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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
It's harder to find examples of social media *making* a business, although there are clear examples of it helping when it's done right. I'm going to ping @johnvlane on Twitter to swing by here, because I know he has some good ones.
But because it's far easier to kill trust (particularly with a megaphone) than to create it, there are plenty of examples of people getting fired and businesses coming down a notch because of how they used social media. Just locally speaking--<a href="http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/um-your-microphone-is-on-how-a-raleigh-bakery-screwed-the-pooch/">Crumb?</a> And then of course, there's when you're doing it wrong, so somebody else steps in--either to do your job, or just to mock. I hear @BPGlobalPR calling. And if you haven't read the story of <A href="http://streetgiant.com/2010/06/02/leroy-stick-the-man-behind-bpglobalpr/">Leroy Stick</a>, I highly recommend it.
FWIW, though, I don't see Silly Bandz as being dependent on social media either. But it also doesn't appear to be hurting them. It would be interesting to find a way to quantify the speed, spread, and death of a fad before social media. Your kid and mine both got them from the old ways. But they're also both too young to read, much less Tweet. What about the students I see here on campus for freshman orientation with arms full of them? Twenty years ago, they probably would have had to wait for that interaction with a cousin. Now that cousin might be on the other side of the country, but she's showing you the new fad through Twitpic *right now*--not at the family reunion in six months.
All this new technology comes down to an old cliche: You get out what you put in.
(<a href="http://blog.networksolutions.com/2009/5-stories-twittering-gone-bad/">Read some mostly non-business bonus stories of Twitter gone bad</a>)
What sorts of things are you wanting to do with Facebook that you can't do without apps? The only thing I can think of where I've run into that is the Picture of the Day app. I wish people would just use their built-in photo galleries. Even Flickr, or whatever external service. But once in a while, I'll see a thumbnail and want to see the rest, but it's "So-and-so has discovered their Picture of the Day!" and you have to have the app to see it.