Everywhere you go these days, you are bound to hear from an opportunistic contrarian about how they strongly dislike social media, abhor the substitution of technology for relationships, are embarrassed to admit they have a Facebook profile that they never check, or some other reason to fear the incursion into daily life of these essential communication platforms. Well, aside from my agreement with the cynics that we are experiencing something of a social media bubble (but like the dot com bubble, the internet didn’t go away when it popped), I am glad to see that some other observers point out that fears over new technologies are nothing new … they were saying the first thing about the telegram, radio, telephone, fax machine, and home computer. Here is some entertaining stuff from Vaughn Bell writing at Slate.com, including why we fear anything new invented after we have turned 35 years of age:
Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.
Twitter’s Staying Power
David Carr has a great article on why Twitter has become so much more successful than other social media platforms:
Beyond the dippy lingo, the idea that something intelligent, something worthy of mindshare, might occur in the space of 140 characters — Twitter’s parameters were set by what would fit in a text message on a phone — seems unlikely.
But it was clear that at the conference, the primary news platform was Twitter, with real-time annotation of the panels on stage and critical updates about what was happening elsewhere at a very hectic convention. At 52, I succumbed, partly out of professional necessity.
And now, nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it.
Some time soon, the company won’t say when, the 100-millionth person will have signed on to Twitter to follow and be followed by friends and strangers. That may sound like a MySpace waiting to happen — remember MySpace? — but I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay.
And I’m not alone.
How Facebook is Changing Friendship
A very interesting theoretical perspective on what it means to be friends with someone, and how this term is changing from a relationship toward a feeling, aided by technologies like Facebook. I do not necessarily agree with the author’s position, and I think that we have seen an avalanche of negative and dismissive articles written about social media (mostly because it is low hanging fruit for the critics) which may not necessarily give consideration to the benefits that these platforms have for society. That said, it is very interesting reading. From the Chronicle for Higher Education:
With the social-networking sites of the new century—Friendster and MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004—the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook’s very premise—and promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they’re not in the same place, or, rather, they’re not my friends. They’re simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.
Here goes an interesting reaction from Seeking Alpha to Virginia Heffernan’s weekend article in the Times about everybody making an exodos from Facebook.
Here’s the deal, churn is part of online media, particularly social media. People come and go. Some stick around, some don’t. These stories about quitters are true of course, but they miss the big picture. More and more people are using these services every day.
Of course, Facebook and Twitter and every other web service out there should pay a lot of attention to why people are quitting their services and address those issues. The best services reduce churn over time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but when we first invested in Twitter, it seemed like only 10% of first time users stuck around. Now that number is much higher and is one of the reasons why the service is growing faster.
So when you read these quitter stories, take them with a grain of salt. And make sure to look at the bigger picture at the same time. It may look very different.
The Other Revolution in Social Media
We saw pro-democracy protestors create spontaneous swarms of people through text messages during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. We saw Twitter leap to life during the aftermath of rigged elections in tiny Moldova. Now, Iran is having its turn using technology and social media tools to communicate amongst the political opposition. In a rather ironic article published in the New Republic, one NYU politics professor outlines the proper steps for authoritarian states to take in order to have the best success stealing elections and repressing the dissent of the youth … and one of these steps includes crushing any access to these important tools:
4) Technology–especially social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, but also more basic technology such as text messaging–is a friend of opposition forces attempting to combat electoral fraud, so do what you can to minimize its impact. One of the lessons from the Orange Revolution was how valuable text messaging could be as an organizing tool. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the early stories out of Iran was about how text messaging services (as well as Facebook) had been shut down, with Foreign Policy reporting that “the person coordinating the blackout, Iranians report, is the son of the Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.” Interestingly, CNN is now reporting that Twitter continued to play a role in the protests over the weekend, a topic I have written about here.
What We Are Doing to Twitter
Twitter is sure getting a lot of media hype. Today Time magazine has something actually worth reading about this platform, which is a cut above the rest of the gushing adoration you’ll find out there. I agree with the journalist about the “surprising depth” that 140 characters can bring, and although I agree with the skeptics who think its marketing appeal is limited, it is a powerful communications tool for awareness campaigns.
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.
The Wall Street Journal has posted a great video discussing the only slightly overblown Twitter phenomenon with the social media luminaries Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
Social Media Bloviation
I have written on this blog many times about the limits of social media. It is not a panacea, not a replacement for PR, and it is most certainly not a substitution for newspapers and traditional media. Yet the impossible promises keep on coming, and when businesses and campaigns are let down by the results, they can even feel cheated. That’s definitely the vibe picked up by Robert Strohmeyer over at PCWorld, writing (rather ironically) on the BizFeed blog:
Lately it seems I can’t go anywhere without running into a gaggle of social media consultants bloviating about the wonders of social network marketing. Sure, you’ve seen ‘em, too. Slick shake-and-bake “experts” promising to help you leverage the power of Twitter and Facebook to raise your profile and, inexplicably, boost your profits. But scratch the surface on most of these claims and they instantly crumble. Meanwhile, it seems the only people making any money in social media are the consultants themselves.
Presidential Blogging
Russia sure has it fair share of problems to address – no democracy, no free press, and regular attacks on human rights lawyers and political prisoners – but on the other hand, its young President Dmitry Medvedev is surely one of the more technically savvy world leaders out there. Not only is he regularly video blogging (yes, I refuse to use the term vlogging – I believe we should all maintain a healthy intolerance for obnoxiously new words) from the Kremlin’s homepage, he also runs a blog at LiveJournal, which is sort of like cross between MySpace and Facebook, and is incredibly popular in Russia. Not only can just anybody become “friends” with the President, they can leave completely uncensored comments – which is remarkable transparency to me, and surprising for the president of a country where many of those who speak out risk their lives. What’s even better, is that somebody is actually reading these comments, and in a few cases they have taken action. Now that’s much better PR, Mr. Medvedev!
From the Moscow Times:
What surprised him was that the Kremlin responded — and quickly. Two days after his post, he learned that Medvedev was looking into the matter. Then Ryazan’s governor called a news conference.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect anything because there were a lot of comments” on the blog, Zubarev said Wednesday. “We were very pleased because the situation really is terrible.”
The Dangers of Employee Blogging
I haven’t had very many clients who have hired me to help them draft a social media policy for their company – meaning what employees are allowed and not allowed to do out there on the interwebs – but I do know that things can quickly get pretty absurd and draconian (I remember one NYC law firm whose strict rules in theory would even prevent an employee from using an online dating site). Most of my services relate to the creation of online content, not the suppression of it, but still this is an area which presents some major PR vulnerabilities for many groups.
For those who haven’t given the matter very much thought, here’s a recent piece from Mashable with some easy guidelines on things to keep in mind (although I don’t want to count how many blog articles I’ve read with a similar headline). If you are a little pressed for time, I’ll summarize. 1) You should have a policy, at the very least to cover your bases in terms of liability; 2) employees who blog/twitter/facebook etc. can be good for the brand – it earned Dell an extra million bucks, for example; 3) a good policy covers everybody, not just marketers; 4) you should train people how to use it; and lastly 5) you should do it now.
It’s not rocket science, but getting down to the brass tacks of what is acceptable conduct in these spaces and what is unacceptable can be pretty tough – especially if you want to avoid being perceived as a censor.
