Blogs | Social Signal

If you’ve managed to sprint inside of Google+ during one of those brief periods when the front door has been left ajar, then the first thing you’ve seen has been Google Circles. It allows you to organize your contacts into lists, based on how you know them, how much you trust them, whether you consider them cool, how you want to communicate with them… whatever criteria you want.

It’s a great feature, done in an appealing way. But it only goes so far.

There's an issue people raise constantly in my seminars and workshops, in a conversation that usually goes something like this:

Them: "Should we have a Facebook Group or a Facebook Page?"

Me: "Well, Facebook wants you to use Pages for organizational profiles, and Groups for small group collaboration..."

Them: "You see, we've had a Facebook Group for a few years now, and it does really well. Will Facebook convert it to a Page for us?"

Not long ago, I saw a reference on Twitter to a clever illustration of either Wolverine or two Batmans looking at each other. I clicked through to a Tumblr page, where someone had reblogged it from someone else on Tumblr, who had reblogged it from someone else, and so on.

When my mother died in early 2004, Friendster was the domain of the young'uns, MySpace was barely out the door and Facebook was still a month from launching.

But for someone who never saw used the word "friend" as a verb in her life, JoAnne Cottingham taught me an awful lot about social networking.

Hi, Elections Canada. We go back a long way, you and me. I'm the kid who had your colour-coded riding map masking-taped to my bedroom wall.

So let me offer some friendly advice. You want to stop people from tweeting election results from Eastern Canada before folks in Western Canada have had a chance to cast their ballots?

Then don't use section 329 of the Canada Elections Act. The full weight of the law is way too blunt an instrument.

This is the story of how one elephant drove us to make a change... and another elephant, courtesy of Switch authors Chip and Dan Heath, showed us the way.

Let's be honest: election debates are usually pretty awful for voters.

Part of a series. Original version at AlexandraSamuel.com.

In my recent blog post about how to sustain your social media presence in just 3 hours a week, I advise drafting 3 blog posts in under one hour. That may sound unimaginable if (like me) you've fallen into the habit of turning each blog post you write into a mini-manual or philosophical essay.

Part of a series. Original version at AlexandraSamuel.com.

When it rains on a weekend, I don't bemoan my decision to live in the Pacific Northwest: I just know it's time to queue up my blog posts and tweets for the week. That's what I try to do in about two hours every weekend, and since folks often ask me how they can keep their social media presence alive in an efficient and sustainable way, I figure I'm long overdue to blog my system.