My hair looks killer (in preparation for the Gemini Awards next week! Ah! Fingers crossed for Tactica, folks!) and I’m all signed up for great Facebook discounts on nice-smelling hair products! Only beef: not allowing fans to post on the wall or upload photos. How can I tell them what a great job they did?
We all know life would be appreciably better if Facebook let page admins choose whether to post as themselves or as the brand they’re representing. That’s not at issue.
Bizzarely, though, sometimes admin actions do show up from personal accounts. I’m gonna presume this is an unsolvable bug on Facebook’s part, because they mention it in their ‘help’ couched in language that’s baffling in its directness.
Ok. The post ‘may’ appear as you. You, the hired gun with no explicable connection to the brand. You, the dissident who’s trying to undermine your oppressive regime. You, the guy who really needs to know when this is going to happen.
The other day I thought I had it figured out. I experimented with every conceivable order of liking and commenting. From my phone, after someone else comments? Check. From the web interface, first liker? Into the spreadsheet it went.
Yes, I made a spreadsheet.
I was going to get to the bottom of this.
Ultimately, there was no rhyme or reason. Except! Except, I uncovered a clue. I don’t know how to make it happen, but I think I at least know when it’s going to happen:
See that logo there? That means you’re the page admin.
See that? No logo? That means (from Facebook for iPhone and from the regular web interface, at least) you’ve clicked the box in such a sideways, php-confounding , full moon, wearing plaid, had chicken curry for lunch, totally random way that deep in the bowels of Facebook’s programming, it can’t quite remember if you oughta be you right now, or some brand. Guh…urk…accidentallypostasyourself!
Note to dissidents: don’t bet your continued subversion on this advice. It’s just an observation.
When you get paid to work your guts out on a fan page, spend all day making awesome content for it, thinking about ways to drive traffic to it, and encouraging fellow staff, fans and supporters to use and promote it, it’s like a bucket of cold ice water to realize you don’t own it.
Been seeing these handy little reminders in my news stream for a few weeks. If you miss the usual birthday notices—not hard to do with Facebook’s uniform interface—or if you were being lazy about it, they give you a little kick in the butt.
The obvious implication is Facebook is reading what you wrote. It sees your wall post contained the key word “birthday”. Do your private messages feel like they just got caught in their underpants with that in mind?
I remember people being afraid of Gmail because Google was doing the same thing, in order to serve* contextual ads. Then we just got used to the idea (I mean, Gmail had amazing storage). It’s ok if robots “process personal information”. They’re just picking out the nouns, right? And what could your aggregated nouns really say about you, floating virtually above your head in a little tag cloud? Forever?
*“Serve” sounds so helpful, doesn’t it? Google’s your butler! Serving up…stuff you should buy!
Facebook’s social search is rolling out, displaying news stories in your search box based on friend’s likes. The Facebook Web Domination Plan Team is aiming at “likes replacing links”—that is, people finding more personal relevance in news stories their friends have given the thumbs up.
Google already kinda does this, according to Graham Blake:
Google crowd-sources very deep, real-time, and context-specific information about page relevance from the way people respond to a set of search results for a specific query. They can track how quickly a specific link is clicked for a specific search query, when a user returns to the search results (presumably due to a clicked link’s poor relevance to a specific query), second and third links clicked, when a user stopped clicking results (and presumably found exactly what they were looking for).
Those are just the most obvious ways Google is already crowd-sourcing from their search results. Further, with sites using Google Analytics – and most major websites do use it – Google can track what users are doing after they click on a link, how long they spend on the site, how deeply they interact with the website, and even track what search terms were used to reach specific sites from *other* search engines.
There is a huge amount of context-specific crowd-sourced data mining going on there. What this all means is that Google is already way ahead of the curve on crowd-sourced link relevance ranking.
The distinguishing factor in Facebook’s far less sophisticated implementation of social search is obviousness. They tell you directly, through interface design, who among your friends thought something was cool, and if you trust that person’s opinion, you’re more likely to check it out too.
People may find this fun, and I totally do*, but I’ve already cautioned that this approach to newsfinding will make us stupider. Our networks tend to be made up of people much like ourselves, and receiving information from so close to home can limit new perspectives and reinforce biases and stereotypes.
Serendipitously, I just saw this wonderful expansion on that idea from Harvard researcher Ethan Zuckerman at TED.
Accidentally useful analytics
I’m a Facebook page admin, and Insights—Facebook’s puerile analytics—drives me nuts. The new social news search, however, turns up some useful data on sharing that I actually haven’t been able to find yet (I’m still getting familiar with Insights, though, so this info may be totally somewhere I haven’t seen yet.)
Check this out: I can see the last two links I shared, what site they led to, who among my friends shared, and how many other people shared—all in one tidy spot. Handy!
Facebook is giving you this info as social proof that these links (and thereby, Facebook itself) is totally worth your time.
This new popularity aggregate highlights the value of asking your staff and friends to like and share as much as possible. Certainly the weight of approval will drive stories to the top of search, earning more exposure for your brand/content. Explain this to people.
*If Facebook can tie location in to social search, there might be something uniquely useful here, especially for small business and local events promotion. Say, a restaurant my friend loves opens a new location near me.
I’d feel really good about myself if you’d subscribe to my blog. Interactive & social media marketing insights served piping hot!
After a week of serious discussion, soul-searching, and near-marital discord (my husband is an interactive producer and has strong feelings about these things ), I’m reasonably sold on the idea of a microsite to host “the promotion”.*
My vision for doing it “all-Facebook” was something like IKEA’s “Showroom” promotion, where the first user to tag themselves in photos of new IKEA furniture won the piece they’d tagged.
There were a number of reasons Facebook wasn’t the right place, user experience and functionality-wise, to host the promotion:
I imagined a user receiving an email with a link to the promotion. Wouldn’t they have a better (read: less confusing) experience clicking through to a site who’s clear visual design leads them through the upload and share process? Being dumped on a Facebook fan page, even on a nicely laid out static FBML tab politely explaining the process of uploading and tagging a photo, depended on the user taking the time to read the instructions. We know where that goes.
Experimenting with fan-uploaded photos, I couldn’t get them to congregate in one promotion-specific “album”, which gets even more complicated when there is video and text-based content thrown in. I fantasized Facebook would be a tidy destination in which to keep all this fan content wrangled, but there was no way to see it all easily.
That was enough push me away from Facebook as a home for this promotion. We’ll still leverage the Facebook news feed to viralize the goings-on of the microsite, but will end up with an aggregated destination that’s easy to use and peruse.
Thanks to all the good peoples (and there have been more since this tweet) who commented & tweeted about this…your input helped me make a (hopefully) non-disastrous tactical decision.
*Without going into the weeds (my current favourite office-speak expression), the promotion consists of people being asked to share an inspiring photo, video, or story about their personal philanthropy, and sharing that story among their friends. Each donation of inspiration will yield, if all this works out, a matching monetary donation to our non-profit.
Here’s the deal. In support of an upcoming campaign, we’re considering a UGC promotion. I’m torn whether it should be conducted entirely within Facebook, or if we should build a microsite to host it.
The market is local (Winnipeg), so broad reach is less important than participant’s social influence on each other.
Desired outcomes include brand awareness, engagement, and viral sharing. The lurkers—people who don’t contribute content, but passively receive it through sharing—are almost as important as the participants.
Facebook seems like fish in a barrel (easier to reach because they’re right there), whereas a microsite seems like fish in the ocean (more of them who travel farther).
What do you think? Is it a better idea to run a UGC promotion inside of Facebook, using the built-in network & functionality there, or would you build a destination to aggregate submissions & let people share from there? Please comment below whether you favour Facebook or a microsite, why, and if I’m overlooking anything.
Experience Path of a Facebook-based UGC Promotion
Experience Path of a Microsite-based UGC Promotion
Entry Points: Facebook
Fan Page asks for participation
User sees friends participating
Facebook ads
Entry Points: Advertising
Main company website
Email promotion
Sponsorship partner promotions
Twitter
Print promotion – newspaper, flyers
Local radio promotion
Entry Points: Sharing
News feed publishing
Content upload
Content tagging
Facebook “Likes”
Facebook “Share this”
Facebook comments
Entry Points: Microsite
Blog
Entry Points: Advertising
Facebook Fan Page promotion
Facebook ads
Organic Facebook (staff status)
Main company website
Email promotion
Sponsorship partner promotion
Twitter
Print promotion – newspaper, flyers
Local radio promotion
Flickr
YouTube
Entry Points: Sharing
Option to “like” Fan Page
Option to email
Option to “Share this” to other social networks
Option to share on Facebook
Option to tweet
Activities:
Click through to Fan Page
Upload content
Tag content
Comment on other content
Share
Activities:
Click through to microsite
Upload content
Comment on other content
Share
Pros:
“Forced” sharing through news stream publishing
No web development required (faster & cheaper)
Viral is built in; all user’s connections are there & are notified when user does something
Ads can be very targeted
Friends more likely to be local & strong ties, so more likely to be influenced and be from local market
Pros:
Users don’t have to be Facebook members; can share outside Facebook easily
More sharing options; broader reach of social networks
Aggregating content across networks
Full branding & user experience control
Cons:
Content is locked down
Must be a Facebook user to participate
Less control over look & feel
Cons:
Users don’t have to share
Development time & cost
Need videos to come from YouTube to avoid hosting & streaming; potentially complicated
Social shares go out as a link to content, not published as an action
Here’s the deal. In support of an upcoming campaign, we’re considering a UGC promotion. I’m torn whether it should be conducted entirely within Facebook, or if we should build a microsite to host it.
The market is local (Winnipeg), so broad reach is less important than participant’s social influence on each other.
Desired outcomes include brand awareness, engagement, and viral sharing. The lurkers—people who don’t contribute content, but passively receive it through sharing—are almost as important as the participants.
Spammers have figured out a not-illegal way to exploit Facebook ‘likes’, according to Dan Tynan. Dan thinks this makes for a bleak situation for the future of ‘likes’, but there’s a simple interface change that would not only provide the chance to announce the presence of or entirely quarantine spam, but would also make ‘likes’ more social by permitting commentary.
That’d do it, eh? I can report it as spam, which would delete it instantly in my fantasy interface, or I could just comment on my suspicions, helping warn other users away from spreading the sleazy link.
Social-wise, it’s always bugged me that I can’t comment on this particular Facebook action—I may have something to say without ‘liking’ something. I get that they’re trying to funnel you towards liking, but greed has opened a spam hole. Plug it with increased interactivity, Facebook!
Facebook. I used to love you, but I had to kill you.
Whether there’s a Facebook exodus come May 31 or not, I have really sobered up to the whole MySpace/Friendster/’it was the style at the time’ social network fad issue. I didn’t believe in it until now. I mean, I knew intellectually that once upon a time MySpace got cool and then uncool, but was sure that could never happen to Facebook. They have half a billion users, for pity’s sake. Like 1/16th of the earth. What could happen to bugger that up?
Facebook’s recent PR shitstorm has largely played out among the digerati, and my sense is that the Average User will continue tending their Farmville real estate come the end of May, oblivious to arcane issues of private data and opt-outs and personalization. That may come to pass, but my faith has been badly shaken.
Like a spooked investor, I see the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket. Building a large Facebook following—instead of a more robust social strategy—could be an unfortunate resource sinkhole, should the bubble burst and the massive social network hustle itself right out of business.
Let’s be proactive and pretend, for a minute, that Facebook is on its last legs as a home for brands.
What’s a marketer to do? Here are some ideas for staying afloat in an uncertain social future.
Diversify your assets
If your core contribution is viral content, spread it out. Use Facebook to point fans to content and foster discussion there, but use YouTube and your own blog/site to host the original stuff. If you’ve just been riding the wave so far and not really developing your own content to share, get busy.
Make real friends & find out where else they hang out
You should already be doing this, but be sure to engage your active Facebook commenters to the point where you feel you really know each other. Google ‘em and follow them on Twitter or on their own blogs. Make the relationship bigger than Facebook, which will help make it deeper anyway. Should a new network arise to take FB’s place, these will be the people you’ll refriend.
Host an IRL event pronto
Get your social scene out and mingling for real as soon as possible. If you’re a non-profit, stage a volunteer event. If you’re a small business, invite people over for a (insert product here) tasting or a workshop. Move the virtual to real life now. This capitalizes on the work you’ve done so far. The point of meeting these people online was to take them to the next level of interaction with your business anyway.
Insource the connections you’ve made
Got an email newsletter, a mailing list, an inhouse CRM strategy? Migrate your new bffs to your own platform. Bring them into the fold. Throw them a discount if you can, and try to attach them to your brand’s inner circle. If you’ve got your own communication strategy running parallel, now would be a good time to solidify subscribers drawn from your FB fans. Invite them personally.
Facebook has taken the web-swallowing step of adding a personalization platform, Open Graph, to as much of the web as will allow it. This means ads and content will be targeted according to your Facebook profile.
Yikes. The web shouldn’t be personalized for me. Here’s why:
1. My interests don’t encompass everything important that happens. The news is what is new and valuable for me to know to understand the world, but I’m not the best judge of that, nor are my Facebook interests a predictor of it. I prefer to rely on the professional judgment of news directors, editors, and journalists to make sure I know what’s up across the globe, not just in my narrow band of interest.
2. I keep very limited info on Facebook out of privacy concerns, and what is there may not reflect my real interests. I might fan a page because it belongs to a friend and I want to support them, or because I’m trying to win a contest.
3. Part of what I’m doing on the web is looking for new things I don’t know I want to find. Serendipity, syntopic analysis, and random discovery make you smarter. Finding more of the same, however novel, doesn’t.
4. I don’t want my biases confirmed or my stereotypes perpetuated. Feeding me what I like surrounds me with people who think like I do, talk like I do, and know what I know. The more insular our thinking and the fewer challenges presented to it, the more homogenous, boring, and satisfied we become. That’s not who I want to be.
5. My friends aren’t that bright either. (Just kidding, guys). Privileging news on CNN, for instance, that amused or captivated one of my friends would work if I was 14, but I’m an adult with a broad range of acquaintanceships. Their interests aren’t any better a source for my daily news than my own; neither would their shopping habits or music tastes necessarily suit me.
6. It impacts the fun I have on Facebook. I’m increasingly nervous about the things I post there. I lock down as much as I can, and think twice before private messaging anything I don’t want to accidentally show up on my wall due to some “glitch”. Now I have to consider the ramifications of listing a favourite book, as the tentacles of my professed liking spread throughout the web and potentially affect everthing I see and read thereafter. Holy pressure = a lot less fun.
Who will dominate location-based status? The Big Blue Boot stomps Gowalla & Foursquare into ‘roo & d0u¢hebag soup. Illustration available creative commons-style on Flickr for all your bloggy uses.
The best way to look like a superfuturist guru is to predict the demise of the current big thing. Social overload is leading some to wonder if, rather than being the year of ubiquitous social web, 2010 might just be the year social eats itself.
People are muttering about social networks not scaling. Overfriending, social lines blurring, and etiquette confusion are sucking the fun out of Facebook. We know you can only maintain about 150 meaningful connections, and that as networks get bigger they turn from conversations back into broadcasting. Group inertia also keeps us mired where our group already is—no one seems to be asking for one more network to log in to, update, and remake connections on. Google Buzz did not entice my mother-in-law.
I’m not sure it’s the number of friendships we’re trying to maintain, it’s the intrusion of different kinds of relationships into inappropriate spaces. It’s like when your spouse shows up at work and it’s so incongruous to see them there that you act weird in front of your work friends. You know?
“It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”
Web 3.0 (don’t roll your eyes) is gonna be about signal to noise. Connecting everyone was great, but it turns out we don’t like everyone. Filters like lists are weak at this point, whether to limit their adoption (more sharing = more revenue) or because demand hasn’t been great enough. But if Big Social doesn’t want to see a precipitous decline in participation, they need to hire a few usability experts and make it happen.
So Facebook is where my robust profile resides, and where I’m most likely to contribute to conversations. You can have the most holistic relationship with me there. As such, I’m ending up friending people I haven’t met IRL, and Facebook is becoming less of a front-porch-with-a-beer and more of a cordial-nod-at-the-grocery-store experience. I kinda like beer. But I’m scared to say so, because Senior People Are Watching. Socializing just became brand building, ugh. What can we do to get that down-home feeling back? How can I associate with people who like my blog without them seeing me in my jammies?
The smartest thing Facebook could do would be to introduce a secondary request system, “Professional Request”, and scoop LinkedIn. I belong to LinkedIn but don’t use it, in part so as not to replicate effort. Facebook could make LinkedIn utterly irrelevant by allowing users to add professional contacts that would receive limited (or different) profile access – perhaps restricting photos, video, and application activities (Farmville, I’m talking to you), highlighting instead fan pages and status updates. This pared down sharing would become the accepted new norm for professional relationships within Facebook, allowing users to keep their Dunbar 150 in the lifestream loop while still offering aquaintances limited access, including messaging. With etiquette in place to govern this dual stream of relationships, users can feel more confident expanding their personal networks to include people they haven’t met IRL and with whom they still want to engage without sharing baby pictures.
This could extend to what virtually amounts to dual profiles, with separate status updates for personal & professional contacts, and a rich niche for developers to build apps geared towards enhancing professional connections. Facebook could smoothly handle this double stream for sophisticated power users that have both networks to maintain.
Btw I googled “LinkedIn is useless” to find this video. Facebook, if you want to pay me for this awesome idea, I’ll be glad to send you my Pay Pal info.
Here’s what I think. There are some big time alliances going down in the social media stratosphere right now. People are picking sides.
ReadWriteWeb had that trouble the other day with people thinking they were logging in to Facebook when they got ReadWriteWeb as a Google result for “Facebook login”. ReadWriteWeb, in a post immortalizing their own internet-famous moment, blames Google for this.
But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.
Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.
While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it.
But does that sound like an accident? This might seem obvious, but Google controls search results. Google’s taking on Facebook head on with Google Buzz. Steve Reubel thinks Facebook might have a crush on Bing, confirming, in my mind, Google and the One Social Network To Rule Them just aren’t that into each other. I betcha Google pretended to think ReadWriteWeb was cute to capitalize on the usual disgruntled user fumbling during a Facebook UI change rollout.
Huh, that’s an interesting idea. What happens when the business that controls the news has to manage news about their business? I know Google’s not evil and all, but if I was the PR guy over there I’d be hanging out around the search guys, um, quite a bit.
So Google hates Facebook, plays ReadWriteWeb to annoy its users. RWW, while flattered at the attention, knows Google is just using them and makes it clear they will never, ever be their date for the prom.
Don your tinfoil helmets, oh friended ones, and wrap your conspiracy theories around this…
Facebook celebrated their 6th birthday by announcing their network now boasts 400 million souls, or almost 6% of the earth’s population. Facebook’s birthday is February 4th…02/04..2+4 is—gulp—6! If you’re slow with math, that’s three big fat 6′s in a row.
Daniel 8:23-25 And through his policy also he shall cause deceit to prosper in his hand…
Could that refer to a privacy policy, possibly the one that roped in millions of users who never dreamed their friend lists would one day be made public? A policy that, once we had unstoppable group inertia* due to our elderly parents making likely their only leap to social networking, then changed to make way for better search results and advertising revenues? Gosh, I hope not.
Daniel 7:24-27 And he shall speak great words against the most High…and think to change times and laws.
Ok, if “he” is Mark Zuckerberg and “the most High” is the American Constitution (specifically, the Fourth Amendment, guarding against “unreasonable searches” and protecting “a reasonable expectation of privacy”) and the “times” he’d like to change are the famous social norms regarding privacy, am I painting a scary enough picture for you yet? But wait…
Revelation 13:3-18 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the Mark.
Gartner Research predicts that by 2012—the end of the freaking Mayan calendar—”Facebook will lead the pack in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web through Facebook Connect and similar mechanisms. The interoperability will be critical to survival of other social networks. Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop…However, they will all revolve around Facebook.” In other words Facebook will control the universe. The universe may or may not include your disposable income.
Alrighty then. Nothing to panic about. We knew the end times were probably upon us anyway. Let him that hath understanding reckon the number of the beast. Hopefully this newfound prophetic clarity is a balm for those souls chapped about controlling their own information. Let it help you accept your fate with grace. I, for one, welcome our new Social Overlords. Happy Birthday, Facebook!
*Group inertia, or social inertia, is the critical mass attained when everyone you could possibly care about joins a social network, making it tough to leave lest they not follow to “the next big thing”.
I’m celebrating Data Privacy Day by staying offline for 24 hours. By “offline”, I mean “not on Facebook”, lest you think I have magic analogue blogging powers. I’m temporarily defecting from the Big F, as a conscientious objection to its recent bait and switch privacy shenanigans. 24 hours logged out of the world’s most popular social network. I can totally do that. It’s just one little website.
Bleary this morning without my usual cup of decaf (I’m whitening), my mouse moves automatically toward the little blue and white ‘f’ icon in my bookmarks toolbar. Whoa! I think, barely deflecting the click in time. Let’s visit somewhere else. Twitter, perhaps. Twitter use doesn’t strike me as contrary to the spirit of Privacy Day, because despite the fact that it’s actually more publicly searchable, I use it for business and it contains no pictures of me drinking beer.
In support of my Privacy Day tweet, I google* “Data Privacy Day”. The second search result is a Facebook page. Ubiquitous little bugger, that Facebook. I neatly avoid that particular link and go on about my day.
On the road, I wonder how my husband’s convergent media panel at ALL ACCESS: The Digital Incubator is going. Normally I’d Facebook him and see what was shaking. Unlocking my iPhone and heading for the blue square is almost one smooth motion; again I brake and consider my other communication options. I’m not going to phone him, for Pete’s sake. What’s this “messages” icon? Huh. I suppose I could text him. That would actually be faster. Ok. Read the rest of this entry »
On the very day I decried Village retailers for ignoring new media channels, I walk into my hair ninjas Oxford’s and find them all over the Facebook thing.
), I’m reasonably sold on the idea of 
