The trouble with resilience

Today’s shooting is one of those moments when time, and our hearts, break. How can we go on? How will life ever feel the same? What should shock us is not only the moment of tragedy, but how quickly tragedy fades. I remember with icy-hot clarity the morning of...

Using the Internet to find empathy in solitude

Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually  agreed to allow residence inside my brain. So writes Adam Brault in a very thoughtful blog post, I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly...

ShopStyle: Diary of an online shopping addiction

Update: If you visit shopstyle.com from outside the U.S, you may be taken to an international site — which in the  case of the Canadian site has far fewer results. To access the U,S. site, visit this URL (and bookmark it). You’ll be taken to the....

2×2: Filtering your Facebook friends

How do you decide to view or relate to different friends on Facebook? As with all things in life, this can be described by a 2×2 matrix: Love this person Not so much Entertaining Facebooker Add to my “A1 pals” list, which is the news feed I look at...

What to tell your kids about dating before the Internet

Hey, old people!  By which I mean: hey, people my age! If you’ve been wondering what dating wisdom you can usefully impart to your teenage or soon-to-be teenage kids, you should read Stephanie Martin’s thoughtful post on Dating in the Social Media Age....

Don’t blame the Internet for infidelity

The Petraeus drama reflects the enticements and betrayals of our new, disembodied modes of discourse. The come-ons, the flirtations, the stalking, the alleged harassment: all were abetted by the deceptive cloak of cyberspace, and all were immortalized there. It’s a...

6 ways to speed up your social media response times

Speed is essential to developing the right social media campaign, response or update. In my last post, I looked at how the right kind of market research program can support faster and more responsive social media management, inspired by The Quick and the Dead, a new...

Why the speed of research matters in social media

How quickly do you have to reply to a critical tweet? How long does it take for the right video to go viral? How often do you have to update your company’s Facebook page? Speed is at the heart of many of the questions that come up over and over again in social...

Should copyediting be part of your social media strategy?

I’ll admit it: I’m a grammar nazi. When I see a poorly punctuated tweet, I cringe, and when I see a blog post with a comma splice in the title, I want to tear my hair out. I’ve fantasized about a supper club for copy editors — the folks like me...