links for 2011-02-16

  • Facebook's new pages: what they mean for marketers | Econsultancy
    Facebook is becoming more adept at distinguishing between corporate and personal use of the Facebook infrastructure. It is clear that the intention is to allow Facebook pages to be used as a form of corporate information hub, (WordPress within Facebook if you like) and use Facebook Groups as the facility where individuals can create their own spaces (Ning within Facebook). All this is consistent with the overall corporate anbition of Facebook as being The Single Place within which to 'do' all your social media, rather than being a more open space which allows integration with a range of other tools and services. Achieving this vision is is probably impossible, because it swims against the tide of what social media is all about – and will probably be the eventual undoing of Facebook. But for now – it does make it a more interesting proposition from a corporate usage perspective.
    (tags: facebook)

I had almost forgotten about …

… PostSecret.  This was one of the things us social media evangelists used in order to illustrate the essential strangeness of the world of social media, back in the time (before Facebook and YouTube) when social media was basically just blogs.  Its’ idea was to create confessional postcards and then share them with the world (rather than the person to whom you had to confess).  I am glad to say it is still going strong.  I found it while doing a search for something else entirely.

links for 2011-01-27

  • Facebook Turns Friend Activity Into New Ad Format
    Facebook trying to create find a way to create content that can then be used as place for advertising. The idea here is that people's activity can be turned into a story, which can then be sponsored. Feels like a forced fit to me, albeit it one which recognises that the nature of content in social media is something which people assemble for themselves, rather than something that is created for them – the content as raw material not finished product concept.
    (tags: facebook advertising stories)

Netvibes and the shift from the Portal to the App

One of the things on my list of to-dos is to write a think piece on an important trend which is becoming apparent – the shift from the Portal to the App.  Basically this means the polarisation of the digital space between web-based infrastructure on the one hand and application style information management tools on the other.  These tools may sit in the cloud (web) or be provided as a specific application which will sit on your desktop or mobile (or more accurately, sit in Windows or sit in Android).  As a result, the web will stop being a destination and will become much more invisible – a piece of service infrastructure. This is really what people mean when they talk about the shift to mobile – it is not a shift to a particular device or platform (as some people think) but the evolution of a new, much more useful way, of using the web.  It is also another example of the fact that the web has stopped being a medium of information and become a medium of connection and action.

A good example of this Twitter.  Continue reading →

Some Christmas fun

Thanks to my fellow trainers at the EACA International School of Advertising and Communications for these festive chuckles.

 

First via Tish Mousell – the social media version of the nativity story (this has nearly 4.5 million hits on YouTube thus far, so you may have already seen it).

Second, via Micky Denehy, Santa Brand Guidelines.  If you have ever received such a tome or sat through a presentation from a brand identity consultancy, you will love this (especially some of the more subtle details).  Fortunately in social media you don’t need brand guidelines, you just need a good story.

Some more leaking wikis

Here are examples of more leaking wikis.  These are much better than Wikileaks, because they they more closely respect the basic process rules that will ultimately determine success in this space.  They are not trying to turn themselves into institutions or flaming bolts of truth that streak across the sky.

Leaking wikis: they only work if they stop being publishers

Clay Shirky has just published some thoughts on Wikileaks.  He makes some very good observations, not least the importance of ensuring that we use legitimate democratic means to work out how, as a society, we will deal with Wikileaks.  But perhaps the article skirts around the difficult and necessary question of determining exactly what Wikileaks, and the forms of leaking wikis that may be to come, actually are.  And this is an important question to resolve as part of working out what to do about it / them. Continue reading →

There are only 10 people critical to your business and social media can help you find them

There are only ten people critical to your business and social media can help you find them.  That’s a pretty big claim.  If it is true (and I think it is) there has to be a drawback.  And here is the drawback.  Those ten people are the people who are critical to your business right now.  In a couple of minutes / hours/ days it is going to be another ten people and another ten after that.  But … there will only ever be ten (or similar such relatively manageable number) at any given time.

This observation has a whole host of implications.  Foremost amongst these is Continue reading →

Diaspora – keep an eye on this

Diaspora is an alternative to Facebook.  One might say how on earth could anyone challenge Facebook, especially with a service that basically does the same thing, but just does it a little differently?  Well, what Diaspora does is give a much greater focus to what a social network is all about – i.e. connection with small groups of people that you probably already have a relationship ‘in the real world’.  Consequently it also makes privacy and ownership of information a much bigger deal (the Achilles heel of Facebook).

Diaspora was launched in September and it may not get off the runway, but it is gathering interest right now – so worth tracking, because Facebook is vulnerable.

Facebook will eventually fall over because Continue reading →

When social media becomes the metric

There is, of course, a huge debate about metrics, measurement and ROI in social media.  This tends to be framed in terms of   “if I do some social media, what am I going to get out of it and how will I measure that”.  Last week I came across an a new take on the whole metrics issue – not measuring the impact of social media activity, but seeing social media activity itself as a metric. Continue reading →