Posts Tagged ‘facebook’
August 23rd, 2010
There has been plenty of conversation surrounding Facebook places over the last week. So, to help you access the discussion around Facebook’s latest launch, The Liberate Media team have put together a collection of their favourite posts in this single “round-up” style blog post.
First off here is the official Facebook Places Check in video.
Facebook Places Launches with Bing’d Out Maps
How To Use Facebook Places For Your Business
Facebook Places vs. Foursquare: Who Has the Business Edge?
Week in review: The fallout over Facebook Places
A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places
Facebook Wants Advertisers To Help Build Out Its Directory of Places
Will Facebook Places revolutionize location-based mobile advertising?
5 Ways B2B Companies Can Use Facebook Places
Do you know of any more fascinating Facebook Places blog posts worth checking out? please let us know in the comments section.
Did Facebook and Twitter influence the General Election?
May 7th, 2010
As I took up my blunt pencil attached to a piece of string in the polling booth yesterday, and made a cross against my chosen candidate, it struck me how much Twitter and Facebook have enhanced my interest and understanding around this General Election, but similarly how far the UK still has to go before we can experience a truly, socially-connected election.
This was the first General Election where Twitter and Facebook played a part. They gave the electorate a new ‘voice’ aside from their vote, enabling them to freely discuss election issues in an uncensored environment within a much wider network of individuals.
Facebook set-up a live voter counter on its website (via a tie-up with the Electoral Commission) - according to the final tally, 107,892 Facebook users voted. A poll was also conducted through this group, aka the Facebook election, which saw Nick Clegg and the LibDems emerge victorious. Facebook groups and political pages have been hugely active - today a particularly active one seems to be ‘I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who want Proportional Representation - UK‘.
But how much of this social network activity and buzz was two-way conversation and engagement?
A comment on the BBC blog is telling:
“I asked questions via Twitter of the main parties, but no reply was ever returned. In fact, the only politician who replied was John Prescott. The political parties were treating Twitter just like another letterbox through which to poke leaflets - but failing to grasps the idea that such systems require two-way communication to be effective. I just felt ignored by them online.”
Today across Twitter in particular, and to a lesser degree Facebook, there seems to be a general feeling that today’s election results do not match with their political learnings and discussions over the past few weeks. BBC blogger, Rory Cellan-Jones, makes the same conclusion in his blog post: So was it an Internet Election?. He opens the post saying: “The verdict was already in, even before polling day. This was not an internet election, and all those who had suggested it might be had got it completely wrong. It was a television election, and all of those tweeters and bloggers were sad political obsessives talking to each other.”
Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly provided a gateway to political engagement, and importantly among the younger generation. A YouGov survey found that a quarter of 18-24-year-olds had commented on politics via social networks. But at the end of the day, this activity seems to have had little impact on the final election outcome.
Co-developer of the World Wide Web discusses Facebook and privacy
April 30th, 2010
I’ve just come across a fascinating interview with Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist who, together with Sir Tim Berners Lee, developed the World Wide Web almost 20 years ago. The video was taken by Robin Wauters for Techcrunch.com, during The Next Web conference that has taken place in Amsterdam this week.
If you’re short of time, scroll to the 5.38 mark where Robert explains why he’s not on Facebook, and offers his view on how social networks need to change their position on privacy.
In regards to Facebook, Robert says: “I can get in, but I can’t get out. I don’t know what happens to my data.”
He also goes onto talk about Skype which apparently refused to take his identifier off once he closed his account. “You have no control. You cannot buy something a la carte. You have to agree to the whole block and go in and be bound hands and feet to their terms of service, which is something that I think has to change…we should seriously look at all of these social networks.”
Facebook application review: Like Button
April 26th, 2010
Let me begin by being clear from the off that by ‘Like button’, I’m not referring to the Facebook share icon that you see on various blog posts, an example of which can be seen on the right-hand side of this post. I’m actually referring to the range of news stories that are shared via Facebook share icons called Like Button.
Overview
The Like button has a set of miniature Facebook type pages set inside it. The first page you come to has a general subset from news sites such as CNN, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal etc. This can easily be changed to sub categories such as Technology.
Inside each miniature news fan page you get a breakdown of the news from that source, as well as a summary of how many times it has been shared on Facebook. Another nice addition is the ability to search on who is talking about that brand’s news within Facebook.
The good
- Great selection of new categories and sources, and you can also request more
- Clean and functional design
- Excellent search functionality
- A good source of trending topics
- The ability to add your own site and find out how many times your content has been shared on Facebook
The bad
- The name is not ideal. I would have preferred a more relevant title such as: Most shared news (on Facebook)
Final thoughts
This is certainly a site that I will be visiting again and recommending to my colleagues and clients alike.
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.
Blog, Tweet, or Facebook, which would you choose?
August 20th, 2009
There has been a lot of talk recently about which is more effective at building brands and authority: blogging, tweeting, Facebook fanpages and groups.
Obviously there are many other ways to build brand authority and reputation but these three are some of the most common and well known. So the question is, which one is would you choose?
We’d love to know your thoughts, and you can cast your vote via this nifty little survey that we have created.