Privacy, Facebook, and Social Media Strategy

A lot of dust has been kicked up in the past couple of weeks surrounding three announcements from both Google and Facebook about search, status updates, and an old favorite of The Internets, PRIVACY.

#1. TechCrunch reported that Google, a popular search engine, has chosen to include "public" Facebook status updates in the special, Real-Time place in regular Google search results.  MySpace and Twitter updates are already showing up.

#2. Facebook just rolled out changes to their privacy settings.  Upon login, people have been presented with a prompt, asking them to confirm their privacy settings to the default, recommended settings, or to keep their old ones.  The default setting for status updates is "everyone," meaning that people's updates of "I'm eating a waffle" are now set to be indexed by Google.

Facebook claims that this is a reaction to the way that people are using the service in this interview on ReadWriteWeb.  Barry Schnitt, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, gives this somewhat veiled explanation:  "Because the site is changing, our userbase is changing and the world changing."

What ever the official stance may be, it is clear that both companies stand to benefit from more updates being made publicly available, and having those updates showing up in search.

#3. The final announcement, as reported by MediaPost, will have an impact upon those that use the Facebook Pages.  From the start, all status updates from a Page have shown up in the news feed of Fans of that Page.  Soon, Facebook will be inserting an algorithm into that process, giving preference to Page owners that have a higher level of engagement with their Fans.  (Engagement, in this case, being people "Liking" and commenting upon updates.)  Simply stated, the more interaction a Page has, more of those updates will appear in Fans' News Feeds.

What does this mean for those that operate Fan Pages on Facebook?

If your strategy has been to set one up and wait for people to make it viral, then you have your work cut out for you.

If it weren't already clear, it should be blindingly so now: your social media strategy is a content strategy.  Status updates are content.  Links and Notes in Facebook are being indexed.  Photos on your Page will soon show up in search.

No need for alarm.  If dealt with properly, it can be cause for celebration.  Reach can now be extended outside of the walled garden of Facebook and into the wide open world of search.  More traffic can potentially be driven to Pages and sections of Pages, like Notes, Photos, and Video.

There will be some work involved. Page owners may need to take a new approach to the content they publish to those pages.

Facebook's new News Feed insertion rules depend on the mojo granted from comments and "Likes."  Page administrators will need to curry the favor of those Fans.  To do this, publishers and content creators should apply the same SEO-friendly rules to their Facebook content and updates that are likely in place for other content:

• Clear, descriptive titles
• Concise summaries
• Relevant images, video, audio content
• Proper metadata attribution
  
• Hooks!

For other content creators and publishers, these changes may be a wake-up call.  Maybe the updates that have been published up to this point haven't been that appealing.  Perhaps they were posted just to post something, to stay in front of Fans.  Now may be the time to look at a larger content strategy.  Or, ask bigger questions, such as "What are we doing here?"

As more outlets [and changes in those outlets' policies] present themselves, they'll need to be incorporated into strategies, workflows, governance, and metrics.  Unlike other, more static components of a content strategy, the rules and tactics in social media are more likely change week to week.  User agreement changes, acquisitions, and partnerships with competitors can all force a re-examination.

Even what seems to be a relatively minor change in a single channel may turn out to have a sizable impact.

["Self Noir" image via Flickr user Jeremy Brooks (CC: by-nc)]

I am not making this up: Tastebook

My wife is a fabulous cook. She gets her ideas from all over the place -- family, friends, cookbooks, and, most recently, the Internets. for years she has been a frequent visitor of popular site epicurious.com.

Epicurious has been one of those places that was ahead of the social media curve in the same sense as Amazon. They were both doing social media-type things before folks were even calling it that. People were posting their recipes, posting comments, and reviewing. I have eaten well as a result, many times.

CondeNet, owner of Epicurious, announced investment in a new venture in October 2007. It was dubbed "Tastebook." Created by the originators of Ofoto in February 2007, it takes some of the concepts of the Ofoto photo service [now known as Kodak Easy Share Gallery]; taking the digital and making it tangible in the form of prints.

Here is what Tastebook is capable of, from their press release:

Registered Epicurious.com members can now instantly import their My Epi Recipe Boxes to TasteBook. In addition, by logging onto TasteBook, users will have access to more than 25,000 editor-tested recipes from Epicurious and may upload their personal recipes. With TasteBook’s simple drag-and-drop interface, making a personal cookbook is as easy as creating a “playlist” comprised of recipes. Details like cover art and title are also customizable.

Anyone can create a TasteBook today by visiting www.tastebook.com or www.epicurious.com to get started. Using the TasteBook service is free, and a personal cookbook filled with up to 100 recipes costs only $34.95.

Those two paragraphs cover what blogger Kevin Kelly speaks of in a post titled "Better than free." Whether Tastebook is aware of it or not, they have provided about five of the "Eight Generatives Better Than Free." In a nutshell, Kelly posits that in the world of free things, creators/aggregators/distributors need to offer value to people.

Epicurious users have access to those 25,000 recipes already, for free. Users have also always had the option of printing a page out of Epicurious as they would print any web page, but those loose pages tend to accumulate in unusable piles on counters, waiting to be painstakingly indexed and filed.

What they haven't had up to this point is this:

• a copy they can immediately pull off of the shelf
• user-selected content
• easily accessed content [via index & tabs in the book]
• findable content [as opposed to those print-outs]
• a hard copy they can happily dust the flour off of [as opposed to a keyboard]

They may have had a couple of those, but the more you have in one place, the greater that value proposition appears. Tastebook is making this downright irresistible for net-savvy cooks.

The name may or may not have been a clever play on the white-hot Facebook. If you ask me, their idea is hot enough that they didn't even need to bother. Perhaps the name was an update on the standby name of 'cookbook;' that term is still functional if not overly workman-like, for sure, but Tastebook lends an air of, well, taste.

Yahoo! Special K!

I saw an ad on the TV this morning that ended with an uncommon call-to-action.

Special K, that Kellogg's diet standby, asked me to go to Yahoo to search for "Special K diet."

I have seen this before; some years ago Pontiac pointed people to Google to search for 'Pontiac.' They did the same thing that Special K did in this most recent ad -- instructed folks to go to a specific search engine and enter a term, circumventing the need for a special URL or landing page that might be hard to remember.

Blogger Cabel Sasser noticed this same phenomenon in Japan on a recent trip; this post details what he saw as a major shift away from URLs toward suggested search engines and terms.

Digging further into the Kellogg site, you will notice that the second item on their left-side navigation is an invite to join them at their Yahoo Group. I went there to find a lavishly branded Group, easily navigable even by those unfamiliar with Yahoo Groups. Newsgroups have come a long way, and this is no exception; there are social functions built in, maps, etc. This is an extensive project, not just a social media tag-along. Props for that. [I am just waiting for a Facebook app...]

The hardest part about trying to integrate this sort of partnership into ad campaigns is yet to come. Folks are pretty well set in their ways when it comes to search engine loyalty. There needs to be an appealing value proposition to make a switch from something as ingrained as Google in their browsing habits. Especially in light of the fact that tons of people are typing URLs into search engines instead of their address bars.

Feeling both lazy and insolent, I went to Google rather than Yahoo to do the search thing. I did the search in my Firefox search field, with Google as the default. Their helpful little 'suggestion' feature brought up 'Special K diet' after I finished the 'K.' Since this feature is based on common searches as entered by other people, I discovered that I was not the only lazy/insolent one. So much for following instructions, America.
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Wait for it... *pop*

[ image courtesy of Paul J. Thompson / Flickr ]

This delightful image from Paul J. Thompson on Flickr shows a bubble bursting in a mudpot at Yellowstone National Park. Here, gases flow up from the ground and percolate through the mud. Like many bubbles, they are intermittent, unpredictable, and quick to burst. The ones at Yellowstone are often caused by hydrogen sulfide; when the bubbles burst, they stink!

I have been to Yellowstone to see these stinking bubbles burst, and I was a part of another bubble burst that stank -- the Great Internet Bubble Burst of 2000. My employer, once flush with venture capital, was forced to downsize and I was left without a gig. After that, things leveled out for teh Internets, and I found gainful employment once again.

Ever since folks have been chattering about Web 2.0, there have been murmurs of "here are the makings for yet another burst-bubble situation." This sentiment has been echoed in a recent article from the NY Times. It explicitly calls out the signs of an impending burst -- tons of venture capital, funny company names, and questionable or non-existent business plans. From the article:

“We are almost going back to year 2000 types of errors,” said Aaron Kessler, an Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. Internet companies “are buying users instead of revenue and profitability,” he said.

Speculation is no new concept, and no one is asking it to cease. The thing that might set this apart from other business analysis situations is the concept of the ghost user. Best described as the registered yet non-participating member of a site/service/community, these users are often curious [as a result of reading an article in the NY Times or WSJ]. A username is selected, password entered, and ghost user is now officially considered another hash mark on the all-important tally of "total registered users." Of the seven Second Life users I know, I am aware of at least six of them are ghost users, not including myself. I did configure that avatar, after all...
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Facebook in the Flesh

[ image courtesy of laffy4k / Flickr ]

Forgive me for yet another post about Facebook. The rest of the media / blogosphere has not given me a respite on the 'Book, so I must continue to comment upon it.

The media that sparks this entry was the old-school format of teh magazine. The New Yorker from September 17th, to be specific. I read it on my electronics-free commute today. [Normally, I am tethered to my iPod for the duration.]

I don't mean to be the nay-sayer, but I think the overwhelming waves of praise of the 'Book could use a small bit of tempering. Not because of what is can do, but rather, what it cannot. The article spoke specifically about NYU students and a seminar offered as a part of orientation titled, "Facebook in the Flesh." Author Michael Schulman begins with the observation that many students now arrive at campus with many "friends" in place. Friends in the I-have-added-you-to-my-Facebook sense of the word. These Freshmen may have some familiarity with each other in the pixelated sense, but the face-to-face interactions and the resulting awkwardness must still be overcome. Oh, how well I remember it...

The fact that this interaction comes at a time when people are first making a go of it alone for the first time makes this seminar all the more relevant, and maybe even representative of the population at large.

Social media in its still-evolving form serves to enhance communication & relationships, not to obsolesce. It simplifies and enriches, connects and enlivens these connections to others. As with other social media, it does not fuel itself, regardless of the sophistication of the application.

Facebook and other social media bring the relationship back to the fore; now replete with widgets, tweets and sundry.

Capitalism Done Right? Perhaps.

This is a nifty bit of widget right here: Goodstorm has created a service that allows users to create a "mixtape" widget to place on their MySpace, Facebook, or blog. Users select songs from the list of 2+ million songs in their back catalog from an array of labels, or they can upload their own creations.

Under the banner of "Capitalism Done Right" they offer a deal that allows everyone in on the cut. From the $.99 cost per track, each artist gets $.65. The complier of each mixtape gets a small portion of the sale as well.

The catalog is the usual mix of non-major, indie labels that can be found on many of the other non-traditional music retailers and outlets online.

If you build it, will they come?

[ image courtesy of prupert / Flickr ]

PaidContent.org reports that Eons, the social networking site for the 50+ set, just received second round of funding in the amount of $22 million. The Guardian reports that Reuters has announced their intent to create a MySpace-like social networking site for the financially inclined. USA Today released a major revamp of their site that takes advantage of several social media components.

Here is where the question lies, as asked by MediaPost in a superb article: Does the standard phrase "If you build it, they will come" apply here? Will these communities be able to sustain themselves?They posit that the best way to grow and maintain a living community is to provide consistent content that will keep folks coming back. User generated content is a part of this ecosystem, but not the only part. Making the experience rich and easily shared with other communities will prove to be make-or-break touchpoints.

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Tasty Snacks.

When the musicians in the earlier days of jazz went into the recording studio, they could only solo as long at the format of the 78rpm record would allow, which was under four minutes, for the most part. Within those constraints, artists like Charlie Parker created brilliance.

The tables have since turned. Artists have gone on to create works of considerable length in film, television and music. Now the challenge is not in the limitation of the format, but rather in the limitation of the new generation of content consumers' attention span. Wired Magazine highlights the phenomenon of re-formatting in their March issue under the apt banner of "Snack Culture."

Much has been written about how writing for the web is an entirely different beast than writing for published books, magazines and newspapers. We are only now seeing the same happen in the world of online audio and video. As technology allows for consumption in places other than where a television or radio are present, ideas about the format are being called into question.

The 90 minutes that NBC still allows for Saturday Night Live serves as a fine example. They are dicing small bits of that now seemingly enormous chunk of broadcast time and placing the best parts on YouTube. One infamous clip [NSFW] was placed there by NBC in its uncensored form, and has since received over 17 million views.

Next New Networks is extrapolating this concept; two former content CEOs [of MTV and Nickelodeon pedigree] created a new venture to cater specifically to the changing format, boundaries and constraints of content. From their website:

We're looking to be available everywhere, from phones to iPods and gaming devices, to whatever the next platform is. Each of our micro-networks consists of 3-11 minutes of content refreshed on a schedule, daily, weekly, or bi-weekly (depending on the network), and offers one or more regular shows.

We are witnessing the truncation of what used to be standard format-imposed content lengths, not only for time's sake, but for the sake of the ever-shortening attention span.

Perhaps we will see a distillation of the idea, without the need to pad it to meet the guidelines of a 74-minute CD, thirty-minute sitcom or 100-minute film. For those that have been creating content like this, perhaps ventures like Next New Networks will provide a viable outlet.

Old-school public radio has been producing to this length for some time, but length isn't everything. New approaches including relevant video and still images would be welcome augmentations in many instances.

Not since Current.TV have we seen formatics tossed out like this.

How is Web 2.0 different?

[ image courtesy of raster / Flickr ]

MediaShift has an excellent interview with Lee Rainie, Project Director for the PEW Internet and American Life Project. Several of the Project's reports have been featured right here on Superfly. Mr. Rainie details the why and how of their topics. Quite interesting.

On a related note, here is a brilliant little video that clearly illustrates why the world of Web 2.0 is such an exciting development. Presented in a historical fashion, it makes even more sense to those with less experience in the internet's earlier days. Worth every second of four and one-half minutes: