Posted: January 16th, 2012 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Marketing, Social Media Platforms | Tags: Facebook, tagging | No Comments »
Social media folks are saying that Facebook’s news feed favours everything but brand page content, and even suggesting that brands bump up the prominence of staff’s personal profiles through subscribers.
Does it make sense that Facebook would deprecate page updates, when surely the bulk of these brands are, have been or potentially will be advertisers on the platform? The argument I could see for that is that people prefer updates from their friends over brands, but since when does Facebook favour usability over dollars?
If that’s the way things are gonna be, Facebook needs to throw page admins a fan engagement bone. One almost universal wish in the hearts of social media managers is the ability to tag fans in our status updates. We obsess over it.
@ I wonder if those 2 guys are admins (being founders). @ Probably, but can you tag admins? I can't. Days elapse…
@ Finally figured this out, because it was bugging me: the founders they tag in the update are Pages, not profiles. Facebook did start allowing brands to tag people in comments when those users were already on the thread, but those people were notified of comments anyway. Small victory. Brands can also tag other brands (useful in the case of a nonprofit with corporate donors), but individuals would get a big charge out of being singled out, IMO, and benefit practically from potential new followers & rise in “influence”.
Facebook, show brand pages some love. Let us tag people. We promise not to abuse it & treat it like the privileged permission marketing it is!
@ @ *you* would, but think of all the assholes out there: Thanks for liking us-enter our contest, |Erica Glasier| ! @ @ It'd be a GREAT tool to thank donors, volunteers, people doing something nice for your nonprofit. @ @ We'd use it to thank donors, volunteers etc. To shout them out, not spam! The social web thrives on reciprocation & building other people’s social capital. Twitter bakes in the ability for brands to shine attention on their fans. Facebook, as a larger platform, needs to catch up. Fingers crossed this is in the works.
Posted: January 2nd, 2012 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: microblogging, tweeting, Twitter | Comments Off
At the end of 2011, I hit 10,000 tweets. 10,000 times I musta decided I had something to say or share with the world.
If it took 10 seconds to write each tweet—and many take longer while I dig around for a special character, edit a photo, or head down the street to report breaking news, for Pete’s sake—then I spent a good 27 hours, 46 minutes & 40 seconds tweeting.
I saw the big 10k coming for a few days and planned to use it for something great, but my phone updates differently than the web & I missed it. My 10,000th tweet was this book cover. Perhaps a 2012 fortune cookie?
To make up for missing the big tweet, I used 10,001 to mark the occasion.
To celebrate my 10,000th tweet, I donated $10 to Care Canada (@) for their work in the Congo. Peace on earth. ☮ Is spending more than a day of my life microblogging worth it?
Sure. Twitter feels critical. Twitter answers questions. Twitter serves news faster than any other channel.
Twitter lets me talk to everyone when I need to get my message to the most people, and to anyone when I want to share a thought with people I can’t reach any other way.
Twitter is media. It’s a global consciousness. It taught me to write short (not because you have to, but because it respects your audience & forces you to clarify your point) and to bastardize English forever with ampersands & emdashes.
It shows me different dimensions of the same friends & what it means to live in public.
Posted: December 22nd, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms, Sociology of Social Networks | Tags: activism, culture jamming, Facebook, newsjacking, privacy, Sponsored Stories | Comments Off
Facebook is trying to mitigate how ticked off people are going to be when Sponsored Stories ads start appearing in people’s news streams, with a subtle little ad of their own at the top of the page.
It's adorable how proactive Facebook is being before the storm of anger over ads in news feeds https://t.co/65UiDLVu They’re anticipating the backlash & trying to gently implant the meme that “selling your private information is just the cost of using Facebook”.
It all sounds very reasonable. What exactly’s going to happen?
Your likes, posts, check-ins etc will become little ads for the brands you’re interacting with.
Facebook’s reality checking us in advance because they know people may react especially poorly to being featured in ads for businesses they don’t necessarily want to promote. And…
If people are angry the first thing they may do is unlike the brands that are using them. Besides removing the permission marketing channel created by likedom, this will no doubt create acrimony (or “a bad brand experience”) between people & the brands they formerly trusted.
But that’s Facebook’s problem. On to the evil idea.
Privacy Activists could jack sponsored stories
Here’s how I think it could work:
- Activist likes a brand & ‘publicly’ posts culture-jamming content on their wall or
- Activist @-mentions brand in a ‘public’ status update without liking
- Activist collective and/or friends of the activist ‘like’ the post a lot, to drive up its credibility
- The robots that select sponsored stories notice & repost as an ad
- A Skittles-level takeover of Sponsored Stories ensues.
Possible? It relies on mighty slack non-human CRM between Facebook & its customers, the advertisers—that is, nobody actually checking the content of the stories that algorithms think are relevant & popular. And it relies on non-anonymous collective action. But people have been in the mood to occupy lately, don’t you think?
Posted: December 16th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: Heather Dooce Armstrong, Urban Dictionary, wrong-piping | 3 Comments »
It totally wasn’t! I wanted to link to it at the end of this article, just in case you’re not a paranoid social media professional, and it wasn’t there!
So I submitted it. It’s not quite writing a Wikipedia entry, but I’m feeling pretty smart. Here’s my defintion:
Wrong-piping: Accidentally using the wrong social media account to utter personal, offensive, or otherwise noticeably off-brand statements.
The wrong pipe may be used either by software glitch or user error (forgetting to switch accounts); the former holds slightly more water with an angry employer.
And my example:
After wrong-piping about her boozy weekend shenanigans one time too many, Heather was fired from her corporate social media job.
I named my fictional wrong-piper “Heather” for Heather “Dooce” Armstrong—not technically a wrong-piper, but in her honour as the generally-acknowledged first person to get fired in spectacular fashion for personal social media.
Posted: December 15th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: mobile, road rage, Twitter, untargeted advertising, wrong-piping | 1 Comment »
Among all the nitpicking & general confusion around the new Twitter UI, it’s comforting to see our old friend, the ‘Twitter Go Mobile’ ad still greeting us inanely upon signout.
This drives me nuts because I access Twitter about 150,000 times/day from mobile. How can they not know that?
I have a better idea for this space: “Hey, we noticed you’ve signed out more than once today. Got several accounts? Here’s how to easily switch between them* without enduring the godforsaken clusterdance that is Twitter’s password autofill.”
And then present me with that helpful ability instead of the ultimate in rage-inducing untargeted advertising.
*Just realized this may be a feature & not a bug. Wrong-piping would surely spike if I was merrily flipping between accounts all day. Wouldn’t want to end up on next year’s 21 Most Horrific Social Media Facepalms.
Posted: December 5th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: Facebook, photos, privacy, tagging | Comments Off
Ever notice that when you tag someone in a photo, you’re forced to allow their friends access to the image? Not enormously private if either tagger or taggee was trying to keep a low profile relationship with regards to the taggee’s friends.
See—so you’re choosing your friends to see your photo there—basically the most private setting without getting all specific.
But right underneath, in palest #808080, it’s noted that friends of the tagged person—not just your friends, as selected in the drop-down—will also be able to see this photo, your caption, and just generally take note of your existence. It’s not clear if they can comment on the photo or, god forbid, share it.
Optimistic investigation of the audience drop-down only reveals less privacy—the dreaded, unvetted FoFs—or specific people/lists.
Unless you make a list of all your (preapproved) friends, you can’t limit the photo to the people you’ve friended (which includes the person you’re just tryna tag). You have to broadcast your existence to the tagee’s network.
That’s unnecessarily public, don’t you think? What if you’re a minor, a mom, a lurker, or otherwise Nymmed-out individual? Facebook hobbles tagging functionality if you don’t feel like exposing yourself to FoFs. That’s a pretty specious commitment to granular privacy—technically possible but disengenously user-unfriendly.
Posted: September 26th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms, Sociology of Social Networks | Tags: Facebook panic, nutty, scam | Comments Off
I’m not even going to link to accurate information about this. When is any message in ALL CAPS not nutty?
Hysterical delivery aside, why would Facebook reward you with a free membership if you warn others of the impending PRICE GRID by posting this as your status? And aren’t all the icons in Facebook already blue?
Sigh.
