User meets Marketer perspective on branding, social media, and everything communications.
Posts tagged facebook
Facebook’s Arrogance
Apr 23rd
I spent the morning reading up on the details of the new features Facebook announced at their annual F8 developers’ conference. The new features include: Social Plugins, which allow websites to add Facebook-style social interaction; the Open Graph Protocol, a way to let Facebook users add external Web pages to their profiles and to provide developers with access to Facebook analytics data; and the Graph API, a rewrite of Facebook’s core developer code to allow easier development on the Facebook platform. Information Week gives a great business and web impact breakdown here.
This announcement has huge ramifications for users’ privacy, marketers ability to achieve social interaction on the web, and of course the part Facebook wants you to focus on the most, the user experience.
Once again Facebook has thrown concerns for their users’ privacy out the window. In a move that makes the epic “Beacon” roll out look like child’s play, Facebook is opening your and your friends data up to the entire web. Anyone who can figure out how to insert an I Frame into their website and entice you to like what they’re selling or showcasing has a foot firmly in your social network. When I visited CNN and Pandora this morning the “Big Brother” feeling was palpable as I browsed through what my friends had been reading on CNN and saw what great (and sometimes embarrassing) tunes they were listening to. Since this feature is opt-out, not opt-in, my guess is that my friends were largely unaware that I was accessing this information. Now to lend some perspective, getting a peek into my friends’ radio stations is something I could just as easily do by sitting in the car with them, but there is something unsettling about being allowed to access this information when they aren’t looking.
These new features are exciting for marketers who want to build websites and online presences for clients that are more than just one-way communication, but two-way social interactions that enrich content and give it legs and presence in the once elusive social networks of their target audiences. Hubspot gives a good summary of these implications here. Facebook’s social plug-ins will allow developers to easily add this layer of sociability and ride on the coat tails of the 400 million user base Facebook has cultivated. There is merit to the argument that this social layer will give credibility to websites and blogs you visit because you will be able to see the footprints your friends have left behind. It will also instantly allow one-dimensional websites to become familiar to users and have interactivity capabilities that would have otherwise taken years to custom build, launch, and debug. The downside of course is that the interactions won’t be unique, they will be the same as your interactions on Facebook. The NHL is using the “like” plugin which will allow you to select the players you like and post the story to your Facebook page. A custom plug in and dedication to building their own online community could have allowed the NHL to let that button link you to the player’s discussion group within their own website so you could instantly connect with others outside of your own network who shared your same passion. Instead, as I discussed in an earlier post, users will be confined to their own past-oriented and often backwards-looking Facebook network when they share these stories, making them less socially useful.
Oh the Facebook user experience. Fodder for fan pages and groups alike who protest the roll out of new features, usually unsuccessfully, and frustrating for a maturing user base that is tired of the Mafia Wars notifications and the “please write on someone’s wall today” notifications. Facebook’s social plugins will allow it to bring in new and unique information into the network that will hopefully solve the users frustration of stale content and Facebook’s frustration with an increasingly apathetic audience that makes data gathering difficult when users aren’t sharing. I think this move will give Facebook another 5 years of relevancy as users are able to connect and interact with their friends based on their web presence rather than their cookie cutter Facebook profile page. The day will come, however, when users will flock to niche networks that are more relevant and useful to them.
Facebook is taking risks with this move, both with their users’ privacy and with the assumption that users like the Facebook model of interaction so much that they will embrace it across the web. I predict that they will be successful with these moves and largely unopposed for their privacy transgressions, but these moves won’t fix the limited nature of your social network with Facebook, the new features will just make it more interesting for the next few years.
A Social Web that is Age Blind
Apr 8th
Usually every couple of weeks you will see articles cycling through Twitter with leads like “Gen Y flocks to Twitter as Facebook Ages” or some impressive stat about just how “old” social media users really are. It is interesting that the dominant age group on the social web is 35-44 year olds and not teens or the 20-30 year old crowd. Social network use is moving beyond connecting with long lost friends from elementary school and we are starting to hear more and more success stories about people leveraging their networks to land jobs , make powerful connections with industry leaders, or maybe even celebrities.
While these statistics and user case studies are important for understanding who is using social networks and how, I’m not sure they help us to truly understand why users are drawn to the social web in the first place. When we connect online we may have specific objectives in mind, but more than likely we are looking to extend our real-world realities to the online realm in a way that has little to do with age or even work. Instead, the focus shifts to interests, common experiences, and the search for useful information that will educate us in our offline lives.
I had the amazing opportunity to see Paul McCartney live at SunLife Stadium on Saturday, April 3 and not only was I amazed by his out this world performance, I was amazed at the mish-mash of people there for the show. As I entered the stadium I was sure I would be the youngest person in the crowd, but I was wrong. Middle school aged kids were buzzing with just as much excitement as I was as they rushed into the stadium with their friends, or even their parents. Throughout the show I was amazed by the interactions taking place in the crowd. Children were dancing with grandparents, young 20-something couples were singing along to every song, and no one seemed to think this was unusual. Why? Well, because it’s not. Our offline lives bring us in contact with people from all over the world and all along the age spectrum. We relate to each other based on common interests, whether that is a love for Paul McCartney’s artistic abilities or an appreciation for technology.
Social network users care less about the age of the people they are interacting with and more about what they have in common with them. College-aged users don’t flock from Facebook because they’re annoyed by a friend request from their mom, but because Facebook, and many brands who try to leverage the space, have done a poor job connecting people who have real things in common outside of their age, location, and past. Most Fan Pages are little more than a stream for a brand’s website and PR content. There is no way to easily search through the other fans of that product, place, or person to see who you might be able to connect with in a real way outside the random comments or clicks of the “like” button.
As social networks mature, niche networks become more popular, and social media users become more vocal about what they want from these platforms, profiles will be less about where you have been (age and school) and more about who you are now and what experiences you are searching for (books you’re reading now, places you want to travel to).
A great example of this is Get Glue, a social networking site that rewards you for “liking” movies, books, artists, restaurants, wines and more. The idea is that the website can recommend products for you based on what you have experienced in the past so that you can have new experiences. The best part is you can see what the people in your network like and what they have consumed, giving you a more intimate look into who that person is beyond their 140 character bio on Twitter or Facebook profile that probably hasn’t been updated in the last year. This sneak peak could lead to the meaningful online and offline connections that users are searching for.
When social networks really make the jump to creating rich online experiences that are inspired by your offline life, statistics will be less about age groups and more about cultural movements, online connections that led to offline interactions, and the creation of innovative user content that bridges age and location.
Privacy Through Obscurity
Mar 22nd
There were lots of smart people wandering around during SXSW, but probably few as smart as Danah Boyd, Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who blew minds with her opening keynote. The title of her presentation, “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity,” seemed pretty straightforward, but she took several recent examples to expose the tricky and shifting nature of what those concepts mean on the web, and in particular, the social web.
Boyd defined privacy as “one’s control over how information flows.” Even though someone may choose to share personal information through specific online channels, therefore making it public, people still expect an element of privacy through the sheer obscurity of that information when compared to the social web as a whole. Their sense of privacy is rooted in their ability to control what information lives where and who is allowed to easily access it.
Social network users are alarmed when platforms attempt to aggregate additional data (such as Google Buzz) or break down barriers to that data (such as Facebook’s ever increasing attempts to persuade users out of their preferred privacy settings). It is not just the technicalities that upset users, but “non-technical mistakes that disrupt societal expectations,” according to Boyd. For example, the very fact that Google chose to place Buzz, a very public, social interaction tool, within email, a very private, personal platform, shattered users expectations of what Google was providing them. According to Boyd, she encountered several users who believed that because they had signed up, often unintentionally, for the service that their email was now exposed to anyone on their followers list. The mash-up of public and private had immediate ramifications for Google and changed the way their customers viewed them.
A second component to this delicate balancing act of private and public on the web is what is at stake for privileged vs. unprivileged users. While celebrities, or even higher level management, may feel comfortable exposing themselves on the web, it is often because they have less to lose. Their reputations are more easily managed and less affected by the minor social web scuffs that leave the unprivileged in the unemployment line. Unprivileged users must often deter their participation in the social web, or at least alter their web persona, to keep their jobs or even maintain their chances of getting into that top notch university.
Boyd has a fantastic talent for taking the straightforward, adding a layer of complexity, and then making it digestible for the average digital citizen. I hope I was able to convey a portion of her mind-blowing smarts in this “better late than never” debrief. A full transcript of her talk can be found here.