How Twitter is Revolutioninzing Business at Entrepreneur details the rise to success of Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) as the twitter-for-business consultant to go to. If you read this success story on Web Teacher, you may be reminded of the conclusion I offered there: Keep up with what’s changing and learn how to use those changes to achieve your own goals.
Using Twitter for business is indeed important these days. I went to the Air America site to vote for @PunditMom to win a spot on a cruise with Air America’s celebrities, including Rachel Maddow (@Maddow). The Air America site uses Silverlight. Alerts about Silverlight popped up immediately when I reached the voting page. I’m a Mac person, and I consider Silverlight irritating. So after I voted, I tweeted this complaint. Air America responded on Twitter almost immediately. Ah, I thought, these people are Twitter smart. So I responded with this additional complaint. Then to give them credit for being savvy about Twitter, I also gave them a high five. @AirAmericaMedia, of course, immediately retweeted my good words.
I don’t know if Air America has been reading and learning from Laura Fitton, but this story is exactly the kind of thing she teaches business to do to make the most of social media in a changing world. It’s a good example of how business can use Twitter to communicate with its community of users.
Greetings to the folks from Air America Media who are now following me on Twitter. 🙂
Looking for Balloons and Insights to Online Behavior is an absolutely fascinating idea from DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency. You can win $40,000 by finding 10 red balloons that could be anywhere in the Continental United States.
Called the DARPA Network Challenge, registration ended on November 23. The contest itself begins on December 5. The first person to send in the latitude and longitude of all 10 red balloons wins the big bucks. Here’s how DARPA explains what they are up to:
. . . explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.
I can’t wait to see how long it takes real-time social media to put this information together for some lucky winner (or winners, if people decide to cooperate in order to win). You can follow news of the contest on Twitter @DARPA_News.
Males vs. females in social media has stats, graphs, and the male to female ratio for 19 social media sites. Overall, women are in the majority but the men have yet to notice and take effective action.
A big reason for not including Gears in Chrome for Mac in the interim, as we wait for HTML5 to solidify, is a technical hurdle.
The stand-alone Gears isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard, the newest version of the Mac operating system. A Google spokesman indicated earlier this month in an interview that it’s a problem with the new system, not with lazy development.
With browsers adopting HTML 5 standards as if they were already in some sort of stable recommended spec, I think the movement around HTML5 will intensify.
What beautiful HTML looks like from CSS Tricks is a PNG image. It’s a little hard to read at browser size, but I can imagine it at poster size on a classroom wall, where it would be very useful and instructive.
“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”
Other technology related words that Oxford considered this year include hashtag, intexticated, netbook, paywall, and sexting.
The L Word ended on Showtime in March. For people like me who don’t have Showtime, the final season is just now coming out on DVD. We are finally getting to see season 6 and watch how the series ended.
I say “watch how the series ended” carefully, rather than “watch how everything turned out.” The series ends with a lot of unanswered questions. Even though I haven’t seen it yet, I know it made a lot of fans unhappy to be left with plot lines hanging and odd character developments. I remember leaving the theater after seeing John Sayles Limbo, so angry about the ending that I wanted to kick the walls. I’m hoping with the last L Word DVD has played and I’ve seen it all, I won’t contemplate kicking the walls. I’m hopeful, but I see how other fans have reacted. I might want to wear tough shoes when I roll the last episode, and stock up on sheetrock.
The wait for season 6 to arrive on DVD has given me some distance from the story lines and my interest in knowing what is going on in the lives of the characters. That distance has led to some reflection about the phenomena of The L Word and its rise to success.
The L Word started in 2004. It was a cast of mostly women–usually at least 8 or 9 major female characters in the story line at all times–and few men. That fact alone is big. BIG. The L Word wasn’t a series with 4 men and 1 woman who just tags along doing whatever the men do. Not 5 male cops and 1 female cop. Not 4 male lawyers and 2 female lawyers. Not 4 men friends and a couple of occasional female sidekicks. Not 6 male doctors and 2 female doctors. No, this was women’s stories, women’s lives.
Grant me that: a series about women is a big deal. As it would be if another one made it on air today.
These women were different from the usual stories about nurses or doctors or army wives that deal with women. That’s because all the main characters except one were some variation on not straight. That’s another BIG deal. Gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and several other points along the gender scale were depicted by major and minor characters in the course of the series.
@chookooloonks tweeted a TED Talks video by Chimamanda Adichie about “The Danger of the Single Story.” I hope you take 20 minutes to listen to this video, but I’ll summarize by saying that we form opinions and stereotypes about people, countries, cultures, religions, and many other things based on a single story, a single idea. That can include a single idea about gender or sexuality. My reply tweet was that the single story of most American television is white, male, and straight. To me, The L Word is important simply because it departs from that monovision.
Grant me that: a series about lesbians is a big deal. As it would be if another one made it on air today.
The dramatic hooks that come with stories about women who are not straight are both personal and political. You get stories about relationships and character development, work life and everyday life. You also get politically charged plot lines about things like:
dealing with family reactions to sexuality issues
dealing with the medical establishment when a loved one is ill
having children
adopting a child in a lesbian relationship
dealing with hate-related discrimination
dealing with work-related discrimination
dealing with don’t ask, don’t tell
wanting to marry a life partner
coming out to family, but also to the public when it may affect a career
changing gender identification
abortion decisions and services
The two big-name stars, Jennifer Beals and Pam Grier, play half-sisters. Women of color filled other major character roles as well. This allowed story lines around racial politics.
The political climate of the Bush adminstration factored into the show, too. It could hardly be avoided at a time when progressive thinking was gaining political traction and a majority of people were eager for change.
Gays and lesbians were in the news. From propositions on state ballots to famous lesbians getting married, sexual identity was on people’s radar and under discussion.
Let’s narrow down the discussion to the star of The L Word–Jennifer Beals. Jennifer Beals was in something like 50 movies before The L Word started. Jennifer Beals has always been able to deliver her lines in a convincing manner. She’s always been able to show any emotion with her face, her posture, and those expressive eyes. She’s always looked fabulous in a tank top, a power suit, or a beautiful dress.
In The L Word, Jennifer Beals showed her talent while looking extremely good, every week, on TV. But, instead of playing opposite Campbell Scott or Denzel Washington, she played opposite Laurel Holloman or Marlee Maitlin. A weekly look at Jennifer Beals from the living room couch in a show that ran for 6 seasons adds up to a lot of visibility.
Other things were going on in the world between 2004 and 2009. Call it Web 2.0 or the explosion of social media or the rise of community. Whatever you call it, it’s a BIG deal. There was now a place to discuss what you were watching each week with the world at large. There was the weekly deconstruction of every episode of The L Word on afterellen, where people could and did comment about all things Jennifer.
There were and are fan sites devoted to Jennifer Beals or to Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman (the players of Bette and Tina, a couple dubbed Tibette by fans). People can and do comment, visit and talk about their feelings regarding Tibette. The L Word stars were the subject of intense discussion. Check out Tibette.com, One More Lesbian or Dorothy Surrenders.
Showtime put Jennifer Beals in special features, podcasts, interviews, and every other type of promotion they could come up with to market the show.
For a while, there was even a site called Our Chart, a social community based on a key concept from The L Word called the chart. The chart is a visual map of relationships intended to show how connected we all are. Fans went to ourchart.com to talk about the show, and about Jennifer Beals. (Since the series ended, this site has moved back into the Showtime web space.)
Don’t forget YouTube. There are now over 3500 videos on YouTube related to Jennifer Beals, many of them clips from The L Word. With comments.
So. Fans are seeing Jennifer Beals in the living room once a week. They’re discussing her on a favorite social media site. They’re invested in Jennifer Beals. She’s an icon among fans of The L Word and has acquired a multitude of avidly loyal fans from around the world. Her fan base has expanded, dare I say it, dramatically.
I’m not saying Jennifer Beals doesn’t deserve to be an iconic figure with millions of fans worldwide. She’s talented, she’s gorgeous. But she’s been both talented and gorgeous for a long time. So what am I saying?
Take a look at this table at Evolution: The Eight Stages Of Listening from Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. When I look at this table, I place what Showtime and The L Word accomplished in terms of interaction with their audience at about step 6 or 7. Do you agree with that placement? I think they got social media right, partly because of their own efforts, partly because the fans were so enthusiastic.
Challenging our cherished belief of the “self-made man,” he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”
One of Gladwell’s theories in the book is that people who put in the time to master something (according to him, it takes 11,000 hours) are ready when the moment arrives to become superstars using what they’ve mastered.
Ilene Chaiken, second from left, in a Keynote Panel at BlogHer09
Here’s part of what I’m saying—there were a “tide of advantages” that brought The L Word and its leading actress to the place where they are today. Let’s check them off:
Ilene Chaiken, the creator and producer of The L Word spent years getting to the point of being ready to seize the opportunity of the moment with this show. She had the idea, the dream. She’d pitched it before—several times—with no luck. She knew the stories, knew the lives. She’d put in her 11,000 hours. She was ready.
Jennifer Beals worked in 50+ movies and many TV shows since Flashdance in 1983. She was ready to be the lead character in a series that was bold and different.
The topic was women. Millions of people were hungry for stories about women.
The women were not straight. Millions of people were hungry for stories about lesbians and other non-straight characters.
The politics surrounding this kind of content was accepting enough that Showtime was willing to give it a chance.
Web 2.0. Social media. Community sites. Blogs. Millions of people were online every day seeking community and connection to others of a similar mind. They seized the opportunity to talk about every minute detail of The L Word with great passion.
Conventions. Not Star Trek Conventions. L Word Conventions. Taking media into the real world on global stages in numerous locations.
And it came to pass that The L Word rode that tide of advantages to the top. It made an icon of Jennifer Beals. It made Ilene Chaiken an influential name in the creative community of TV and movies. It carried a slew of actresses, web sites, community sites, and discussion boards along with it.
I know I’m leaving out a great deal by tying the idea of The L Word up within loops of social media. I haven’t mentioned how sexy the show was, for example. Sex is factor in success—just look at True Blood. I haven’t mentioned any of the criticisms of the show, and there are many. But, hey, that’s what comments are for. Can you add something you think figures into this particular story?
Maybe you’re not blogging about lesbians, or running fan sites about TV stars, or pitching ideas to Showtime. But you do have a passion for something. Keep at it, keep putting in your time, develop mastery. Be ready to ride the wave of your own tide of advantages. Keep up with what’s changing and learn how to use those changes to achieve your own goals. Work it. That’s what I’m saying about success.
Usability Issues that Impact Online Learning from Faculty Focus doesn’t mention specific tools that meet some of the standards suggested for good usability in online learning, but it does tell you some things to strive for:
Good usability for online learning materials means the site, content, and media are easy to find, use, and navigate. And good usability for people means the interaction tools (such as email and discussion forums) are easy to use and facilitate getting input or help as needed.
It would be nice to see an exploration of the usability of the major online learning systems common to colleges. Has anybody done something like that already?
I think it says a lot about the economy, the culture, the Internet, and the power of personal blogging when Dooce can raise money for charity online by selling photos of The Former Congressman Charles. What was it my English teacher used to say? The personal is universal . . .
