In an interview with USA Today, General Mills Chief Marketing Officer Mark Addicks points out that the cereal box is one of most read items today. On the average three people per household read the box up to twelve times. Now they can be providing more content – to those folks who have smartphones. They are also looking at apps.

Apparently we can expect to start seeing these tech treats later this year. Addicks didn’t want to get in too much details, in case competitors might be reading, but he did offer this…

“You point to a logo and things start to appear,” he says. “Maybe some functional content will pop up on a cake-mix box, or you might see entertainment and games coming from a cereal box. What I’m hoping for is pure entertainment.”

It’s fun but I think it also speaks to the growing ubiquity of smartphones. Brands generally do not shoot for attracting the bleeding edge of customers – they want the critical mass.

Thanks to a grant from the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities Program (MIRC), WGTN-TV 3, formerly only accessible for cable subscribers in Worthington, can now be accessed through the Internet.

Available at www.wgtntv3.com, anyone with an Internet connection can watch live coverage of local sports games, community meetings and other events covered by WGTN-TV 3.

The events will also be archived for viewing at anytime.

The benefit for snow birds and other seasonal or past residents is easy to imagine. And although it’s tough to imagine that we’ll ever see snow in Minnesota – it will come. And when it does it will be more difficult for many people to get around; viewing programs at home is more reasonable for folks with any mobility issues.

The ability to view anytime may be at least as valuable. People lead busy lives and attending local community meetings can be impractical – but imagine being able to view at your leisure. Suddenly it is possible to keep up on the Nobles County Board or Worthington City Council. And once you’re informed, it’s easier and makes more sense to get involved.

It’s also now easier to get involved on the other side of the camera – the article indicates that there may be more opportunity for local programming – and I suspect the incentive may be higher when you know there’s a chance for a greater audience. The Daily Globe reports..

“As time goes on, we’ll try to further develop other programs within the community,” Reeves said.

“We’re hoping that this will also encourage and help people become more involved with how to film,” Schnieder said. “Staff-wise, the station is limited, but maybe we can get something going with community education classes. There are a lot of talented people in the area, and we’d like to get them involved.”

It will be interesting to hear if there is an increase in civic participation and community engagement.

Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites.

I guess I’m a little surprised that 5 percent of those surveyed weren’t online. The teen and preteen in my house would have a lot of extra time on their hands if they were in that demographic. The report doesn’t focus on who is and isn’t online as much as what’s happening online.

The not so surprising news is that sometimes kids are mean online – and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they ignore the meanness, sometimes they step up and defend each other. Here are the numbers:

• 88 percent of social media using teens have seen people been mean online
• 15 percent felt that they had been the target of online cruelty.
• The most popular reaction to witnessing online meanness was to ignore the situation (95 percent)
• 84 percent reported having seen people come to the defense of the targets of meanness
• 80 percent that they themselves have defended folks online.
• 78 percent report at least one good outcome from using social media
• 41 percent report at least one negative outcome
• 44 percent of the teem social media users lie about their age to access social media sites. (Which would indicate to me that 44 percent were under 13, since that’s the stated required age for Facebook users.)

Facebook was overwhelming the most popular social media network. Twitter was one of the fastest growing. Google Plus was too new to really rank, though Google Buzz (now defunct or near defunct) was not popular.

I scan my kids’ social media use daily – so I wasn’t so surprised by most what I found. I was a little surprised at where kids were learning about how to use social media – but I was surprised in a good way. Here is what Pew reports…

For general advice and influence, parents are still the top source for teen internet and cell phone users. However, teens receive advice from a wide array of sources.

• 86% of online and cell phone-using teens say they have received general advice about how to use the internet responsibly and safely from their parents.
• 70% of online and cell-using teens say they have gotten advice about internet safety from teachers or another adult at school.
• 45% have received advice from friends or classmates, 45% have received general advice from an older relative, and 46% have received internet safety advice from a brother, sister, or cousin.
• 58% of teen internet and cell phone users say their parents have been the biggest influence on what they think is appropriate or inappropriate when using the internet or a cell phone.
• 18% of teens say their friends have been their biggest influence on appropriate internet or cell phone behavior.
• 18% say “no one” has influenced them.

I’m surprised because so many parents tell me they are lost when it comes to many of the details – but I think parents get the big picture. I was just having a conversation about kids and social media with colleagues. First – kids don’t always understand the details as well as we think. Second – I think they very often miss that big picture – like a strange is a stranger. So in the end I think the Pew Report demonstrates that kids are still kids and parents still have a role to play in helping them become responsible adults (online).

On a personal note – it’s super helpful to know the details of social media with young teens. My new best threat is tagging my preteen in Facebook posts in embarrassing places, which would be anywhere with me these days. Stops her from complaining instantly.

Got Broadband? Building Businesses on Rural Broadband Investments
December 14, 2011 11:30 a.m. ET
About the Webcast
USDA invites you to join us on Wednesday, December 14, to learn more about the opportunities presented by new broadband investments made through USDA Rural Development’s broadband programs in rural communities across the country. You will hear from several USDA representatives as well as representatives from innovative companies that are taking advantage of broadband to attract and develop businesses in rural America. (Get details)

And the Minnesota event…

Creating a Business Facebook Page
December 15, 2011 noon (to 1:00)
There are more than 800 million active users on Facebook and more than half log into Facebook every day. It’s a place to connect with existing customer or make connections to potential new customers. But there’s definitely a right way to do it – both in terms of Facebook policies and to make the most of the different types of connection. Join us for an introduction to the different types of Facebook accounts (user, group, page, event…) and instruction on how to create a page. (Get details)

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, speaking in Minneapolis Wednesday, said the company will get the vast majority of its revenue from advertising for years to come.

And he says that means Gmail, YouTube, and other online applications and services from Google will remain free.

“I’m sure it will,” Schmidt said during a forum at the University of Minnesota. “You never say ‘never’ or ‘always.’ But our model of Google apps as a free service for universities and the average consumer is working really well for us.”

Schmidt said advertising revenue makes everything click for Google.

I buy Google ads on behalf of a few clients – a very small drop in a big pond of their revenue – but even I can see that it’s got to be pretty profitable. Because the cost per click is based on a bidding process, I think that it’s likely that costs will go up as more and more people buys ads. I’ve certainly seen costs rise over the years (8-10) that I’ve been working with Pay Per Click ads. As the article points out, it’s a business model that seems to work. From the consumer perspective, it does keep services free – although as we’ve written here before, free often comes at a cost. And right now the costs is privacy.

Schmidt also spoke about copyright legislation. Sounds like he’s for copyright – not so for the current legislation. I suspect the hot point is making it illegal to index copyright material, which he calls a slippery slope. He’s right – it means asking the search engines to start censoring.

You can see his presentation at the Um of M on the U of M website.

The St. Paul Public Library has been awarded a $100,000 grant to create special computer labs for middle and high school students that the funders hope will become national prototypes.

The plan is to get students creating, not just consuming content.

The grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Science and the MacArthur Foundation is to the St. Paul Public Library to plan and the design the labs.

The local library, the city and the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library will provide another $65,000 in in-kind support.

Dunbar’s number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.

We both wondered about the impact of social media on that number. I thought about research reported in the Daily Yonder two years ago about the difference between rural and urban social media use…

The report looked at 3,000 MySpace accounts (at the time MySpace was more popular than Facebook) of rural and urban users.

They found that rural users had fewer MySpace friends, and the friends that they did have tended to reside closer to their home, that rural women are more likely to use social media than men, and they are more apt to set their profiles to “private” than their urban counterparts. The article said, “In short, rural users relied on social media primarily to bond with existing close friends rather than building friendship bridges to users in other areas of the country.”

We replicated the study ourselves at the time (using Facebook and Twitter) and found pretty much the same thing. Our response base was 74% rural. Most folks tended to have online friendships that coincided with offline relationships. Back when we did the story I asked about the value of online connections…

I also asked what people found most valuable about social media. Keeping in contact with families and friends far away was a top reason. Getting to know people locally was another. Some use it only to connect around specific events or issues. It would be interesting to do the study again to see if folks felt the same way.

I read an article from someone who had a very different view on connections. The article said that Dunbar’s number is totally irrelevant in social media. The author (Jacob Morgan) maintains that Dunbar is talking about close relationships and that good social media is built more on acquaintances (or as he says weak links).

What social networks have allowed us to do is to build massive networks of weak ties. I use these weak ties all the time to reach out to folks for guest articles, business requests, speaking engagements, or ideas and advice. The mere fact that we are connected to people online creates a type of weak tie because you can always reach out to the person you are connected with.

I think one main difference between the people who took our survey two years ago and this author comes back to the definition or “close relationships” in Dunbar’s definition and the different approaches to (maybe goals of) social networking. The survey takers were regular social network users; the author is a social media marketer. So one is using the network for a purpose and the rest seem to be using more as a pastime. Again, it would be interesting to repeat the survey now to see if more folks are using the network for a purpose other than keeping in touch.

I think there have always been super connectors – folks who interact with a lot of other folks. Social media makes it easier to mobilize connections more quickly – but can it turn people into super connectors who weren’t super connectors before.

Back to Dunbar and social media – is there a connection, lesson, change in Dunbar’s number with the advent of social media? I suspect that to stick true to the “close relationship” focus there may not be. Perhaps 150 is the hard fast number of friendships we can maintain at any given time – but while the number doesn’t change, friends do. Maybe social media allows us to keep friends on deck by maintaining connections to folks with whom we would have lost touch and in some ways maybe social media offers a glimpse at future friends by allowing us to connect to folks with shared interests who we don’t really know yet.

The Jackson Pilot featured QR Codes last week – including a big ol’ QR Code in the article that promotes a coupon for the paper. They talked about the benefits and drawbacks to QR Codes. The benefits include the ability to connect folks to information at their fingertips and the opportunity to be first in your industry or town or publication to use QR Codes. The drawback is that not everyone recognizes a QR Code yet – or has a smartphone to read them.

CityCamp Minnesota will launch our first unconference on Saturday, November 12, 2011 in Minneapolis with the broad theme of “Community 2.0.”

From great people in government, community organizations, and technology start-ups to “everyday citizens” who happen to be software developers, social media experts, open government advocates, and students, everyone is welcome.

• In a world of scarce public resources, how do we take advantage of the “2.0″ online, social media, and open source world to help build awesome local communities?
• How can we connect the interested public with 2.0 skills to work with government, community groups, neighborhood associations, local ethnic associations, and more?
• How can our local communities be bold, inclusive, open, accessible, wired and darn right innovative when bottom-up connects with top-down for collaboration?

The Conversations Starts with You.

Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

I often say it to myself as…

Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use Twitter (or email).

Turns out that sentiment was especially true for travelers trying to reach Delta during Hurricane Irene. According to Minneapolis St Paul Business Journal…

Delta, which canceled hundreds of flights in advance of the storm, kept callers waiting an average of nearly 34 minutes, according to a customer survey conducted by StellaService, The New York Times reported. That was second-worst of all airlines in the survey.

…

StellaService did say that Delta responded well on its Twitter account. The airline reacted to 100 percent of Twitter messages in the survey, with an average time of 14 seconds. American never responded to any Tweets.

I’m not trying to pick on Delta. Apparently they were much better than American Airlines – just pointing out the social media silver lining.