“... Social media is just a fancy name for online communities, and they have been around since the Internet’s infancy… So for anyone who thinks that social media or the use of it for business purposes is new, please think again! The thing about social media that seems to escape many people is that it works best as a lead generator or a way to get links only when it’s used first and foremost for true social purposes. If you are using it because you think you have to, or as a duty, you’ll never discover its full impact.”

Jill Whalen
(via Nick Wilsdon)

“In the past, we interacted with the Internet, which is to say a bunch of static information.  Now the aim is interact with each other through the Internet.  Not to use it as a way to avoid each other but as a way to engage and deepen ones connection.”

Joel Ordesky
Executive Networking & Technology Group
(ExecTec of LA)

“The normal maxim for measurement is, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.’

The problem with measuring blogs is not how to do it, but rather that the nature of blogs renders management impossible.”

Katie Delahaye Paine
Author
Measuring Public Relationships

"In today’s proactive culture, people do not want to be spoon-fed content, forced to watch commercials, be restricted by paid programming or bombarded by points-of-view they don’t agree with. What they do want is an a la carte menu—the ability to pick and choose the content they consume the way they pick and choose what to eat, drive, and wear.”

Carla Ranno and Shana Lory

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,’ Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, ‘can be an enormous boon to thinking.’ But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Nicholas Carr
Author/Speaker
(via The Atlantic)

“And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of ‘news’—and each with its own set of ‘truths’ upon which to base debate and discussion—will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of ‘facts’ by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly ‘red’ or ‘blue.’”

Eric Alterman
The New Yorker