Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

This is cross-posted from my personal blog. I was chatting with Jed Hallam the other day and one of the things that came up was the reaction that some people have to my posts. Unlike many people in the digital space I try not to blog about social media and PR all the time. There are a number of reasons why this is the case:

• Social media and PR exist in a wider context of economic, societal and technological change; I’ve always intended that my posts did the same
• A lot of the time, people have said it better elsewhere, its more about pointing to their efforts and explaining why theirs is particularly good
• I’ve never had a laser focus in terms of my interests, it meant that revision for exams is my own personal hell; but it also means that I get inspiration for ideas from completely disparate places
• Sometimes I get home from work and talking shop about social media isn’t particularly welcome
• Because too much of the talk about social media focuses on the media rather than understanding the people pushing the buttons and does more to confuse and instill fear into the establishment than foster best practice
• Building on the previous point about a lot of the focus on social media; I find the consumer insights and behaviour changes most interesting. What happens when the technology hits culture, and why does it take different routes in different countries?

A row erupted a few weeks ago over the use of the Facebook Connect authentication system to confirm the identities of commenters on Techcrunch. I spent a while thinking about this before putting fingers to keyboard on this. In order to think about it I wanted to reflect on the process from a number of different angles:

• Why would Techcrunch do this?
• Why Facebook Connect?
• Why are people concerned?
• What does it all mean?

Why would Techcrunch want to do this?

Techcrunch like similar media operations notably Gawker Media realise that the community interaction is a key part of their sites. Their journalists may know their beats, but chances are at least some of their readers have deeper domain knowledge or a different perspective from ‘being in the trenches’.  Gawker Media looks at its community numbers as part of the businesses performance metrics.

However the ‘health’ of these communities is not just about the number of comments, but keeping the quality high. This is something that these companies, social networks like Flickr and Quora have put a fair amount of thought into keeping that quality high. Techcrunch eventually must have decided that having people file under a real identity. The problem is that even if Techcrunch asked for a real name it may not get it. So it defaulted that authentication to a third-party service: in this case Facebook. Facebook has a really strong record of ensuring that people have put down their real name as their identity.

Why Facebook Connect?

Facebook has one of the biggest computer infrastructure set-ups in the world. The company has prided itself in the past as the biggest user of MySQL database technology and this takes a lot of technological savvy. Something that every Facebook user has to do is log-in and log-off, this identity is also used to give permissions to third-party code (for instance Facebook applications). Once Facebook grew its network to a critical mass, extending it’s authentication out to third-party sites is a natural progression of their technology.

A secondary aspect of this process is what it does for the third-party site. Using Facebook Connect absolves them from a potentially costly development or purchase of an equivalent system. Secondly if things go wrong, like they did with Gawker Media, the third-party site can blame Facebook rather than suffer a tarnished brand.

Why are people concerned?

If you look at the proto-culture that formed around the web, it came from people like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly who had a libertarian viewpoint as exemplified by the back-to-the-land movement that was part of the hippie culture and a general distrust of ‘the man’. Because of this privacy was an important part of web culture.

There are a number of reasons why privacy is considered important:

• It allows people to share information more freely. That is the reason why journalists get background or ‘off the record’ briefings. Conversely, when real ID is in force (like South Korea) it can impact  or ‘chill’ speech on subjects such as corporate malfeasance. Interestingly business schools are scrutinising the social network profiles of potential post-graduate students, which means that the stakes for privacy are high
• Historically authoritarian regimes like the Nazis and the subsequent Soviet-orientated East German regimes looked to have an insight into every aspect of people’s lives and that was generally considered unhealthy amongst westerners
• Hackers fought a concerted battle with the US government in order so they could develop encryption for consumers. Originally this was for electronic privacy, but most people use it to secure credit card payments. Given this battle was hard-fought, geeks are loath to give up their right to privacy

A second complementary aspect to privacy is the unscrupulous commercial exploitation of consumers data. Some 10 years previously Windows Live ID (or Microsoft Passport as it was then known) was touted as a one sign-in for e-commerce sites and the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) criticised the service would have full access to and usage of customer information. Given that Facebook has already had issues over consumer privacy protection, people’s concerns over Facebook Connect are understandable.  At one time Monster.com and eBay relied on Microsoft Passport, but Microsoft cancelled it in 2004 – Facebook has already screwed over partners so often there is even a phrase of it, to get Zucked, so you have to wonder why people would rely on Facebook?

In terms of the architecture of the web, openness has been at the centre of the web ethos. Prior to the web; competition and innovation was stymied by the tight grip that Microsoft held on the computing platform. AOL tried to do this unsuccessfully with its walled garden. You can judge how successful this was by pondering how much value was destroyed with the AOL | Time-Warner merger, that AOL has been laying off people for 11 years straight and the fact that few people hear ‘You’ve got mail‘ any longer.

What does it all mean?

According to Steve Cheney Facebook Connect has a chilling effect on Techcrunch commenters, using their real name and providing a strident (not rude, but strident) opinion could be enough to kill a job interview down the line. Robert Scoble disagrees with Cheney and thinks that:

• Most people will have principle and say what they think
• Google will surface the content anyway

Google will surface content, but most people don’t have access to ways that would authenticate content beyond their name or a user name that would know to be attached to that person. Secondly, most people have more realpolitik than Scoble. And to be honest with you Scoble would have been hard to fire because of his profile, so he had a lot less to lose than your average worker, especially in this economic climate.

What I find more interesting is that Techcrunch lost a golden opportunity to get everyone to get an AOL ID which could have then been also used for their instant messenger service or on other AOL portfolio sites. There is nothing like using your own technology to be an advertisement for it.

Further reading

Steve Cheney: How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity
Robert Scoble: The Real “Authenticity Killer” (and an aside about how bad the Yahoo brand has gotten)
ReadWriteWeb: 4chan Founder: Anonymity is Authenticity

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Thanks to Selena, I got to spend a lot of Monday at Social PR 2011. Here are some of the notes that I made from many of the sessions.

Activision

SonyEricsson

Web measurement

Negative PR panel

KD Paine on measurement

Barclaycard

The presentations from the event can be found here, Luke Brynley-Jones summary and Selena’s own blow by blow accounts. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

This tweet from Brian Clark was getting a lot of rotation on Twitter.

I found it interesting less because of its accusation of Quora than of its attitude to the social web. Much of the arguments about Quora in Scoble’s post could be just as easily made against Facebook, The Huffington Post or LinkedIn. Quora was never about blogging, it is more about expert reputation in the same way that LinkedIn is about professional reputation.

For many people blogging is about demonstrating their expertise and providing ‘thought leadership’, however may blogs get little to no readership and Quora can can aggregate eyeballs around topics of interest.

The sharecropping allegory is brought up again and again by people who don’t understand the currency of kudos and the fact that there is a certain amount of altruism in society. It was something that I had to deal with on more than one occasion when I worked at Yahoo! talking about the concept of knowledge search.

Services like Quora are more like a digital barn-raising than sharecropping, since people share their knowledge in the expectation of tapping into others expert when they need it - there is a strong altruistic element to it. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

This was the question that Becca Caddy posted to me for an article she was writing for Reputation Online. Becca was prompted to write the article by a piece by an op ed by Dan Greenberg over at Mashable. Dan laid out what three factors he felt were key to ensuring a video went viral:

• Psychological Share Motivation (an emotion that resonates with the audience, self-expression or useful content)
• Easy shareability
• Data-driven strategy (planning, thinking about where the audience would see it)

Becca got responses from Matt Morrison, Wadds and myself, you can read her article here. Here is my response to her initial inquiry below (complete with typos and bad punctuation):

When I hear the word ‘viral’ I think of Nic Roope’s (of Poke London fame) tongue in cheek intro of Lean Green Fighting Machine at a Webby evening event a few years ago when he defined viral as something that was ‘a little bit shit’. It’s a much maligned concept. Marketers think that its ‘free advertising’, they think its cheap, that its easy and YouTube is full of ‘viral videos’ that would put you off watching video online for life (just go and have a look at Leicester County Council’s YouTube channel – or most local government videos for that matter).

I’d argue that Dan Greenberg’s points are actually equally valid for all social objects not just virality with video. The data strategy also needs to understand user contexts | intent – you could do a great viral campaign for hemorrhoid cream but I may not want to share it.

Shareability also needs to think about transmedia, not just online.

You also need to have a great idea – which is hard and even harder to keep untainted because everyone in marketing thinks that they are a creative and everyone in legal thinks that they are the god of everything. The idea may not be expensive, but having a budget helps. The idea is also hugely important for keeping the conversation going after the viral hype has died.

Finally all of this needs to come from an essential brand truth: Halo is a mighty saga – a silicon version of Beowulf, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk – is a comfort food, it makes people who eat it feel better… until the guilt kicks in about the calories, drug dealers are awful people who sell a crap product in the case of Pablo the Drug Mule Dog for the Home Office

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

When the new Twitter was first previewed I put down my initial thoughts on this blog post. Having had a chance to play with it and take some screen shots, I managed to confirm my concerns that:

• The new Twitter would affect delivery of brand messages and depersonalise consumer accounts
• The new Twitter would adversely affect current Twitter accounts (particularly customer service accounts) efforts at personalisation

Let me show you.

I have a close-up shot of a flower as my background on my Twitter profile currently. In the old view there is clear real-estate either side of the Twitter activity area.

In the new Twitter view the image is sufficiently diminished at the edges that you couldn’t really meaningfully say what it was.

So the profile customisation has effectively been depersonalised in terms of the background image.

Ok moving on to existing corporate accounts: I am a fan of the @vodafoneuk and @vodafoneukdeals accounts and that way that they use Twitter for customer service.

I had taken a screen shot of the old Twitter view of @vodafoneukdeals which is fine for illustrative purposes:
One the left you can see a mini-profile of each of the main participants on the @vodafoneuk accounts. This gives you a bit of a feel for the person that you would be dealing with. In contrast, on the new Twitter view their profiles are almost completely obscured:

This adversely affects the personal feel of the tweeted responses and the perceived customer empathy with the team. However I noticed one piece of silver lining from this image: it looks like the colours of the activity area can be tweaked, lighter colours provide a more translucent looking background so brand imagery on the right-hand side would appear like a watermark. So whilst brand ‘humanisation’ is diminished, brand identity can be reinforced.

Thinking about the designs of future background images and settings, using light colours for the activity area seems to make the most sense: use simple bold high contrast background images and typography with an emphasis on the right-hand side of the screen to maximise brand visibility to your audience.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

When I first started surfing the net I came across groups of sites usually on subjects like Star Trek or the works of J.R.R. Tolkein. You would land on a site and at the bottom would be a control that allowed you to move on to the previous-or-next site connected in a giant ring.
This was before search changed web surfing into something much more purpose-driven in nature. I found an example of a web ring for you connecting fans of the western TV show The Young Riders. Web rings are now largely artifacts of a simpler time online.

I was reminded of web rings when I came across a campaign by Pedigree Foods as part of their ongoing programme to encourage adoption of rescue dogs (and sell a few bags of dog meal in the process). They have developed a ‘Write a post, Help a Dog’ programme to engage bloggers in discussing rescue dogs and Pedigree Petfoods efforts. One of the key elements in this programme is something that they call a ‘blog hop’ which works in the same way as a web ring. The key difference seems to be that all the blogs are visible to each other.

This provides those involved with a greater sense of involvement, but also a denser set of interlinking which may look like spam to your friendly neighbourhood search engine. From a PR perspective it also makes the coverage generated easier to find. Pedigree Petfoods used Linky Tools to facilitate their blog hop.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

I received this captcha to complete in the midst of posting an update to Facebook, it hasn’t happened before or since.

The humorous caption is happenstance. Reposted from my personal blog.

I started to think about the impact that connectivity makes in our daily lives, after one of my colleagues was worried about getting mobile broadband connectivity on a trip to Cardiff. So this prompted me to think about the ten web services that I can’t live without.

Putting this blog on the list would be conceited and I left Facebook off because I think that it lacks quality. Jedward and the Cheeky Girls are proof that just because something is popular doesn’t make it good - I could spend a whole blog post writing about why I dislike Facebook but will leave it unsaid for another day.

Accuweather just missed the cut, but I find their service particularly the ‘Real Feel’ number invaluable. I even ponyed up for the premium mobile application.

The list is no particular order of merit:

• Bloglines - I have an eclectic and wide range of online reading material that I like to keep up with. Whilst I have a Google Reader account, it is set up as insurance against IAC shutting down Bloglines. I find Google Reader intrusive and not as productive as Bloglines. In addition, Bloglines works better on a mobile phone and power my blogroll
• Delicious - is my memory. I am a web pack rat and it comes in handy for research or pulling together case studies for presentations. I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks on my computer, mostly bookmarklets to take advantage of Google Translate, subscribe to a blog and pull up the local weather
• Google - as well as it being my default search engine, Google is also my currency converter, calculator, spell checker and timezone checker. The site has a surprising amount of shortcuts that make my life a lot easier. They don’t require any technical skill, more details here
• Teoma - one of the best kept secrets of the web, Teoma is my back-up search engine if Google isn’t giving me the kind of results that I want. If anything Teoma is more relevant than Google is on its search responses. It naturally doesn’t trawl as much of the web as Google and it isn’t as good for real-time or semi real-time content like the latest blog posts. But it does have a clean interface reminiscent of Google previously. If you hit the ‘Google found approximately 150,000 results’ and you can’t find what you are looking for in the first page (which you should have set to 100 results per page) then give Teoma a go
• Email - my primary personal email account is an Apple IMAP account (now sold as MobileMe), but I’m old school so I have a .mac address. I also have a couple of other IMAP accounts with a more limited circulation. IMAP is great as it allows you to sync your account across multiple devices and not pay a fortune for Microsoft Exchange
• iDisk - I know lots of people swear that Dropbox is the best, but I still like to use iDisk for large file transfers like presentations. Apple has progressively improved the product and I know it inside out
• Flickr - if Delicious is my memory of facts and figures then Flickr is my visual memory I use it as an aide memoire, image storage for my blog and as a kind of photo scrapbook
• Twitter - is the new IM. Instant messaging on my iPhone and on corporate networks can be a bit haphazard. Twitter gives you the direct message capability of IM but also allows for broadcast messages and syndication of content
• Skype - whilst all the fuss is happening in the iPhone world about Facetime I am more interested in Skype. Its combination of reasonably-priced VoIP calls and free Skype calling together with robust file transfer and chat messaging has made it ideal for business communications and keeping in touch with friends in far flung places
• LinkedIn - I’ve got business out of LinkedIn, polled opinions on the best content management system for a particular purpose and received recommendations on a web hosting company in Hong Kong. LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

At the end of June I referenced Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard as forward-thinking managers when they founded HP. My thoughts turned to HP’s founders again when I caught up with a friend who works in the business recently for lunch and we were shooting the breeze over some Japanese food.

One of the things that came up was how less-experienced practitioners often didn’t build relationships properly or say please and thank you when doing outreach via social media channels. I’ve been pretty fortunate in this regard mainly because I am quite big, have a northern accent and a shaven head which tends to give away my no-nonsense approach, so I suspect that people move on to easier pickings elsewhere.

The conversation reminded me of a set of rules that Dave Packard presented at HP’s second annual management conference some 52 years ago which demonstrated the kind of smarts social media practitioners should have. Politeness and respect are central to Packard’s approach:

Think first of the other fellow. This is THE foundation — the first requisite — for getting along with others. And it is the one truly difficult accomplishment you must make. Gaining this, the rest will be “a breeze.”

Build up the other person’s sense of importance. When we make the other person seem less important, we frustrate one of his deepest urges. Allow him to feel equality or superiority, and we can easily get along with him.

Respect the other man’s personality rights. Respect as something sacred the other fellow’s right to be different from you. No two personalities are ever molded by precisely the same forces.

Give sincere appreciation. If we think someone has done a thing well, we should never hesitate to let him know it. WARNING: This does not mean promiscuous use of obvious flattery. Flattery with most intelligent people gets exactly the reaction it deserves — contempt for the egotistical “phony” who stoops to it.

Eliminate the negative. Criticism seldom does what its user intends, for it invariably causes resentment. The tiniest bit of disapproval can sometimes cause a resentment which will rankle — to your disadvantage — for years.

Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn’t want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him to embrace a higher working goal — a standard, an ideal — and he will do his own “making over” far more effectively than you can do it for him.

Try to understand the other person. How would you react to similar circumstances? When you begin to see the “whys” of him you can’t help but get along better with him.

Check first impressions. We are especially prone to dislike some people on first sight because of some vague resemblance (of which we are usually unaware) to someone else whom we have had reason to dislike. Follow Abraham Lincoln’s famous self-instruction: “I do not like that man; therefore I shall get to know him better.”

Take care with the little details. Watch your smile, your tone of voice, how you use your eyes, the way you greet people, the use of nicknames and remembering faces, names and dates. Little things add polish to your skill in dealing with people. Constantly, deliberately think of them until they become a natural part of your personality.

Develop genuine interest in people. You cannot successfully apply the foregoing suggestions unless you have a sincere desire to like, respect and be helpful to others. Conversely, you cannot build genuine interest in people until you have experienced the pleasure of working with them in an atmosphere characterized by mutual liking and respect.

Keep it up. That’s all — just keep it up!

This isn’t about social media, although Shel Israel or Brian Solis would say much the same things with a sprinkling of digital pixie dust, these practitioners need to conduct themselves as mature adults and pick up a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.