New Influencer » Social Media

Facebook’s approach to privacy in product releases (aka shoot first and ask questions later)

Jiyan — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:39:03 +0000

Personally, I haven’t really cared that much about what Facebook does with their platform. In general, I would say that they are trend-setters when it comes to design, UX and general social functionality. People often grumble when they release new features however retrospectively, most of the features they release tend to achieve significant adoption and many come to define the industry standard.

One area that Facebook does tend to drop the ball is with features oriented around privacy as they tend to err on the side of keeping things open as opposed to closed. When it comes to social networking platforms, this is a mistake.

In their recent release, Facebook made some rather fundamental changes to the entity type, “lists.” On the legacy platform, you were able to define privacy settings for the various profile components and attribute certain privacy settings to specific lists you had built.

Cropped from Alison Driscoll’s excellent Mashable article on Facebook privacy settings (2009)

The feature made it simple to categorize your network into buckets and set preferences that would be applicable to these various buckets.

When Facebook released their most recent product update, I didn’t give it much thought (beyond thinking it was cool that they had increased the size of photos in the feed) until I decided to help a friend configure her privacy settings. I was a bit surprised to find that the UX behind security had changed and also disturbed that my legacy privacy settings had simply disappeared.

After a bit of poking around, I finally stumbled upon the new privacy control and it confirmed that everyone within my network now had open access to my full profile content.

The magical, disappearing privacy settings

Amusingly, it would also appear that adding a value to the “Hide this from” field doesn’t actually save (on Chrome). Currently, not only are my former privacy settings gone but I am ostensibly not able to re-configure them.

So, where does this leave us?

I truly believe that the new entity type, “Lists,” was rushed to market to respond to the launch of Google +. To me, it reeks of reactionary product development, which I fundamentally disagree with. Reactionary product development moves companies further away from the core tenants that made them successful in the first place and long-term, is a negative practice.

On a very fundamental level, the trust that I had been building over the past five years with Facebook has been compromised. I would also note that trust is the single most powerful point of differentiation, which allowed Facebook to grow into the empire it is today.

From my perspective, Facebook simply is no longer a viable platform for managing both my professional and social life. Moving forward, I’ll start curating my network on Facebook to simply host my social relationships because quite frankly, I don’t want to go through all the trouble of configuring settings when the next Facebook release may just wipe them out again – particularly, when there is a better option available (LinkedIn).

Furthermore, I plan to filter out all the network connections that are not strong, primary connections because I simply don’t want people who are not part of my everyday life to have access to my everyday life.

I’d love to know what other people’s experiences have been and how they plan to respond.

Comcast – Continuing to Fail at Customer Support and Communication

Jiyan — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:30:19 +0000

Let me begin by saying that I’m writing from a Starbucks near my house because once again, Comcast (CMCSA) has failed to deliver and I’ve finally made a decision I should have made a long time ago, to cancel my Comcast subscription and use an alternative.

That being said, I feel obliged to share some details from this last debacle…

Things got kicked-off at around 1PM (ET) yesterday when the cable went out, which I had been expecting for the past twelve hours (we did have a Hurricaine come through town). I did notice that Comcast had somehow managed to make it through the actual storm itself, failing once the weather had normalized, but gave them the benefit of the doubt given the circumstances and decided to enjoy the beautiful Sunday afternoon.

I returned at about 4PM to find that the connection was still dead, so used my phone to check their site to see if anything had been posted.

Buried underneath a bunch of ads XFINITY was the following:

It must have been hard for them to part with this space that could have been dedicated to selling XFinity

The informational page itself was a pretty good example of a company not taking the Internet very seriously.

It contained some tips for what to do before and after the hurricane including this gem for what not to do after the storm: Be careful to not cut cable lines as you trim trees and clear debris. Thanks Comcast, I didn’t know you should avoid cutting cable lines as you trim hedges after a storm.

I did find it slightly ironic that one of the tips was, “Be prepared and have an emergency plan in place. If you don’t have a plan, or don’t know how to make one, click here to learn more.”

What was Comcast’s emergency plan? Where was all the information showing me what you are doing to ensure minimal downtime in the wake of the storm. Why are you telling me not to cut cable lines?

Continuing down the page, I couldn’t help but laugh to find this diagram that apparently explained how the cable system worked:

Missing the part where Comcast executives poop on customer’s heads

Their joke of a page was missing any actual useful information such as A. the scope of the issue, B. estimated downtime and C. What Comcast was actually doing to help restore connectivity.

Compare this to the Pepco Web site, which dedicated their entire homepage to keeping customers updated on their efforts and even offered customers a dynamic outage map, which detailed the scope of the issue, actual numbers of affected customers and outages and an estimate for when power would be restored.

Not bad for a company with a monopoly

Realizing that the Comcast Web site was a complete waste of my time, I headed to Twitter, where I knew Comcast had been making an effort over the past few years to better connect with customers. I was sort of amused to see that @comcastcares had decided to split town.

I’d also leave town during storms if I worked for Comcast support

As a last resort, I picked up the phone and called Comcast and must admit that I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to speak with a customer rep. after only a few minutes. ”Maybe my luck with Comcast is changing,” I thought to myself.

The rep was offshore but very pleasant, well-spoken and seemed to actually care about me (I am susceptible to faking).

The downside to the interaction was that she answered every one of my questions by saying, “Sir, all I can tell you is that we are doing everything possible to resolve the situation.” I really would have loved to know what areas they were working on, what their restoration plan involved and a general estimate of how long I could expect my power to be down but I guess that’s a fantasy. Interestingly enough, she did reveal that only about 17% of households in the DC area had access, which was something. She also did assure me that all customers who lost service during the outage would be reimbursed (provided they called back in once service had been restored). I thanked her and got off the phone after a few minutes of not getting anywhere.

Back on Twitter, I was amused to find that XFinity had begun talking about the cable lineup for the evening. I decided to respond, which resulted in this little exchange:

I wasn’t the only upset customer on Twitter. In fact, the combination of the service outage and mobile access to Twitter culminated in a pretty hostile online environment for Comcast:

So, just to avoid making this a completely negative post, here are some things I think that Comcast could have done differently:

1. Next time, have an actual plan and tell customers what it is - I’d like to believe that Comcast did actually did have a plan that included collaborating with local utilities and staffing up to minimize downtime. Educating customers on some key points of the actual plan would have demonstrated that there was substance behind Comcast’s general messaging.

2. Give customers actual information – What is worse than a pissed off customer? A pissed off customer in the dark. It is inevitable that outages are going to happen but next time, provide customers with actual information. Repeatedly telling customers, “We are working on it,” and showcasing a diagram from the 80′s that explains how the cable system works doesn’t help much.

3. Proactively credit customers for the outage – This may sound insane to anyone at Comcast who is tied to revenue, but I truly believe that proactively compensating customers for outages will ultimately be counterbalanced by reduced matriculation to competitive service providers. It’s at least worth testing. When you are in the midst of an outage you are already pissed off, the last thing you want is to be told that you should call in once service is restored to request a reimbursement for lost service.

4. Think about freezing advertising during outage periods – I shouldn’t have to hear radio ads telling me about the awesome new packages you are offering customers when your service doesn’t work. I know you can’t really control all communications channels but you should be able to exert some control over the radio ads. Use the ad inventory to tell customers what you are doing to get them back online. That’s going to be better advertising that telling a city of people about Xfinity when nothing is working.

5. Maybe get someone who isn’t on vacation to be your first POC online – I find it laughable that a guy with the twitter handle “comcastcares” was on vacation during the outage. Consider creating an ongoing channel that isn’t tied to one individual and have several people manning the channel and providing meaningful updates. On a side note, it’s a little sad that another one of your social media folks (@xfinity_tv) referred me to a guy on vacation. Take social media more seriously.

An Early Look at Sprout Social

Jiyan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 20:49:50 +0000

Mashable reported yesterday that Sprout Social just closed a $10m series B round from New Enterprise Associates. The company, which can “turn social connections into loyal customers,” is a business application that helps users manage their social media marketing across the more prominent social sites (Twitter and Facebook) as well as some of the more locally-oriented sites, Foursquare and Gowalla. Their SMB focus is evident throughout their product, pricing (packages are currently $9 and $49 monthly), and marketing communications although the application for mid- and large-market organizations is obvious.

I figured I would take a spin through their new application and share some general thoughts – but first, a bit of insight into who they are.

Who is Sprout Social?

Sprout Social is lead by CEO Justyn Howard, who earned his stripes in sales at New Horizons (1999-2005) and Learn.com (2006-2010). He started Sprout Social in 2009, ostensibly bootstrapping, until he received a Series A around mid-2010 from Lightbank, the investment firm started by Groupon founders Eric Lelkofsky and Brad Keywell. Howard’s technical counterpart is Co-Founder and CTO Aaron Rankin, whose past experiences include Endeca Technologies and IBM. Of note is also Designer & Partner, Gilbert Lara, whose impact on the company is immediately clear once you enter the application. It’s a lean team that seems to have some talented guys focused on R&D and UX.

How is Sprout Social packaged?

Sprout Social offers two packages: a professional package for $9/month that seems primarily aimed at helping “independent, small and online businesses” manage and grow their social networks, and a business package for $49/month that offers features oriented towards businesses with a “local audience.”

First Impressions

My first impression of Sprout is that they follow the Web 2.0 online marketing playbook pretty carefully – they have a clean design aesthetic that pushes people to a free trial. Once registered, they push users to connect with their social accounts. Everything is done cleanly and precisely through the point of registration to the dashboard. Kudos to Nate Turner, their online marketing director.

The Dashboard

My first impression of the dashboard was extremely positive. They provide you with a good set of information however there is an extremely well construed visual balance of icons, panels, actions and data. It’s personalized out of the box and there are some intriguing data points (i.e. engagement and influence scores) that draw you in. Scrolling down, you are presented with some real information drawn from your social accounts.

The Dashboard

Sprout Social includes the following modules:

Inbox - A stream of posts aggregated from your various social accounts. The application offers various filtering options (types of communications as well as by social account) as well as the ability to tag different posts (i.e. needs response).

Discovery - A tool set that allows you to run and save various queries (which they refer to as agents) that can be run on either Twitter or “The Web,” which they define as “websites, blogs, and news sites.” The “Web” query seems to run across a variety of public engines including Bing News, Yahoo! News and Google News. I like the branding of the module (Discovery) however I found this to be the most deficient of all the modules. My assumption is that the purpose of the module is to help users identify new potential followers, friends, etc. however the UX doesn’t do a great job facilitating the completion of this goal. I think there is a great opportunity for Sprout to A. help users better understand which queries to run and B. figure out how to make the data that streams in more actionable.

The Discovery Module

Reports - The reports module contains a variety of graphs that visually represent the user’s behavior across Twitter and Facebook. I wasn’t immediately clear on how the data would be immediately helpful. It does present the user behavior in a manner that is more intuitive, which brings a user one step closer to extrapolation however I have a feeling that most SMB’s are going to need more than this.

Schedule - This module is something I really like because it alleviates the known hassle associated with posting across multiple platforms. Additionally, the calendaring feature allows for scheduling of a post and users can even create recurring posts.

The submission tool

My Locations – This is another interesting module. It allows you to synchronize your account with your Foursquare and Gowalla pages and receive mobile or e-mail alerts when customers check into your venue.

Contacts - Finally, the contact module allows you to view your Twitter followers and add them into a separate list “to keep your most important contacts organized in one place.” I’m not entirely sure what the benefit of a separate Sprout Social list is unless they are planning to broaden the feature set in the module to include additional methods of interaction with users, which is somehow facilitated through the Social Address Book.

Concluding Thoughts

Based off a pretty brief interaction with the application, my general thoughts are that it is incredibly well designed and the overall modular framework seems to be the correct one. The fundamental question is whether or not SMBs are going to find utility in the application. The UI alone seems to be worth the relatively low cost of the $9/month package and the local features are a nice incentive to upgrade. I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop the various modules – particularly the “discovery module” – to make them more useful to SMBs but I would say in general, they are off to a great start.

Is Facebook on the peak of inflated expectations?

Jiyan — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:04:10 +0000

There has been a lot of recent discussion around Facebook’s traction with respect to Google. Back in September, comScore announced that according to their panel-driven data, total time spent on Facebook properties actually surpassed the total time spent across Google properties (including YouTube, Gmail and Google search). Stan Schroeder from Mashable speculated that”it’s a worrying stat for Google. . .without a large social networking property Google will have a hard time snatching users’ time from Facebook’s hands.”

Arguing against the ubiquity of Facebook would be a pretty stupid endeavor. However, I do think that comparing aggregate time-on-page does tend to oversimplify the reality of the situation (although said oversimplification does clearly have some significant PR benefits, as the traction of the Comtex announcement indicates). The reality of the situation is that even if the metric is accurate (and I think it’s questionable to fully trust the accuracy of one source) Google still accounts for significantly more unique visitors monthly according to the same source, which makes sense when you consider the typical use case on each of these properties.

For me, the metric says more about the changing nature of the Web than it does about competition between Facebook and Google because they facilitate fundamentally different experiences from one another. To use a gross oversimplification myself, I would say that Facebook fulfills people’s need for recreation while Google fulfills a far more functional need. Facebook has simultaneously benefited from and contributed to the Web’s evolution, from a functional medium into one that is more multi-dimensional.

Although Facebook has most likely eaten into the hours users once spent on Google, listlessly browsing the Web for something about their favorite celebrity or sports team, the likelihood that Facebook has eaten into the more functional, revenue-generating queries on Google is slim. What’s more likely is that Facebook’s growth has come at the expense of other online leisure activities (i.e. e-mail, aimless browsing, chat) during work hours and quite possibly offline leisure activities (i.e. talking on the phone, chatting) during non-work hours. It is worth mentioning that Facebook has quite possibly eaten into the time spent on one of Google’s most valued properties, YouTube based on this line of reasoning.

All that being said, the prophecies of Facebook eating significantly into the more utilitarian applications currently associated with Google are overblown in my opinion. I have yet to see a corporate Facebook page that I took seriously and my attempts to ask questions and find any real information on Facebook have met with underwhelming results compared to Google. I do think that Facebook has always been and will continue to be a place where people go to flirt, play FarmVille and look at pictures and Google will continue to be the place people go when they need real life questions answered.

That is not to say that Facebook won’t have an impact. In fact, Facebook’s archival of social data will likely have a profound impact on the way search results are displayed as they provide their social data to the engines. What I have skepticism in is the notion that Facebook will significantly challenge any of the entrenched entities in this domain.

The Increasing Presence of Multimedia in the Newsphere

Jiyan — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:59:35 +0000

Next Friday, I’m going to be presenting at Newcomm Forum on how the newsphere has evolved from being primarily text-based into one that is multimedia.

Over the next week I’ll be sharing various pieces of the presentation.

The first piece is a brief deck that shows how CNN.com feature story has evolved over the years and in it’s current incarnation, is almost completely dominated by multimedia.

Special Discounts for NewComm Forum 2010

Jiyan — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:47:34 +0000

Every year there is one conference that I will go to regardless of whether or not I’m speaking or presenting there and that is the Newcomm Forum.

Simply put, the event draws in some of the most forward-thinking professionals and academics in communications for several days of presentations, discussions and social events.

It’s sort of like my annual social media pilgrimage to the Valley and I always come away feeling refreshed and full of ideas on how we should implement social media into our program.

This year, they are throwing out a few special offers that I wanted to share and for $395, people can visit for just one of the days to see experts and practitioners from leading companies speak in a variety of topics. Here is a sampling of sessions that will take place at the event:

Social CRM
Markets are Conversations: From Theory to Practice
Understanding the New Media Landscape
NewComm Essentials

Keynoters include:

Jackie Huba, online marketing expert and author
Dave Carroll, singer/songwriter, “United Breaks Guitars”
Scott Monty, Ford
Jack Holt, US Dept. of Defense
Tim Westergren, Pandora
Neville Hobson, WeissComm

For more details, visit http://www.newcommforum.com/Social-Media-Workshops.

If you use discount code NCFW100 you can save $100 on a pre-conference workshop or you can receive a 1/2-day session for $195.

Or, if you want to register for the full conference at www.newcommforum.com you can use discount code NCF500 to save $500 off the full conference fee.

Interview with Jason Kintzler from PitchEngine

Jiyan — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:54:44 +0000

This past week, Brandy and I chatted with Jason Kintzler, founder of PitchEngine. The interview can be downloaded or heard online at WebmasterRadio.fm.

Analyzing Influence in Twitter

Jiyan — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:15:54 +0000

There are a variety of perspectives on how best to analyze influence in Twitter and it is not the goal of this post to present another approach. Rather, I want to take take account of the existing ones, spend a few minutes presenting a perspective and hopefully get a few subsequent subsequent perspectives on this.

Let me start out by stating the motivation for this post: I am interested in knowing more about how people think about activity in Twitter and the thought process they go through when they see a Tweet that is relevant to them for some reason. There is an assumption of a direct correlation between perceived influence and consideration. For example, if I see someone with two followers complaining about my product I probably won’t care as much as if I saw someone who was a well respected industry voice with thousands of followers complaining about me.

I think this is a pretty safe assumption to make but there may be differing perspectives on this.

The Web Ecology Project

At any rate, let’s dive in and first examine some of the work done by the Web Ecology Project, an “interdisciplinary research group” in Boston who do a lot of data mining.

They have come up with a great research article, Analyzing Influence on Twitter (PDF). The Project define influence in Twitter as “the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user.” Using this definition, they then perform comparative analysis of 12 prominent Twitter users for 10 days, who fall into three broad classifications (celebrities, news outlets and social media analysts). The research paid particular attention to the outcomes associated with original tweets.

Based on their formative definition of influence, the study concludes,

That social media analysts receive minimal reward for the effort they exert in maintaining a conversation with their followers. For those users that succeed, most news outlets were more successful at having their content pushed to other users. Celebrities, on the other hand, appear to inspire conversational responses with their followers, yet with more success than the analysts.

So basically celebrities inspire conversations with their followers, news outlets compel people to share information, and social media analysts are loudmouths who people generally ignore. Nothing surprising about these findings.

The real value for me is in the initial categorization scheme. From a user perspective, it probably is interesting to note what type of influencer is tweeting about you because that is likely to inform your consequent action.

Twinfluence – Influence Analysis Light

Moving on, Twinfluence is an online application that ranks users in Twitter according to three categories:

Reach – the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers) in addition to all of their followers (second-order followers).
Velocity – An average of the number of first and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer established their account.
Social Capital – An estimation of how influential (how many followers) a Twitterer’s followers have.

Twinfluence offers some basic indexes based on these variables but it doesn’t seem actionable (to me). The one takeaway for me here is their observation that there is semantic value in examining the influence of a Twitter user’s audience. The search engine analogue for me is Google’s observation that a page’s backlinks tell only one side of the story, the authority of the pages linking to the page in question are also important variables to be considered.

Klout – Influence Analysis Heavy

Finally, I took a quick look at Klout, a venture-backed Silicon Valley start-up that “measures influence on topics across the social web to find the people the world listens to.” Like the Web Ecology project, they define influence as “the ability to drive people to action.”

They provide a score based on 25+ variables that is a “numerical representation of the size and strength of a person’s sphere of influence on Twitter.”

Major categories of variables include:

True Reach – a variable that filters spam bots and inactive accounts as well as dormant or non-interested followers.
Amplification Ability – The likelihood that a message will generate retweets or spark a conversation.
Network Score – A measure of how influential a person’s network is.

I was a little skeptical initially based on the breadth of variables they examine but a quick search for my own profile revealed some pretty good information that seemed fairly usable. These prompted me to sign-up and take a look around. I like the basic Klout score as a top-line metric to use however there does seem to be a bit of a learning curve because Klout has created an entirely new language to talk about influence that needs to be learned before it can be used.

My Own Fairly Non-Influential Perspective

I’m a little curious if we even need a new set of variables to analyze influencers. When I look through my own stream of tweets, the first thing I do is see if anything sticks out as being an extreme response. In other words, I’m not looking for non-intrusive observations but for exclamations about my product. From there, I’ll generally think about whether to interact or not – but in general I don’t care that much if the person is influential. In fact, I rarely look at their followers even as a top-line reference before interacting – I just look at their message. That being said, I don’t believe we have the type of chatter that major brands are going to have so some type of categorization is going to be necessary for them. I’m just not sure how sophisticated it needs to be.

Curious to get some other perspectives on this. . .

Conversation with Stuart Foster, Social Strategist at Mullen

Jiyan — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:53:09 +0000

This past week I had a great chat with Stuart Foster, social strategist at Mullen. We got into a number of topics including the role of creativity in public relations, the incredible (and sometimes forgotten) potential within social bookmark communities and more.

Review of OnlyWire

Jiyan — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:00:46 +0000

I toyed around with OnlyWire for a while today and wanted to share some initial observations but first a little bit of foreplay.

Bookmarking is a vestige of the Mosaic browser (circa 1993) and has subsequently emerged into a persistent feature of Web browsers. Bookmarks aren’t rocket science:

There are a lot of pages on the Internet.
Some of these pages are interesting.
It might be handy to have a tool to help remember the interesting pages.

Pre-bust, a number of venture-backed startups tacked on an additional step in this progression:

It might be handy to have an easy way to share interesting pages with others.

Of course, this was all pre-bust and all the companies that were working on implementing this last point flamed out because there was no financial model behind these startups.

Post-bust, a new wave of startups (most notably Delicious) began exploring this question once again and some of them achieved a modicum of financial success (i.e. Digg). Although there has been limited financial achievement from social bookmarking sites, the general usage has been more significant and at this point in time the marketers enter the progression and add another point:

There are a lot of bookmarking sites with a lot of eyeballs so it would be good to share our message with that audience.

And predictably, the service providers enter the equation with:

There are a lot of marketers spending a lot of time posting business messages to social bookmark sites so let’s create a tool that helps them streamline the process.

Enter OnlyWire and a few others.

So at any rate, OnlyWire is a tool that makes it easier for marketers to post their business messages to multiple sharing sites without having to spend the time and individually share their message. In fact, the one-off nature of other sharing tools like ShareThis and AddThis is a differentiator that they point to in the brief introductory video on their home page.

‘Saving people time’ is a great benefit prop for online applications however in general I ask the question ‘What is the act that is streamlined.’ For instance, if a tool helps people save time involved with monitoring social media sites (i.e. Radian6) then that is a good thing. Monitoring and analysis of online conversations is good.

If a tool helps people save time interacting within various social media sites that is also good.

The issue for products like OnlyWire is that I’m not sure if they are a tool that helps people save time engaging within social media or spamming online communities. My initial impression is that in the spam-engage continuum, OnlyWire falls further on the ‘spam’ side and that is fine – as long as their roadmap is eventually focused on moving customers from spam to engagement.

From a realistic perpsective, posting a bunch of messages (without engaging) is a short term proposition. You will probably drive traffic at the outset but over time if you are just posting and not engaging you will be either tuned out by the community or banished.

Now I know that since their acquisition they have attempted to place filters in place to prevent spam practices but if I were PM’ing OnlyWire I would seriously be thinking about how to solve the following problems:

How to help customers be selective about the community sites where they are going to be active (instead of providing them with a big page of community sites where they enter credentials);
How to help customers listen to conversations going on in those communities so they are actually plugging-in. This doesn’t mean offering a full blown monitoring solution like Radian6 but it may mean helping them aggregate and organize feeds;
How to help customers engage beyond their own posts -

My guess is that a use case where one customer signs up for two or three sites and spends time engaging is going to result in greater longterm tangible benefits (SEO, traffic, business, etc.) than spending the same allotment of time autoposting to thirty sites.

What other people are saying about OnlyWire: