Shel Holtz, Communicator

Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest.

Harvard University today (Jan. 12) announced its presence on foursquare, a new location-based, mobile social networking application. The service, which is accessible from smartphones and other mobile devices, enables students and visitors to explore the campus and surrounding neighborhoods while sharing information about their favorite places.

In addition to creating an up-to-date online rating guide of stores, restaurants, businesses, and other venues throughout Harvard Square, foursquare users can also employ the application as a game, in which they earn points, and ultimately acquire coveted foursquare “badges.” Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest. Users who have visited a predetermined number of sites on the campus will be awarded the Harvard Yard badge on their foursquare profiles.

Be sure to read the complete article. As David Armano noted in the tweet that pointed me to this article, this represents a smart use of FourSquare -- which still has plenty of doubters -- by an organization. I'm certain organizations of different natures will find a way to leverage the service to achieve their own business goals.

For all the upsides to social media, its viral nature can be difficult to handle. American Airlines learned that in the wake of the Haitian earthquake.

Several lessons here. First, you need to be vigilant in your monitoring to identify these issues as soon as they come up and address them quickly. Second, there's a phenomenon associated with being retweeted by celebrities with a lot of followers. And third, mainstream, traditional media can play a huge role in helping to remedy a situation that's gotten out of control.

A single TwitPic of a napping transit ticket collector in Toronto, Canada, has jump-started a major controversy that has made Toronto’s transit agency, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), the target of citizen and media anger.

Another story illustrates the impact social media can have on events. Citizen journalists may not be doing much first-reporting (per recent studies), but that's not the only way to influence the news or public reactions.

The very same "media industrial complex" activists accuse of bias, inaccuracy and all sorts of underhanded agendas remains the trusted source of information, while reports using social media channels emanating from within the activist community itself remain questionable.

Nathan Schock pointed me to this article in a note to the FIR Friendfeed room. It's the first in a series by new media veteran and online activist Kevin Grandia. Grandia reports that he obtained an important leaked document while at the climate change conference in Copenhagen. but because he exposed it over social media channels nobody took it seriously. Only when a mainstream newspaper reported the document was it deemed authentic. Even the activist community waited for verification from a trusted mainstream source before believing it.

Many of us who love social media get carried away with enthusiasm, believing that more has changed than actually has. It's easy to be lulled into this fantasy because a lot has changed and we've been changed.

But the transition has only just started. We haven't thrown off our dependence on mainstream media. We have no idea what kind of media environment we're ultimately transitioning to, only that it will be very different. One thing unlikely to change is our need for an authoritative voice, someone who strives for accuracy above all things and whose track record and credentials lead us to say, "If they said it, it must be true." Some form of professional journalism will still have a place in this altered landscape.

In the meantime, Grandia's piece makes it clear that we're still in the early stages of this transition (he calls it "online activism 1.7") and traditional mainstream media still matters. It's an important piece; I'm looking forward to Grandia's upcoming entries.

Employment of public-relations specialists is expected to increase by more than 66,000 jobs, or 24 percent, between 2008 and 2018.

PR's dead, huh?

U.S. News and World Report calls public relations specialist one of the 50 best careers in 2010, which notes the medium annual wage for PR specialists last year was around $51,300.

Welcome to a movement the tech crowd is calling "Gov 2.0" -- where mobile technology and GPS apps are helping give citizens like Newmark more of a say in how their local tax money is spent. It's public service for the digital age.

This CNN piece introduced me to SeeClickFix, an iPhone app that lets you shoot a picture of a problem -- a pothole, say, or graffiti -- and send it to city officials who can fix it. You can also spot reported problems near you that others have reported.

Here's a video on the service from the SeeClickFix website:

Mashable's Barb Dybwad posted an item about this video from Whirled Interactive, proclaiming it "another intelligent use of Google Wave as a video production medium." I was just as intrigued by Wave capabilities that flashed by in this video that I haven't yet uncovered. Time to go exploring.

According to MIT Sloan Assistant Professor Alessandro Bonatti, the same search and other technology that has certainly enabled advertisers to target particular audiences, such as men between 25 and 35 years old who work on Macintosh computers, is also creating greater on-line competition for the same audience, thus reducing the profitability of advertising on any targeted web site.

Too many people in the social media space think that taking your case to Twitter will give you an automatic win. Perez Hilton learned otherwise as he was smacked down -- way, way down -- by Sam Rubin of Los Angeles TV station KTLA. Accuracy and honesty are still worth a damn sight more than 1.5 million Twitter followers.

If information overload is such a problem, why don't we do something about it? We could if we wanted to. How many of us bother to tune our spam filters? How many of us turn off the little evanescent window in Outlook that tells us we have a new email? Who signs off of social media because there's just too much junk? Who turns off their BlackBerry or iPhone in meetings to ensure no distractions? Nobody, that's who — or very few souls anyway.

Tom Davenport, who holds the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, articulates in a post to the Harvard Business Publishing blog exactly what I've been trying to say for years: Information overload and the so-called "attention crash" are a lot of hogwash.

Davenport -- who co-wrote "Working Knowledge," the best book I ever read on knowledge management -- lists three reasons to dismiss the whole overload/crash meme. First, we keep hoping to find something new and exciting (and we often do). Second, it's just not so serious that it's worth expending any particular effort. And third, we don't assign enough value to our own attention (or else we wouldn't open junk mail delivered by the post office).

I'll add one: If something really is overload -- if we honestly don't care about it at all -- we'll ignore it.

Davenport concludes his post with these wise words:

Amen, brother.