Category Archives: Facebook

My Facebook foul-up

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Take a look at the image below. Is this the type of photo you’d want to put beside a serious business inquiry? I wouldn’t. But I did.

It was an embarrassing experience, and perhaps my mistake can serve as a lesson for anyone who’s considering using social networks to transact business.

Last week was the first time I’ve used Facebook to direct a professional inquiry to a group of my friends. I was looking for some active Facebook users to profile in a book I’m writing, so it seemed a natural place to find them. I used a third-party application called FunWall, which is made by Slide. It looked straightforward enough: type the question, post it and then e-mail a notification to a list of your friends.

So I posted my question and send an invitation to everyone on my friends list, some 225 people. A couple of hours later, my wife sent me an instant message questioning the appropriateness of the image on my FunWall. “What image?” I said. I quickly logged on to Facebook and found my question next to the item below. There were already a couple of e-mails from friends questioning my good taste. I scrambled to delete the original message, which wasn’t all that intuitive, and to post an apology. I received a couple of more snickering responses from my associates, but have no idea how many people saw the offensive photo and thought I was serious.

As far as I can tell, the error occurred when I clicked the button to post my question, I inadvertently clicked the option just below it, which sent a postcard to accompany the question. For some unfathomable reason, the default postcard was the image below. I didn’t bother to check the post after I submitted it, and would probably not have even known of my error for hours unless my wife had pointed it out.

So shame on me for not double-checking my work. And shame on Slide for making it so easy for even an experienced user to make such a dumb mistake. If there are lessons, it’s that you should beware of the new breed of third-party apps that Facebook and other sites are accepting. And use that preview feature! You don’t want your best intentions undermined by a stupid user interface.

I’ll just go crawl back in my hole now…

Daily reading 12/19/2007

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On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data – New York Times Annotated

Snips:
“S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.
    “An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family.”

      Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input – Knowledge@Wharton Annotated

      This article covers several examples of successful word-of-mouth marketing efforts and offers advice on what works:

      • Keep branding to a minimum
      • Engage with customers in a way that’s meaningful to their lives
      • Be self-deprecating and funny
      • Have a thick skin; you will encounter some criticism

      Several examples and case studies are included.

      Report: Half of online adults, 85% of online kids to use social nets by 2011

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      eMarketer says that 37% of online adults use social networks at least once a month and that the figure will grow to nearly 50% by 2011. Among teens, usage is already well over half and will near 85% by 2011. Social nets clearly offer value that conventional news and information sites don’t.

      Allan Cattier, Director of the Academic Technology Group at Emory University gave a mind-blowing statistic in his presentation to the Communintelligence Executing Social Media conference in Atlanta last month. He said Emory had surveyed its freshman class and found that more than 80% of the students log on to Facebook 18 or more times a day. Imagine how our institutions will be shaped by this trend in coming years. He also showed a compelling video called “A Vision of Students Today” created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. See below.

      Still more AMA Webinar questions answered

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      Here are more responses to questions that time didn’t permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions. More to come!

      Q: Jodine asks “Another great example of this marketing approach is in the new music industry. Independent distributed musicians that gain their fans from MySpace and other social networks. Is this marketing approach what they call grassroots and/or organic marketing?”

      A: That’s certainly an appropriate term for it. MySpace, for example, has been a gold mine for independent music groups who don’t have the marketing dollars to put into advertising. The idea is to create networks of friends who self-define their interests and share favorite bands among themselves. Also, people who produce podcasts and blogs devoted to music often make it a point to promote lesser-known groups. While these tactics so far haven’t duplicated the throw weight of mainstream media campaigns, their popularity testifies to their effectiveness.

      Q: Sanjay asks, “Are there any potential problems for a regional retailer with just a few locations?”

      A: Not that I can think of. In fact, that person is a natural candidate for social media. Facebook, for example, is a great place to find people nearby who are interested in the products that the retailer sells. If I was a camera store owner in Chicago, for example, I might set up a Facebook group for photography enthusiasts to discuss their favorite Chicagoland sites to photograph. You can use that as a jumping off point to create events and even more targeted groups.

      A blog is also a terrific way to showcase expertise, and if you’re careful to label the blog and its posts with regional tags, you’ll do better on search engines. For small businesses on a budget, social media is a godsend.


      Q: Kristin asks, “How will the change in social media affect crisis communications?”

      A: I can think of a couple of major ways. For better or worse, people are increasingly taking their gripes and frustrations to their blogs instead of going through customer service channels. This makes the blogosphere an excellent early warning system. You should have Google Alerts set up for every product and brand you own, and you should also create RSS feeds from sites like Technorati, BlogPulse and IceRocket that can alert you immediately to new topics of blog chatter.

      In terms of responding to a crisis, a blog is perhaps the fastest way to get information online. This bypasses the media gatekeepers and insurers that the message is coming directly from you. If you link aggressively to the blog from your website and from blogs maintained by your employees and outside constituents, you can build visibility very quickly. Sites like Twitter are also increasingly being used by marketers to get messages out to the public instantly.


      Q: Viktor asks “What’s your opinion on intellectual property rights
      with blogging?”

      A: There effectively are none, and this is a huge hairball for new media. The reality is that many people who are now publishing online could care less about intellectual property or copyright. I have had entire articles lifted verbatim from my blog and even mainstream media sites and republished without any attribution whatsoever. It’s not worth going after people legally in most cases, and that tactic can actually create unwanted publicity.

      The entertainment companies have led the charge in trying to bring some order to this intellectual-property chaos, but they have encountered a lot of resistance and their tactics have not always been diplomatic. They have done themselves few favors. I’m afraid that these issues will take years to hammer out, and that our notions of copyright may look very different a few years from now. I wish I could be more encouraging, but a lot of people are wrestling with this problem.