Would you trust your daughter’s beach pics to Zuck?

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

We heard the resounding answer yesterday: NO!!

Instagram and Facebook have “clarified” the new privacy settings for Instagram after a furor caused by the original announcement of the new rules.

The original announcement indicated that Instagram and Facebook had the rights to all of your content including the right to use your photos in ads:  “A business or other entity may pay” Instagram to display users’ photos and other details “in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.“

Today Instagram “clarified” away advertisers ability to use your pics… Clearly Facebook backed off its original plan due to the swell of protests.

Why does Facebook have one PR disaster after another with regards to privacy or other changes in its service. One answer is the clash between the freemium model used throughout social media and the desire of these companies to grow revenue. (More about this in my next post.)

But I think Facebook is a special case because of the corporate DNA from founder Zuckerberg. We all know the famous stories:

  • Developing FB while telling the Winklevoss twins he was working on their Harvard-only social network,
  • Disputes with his former roomate and co-founder,
  • His famous reply to why clients gave FB access to their private data: “They trust me…dumb f***s”,
  • The change in algorithm that reduced viewing of FB pages posts just as FB started pushing promoted posts for FB pages,
  • Strange  and confusing changes in privacy settings,
  • Etc.

I discussed this issue in a previous post: The Social Network – The IPO. I believe that a lack of ethics and disregard for privacy is central in the corporate DNA and corporate culture of Facebook. (Sorry to mix metaphors.) I believe that FB’s corporate slogan should be:

Customers trust us, the dumb f***s!

If you rely primarily on your Facebook page for your organization a good question for you might be:

Would you trust your business to Zuck?

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Top 11 Social Media Sites

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

It is interesting to browse through the top websites as assessed by Alexa here: TOP Sites

Eleven of the top 100 websites are social media sites. (I have also included an estimate of recent total monthly visitors, when I found a credible estimate somewhere else on the web.)

Note that blogging is understated because it is not dominated by a social site. For example, according to WordPress there are more blogs using WordPress software on a private site than using the WP blog hosting site that is used in this ranking.

The top eleven ranked by Alexa:

Platform(s)                Social Media                Monthly Visitors             Alexa Rank[2]

  1. Facebook             Social Network               850 million                                2
  2. YouTube             Video-sharing                 800 million                                3
  3. Twitter                Micro-Blogging               250 million                                9
  4. LinkedIn             Professional Network    110 million                               14
  5. Google+               Social Network               100 million                                —
  6. WordPress          Blogging                               —                                           22
  7. Tumblr                MicroBlogging                  13 million                                36
  8. Pinterest             Social Scrapbook              11 million                                38
  9. Blogger                Blogging                                                                              47
  10. Flickr                   Photo Sharing                                                                    56
  11. Instagram           Photo Sharing                                                                    98

[1] Wikipedia estimates (October  2012) unless otherwise cited; the sites are ranked by the Alexa ranking for consistency

[2] Alexa web site rankings at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo World Ranking

[3] Top 15 social network sites, October 2012, eBizMBA http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites

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Social Learning and Online #HigherEd

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

The past two days I enjoyed observing social learning at work in my classes.

Friday I gave my sales classes a midterm. I then allowed them to form groups to retake the tests to improve their individual scores. It was fun to watch them discuss issues I consider important and reach consensus within their groups. This simple technique (which I highly recommend),  turns the exam into a genuine learning activity! I have been doing this for several years: I have gotten some negative feedback (a couple students have cited the retest as proof that I am “easy”), but the process is an incredible improvement over the former professor-led test review.

Monday I decided to have my social media marketing class present their progress on their individual semester projects at the half-way point. I had intended it mostly to give them a push to get going. What a wonderful session! Students talked about what they have been working on and got feedback and ideas from other students. Great learning session, likely the best next to my great guest speakers!!!

Use of MOOCs

These two great examples of the power of social learning or peer-to-peer learning lead me to be skeptical of current MOOCs…

I freely admit that somewhere on planet earth there is likely someone who gives more engaging lectures on personal selling or social media. I also believe that lecturing is one of the least effective ways to learn, and that watching a 40 minute video of my lectures would suck. Unfortunately for the more  simplistic MOOCs I believe that watching a series of videotaped 40 minute lectures from the very best lecturer on earth would also suck – just a bit less.

Flipping, social learning and social media

Thus I think the best use of the much heralded MOOCs would be be to provide raw material to “flip” classes. (For example, instruct students to watch some of the lectures online if they can stand them and then apply the concepts in class by problems and discussion.) Ultimately, of course, lectures can be made more palatable by cutting them into 10 minute chunks and using animation to replace talking-head professors. [not cheap]

However the key to online learning success will be to bring my wonderful Friday and Monday classes online – online social learning. This will be a valuable application of social media. I have seen some evidence of social learning in Facebook groups and wikis in my classes. I expect the effort to mirror in person social learning via social media to be difficult, really difficult, but not in the end insurmountable.

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Can One Billion Facebook Users be wrong?

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

According to Wikipedia (note: don’t cite in my classes!) as of early summer the social platforms had the following number of users:

  1. Facebook         955 million (certainly 1 B by now)
  2. Twitter            500+ million
  3. LinkedIn          175 million

Am I the only one who thinks these numbers are skewed? Based on strictly anecdotal evidence I believe that there are a LOT of fake and duplicate FB accounts out there. My personal example – My wife and I between us have:

  • TWO LinkedIn accounts (and don’t know anyone with dups) and
  • FIVE Facebook accounts (and know many people with dups).

What do you think? Do you also have dup accounts? (I have one for old high school acquaintances and my dog has one that he really doesn’t post on.)

Does LinkedIn have both a more professional group and honest count?

 

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What is your Klout score today?

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

Even after carefully reading Mark Schaefer’s excellent book Return on Influence, I am still one of those unrepentant Klout-bashers that Mark has referred to in several of his recent posts. I believe that a Klout score has little value and acts like an SEO-like force in motivating participants to game SM, thereby coarsening social media. See selected posts:

Last evening at the ribbon cutting for the beautiful new business building at Radford U. – Biz Building – an MBA student not in my SMM class came up to me and said “Your social media class has impacted everyone in the program. It seems the new greeting is ‘What is your Klout score today'”

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

 

 

 

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Professor Klout

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

“…here is an inescapable fact. Many firms are sizing up college student’s Klout scores as a quantitative metric to use for job applicant screening. Therefore, I decided to create a class project in which the final grade earned is solely determined by a student’s Klout score.”

This is a quote from a post by Todd Bacile ( @toddbacile ), a new PhD from FSU on Mark Schaefer’s Blog http://www.businessesgrow.com/2012/08/26/florida-state-university-class-using-klout-to-determine-student-grades/

This blog post generated a bit of a storm in the comments on the Grow blog (my comment must have been screened out…) and on FB and other social media sites. Todd is likely now the most talked about marketing job candidate. USNews even ran a tepidly critical comment: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2012/08/29/professor-sparks-controversy-for-klout-based-grading?page=2

Todd’s curious wording – some readers interpreted “the final grade earned is solely determined” as meaning the class grade – and provocative use of “gaming” helped incite the ire. However his key premise that since some employers are using Klout scores to screen job candidates, Universities must teach students to achieve high scores is also widely criticized.

I am a fairly consistent Klout-basher. [For example see http://servicecocreation.com/2011/02/16/will-klout-kill-twitter/ ] I think the measure itself is faulty, even somewhat silly (and worse since the recent modifications – more later on this). More importantly I believe that the service becomes harmful to social media as participants game their scores under pressure from imbecile employers who screen with Klout or perhaps by professors who specify that a “final grade earned is solely determined” by the measure.

I think most social  media participants have already seen clear evidence of the coarsening of social media due to J0e Fernandez and his Klout henchmen in their Facebook stream. Why has there been an increase in:

  • Artificial or photo-shoped pics?
  • Vapid posts that sound like campaigns for Miss American? (Why can’t we have world peace?)
  • Exhortations to click “like” – Please “like” for world peace, Please “like” to support our veterans, please like if you love the Hokies (local).

Answer: Pumping up the K-score!!!

What should an academic do? Klout and its competitors do exist, try to measure something important, and are widely followed. I personally think Todd may have pushed too far…

BUT I do offer extra credit in my social media courses to the two or three students who over the course of the semester: (1) end the semester with the highest Klout score, (2) show the largest increase in their Kred and /or PeerIndex scores.

What is your opinion:

  1. Does Todd go too far in promoting Klout in his class?
  2. Do I go too far in promoting Kred, Klout and PeerIndex in mine?

Posted in Social influence | Tagged , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Wicked Commentary on Social Media

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

This “ad” for the iPhone 5 is also a wicked commentary on social media!

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Social Media used to Crowdsource a New Course!

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

A recording of a presentation at Social Slam 2012.
(Also posted at servicecocreation.com and youtube.)

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The Social Network: The IPO

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

Six possible lessons of the Facebook IPO? Investors in an IPO should be wary if:

  1. “They trust me…dumb f–ks” is a corporate slogan. (Zuck in early days…)
  2. All the insiders are selling as much as they possibly can.
  3. A tech company hasn’t transitioned well to the new platform…(mobile)
  4. The public has lots of access to shares
  5. The price and quantity of shares is ratcheted up just before the launch
  6. The CEO wears a hoodie (or a mask) to investor meetings.

Disclosure: I was deeply skeptical of the FB IPO and tweeted the Forbes article about whether FB would even exist in five years multiple times, but I was not brave enough to explore options to go short on any bounce.

The biggest issue: Will Facebook exist in five years?

Mobile IS the new platform. Facebook was dominant in the Web 2.0 world – it is having problems in mobile. To summarize: Facebook mobile is clunky and boring and currently has no ads!

In my social media marketing class I had to persuade about 10% of my students to reopen Facebook accounts. They see FB as a place to exchange pictures with grandma but not too useful on their iPods. Twitter or texts plus instagram readily replaces what Facebook did from them in the Web 2.0 days – no wonder Zuckerberg quickly doubled Twitter’s buyout offer for Instagram!

Of course FB is focused on mobile and has a legion of smart people working on it, so they can’t be ruled out. But as Forbes noted a couple of weeks before the IPO, it is a question if Google or Facebook will even be around in 5 years: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/04/30/heres-why-google-and-facebook-might-completely-disappear-in-the-next-5-years/

(It seems to me that Google is better positioned.)

The revised earnings scandal

I was not surprised to hear that “eyeballs are increasing faster than ads” at Facebook. Even though their app is clunky and boring, the world is going mobile and FB is adding users on mobile and as noted has not yet figured out how to put ads there!

It does seem tawdry for the underwriter to share info with the institutional buyers that it didn’t share with the public, so let the suits go on! But the simple fact that the deal was available to the public was an ominous sign…

“They trust me… Dumb f—ks”

The biggest worry with FB is whether it can master mobile. Issue #2 is whether it is run by grownups. Wearing the hoodie to investor meetings should have been a reminder of the startup days of Facebook. Zuckerberg in a series of IMs (he didn’t have Twitter then) told a friend that he could get him private data on nearly anyone at Harvard:

ZUCKERBERG: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCKERBERG: people just submitted it…i don’t know why…they “trust me”…dumb f–ks

A good question for a potential FB investor: Does Zuck respect you the way he respected his early users or his users’ privacy?

………………………….

For further insight into the founder’s character, remember how he stole the idea and perhaps some of the code as also discussed in a recent Forbes blog post by James Crotty: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2011/07/22/learning-from-the-winkelvi/

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SoSlam: The BIG picture

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

Social Slam was exhilarating for me! Being with 550 people excited about social media, meeting a score of twitter friends for the first time, and listening to superb talks: how could it get much better?

The Social Media Club of Knoxville and Mark Schaefer did an incredible job of hosting a conference!

The Host

It was a pleasure to meet Mark in person. Even jet-lagged, tired and coming down with a cold, he was full of energy and concern that all of his “guests'” needs were being met. Hard as it is to believe, he may actually be nicer in person than online!

Mark is a friendly, low-key but very persuasive speaker: His talk about influence measuring and warm stories of high-Klout individuals ALMOST made me want to sip the Klout Kool-Aid…

[Read Jeremiah Owyang for an antidote: How ‘Social Profiling’ Will Work In The Real World http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2012/04/25/how-%e2%80%98social-profiling%e2%80%99-will-work-in-the-real-world/ ]

Sessions

More later – after papers and projects for the semester are all graded.

But my quick take is that SoSlam has a great format: 50-minute “keynote” speakers, followed by 50 minute slams or panels of 10-minute talks. I loved the short talks, especially the 10 tips in 10 minutes session! Great ideas on blogs, using LinkedIn, etc. I usually circled at least four of the ten tips.

One of the themes I take away from the Slam is to not discard established platforms when chasing after the new new things like Pinterest, Instagram, Viddy, etc. The greatest value may still be in less glamorous platforms like LinkedIn, blogs and even email.

The Innovation Panel

I was looking forward to being part of this group. Amy Kenly and I are both contributors to the upcoming PDMA  Handbook on New Product Development. We are both interested in social media and product innovation, had chatted online a few times, and had ALMOST met at the recent PDMA conference. Jay Baer was another twitter friend, whose content I have long enjoyed. And I was eager to hear from Clinton Bonner from TopCoder about running crowd-sourcing contests and competitions.

I believe this panel showcased Mark’s deft skill in putting Social Slam together. Amy provided an overview of corporate experiences crowd-sourcing, I provided a personal narrative of community-sourcing, and Clinton discussed maintaining community. Three viewpoints of the same phenomenon that I believe really illustrated it.

WIRED and WEIRD

It was positively weird to address 350 people who were all tweeting about the event! Even my three fellow panelists were typing while I was talking! No wonder everyone’s twitter score increased on Saturday!!

I had a pleasant discussion with a woman over beer and bacon (love Knoxville!), who suddenly said “You’re ProfessorGary – Sorry I didn’t recognize you but I was busy on both Facebook and Twitter during your talk. But I really enjoyed it!” [I had been thinking of easing up on my closed computers policy in my classes, but after SoSlam maybe not!]

The organizers were right to not post the twitter feed – at that point I would have sat down and tweeted to keep up…

Social

It was a social event. I met a score of twitter friends in person and made some new friends. It was wonderful to shake hands with long time twitter friends such as  @markwschaefer @Brad_Lovett @MargieClayman @ProfessorS @HowellMarketing  @akenly and many others.

It was great to meet Kristin Daukas:

And it was truly special to share the Slam with my daughter @christineschirr who does social media for the RBTC, an organization of high tech firms in SW Virginia. She is shown below with some other attendee at SoSlam:

[Another gain from the conference – my daughter showed me how to use instagram!]

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