Posts Tagged ‘facebook’
What will Facebook do with its News Feed patent?
February 26th, 2010
This week Facebook was awarded the patent for the News Feed - a feature common to Facebook as well as other social networks such as Twitter and MySpace, and a number of social media apps and startups.
The patent refers to the method of displaying stories/news items relating to online activities to a predetermined set of viewers, and “assigning an order to the news items”. According to reports, the patent also covers the auto-generation of a user’s activity and the display of that to friends. That means the news updates you get when your friends upload videos and accept friend requests is covered by Facebook’s new patent.
It’s true that Facebook pioneered the News Feed technology back in 2006, and so on the face of it deserves to own the patent…but what does this mean for the rest of the social media industry? Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, and so if it’s going down the road of seeking patents for its technology, this could really hamper innovation and progress within social media, and render networks such as Twitter useless.
It’s currently unclear what Facebook plans to do with this patent. It could take the hard line and pressure Twitter, MySpace, Google etc into taking down their News Feed features, or at the opposite end of the scale it could choose not to exercise its patent.
The reason why social media has evolved so quickly is all down to collaboration, the mashup of content and technology and the sharing of creativity. Patents are arguably not a good thing in this space, but what can we do to stop them?
At the moment this is primarily an industry story, but should Facebook choose to make use of the patent, it’s likely to reach the attention of a wider audience. Ultimately the power rests with individuals to stop Facebook from agressively patenting its technology - if the business becomes too commercial in its focus, it will lose popularity, and could suffer massively in terms of online PR.
What’s this Facebook status message craze about?
February 5th, 2010
Last month I blogged about why women on Facebook were changing their status messages to a colour, which as you now know, was related to a guerilla campaign promoting Breast Cancer Awareness.
Since then, the Facebook status message craze has reached epidemic proportions.
If you’ve missed them, we’ve had:
- My fine is…. - a Facebook group that encouraged users to calculate a fine for their misspent youth (i.e. smoked weed £10), and enter the result in their status message. The group is less than a month old and already has 440,837 members, attracting an astonishing 79,181 members on the first day of opening.
- Celebrity doppelganger week (or month – it seems to have taken on a life of its own) - encourages Facebook users to change their profile picture to that of a celebrity who they’ve been told they look like.
- Urbandictionary.com - Facebook users have been changing their status message to the Urbandictionary.com definition of their name. Mine by the way is “intellectually attractive woman” which I completely agree with! The Urbandictionary.com Facebook group has almost 14,000 members.
Well at least those are the crazes that I’ve picked up on!
So what’s the point? There was a clear agenda to the Breast Cancer Awareness campaign, but not so for the others. So why are they are attracting thousands upon thousands of fans?
The answer, I believe, is a tribal one. As users’ lives become increasingly ingrained in social networks such as Facebook, they feel the need to align themselves with certain tribes. All of the above examples enable an individual to tell more about their personal narrative, be it how naughty they were in their teens, or who people have told them they look like. By participating in these status message crazes, they are managing their online tribal identity.
If this line of thinking interests you, it might be worth checking out the blog of Michael Bayler (who is a client), who has written a lot about consumer identity and the new tribalism.
I’m sure brands will be trying to cash in quick on the Facebook status message craze…so expect more of them…but I don’t suspect the trend will last if every brand jumps on the bandwaggon.
Is journalist experiment to write news through Facebook and Twitter irresponsible?
January 22nd, 2010
A journalist-style Big Brother has today been announced, whereby five journalists will lock themselves away in a French farmhouse for five days, with access to only Facebook and Twitter as their news sources. The experiment will test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites as access to all other areas of the Internet will be banned, along with smartphones, TV, radio and newspapers.
The journalists from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations will be expected to go on the air on their channels to comment on news they have found. But without being able to corroborate their news through usual sources and channels, it remains to be seen whether they will have any news to report!
The RFP French-language public broadcasters association has organised the event, and claims: “Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources.”
The stakes are high - the experiment is likely to attract a lot of media attention and so the journalists will be under pressure to deliver ‘news’…but at what cost? Will they take the risk of reporting news that has not been properly corroborated by multiple sources? Surely that would be highly irresponsible behaviour for a news organisation.
As I previously documented in a post last year entitled: “Mzinga backlash: Is Twitter a reliable journalist/blogger source?“, Twitter can be an unreliable and liabellous source of news, and hoaxes are commonplace. While it will be interesting to follow the journalists’ findings and experience, I’m not sure I even agree with the point of the experiment as it completely contradicts with the principles of quality journalism.
I imagine it will be very time consuming for the journalists to try and validate stories, and so in particular I will be watching to see whether they are able to deliver ‘breaking news’, or whether it will just be commentary after the event. It will be interesting if the journalists share the criteria they used for corroborating stories i.e. volume of Tweets on the subject.
I’m sure there will be a follow-up post from me when the experiment concludes!
Why are women changing their Facebook status to a colour?
January 8th, 2010
If you’re a Facebook user, you may have noticed that women have been changing their Facebook status to a colour over the past day or so. Mine currently reads as ‘black’. It’s been driving men mad, including my husband! So what is it all about?
Well I hope I won’t get shot down for revealing that the colour corresponds to the bra that we’re wearing. It’s all in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness, and has been a beautiful demonstration of how the most simple social media marketing idea can reach epidemic proportions within a matter of hours.
Last night I received the following Facebook message from a female friend of mine:
“Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men …. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha!”
The tone of the message was perfectly executed - it had the desired affect of making me giggle, change my status message, and pass onto my female friends as instructed. I’m not the sort of person to usually participate in chain messages and so this demonstrates how important language remains in social media PR communications. Within minutes of forwarding the message I could see friends of mine getting excited and updating their status messages - I received a number of texts from recipients expressing their enthusiasm for the idea. If it’s possible to sense a ‘buzz’ across Facebook, there was definitely one last night among female users. This morning when I logged into my Facebook Newsfeed, I was greeted with a long list of colour themed status messages.
The Breast Cancer Awareness raising exercise was free and quick to implement, but has been highly effective in terms of reminding people about the cause. It just goes to show that social media PR doesn’t have to be about big budgets, but just a neat idea.
Buying friends isn’t social, it’s antisocial
September 4th, 2009
There has been much discussion around an article featured in AdAge earlier this week, which profiles some of the services offered by a company called uSocial, which is an odd name for a company that appears to offer a service that is in fact antisocial (anti social media that is).
As AdAge put it, ‘Pay them (uSocial) money and they’ll make you at least appear to be very big on Facebook. In fact, they’ll deliver you 5,000 Facebook “friends” for 7.6 cents per friend ($654.30), or up to 10,000 Facebook “fans” for a mere 8.5 cents a fan ($1,167.30).’
The article continues: ‘USocial has been in the Twitter-follower game for a while but is adding Facebook friends and fans to its offering today, per a press release declaring the adage “You can’t buy your friends” to be incorrect, at least when it comes to Facebook. It claims that since each Facebook friend or fan is worth $1 per month, buyers will make back their investment many times over in the first month (it’s unclear how it came up with that number).’
uSocial also sell you votes on Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon and Propeller.
On the face of it, I can see why a company, brand, individual might think - more followers, equals more potential business, which equals more money - right? Wrong!
As anyone, with even the smallest understanding of social media, will tell you, at the heart of social media is a number of basic elements such as listening, conversation, openness, community, reputation, trust…I could go on. So how does buying followers, friends or votes help?
Oh hang on, so the more votes, friends, followers you have the more important your business seems, the more traffic to your site and the more opportunity to buy your product/service, right? Wrong!
If I pay 50 people to go to a shop, let’s say the shop sells babies clothes, and they all turn up and make the shop look busy, how many people are going to stay in the shop for more than five seconds? Or listen to what the shop keeper has to say? Or tell their friends about the shop? Let alone buy anything? Not many because we didn’t check to see if those 50 people were relevant or even interested in buying clothes for babies. They’ve been paid to go there and they have zero interest in anything other than fulfilling that limited contract.
Ah but what about the people passing the shop, who see it’s busy and go in to see what the fuss is all about? Well, as soon as they find out there is nothing relevant and the people in the shop aren’t even interested, guess what, they’re off too!
So, I have purchased my 5,000 friends on Facebook, what do I do with them now? They have no interest in what I’m saying, no desire to engage in conversation, and will they even stay there?
But hang on, perhaps I’ve been too hasty, a look at the uSocial website tells me: ‘How we get you friends is simply by finding out exactly what industry, niche, or target market you are wanting to find people to target and then we go about attaining relevent friends for you and adding them to your Faceboook account. Every single person we gain for you will be real users and exactly relevant to what you are looking for — this is our guarantee.’ (BTW: the text is taken directly from the site, so forgive the typos)
There, doesn’t seem to be any confirmation of how they go about ‘attaining’ these relevant friends, and i fear the paid element may in fact tell us all we need to know, in which case I refer you to my example above.
This, in my personal opinion, is another example of old media rules being applied to a social media world. E.g. If I stick an advert in a newspaper with a readership of one million, I’ll get a massive return, easy! Advert placed, sit down and wait for phone to ring…you’ll be waiting a long time.
I’m afraid the bad news is there’s no quick win in a social media environment, and while this service may, and I stress may, get people to your website, I doubt they are interested in what you have to say, and on that point I agree completely with Chris Norton’s point in his post on the subject where he said: ‘Social media is about relationships and people need to remember that.’
Exactly.