Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

Chapter 14. The New Media University: MBA Program™Second Year

Scholastic institutions all over the world are preparing tomorrow's workforce for jobs, challenges, and market conditions that don't yet exist. This book and others, as well as blogs, micromedia channels, social networks, and the voices that power them, will collectively pave the way for all of us to learn and adapt to the perpetually evolving landscapes of media, business, and influence.

In the previous chapter, or, in keeping with our metaphor, in the first year of your MBA program, we studied the rise of the statusphere, the focus of awareness on attention dashboards, the thinning of attention span, and the competition for being a leading source of intellectual stimulation. We also discussed the fabric of the social effect and the influential factors that propel social objects across social graphs, thus making them legitimately viral.

I alluded to filtering earlier, and this is where we continue our higher learning. We'll then follow up with a study of how people currently populate the social landscape, in order to shape and fine-tune our social initiatives.

IMPROVING THE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO

Social media, for the most part, has thrived on the excitement of users when they find themselves being a part of a new (r)evolution that is defined through participation, consumption, sharing, and contribution. However, as we're experiencing this (r)evolution, our threshold for information processing, the disruption point, is lowering, ...