@RyanNewYork
He sits on the Broad of Directors of The Ali Forney Center, where he is the founding producer of their annual Broadway Beauty Pageant fundraiser. He's also on the Board of Directors of The Deconstructive Theatre Project and the Board of Advisers of the startup TV Dinner.
He's also a director/producer, who lives in Brooklyn, NY and created the musical White Noise. Ryan writes about politics for The Huffington Post & The Hill. He has been a guest editor for Queerty and is the host of the podcast Gay History: Uncut.
Here Ryan blogs about politics, film, TV, history, religion, science, books, theater, digital media, LGBT issues, Bushwick & Williamsburg, New York City, and anything else he's interested in at the moment. Oh, and he'll probably talk a lot about himself.
This is a personal blog. Any opinions expressed here and on my Twitter represent my own and not those of my employer or clients.
Here’s me talking about Twitter’s 7th Birthday. Click here to watch.
You know you’re in a pretty weak position as a dictator when you’re threatened by a girl band. #FreePussyRiot
— Ryan J. Davis (@RyanNewYork) August 17, 2012
Davis said most Twitter users recognize that the Twitter feed of a celebrity such as Britney Spears or Justin Bieber is more PR outlet than “authentic and personal.” But he argues people expect more from officeholders.
“When you’re a lawmaker, you’re dealing with issues with a little more complexity than when your latest single comes out,” he said. “The stakes are certainly higher.”
Cory Booker’s bizarre take on Bain Capital on Sunday’s Meet The Press has been talked about lots over the last 48 hours. We now know that Cory took over $500,000 from the financial services industry during his campaign, including at least $40,000 from Bain partners. Not small change for a Newark mayor’s race.
My colleague Evan Moody performed sentiment analysis on Twitter to see what users of the social network thought about Booker’s statements. The results show that overwhelmingly, Twitter users thought Cory was wrong on Bain and support the President’s view that it’s fair game during the campaign. The big red spike is bad news.
I clearly agree with the vast majority of Twitter users and hope Mr. Booker comes around.
lambjustin Asks:
ryanjdavis Said:
It’s a great question and one that Twitter has clearly thought about, since reports surfaced they were interested in acquiring Instagram too.
Images have rapidly become the lifeblood of social media, they are the most favored content syndicated the Facebook News Feed and have spawned other image-centric networks like Pinterest and Tumblr.
Twitter has tried to incentivize picture sharing, updating their website functionality and integrating with iPhone’s camera. To some extent, they’ve been successful. Instagrams make great Twitter content and are now responsible for the largest percentage of images shared over Twitter. So its growth has so far been a net positive for Twitter.
I was talking about Twitter’s future with a digital director of a large organization a few days ago and he convinced me that Twitter’s space as a real time news and information service has yet to be challenged.
As long as Twitter maintains it’s hold on journalists and other news makers, it will keep an influential active audience. It’s too early to be talking about the decline of a channel that sees over 340 million tweets a day, up from 230 million tweets a day in September.
So until something else comes along, I’m gonna keep tweeting.
Photo by William Beasley.
Thanks for helping me reach my personal fundraising goal of $500 for my mom’s St. Jude Children’s Hospital walk on Saturday!
Even this girl isn’t on Google+.
(via liquidzoot)
It’s really, really difficult to create a trending topic. It takes a lot of tweets, from a lot of users, over a sustained amount of time. But, even if your topic doesn’t trend you can still generate buzz through unique impressions.
Last night, when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoed marriage equality, I took to Twitter with the hashtag #shameonyouchris and directly asked people to tweet with the hashtag. Thanks to the support of many digital activists, we generated 405 original tweets, totaling 1,152 with retweets and mentions. In a world where every follower reads every tweet (which we don’t live in) the maximum audience was 403,307.
These pictures are just a few of my favorite #ShameOnYouChris examples.
Even though we didn’t officially trend, we did get mentioned in The Huffington Post, and Broadway celebs like Audra McDonald, Neil Haskell, and Rory O’Malley participated.
This goes to show that even if you don’t trend, a well-executed, real time hashtag campaign can still make a mark. Especially when you’re dealing with someone as shameful as Gov. Christie.
Hands down the best part of this is “G+ - I’m a Google employee who eats donuts.”
(via liquidzoot)
Some of my favorite thinkers on Twitter.
On Wednesday, I lectured at The Yale School of Management for Dina Mayzlin’s social media class. I spoke about social media best practices, what to expect out of digital in the next few years, and some of my favorite Blue State Digital case studies.
I asked the students to tweet the takeaways from my talk, using the hashtag #YaleSM. You can see what they learned by viewing the images above.
I get asked often by clients to explain the difference in tone between the different social networks. The above image is a bawdier version of my typical answer.
The question I get asked most often over Twitter, along with my typical response.
