Laura Mansfield Bower

I want to thank Laura Mansfield Bower for a FABULOUS guest lecture presentation to our Social Media Class at Tennessee this morning - very insightful advice on social media and blogging in PR / Advertising! Thank you again for sharing your expertise and experiences with the class! 🙂

Here are a few readings for today:

“A decade from now some young whippersnapper of a reporter will look up this article and laugh at the archaic “social media” tool we once called Twitter. But that future arse-of-a-journalist simply won’t grasp the significance of the Twitter revolution to the world of sports reporting. During the NFL playoffs this year one-third of players were on Twitter. These athletic millionaires offered a limitless supply of articles to write with their poorly filtered ramblings.”

Some of the brightest minds in social media in the country are coming to Knoxville Wednesday, April 13, 2011 for the can’t miss marketing and PR event of the year: Social Slam 2011! As social media continues to evolve, it’s not just about being on Twitter, Facebook and other networks. Now, businesses need to get serious about how they’re using digital media, how to measure it, and ultimately how it affects the bottom line. Social Slam will teach both experienced social media practitioners and those just getting involved how to do just that!”

Money can buy you friends on Facebook, if you’re a marketer. But the price is going up. A whitepaper by social marketing and analytics firm Webtrends, which studied 11,000 Facebook ad campaigns in the U.S., found that the cost of advertising on Facebook that encourages a user to become a “fan” on the brand’s Facebook page is $1.07.”

Since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, different forms of media have played a critical role in the spread of revolutionary thought and in bringing about political, economic and social change. During the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ first steps were to seize the telephone exchange, the railway stations and the main bridges going in and out of Petrograd, the capital of the Russian Empire. This allowed them to control the message about the revolution and to prevent counter-revolutionary propaganda. They then used the wireless room of a loyal warship to broadcast messages appealing to the Russian people to support the revolution.”

What ever happened to the mashup? It seems like it was only a few years ago that we were breathlessly talking about mashing up Flickr photos with Google Maps to create something entirely new. But now when we talk of mashups it’s seemingly only to describe music, like DJ Gregg Gillis of Girl Talk whom mixes-and-matches hundreds of pop songs at a staggering rate.The answer, simply enough, is that the mashup has become woven into the fabric of the modern web. Now, instead of talking about mashups, we talk about APIs, apps and cloud computing, all of which are rewiring the internet and have the potential to dramatically change the way brands connect with consumers.”