Charlie Southwell ‏ (@charliesaidthat) tweeted a link to an insightful article about the return on investment for social media. Social Media and ROI: Some clarity. (Again.) by Oliver Blanchard points out that the question, “What is the ROI for social media” is the wrong one:

The question is too broad. Too general. It is like asking what the ROI of email is. Or the ROI of digital marketing. What is the ROI of social media? I don’t know… what is the ROI of television?

So what is the right question? Blanchard nails it with:

The question, then, is not what is the ROI of social media, but rather what is the ROI of [insert activity here] in social media?

Check out the rest of the article for some other excellent points.

It’s not often tech writers get included in a meme, so I’ll post this here.

The words used to describe major events seem to propagate through the blogosphere in the much the same way that earthquakes affect our planet. So says a study done by physicist Peter Klimek of the Medical University of Vienna.

The study looked at the frequency of words in political blogs, and found that the topics emerged and decayed in a manner similar to the Gutenberg-Richter law, which describes the relationship between magnitude and number of earthquakes in a given region.

As reported on Wired.com’s Wired Science blog:

“We show that the public reception of news reports follow a similar statistic as earthquakes do,” the researchers conclude. “One might also think of a ‘Richter scale’ for media events.”

However Duncan Watts, a researcher at Yahoo! Research, … notes that drawing mathematical analogies between unrelated phenomena doesn’t mean there’s any deeper connection. …

“But they’re all generated by different processes,” Watts said. “To suggest that the same mechanism is at work here is kind of absurd. It sort of can’t be true.”

See the full article on Wired Science, and the published report on arXiv.org.

If I had more time I could write shorter manuals.

I love style guides almost as much as I love disagreeing with them. That’s why I’m excited to get my hands on Yahoo’s new house style book, The Yahoo! Style Guide. The style guide is available in hard copy (starting July 6) but much of the content is available on Yahoo’s style site at styleguide.yahoo.com.

I’m glad to see Yahoo has axed a lot of hyphens: 3D, not 3-D; email, not e-mail; and website, not web-site (in which they agree with AP).

Oddly, Yahoo offers Ni-MH for nickel-metal hydride (as in the batteries). Typically chemical compounds are not expressed using hyphens (NiCad anybody?).

Lifehacker puts it nicely:

As with any style guide, nothing’s written in stone—just because Yahoo or AP declares a style doesn’t mean it’s the only correct way (sorry Yahoo, but we’re sticking with “internet” rather than “Internet“)….

Based on my brief time there, the yahoo style site looks like a good resource. I’m looking forward to getting the book as well.