Social media tools are a great way to get to know your audience better and for less expense, than you ever have before. Yet, social media tools seem to change overnight. As Heidi Klum says on Project Runway, “One minute you’re in, the next, you’re out.” For social media marketers, communicators, and researchers, this means not only keeping your finger on the pulse of public conversation but also on how that conversation is getting around. New technology impacts the quality, quantity, and use of information as it moves across a networked society. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, both the medium and the message will impact your relationship with your audience. Zeitgeist is a German term that means, literally, the spirit of the times. It captures what’s on our mind, our mood, and the energy level across society. As our world becomes more interconnected, we have the ability to watch the zeitgeist of the country online through different lenses, from sophisticated ones … [Read more...]
The Positive Psychology Of Entrepreneurship
A version of this post appeared in my blog Positively Media on Psychology Today. There's a lot of buzz about entrepreneurship right now. This is especially obvious if you hang out on LinkedIn, Twitter, or cruise the Ning social networks. It is not surprising, given the amount of people looking for jobs due to cutbacks and restructuring and a few bankruptcies thrown in for good measure. So far, the government plans to promote economic growth have tried to stimulate a lot of things, but stimulating entrepreneurs doesn't seem to be one of them. It's important to encourage entrepreneurship and not just for economic reasons. Entrepreneurship is the ultimate exercise in developing the attributes that we know from positive psychology to be essential to having a good life: self-competence, optimism, engagement, and resilience. I'm against government stimulus the way it's usually done for the same reasons that I'm for entrepreneurship. Sending people checks in the mail may give them … [Read more...]
