain the secrecy of information. The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did protect the right of the New York Times’ to print the materials.

Wikileaks is not based in the U.S. nor does it cater to the U.S. only. My question is, how can a single government take down a website catering to the World?

The internet was designed to be indestructible. The internet however, has exceeded what it was designed for. Since then issues have come up where Governments like China and Australia censor the internet that their citizens can access. To me this goes against civil liberty since the internet is not owned or operated by any one person, government or organisation. However if an elected government decides to censor the internet for their nation for the better well being of it’s citizens, then they have the right to do so (especially for content like child pornography).

What is wrong with the Wikileaks case is that their major service providers (hosting and payment gateway for donations) have ceased working with them. The biggest blow was when everydns.net also ceased providing Domain Name Service which basically erased Wikileaks from the internet. Doing this to any website will cripple it, fortunately Wikileaks is resilient.

When I speak to people about Wikileaks, they have mixed reactions, some say it’s a security risk, others say it just really doesn’t matter. However the fact is, what if Facebook was shut down in the same manner? Not accepting payments, not being found in search engines, their hosts denying traffic? Facebook is now used by 500 Million people and is a huge communication tool. In the same breath I live on the island of Jamaica, could a foreign government deem our internet use illegal and cut our internet connection? What if a major company can lobby a government to block a rival company’s website or service to an entire nation?

We have all become so used to and take for granted the many services provided by the internet. I would go as far as to say that information is the new valuable resource, bigger than any other industry. The scary ting is that it is not renewable, when people don’t get access to information it cannot be used, new things cannot be developed from it, policies cannot be changed because of it. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king, however the internet allows us all to read and type braille.

What will happen

In the coming years, Internet Governance will become a major issue. Currently organisations like Diplo train people and organise workshops to create policies and awareness for a free and open internet. Unfortunately I fear that cases like Wikileaks may re-occur before the necessary international laws are in place to protect online content.

Back in 1999 the first real online media challenge arrived in the form of Napster. Napster was the first popular peer to peer music sharing application and it upset the big record labels, causing it to be the target of many lawsuits which led to its eventual demise. Since then it has led to more sophisticated peer to peer networks, which have resulted in new technology like Bittorrent being created. Bittorrent is virtually impossible to control or limit due to its architecture, many have tried with limited success. In the same way, the censorship of online content will only result in new ways to distribute it. There have been many sites taken down before, even seized.

Already Wikileaks has created opportunity for others, Openleaks.org has been created to share similar content and a new payment service flattr, has since become popular for still supporting the site. This is the type of growth to be expected in the coming years as new opportunites present themselves. The internet is a snowball that seems to have no end.

I hope to continue to enjoy a free and open internet, where I can share content without censorship. -Dmitri

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Chilitos JaMexican restaurant in Jamaica is a huge fan of social media. They use it actively in promoting specials, events and to get provide better customer service. Chilitos is one of the first restaurants in Jamaica to use Foursquare (what is?) specials, giving away Margaritas to repeat customers. They are also heavy Twitter users, with over 290 Jamaican followers, proving that social media works for niche markets in the island. Recently Chilitos made a first by creating a physical Follow Friday board, to promote their most loyal twitter users:

With the Monster Foursquare Halloween Costume Party Chilitos is not only organising the first Foursquare event and meetup in Jamaica, but also attempting to unlock the swarm badge for customers. When 50 or more Foursquare users are checked in to the same place, they can unlock the swarm badge:

Currently I don’t think any Jamaican Foursquare user has the swarm badge, unlocking this badge will be valuable to the users of this popular geolocation service. The event is also being sponsored by Fiction Night Club, who will be hosting the after party and will also feature Foursquare specials all night. As well as NCB Jamaica who with My Elite Grocer will be providing prizes and surprises all night at Chilitos. Other attractions include foursquare specials all night, a taco eating contest and more.

For those planning on attending the event and tweeting, they will be using both #monsterja and #4sqpartyja hashtags, you can use either to see tweets about the event.

For more information please see the Facebook event page, tweet chilitos (@chilitosmexican) or call them 876-978-0537

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