How to Stop Focusing on a Social Media Manager’s Age & Start Focusing on How to Hire the Right People

Recently, there’s been a flurry of articles, blog posts and general web-based rants arguing about how old a social media manager should be. Starting a few weeks ago with Cathryn Sloane’s controversy-inducing “Why Every Social Media Manager Should Be Under 25,” continuing with Deb Ng’s “On Being Over 40 and Working in Social Media,” Hollis Thomases’s “11 Reasons a 23-Year Old Shouldn’t Run Your Social Media“ on Inc.com and, last week, BostInno’s rebuttal by Lauren Landry, “11 Reasons Why You’re Wrong About the 23-Year-Olds Who You Say Shouldn’t Run Your Social Media,” it seems like everyone with an internet connection is either questioning or defending our generation’s ability to manage a brand’s social media presence.

I’ve read many good points from both sides of the age gap, but all this arguing about how old a social media manager should be has left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Instead of talking about what really matters, we’re focusing on a war between the generations and making gross generalizations about 20-somethings. Hardly productive.

What I’d like to suggest we argue about instead is not how old our social media managers should be (or really, how old any of our employees should be, since age discrimination is actually illegal), but how to hire the right people. I’m no HR professional, but to me, that part seems pretty simple.

So without further ado, here are my 3 commonsense suggestions:

1) Hire someone with not just the knowledge to do the job, but the enthusiasm, too.

For a social media manager, this means you’re hiring someone who not only knows the mechanics of running a Facebook page or writing a blog post filled with valuable content, but someone who cares enough about the subject matter to make geeky hashtag jokes, spend their Saturday mornings catching up with the latest industry-related articles, or download tons of new apps to their smartphone because they wanted to check out Pinterest, Instagram and Path as soon as they heard about them. It’s this employee who will care about your brand’s social media presence for more than the required 40 hours per week, and it’s this employee who will help you create innovative, cross-platform strategies when your marketing plan is in need of a jolt.

2) Hire for culture fit.

Hire someone who will fit your company like a glove: they’ll make a positive impact at the office and be able to represent the best qualities of your brand to the outside world, too, both on- and offline. This person won’t just be comfortable in their own skin, but in your company’s skin. Employees who fit well with your company culture can be great brand ambassadors, and are more likely to be loyal in the long term, as well.

On the flip side, I think we’ve all seen what a coworker who’s a poor culture fit can do: bring down office morale, create conflict or even present a bad image of your brand when they’re outside of working hours. Hiring a social media manager — or software developer or CEO or account manger — whose off-the-clock interactions reflect poorly on your company is a risk your brand shouldn’t be taking…no matter their age.

3. Hire someone whose judgment you trust.

Ultimately, if you don’t trust your employees with your company’s brand, what can you trust them with? A 23-year-old can be just as deserving of your trust as a 45-year-old, and vice-versa, especially if you’re using personal and professional connections to find that person in the first place. Choose someone who comes highly recommended, if you can, and don’t send over that offer letter until you’re confident they’re someone you can trust with the future of your business.

Your social media manager should be someone you trust with both your brand and your business, and someone who understands that the success of one is highly dependent on the other. Trust them to run your Twitter account; trust them to exercise their best judgment in cleaning up the mistakes they make along the way. (Hey, none of us are perfect!)

So instead of arguing about whether our latest few birthdays have made us obsolete in the social media world, let’s focus on hiring and keeping those employees who fit our job requirements, our brands and our companies overall.  Age — like a college GPA or how many Twitter followers you have — ain’t nothing but a number.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/08/20/how-to-stop-focusing-on-a-social-media-manager...

Hulu CEO May Step Down in September [REPORT]


Hulu CEO Jason Kilar may be leaving the company as early as September, according to a leaked memo dated in July.

The memo, which was obtained by Variety, outlines the company's future plans in three pages of bullet points. The top of these reads, "Outline transition plan for new CEO. Discuss potential candidates and process."

As Variety notes, the bullets don't definitely mean that Kilar is scheduled to exit the company -- it could be a contingency plan. Kilar and other employees, who together own 10% of the company, will be eligible to cash out of their shares in September as News Corp. and Disney up their stakes in the company. A much-richer Kilar -- Variety reports he may be up for…
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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/20/hulu-ceo-jason-kilar-may-step-down/?utm_source...

Twitter at the crossroads — growing up is hard to do

It used to be so easy being Twitter. No one expected much from the company when it was a plucky young startup in a brand new market; even when its servers repeatedly failed and the network went down, users would grumble and then come flocking back in even greater numbers. As it grew larger and became more of a business, adding commercial features and swapping its CEO for one with more corporate experience, fans still mostly cheered its expanding influence and its power as a tool for free speech and real-time information. Twitter was the newswire of the future, a shining example of the democratization of publishing in action and the rise of the social web.

Over the past few months, however, it has become increasingly obvious that the honeymoon is over. What began as a murmuring of dissent from developers over Twitter’s control of its API and treatment of its ecosystem has turned into open revolt, and even some former fans have begun to question whether the company is paying more attention to its advertisers than it is to the users who provided the foundation for its success. Driven by the need to generate revenue for the financial backers who have given it an $8-billion market value, Twitter is in the process of becoming a major digital media entity. But can it make that transformation and still retain the qualities that made it a consumer darling in the first place?

Becoming a media entity is a double-edged sword

Turning into an ad-driven media company might be a smart business decision — at least in the short term — but the billion-dollar question is whether these changes will eventually kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Will an increase in advertising, or evidence of special treatment for corporate partners — of the kind it displayed for NBC during the Olympics — or the slow death by strangulation of favorite Twitter clients turn enough users off to make an impact? Or does Twitter have enough network effects, because of its massive user base, to fend off challengers such as App.net and keep the market to itself?

In the early days, even Twitter didn’t know what it was supposed to be — or what it was in the process of becoming. It seemed like such a trivial thing, with its 140 characters and its goofy name, that hardly anyone paid it any notice, except to scoff at the idea that it could be good for anything but wasting time (of course, plenty of people thought the same thing about the telephone). And so co-founder and CEO Evan Williams and his partner Biz Stone did whatever they thought made sense, including releasing an open API that developers could use to build cool features on top of the growing network.

Virtually all of the things that we think of now as core functions of Twitter, from the use of a hashtag for topics to the use of the @ mention and even the idea of a retweet, were invented and popularized by users and the apps that were built on top of Twitter’s API. That’s probably why the first backlash against Twitter came when the company started moving in on its developer ecosystem — or bulldozing it, depending on your viewpoint — by adding features that others had built businesses out of (including shortened links) and buying up players like Tweetie to create “official” Twitter apps for various platforms.

Twitter wants to control all aspects of the network

That was the beginning of the transformation that we’ve seen accelerate in recent months: no longer just a “hippie-style open network” with the laudable goal of improving the world’s access to information and lowering the barriers to free speech, Twitter rapidly became a company. It swapped Evan Williams (who just launched a new content platform called Medium) for a high-powered CEO in former Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo, raised hundreds of millions in venture financing that gave the company a theoretical market value in the billions, and started limiting the things that developers could do with its API.

For the most part, this kind of behavior only caused tension and dissent in the developer and geek communities. One of the company’s early development heads, Alex Payne, quit after sending out an open letter saying that Twitter needed to “become more open or die,” but for users there was nothing but upside — the network was growing rapidly, and early adopters no longer had to launch into a long explanation about what Twitter was. Oprah was using it and so were tons of other celebrities, and during the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia the network became an almost unparalleled source for news thanks to NPR’s Andy Carvin.

And as it started to became more mainstream, Twitter launched the revenue model everyone had been expecting (and in many cases dreading): namely, advertising. At first, it was just “promoted tweets” and “promoted trends,” which only appeared in certain spots — then advertisements started showing up in people’s Twitter streams, but only if they had already expressed some interest in the topic. At the same time, Twitter started to form corporate partnerships with media companies for special events such as the Academy Awards, where tweets from the audience were displayed on TV networks as a kind of “second screen” feature.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo

Although CEO Dick Costolo denied a number of times that Twitter had any intention of becoming a media company, it soon became obvious that this was exactly what the former startup had in mind — not a traditional media outlet, perhaps, but a content-distribution network powered by advertising revenue. Instead of trying to fulfill its early goals of becoming an open platform or real-time information utility, Twitter started to focus more and more on its advertising partnerships and its media partnerships, driven in part by the desire to justify its estimated $8-billion market valuation.

The pressure is on Twitter to monetize

Utilities don’t make much money but media companies can, especially if the cost of creating the content they distribute is virtually zero — and especially if they control the content. And that seems to be the impetus for most of the changes that Twitter has made to restrict its API: a desire to control more of the content so that it can monetize its growing audience via advertising (my colleague Eliza Kern will cover the API restrictions and their effects in more detail in an upcoming post).

Driven by that impulse, Twitter also started creating curated media “hubs” in partnership with a number of players, including a NASCAR-themed hub, followed by the biggest effort of all this month: an official Olympic hub with a curated stream of content in partnership with NBC. That partnership (which also forced Twitter to geo-block anyone outside the U.S. from reaching its official hub, since NBC only had the U.S. rights) created a significant controversy when the company suspended the account of a British journalist who criticized NBC, something the network’s legal counsel later apologized for.

For some critics, the suspension was a test of trust for Twitter and its new corporate relationships, and the company mostly failed. More than anything, the incident highlighted the difficult of walking the kind of tightrope Twitter is trying to walk with its new evolution as a global media entity: it still wants to be the champion of free speech, but governments and corporate partners are likely to bring increasing pressure to block or delete certain kinds of content. It wants to be seen as a partner for media companies, but its ambitions make it look an awful lot like a competitor as well. And it wants to monetize the features that users and developers created, but in order to do so it has to control as much of the network as possible.

Add to all of those challenges the difficulties caused by Facebook’s high-profile IPO disappointment — which some say has effectively closed the window for social-web IPOs — and the increasing pressure on Twitter to generate large enough sums of revenue to justify its market value, and you have some pretty substantial growing pains. Will Twitter be able to survive and become the media entity it clearly wants to be? Or will users grow restless with its newfound ambitions and take their content elsewhere?

This is the first in a series of stories about Twitter’s transitional summer. On Tuesday, Eliza Kern will examine the impact of its recent API policy shift on the partners who helped make Twitter a success, and on Wednesday, Derrick Harris takes a look at the infrastructure challenges involved to keep the tweets flowing.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zert Sonstige and Micky Aldridge


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/08/20/twitter-at-the-crossroads-growing-up-is-hard-to-...

Syfy for iPad app adds Sync feature, second screen content launches Tuesday with Face Off (video)

Syfy's for iPad adds Sync feature, second screen content launches Tuesday with Face Off

We're still not sure about the Sci Fi / Syfy Network name switch, but whatever you call it the network is the latest to jump on the trend of second screen features. Currently available on the latest version of its iPad app (and listed as "coming soon" for Android tablets on the official page an in the demo video embedded after the break), Syfy Sync will work with certain shows to pull up interactive content on your mobile device along with whatever is playing on TV. The first show to get the treatment is the season premiere of Face Off airing August 21st. Naturally, there's a social media element as well, with sharing to Facebook and Twitter, as well as integrated GetGlue check-ins. Whether or not you dig the second screen aspects or are just waiting for some better shows to come on, there are other upgrades with a new UI as, show related photo galleries and support for AirPlay to play the app's video clips on your TV. Syfy for iPad 2.0 with sync is available for free in iTunes, we'll let you know when the Android version is upgraded and if similar features head to any other mobile platforms soon.

Continue reading Syfy for iPad app adds Sync feature, second screen content launches Tuesday with Face Off (video)

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Syfy for iPad app adds Sync feature, second screen content launches Tuesday with Face Off (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Aug 2012 04:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/20/syfy-sync-ipad-second-screen/

Big surprise: Hulu’s owners can’t agree on its future

Hulu’s corporate parents are set to buy out their co-owner Providence Equity Partners by September, and the deal could trigger numerous changes to the site, according to a Variety report that’s based on a leaked memo obtained by the publication.

One consequence: Hulu CEO Jason Kilar could be set to cash out up to $100 million in equity – and that windfall seems to worry News Corp. and Disney, who both own close to 30 percent of the company. The media conglomerates seem to fear that Kilar could jump ship, and the memo obtained by Variety seems to indicate that they’re working on contingency plans (Comcast also owns roughly a third of Hulu, but doesn’t have any direct influence on the company’s future due to conditions for its merger with NBC Universal).

The report also suggests that the Providence buy-out could lead to a number of licensing changes, which could in turn lead to Hulu losing exclusivity for some of its content.

But come September, Hulu’s owners may be confronted with an even bigger question: What will Hulu’s future look like? And that’s where News Corp. and Disney seem to have somewhat different ideas.

New Corp. wants to double down on authentication. Fox shows started showing up with an eight day delay on Hulu a year ago. Only viewers that either subscribe to Hulu Plus or authenticate themselves as pay TV subscribers have next-day access to shows like Glee or Family Guy. So far, Hulu is providing authentication for subscribers of Dish, Verizon and CableOne. News Corp. wants to quickly extend this to other pay TV operators.

Disney, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with this kind of authentication, according to Variety. That’s notable, because many observers have speculated time and again that Hulu will eventually transform to a TV Everywhere service that will only give pay TV subscribers access to its content. That kind of future seems to be a bit more uncertain now.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/hulu-kilar-may-leave/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_mediu...

Boxfish’s new TV guide iPad app is like crack for news junkies

Forget social, forget check-ins, and don’t even think about TV shows on Netflix or Hulu: Boxfish’s new iPad app, which went live in the Apple App Store Tuesday, is taking a radically different approach to tell you what to watch. It’s squarely aiming at news junkies, sports fans and people obsessed with celebrity gossip – or anyone who wants to have fun flaking out in front of the TV.

Here is how it works: Boxfish takes the the closed captions from 3,600 cable and local broadcast stations all over the U.S. and indexes and analyses all this data in real time. The result is presented as a constantly updating stream of trends and topics – think Tweetdeck, but for live TV.

Boxfish presents updates from the world of sports, news, business and celebrity gossip by default as part of its live feed. It also surfaces trending topics, which at the time of writing included Paul Ryan, Medicare and Chad Johnson. Users can customize the app by adding their own favorite channels to take a quick glance at what’s being talked about on CNBC or ESPN at any given time. And the app can be synched with a TiVo or a DirecTV set-top box to help users change the channel every time they want to tune into a conversation. However, there’s no esy way to filter out channels that a subscriber doesn’t have access to.

Check out a few screenshots of the app, or continue reading below:

 
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Boxfish co-founder and CEO Eoin Dowling told me during a Skype chat Monday that his team initially set out to build a kind of Google for TV shows, allowing users to search for content through captions. But once it started testing its technology with users, it realized that the search engine analogy was all wrong: Early testers weren’t interested in complicated searches. “They were using TV as a live stream,” said Dowling. In other words: Less like Google, and more like Twitter.

I’ve had a chance to play with Boxfish a little bit over the last couple of hours, and gotta say that the app is definitely intriguing. Yes, it can seem a little bit overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to catch up on popular topics.

But the basic idea behind it is very clever: Dowling and his co-founder Kevin Burkitt told me that only about 60 percent of your average TV viewing time is spent on shows and movies you don’t want to miss. The other 40 percent is about tuning in, trying to catch up on news and just randomly flipping through channels, looking for something new. That’s the 40 percent Boxfish is after. “TV does a terrible job giving you new content,” said Burkitt.

So what’s next for Boxfish? The duo told me that it has an iPhone app more or less ready, but wants to collect feedback from iPad users first before releasing it. It also plans to release apps for Android and even smart TV platforms, but eventually wants to give others access to its treasure trove of indexed captions through an API as well. “It’s really interesting data – and there is only so much we can do with it,” said Downling.

Boxfish was founded in 2010 in London, and the founders moved to the Bay Area in 2011. The company raised a $3 million Series A round, which was led by T-Venture, and the team currently consists of 10 people.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/boxfish-ipad-app/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=fe...

Researchers measure 3D objects using just a camera and projector, can tell if you've ironed your shirt (video)

Researchers measure objects using just a camera and projector, can tell if you've ironed your shirt video

For years the projector and camera have served us well, performing their respective tasks. Now, researchers at Japan's Advanced Industrial Science and Technology institute are using them together to measure 3D objects. By projecting a special pattern onto the subject and then using the camera to "read" the amount of distortion in the image, a three-dimensional model can be constructed. This thing is accurate, too, with precision down to 1 - 2mm which means it can measure wrinkles in clothes, or even details in hands. The technology can even be scaled to work with microscopes. The creators say that it could be used in video games (much like Kinect), and even for tracking athletes' movements thanks to its ability to capture fast-moving images -- something existing systems can struggle with. Jump past the break to see the tech in action.

Continue reading Researchers measure 3D objects using just a camera and projector, can tell if you've ironed your shirt (video)

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Researchers measure 3D objects using just a camera and projector, can tell if you've ironed your shirt (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/14/researchers-measure-3d-objects-using-just-...

TVSync API unveiled, helps devs build second-screen and smart TV apps

TVSync API unveiled, helps devs build second-screen and smart TV apps

Second screen apps seem to be all the rage as of late, and Vobile's freshly announced TVSync API platform can help developers ride that wave of popularity. Compatible with iOS and Android devices, PCs and some smart TVs, the API can be leveraged to supplement what's on the silver screen with relevant content ranging from polls to products. Apps developed with the interface can trigger what's displayed on the companion screen at just the right moment by analyzing audio, video, or both. For instance, a recipe featured on a celebrity chef's program could be pushed to your slate as soon as it's first mentioned. Yearning to code an app of your own with the tech? Visit the source to request beta access to TVSync or look below for the full press release.

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TVSync API unveiled, helps devs build second-screen and smart TV apps originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Aug 2012 05:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/16/tvsync-api-smart-tv-second-screen-apps/

Store All Your Fitness and Health Stats in This One App


Do you use more than one app to record and view your health and fitness stats? A new app wants to be the one-stop-shop of apps for storing all of your health and fitness data. You may not actually use fewer apps, but with the Withings Health Companion, you can view all that health data in one place.

The Withings Health Companion app [iTunes link] for iOS, launched on Aug. 13. It allows users to monitor their weight, physical activity, heart and sleep quality and sync it to the app -- even if you use other apps to track that information.

The health and fitness monitoring app space is a crowded one. But Withings has a long history in this particular niche-- at least compared to oth…
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More About: apps, fitness, health

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/17/withings-health-companion/?utm_source=feedburn...