Cullmann Design Blog

CNET’s Rafe Needlemen has written a post forecasting what’s to come for social media in ’12. Among some excellent insight into the maturing mobile space and it’s impact on social media networks and some deliberation on this year’s IPO, Rafe hits on a point about the impact of social media on the 2012 Presidential Elections.It’s early for politics, but the last presidential election happened just as social media was getting widespread traction. Today, over 65% of adults, or a majority of “The People” are on Facebook and other social media networks. The campaign polls of only a few years ago are replaced by real-time feedback based on Facebook “likes”, website data, and online polling. The role that social media is going to play in the shaping of this political campaign cannot be underestimated. This is good and bad: The transparency and accessibility of social media makes it attractive to a new generation of voters. The widespread miss-information (and savvy of campaigns using these techniques) is a challenge for those seeking real platform information on candidates. Both parties are looking to win new voters and keep constituents with use of this still new medium.

The use of social media does not stop on Facebook. Look for campaigns that smartly deploy #hashtags in their television and print campaigns. Hashtags are search tags used to help those multi-tasking viewers participate in conversations happening on Twitter and other social networks while they watch television or listen to live broadcasts. These tags (#glee #superbowl, #egypt, etc) help group people, messages, and topics in a busy stream of information. The effect is like creating a channel to follow-along with interactively and participate along with an event or program. The Washington Post has already published a guide for Hashtags Guide for the 2012 Elections to help users, and political groups arrange their media programs.

2012 should bring new campaigns in social media and also many more users for the big networks like Facebook and Twitter. It’s very promising for those new to this kind of truly interactive media and I hope it brings mainstream adoption of social media as a way for politicians to truly gain insight about their audience’s needs and wants.

Read Rafe’s full prediction list on CNET’s website.

In 1967, the graduate is counseled to pursue a future in plastics. Good advice for the time. To the modern business graduate, what is a sure thing?Regardless of what you believe the shelf-life of social media is, there is a fundamental shift in business communication that is occurring. At one point recently, the business world and the interactions between companies, and between companies and their clients was opaque. With the growth of social media, and the mindset of consumers that they can reach large businesses, that perception is changing.

With this change, comes an opportunity for those who understand what to look for in a changing world. The people are not the social media experts and gurus who claim that Facebook and Twitter are the end-all-be-all of new business. The people who have a future are the people who understand that the world is changing and are constantly on the look-out for what will change next and how.

I don’t want to make light of the current state of employment in this country, nor do I believe that the current guard of business is asleep at the wheel. I am proposing that the savvy graduate coming into the business world will need more than a business degree to make a difference. The opportunity for new graduates to make a mark for themselves is leveraging what they have likely been using to communicate with their friends and family, using to promote their band, and using instead of a television to entertain themselves. They will need to bridge those tools to promote businesses and brand, but do so in a way that makes sense for the channel and time.

The same successful graduate who uses these tools will also need to be know why they are using them. Is Facebook a better choice because it has a broader demographic than Google+? Will Google+ provide a platform relevant to marketers? Having a hunch which is the right choice (and being able to articulate why) is what companies need right now and will be willing to pay for.

It sounds insane, but what the modern business needs is more alchemy than science. It’s the individual who can understand how to apply what is available now and read the tea-leaves to for the next big thing to come from Disrupt.

Recently, I’ve had a few friends ask about Twitter and how to make sense of it. There are those that only see Twitter as a novella of recent meals and Glee highlights. The fact is that Twitter, with a little bit of management, can help you cull down the noise of the Internet and create a best-of list for the web.

So how does someone new to Twitter make sense of this massive onslaught of Tweets? It’s pretty easy to start. Go to Twitter.com and click create an account. Once you’re account is set-up, search for your friends and the names of sites and blogs that you go to regularly. You can also let Twitter help you with a list of people they think you should follow by using the link in the menu bar “Who To Follow”.

It’s likely that you are already regularly visiting websites and news source on the web. Equally likely is that those same sites have some presence on Twitter. So look for an icon or “follow me on Twitter” button and give follow-them (don’t be surprised if they follow you too). So these are the basics.

Live with Twitter for a few days and get a feel for the cadence of those you’re following and if they’re Tweets are of any interest. Don’t be afraid to “unfollow” those people who just aren’t producing anything of interest for you. What will make Twitter useful to you is parring down the incoming “stream” of tweets to the content that is interesting or beneficial to you.

After several days of reading people’s Tweets, you’re going to start seeing how the people you’ve followed are using Twitter. Some people use it as a life-journals, others as a way to promote their content or products, others to aggregate links and videos on the web they find beneficial. You’re also going to begin to see how people are “Re-Tweeting” (re-sending a high-quality Twitter post) and mentioning people with strong links. Start to follow those people too. You’re going to start to see that as you expand the list of people you’re following, you’re going to start seeing more and more links that are of interest and you may have not been seeing previously.

As your Twitter follow lists grows, you’re going to start seeing the “stream” or incoming links move fast and faster through the interface. This is where Twitter Lists come in. Twitter provides an explanation and tutorial on how to make a list, but essentially, it’s a subset of your Twitter group. You can put as many as 500 users in a list and catagorise it in anyway that you like. To make it useful, I have arranged my lists so I can focus on content at any given time. For example, I have a list for design, a list of people I work with, a list for of pharmaceutical industry observers and so on. The list feature can give you the ability to organize and quickly focus on a particular interest when you review your Twitter feed.

In addition to lists, you can also search twitter using keywords or phrases. Like a search engine, Twitter will return posts from the entire Twitter community that contain your particular search string. If you are searching from Twitter’s website, you can then search through the results by last date posted, geographically (tweets near you) and person who is tweeting. All very powerful tools. Google and Bing both provide search features that can focus searches on Twitter and show results in real-time.

You can also search Twitter using hashtags. These tags are a created by putting a “#” sign infront of any word or phrase. Doing so allows that phrase to be easily searched and parsed. Users can then follow a particular hash-tag in a fashion similar to the way that you might follow a user. Some examples are #mobile, #design, or #fdasm. Hashtags are an organic product of the Twitter community and not part of Twitter’s supported API. To use hashtags properly, apply the “#” symbol infront of any word or term without any spaces. Upper and lowercase characters can be used to discern words in a phrase. Managing these hashtags becomes easier if you use Twitter in a desktop or mobile client.

Once you’ve conquered some of the ins-and-outs of Twitter, you may want to start mastering Twitter. Although Twitter’s web interface has come a long way, many power-users make use of desktop clients like TweetDeck (Mac and PC), Tweetie (Mac) or Twirl (PC). Twitter, having recently purchased several third-party companies creating Twitter clients has released their own platform clients. Twitter for the iPhone and Twitter for Mac are two examples. Personally, TweetDeck is a fantastic client developed using Adobe AIR. It works on all major platforms and is very powerful supporting multiple accounts and several other services.

Twitter is as powerful a tool as you make of it. With a little management, careful curating and a little bit of use, you can turn Twitter into a powerful way to pull in information from all over the Internet ranging from topics you are familiar to information that you may never have known existed. It’s important that you spend a few minutes to review some of the etiquette of Twitter as well. It’s a very fickle community and being aware of when to cite a source, what a retweet does and how to direct-message are all important to being a good citizen in the Twitterverse. Chris Brogan has a wonderful Twitter Etiquette post that summarizes everything for the nube and veteran Twitter user. Mashable has created an equally useful Twitter Guide as well.

Follow me on Twitter and happy Tweeting.

Information is moving to a new venue: Even in the few years since I had graduated college, the internet has completely shifted the way that the public consumes information. Content is available in every medium, flavor and at every level of learning and depth that you can imagine. More and more people, from all over the world are finding niches to express themselves and communicate.

This isn’t limited to academic ideology. The idea of information as power has never been more evident than this past month as the riots in Egypt are unfolding as much via blogs and twitter as in the streets themselves.

Education, and access to it, needs to be accessible, and have the ability to be held within any medium. The limitations are no longer paper, because digital media can be viewed in hundreds of ways. Language is becoming irrelevant as Google and Microsoft make real-time translation a reality. Even literacy itself is less of a hurdle with audio and visual content available for every level of education.

The paradigm has changed and with it, we need to change the vehicle that we are teaching with. Books, text books especially, are slow moving and come with many barriers. Costs, flexibility with curriculum, distribution-all acting as barriers to the act of learning.

Information is changing faster and faster. Although printing on demand offered sophisticated educators flexibility and materials that can be tailored to particular course work or degree paths, licensing and costs can make wide spread use unpractical. Many educators are looking to web-born tools like licensed content via course-based portals. Laptops and netbooks have become cost-of-entry for college students and the media lends itself well to real-time updates and customized courses.

The surge in popularity of the tablet, championed last year by Apple’s iPad, presents students of all ages with a viable option for a portal device that delivers a viable text book replacement. These tablets devices can last long hours, present typography well and support a wide variety of media. There are many, many examples already in the Apple AppStore that showcase what a flexible educational tool the tablet can be.

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) recently produced an tablet application to accompany guests visiting their Abstract Expressionist New York showing. The application provides guest of the MOMA with details about each piece in the show and background including video of the artists, commentators and critics explaining some of the nuances of the exhibit. As an educational tool for those not able to view the showing in person, the application is a potential substitute featuring detailed photography and the capability to zoom into each piece for a level of detail that rivals the more expensive art books covering the subject.

Inkling, a new solution for text-book like solutions designed to take advantage of iOS, offers content authors a publication platform with a distribution channel built within. The software allows for the more pedestrian presentation of text in a page-by-page format. Beyond that, illustrations feature the ability to zoom, pitch and make use of high-resolution imagery as well as 3D models built directly into the pages. There is also the ability to tie video and motion-graphics into the pages.

One of the features that are important to college users, and also the charm of paper-based learning tools, is the ability to add highlights and noted throughout the text. Notes appear in sidebars and are able to be exported as separate documents.

Currently, titles are limited, but there are new entries frequently and a brief overview of the materials shows that no detail from standard text is missing. A determent to this system is cost. The texts are priced similar to standard text and locks users into the Inkling software ecosysytem. Inkling is an excellent example of how innovative companies are approaching the challenge of new learning and eBooks with technology and practical infrastructure.

Apple and iTunes U strengthens a brand once synonymous with classroom computing. Apple presents a truly modernized approach with iTunes U, a treasure trove of edu material available in it’s free software. It’s an example of new media learning at its best. I’ve written previously on the tremendous offering of free material is available within iTunes and my feeling is still the same.

There is an almost limitless well of material (Apple reports over 350,000 lectures and pre-recorded presentations) for every course description. Every level of higher education is represented: Ivy league to progressive county colleges. Some are integrated into degree requirements, others are offered as supplemental material. The level of finish also varies from amateur to professionally produced.

What is so compelling for me and why I believe iTunes U is so progressive is that it presents a learning opportunity for anyone who has access to a computer. Designed to work on iPods and iPhones, Apple’s free iTunes software can introduce anyone to higher learning. It also provides a method of learning that doesn’t require a high level of literacy. Many of the course provided are 101 and entry-level discipline courses. A majority of the content is available via audio and video media.

Apple is also offering ePub solutions via the iTunes U distribution channel. This provides a vehicle not limited to audio and video, but also text-based learning and read-along materials. This mated with translation services removes language as a content barrier.

Paper is a cornerstone of education. It is a permanent, portable and technologically agnostic method that the world is comfortable with. It’s cheap, recyclable, and can be produced in countless forms. For a new generation of students, young and old, there is a better way to learn. eBooks and new media learning provides exposure to materials from all over the world and for a myriad of cognitive abilities. It can provide basic reading and writing materials, complex diagrams, video material and audio. It is persistent and the barrier to entry for content producers is low. Regardless of your course material or the focus of your class, a new breed of “book” can act as a vehicle for all of your thoughts and become a mega-phone to a global classroom.