At IDEO’s Humanizing Social Media event in February 2010, we explored the implications of social media on interpersonal communication. Rather than perpetuating the discussion of case studies and e-commerce during Social Media Week, this social experiment left us questioning how the communications shifts have impacted the way we develop new friendships online. Our cellphones were left at the front door and we exchanged our clothes for a plain white t-shirt affixed with buttons which carried tags that describe ourselves, like “blogger” and “geek” in my own case.

It was an thought provoking exercise, and now I can  finally share the results from this experiment with you.  We had a great night at this event, so much that I was awarded the honor of “Person with whom you’d most like to stranded on a desert island with”!  Look for yours truly to take a staring turn during the panel discussions, as captured in this video.

A little further news and notes not quite long enough to warrant a blog post of their own:

• The Case Study of my work on  SpaFinder’s Deal Days event using social media has been published.  Our outreach to bloggers and through social media resulted in at least 1200% increase in word-of-mouth discussion of their brand, successfully launching this event while working to promote their brand and improve SEO.  My responsibilities also included developing best practices for their social media strategy, in addition to helping launch their iPhone app and video production work.
• Following the announcement at Facebook’s developers conference, I tried to answer what  Facebook Open Graph means for website owners, in a post Blue Fountain Media’s blog.  Since then we have an even better picture of both privacy concerns and the benefits of the platform for casual users and developers alike.  In many ways Facebook is poised to become the first semantic search engine by integrating their social network with the rest of the internet.
• BrewNoob.com has officially launched!  Only one year ago I created a Twitter account to share my love of tasty beers, and now it has grown into a blog in its own right.

The best is yet to come, so come back soon for exciting updates as I grow professionally (and personally) online and off.