Children aren’t going to understand the importance of keeping passwords secret unless you explain it to them.
I had a conversation with a guy the other day, and he told me about his son’s personal password tragedy. The kid really liked an online game. He played it often and accumulated a lot of valuable in-game items; magic swords and armor. One day another guy in the game convinced his son to give up his password. The guy stole all of his son’s equipment and left his character essentially naked.
The bright-side of this story is that his son learned a valuable lesson about password protection, privacy, and security within the safety of a game. As upset as the child was, the damage wasn’t irreparable.
My message is simple, teach your children to keep passwords secret.
After you teach them, they can choose to ignore you as a teenager… But that will be on them, you did your job.
Last week, Google released Google Buzz to the social media world. With Google Buzz, you can update your status, share links, photos, videos and more. It integrates directly with gmail and connects to sites like Twitter and Flickr to make sharing even easier. With this new sharing tool comes new code that you may want to put on your blog.
And the addition to the code that we use on this site (which is shown in my previous post) just adds a new list item to the existing links:
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&srcURL=<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="Share with Google Buzz">Buzz</a></li>
Note that Buzz uses Google Reader to share links. In order for this to show up on your Buzz, you have to make sure that Reader is connected with your Buzz.
Yesterday, I attended an event by the New Jersey Communications Advertising and Marketing Association (NJCAMA). Met some good people and heard some great things. The guest speaker for the evening was Geno Church from Brains on Fire. Geno gave a great presentation on word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and movement building where he took us through a few case studies with Best Buy and Fiskar (yes, the orange handle scissor people).
Here are a few notable quotables that stuck with me and my notes.
Everything is crap… Unless you have a strategy behind it
Social media is not WOMM
People trust people
Tactics bog us down
“No! If you build it we won’t come”
90% of WOMM occurs offline
Why should people be motivated to participate and share? Why people tell stories
support a cause
enable an experience
communicate the ethos of a brand
Geno captured everything quite eloquently when he says that we should create movements not campaigns. Then he went on to explain lessons learned about movements
There are tons of WordPress plug-ins that offer you the ability to share your blog posts using social media websites. Many of these plug-ins word great (bookmarkify did its job for us in the past) but you are limited to the websites and, most of the time, the design. You also may be limited to the message that you want to include with the link – for example, adding your @Twitter ID to the Twitter link – and not being able to include URL shortening.
So what if you want a completely custom way to share your links? Keep reading, I’ll share the code that I used to convert the Local Wisdom blog from being plug-in dependent to having our own custom code.
Our phase 1 integration with Facebook is in its testing phase. To help us test it out, we need your assistance!
After reading the Smashing Magazine’s article How to Integrate Facebook with WordPress, we decided to try this out ourselves. Not only can you read our blog straight from our localwisdom.com URL, you can also access it on Facebook from apps.facebook.com/localwisdomblog. Comments are shared between both locations. If you want, you can set up the blog feed right onto your profile using our blog application.
We also set up a Facebook login using Facebook Connector from Sociable (see image to the right) so that you can log into Facebook straight from our blog to comment as yourself (for now, the log-in is located as the last item on our sidebar).
Now this is where we need your help – we need Facebook users who do not currently have a username on the LW blog to make some comments so that we can fully test these plug-ins. No… I’m not trying to fish for comments here, just simply asking for a favor from some of our Facebook/blog readers so we can see if this thing really does work properly. If you do this, you get your very own Derrick-ism that you can use with no limits, no trademark symbols, given by the man himself (certain restrictions apply to the term itself – sorry folks, but I can’t give away words like Fridaying®, Friday-eye® Laterz®, etc that are already hard-coded into the Derrick-tionary).
If you run into issues with it, just leave a comment here and I’ll attempt to work it out.
Earlier last month Jakob Nielson posted his latest research findings on Social Networking on Intranets. Also always the study was quite thorough with case studies from 14 companies over 6 countries.
We work on a good number of Intranet sites for our customers and we find they are facing many of the same challenges.
Here are some notable quote-ables from the article.
When Intranet information architectures are structured according to the org chart, employees have a hard time finding their way around.
As people embrace social media in their private lives, they naturally expect to use similar tools within the enterprise
most companies are not very far along in a wholesale adoption of Web 2.0 technologies
Social software is not a trend that can be ignored. It’s affecting fundamental change in how people expect to communicate, both with each other and the companies they do business with.
successful social media initiatives at many companies emerged from underground, grassroots efforts
social software isn’t really about the tools. It’s about what the tools let users do and the business problems the tools address
So, rather than saying: “X is hot on the Web, let’s get it on the intranet,” say: “We need to accomplish Y; can X help us?”
void advertising the new tools as new tools. Instead, simply integrate them into the existing intranet, so that users encounter them naturally.
The tool itself is nothing; the value comes from the strength of its content.
Widespread use of internal social media breaks down communication barriers. That sounds good, but it can threaten people accustomed to having a monopoly on information and communication.
Corporate communications must adapt to social media’s real-time culture and become much more proactive than in the past
Before implementing intranet collaboration tools, you must consider company culture.
After reading the Smashing Magazine’s article 
Love the Shift Happens series. Always combine 3 things I like to see on my computer: good design, cool transitions, and impactful statistics.
