This is a little off-topic for Netkritter, but Ponyo is a magnificent movie. It’s a G-rated family film, but anyone who has a love for film, especially animated film, will fall in love with this tale, which is vaguely reminiscent of The Little Mermaid. And if you happen to be a parent looking for something to do with the kids, this gives you a better alternative than G-Force. Kenneth Turan review with clips below.
Latest Facebook lawsuit alleges site exists only to snoop on you and sell the information
Five users of Facebook recently filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the true purpose of the site is to collect information about consumers “in the most innocuous way possible” and sell it to third parties. While it’s doubtful that the suit will gain much traction, the litigants’ analysis of the Facebook business model is correct. This is precisely what Facebook is doing, and not just with the words we type in but with the photos we upload as well. And we enable FB to do this every time we use an app.
Writers on sites like TechCrunch, Ploked and MSN.com have been dismissive, even contemptuous of the lawsuit. They’re backing up the company that enables third parties to take a happily married woman’s photo and use it in a singles connections advertisement so it can be seen there by her husband. They’re backing up the company that enables third parties to put users’ photos in IQ test ads, showing an IQ score that is incorrect, claiming those users have taken a test that they haven’t. That’s understandable — they know which side of their bread gets buttered. It’s fun riding on the social media bandwagon. But Netkritter is disappointed that more writers aren’t looking at the larger issue behind these five litigants’ complaint.
The line of reasoning among the lawsuit’s critics is that when you start to use a Facebook app, it asks you for permission to “pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.” It also notifies you that in using the app, you are agreeing to abide by the terms of service for both Facebook and the third party.
Fine. In a legal and legalistic sense, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with what they’re doing. But the question has to be asked: If everything is hunky-dory, why not be more open about what they’re doing? Facebook and the third party companies know, of course, that consumers will not read the terms of service. They know that most consumers will not grasp the hidden meaning of the message on the opt-in window. They are hiding behind the fine print. Do you, as a consumer, like dealing with businesses that use a lot of fine print when describing the nature of your agreement? Car salesmen and landlords come to mind.
Critics of this lawsuit are correct on one point: It is up to us as consumers to understand what we’re doing when we’re online. If we’re not sure what we’re getting into, we shouldn’t click Yes on cryptic opt-in messages.
But at the same time, we as consumers have a reasonable expectation of fair play. It is not reasonable, for example, to assert that because a consumer fills out a silly little quiz on a web site, they should expect their photos will be used in advertising in a way that casts them in a bad light.
Testing the effectiveness of Linked In group discussions
A few weeks back there was a discussion in a Linked In group for e-marketers in which the initiator complained about people who start topics ostensibly to have a substantive discussion, but it’s actually an attempt to promote their services – usually consulting of some kind or another. Anyone who’s spent any time in Linked In groups has seen this. A large number of responses followed, with some respondents agreeing with the complaint and others, predictably, using the opportunity to promote their services.
Of course, the original poster is right. Many Linked In users do try to use the groups in this way, but aren’t nearly as smooth about it as they think they are. And it’s easy to understand why they’re doing it: it gets their message in front of large numbers of people in a targeted audience, and it’s easy and it’s free.
But for the rest of us, it generates clutter and reduces the value of what should theoretically be a powerful and valuable tool. For Linked In, it represents advertising they are having to host without getting paid. For group moderators, it creates an ongoing headache in which they have to constantly weed out the offending posts or give up — and then take heat from the other disgruntled group members.
The discussion got me thinking about the effectiveness of Linked in groups as a tool for knowledge seeking. I’m a member in several similar groups. In a very small experiment, not enough to prove anything scientifically but enough to make a point, I posted some questions in a few of these groups. These were not “what do you think” questions; they were requests for the answer to specific problems. In other words, these were questions requiring expertise to answer, not personal opinion or sales pitches. I wanted to see what the response rate to these questions would look like, compared to the other kind.
It doesn’t look good. The questions seeking out specific expertise typically go unanswered, whereas when a topic seeking opinions or leaving an opening for a sales pitch gets posted, it frequently gets multiple responses over the next few hours.
In one case, I posted the same question on Linked In and Twitter. Twitter solved the problem for me with several responses, including one from the other side of the globe. Linked In users ignored the question.
I’m considering doing a test on a larger scale and reporting numbers.
Despite this, Linked In groups still have a lot of value. They are a great way to get a good sense of the conversation that’s happening out there. They are a great way to find people in your industry or discipline. And I once got interviewed for a marketing professional’s blog as a result of an answer I posted to a group. So don’t get me wrong, I still actively use Linked In groups.
But this trend of sales pitches and discussions of opinion dominating the groups while more substantive topics go ignored is annoying and detracts from the experience, and I hope Linked In is thinking about a solution. In the meantime, if you want to ask a lot of people a specific question and get a quick answer, there may be better alternatives for you, such as Twitter.
Fluid dynamics (read: cool graphic effects) with Silverlight
Silverlight, Microsoft’s market response to Flash, is a powerful tool for creating rich media. It comes with a marvelous development environment and claims some technical advantages over Flash.
Its market penetration is still in the neighborhood of 1 in 4 computers — Flash, which is ubiquitous, still dominates. Although Silverlight has succeeded in landing some very high profile showcases, it is simply not as well known as Flash yet outside developer circles, and companies considering it for external web sites have to contend with the question of whether they want to require site visitors to download another plug-in — more of a psychological barrier than a technical one these days, but still a barrier.
But the current lopsided situation won’t last forever. Adoption of Silverlight will spread. In the meantime, here’s a glimpse at the kind of graphic effects Silverlight can achieve.
http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/page/rickbarraza?entry=fluid_dynamics_in_silverlight
Another popular blogger gets fired
PittGirl, an anonymous blogger and vocal critic of local government in Pittsburgh, revealed her identity when she realized readers were getting close to figuring it out.
And the non-profit where she worked canned her. The reason? In her words, they “didn’t need the distraction.”
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/outing.anonymous.bloggers/
How cool is this? Video on the printed page in Entertainment Weekly
CBS and Pepsi are placing video ads into 100,000 copies of Entertainment Weekly next month. The article compares this to the magical newspapers in the world of Harry Potter, but in my opinion a better reference is the newspapers in Minority Report.
The technology is in its infancy and currently way too expensive to appear very often. But still, it means great things are coming. Technology like this, once it becomes easier and cheaper to produce, could even breathe life back into newspapers.
40% of Twitter traffic is worthless tripe, study says
Pear Analytics of San Antonio studied 2,000 tweets and broke them down into categories. They classified 40 percent of the tweets as “pointless babble.” Only 3.75 percent of tweets were designated spam, which shows only that they have a much narrower definition of the term spam than I do. Read Pear’s announcement of the study.
Hunch.com applies social media techniques to build collective intelligence
If you haven’t stopped by Hunch.com, it’s worth a visit. The first thing the site will do is ask you to answer some questions. No, not your social security number – questions about your likes and dislikes, so it can learn about you. Then it will let you do one of two things. You can take surveys to help you decide things, like where to take a trip or what kind of laptop to buy, or you can help build those surveys by adding questions and answers of your own to the ones somebody else has started.
The result is a rapidly growing collection of quizzes that are getting better and better at helping users get a good answer to the question. Naturally, a lot of the quizzes are goofy, but many others are quite useful.
If you have a weakness for quizzes (any Facebook addicts in the audience?) you will LOVE this site. Check it out!
Why we’re seeing a social media gold rush
We are in the middle of a gold rush. A full-tilt, get out of my way or I’ll trample you gold rush. Possibly the biggest gold rush in technology since Y2K.
I’m referring to the flood of people competing in a noisy, rapidly shifting environment to gain quick recognition as the vaunted SME: Social Media Expert. In 2008, Facebook and Twitter exploded in popularity and suddenly this phenomenon of social networking that had largely been the province of geeks, early adopters and hip teens was everywhere. And you know what that means. There’s money to be made!
All of a sudden a plethora of “experts” were on the scene. They’re out there now, frantically self-promoting and drumming up business in Linked In group discussions and low-value tweets. (It’s amazing how many of these people are CEOs. Yeah, CEO of a company of one!)
They clutter the social networking phenomenon with their attempts to monetize everything Web users do. In fact, the very name of the phenomenon, social networking, is gradually being edged out from the business side because it implies an activity over which the users have control. That won’t do! The new name, social media, is more comfortable in the business world, because media means something you use to control the message that gets to the users. And now we have the field of social media marketing, and it has filled with experts in a miraculously short period of time. Can you remember how different the Internet looked just 18 months ago? There was none of this, for most people. And yet suddenly they’re everywhere, people who promise you a comprehensive and integrated social media marketing strategy. With conversions! They like to use the word integrated. And the word conversions.
Here’s the thing. This field hasn’t been around long enough for there to be this many experts. Furthermore, there are very few places to go to become an expert in the traditional sense of the word. Like ‘hero’ and ‘legend,’ the word ‘expert’ is not one we are supposed to confer upon ourselves. To be an expert, you have to be widely recognized by others as accomplished in your field, and there’s usually some kind of token that provides proof of your accomplishment. A certification, a degree or even a published book (and I don’t mean a free e-book, otherwise known as a PDF). But in social media, as yet there are very few ways to earn proof of your expertise that you can hang on your office wall.
You won’t ever hear me call myself a Social Media Expert. I prefer Social Media Enthusiast. How can anyone be an expert in something that just got invented, is morphing rapidly and could look drastically different in a few months’ time? But in the world of social media, experts are people who signed up for Twitter three months earlier than their friends. We now have job titles like Social Media Scientist. Are you kidding me? Do you have a Bunsen burner?
It’s not hard to discern the driving factors behind the gold rush.
Why social media marketing is irresistible to marketers and consultants
1. There are a lot of people out there who need work.
2. Social media marketing is not that hard to learn, if you’re willing to put in reasonable time and effort. Cleverness and imagination help, but it is not rocket science. (That’s kind of the whole point of social media – powerful, yet accessible!)
3. The activities of which most SMEs speak do not require much in the way of technical skills. A social media marketer is a somewhat advanced end user of a variety of simple, intuitive tools. It’s not like, say, being a web developer.
4. It can be done without a budget and without a large staff, using freely available online tools.
5. Coincidentally, right now, nobody has a budget or a large staff, so social media marketing is an attractive option.
6. It can be done in your pyjamas at home, and a lot of marketing and IT professionals are in their pyjamas at home right now.
7. Many managers are not aware of #2, #3, #4 and #6, and as a result social media retains an aura of mystery for many.
8. These techniques are so new, and changing so rapidly, if you are even a few weeks ahead of your associates, you can look like a genius.
9. There are very few places to go to get degrees in this subject, and no pre-eminent certification programs, which means nobody can be looked down on for not having any.
10. This is so new, there hasn’t been enough time for a large body of case studies to be built up by the industry, which again means nobody can be looked down on for not having any.
That combination of factors is irresistible.
What does this mean for employers who want to start incorporating social media into their strategy and are looking to hire employees or consultants? Simple. Don’t run and hide from social media marketing, but make sure you don’t hire a phony, or the failure to exploit social media properly will sour you and your employees on it for a long time to come.
How to make a good social media marketing hire
Hiring managers must beware in this environment. In such a fluid environment, it can be difficult to tell the real thing apart from interlopers. Social media expertise is easy to assert and difficult to verify.
1. Demand case studies of the candidate’s previous accomplishments. And not case studies from some other company that they read about on a blog. Insist on proof of what they have done themselves.
2. Understand that social media marketing is always about targeting specific market segments and less often about huge numbers (though it can sometimes be about that too). So, don’t expect huge numbers in your candidate’s case studies. Pay more attention to whether organizational goals were achieved and how efficiently it was done (how much it cost).
3. Make sure your candidate’s idea of strategy goes a lot deeper than opening a bunch of accounts on different social networking sites and updating them every once in a while. There are people out there selling guides on social media strategy, and all these guides tell you to do is open accounts on Twitter etc. and post to them on a regular basis – that’s it. This is not a complete strategy. How do they talk to each other? What’s being posted and what’s not being posted, and why? What Twitter tools outside of Twitter should you use, and why? What time of day should you post? What day of the week? How will you monitor the results of your activities? How will you use the responses you get to your posts? And so on.
4. Check to see what sites they’re on. Do they eat the dog food? A person who is using a large number of social media sites is OK. A person who has already stopped using less useful sites and is now focusing on a select few because they present more value is even better. It shows they’re thinking about what they’re doing. A person who started a Facebook account and hasn’t updated it since is obviously suspect.
Don’t get me wrong, I love social networking and I make use of social media marketing techniques to support a non-profit organization I work with. I have made social media work for me, and I’m not trying to cast doubt on its value. I know there are a lot of people with valid claims to expertise in this area; I’ve met some of them. It’s just that I hate to see the hucksterism I am seeing out there. Anyone who calls themselves a social media “expert” this early in the game deserves careful scrutiny. Don’t get caught up in the gold rush.
Backlash against travel web sites (well deserved)
I’d long felt that travel web sites are not all they’re cracked up to be. I’ve never once felt, when searching for fares on one of them, that I was getting one of the vaunted great deals they promise. A skilled travel agent or the concierge at your company, if it has one, will do much better for you.
This article confirms many others share my opinion that travel sites do, in fact, suck.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/08/12/travel.agent.comeback/index.html