twitter for comments.

There's been a fair amount of talk regarding using Facebook Connect comments, since they launched in February.  I was somewhat excited at first, because it attached comments to a fairly persistent identity, which has the potential to curtail some of the negative (or anti-social) behaviours associated with online commenting

I'm starting to think that a comment box that used twitter accounts, and actually connected to the usual twitter feed, would be substantially more useful.  The reasoning is fairly simple; twitter is a conversation tool, where facebook was once about the social graph, and is currently confusing me as to it's focus.

If the point of attaching an identity to comments is to create accountability, facebook connect is undoubtedly the better choice.  Facebook can easily be a window into a personal social circle.  Tying comments to that social circle might reduce some of the more absurd aspects of online comments.

If the point of attaching an identity to comments is to create a dialogue (which can also create accountability) I would suggest the use of a service that is essentially a lightweight dialogue tool.

This came to mind when I was reading a blog post over the weekend, and before I thought to comment on the page, I had opened TweetDeck and started to type.  When I think online dialogue, I think twitter.  I'm probably not the only one.

[This could also be a potential means of monetization - if a customized twitter interface is embedded on every post, a small percentage of ad revenue shouldn't be completely out of the question, assuming twitter develops, maintains and supports the specifics of the service to an acceptable degree.]

question two: over-hyped social media service.

What social media / social networking service do you think is the most over-hyped?

For me, the only answer is LinkedIn.  I understand it's importance, I have a profile myself, and I do my best to keep it updated.  But for me, LinkedIn fails on the 'social' element, and that keeps me from making it part of my day to day usage.  I don't have relationships on LinkedIn, (and I fully admit this is my fault) I only have information there.

LinkedIn serves a particular niche, in my eyes - People who see the power of social media, and are still unnerved it.

Twitter has conversations, which lead to being exposed.  Facebook has history and context, which lead to being exposed.  Blogs have content, which paired with context, leads to being exposed.  LinkedIn seems designed to avoid exposure at all costs, and feels like it is based on the premise that your work life, and work social ecosystem, should be kept separate from your personal one.  To me, this feels like a service designed for people who like the idea of social media, but are terrified of incorporating it into their lives, and dealing with the exposure related to that.

Again, I understand the appeal of LinkedIn.  But for me, it feels as though it was designed for a subset of the current generation of employers, the people who think an embarrassing picture on Facebook, from five years in the past, is an accurate indicator of an individual's ability to contribute to an office environment.

So, I don't think LinkedIn in the future.  I think it serves a specific missing link between the people who have no interest in using social media, and the people who will soon be the only target market that matters: those who live in social media.

[This is the second in a series of posts where I answer the questions I suggested people ask potential media hires.]

dear facebook, beacon is evil.

I know I've just recently berated anyone who whines about Facebook's new setup, but I've been seeing rumours here and there that the Beacon system might be coming back.  I hate Beacon, and I think my rage directed at it is more justified than those raging against the live feed option, or the new layout, or what have you, for one reason.

Facebook catalogues and organizes your social information.  It does this based on what you decide to tell the site about yourself, filtered through your privacy settings.  You might not like everyone you are friends with seeing what you do or say on Facebook, but you have decided to do and say those things, on the Facebook platform.

Beacon is problematic because it follows you around after you leave Facebook, and then tells everyone you have identified as a friend what you are up to outside of the Facebook platform.  To me, this breaks the implicit contract that Facebook users have - that Facebook stays confined to Facebook.  Telling people I'm said 'Happy Birthday' on a friend's wall is very different then telling them I googled the release dates of 35 mens fashion magazines, or watched several videos centred on the history of the bow tie.

What makes me odd, is that I don't have a problem with Facebook tracking this information, and using it to better target ads to me, assuming it is stored in a double-blind system, and kept for a limited amount of time.  What bothers me is that information, which I did not tell Facebook to collect, being distributed among individuals. 

Social networks are about projected identity, not actual identity.  If you remove the user control over the identity presented online, then yes, you are invading their privacy to an extent.  That, I have a problem with.

on the new facebook.

I have a lot of trouble taking any complaints about changes to Facebook seriously, because they are almost always freak-outs based on a fear of change.

When the News Feed first emerged, everyone freaked out except me.  It was called 'Stalker Feed', a bunch of groups were started and joined, and people generally decided that presenting the same information that was available before in a more logical way was terrifying.

People actually freaked out, because people knew what they were doing, on a system composed entirely of profile information and lists of people who can view it.  This is the greatest example of cognitive dissonance I can think of in the last 5 years.

Now, the same people are freaking out about the new Facebook, calling it 'Stalkerbook', and complaining, paradoxically, that it makes it too easy to see what people are doing, and too hard to find information on them, due to different tabs for different things.

This is a service, that is based entirely on organizing and sharing personal information with a select few approved people.  If you want to freak out about Google listings of personal info, and it's impossible to opt out, then fine.  Otherwise, you're getting what you expected, and freaking out because the package is more clearly organized.

This probably means you're irrational, at best.  A more usable version of the same information is BETTER, not scarier.

aggregation does not a destination make.

Interesting observation:

I set up Facebook to import my posts from BrokenGentleman.com as notes.  A post that appeared both on my blog, and tumblr, to no response, got 5 comments within 5 hours on Facebook.

This, oddly enough, got me thinking about FriendFeed.

If a service’s only value as a destination is the ability to import data from multiple places and aggregate the same grouping of data from multiple contacts, then why am I headed there instead of to Facebook, which can do many of the same things (and could do all of them, if Zuckerberg and company saw potential there), while providing an established wealth of value and content of it’s own.

Honestly, if Facebook would let me set it to import more than one blog feed, and expanded importing support to more outside services, I could easily see it becoming even more of a destination than it already is.  If people are already going there to see what is going on in the lives of their associates, why not take advantage of that and put the things you are doing in front of them, whether they are RL or online based.

This is likely one of the posts that is more for me than for anyone else.

a soon to be unpopular opinion.

I actually quite like the new Facebook layout.

Vanity Fair stumbles into Social Media relevance.

Every once in a while, an dead-tree outlet does something that's either a beautiful accident, or a rare moment of brilliance. Vanity Fair seems to have one going on at this exact moment.

"Five weeks ago, when I started working as as editorial assistant here at VF.com, my boss casually mentioned that he was giving me until August 5 to attract 10,000 fans to the Vanity Fair Facebook page. It was an onerous and epic assignment, and I responded to it the way any sensible person would: I brightly answered “Yes, sir,” and then did nothing, hoping he would forget about it."

The actual idea is absurd, legislating a quota for something that is 1) opt in, and 2) offers no reward, is more or less a recipe for failure. The difference is that the larger picture, giving a new employee an impossible assignment, and having it incorporate social media in an integral manner, taps into the point of something like Facebook.

This isn't about Vanity Fair anymore. It's about Bill Bradley, it's about overbearing bosses who don't get it, it's about the way new media is being glued to anything with a faint pulse in hopes that it will be revitalized. Vanity Fair now has a story on Facebook, or more accurately, Bill Bradley has a story on Facebook that draws attention to Vanity Fair.

I'm assuming this is a well planned and low budget attempt to go viral, but given my job and my interests, I see campaigns where there are none all the time.

Still, it's a good lesson for anyone trying to figure this Facebook thing out; the point isn't to put your brand into a social network. The point is to attach your brand to a person, via a story, that creates associations. Social networks are about people. People are about things. But this order needs to be maintained to generate interest without coming across as a colonist.

who cares: social media and the 'assumed' audience.

So, I started using twitter. This is only notable because it started an interesting conversation, one I have had before, in various permutations. It was kicked off by this Penny Arcade comic, and went from a question of 'does anyone really care to read what you are doing at any given moment via twitter' to 'why do you use social media?'

I explained, pretty clearly, that for me, social media is about interaction, but not really about the potential or intended audience.

Some people using services like tumblr, or twitter, or pownce, etc, are doing so as a promotional extension of their dominant destination, whether or not they are thinking of it as such. When someone has the power to break websites by linking to them, yeah, they have to consider their intended audience. But these are not the people that make social media work, really.

It's become cliche that most blogs only have one reader - the person who writes them. And yet, blogs continue to be created in a non-professional capacity, and facebooks and twitters and tumblrs follow suit.

For me, social media is about building my context. It's about building an archive, a data shadow, and something to point people at when something I thought or wrote or experienced has new relevance. This became clear a little while ago, when I shuttered my livejournal account. I backed up the whole 5 year ordeal as a PDF, and it's sitting in my laptop, and on my backup, as a giant pile of information that could be best labelled 'Jon Crowley, 2002-2007'

It's a wonderful side effect that people who care what I have to say, however few, can dig through the trail I'm generating, and possibly find something that interests them. But I'm not, and in all probability will never be, one of those people who can ask the legion of fans to help me with a technical issue, or to surge to the defence of something I have a personal interest in. And while that's cool, it's not what I was after when I started playing around on the internet.

I was, and am, in love with the utility of a recorded history of minutiae. I'm addicted to information, no matter how miniscule, and how it all fits together. I like the idea of that information, that minutiae, being parts of a person, thoughts, ideas, random snippets. I'm willing to (with a clear understanding that nothing is private), put selected thing out there.

So, I understand the appeal of twitter, at least for me. It's another way to record my minutiae, and another solid point I can direct people to if they want more context, more snippets. That's what this blog is for, the utility of recorded ideas, not some imagined readership that (frankly) I know I'm a little too unknown, and a little too inconsistent, to have.

engagement as facilitation.

While working on the last 2 posts, and considering how to generate engagement, I realised that my core point wasn't the focus on issues, per se, but rather creating a tool to facilitate action. This is a pretty simple rule for whether or not something will generate engagement in a user base, so I thought it should be made explicit.

Content, or Information, or even Distraction don't guarantee engagement, and if they do, they can only do so for the short term. People talk about the value of Facebook as a 'social graph'm but I find I can only explain the value to non-users as a means of keeping in touch with people I would otherwise lose track of. Facebook is filled with information, and things to do, but the engagement comes from it's use to facilitate events, or friendships, or contact.

Wikipedia works the same way. It's not naturally engaging to the majority of users - we show up, get the information we want, maybe click a link or two, and move on. But to those who see Wikipedia as a way to facilitate explaining their expertise, and sharing it with others, it becomes an addiction. These superusers are the ones who keep the project alive.

I use Tumblr because it facilitates sharing short bursts of information with my friends. There are other ways I can do that, but Tumblr also facilitates interaction with the information my friends post. It gives me a dead easy way to take someone else's content, respond to / remix it, and repost it on my own account. This is then shared with anyone following my account.

This is obvious, and should be fairly intuitive. You can't just offer something, you have to offer a means to action, to actually engage users. So, there's the short version of how I need to consider any changes to anything in my life - what action am I facilitating, and what am I trying to shore up with nothing but content?

advertising vs. data collection in monetizing social networks.

I promised to follow up on this post around two weeks ago, but I think I can be excused due to the holiday madness that filled that time period.

In the previous post, my general complaint was that the amount of initiative necessary to elevate advertising in social networks from an annoyance to a service is negligible in comparison to the potential returns, both directly and in terms of reputation. The example at hand was Facebook, and the mediocre targeting that let me know a band I like was touring in my country, but didn't bother to take it a step further and actually point me to venues near me, and a place to purchase tickets.

The problem goes deeper than that, and it's pretty simple to explain. Facebook, like most social networks, has made the assumption that having a business model based on advertising revenue means you are a company that works in advertising. Looking into Facebook's brand promotion 'Fans' pages, etc, there is a lot of useful space in which to inject a brand identity. They've also made a point to keep the structure fairly rigid, which I respect - this feature was, at first, the major differentiator from MySpace. I'm not trying to question the advertiser focused initiatives that Facebook has created. I'm just wondering why they were necessary at all.

Facebook is not an advertising company. Facebook, like all social networks, is more accurately a clearing house of user data. Facebook has a lovely, massive community of people, many of whom are highly engaged with the 'social utility'. Most of whom have made vast amounts of personal information available. This is what Facebook is selling, first and foremost - the ability to identify a useful target market for ads, services, etc.

So why are they taking it further than that? You want fan pages for Brands, sure. This makes perfect sense to me. But beyond that? What you have to offer is a community, and your collected information about them. Leave the rest to people why can actually make creative, targeted advertising work. Don't further the spread of the pseudo banner ad by putting them into the News Feed.

Offer the information. Leave strategy to the same guys who handle the creative in other, slightly less closed systems, all the time.

When reading about advertising and the future, the word that is thrown around a lot is authenticity, because us youth of today have finely tuned bullshit detectors, etc etc. My stance is that it's often quality that's more important - you can't make something an ad, and hide that you are trying to sell me something by coating it in a fine layer of authenticity. But you can make me care, and sit through the ad, because the content is good, relevant to me, and entertaining.

Facebook has the information to be astounding at determining the relevance of a product or service to it's users. But honestly, trusting either quality of content, or entertainment value to a company who openly and proudly has been built on unpaid, personal contributions by users seems more than slightly odd.

Hopefully it's clear that Facebook is interchangeable for any other social network or social utility here. The issue is that if the only thing you are actually bringing to the table is information, why are you trying to sell a full service, rather than just taking money for the information at substantially less overhead?

facebook ads and failures of monetization.

Depressingly, I do not have access to the screen shot I took of the specific Facebook ad that so offended me. If I get to it, I'll edit it into this post in the near future.

One of my issues with monetizing social networks is that it's always done in the least logical model possible. Instead of selling information (which, really, is the only product they have to offer other than the easily offended and fickle masses that make the entire engine run) they inevitably attempt to create a full service perfect storm of failure, that ends up making the advertisers look clueless and stupid, and makes the company itself look like they don't value the community in the least.

Looking at you, Facebook.

Here's the short version of my experience with Facebook ads. On my News Feed, I find an ad for Modest Mouse. I like Modest Mouse, and Facebook knows this. Because I told them, in my profile. Facebook also knows I live in Canada, again, due to my profile.

What Facebook doesn't seem to know is WHERE in Canada I live, or which venues are conceivable accessible to me, despite that information being very available to them. So I get an ad that says, more or less, 'Hey Canadian Modest Mouse fan! Modest Mouse is touring Canada. Now click this and dig through a bunch of crap to find out when they are near you! Then go to ticketmaster and go through more crap!'

I can see why they wouldn't want targeted ads that are actually well targeted. More work, more money, and the assumption that the true fans (the kind who label themselves such) are willing to hunt a little. And I guess that's fine. But from my point of view, it's also a waste.

If that ad had popped up with "Hey [NAME], Modest Mouse is playing at [Venue] and [Venue] near you, on [insert dates here]. If you would like tickets or further tour information, click here [link to ticketmaster page with info on the concert / venues]."

This wouldn't bother me, if the ads were calibrated to my stated interests, and my stated location. This is, I would argue, the whole value of social networks. The idea that advertising can be so targeted that it stops being an intrusion, and starts being a service.

A little more effort on the experience, and a fairly meaningless ad could, conceivably, have driven me to buy tickets on the spot, rather than compose a blog post in my mind.

I'll be following this up very shortly (possibly this evening) with another, more general post on my issue with how social networks are monetized, and how they could generate revenue without disrupting the user experience on which they completely rely.

[Standard apology for radio silence.]

My good friend at Ghost Razor got me thinking about advertising and social networks. Well, he, the Microsoft-cash-certified 15 billion facebook valuation, and the fact that targeted advertising hasn’t really shown me much other than location targeting, and google style text ads that are based on the content of your screen / email / profile, etc.

The short version of this is there is a complete lack of creative work in these ads – text ads are boring. And text targeted ads result in some hilarious missteps, as well. Google is home of the brilliant proprietary algorithm, but I still get ads that suggest things based on sarcasm.

The response I’ve been seeing from advertising pros seem to be the most phoned in things in recent memory. I keep reading commentary about how targeted ads need ‘authenticity’ or how the essential missing ingredient is ‘engaging content’. For anyone who hasn’t been watching, this is the solution that is generally proposed by adver/creatives for anything in the universe. And it makes sense, because it’s important that spots be somewhat authentic, engaging, because these are code words for ‘not-insulting’ and ‘not boring’. Bravo.

There is place for creative content in targeted ads, and it just requires two major things – more work per account, and a better tool for profiling than just looking for keywords and spitting out the content that best fits.

My immediate reaction to being posed this problem was to think of profiling. Not in terms of looking for certain keywords and responding with certain ads, although that has a place. My interest is more in creating a dozen or so profiles for users that fit within the target market for your product, and then finding the interests, keywords, and relationships that identify these groups. This would require not only tracking the interests and usage of one person, but more important to track how interests spread between friends in the network – this could help in tracking the alpha consumers who are the holy grail. More importantly, it allows separation of users based on personality type, interest type in your product, related interests, etc.

Targeted advertising should be more than just sending people who say they care about something related to your product information, it should be about walking into the conversation of social networking, and treating different people with a past of different actions and different interests, differently. Treating people differently makes no sense in terms of broadcast model advertising, ie, advertising at scale.

This is different.

This is lucrative for both sides of the equation – the advertising agencies would now be creating multi-pronged campaigns with materials targeted to each of the X profiles created, so they would be (logically) charging substantially more. Also presumably logical would be increased effect from (actually) targeted advertising.

I guess all I’m saying is that targeted advertising means more to me than throwing the same content, or less involved content, at people who are more likely to care.

If facebook is worth 15 billion on the strength of the information it has gathered from it’s community, maybe targeted advertising should mean a little bit more in terms of giving people a personalized experience, rather than just very specifically aimed generic content.