By Alexandra Reid
At Social Media Breakfast Ottawa yesterday, Sam Ladner presented her research on the mobile work life, which seeks to add to our current understanding of the smartphone and its impact on work/life balance, practically, culturally and symbolically.
According to Ladner, smartphones fundamentally transform the way we communicate at work, at home and in between. We are now contacting people as they move through multiple social contexts through an array of channels, including voice, text, email, calendaring and other applications. In her opinion, the complexity of the mobile space has been swept under the rug. Mobile phones are reconfiguring our habitual social interactions, yet we know little about how and in what ways those interactions are changing. Ladner’s presentation brought to light a number of important findings.
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Thank you for being with us for the seventh month of our new blog. In case you missed any, here is a recap of our posts from August, beginning with, in chronological order, the latest installments in our series, The Commercialization Ecosystem.
August 2: Getting university IP to market: How Canada falls short by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 4: Is your invention novel enough to warrant a patent? by David French
August 10: Getting university IP to market: Who needs to step up? by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 15: Getting university IP to market: Levering youthful ambition by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 22: 30 considerations for getting tech to market: Part 1 by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 29: 30 considerations for getting tech to market: Part 2 by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 31: File early, file often to accommodate changes in U.S. patent law by David French
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By Alexandra Reid
Social media has transformed the way we communicate online, but creating content for the social web does not require a revolution in the way that we have traditionally produced content. News value and proper writing style still apply; what has changed is the environment, which provides us with new tools that require a more conversational approach and faster pace to producing content.
New media still favours content that is newsworthy and concise. The core components of newsworthy content a hundred years ago maintain relevancy in today’s social web, which are timing, proximity, significance, prominence and humanity. The same rules for good writing are also valued today. Brevity is still regarded by many as the soul of wit. Grammar, spelling and proper sentence style are still integral to demonstrating professionalism and authority.
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By Alexandra Reid
It’s still the summer and the New Year seems a long way off, but while we’ve all been enjoying these nice manageable months, strenuous September has crept up and now lurks around the corner. This may be your best time to start thinking ahead about how to realign your social media strategy to stay competitive in the coming year.
It’s prep time, and for us social media professionals, that means looking at research and trends to predict where the social media engine will go and ensure we all stay on board. To make the most accurate predictions, I have taken into account projections made in the past as well as the most recent information I can find on the subject, adding my own interpretations based, in some cases, on my own experiences.
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This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.
— Winston Churchill
Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts
— Clare Luce Booth
While not an exclusively human characteristic, the ability to lie is certainly a characteristic of humans. Philosophers such as Augustine, Aquinas and Kant condemned the use of misinformation and deception inherent in human communication, referring to false statements made with the intent to install false beliefs a perversion that undermines trust in society.
Yet the capacity to lie is undoubtedly a universal human development, and our language is full of nuanced descriptors of this behaviour – from barefaced lies to bluffing, from exaggeration to fabrication, or from perjury to puffery. So it is not surprising that in this age of neuroscientific breakthroughs, a most intriguing area of investigation concerns the impact that modern technology is having on the human tendency to “stretch the truth.”
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