There is no doubt that social media has gained a foothold in our personal and business lives. Yet despite the fact that many businesses and associations are embracing it’s use and realizing the qualitative and quantitative results/benefits from adopting specific tools for specific purposes, for many the decision and choice are still a crapshoot. Having a clearly defined objective is essential for choosing the right tool/service/media.

This video from Will It Blend with special guest Forrester analyst and Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff reinforces that thought.

It’s all about having clear objectives and using the right tool for the job. Otherwise, as the video illustrates you end up with nothing more than a pile of dust. If you need a refresher to help you get focused or even a starting point take a look at a few of these eBooks:

• Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter - Geekpreneur
• The Zen of Blogging - Hunter Nutall
• What is Social Media - iCrossing
• A Primer in Social Media - SmashLab
• We Have a Website. Now What? - Craig Rentmeester
• Social Web Analytics - Social Web Analytics
• Blogs & Social Media - PRSA

For a number of other great eBooks on Social Media, check out Chris Brogan’s recent blog post: 20 Free eBooks About Social Media.

I’ve written about Dr. Michael Wesch a number of times in the past. For those of you not familiar, Dr. Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University and heads the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of cultural anthropology undergraduates exploring the impact of digital technology on human interaction and human interaction on digital technology.

Wesch, dubbed the Explainer by Wired Magazine has created and produced videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed over seven million times and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. He is perhaps most known for his videos that concisely but accurately describing the fundamental concepts surrounding the Web 2.0 phenomenon (Web 2.0… The Machine Is Us/ing Us). He recently did a public presentation on June 17, 2008 at the University of Manitoba where he described his own attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.

“It’s basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my students to work online,” he explains. “We tried every social media application you can think of. Some worked, some didn’t.”

Image by University of Manitoba

The video I am linking to above on the University of Manitoba website is all about media literacy and how he engages his students at Kansas State University. This 66 minute video provides some insight into how he tries to make students knowledge-able (able to create and critique knowledge) rather than knowledgeable (mind dump education). The 66 minute video is lengthy but well worth the time if you are involved in education or professional development or are interested in what is really possible and how it can be done using collaborative technologies to engage and interact with learners.

This excellent slide show demonstrates the growing importance of micro-blogging and makes a case for “social objects” rather than social networking, and then lays out 5 principles for building services around them. Engestrom argues that “sites that fail are just ’social networks’,” whereas sites that have succeeded have organized around social objects such as music, photos, favorite websites, and books. He contends that microblogging with such applications as Twitter are disruptive because they are simpler, cheaper, and only need a mobile device to work, making them also more convenient.

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