Scheduled Tweets break social norms (says network)
Pushing out links automatically via Twitter as content is published using services such as Feedburner has been become accepted practise for Twitter users.
But there’s a new game in town: scheduling Tweets using services such as Hootsuite to be published when you’re busy or on holiday.
It’s a form of automated networking that inevitably limits the opportunity for conversation. I asked people in my Twitter network for their view:
“Personally, I do not. However, I can see how schedules and ‘windows of opportunity’ may not have their openings align.” @briansolis
“No, I don’t schedule tweets. […] seems to be a growing practice; don’t like [it] myself. Something almost mechanical and remote about it turns your own Twitter handle into a marketing channel. Only valid for tweeting from a handle that actually is your marketing channel.” @jangles
“Looked at it once but it seemed too unreliable; what if there was an issue and a schedule tweet went out? I’d look like I was either paying no attention to what’s being said online, or just really inappropriate. [I] would rather do it in real time.” @vikkichowney
“Hate it – it’s mercenary, manipulative marketing at its worst. It’s a social network, not an automated one. People are the beating heart – millions of conversations prompted by an emotional response to a real-world incident or real-world tweet.” @paulfabretti
“Nah can’t be bothered. [I’m] better off saying that I am out for a bit and haven’t got a connection.” @r_c
“I don’t no. Why? [In the] fast moving pace of the network, something written in advance, might not work at a future determined time.” @litmanlive
“It works from a one-way perspective. I do it to keep hits ticking over while I’m too busy or on hols. [You] can’t interact, of course.” @CMRLee
“I don’t – only point I can see is if embargoed news. I auto-publish articles but that’s it. Scheduling seems to go against grain of Twitter.” @JoshHalliday
“Wouldn’t completely rule it out but haven’t felt the need to. My tweets are not that important.” @stedavies
Five ways of promoting an event via LinkedIn
- Create an event on LinkedIn using the event application
- Share the event with your contacts using the LinkedIn event application
- Consider creating a LinkedIn ad about your event using the LinkedIn event application
- Share details of your event with relevant groups of which you’re a member (but don’t spam)
- Ask people in your company to help promote the event using their status update messages and other social networks such as Twitter
Your social network as an editor (Twittertim.es, Paper.li and Flipboard)
The last few weeks has seen the rise of a series of tools that take content recommended by your Twitter network and presents it in a newspaper-style format. Your network takes on the role of an editor.
Twittertim.es is the first instance that I discovered. It assembles content tweeted by your personal network and friends-of-a-friend network to create a crude web page summary. Stories are promoted based on how many times they have been tweeter.
Paper.il uses the metaphor of a print deadline to generate an online newspaper that is emailed to you once a day. Content is organised using semantic analysis into difference sections such as media, business and technology.
Flipboard is an application launched three weeks ago for the iPad. It collates articles, images and videos from URLs and organises them into a beautiful electronic newspaper that squeezes every bit of graphic and navigation functionality out of the iPad.
And to prove the point that my Twitter network has become my personal editor, here’s a story that I received via my network yesterday (via @markpinsent) from Mashable about how news consumption is shifting to personalised news streams.
Facebook: ‘Get back in touch with your wife’
There’s a flaw it would seem in Facebook’s network algorithms. Yesterday it urged me to get back in touch with my wife.
I know that I spend a lot of time away from home but I am fairly confident that there isn’t much that Facebook could bring to our relationship of 16 or so years.
Its not uncommon it seems for people to be prompted to connect with their nearest and dearest. Here’s comment from my Twitter networks.
Facebook clearly hasn’t realised that the people with whom you interact least online can be those closest to you.
Facebook privacy: software tools enable personal content to be interrogated
Image via Wikipedia
The chances are that I’m not your friend on Facebook. But that doesn’t matter. I can almost certainly access personal content that you’ve posted on the network.
With a very simple web script I could mine the comments that you are making to your Friends on your Facebook page – unless you’ve throttled back your security settings to the maximum level of protection.
Speed’s Dan Howe tracks social media developer sites and forums and has spotted a potential security hole in the Facebook applications designers Graph API. An API is a fancy name for how one software application such as Facebook talks to another. TechCrunch also spotted the conversations about the hole and covered the story this afternoon.
The Facebook Graph API can be used to find out what people are posting behind the network’s closed walls.
Here’s an application call for everyone that is making posts about a job interview. If you click on the link you’ll see the code generated by the API-call. Look closer and you’ll see text strings of each conversation that mention the string “job interview”.
Can you see the privacy issues we can?
Of course we could make the presentation prettier by designing an application to manipulate the search data and present it in a more attractive way, but that’s the not the point. This is a very trivial example that demonstrates how easy it is for developer to integrate user data within what we assume to be a closed social network.
I caught up with Dan this afternoon. He’s been working with the API and reckons that unless you have locked down your privacy settings to a friends only setting it is possible for anyone with a web browser to access content that you post on your personal Facebook page.
Facebook has published a list of the type of search queries supported in the documentation for the Graph API. These include individual users (you and me), pages, events, groups and status messages. It’s a marketing wet dream.
I don’t know about you but it makes me very uncomfortable and I’ve locked down my security settings as a result. Privacy and transparency are the two issues that could halt the phenomenal growth of social media.
Facebook must make users aware of the potential of the tools that it’s making available to harness data and content posted within its network if it’s to avoid a backlash.
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Reputation Online article on Nielsen’s report on social advertising within Facebook
Here’s an article that I’ve written for Reputation Online about Nielsen’s report published at ad:tech this week on the effectiveness of social advertising versus PR within Facebook.
The report says that earned media, the goal of any PR campaign, is a highly effective way for a brand to generate awareness in a social network such as Facebook – but cannot be guaranteed. Meanwhile, social ads (a form of network endorsement on ads) drive engagement and reach similar to traditional paid-for campaigns.
The Nielsen report is compelling but is flawed by its focus solely on social ad campaigns. It omits an analysis of the impact of standalone earned media campaigns on Facebook, what we’d more commonly recognise as traditional PR or word of mouth campaigns. Its uncountably a vehicle to sell ad campaigns on Facebook but is worth reading nonetheless.
Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression
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Five minutes with Mayfield: common names in networks and Google’s appetite for personal data
I caught up with Antony Mayfield after reading his recently published book: Me and My Web Shadow. He kindly agreed to talk further about some of the issues covered in the book.
Over the next few days I’ll post his comments on dealing with common names in networks, duplication in networks, syncing updates between personal networks and web serendipity.
Antony has created a category on his blog for updates about the book.
How do you manage your web shadow if you’ve got a common name such as John Smith?
The most important question to ask is: can people find me when they want to? What will they do when they are looking for John Smith? Well, most of us would start adding keywords to Google searches like your job, companies you have worked for, where you have lived. John Smith may not appear in the top results for his own name, but he should appear for “John Smith Acme Widgets Ltd”. Making sure a current photo of you is on your LinkedIn, Google and personal websites is also going to help make sure people don’t miss your profile or mistake someone else for you.
When establishing your web presence – personal website, social network profiles – it is important to make sure they include some of these keywords that are part of how people will want to find you. You might also think of adding addresses to your website and key profiles (LinkedIn and Twitter for work) and other places on your emails, both personal and corporate accounts so people can by-pass Google when they want to find out more about you.
The other thing to think about it is making yourself stand out from the crowd a little. Many people use a common name for their Twitter profiles and the like that is specific to them (for instance, Wadds). Keep that consistent (and your avatars/profile pictures) so it will be easier for people to recognise you in different networks.
Should we be concerned that Google is recording our every interaction on the web?
First of all, we should be aware that this is happening, and not just with Google either. Although people who work with the web a lot know this, many people don’t understand how much data is being gathered by them.
Google itself is a benign guardian of our personal data and the pay-off of free services and access to their technology seems to be a deal most of us are happy to make for the moment. The fear some rightly have is about who will have access to that data in the future? What will Google be like in 20 years time and who will own it? This is an important and ongoing debate.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s COO, says that the company would like to make it possible for people to take all of their search data with them – it would be good for Google to make it clear that we can all have access to and the right to delete all of our own data if we wish. As the volume and importance of the personal data held by Google (and others) grows, I would like to see them staying ahead of both governments and citizens in putting in governance structures and safeguards against abuse. They have to keep earning our trust.
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Local newspaper engages with audience via social network: from Flickr to print
Newspapers have largely ignored social networks as a means to engage with their audience, seeking instead to force readers onto their web sites. But this example bucks the trend.
Remember the sunset shot that I took of the Cheviots in Northumberland a couple of weeks ago? Probably not but stick with me.
I posted the image to the Your Place Northumberland Flickr group that’s curated by the hyperlocal team at the Newcastle Journal. It made the Your Place hyperlocal web site. And now the Northumberland Journal Extra local newspaper.
I think that its an important step because it shows traditional media engaging with its audience and sourcing content via a social network.
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Book review: Antony Mayfield’s Me and My Web Shadow
Proponents of social media in the UK and US will almost certainly have come across Antony Mayfield’s work. He’s a senior vice president at iCrossing, a digital marketing firm, that works with brands including Coca-Cola, Toyota and Channel 4.
We’ve only ever met once very briefly but Mayfield feels like an old friend. I read his blog and follow his tweets. Therein lies one of the benefits of maintaining a strong web shadow.
Managing your own web shadow is important says Mayfield as our lives increasingly move online. The web is the first place people will look to find out about you and being connected brings opportunities he says.
Mayfield’s personal web shadow extends over his blog, Delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Look him up for yourself.
Me and My Web Shadow is a guide to managing and promoting your personal reputation online. In three sections Mayfield covers the basics of the web, a review of your personal reputation online and a self-styled “Haynes manual” to managing your web shadow.
It’s an incredibly well written book (Mayfield is a former PR) that successfully bridges the gap between self-help manual and text book. The theory is there when you need it, but for the main part, the book is packed with practical advice and links to useful resources and tools.
This is a book that you should share with your family and friends. Mayfield says this is his intended audience. It works equally well for web savvy and the “I don’t get Twitter” brigade alike. My wife, a self-confessed privacy obsessive and social web Luddite has bagged my copy.
Me and My Web Shadow focuses on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as a means of building a personal profile online. Each social network is tackled in a basic guide to getting started, through building a presence, establishing a network and publishing content. The personal benefit of blogging is also covered in a chapter of its own.
But Mayfield doesn’t dodge difficult issues online such as dealing with bullies, trolls and negative comments, identity theft, privacy and dealing with mistakes.
The key theme of the book is that openness online is rewarded. In the conclusion Mayfield introduces us the concept of serendipity engines.
“[…] to be connected is to be lucky, or at least luckier. […] Online connections increase your chance or finding the right person with the right knowledge at the right time,” says Mayfield.
Openness uncovers opportunity through connections.
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