10 posts tagged “social media”
I was catching myself up on Beth Kantor's blog this morning and found out in a guest post by Michael Hoffman that YouTube was now allowing members of their Nonprofit Program to embed overlays at any point in their videos that allow viewers to go off-site to make a donation.
This a a huge boon for non-profits who are funded, at least in part, through donations. It works just as well for petition drives for social change campaigns. It's also a great way to get viewers more information and get them signed up for further contact, even if they don't end up donating.
YouTube should be commended for providing great functionality especially since they know people might not come right back to YouTube after clicking off-site.
Facebook's continued interest in being a part of the political dynamics in Iran has lead to them pushing up the launch of their Persian language translation of the entire Facebook site to tonight. They also would, undoubtedly, like to catch some of the media attention that has been going to twitter as a top enabler of political communication and organizing in otherwise censored Iran.
The site will be machine translated, but user corrections can be submitted.
Undoubtedly, Facebook needed feed search and public profile/page search just for functionality sake. And, undoubtedly, it was feeling pressure from Twitter addicts/researchers/marketers/reporters to have information remain relevant beyond the couple hour (or less) window of a person's feed (especially with feeds only covering a small portion of the info available to a Facebook user). But, I have to wonder if the events currently unfolding in Iran also had anything at all to do with the timing of the beta roll out too..? Even if just a little.
Consider...
1) Facebook was widely used as part of Mir Hossein Mousavi's political campaigning in Iran. The same has become increasingly true with Twitter.
2) Facebook has been sporadically blocked by Iranian officials throughout the past 18 months and during the protests has been almost completely blocked by the government.
3) Profile, page and public feed searches on Facebook would provide continuity of information over time for those Iranians who cannot access it for hours or days. Without search, much of the citizen journalism from Iran becomes, essentially, "lost" just due to it ending up obfuscated by newer posts. The same thing happens with information going into Iran and information coming from Iran's campaigns and organizers.
4) A government ban on posts that might cause "unrest" can be complied with on it's face (posts can be removed, etc.), but they might (depending on functionality) still be available via search. This would provide a lot of political/legal cover to the Iranian poster.
5) The Facebook engineer who announced the search beta, Kari Lee, concluded her blog announcement post with the following statement:
I'm interested in the latest updates on the aftermath of the Iranian election. By entering the term "Iran" in the "Search" field in the upper-right corner of any page on Facebook, I will see up-to-the-minute results from my friends and the Facebook Pages of which I'm a fan, not to mention people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone. I'm able to discover what blogs and news sources my friends are following, what my friends are saying about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and how people in general are reacting to the election results.
While the beta won't be able to address the issues of the currently unfolding situation in Iran due to it's small scale, the widespread roll-out of search very well might help Facebook remain relevant for the next "situation". And it would not surprise me if that was on the mind of at least a few folks over at Facebook.
Facebook is starting beta testing of new search functionality that covers pretty much everything posted by your friends and pages you are a fan of (basically anything that could appear in your feed).
It also covers everything published by anyone who has a public profile or page. This is huge. This is not only functionality that will be very helpful for the individual casual Facebook user, it will be of immense help to folks who are using Facebook as a research and promotions tool for their cause or business (or meeting their story deadline). They will finally get something more akin to Twitter search but covering the diverse content of FB (Photos, notes, posts, and comments galore!)
Admittedly, search will still be limited by privacy settings, but that is neccasary and does not much dilute this huge step forward.
ONe side effect I can see is pushing folks to establish both a public (marketing) profile and a private (personal) profile so they can have publicly searchable content for the whole community to see. I'm on the fence about this but leaning against (and which Facebook strongly discourages...mostly by deleting accounts). I'd say, stick with a page for that sort of thing...
(As per usual, they announced it with a random blog post by an engineer at 9:30pm the day before.)
This can't be fully rolled out quickly enough, in my opinion!
I'm hoping they open up public search outside FB (and not just to Microsoft as per one of thier last search partnership deals). This would make the business and research side of this functionality even more desireable.
(My friend and colleague David Erickson at the e-Strategy blog, has been pining for this for years...so if anyone can get him in the beta...right after they get me in...there will be a bag Twizzelers in it for you...the big bag too...with the ziplock!)
Wikiscanner has been getting a ton of attention lately. With articles cropping up all over the place detailing editing "abuses" by corporations, the government and PR firms. When you look over these articles or, perish the thought, actually use wikiscanner yourself, you end up finding that abuse is fairly rare. Most cases of changing articles are factual in nature.
However, there seems to be a very vocal group of folks who think that any change in wikipedia information by a corporations/government agency or a public relations firm is taboo.
I think this is crazy!
Wikipedia is about creating the most expansive base of factual knowledge possible. The plain fact is that, often times the people with the most depth of knowledge on a topic are people who work at - or work for - the entity that the facts describe.
If you want to exclude information about the CIA just because it comes from a CIA employee you will possibly exclude the most accurate and timely information. The same is true about a General Motors product being described by a GM employee, or a James Blunt entry being edited by James Blunt's PR agency.
I have no problem with full disclosure. Editors should let folks know their background in their profile. And this is especially true if they have a connection to the topics they are editing. And people should not be entering opinion, or "edited backstory" about their corporation/agency/clients. But facts should not be excluded from them based on thier emplyer. In reality, facts should be demanded of them.
To decry editing from classes of people that may have usful information to add should be considered antithetical to wikipedia's mission. To claim otherwise is to lock up knowlege based purely on ad hominem grounds. And that's a ridiculous waste.
I recently had the following scenario related to me by a good friend of mine: Someone sent out at our company yesterday a broadcast e-mail to everyone in the corporation asking if they had a recommendation for a specific situation. It happens occasionally. Someone else replied to all with a specific suggestion. She should have replied only to the sender, but not a big deal. Then someone else replied to all asking to be removed from this list (possibly facetiously, possibly not). Oh, my, the results were entertaining. In the end, more than 75 e-mails were sent to everyone in the company, each one a variation of: Their IT guy estimated approximately a half a million e-mails were generated internally. My friend estimated that, even if each email took only 1 second for people to look at and delete, there were still 17 working days lost cumulatively to this email chain. It really underscores how modern tools - in this case email - aren’t always all that modern anymore and are, at least in some cases, not even the right tools for the job... Imagine if employees had specific spaces on their corporate intranets where teams could outline problems with members who would likely have the knowledge and background to solve them. Imagine if employees could post a request for information in a common area devoted to the kind of knowledge they were seeking. Then other employee, who had something useful to contribute to solving the problem, could discuss the situation in a threaded discussion. Imagine if solutions could be presented in these spaces in a format that could be easily tagged, searched for, and even modified in the future as others refined the processes and added to the base of knowledge. But, of course, no imagination is really necessary. All these tools exist - and a few forward thinking companies have already implemented them. Now all those companies need are enough forward thinking employees to really make them work. Much has been made about the Web 2.0 revolution and the rapid rise of social media over the last two years. And, while the public social-media-scape makes general social relationships easier to form and maintain (and will surely generate some new Web-billionaires in the process), the real economic promise of the Web 2.0 revolution is going to come from within corporations. I truly believe internal social collaboration and sharing is the next big productivity step about to be taken by companies that rely on knowledge workers. The key, of course, is to get those knowledge workers to “get it” and contribute their private-knowledge base into the whole public-knowledge base of a corporation where it can mix with other’s contributions creating a “force-multiplying” effect. Employees need to realize that the old adage about money is now just as true about time…It takes time to make time. A little time spent by a few folks on an internal social-media site (perhaps a blog, wiki or discussion group) would have saved a company 17 days of worker productivity. Imagine the bright future for the first few companies with employees who really get that!
Earlier this morning I was thinking about the "Digg Riot" that happened last night. Digg executives received a cease and desist letter from lawyers from AACS (the HD-DVD DRM encryption folks) asking Digg to remove items refencing decryption keys. And, fearing they would be sued out of existence, Digg complied. The reaction to Digg removing the initial messages and then removing additional messages critical of the initial deletion was swift and massive, flooding Digg's front page with user promoted items containing the encryption keys and trashing Digg's decision.
At first I was fascinated by how quickly the fortunes of a popular social media site were shifted through action taken by the very people that made up its social group. That in itself would have been fodder for me declaiming on and on for a good week. But, what really struck me was the way Digg founder Kevin Rose reacted the the riot:
"We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code," he wrote. "But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."
It was a brilliant PR move (at least as of 2:30am the next day). It could not have been planned better (hmmmmm...?).
Think about it...
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Digg relies solely on its user's to promote items appearing elsewhere on the web. Its business model is 100% reliant on its user's actions. If enough of its users act in concert (and DRM seems enough to initiate such mass action) they can cause Digg to display whatever they want.
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Digg can never truly eliminate the publication of AACS keys, because users can keep adding them. Digg can only react after the fact.
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Digg cannot control the masses flooding the site with anti-Digg items, if the masses are angry enough to do it. The Digg community could keep this up as long as they wanted to. There was no way they could win against a backlash and still keep a profitable company going.
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There was nothing worse the AACS lawyers could do to their business then what the Digg community itself could do.
But, with Kevin Rose's post the situation clears up considerably...
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Digg looks very responsive to their users. Responsive to the point of seemingly (maybe really) risking thier business. They solidify loyalty
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If the AACS lawyers do come after them Digg has already framed the fight as David versus Goliath ("You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company."). And the odds of that are exceedingly slim anyway. With hindsight they could see that thousands of other sites were in the same boat legally and Digg had no additional liability that would make them a more attractive target. In fact, there has been little case law on this topic and the publication of the keys may not, in itself, be found in violation of the DMCA since there are legitimate non-infringing uses of the keys (including uses that fall under LoC exemptions to the DMCA).
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Digg's users quickly went back to digging the same sort of stuff they did before (gas prices, calls for impeachment, and gladiator graveyards). The riot ended, and almost all of the DRM stuff and AACS keys end up off the main page.
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The stuff Digg pulled from the site before never came back. Without new diggs it didnot end up restored.
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Digg (and Kevin) come up looking like roses to the people who will make their business work (or fail) in the future.
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They take only a very minor legal risk to do it.
Brilliant!
I moderated a round table this morning on "Journalism and the Effect of Emerging Technology" that was sponsored by PR Newswire. I thought it actually turned out very well. I often go to round tables where they just seem to peter out about 15 minutes because there is general agreement on the answers or because the topic is too narrow, but this one could have gone on for a couple of hours and still stayed interesting.
Today's success was due to the really knowledgeable folks on the panel and some nice debate that occurred that, frankly, I didn't expect.
We had Greg Swan, a PR professional and the founder of music critic site Perfect Porridge and regular contributor to the Minneapolis Metroblog. Greg took the general stance that information wants to be free and that blogging is a good way of setting it free (my paraphrase).
We also had Kate Parry the Reader Representative (aka ombudsman) for the Star Tribune who also writes the omblog. Kate took the general stance that traditional journalists, whether online or off, provide a source of information that is generally more vetted, more trustworthy, and better researched than what readers would find in the overall blogosphere (again, I paraphrase).
Our third panelist was Mark Holterhaus from our PR agency Tunheim Partners. Mark is always a wealth of good analysis and he provided a great voice to tie together the disparate opinions of Greg and Kate.
I have to admit it was sooo hard for me to be a moderator rather than a panelist...Those of you who know me know how much of a struggle it must have been for me to not go on - ad nausium - about my own opinions on the various topics we covered (which ranged from "is traditional journalism still relevant today" to "the ethics of PR agencies using social media to tell their client's stories"). I had about twenty minutes of "introductory" material that I pared down to about 4...but maaan it was hard.
One of the things that really surprised me was how many PR and marketing professionals we had in the audience. We had about 75 people that showed up. Two of them were reporters, a couple were business owners and the other 71 were PR/marcom people. Maybe it's because that's who recived the PR Newswire email release about the event (It just demonstrates the potential of new media to target folk's interest area's!).
I've just started putting together a glossary of social media terms and sites (which will be outdated as of yesterday, I suppose). We are going to do try and cover all the main social media sites in an hour during a "brown bag" session tomorrow, showing interesting uses and business impacts all the way.
It approaches imposable.
And I'm sick. Really really really sick.
My eyes are watering so bad it looks like I'm at the funeral of a wedding party. And that's after the maximum dose, (plus a couple extra for good measure) of pseudaphed. No sleep for me for awhile, I guess.
I better wait to make copies of my "catalogue raisonné" of the web 2.0 cream...or it's going to be all water stained...
Over the past month I have installed Sharepoint 3.0 / 2007 design, SQL Server Pro, Dynamincs CRM 3.0, and Exchange 2003. The plan is to have a fantastic Utopian sandbox with which to allow our staff to create the ultimate socially generated Intranet site. Just the thought of it gives me a surge in my heart and a gleam in my eye. Oh the things we'll be able to do!!!
But, my dreams of social media paradise have been dashed, like so many prince ruperts drops, by the hidden evil that calls itself the oh-so-innocent-sounding name of "Microsoft Wizards". These wizards purport to automate a few (far too few...) of those many tasks required to set up complex back-end systems. Instead of lending a helping hand though they instead concoct a cloak of false security, which quickly falls away when you try to do anything usefull.
None of them work right on upgrades, none of them seem to get IIS settings correct, and each of them, when combined, leads to litterally a hundred hours of diagnostics. Even Exchange 2003, which I have installed many times before without incident, failed to work correctly after getting a taste of some evil CRM wizard action.
I feel better now, having vented to you, my loyal readers reader. Some of the taint has washed off my soul.
Now, back to running IIS diagnostics...the promised land is still far out of sight...
