Two Boys Opera published a short video showing how silly our online habits appear when we use them in the physical world, to promote their opera at the London Coliseum, running this month and next.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

Affluence Collaborative recently released data comparing the reasons that afffluent Americans follow brands on social networks, compared to the general population. I indexed the data to create the chart below, and it looks like:

• Affluent Americans are more prone to following a brand when the brand’s social account is mentioned in an article or ad.
• Affluent Americans are far less likely than the general population to follow a brand for discounts or deals, or for entertainment value. Affluence Collaborative found that the general population tends to follow brands to get deals or discounts.
• Affluent Americans are far more more likely to follow a brand based on professional interests, compared to the general population — which means that anyone hiring senior executives should consider opportunities for using the brand’s social accounts to support recruiting

You can review Affluent Collaborative’s raw data.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

Clay Shirky teaches Social Media Theory and Practice at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and recently described the ways that social media are changing how websites are architected and built. Listen to the recording on Drupal Voices.

Some of his points include the following:

When we see technology characteristics that are significantly different than what we are used to, we can not just add those new technologies to existing systems and make the existing systems work better and faster. The first working steamboat was the fourth attempt the inventor had. The steam engine required a re-design of the boat itself. It couldn’t simply be applied to faster rowing of oars.

As we socialize business that were previously run by managerial oversight where the individual users or customers were not involved with each other, then we build those businesses on social platforms, things like content management systems require a re-engineering of the business.

Three examples of the redesign:

1. Once we add participation, the differences in participation occupy such a wide spectrum that the concept of a user breaks down.
2. We can target behavior rather than people as the content of the system. If you have spam on a system and the users don’t care, is it really spam?
3. The possibility of the users owning the system as designers and re-designers of the system (e.g., Stack Exchange).

Shirky talks about how Drupal makes web development more iterative and easier. He also describes ways that the culture of open source creates a culture of failing faster so that you can adapt to the changing conditions without over-investing time and energy into failed strategies. (Those interested in reducing the costs of innovation through faster experimentation should also see the Lean Start-up concepts published by Eric Ries, and you might also follow Eric Ries on on Twitter).

He talks about the Drupal open source community and some of the qualities that help to make Drupal a successful open source project. He talks about how people in the Drupal community apply the principles of Cognitive Surplus, and the role of technology in social change, as well as in the field of journalism.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

Forrester recently published the following stats about the use of Twitter by financial services firms that they selected:

• Consumers on Twitter earn more than $85,000 in annual income on average, 9% higher than the average income of US online adults overall.
• Slightly more than one-third of US online adult Twitter users agree with the statement “I often recommend financial products and firms that I like to my friends and acquaintances,” compared with 21% of US online adults overall.
• 45% of online US adults who have a Twitter account are interested in interacting with financial services firms via Twitter.
• Consumers say they are interested in receiving promotional alerts, financial advice, and customer service from their financial provider via Twitter.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

The location of your data changes your protections from illegal search and seizure by the federal government. Specifically, if your data is stored in Gmail or Google Calendar, then the government can force Google to hand over your data, and, using a sealed subpeona, Google may not be able to tell you about it. However, if you store your data on your own computer — or, in the case of one TechCrunch writer, you switch to a paper calendar — then the government has to subpoena you directly, in order to get your data.

The only determinant of whether the government has to inform you about taking your data is where the data lives.

Is there an opportunity for new applications that place all functionality in the cloud, and leave the data on your local machine, where users are concerned about privacy?

A few months ago, I wrote an article, and then a second, about the rising opportunity for applications that protect consumer privacy by charging for their application, instead of selling their users’ data through advertising-related services.

As consumers grow more aware of the the threats to their privacy from many angles, there will certainly be market opportunities to fill.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.