Forbes Magazine is about as old school stogdy as it gets. Yet, here is an article in Forbes about the power of social media.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/09/07/social-power-and-the-coming-corporate-revolution/.

I went through the list of projects, especially the ones on which I work, to see who had RSS, who was on Facebook, who was on Twitter. Many projects do align themselves with these tools; but if one looks deeper, one finds that they use them very little.

We should not need the news of the revolutions in Eqypt and other places in the Middle East to realize the power of utilities like Facebook.

I follow for my ScienceSpring blog a whole bunch of institutions: a dozen of the U.S. D.O.E. labs, and the U.S. D.O.E. itself; NASA, and separately at NASA Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, and Webb; at CERN, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS, LHCb, and CERN itself, along with off-shoots like Quantum Diaries, SymmetryBreaking, Interactions.org; every project at WCG; as many projects running BOINC as I can find. I can tell you that all of the D.O.E. facilities, all of CERN, and all of NASA use RSS, Facebook, and Twitter extensively. The only group running a project using BOINC software to really get the message is WCG's cep2 group at Harvard, described to me by one of them as "2-1/2 men and women" Somehow they find the time. They are all over this. It is having results. They are getting media attention, they are getting people attaching and running their tasks. WCG itself took a long time to get this right. But now they have it all figured out, especially Facebook and Twitter.

I think that every project admin should read the Forbes article and think ab out what they might do to utilize these no longer new forces in the world.

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