I’m not saying all people of a certain generation are completely hilarious with regards to UI changes, but you have to enjoy how they capitalize It like It’s been handed down from Above.
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.
Days elapse…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s how I think it could work:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
As our culture rapidly changes under the yoke of technology, as these changes are forced upon it, it’s heartening to see the subtleties of Facebook’s effect being discussed from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, marketing, & privacy.
Here’s some thinking on Facebook big F8 announcements. I know it’s a lot (though far from all) to take in, but hey, it’s a lot to take in.
Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web (Facebook is Killing Taste)
Premise: Zuck wants you to share your every move, regardless of whether that move turned out to be a really good experience actually worth sharing. Frictionless sharing takes the curation element (or “taste”) out of your presentation.
UI implications: The news feed is now totally stories about your friends (status updates), whereas the minutiae of their liking & commenting has moved to the ticker.
Assessment: I don’t want you to know about every movie I watch, only the ones I liked so much I want to endorse them and thereby incorporate them into my personal brand. Media will become status, like wearing a logo, as a display of taste. People may be less inclined to experiment, because merely absorbing media now implies some sort of support for it.
What Facebook Open Graph Means for You
Premise: “You, the point of friction in their data mining, have just been excluded from the process.”
Assessment: I agree. Facebook wasn’t wringing every piece of information out of users, and information about users is the product it sells its customers, advertisers. The more it can collect about what you watch, listen to, like and use, the more money it makes.
Why Facebook Timeline Is Made For Its Youngest Users
Premise: Facebook’s Timelines is intended to facilitate the communication & sharing needs of younger users, and doesn’t really care if older folks want to ‘scrapbook’ (ie, blog) or not.
UI implications: Not everyone wants to blog or lifecast. Picking a header (‘cover’ picture) etc might be a little more tech/design-intensive than they desire, which may lead to a feeling of pressure instead of fun for some users (age agnostic). With customization comes a pressure to perform that some people might not appreciate.
Assessment: As far as I know, GenX is still the biggest participants on blogs, microblogs (Twitter) and Facebook. We’ll be ok, and the Millenials will too. Boomers who don’t work in the tech industry will not like any of this (UI changes or personal record). And GenZ? They could probably use a little MySpace. Expressing yourself is paramount in the Maslowian hierarchy of the young.
What newsrooms should know about new Facebook stream
Premise: Getting content seen depends on quantity of interactions (like & comments). More frequent posting is going to be required to get in front of people.
UI implications: Stories need to gather the momentum of user approval before they join Recent Stories
Assessment: A commenter thinks the author of this post has it all backwards, and branded pages have a better chance of being seen in the timeline. I dunno. I can tell you that as a brand manager I was masterminding an inside liking job like no other on Thursday, trying to push my update into people’s streams. It didn’t feel good, but it did feel necessary.
All Facebook thinks the ticker stands to be a huge force for branded page interaction, spreading social proof. This also benefits from grassroots liking, commenting, & sharing as every such action not only lends weight to GraphRank, but floods the ticker with evidence of how awesome your content is.
What Facebook Changes Mean for Marketers
Premise: Apps that provide real value, like Nike+ are going to be key; content is going to have to step up its game. Gathering likes means less than ever.
Assessment: The onus truly is on brands to earn a place in people’s lives.
The Ultimate in Privacy
Premise: The ticker is freaking people out. The “please hide my comments & likes for me” status that’s going around tries to put the onus for your privacy on your friends.
UI implications: We need to either get comfortable with all our actions being visible, or leave the system.
Assessment: The way the ticker is set up, it’s a bit of a reality check into “Hey, everyone can see what I do on the internet”. They always could, but aggregating those actions and explicitly revealing them makes people feel kinda naked.
The ticker doesn’t follow normal conversational conventions (though it does lead to new person/topic discovery, which is what Facebook is trying to facilitate to combat social graph boredom and purchasable media sharing). So I sort of see the freaked out users’ impetus for wanting to hid eall that minutiae; it isn’t actually intended for everyone; it functions beneath status updates as a subtle communication upon which it’s a bit awkward to shine a light.
There’s a distinction to be drawn between inappropriate sharing and action aggregation. When you see the sum of your actions gathered and reported by an insensitive algorithm, it seems like an unfairly black and white overview of your character.
This is precisely why the likes Sponsored Stories, Klout and retargeting bother privacy advocates so much: they lack context. They paint a partial picture by which we are judged, but that we can’t fail to own because it is, after all, constructed of our data.
We’re All Doomed: Facebook’s Giant Reality Show
Premise: “The lines between entertainment and real life disappear, as people use social media to broadcast whatever they want. Criminals like thieves and murders are followed online, given TV shows, endorsement deals as we as a culture begin to lose grip of reality. A world where everyone’s a celebrity and anything can be entertaining leads to murders and suicides for fun as advertisers monitor in-depth metrics on what we view and how. Our social lives are put in digital pens that lie to us and tell us that we are all stars”.
Assessment: No surprise: “Heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they also have larger social networks, share more photos and are more likely to engage in “friendships” with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending”.
A generation is going to grow up living very public lives, because that provides more accurate information for advertisers.
More thought-provoking stuff people are sending me.
Logging out of Facebook is not enough (from David Pensato)
Facebook: “We don’t track logged-out users”
Facebook Changes Upend Advertiser and Agency Models
Facebook Disconnect Chrome Extension
Facebook’s Eerie Goal: Why Timeline Changes Everything (from David Pensato)
Facebook is Scaring Me
What Facebook’s latest updates mean for journalists
How Not To Make Music Social: The Way Spotify And Facebook Did It
Facebook confirms ‘Like’ data collection, will fix three cookie-related issues within 24 hours (from Nico Wlock)
No, you aren’t going to quit Facebook
Is Facebook trying to kill privacy?
The Pros & Cons of Frictionless Sharing
It’s the end of the web as we know it
The Problem With Facebook’s New ‘Frictionless’ Sharing
Facebook is getting too damn complicated
Facebook seems to have acted quickly to restore the essence of the ‘Most Recent’ news tab. I’m glad; I don’t want to miss less popular / frequent / interacted-with friends because they statistically uninteresting 
I’m pretty sure this is new overnight, and if so, agile response to user feedback!
An animated arrow now desperately dances for your attention when you visit Google. When did The Social Platform Wars get so clingy?
Use this image to illustrate articles on, presentations about & screeds against Google+. It’d be swell if you linked to my portfolio.
A guy I don’t know (who seems arty & lives where there’s palm trees), who had me in an unreciprocated Google+ circle, shines some light on how social search on Google is going to be weighted towards your G+ peeps.
I’ve been fretting over social search since been pimpin’, and the reason is mainly that I don’t want Google to compromise great search for social. My friends don’t necessarily know the most about the subjects they talk about, and the links they share might not deserve a place on The Vaunted First SERP (Me totally included. I was horrified this guy was getting my recommendations in a Google search).
In this case, though, I seem to have shared a link that was actually exactly what the person was looking for. The morale may be: choose the right friends and social will be a nice layer on top of search.
I’ve since circled the guy, btw. He totally earned it.
Yesterday I livechatted my butt off with fellow panelists Matthew Ingram (GigaOm), Modern’s Earth‘s Ian Rountree, and 416 other interested parties.
The topic: Google+. The pace: frantic!
Hosted at the Winnipeg News Cafe by Free Press social media reporter Lindsey Wiebe, the chat used CoverItLive, a nifty live participation tool journalists use to update realtime from events, take questions, curate tweets by hashtag and liveblog.
The stream moves turbo, questions fly, and it’s a lot of fun. After, I asked Lindsey how she thought her first totally-on-her-own live hosting for the Free Press went.
Me: Were you nervous!? I totally was, until we got rolling & got swept away by the speed & the fun!
Lindsey Wiebe: I totally was! (But) I was really happy with the overall level of engagement and participation. According to the CIL data we had 416 readers total & 156 reader comments.
There are a few things I might do differently in future, based on suggestions and feedback. Numbering the questions, for one, would have helped (thanks for that, Matthew Shepherd!), and I think soliciting for questions prior to the event would have allowed us to target the conversation a bit better, and narrow down the number of similar questions.
The chat tended to veer off in different directions, which was fine with me, but I’m not sure how easy it was to follow for readers who weren’t used to live chat formats.
Me: We went about an hour – did we talk about everything you hoped to (in the depth you hoped for)? If not, what would have made it work better?
LW: I had a few questions I didn’t get to, or that didn’t really get taken up by the panelists, and there were some areas where I think we could have gone into more depth. But the unasked questions didn’t really bother me – the chat was for the benefit of participants, and if their questions are addressed, I’m happy.
Me: I’m curious about how the comment moderation works. Did the moderator hold back a lot of reader comments to keep it making sense, or let everything through except unacceptable stuff?
LW: The goal of moderation was mainly to guide the conversation and make it easier for readers to follow along.
Since a lot of the comments were in the form of questions, we tried to stagger them a bit so there wasn’t a question deluge. But I realize this might have been confusing for people who posted questions and wondered about the lag time, and for our panelists (like yourself), who might not have been clear where they were meant to direct their energy when new questions popped up.
I’m still thinking on how we could fine tune this in future, and whether it was the best approach: would it have been better to allow a commenting free-for-all? To close comments entirely until a designated period? To set clearer comment rules?
I find that live chat conventions tend to favor the speediest typists and thinkers, and the pace and rhythms (plus keeping track of various question threads) can be a little daunting if you’re not accustomed to it. But it’s always going to be a challenge to keep the conversation moving quickly enough for more active participants, while making sure it stays coherent and well-paced for newcomers.
Update: some tweeted replies, in the interest of keeping all the feedback in 1 place for Lindsey
[edit 1] Yesterday Facebook’s news feed got all circley. Today, Twitter launches an in-stream image. G+ competition is making everyone step up their game!
[edit 2] Boo, the image appears as a link, not instream. Too little…
[edit 3] Well, it kinda appears instream. If you click on the tweet it shows like any media in the right-hand column, and if you link directly to a tweet it shows there too (I’m talking Twitter web interface here). This is the anticipated photosharing feature announced/leaked in May.
I’m super proud of my friend Venessa for the CNN coverage of her Future of Facebook project, and stoked to have my STEEP analysis illustration run on CNN as part of it. Go team! 
Amber Mac asked recently if anyone has recent stats on the maleness to femaleness ratio on G+. I’m doing some livechat action with the Winnipeg Free Press (with GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram, Modern Earth‘s supercute Ian Rountree & the Freep’s social media reporter Lindsey Wiebe) about Google+ on Tuesday, so I need to know this kinda stuff.
SocialStatistics—crawling 45k+ G+ profiles—says about 12.5% of the landscape wears lipstick and uncomfortable shoes. If you know anything about surveys, you know a sample size of 45k is oodles more than statistically accurate.
This isn’t the only gender ratio guesstimate available, however: Find People on G+ speculates chicks are more in the 30% range.
Personally I’m surprised at the Google+ insistence on identifying gender (and therefore not surprised that ‘other’ comprises almost 85k people) in light of the “It Gets Better” campaign. Drop-down-menuing gender seems a little off brand.
Note to chicks: take advantage of this early girly disparity to make the most of your personal, chickified brand. You’re currently rare.
With the social media shakeup of recent weeks (G+ is great! LinkedIn is stupid! Klout is for a$$holes!) it’s time we all regroup, take a deep breath, and look at the data.
Mashable’s leaked iPhone 5 pics—sure to be a supertopic among techy, trendy, early-adopting social media peeps, our test audience—have garnered many a share since they came out 1 hour ago. And where are the socialites sharing said hardware porn?
On Twitter, friends. By a dramatic margin—a full 3/4 of shares. Despite Mashable’s sharing bias of highlighting G+.
Here’s that info restated as a hippocampus-friendly pie chart. Most of the pie is blue bird flavoured, and I think this represents the network zeitgeist as to where sharing has the most perceived value/enjoyment.
[Mashable can probably kill Google Buzz now, eh?]
People asked me why I left LinkedIn yesterday, so I thought I’d give a few reasons beyond “LinkedIn’s CEO dared me to“.
1. I want to work with awesome people. How do I know they’re awesome? I’ve spent time sharing stuff with them & commenting on their stuff. People don’t get to know each other from a resume database.
2. LinkedIn is a great resource…for HR departments. I don’t want to work for an HR department.
3. Anyone who could really collaborate with me will find me organically because we share the same interests. If they don’t, I’m not publishing enough.
4. I’m not afraid. LinkedIn’s premise has always been a vague fear: fear that if you don’t participate, you’ll be overlooked for That Next Awesome Career Move. Have you done a lot of career movement as a result of LinkedIn so far?
5. Ignoring a social presence doesn’t work for me. It needs maintenance, and Jeff Weiner’s right, I don’t have time for endless profiles. At the very least, one day I’ll lose my login & never be able to change a photo I suddenly deem mortifying. My personal brand fluctuates.
6. The groups I subscribed to (see, I did try to participate) didn’t give me better news, conversation or insight than I was able to get on Twitter. I could have invested the time to find groups that were a better fit—but no, wait, I couldn’t have invested the time.
7. I got spam (indeed, if you define spam as “stuff I’m not interested in”, a whole lot of the communication with LinkedIn is spam). I’m sure I could have managed my notifications, but you need email prompts to interact with this network (because so little dynamic interaction is built in to the system).
8. I got insistent connection invites from people I don’t know—connection with whom being the way LinkedIn suggests you’ll get the most value from its service. Not that I think privacy exists, but when did we get all comfy with total strangers knowing where and when we worked and went to school?
9. If I was desperately looking for a job (the purpose of the network, right?) I would bet my last EI cheque that the connection wouldn’t come from ramped up LinkedIn presence.
10. Social media overload. I need to put my attention where I’m having fun. I don’t appreciate the pressure LinkedIn represents—you know, the opposite of fun.
11. Linked In takes more than it gives. I just don’t need it.
LinkedIn’s CEO says I don’t have time for Google+. I can make some.
