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: December 30th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Marketing | Tags: critical thinking, Facebook, hoax, scam | 1 Comment »
Facebook scams usually rely on minor greed, like “insert big box store is giving away $1000 gift cards to every slob who can muster the effort to click like” (but no such lavish reward for their actual, in-store customers for some reason. Realistic, right?)
Scams aren’t just annoying proof of your *friend’s lack of critical thinking skills 
; sometimes they’re dangerous likejacking attempts (where you can’t see the thing you’re actually liking/sharing—potentially a virus.) They work because we trust our friends.
Which brings us to this stomach-churning hoax, “Little boy needs 100 shares for a free heart transplant”.
I mean, this scam doesn’t even make sense. How would shares benefit the hospital or donor who would pay for the supposed heart transplant? Do I need to point out they’d only get horrific PR from tying a kid’s life to “Facebook engagement”?
So, I mean, Google is your friend. Check if something’s fake. Was it Confucius, Jesus, or Elvis who said “All that glitters is not gold…?”
* I don’t blame my super kind-hearted friends for sharing this. I’ve retweeted fake amber alerts for missing kids before, because even though you know they’re probably fake, what if they aren’t? We all just wanna help.
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 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 24th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Culture & Cultural Anthropology, Social Media Platforms | Tags: culture, Facebook, futurism, redesign | Comments Off
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.
@ All interesting. Maybe younger gen is more willing to share in general, but less willing to share something out of mainstream? @ Our gen will be more consciously self conscious, but they'll have that judgement of their tastes built in to their DNA. Holy. 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.
As a page I feel like Facebook's new feed needs me to either create awesome content or drum up a whole lotta support to get posts seen. 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.
@ I think the danger in what they're doing is it will force everyone to pump up the volume until its all too noisy... 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.
Facebook is actively gathering your life story: it just suggested I add a photo of the day I was born. http://t.co/p6SiEeBs @ and how do you feel about that? @ At the moment (I might change) like it's super cute, a fun thing to share & valuable to digitize (likely 2 b a real Polaroid) @ But is it there this memory should reside? If it does, does it become a more valuable, emotional platform for me? Update
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
Posted: August 9th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: competition, Facebook, Google, images, Twitter | Comments Off
[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.
Posted: May 18th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Graphics, Social Media Platforms | Tags: artwork, design, download, Facebook, freebie, icon, like, recommend, share, vector | Comments Off
Who doesn’t need a good vector Facebook icon once in a while? Trouble is, there are so darn many social actions on the ‘Book these days, a designer needs more than a mere ‘F’ in a box!
So download these vector (Windows AI CS4) files here, why dontcha. My gift to you!
Bonus production assistance: need to type Facebooky stuff? The Facebook font sure looks like Lucida Grande.
