Media
I frequently comment on social media, the personal, social and political implications of technology adoption, entrepreneurship, and other topics.
Editors or reporters on a deadline can reach me via cel (604.726.5445) or Twitter (@awsamuel) or contact my assistant, Morgan Brayton (778.858.8787). You can reach me via e-mail as alex[at]alexandrasamuel[dot]com or by using the contact form on this site.
Recent clippings:
Story Lab
Bra colors & cancer: Putting the social in social networking by Brigid Schulte
January 11, 2010
Was posting your bra color on Facebook a joke? Was it an attempt to raise breast cancer awareness?….What did this all mean? On Friday, I tried calling a couple of “social media experts” to ask that question. Alexandra Samuel had this to say:
This is a great illustration of the value of asking for low-threshold participation. Too often, organizations and businesses seeking social media engagement ask their supporters to do something relatively big, like submitting a video or blog post. But creating mechanisms that invite micro-participation is incredibly powerful, because it makes it easy for so many people to get involved — and form there, to move them towards more substantive involvement. The real challenge for [The Susan G. Komen Foundation] now is to take those 134,000 new followers and turn at least some of them into engaged supporters and contributors.
iPhone apps emerge as newest electronic pacifier by Charlene Sadler
December 31, 2009
When Alexandra Samuel’s two-year-old first sat down to play a video game on her iPhone, the Vancouver mom was more worried about his impact on the device than the effect it could have on him.
Samuel was surprised by what happened next.
“What blew my mind was that within four days of us first handing him the iPhone, if you gave him the phone while it was off, he knew to hit the power button, slide to unlock, navigate to the iPod apps, navigate to the videos and then start Diego play,” said Samuel, director of social and interactive media at Emily Carr University.
“Nobody taught him, he just figured it out, and I’d love to tell you he’s a genius,” said Samuel, who with her husband also runs the social marketing website socialsignal.com.
…
For Samuel, she sets over all time limits on the amount of time the kids can spend in front of a computer screen.
“But you know, we really struggle with that whole question of how wired to be, but I sort of feel like, live by the sword, die by the sword,” she said.
“My husband and I are professional techies, we are total screen junkies ourselves, we have five computers in the house, we are constantly on our phones and it’s just who we are. And I don’t think it’s any worse for the kids than it is for us.”
Users, not creators, define Web 2.0 by Richard Warnica
December 31, 2009
What will happen when today’s youth are no longer so young? Will they regret having bared so much of themselves at so vulnerable a time? Will they try to scrub their pasts from the web?
Alexandra Samuel doesn’t think so.
Samuel is the director of the Social & Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. To her, the big generational disconnect from the last decade is around the idea that people should have a “professional” appearance online.
“It think it’s because us old people, in our thirties, came of age when the Internet really was a work tool,” she said. “And in the last decade it’s become hugely social and entertaining.
“Anyone under 25, pretty much, is going to have a picture of themselves puking, or in their bra, or whatever. And for now, there are still more old people to be shocked than young people to find it normal.”
The thing is, most of the things young people are putting online don’t show them doing things college-age kids weren’t doing 10 years ago or 10 years before that. And Samuel thinks all the worry about employers finding these pictures or reading these blogs as these people get older will mostly disappear.
“I mean, it’s one thing if you’re shooting heroin,” she said. “But if you’re doing stuff that is well within the bounds of normal adolescent behaviour? They’re just missing the opportunity to make good hires.”
An iPhone in every crib, an app for every toddler by Dakshana Bascaramurty
December 20, 2009
Ms. Samuel recalls Apple telling her that her warranty was void when she tried to get her iPhone repaired.
“My little drooly two-year-old had drooled into the moisture detector,” she said. He hasn’t dropped it yet, but there have been many close calls.
“I will often find him in the bathroom, peeing with the iPhone held over the toilet,” she said.
Social media pioneer hired for Emily Carr technology post by Gillian Shaw
December 10, 2009
Alexandra Samuel has chalked up some impressive firsts.
With her husband Rob Cottingham she launched Vancouver’s first social media firm back when Twitter was something birds did, not humans.
More recently, she and Cottingham astounded traditional knowledge-based businesses by giving away the keys to the shop — open sourcing all their trade secrets and lucrative and long-built consulting tools.
…And this week Samuel announced she is taking up a post as director of the new Centre for Moving Interaction at Emily Carr University of the Emily Carr University of Art+Design.
…”The hope is that connecting ECUAD students and faculty will foster that kind of break-out creative thinking.”
It was creative, out-of-the-box thinking that led to the decision by Samuel and Cottingham to open source their company’s intellectual property.
The company has been what Samuel describes as an “outsourced innovation shop” for companies and organizations that wanted to create social media projects and online communities. She said now it would like to help organizations take that expertise and build their own social media skills and teams.
“Open sourcing our IP and focusing our consulting work on training, workshops and content, is a way of building skills and capacity within these emergent social media teams and in the large and growing community of social media vendors and practitioners, teaching people how to fish, so to speak, rather than fishing for them.”
Samuel said the decision to open source the very tools the consulting business was built around runs counter to ideas of how a business should run.
“We had a hunch this would happen,” she said of the positive reaction to the company’s shift in focus and its IP sharing. “We got four times as many inquiries after we announced we were open sourcing as we did before.”
Big ideas: More offers — and more distractions by Gillian Shaw
December 7, 2009
As Alexandra Samuel, co-founder of Social Signal and director of Emily Carr University’s Centre for Moving Interaction, aptly describes it, we’re suffering from FOMO — fear of missing out.
“It’s Friday night, you’ve just come home and you’re super tired but hey, there’s a party on and you’re afraid if you don’t go you’ll miss this awesome event,” she said.
“We all make decisions because we are afraid of missing something.”
The pain of missing out is only growing as technology lets us juggle more and more.
“Maybe five years ago it finally occurred to me that just because I wrote something on my to-do list I might not have time to do it,” she said. “In this task-oriented culture where we are all trying to get stuff done, it’s easy to lose sight of that fact. We all have to come to terms with the pain of missing out on a lot.”
There’s no running fast enough to escape that pain, Samuel says.
“If you step back and recognize that if you go out party-hopping, or Facebooking, Twittering, working 18 hours a day — you’re multi-tasking your guts out and instead of missing 99.9 per cent of what’s going on, you’ll only be missing 99.8 per cent.
“The flip side of multi-tasking is learning to prioritize and deciding what’s really important to you.
“It’s saying that ‘If I’m going to miss out on a lot, the things that I am doing must be the ones that are the most valuable and the most meaningful for me’.”
Politicians Use Social Media to Bypass the Press Corps by Stephen Davy
November 2, 2009
“Mostly what you read in newspapers feels like press releases,” Samuel said. “So can that be replaced? Yeah, that can totally be replaced. Why should I as a politician or political organization rely on some respectable news organization to essentially rewrite my press release and print it in their newspaper when I can send that same information directly to my constituents? There is not really much value added.”
Companies seek cyber social butterflies by Tamsyn Burgmann, Canadian Press
October 19, 2009
“What younger people bring to the table is that they understand social media culture, because it’s actually the culture they live in,” said Alexandra Samuel, who teaches a continuing education course on social media at the University of British Columbia.
Samuel, 38, and her husband Rob Cottingham, 46, are Vancouver-based social media gurus who founded one of the world’s earliest social media companies, Social Signal, in 2005.
…”What makes it a really good career choice for people is that, in a lot of fields, if you’re in your 20s people don’t take you seriously and there’s a sense you haven’t paid your dues,” she said. “This is one of the few fields where you can come in as a 23-year-old and be seen as an authority.”
Successful Web strategy is in enticing visitors to stay awhile by Gillian Shaw
October 7, 2009
Alexandra Samuel, chief executive of Social Signal, who recently wrote an online post, Six Tips for Scoring with Social Media for Harvard Business Publishing, would agree.
“If you have an ad on TV and the phones start ringing then you know your ROI [return on investment],” she said.
It is not as straightforward when it comes to the Web. Instead, companies should be looking for qualitative measures, not quantitative, she said.
“Companies looking for ROI want to know how many more products did we sell this week because of an ad we put on Facebook,” she said. “It is not about that.
“You are trying to get your customers to love you, but your customers are not going to love a number like how many site visits you get or how many followers you have.
“You can’t put a price on that loyalty but it can transform the way you work.”
