Global Beach » Social media

+1 seems like a complicated solution to a problem that doesn’t exist

Peter — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:24:44 +0000

I am probably a typical heavy web user. I use eBay to search for those gadgets I really can’t do without, I download my music from iTunes and books from either Amazon or iBooks for my iPad. I set up a twitter account ages ago but have less than 10 tweets. I use Linked in for my work networking and Facebook for my Social networking and draw a very firm line between the two.

Of course, we include all of the Social channels when developing digital strategies for our clients and we are big fans of Facebook as a means of finding and developing relationships with brand advocates.

All of the above are easy and straight forward to use, so straight forward that even my mother has managed to join the online Social crowd (and I used to have to reset the clock on her VHS every time we went from summer to winter!)

Google +1 isn’t. When they announced +1 I was interested. I followed the links and opted in to the trial for +1 on Googles experimental page. Then I discovered I had to have a Google profile so I created one and joined the experiment again. Nada.

I’ve just conducted a straw pole of the agency and most hadn’t heard about it (a bit worrying) and those that had have had the same experience as me. Explanations such as ‘maybe it’s not available in the UK yet’ are all well and good but nobody’s telling us that.

My point is this. If this is Googles big grab for a slice of the Social pie they’ve made it far too difficult. I don’t want to have to be logged in to Google as I search the web. I am more than happy to be on Facebook and login to this when I want to. If I find something I like on a site I am browsing and I think my friends might be interested I have no problem clicking the Like button to broadcast the fact to my friends on Facebook.

Facebook is an environment for me to share things with friends and family around the world. That’s why I am on it and that’s why I created a profile and added friends over the last 5 years.

Google is a search tool. I don’t log onto it to share things with my friends or colleagues nor will I considering how complicated they are making it to even join the experiment. Google are going to have to entice me with a lot better reason to join than the fact I might be able to see a recipe that my mother +1’d as she won’t have.

Ask your Digital Agency to close your Facebook Community Page

Luca — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:19:14 +0000

When Facebook introduced Community Pages, they were created for everything listed in profiles, creating many empty pages. Now, thankfully, it is possible to claim them, and it is advisable too as having more than one landing page for a company would generate confusion in the prospect fan or customer and distract traffic. Sadly, the verification process in place at the moment returns an error, so this isn’t really possible yet (if you manage to get it done, let me know).

A solution is to be found with the new service that Facebook launched in the US and more recently in the UK and Ireland, which is an dedicated account manager for your Facebook Business Account. As far as I know, you can only get this service if you manage a large number of marketing campaigns on the social medium, which means that in most instances you will have to ask your agency to do it for you. We had one instance where we used the service and it went smoothly.

If you would like us to manage your Facebook ads, let us know.

MySpace doesn’t surrender to Facebook, it just syncs with its social graph

Luca — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:56:15 +0000

The recent Myspace move that integrates Facebook Connect to the (really) previous most-popular social network isn’t, as many say, surrendering to the social networking Goliath.
Myspace surrendered years ago by focusing on creative content rather than on plain, basic interaction. In a way, it has always been a platform to showcase creativity and create groups of interests around a particular form of expression, typically music.
The fact that Myspace now integrates with Facebook is more a late reaction to a matter of fact than a surrender.
We must make no mistake and take it as if Myspace is slowly fading away. The truth is simply that the model wouldn’t have worked like Facebook since the beginning, and the high adoption rate in the USA was simply reflecting the lack of a valid alternative. This is not to say that there weren’t any, only that at a given time the value of a social network is the adoption rate, as explained in a previous post.
But Myspace has still a great potential, which cannot be put down in simple numbers: it is a thematic social network, and as far as I’m concerned music is a huge theme to center a community on. Definitively better than a social network which matches dating and smoking like this one.
In essence, the counterparts would be Facebook groups or Twitter lists, but at this time none of the two giants have created a transversal syndication of interests, creating dedicated interfaces for different themes which aren’t managed by the users only and are syndicated by the provider of the service.
With this in mind, the recent Myspace – Facebook agreement is, simply, mutually beneficial.

Network Externalities and the Google-Facebook war

Luca — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:55:42 +0000

Facebook email should be here, although I don’t see it. This whole battle over our own data made me feel a bit like Poland in the second world war (metaphor borrowed by a friend of mine): do we matter? We might start to matter when projects like diaspora start kicking in. Of course the most important part of them would be the portability of Facebook or other social network contacts, with the options of keeping them on hold until they too open their account. With this, the transaction should be smooth. An open source social graph would be fostering competition in the market, because all players could develop a better-targeted offer. Which, eventually, would lead to all the benefits we traditionally associate with competition.
Some of you may say that monopolies are good in certain instances: yes, this is true in some cases and economic theory covered it all. The fact is that this does not apply to information. Monopoly of information is inefficient (because the costs of having it can be close to zero, which means that there is a huge surplus to be distributed among either competitive players or consumers) and, as it were, plainly wrong.
So this could be the first stage: a nice duopoly. But can it exist? We know very well the big role of positive network externalities in the case of anything remotely social, that can be shared or the cost of which decreases (or quality increases) for the consumer depending on the number of other consumers of the same product.
Social networks are the purest form of network externalities driven businesses, and that is because the value for a consumer is identical to the network itself.
A solution could be compatibility, but that is only possible once there is at least one dominant open source standard. I can’t make predictions, but the future could depend on the market being broken into a duopoly to start with. I personally do not think that niche social networks could win (see here) because it just take a little advanced feature on Facebook to make it happen within Facebook, which will simply turn into your online identity, with layers of permissions to define your social graph. Compared to offline socializing, social networks make it more sophisticated for a user, who actually has to think of her own social graph in a very analytic way. But this will be the topic of my next post, which will go back to what I mentioned previously.

Social Media, Geo-Tagging and Real Time interaction: where is this leading to?

Luca — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:27:06 +0000

To an acute observer, the new features embedded in pretty much all social media aren’t a big surprise. If you think of interaction there are some traditional elements that are in some way necessary to make such interaction meaningful.

It goes without saying, there are important phenomenological issues that media are trying to address: to start with, we can think of perception and how perception works. With time, I will address all specific aspects of it in detail.

For thousands of years, meaningful interaction was only and necessarily “real time” and its boundaries were immediately “spatial”. When written language came, mankind had the chance to delay the fruition of content virtually forever, but at the same time some spatial boundaries remained. Think of how text was ritually read, being it religious (the Koran, the Bible are public readings), entertaining (minstrels and all the “sharing” and “likes” they did will deserve a dedicated post), scientific (remember the Peripatetics? Yep, that was “social” learning).

Then, with better education and media, content fruition turned a-spatial: with the internet, this is actually true in the real sense (where is your tweet?). But we went from interaction (the Peripatetics again, and Socrates before them, with Plato going as far as to write as if people were discussing, quite in line with his personal issues with representation) to information.

As we know, making good use of information implies discussion and dialogue –turning information into knowledge- and that is potentially achievable with Twitter, Facebook and the like.

There are some things missing, which go back to phenomenology: interaction is inherently multi sensorial. Ok, we created “multimedia”. Obviously there are some senses we haven’t approached yet and I let you think of which ones are missing, although I guess you wouldn’t talk to an unbearably stinking person.

Now with the creation of spatial boundaries to pluri-directional real-time information we are a bit closer to the Peripatetics (I won’t mention them again, I promise) but in some way no one is sure whether the right direction is to create digital surrogates of real life rituals or creating new functional equivalents (I will give a Luhmann-style reading of digital media soon, I promise).

Question: What do you think about the geographic extensions of social media (Foursquare, Facebook places, etc.)? Are they here to make our interactions more meaningful (1) or are they another piece of information (2)?

During some of our researches at Global Beach, we analyse perception schemata to enhance conversion; and it is more and more clear that some of our results are universal, and that a universal digital grammar could actually exist. The true relationship between the digital and non-digital grammar is yet to be discovered, and this is an effort common to all digital media players. When we design a website we aren’t doing anything different (both theoretically and practically) from what social media are doing.

Going to the roots of interaction.

Good use of technology

Peter — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:54:58 +0000

Nice to see the election is providing us with useful ways to use sites like twitter to measure the collective conscience.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/04/the_tv_debate_what_did_twitter.html

Here they come…

Peter — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:44:24 +0000

Google Set to Make Gmail Social With Status Update Features

http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/gmail-social/

…taking over the world

Peter — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:41:36 +0000

Right. Summer break over. Went to a very slick presentation from Google yesterday afternoon. The amount of user data they have is quite scary. It’s no wonder they are…

Bring Me Sunshine

Andy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:45:26 +0000

In 1978 viewing figures for the Morecombe and Wise Christmas show on ITV were in the region of 28 million people. Around the same time Nescafe launched an advertising campaign involving the Gold Blend couple which at its peak attracted more than 30 million viewers.

The connection is obvious. Three decades ago the most popular television programmes could attract almost half the nation. Vast numbers of people where on the same frequency. All an advertiser needed to do was position their product in between shows like Morecombe and Wise or soap operas like Coronation Street, and they had a totally captive audience.

By contrast, nowadays, in the modern home very few people are listening or watching the same thing. There are no longer two or three television stations, there are hundreds available via satellite. And countless radio stations. A recent survey carried out by JupiterResearch found that online users are now spending about 14 hours a week, on average – the same amount of time that they spend watching TV – surfing the internet.

By their nature web users are far less passive than the average television viewer. They spend time networking with friends, swapping information and sharing views. They comment on blogs and upload videos and photos. They are busy doing research, downloading music and checking out weird and wonderful facts.

Collaboration and participation are the buzzwords of today. As described in the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams: “Blogs, wikis, chat rooms, search engines, advertising auctions, peer-to-peer downloading, and personal broadcasting represent new ways to entertain, communicate, and transact. In each instance the traditionally passive buyers of editorial and advertising take active, participatory roles in value creation. Some of these grassroots innovations pose dire threats to existing business models.”

Our job at Global Beach is to be like a new generation advertising agency creating communication strategies that respond to and reflect modern tastes.

Old School!!!

Peter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:34:14 +0000

Apparently I, like Web 2.0, am old school and past it. So say my designers. Apparently we should now be talking about the coming internet.

Really? I thought it was about using the best tools for any job. Whether these happen to be a Blog that allows a company or individual to express opinions, a website to sell or tell people something, a forum that allows people to interact or some careful pre-planning that allows a site and it’s content to be found easily by search engines is not important. What is important is using the right combination of tools for the job. Intelligent Interaction.

And while I’m ranting let’s not forget children (designers) that Social Media isn’t a new phenomenon. Oh no. Interactive forums have been around for years. Facebook etc. just put a pretty face on them.

Check out our Triumph Pitch site if you don’t believe me and take some time to browse the many forums. Old school. Yes please…