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?
]]>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.
]]>Therefore, someone having the intention of disguising advertising as content is going to have strong persuasive power since the consumers’ advertising defense mechanism will be sleeping. The messages that are not displayed as promoted content will be processed as being reliable information created by a peer social media user.
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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.
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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.
]]>Now this post is about link building or search engine optimization, so what’s the point you would say. Let me start by saying that it is known that backlinks are the main factor behind the page rank. Also, it is often said that the best way to have a lot of backlinks is to create great content. Of course, nobody ever came up with a clear definition of what makes content to be great, but one thing is sure: if you don’t have enough backlinks to your page, that page will probably not make it to the top of Google for main keywords.
Ahah! Here lies the dilemma: from one hand, pages with great content will not be shown on top of search engines unless they have backlinks. On the other hand, pages need to be found to have a chance to be linked to. Therefore, someone who bases his marketing campaign solely on search engine optimization will have to adopt long tail marketing techniques so his pages could have top position only through internal page optimization and hope receiving backlinks from those who search for those long tail keywords. Another way of saying would be that all the good keywords are already taking by websites who have build a strong backlink network. Newcomers will have to find a niche and stay there.
Well, there is another option: social media marketing. If the point with search engine optimization is to get people visit your website, then what difference does it make to have them find you out through Google or Twitter? What do you prefer? Talking to people on Twitter to get them visit your website or asking some blogger to link to your website?
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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.
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With 50 million tweets a day and 300 million Facebook users spending 5 minutes the questions marketers ask are 1) “How do we take advantage of the platform?” and 2) “How do we measure ROI on our social media effort?” In my opinion, the first question is legitimate while the second question is a misunderstanding of social media.
For marketers, social media are worthwhile because they can create word-of-mouth around a product or service. Therefore, the ultimate goal of the ROI measurement activity is to see how viral a certain social media campaign became. This idea come from a religious adherence that many marketers have in quantitative data analysis. Call it business intelligence, data mining or web analytics, but the main philosophy is that data contains knowledge. If we dig hard enough we might find something about why certain things work and others don’t.
The main problem with this assumption is that marketers will ultimately use tools that is not compatible with what social media are. If by social media we mean the horde of hired social media ‘gurus’ who do nothing else than promote a brand all day long, then business intelligence techniques make sense. But then again, are we measuring ‘real’ people? I don’t think so. Real people use social media for reasons that have nothing to do with consumption. Real people use social media for emotional reasons. Therefore, measuring brands is equivalent to measuring the work of those social media gurus we hired. What is the real percentage of people who talk about brands if we take out those who do it for money?
The truth is that the real effect of a good social media marketing campaign will not leave traces on the platform where it was executed. Most social media experts (the real ones) agree on saying that quality is better than quantity when it comes to social media. In other words, engaging with people in a friendly and courteous way is more relevant than using brute force applications that flood the social sphere and that end up doing nothing else than creating noise and discontent.
The competent social media guru will engage with people by sharing knowledge about a product. Once that knowledge is transferred from the guru to the client, what happens is that the latter will have a change of attitude and behavior towards the product or service. Whether it is by using the product more or by buying a new one, the effect of the marketing campaign does not happen ‘online’. So the real problem for marketing is to correlate effort spent on social media with what happens in the ‘real’ world.
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Twitter is great for celebrities. If we look at both the number of followers and retweets received, celebrities are among the top Twitter users. This is something that annoys me. Twitter is an open communication platform which means that it should give voice to everybody. However, those who flood traditional media end up having an omnipresence on other social media. As a result, social media becomes an extension of traditional media. TV viewers are first fed with stuff on Entertainment Tonight and then start commenting about that stuff on social media. It is a convergence of traditional and social media towards the same kind of useless nonsense about the silly life of celebrities.
After celebrities, other known faces take the second spot on Twitter. A-list journalists for instance happen to have a lot of followers. So once again, the propaganda machine is doing a great job of having all kinds of media converge on the same subjects. Is there a way out of this situation? I believe so, but it is going to take time.
A Forrester report shows that 70% of people on Twitter are spectators. When a spectator signs up with Twitter for the first time, he is offered to follow a list of people who are celebrities. For this person, it is only a natural to follow celebrities because his other source of information does not expose him to anything else that celebrities. This is the first obstacle to real social media: people just don’t know where to start since traditional media has kept them in the dark about a lot of real issues.
The second obstacle to real social media is time and effort spent by alternative sources of information to reach people and attract their attention. Since people are used to a certain kind of conversations that are dominant on TV, new ideas are marginalized and it is going to take time before people can find meaning in them. The danger is that Twitter and the Internet in general are cheap media but it doesn’t mean that competition is free. Traditional media can also broadcast for low costs and they have the kind of muscle to direct people to their websites. However, the possibility is there for innovative communicators to broadcast new ideas with relatively low costs. Once every a while, when someone will be tired of the same old opinions being exchanged on CNN or the Wall Street Journal, he or she might try something new and here we go. A new person joins the crowd of those who wanna do something good with social media.
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When octogenarians have Facebook accounts, the only people that don’t have one are those who have something to hide. A terrorist for instance would prefer to operate in the dark and not let everyone know with who he is connected. One thing is sure: someone with a Facebook account has at least a few friends to show off, something that could create an attachment to life! The problem is that being on Facebook doesn’t clean someone as we have seen in the past, many radical religious groups have used social media to promote their ‘ideology’ and ‘achievements’. My point is that it is the absence of Facebook presence that could mean danger.
Do you know people who are proficient with computers and do not have a Facebook account? You should report that person to law enforcement. The person is probably planing a terrorist attack and obviously doesn’t want to update his status! Or, if it’s a Jihadist or Taliban, the person might not have a friendly picture to put on the website. At least, the person might think that putting a Taliban-fashioned picture on Facebook might attract the wrong kind of friends: the FBI.
There are also those who think that Facebook is evil. I’m talking about those who think that Facebook promotes debauchery and that it is not compatible with divine law. Those guys will probably not like to be part of the debauchery and avoid computer all together. Of course, when 300 million people use Facebook, it might be an indication for that person that debauchery and corruption is widespread to unacceptable level. What’s next? a terrorist attack.
All an all, the census bureau should have a list of residents who do have Facebook accounts. All the other residents are potential terrorists and added to a watch list. Of course this seems to be very discriminatory and a breach of privacy, but is it really impossible?
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