Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: social media

  • Facebook’s Childrens Network

    Facebook’s Childrens Network

    The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is developing a childrens network to overcome the problem of kids under 13 joining the service.

    Underage kids getting on the network is a major problem for the social media service with last year’s Pew Social Media and Young Adult survey finding over half of US children logging onto these sites.

    The rule of under 13s joining Facebook or other social media services isn’t one born out altruism – it was born out of the US COPPA law which was enacted at the end of the 1990s to protect young children from inappropriate advertising and data mining.

    For Facebook and all the other social media data mining operations the inability to gather information on or advert to minors means they haven’t been interested in investing time or money in developing childrens’ networks.

    As social networks become more critical to kids’ social lives, it’s not unexpected that younger children are going online just like their older brothers and sisters and this creates risks for services like Facebook.

    To mitigate those risks, it was inevitable that Facebook would have to address the problem with setting up a service aimed at younger kids.

    Where the challenge lies for Facebook and parents is encouraging kids to use the younger service. It’s going to have to be compelling for the youngsters to use it in preference to the adult network.

    The key there is to get the critical mass of kids onto the service – social media platforms only succeed when users know their peers will be there.

    So Facebook are probably going to have to offer most of the features of the main platform, without advertising or some of the more intrusive data mining and games.

    It also won’t be possible to exclude adults from the kids network as parents and other relatives want to know what their offspring are doing and being friends with the younger ones is essential so they can see posts and other activity.

    Age will also be an issue, it may well turn out that a kids network is more appropriate up to say 15 year olds rather than the current thirteen mandated by COPPA.

    Overall, a Facebook Kids Network will be sensible move. The worry for Facebook is that kids might just decide there is more compelling place for their friends and interests.

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  • Do you want to be the personal lubricant guy?

    Do you want to be the personal lubricant guy?

    Nick Bergas is a multimedia producer in Iowa City, but to Facebook he’s a live advertisement for personal lubricant.

    As the New York Times reports, last Valentines Day Nick saw an Amazon listing for a 55 gallon drum of personal lubricant, ticked the product’s Facebook “Like” button  and added a witty comment to his friends.

    Shortly afterwards, Nick’s face started appearing in Facebook sponsored posts for big drums of personal lubricant.

    Last year I wrote The Privacy Processors on how Facebook is using our personal data and Nick’s story is a good example of how every like, relationship or comment is potential fodder for Facebook’s marketing platform.

    While Nick seems pretty chilled about his Facebook celebrity, for some it might not be so benign.

    As we’ve seen for student teachers and others, an innocent or even funny posting may be a problem to those without perspective or a sense of humour.

    For Facebook and other social media services, Nick’s story also illustrates a problem – that of “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.

    While one of Facebook’s major assets is its huge user database, there’s no guarantee the data is accurate or useful.

    Selling Nick’s details to a bulk medical lubricant wholesaler is pretty pointless, but that sort of intelligence is key to the future value of Facebook.

    That much of the data gathered is the flaw at the heart of Facebook’s bid data aspirations and Google’s hopes to become an identity engine with Google+.

    For us mere individuals, the lesson is we need to be a little bit careful about pressing those “like” buttons; explaining your affinity with bulk lubricants could be a bit tricky with your mum or partner.

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  • You’re doing it wrong

    You’re doing it wrong

    Earlier this week Smartcompany released the results of their 2012 business technology survey. One of the things that stood out was less than 30% of businesses are happy with their online results.

    Almost certainly this is because most businesses diving into social media are doing it for marketing or advertising reasons – so they expect to make sales shortly after they start posting updates.

    While social media can be a good marketing tool, it’s almost always time intensive and often it doesn’t work at all.

    For most businesses social media is much more useful as a market intelligence tool or a communications channel.

    Talking to your customers and helping them with their problems is probably the thing social media does best.

    While it can be argued that good customer support is the best way to build a brand and market a business, that’s a major change in thinking for many organisations.

    If you think social media is all about marketing – or customer support isn’t about your business brand – then you’re doing it wrong.

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  • Does Facebook’s float mark social media’s peak?

    Does Facebook’s float mark social media’s peak?

    After its successful float on Friday, social media giant Facebook’s stock is now 18% down on the IPO price and there are claims some investors were aware of revised analyst expectations shortly before shares went on sale.

    Facebook’s share price isn’t being helped by large advertisers, most notably General Motors, publicly expressing their dissatisfaction.

    In SmartCompany’s survey on business tech use, one statistic that stood out was that less than 30% of businesses were happy with their returns on social media.

    Facebook can’t even win in the courts with a Californian magistrate throwing out the social media platform’s trademark case against a Norwegian pornography site.

    It’s been clear for some time that the tech industry has been in an investment bubble and social media services have at been the centre of that hype .

    The huge expectations of Facebook’s float value has been one of the drivers of Silicon Valley’s investment boom – a dangerous feedback loop in itself.

    So now Facebook’s share price is in decline and angry investors are asking “why” and demanding answers from advisors and banks.

    The real question though is does Facebook’s float mark the peak of the current tech boom in the same way AOL’s merger with Time Warner in January 2000 marked the peak of the original dot com mania?

    One of the great similarities with the original dot com mania is the businesses’ failure to make money from their services – today’s Pintrest and Twitter have that much in common with the great Dot Com boom debacles of Pets.com and Boo.

    The biggest problem with the social media services is most of them are advertising dependent. As we see from General Motors’ dissatisfaction and that of the businesses in the Smart Company survey, most businesses aren’t happy with the performance of social media platforms.

    Getting the advertising, or other revenue streams, right is key to the survival of these services. Google cracked this after the original dot com boom and are now one of the most successful companies ever.

    The companies that figure out the revenue models for social media, or online news, will be the next Google’s and Facebook could well be the business that cracks the code for social media.

    For the social media industry overall, it appears the sector is now at what Gartner calls the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” on their hype cycle.

    The next stage from the peak is the tumble into the “trough of disillusionment” and that appears to be where Facebook is heading.

    As Gartner points out, that trough is also where good, stable businesses are built. While the sector or technology is scorned, those who survived the tumble out of fashion are able to consolidate and learn from the harsh lessons they’ve received.

    Eventually the market rediscovers the technology or industry and eventually becomes accepted as a mature part of business or as Gartner put it, they enter the “plateau of productivity.”

    This is exactly the process Amazon went through during the dark days of 2002 and 2003 after the tech wreck which today finds them as one of the Internet’s giants.

    Whether Facebook can emulate Amazon or Google is for history to judge, but social media’s falling out of favour is not a bad thing, the wreckage of the current tech mania will see much stronger and viable social media businesses that will deliver real value to industry and society.

    In the wreck of the dot com boom we saw HTML “coders” reduced from driving Porsches to driving buses, the same thing will probably happen to many of today’s social media experts. That in itself is not a bad thing.

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  • Eroding business silos

    Eroding business silos

    During our ABC radio discussion on politics and social media with Jeff Jarvis, we inevitably came around to the issue of sharing information.

    We’ve covered the risks of personal sharing extensively and Jeff’s view is that our perceptions of privacy are evolving as we explore what is acceptable or tolerable in an information rich world.

    Overlooked in this discussion is just how important sharing is for businesses – particularly in breaking down silos within an organisation.

    As organisations grow, silos develop as various groups or departments grow to address specific functions. It’s a natural process.

    However silos can damage businesses as valuable business knowledge is kept within the group rather than shared with the entire organisation.

    This is the opportunity we see now in the various cloud computing, social media and big data tools that have developed to help people, gather, curate and share information.

    Today there is no excuse for critical customer information sitting in the call centre logs not being available to marketing, sales or management teams. That is just one example of thousands.

    Over time we’ll see businesses owners and managers develop the skills and tools to use data more effectively. This is already happening as many IT people move from Information Technology to Knowledge Management.

    Business silos won’t ever be fully eliminated; in many ways they are necessary as you can’t expect the company accountant to know everything the customer service or sales staff do.

    Those businesses who are successful will be those who overcome internal politics and resist the managerial urge to build little empires, information is too important to be hoarded by middle management princelings.

    In the 19th Century power came in the form of steam engines, today it comes in knowledge. How well are you harnessing the power in your business?

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