Posts with tag "Facebook"

Yes Chris, social media is hard and companies don’t get it

caution-hard-work There seems to be this thought that social media is just something that you can start doing one day because that is what everyone is talking about. The idea being that you can just set yourself up with a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook (sponsor) page and you are off to the races. PR firms fire off electronically mimeographed press release about how this company or that company is now listening to everyone and how that should get them all kinds of brownie points.

Well here’s a hint – it doesn’t.

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Keep your DiggBar off of my blog

no-to-digg Like most things, we seem to be travelling back in time to pick out the worst shit possible, give it a nifty Web 2.0 type name and then release it upon the world proclaiming it as great stuff. Case in point is social media services like Digg and Facebook bringing back the black plague of iframe software toolbars.

These were a bad idea back in the 1990 and they are still a bad idea a decade later.

As it is, just about any blog already offers plenty ways for you to share posts so this idea does nothing to benefit the blog owner and in some ways does them damage. Along with that I personally find them nothing but an eyesore that makes a blog look like a page that is being provided by which ever toolbar provider the reader is using.

Some folks are suggesting that blog owners will benefit by an increase in pageviews but that is an argument that makes no sense. If I wasn’t getting that Digg, or Facebook, traffic before how is the addition of some page stealing toolbar going to make any difference?

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Me? … I’m a cranky social media un-expert

ifyoutalkedtopeople Late last night I jokingly posted a note on FriendFeed with something similar to the headline of this post. I say jokingly because I have in the majority of case come to the conclusion that anyone calling themselves a social media guru, or expert, is full of shit.

There are exceptions, as there are to any rule, but those that are the real experts – the real gurus – are an exceptionally rare breed. They are people like Chris Brogan, Brian Solis and Stowe Boyd. The rest of them are just tacking on the newest marketing buzzword to their signatures without even understanding what Social Media is.

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Let’s all dump on social media and Twitter

Truck-Dumping It must be the weekend because much like my post earlier today everyone seems to be lining up to take some shots at social media and even bigger shots at Twitter. It’s not that these things might not deserve it especially when we find out we have ghosts in the machine but really it does get a little old after awhile.

I’ve had three posts from earlier today lined up all ready to shotgun together a nice little rant and then Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins had to go and ruin the flow – more on that in a bit. For now though I just want to take a look at two specific posts from this morning because in of themselves they were some pretty good smack down. First up is a post from Douglas Karr over at The Marketing Technology Blog and while I’m not use to Douglas going on a rant like this, it definitely went well with the morning coffee.

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How to show you’re a loser on Twitter and in social media

ghost-twitter Everyone is in an uproar today (gee does anyone smell a bitchmeme in the works?) over a post by Noam Cohen at the New York Times about how <gasp> all those famous people on Twitter might just be ghosts of themselves. Gee do you think – what a conclusion to come to.

I’ve been saying since the beginning of this whole follower or friend malarkey that anyone who thinks that people like Barak Obama or any one of those fancy ass stars are actually writing those messages need to check their grasp on reality.

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What if the money train stopped rolling for Facebook?

empty-wallet I hate to be the person to rain on the social media bandwagon – well okay maybe that’s not quite true but anyway … I’ve been reading a couple of posts about how Facebook is back out there looking for some more debt financing. Financing to the tune of $100 million is the reports are correct and this is already on top of the $100 million that they got from TriplePoint Captial did a $100 million dollar debit refinancing deal with Facebook last year.

Of course the need for the money – or credit line for equipment leases as they are calling it – is growing at an incredible rate. Just as their registered members numbers continue to grow so does the need for the computer hardware to support all that new membership. It is estimated that it is costing Facebook $1 million per one million new user signups and given that they are reported to have 275 million members worldwide – well you do the math .. no matter how you look at it Facebook needs lots of money and they just aren’t getting in this advertising soft market.

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Does an Authority Index even mean anything anymore?

From the early days of blogging there has always been talk about the upper level of writers who were often referred to as the A-List of blogging. This was all derived from the Technorati leader board that listed the top 100 blogs in the world. Over the past couple of years though this list has grown to mean less and less.

Part of the reason was that increasingly we were seeing mainstream media showing up on the list as they began to embrace the social media world and blogging. As with Techmeme the individual blogs began to fade from these Authority Indexes being replaced with the likes of The New York Times blogs and even faux corporate blogs that didn’t do much more that post press releases.

However their effect on the concept of the Authority Index is nothing compared, in my opinion, to the effect that services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook ultimately have had on it. You see the idea behind the Authority Index is  that it was the measure of the number of links to any blog from other blogs within a 60 day period. With the burgeoning popularity of things like Twitter we find that links are being spread further afield from blogs.

As this trend increases – which it will – the value of links in blog posts as a way to measure another blog’s value decreases. Rather than people posting interesting links on their blogs they are posting them instead to Twitter or FriendFeed. As Brian Solis points out

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

All this change therefore begs the question – is the idea of an Authority Index now something of the past or can it be modernized to take into account these micro communities?

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Time for a little Business 101

Earlier this morning I wrote a post wondering just what it was that the consumer was winning as we rush through this increasingly demanding social media world that is occupying us and our time. It was an after a fashion questioning rebuttal of a prior post by Louis Gray and he was good enough to leave a comment that tried to address my questions. At the same time though he also raised another issue with which I have a really hard time reconciling with the real world – in contrast to the electronic one.

The point that he was trying to make is the same one that I see being echoed all over the place in light of Facebook’s recent understanding of why there was a backlash to the changes they had made to their terms of service. This is what Louis said in the comment

Regarding Facebook’s walled garden strategy, which you mentioned, comments from the panel suggested more data will be allowed to flow out. Steve Gillmor positioned FriendFeed as open and Facebook as a walled garden, and the ensuing conversation made it sound like Facebook was going to continue opening up.

What I would say in response is just because that Facebook; and other services in the social media sphere, say that they are open and transparent it doesn’t mean that some very basic business fundamentals have changed – or will change no matter the proclamations of warm and fuzzy openness.

Object of having a business

Number one rule for the creation of any business is to make money. Even if you are giving something away for nothing at some point the company has to make money. To do this you need two ingredients – product and consumers that want that product. Sure you can be good buddies with the company next door. Hell you can even share customer information so that the prime beneficiary is the consumer base that you both lust for but at some point you are going to have to try and do something to increase your consumer base; after all it is about the money.

Raiding the pantry

So there comes a time where you have to start looking around to see what you can do to get your consumers to spend more money at your business. You see that one of your competitors has a really nifty idea that your consumers go there to use or buy so you look at how you can do the same. As much as you might like your competitor and as friendly as you might be you want their consumers to spend more of the money with your business.

So you have a choice – see if they are willing to sell to you or copy what they are doing. There are arguments for either strategy but the end result is the same – you want to increase your consumer base at their expense.

How does openness, transparency and data portability play into this?

It doesn’t.

glass walls Sure it makes for a great smoke screen and helps flip the gullible into being advocates for your business but in the end it is all about making money, gaining new consumers from where ever you can and then keeping them coming back to your company all the time. You don’t make money when they go and visit your competitor.

Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and any number of the other services in the social media sphere can talk all the data portability they want. They could have glass walls around their gardens and easy spinning turnstiles at the doors to those gardens but it doesn’t change the fact that they are  still walls and those turnstiles will still spin you back into the gardens.

Business is business and it’s all about making money

Just because you are open and transparent doesn’t mean you aren’t there to make money. Just because you mouth all the nice warm and fuzzy buzzwords at conferences doesn’t change the fact that you will do anything to make sure your business comes out the winner.

If this wasn’t the case then Facebook and all the others would be run as non-profits with great big donation buttons on their pages. Openness has nothing to do with trying to get as much of the customer base as is possible and then keep them – even if it means making yourself appear to be doing something that you really had no intention of doing – or wanting to do.

It is just another gimmick in a bag with lots of other gimmicks.

Remember it is all about making money and anyone who doesn’t thinks so – well here’s some sugar cubes and a copy of Jimi Hendrick’s All Along the Watchtower … have a blast.

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