Chasing lazy people on facebook: an Italian approach

Renato Brunetta, minister for innovation and public administration, has decided to use facebook to chase the “fanulloni”, literally “those-who-do-nothing”.

The Corriere della Sera reports that the minister’s reasoning is that civil servants in Italy spend, and therefore waste, a lot of their time on facebook.

Consequently, he decided to fight this war on the “fanulloni’s” turf and opened a page on facebook. So far he as attracted more than 15 000 followers. It is not clear though, how his presence on facebook will somehow halt the presumed downward spiral in productivity.

One comment reads:

a proposito di fannulloni: che è andato a fare su facebook, a perdere tempo?

Speaking of “fanulloni”: what is he doing on facebook: wasting time?

A minister with a social media mission!

Webstock, New Zealand

Can you get to New Zealand for it?

5 full-on days. 8 hands-on workshops. 23 kick ass speakers. 26 must see presentations. Truckloads of design, development, user experience, web standards, content, community, innovation and inspiration.

Webstock ‘09 will again be held at the Wellington Town Hall. It’s slap-bang in the middle of Wellington’s central business district and only a minute’s walk from the waterfront and views of the harbour.

Wellington Town Hall
111 Wakefield Street
Wellington
New Zealand
Freephone: 0800 20 23 24

Click on the picture for more information.

Can Social Media help public radio

A report from WBUR’s december tweet-up.

The discussion centered around how, public radios such as WBUR can use social media.

Several proposals were made:

• Allow phone/PDA’s contributions and
• Encourage several low contributions ($1 to $5) in addition to the current four official fund-raisers
• Make the act of contributing seamless
• Any contribution, however low, should result in membership (currently the minimum is set at $60/year)
• Recognize contributors who referred other donors
• Distribute electronic badges (I pledged) in the form of a .gif that people/bloggers/twitterers can display on their social media platforms and…
• Create an electronic equivalent of membership donor card
• Open archives on a pay-per-download basis (though this might be tough to negotiate with NPR, CPB etc…)

Any other ideas?

Social Media Gathering at WBUR

Facebook/Twitter tie-up: have your say!

Public Diplomacy 2.0

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Public Diplomacy 2.0

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To download or email this video, click here.

How the State Department, with partners like YouTube, Google and Facebook, is taking advantage of social networking technology to tell America’s story and to encourage young people with political grievances to find outlets for their protests other than violent extremism.