Social Media – Steffan Antonas

Why I’m Keeping Facebook a Friends-Only Affair

Along with the shocking number of Mafia Wars invites I get on Facebook, I continue to get daily friend requests from people I have never met or had any contact with. Almost all of these invites have a similar personalized message attached…

“We’re already friends on [some other social network]“… so let’s be Facebook Friends!”

If you’ve sent me a connection request in the past and you’ve never gotten that “Steffan has accepted your friend request” notification back, please don’t take it personally. If I don’t know you well, you’ll have to settle for Twitter, FriendFeed, my Youtube or Vimeo account, my blog or (gasp!) email…I’m keeping Facebook a friends-only affair. Here’s the logic behind my “True Friends Only” rule for Facebook…

Keeping Interaction Meaningful and Personal

I’ll admit that I’m a promiscuous linker on most public social networks. I auto-follow back anyone who wants to follow me on Twitter (so I can DM) and follow large targeted groups of people on FriendFeed to listen to industry news etc, but Facebook is the only place where every single person I’m connected to, I know well. The fact that I have a personal connection to every face I see when I log on to Facebook makes the experience much more interesting and meaningful. I’ve got around 700 people from my life I’m connected to on Facebook – all my family members, hundreds of people I went to school or worked with, friends I’ve had experiences with, people whose blogs I’ve been following and commenting on for years – these are deep relationships I’ve developed over time, and so news, photos and thoughts I read from these people have personal significance to me. Having a place where I can maintain those relationships and keep the interaction meaningful keeps my time in Facebook fun, personal and interesting – and that’s what separates it from all the other platforms out there for me.

Public-ness vs. Private-ness: How Safe Space Changes What We Share And How We Behave

I wrote a lengthy post back in March called Status Culture – Public vs Private and Why It Matters where I go into detail about the differences between how relationships are structured on Twitter vs. Facebook and how it changes interaction patterns and norms. If you’re interested in the technical aspects of community building and interaction you may enjoy the post – it’s one of the most popular articles on this blog. For the rest of you – here are the main arguments from the post that relate to this discussion -

Having (the perception of) private space changes the game, no question. Creating “trusted space” is not just about you, it’s about the perception your entire community has about the shared space (your wall, tagged photos etc). Having a place where my family and friends feel ok to be themselves and share personal elements of their lives is important. They don’t want random people I met on the internet being able to join in their discussions on my wall, or see photos I’ve tagged of them at a private event etc. Many of them wouldn’t dare use Twitter for it’s public-ness for that very reason, but they’re hyperactive Facebook users. The point is, when everyone assumes you’re actively controlling who sees what, the perception of what’s acceptable changes for your community, and with that shift in perception, who interacts and how often the do etc. changes in significant ways. By limiting my connections to just people I know, I create a space where the people I care about can share themselves without fear of the unwanted gaze of unfamiliar third parties.

Lest Ye Not Forget The Spam Problem

This one’s a no brainer. Most of the unknowns who solicit you for connections on Facebook (or any other social platform for that matter) care more about pushing their content on you than getting to know you better. Getting you to accept their friend request is just another way for them to promote themselves. Don’t let em’ in, and you’ll never have to roll your eyes when you start getting spammy messages from Johnny Life Coach.

The Accessibility and Portability Of Your True Social Graph Will Become Increasingly Important

This is a biggie. It’s crucial to realize where the social web is heading and how your social experiences are going to be stitched together in the future. Being choosy about your relationships doesn’t matter as much now as it will. Social networking is still in its infancy and many analysts believe that in just a few years, we’ll be carrying our social graphs with us wherever we go on the web (your graph, your data, everything). Social colonization (the next phase of the social web) is already starting to surface with technologies like open ID, and Facebook is priming itself to be a hub with Facebook Connect. There will likely be a day when you’ll be glad you were discerning about the way you created your relationships on social platforms like Facebook because they will define you and shape your experience more and more as the technology evolves.

Discussion Time…

Now that I’ve provided my thoughts, I’d like to hear yours. I know a lot of my friends and many successful bloggers do exactly the opposite to what I’m doing, and they have their reasons. I’m curious to hear other points of view on any of this. How important is protecting your true social graph to you?

How Restaurants Can Use Social Sites Like Yelp To Boost Business

This Building43 video is a goodie. Robert Scoble does a quick 2 minute interview with Isaac Mogannam, the owner of Phat Philly Cheessteaks in the Mission District in San Francisco, CA. If you’re a restaurant or small business owner trying to figure out how to make the web work for you in your local area, this short video is worth your time.

According to Isaac, since opening a little less than a year ago, Phat Philly Cheesesteaks has gotten around 275 mostly positive reviews on Yelp and he says that it’s had a major impact on his business. He estimates that around 40-60% of his new business is driven by Yelp (woah!), and because of the size and popularity of the site, people searching for food in their local area usually find his restaurant (and everyone’s reviews) on Yelp before they find the restaurants website. That’s an important insight for any small local business – people are using the web to find out what’s good in their area and, because of the way search works, their first interaction with your brand online is often NOT your website. Instead it’ll be the popular social sites where all the chatter is happening, so you can’t afford to ignore what people are saying about you online. Because people’s first impression of you happens where the chatter is, ignoring the conversation is a big mistake.

In this interview, Isaac talks about how he’s embraced Yelp, started listening, joined the conversation and used it to his advantage to quickly build a local (and loyal) customer base. Not surprisingly, he says he did it “one customer at a time”.

This video was originally posted on Building43.

Expert Tip: How To Use Google Alerts To Monitor Links To Your Profiles and Sites

Knowing how to use Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about you or your company online is a fundamental skill for managing reputation on the web. Setting up a host of keyword alerts for your name or company brand is a great start, but here’s the rub…what if you have a common name like “John Smith”, or someone writes about you and uses just your first name, or worse yet, something more…ahem..creative? You’re hosed. Not anymore. Here are a few expert tips to help you get more mileage out of your alerts…

Your Best Friends And Worst Enemies Rarely Use Your Full Name

Familiarity and creativity tend to come from one of two extremes – people who you have strong relationships with, or those that want want to talk about you but distance themselves from you. The funny thing is, these are the people you want to monitor most. A good friend might write “I was chatting with John about this” in a blog post and be talking about you, but unless that friend shot you a note and told you that she “mentioned” you in the post, you’d never know – and that’s probably a conversation you’d be interested in joining! Then there’s the guy who wants to sing from the hills just how hard they think you and your company sucks. If that guy knows how Google alerts work, he might try and get creative or vague with your name, or just leave it out entirely and link to your site (there are thousands of examples of this on the web). In both cases, you want to know about what’s going on and be able to engage the friend or enemy quickly.

People Use Links To Indicate Identity And Show Relationships On The Social Web

People often don’t use full names on the web because they don’t need to. Linking to someone’s site, social media profile or blog article is much more effective for clearly showing who or what you’re talking about. I could just say “I had a great chat with Robert on FriendFeed” and you know that I’m talking about Robert Scoble. People use linking like this to talk positively and negatively about people, brands and products every single day, and monitoring this with basic keyword alerts is impossible. But you can monitor it…

Use Google Alerts To Know Whenever Someone Links to Your Blog or One of Your Social Profiles.

If you monitor links as well as keywords, you’ll adapt to the blogosphere’s writing culture and catch a LOT more of the instances discussed above. Here’s the ninja skill. With a small change of syntax in a Google Alert, you can monitor when anyone links to any web page, including your blog, social profiles etc. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts (you’ll need a Google account, so set one up if you haven’t already)

2. Instead of entering keywords into the “Search Terms” box, cut and paste the link to the site, page or profile you want to get inbound link alerts for like this…. “link:[putyourURLhere]”

3. You can configure the alert to get sent to you as it happens (the moment Google knows, you know), or you can get it to send you a summary at the end of the day or week. For this type of monitoring, I’d recommend as-it-happens, but if you’re heavily into social media and interact a lot, you may want to go for just a daily summary.

Note: This strategy works GREAT for finding out when people write about you and link to your blog or a static social media profile like LinkedIn or Facebook, but you’ll get mixed results with links to more dynamic profiles like Twitter (you’ll get an alert every time someone adds you and you show up in their “following” box on their profile).

Know of any other neat tricks? Please let us know in the comments!

An In-Depth Look at the Most Active Users on Twitter

When Sysomos published its initial “Inside Twitter” report last month that looked at the people on Twitter and how it was being used, we discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity. This finding was based on indexing 11.5 million accounts, and then looking at the top 5% users who accounted for most number of Tweets. Now they’ve taken it a step further and done an in-depth analysis of that top 5%. Here are some of the highlights of the findings…

BOTS Tweet The Most: Of the most active Twitter users updating more than 150 times/day, nearly all of them are bots operated by sources such as hotels offering deals, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators. These very active bots account for one-quarter of all tweets.

4 Of The Top 5 People That Tweet The Most Are Celebrities: Among the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers, we find singer Tyrese (@tyrese4real), actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), celebrity Tila Tequila (@officialtila), tv host Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and evangelist Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki).

The Most Active Users Live In the U.S. - 60.6% of the most active Twitter users live in the United States, while 6.9% are located in the U.K, 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada.

The Top Men Tweet More Than The Top Women: The split between genders among the most active Twitter users is fairly balanced, but the men post more – 54% male, 46% female.

They Rarely Miss A Day – 88% of the most active Twitter users have never missed a day without making at least one update, while another 2.1% have only been inactive for one day.

Only Half Of Them Have More Than 100 Followers: 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for overall Twitter users.

They Follow More People Than The Average User: 44% have more than 100 friends, compared with 7.5% overall.

Most Of Them Are Veterans: 33.7% of the most active Twitter users have joined Twitter this year, compared with 72.5% of overall Twitter users who have signed up this year

A Higher Percentage Of Their Tweets Get Retweeted: In examining more than 80 million updates made since July 23, ReTweets among the most active users accounted for 5.06% of their activity – about 20% higher than overall users which is 4.02%. Given that some of these people are Tweeting as much as 30-50 times a day, this is quite surprising. It gives some indication that for all the noise they’re adding to the ecosystem, they’re adding more (perceived) value than most.

Interactive World Map Of Social Network Dominance

Vincenzo Cosenza has mapped the most popular social networks by country, according to traffic data gathered on Alexa & Google Trends (June 2009). While Facebook’s growing dominance over MySpace in the US and other countries comes as no surprise, it is interesting to see the few smaller networks that most of us have probably never heard of that are country specific. It’s also important to note that that while Facebook is all the rage in the west, QQ (China) is still by far the largest social network in the world (300 million active accounts). As people continue to focus their time and energy on dominant networks, and the successful networks grow and take over, you’ll likely see many of these smaller social networks die out. It’ll be most interesting to see what happens if and when China becomes more open over time. We tend to forget about large networks like QQ and companies like BIDU that dominate the waking giant.

The Current Snapshot:

Facebook is continues to dominate globe, especially in the west and other english-speaking regions, with more than 200 millions users.
QQ, leader in China, is the largest social network of the world (300 millions active accounts)
MySpace Still leads in Guam
V Kontakte Still dominates Russian-speaking territories
Orkut is strong in India and Brazil
Hi5 is still leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other scattered countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania
Odnoklassniki is strong in some former territories of the Soviet Union
Maktoob is the most important Arab community/portal
Friendster is still rocking in the Philippines (remember Friendster?)

How To Build Cloud Communities

In this interview with Robert Scoble, Ripple6 founder Sang Kim talks about what his company has learned from trial and error since the community management system launched under the name Mom Junction in 2007. He discusses how to create what he calls “cloud communities,” how to scale them and how to reward and engage community members.

Actions Speak Louder Than Advertising

Razorfish released a report this month that’s worth spending some time with. The report has some valuable insights on how social influence marketing is shifting the advertising game on the web. A survey with 1,000 consumers plus six months worth of conversational data serve as the backbone of the findings. The sections are digestible, easy to scan and each contain an “implications for brands” bulleted summary that contain quite a few noteworthy nuggets. Many thanks to my friend Vada for seeing the value in this and and sending it along…

What The Fluent Report Covers:

The importance of social media in making purchasing decisions, and how brands need to develop a credible voice, socialize with customers and provide a return on emotion (ROE?) to their customers.
How traditional top-down branding will become increasingly impotent as social media grows
How (and what types of) Influencers Drive brand affinity
How influencers impact the marketing funnel, and what type of influencers matter most at different stages
How “herding” around top social networks and the emerging choices of people to focus on a few social networks (instead of spreading themselves thin on many networks) is leading to consolidation and heavy clustering around “winning” social media hubs
How social features are becoming integrated into online display advertising.
How social media is becoming both a paid and unpaid distribution mechanism for advertising content
How tools like Facebook Connect are moving the social graph out onto the Web
10 Ways to Make Twitter Work For Your Brand

Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report

Download A Copy Of The Full Report Here

This report touches on how Social Influence Marketing encompasses every part of marketing and every dimension of an organization. A survey with 1,000 consumers plus six months worth of conversational data serve as the backbone of the findings in this report. We also introduce the SIM score, a simple but groundbreaking index for the social web.

Topics

Category Social Media