Get Noticed
Collaboration
Knowledge, Search Engines and Social Media
Aug 3rd
It is often said that we live in a knowledge economy. In such a context, it is only natural that information technology receives great attention as a set of tools that can lead to economic development. Search engines, for instance have become part of our daily lives. Google, with sales slightly above $20 billion a year, is worth around $150 billion in terms of total stock shares, while Wal-Mart – the biggest company on the planet – is only worth around $190 billion with $400 billion sales. It appears that financial analysts are convinced that information is more valuable than everyday things!
Search engines are so valuable, not because they contain information, but because they speed-up the search for relevant information. This is because an important distinction must be made between knowledge and information. Knowledge is a state of mind that one reaches after performing a certain task. When someone used a hammer, for instance, that person acquires knowledge about how to use a hammer. It is this change that happens in his mind that constitutes knowledge. Now, if that person sits down and writes a procedure about using a hammer, that would be information. This information about how to use a hammer is in no way knowledge about using a hammer. In fact, someone who would read that written procedure would not necessarily know how to use a hammer unless he actually uses a hammer, and therefore acquires his own knowledge about using a hammer.
My point here is that using a search engine does not directly contribute to the economic development of a country in the context of knowledge economy. It only helps in not missing a piece of information that could be useful in guiding our actions and leading to new knowledge. Let’s say someone wants to create a Facebook application. Searching for “how to create Facebook Application” on Google will not give the knowledge necessary to build a Facebook application. It will only lead to a couple of web pages that could contain information about how to build one. The searcher will have to read and select the page that is appropriate for what he wants to build and go on building the Facebook app by following the procedures. Since these procedures never complete enough to get the job done, the searcher will have to find some things out on his own and it is this whole process of contextualizing and sense making of the information that is found from the web page that leads to knowledge about building a Facebook app. Well, ‘thats obvious’ you will say, but this obvious thing can lead to something important.
If a web page exist out there and describes a procedure on how to build a Facebook app, it is because someone out there knows how to build Facebook apps. Therefore, reading that web page is not the only way to have access to information about building Facebook apps. Talking to that guy who created the Facebook app is another option, and it could lead to better learning experience for the searcher. Now, how can the searcher talk to that guy if he doesn’t know him? Answer: Social media!
Social media is not just one way of keeping in touch with friends and have a laugh. It is also another way of looking for the right source of information. Only, the difference here is that social media is interactive because we’re not dealing with a website but a person. Therefore, there is a whole new set of things we can do using social media that we couldn’t have done with search engines.For instance, we don’t have to find the right person by searching for a couple of keywords. We can ask a friend who can ask a friend and eventually get connected to the right person with the knowledge we’re looking for. The advantage here is that if we’re ignorant on a subject to the point that we don’t even know the keywords to look for, then it is only by interacting with someone else who will know a little more that we can get to the right source of knowledge.
The big question is, will social media become bigger than search engines?
Social Media, Weak Ties and Trust Agents
Jul 22nd
There is something we can do with Facebook and Twitter and that we cannot really do so easily through traditional means of communication. And that thing is to connect with people without investing too much time in the relationship. Take the example of Twitter. A user can follow another user with very little costs besides spending a few minutes finding that user through Twitter’s search functionality. The good thing with Twitter is that information can flow from the friend to the follower for as little time investment as a mouse-click. These type of connections are weak ties: besides that Twitter connection between both parties, there is little that brings them together.
Because they don’t require so much time and effort, weak ties are not those ties we trust most. Long-time friends and family members are usually those we trust and rely on in our life. These are strong ties and are build through the years. However, weak ties have something to offer that strong ties cannot offer: diversity. Since we hang out so much with our close friends and family members, we end-up influencing each other. Our perception of the world and life becomes very dependent on how our strong ties perceive things. In one word, spending too much time with the same people is bad for out brain!
This is exactly where social media picks things up. By allowing us to connect with people without having to engage in costly relationships, we can find out about new things for very little effort. We end up with a better understanding of the world by seeing things from fresh perspectives.
An implication of this conception of social media is that trust agents are bad for our health. Trust agents are those high profile social media users such as top bloggers, gurus, celebrities, etc. Sticking too much to what these people say will have the same effect of sticking only with close friends and family members: we will be exposed to only one way of seeing things. Trust agents should be avoided and social media should be a tool for exploration.
So What If Obama Thinks Information Is A Distraction?
May 14th
People where surprised when Obama came with his remarks about information and distraction. After all, he has a Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook page and was very active on social media before the elections. So what does this comment really mean? A shift in US technology policies going towards utility rather than entertainment?
Well, Obama also said something about technology as a tool for empowering and emancipating communities. What does that mean? Does this mean that he is OK with social media but that he feels it should be used to lead to constructive action in the real world?
My opinion is that this could be a new era for social media. I don’t think Obama wants to shift American policies but rather express something everybody feels in some way.
Why Facebook Users Don’t Care About Privacy
May 5th
There are two kinds of Facebook users: voyeurs and exhibitionists. Therefore, Facebook is built with the idea of invading privacy or not having any private life at all. And this is why Facebook opening privacy features doesn’t really bother any of its users. Living with the idea that the world is watching us, we feel like if we were celebrities. And this is what Facebook is selling. Forget about talking to friends. We can do that on the phone. Forget about sending messages, we can do that by email.
What Facebook offers and that no other communication platform offers is to let everyone (I mean complete strangers) know about us. When we add a picture on our album, the idea is to have as much people as possible who can see it. And for those who are more curious, it allows to enter people’s privacy. So let’s stop nagging. Having our ass shown to the world was pretty much the reason why we signed up with Facebook in the first place.
Celebrity Friendship: Turning Twitter Into A TV Show
Apr 18th
If we believe its blog post, Twitter is not meant to be a TV show. But what do we find when we look at Twitter’s suggestions? For news, we get Slate, CBS, CNN and Larry King. For funny, we get Conan O’Brian. It all looks like Twitter is an extension of traditional media. But how did this happen? Celebrity friendship! Celebrities are those that are the most followed on Twitter. It seems like everyone on Twitter is befriending a celebrity. Or is it a small group that follows no one else but celebrities? Of course, we can’t really answer this question unless we take a close look at the network structure on Twitter. Given the size of the network and the little effort it takes to follow somebody, we can bet that it’s one hell of a huge network graph. However, one thing is sure: those who have more followers will have a greater audience for what they say than those who don’t.
Let it be purely on mathematical basis,one having millions of followers is guaranteed that a large number of people will be exposed to one’s tweets. Don’t forget, Twitter is real time. If you follow a hundred people who happen to tweet at a high and constant rate, you will have to be on Twitter constantly to make sure you don’t miss a thing. Since nobody can really be on Twitter constantly, it means that there will only be a fraction of one’s followers who will see a tweet. In other words, a Tweet will get attention only for a very short period of time, unless there are a lot of people who see that tweet in that short period and that they retweet it. Thus the value of having tons of followers.
This is the problem with celebrity friendship. Everyone being friends with celebrities means that celebrities are the ones that have a voice on Twitter. Other people’s tweets will be buried under the heavy noise generated by the millions who follow and retweet celebrities’ none sense. To make my case more dramatic, a close study of retweeting rate vs number of followers shows that those with more followers are less likely to retweet one of their own friends! Isn’t that awful? Ashton Kutcher is probably the most generous celebrity when it comes to retweeting and he is way below average when it comes to retweeting others. As a result, Twitter ends up being just a broadcasting platform for those who already have one: TV. Befriending celebrities is definitely not a win-win situation.
A Critical View About Advertising on Social Media and the Need for User Code of Ethics
Feb 27th
Generally speaking, I’m very against a lot of promotions and advertisements that happen on social media. That’s not because I despise advertising, but more because a lot of ads on social media are actually disguised as user generate content. Things got so ugly that the FTC had to step in and impose regulations on how to advertise on social media. Recently, there was a class action filed against Yelp for extortion, where the company is accused of asking for money in exchange of good reviews. How did things get there and should we get rid of marketers?
Advertising is unavoidable in a free market
The great thing about capitalism is that all have the freedom to choose a trade out of their own decision. There is no government that will impose it’s view on how the economy should be run. Rather, it is an ‘invisible hand’ that dictates or at least suggests picking one trade over another. Basically, when one has to take its own competences as well as that of its surrounding when deciding upon the trade to choose. For example, someone who is good at repairing cars must also see if there are other mechanics in the area where he wants to open his business.
Here, free market must have a mechanism in which suppliers can promote their products or services in a way with which consumers will be able to decide between a few competing suppliers. In other words, every business has to be allowed to communicate whatever it is offering to the market, but also, every consumer accepts to invest some of its time to take knowledge of the different offers available on the market. Without this implicit agreement, free market wouldn’t exist meaning that there won’t be any competition and that things will end up in monopolies.
Advertising needs space to communicate its messages
We live in a physical world. Therefore, even things that seem abstract like communication needs a medium to travel. One very simple way of communicating is through sound. If I shout loud enough, then every body on the planet will hear me! I wish I could do that…
But there are other ways of communicating. For instance, posters are used a lot everywhere to communicate messages to people. In a similar way, the Internet is also a medium to communicate. Of course, it seems abstract because everything is bits of information, but if you think of a wall of information where your favorite news or email is displayed, then it is easy to see that that little space that is used for advertising is taking a piece of physical space. My point is that this is the second pillar of marketing, meaning that it needs to have access to all the space that it can use to communicate its messages.
Social media is a damn good space to advertise
Since social media has attracted a great amount of attention lately, it is only natural that marketers throw themselves at the platform. The same why big displays on the highway are used by marketers to advertise their products, a few pixels on a web page can also be used to advertise. But there is something about social media that is different from traditional platforms for promotion: it is new. Since it is new, people don’t deal with it the same they do with other platform. When we see a ad on a poster, we know it’s an ad because we have been trained for it.
The new thing with social media is in the agreement that all users have to exchange with complete strangers. We have tons of Twitter friends and followers and we are friends with Facebook people that we have met on Mafia Wars. So somewhere, we have all agreed to have a place where we could exchange with people we do not know of, something that we don’t do in real life. Now the problem is that having people to cooperate on an open platform doesn’t guarantee that malicious agents will not infect it.
Imperfect information and market failures in social media
The problem with marketing on social media is that consumers and suppliers are in a game of imperfect information. When a suppliers pays someone to write positive feedback about a product, there is practically no way for the consumer to find out who is behind the good review. Of course, consumers could check the reviewer’s history and try to estimate to what degree it can be trusted. But then, people have to spend a lot of time figuring out who is trustable or not. Even worse, there is no guarantee that someone who has been a reputable source of reviews has integrity in the future.
It is precisely this reality of social media that malicious agents exploit in there advantage. This is where the market fails to deliver value or that value is not delivered in an optimal way when dealing with advertising through social media. The problem is that people will take bad decisions because they will be deceived by user generate content that is not really content but only advertising. Trying to avoid deception at all costs could lead to pathological situations where consumers will have to spend an undefined amount of time screening reviews to make sure of their legitimacy before taking a decision. Since there is no guarantee that the consumer will get anywhere by screening he might become victim of paralysis by analysis and not be able to take a decision.
Advertising on social media must be regulated
Knowing that markets can fail, there could be an attempt to regulate supplier behavior on social media. FTC’s attempt to fine bloggers who don’t disclose payments is one of them and it could be a safe bet to say that more regulations are to be expected in the future. These regulations will impose that advertisement must be clearly marked and differentiated from real content. What it means in terms of the agreement between consumers and suppliers that I describes earlier, is that consumers are willing to have a piece of that physical space reserved for advertising. For example, people are willing to have the right sidebar on Facebook be reserved for advertising. Of course, this is going to take space that will not be used by Facebook to display otherwise useful content. That not-displayed-and-useful content will have to be places somewhere else on another page and accessing that page will mean that the consumer will have to perform a click.
Consumer lassitude and the failure of regulations
It might seems to be little effort in exchange of living in a free market, but it is still effort that means a bigger server for Facebook, and a whole lot of clicks if we add up all those clicks by the 300 million members. As a result, there is a general lassitude among consumers in regards of advertising. It is as if all consumers know that they have to deal with advertising for free market to function, but that at the same time they are fed up with being exposed to it.
It is because of this feeling that people disregard publicity and it is the same reason that pushes marketers to use tricks to avoid the defense mechanism that all consumers have developed against advertising. In other words, regulations will not regulate supplier behavior but only force them to combine secretly with malicious agents. Now the challenge for legislators and law enforcement is to prove the existence of secret combination between a product supplier and a social media reviewer. History shows that this is a very difficult task that succeeds only under a few strict conditions.
Consumers must be aware of the different forms of advertising
Since regulations will not stop businesses to use fake reviews to promote their things, consumers must learn to use social media in a way that would detect fake reviews. To take an example from day to day life, fake reviews would be like walking in the street and having someone come up and say: “Pepsi’s so good for the stomach, I tried it and its great. You should do the same”. How do we know that this person is working for Pepsi? Simply because it doesn’t make any sense for a sane person to go out there and say such a thing to someone he doesn’t know. Therefore, our reflex is to thing that the person is crazy and that the message that he is communicating should be disregarded. Marketers are very aware of this fact and that’s why they don’t invest in such techniques!
Now my point is that the should be common understandings among social media users about what is the ethical way of interacting to each other. The same way that there are norm in society about not going to a stranger and talk about Pepsi, there should be norms of ethics for proper behavior on social media. My point is that consumers must adapt their attitude and behavior to a new media for communication if they want to take full advantage of the benefits the it offers.
The Economics of ‘Mass Tweeting’ And ‘Mass Following’
Feb 15th
I have briefly discussed the concept of mass tweeting as a tactics used for garbing attention to the mass tweeter’s account with the hope of transforming some of those who are followed into followers. I have stated that mass tweets can only lead into attracting one kind of Twitter users, that is ‘mass followers’. This is a normal phenomenon since mass following requires searching for certain keywords, which means that those who tweet a lot have more chances of being found in search queries and eventually followed by mass followers.
What I will question in the current post is the common belief that such tactics are futile. Indeed, many would argue that mass tweeting is bad strategy for marketing since it attracts the wrong kind of crowd. I would argue the opposite. I think mass followers and mass tweeters are the right kind of crowd to be in touch with, especially for those who are into social media marketing. I will try to explain why it is so.
Mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers
First, we have to understand that mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers. There will always be a small amount of ‘curious’ Twitter users that will follow a mass tweeter simply because of the fact that there are tons of people who listen to Twitter streams and that most of them are ‘followers’ who don’t tweet that much. These curious users are valuable because they have the potential to blossom into qualified leads, meaning that if they are exposed to the right message, they will be interested in the product or service that is promoted. Since the proportion of these curious users will be small compared to mass followers, it will be hard to justify the investment of all that effort in gaining only a few potential qualified leads.
Mass followers can be profitable too
However, a closer examination of mass followers will show that they are also valuable to a certain degree. Mass followers might not become qualified leads, but they know that most of their followers will not be qualified leads either because they have been acquired through either mass tweeting or mass following. Therefore, the mass follower has to adopt a more rational relationship with most of his friends and followers. He will have to enter into a ‘retweeting association’ with his followers meaning that they retweet each other in other to profit from each other’s ‘curious followers’ that they have each amassed through mass tweeting and mass following!
Now, this is going to create serious traffic to a promoted product or service only if there are enough marketers connected to each other and constantly retweeting each other. This implies that they all use some king of automatic retweeting application that saves them from having to be retweeting 24/7.
The effects of automated tools on Twitter user experience
Who says automatic application means spam. My view is that while this is close to black hat social media optimization, it is not so bad since the marketing/SMO community seems to be very small compared to the whole Twitter network of 25 million users. In other words, these automatic retweeting software will only not seriously affect Twitter’s quality of service or user experience because spam will be filtered out by the ‘curious users’ who happen to be part of the SMO clique. However, these software will insure the majority of marketers that there message will reach a critical amount of curious users, hoping that they create the proper word-of-mouth.
Google Wave Follow Feature: Social Media Market Penetration Strategy
Feb 6th
Facing increasing danger coming from Facebook as number one website on the planet, Google has to do something about positioning itself against social media. The easiest thing to do for the giant was to use its existing capabilities, i.e. information retrieval, to index social networks. Google will become a social search engine and a real-time search engine.
But all this is not enough in my opinion. There is something that social media do that search engines cannot do and that is offering interaction between users who are holders of knowledge and who are willing to share it. Of course, Google has Friend Connect and has also bought Orkut to have social media products in its portfolio, but those are definitely not competition to Facebook. So Google has to come up with something different, something that offers new communication capabilities to users. Well, that thing is Google Wave.
Google claims that the Wave is chatting 2.0. This is mainly because 1) your ‘waves’ are broadcast, 1) what you type is broadcast in real-time, and 3) you can follow waves. So basically, we could say that Google Wave is Live Messanger meets Twitter! Now the analogy with Live Messanger is not so important. What really matters is that Google Wave can do something that Twitter cannot do so well: instant messaging. While it is possible to use Twitter for instant messaging, things get complicated when you want to follow a stream of conversation when you have of a lot of friends and followers. In other words, Google Wave is disruptive to Twitter’s domination of the broadcast-based communication model that it is dominating. My opinion is that Google can slowly take pieces of market away from Twitter and having a strong network of application developers complement the platform is going to be very helpful.
Your Twitter Followers Are Worth Their Retweets
Jan 25th
If you’re into Twitter for business, then you are into word-of-mouth marketing. You should look for people who retweet a lot and start retweeting them. Anything else is a waste of time in my opinion. Of course, companies use Twitter as a tool for customer support or relationship management but Twitter’s unique capability is in empowering promotion.
Retweet as indicator of social behavior
Since Twitter is a social media, it is expected from its users to be sociable. Now, what would be considered socializing on Twitter? I would answer this question by asking another question: what is the point with having followers or following others?
It becomes obvious from this question that the role of followers in Twitter is to perform word-of-mouth for the person they are following. So following someone on Twitter is one way of saying: “I like your stuff, i’ll let people know about it”. Now this ‘I’ll let people know about it’ part is achieved through a particular feature on Twitter: retweeting.
From here, it social practice for professional users to retweet each other out of necessity. If two marketers are mutual friends and that they roughly have the same number of followers, they will be better of retweeting each other since each will benefit from the followers of the other.
The importance of having lots of followers
This is why it is so important to have a lot of followers on Twitter. By having a lot of followers, you have a higher reach and more people are likely going to retweet you. As a result, for the same effort required to write a tweet, you will have better return.
However, there is another indicator of value for your followers: they should be retweeting a lot. If you have the choice between 1000 followers who retweet 1% of your tweets in average, or 100 followers who retweet 15% of your tweets, which one are you to choose? I bet you’ll take the 100 followers who retweet more frequently.
Facebook Soon Number One?
Jan 21st
Facebook is number two on Alexa since september 2009
Facebook has been world’s second most visited website for more than 5 months now. Taking into account that Google is the default page for most browsers, it is pretty much an unavoidable website. Whether they want to admit it or not, Google and Facebook are in competition for at least one thing: traffic. My view is that they are competing for more than just that. I believe Google and Facebook are two different ways of offering a platform for transmitting knowledge. However, the interactive nature of Facebook place it in a stronger position to fulfill this need. In this regard, using Facebook to get knowledge from our network is going to slowly replace what we used to obtain from Google.
There is another space where Facebook can take pieces of traffic away from Google and that’s in browsers default page. This trends is already happening for hardcore Facebook users. With people increasingly spending time on Facebook, this trend will only be on the rise. Facebook was already number one website for 2009 Christmas where people spend a lot of time sending greetings. I also believe this is not a glitch but more a trend towards Facebook dominating traffic on the Internet.