Archive for the ‘Social networking’ Category

Only connect

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 12, 2009

One in every 11 minutes spent online globally is on networking sites. Between December 2007 and December 2008, the time spent on the sites climbed 63 percent to 45 billion minutes. . . .

The biggest growth in Facebook membership comes from the 35-49 year old set. Facebook has added twice as many 50-64 year old visitors as it has visitors under 18.

It’s really not surprising.

Online social networking is moving from a toy in the hands of adolescents to something grownups can understand and use. Well okay, not all grownups; I needed half an hour to talk my mother via Skype through the process of uploading a picture onto Facebook. But clearly its application has matured [UPDATE:] and, as Bill Scoble says in this article, there are separate FB worlds for grownups that have nothing to do with what “the kids” do there.

In other words, people like people.

They particularly like people whom they like.

That includes people they used to like, and with whom they may not have had contact for decades. Even more powerfully, it often includes people whom they hardly knew, and even some they didn’t like at all, but who now connect as adults with far more in common than once divided them, across the intertubes.

I guess you could really say that, well, the whole thing is very nice. Contrary to all our talk about alienation, atomization and polarization, maybe the very things that threatened to chill and isolate us could, with increasingly compelling levels of truly warm, personal interaction, bring us — back — together again. A great thing happens when we can lap at the milk of human kindness. Yes, it’s an absolute good to be reminded of how others care about us, remember after a generation good things about us we thought were ignored or didn’t even see in ourselves, or even build bridges over long-dessicated channels of separation. When spirits connect and share each other’s warmth, a lot of other harsh, stupid and ultimately meaningless things can recede to their appropriately subsidiary places in our lives.

What if, because of the Internet, the famous attention that, for so many of us of a certain age, “must be” but is not paid… can be? Even just a little?

Do pay attention.

UPDATE: Other are. Here’s a thoughtful article from a mature adult professor at William & Mary about how faculty members are using FB to stay in touch with the development of recent graduates; and Mashable, of course, is way ahead of everyone else.

Posted in Heart and spirit, Nuvo-Techno, Social networking | 1 Comment »

Social notworking

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 3, 2009

I liked this Business Week article about certain social networking myths, sent to me by Ben Rothke (my computer security maven friend whom I also linked to last week on the other blog). Two passages deserve to be excerpted. The first one is about the gigantic baloney factor out and about there right now:

A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:

• 4,273 Internet marketers

• 1,652 social media marketers

• 513 social media consultants

• 272 social media strategists

• 180 social media experts

• 98 social media gurus

• 58 Internet marketing gurus

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

I think you’d also be hard-pressed to call at least half of these characters any kind of “kids,” much less whizzes. “Social media consulting” is about as accurate a term for most of these wizened hustlers really have to sell as “coaching” (another racket we’ll have to talk about one of these days).

Here’s the second excerpt I liked:

Social media is great if you’re already a star, but that doesn’t happen overnight. . . .

Zappos Chief Executive Tony Hsieh, whose company has millions of customers who are evangelists for the great service that built the brand, quickly became a Twitter star, with more than 32,000 followers. When Dell, JetBlue Airways, the Chicago Bulls, and other love-’em-or-hate-’em brands joined Twitter, they immediately developed huge followings.

Tweets can be used to drive traffic to articles, Web sites, contests, videos, and so on—if people already care about your brand, or if you have a truly original idea that people will want to share with their followers.

The focus, really, in the second excerpt should be on the last sentence. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Social networking, Stragety | 5 Comments »

Writing on the wall

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 27, 2009

From the Inside Facebook blog:

“People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says.

This sounds like an oversimplification to me. There are more than one level of interaction available to dynamic users of social networking. Indeed there are many different kinds of social networkers. The vast majority are relatively passive, as described in the article linked to at the blog, and while they may like to have big networks they mostly hang out with their circle of friends. But the results of the data discussed in the article are at least presented somewhat misleadingly, it seems:

[I]n a recent interview with The Economist, Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, shared some interesting stats on Facebook users’ social behavior patterns.

His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

This may in fact be true, but I would certainly want to know the distribution of that trend across users. I would expect the data to be heavily skewed by the vast number of young to very young people who use Facebook as a toy or a game, which is fine, but which indeed is not at all about networking.

That is not, however, what is getting people interested in Facebook today. Grownup people, that is. Are they missing something, because Marlow’s data is an accurate reflection across the board? Or are we missing something because Marlow’s only giving us a peek of the whole story? On the other hand, if it’s the latter, what would be his — Facebook’s — motivation for doing so?

Posted in Social networking | 1 Comment »

The lawyers’ list

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 29, 2009

My first venture into “social networking” — not counting membership in various now-defunct early social networking sites targeting Ivy League alumni — was founding an email list through Princeton University’s TigerNet service, exclusively for Princeton graduates in the law. Princeton has no law school, but many of its alumni are lawyers, and I thought this would be a good way for us to connect. This was in 1995.

Nearly 14 years later, the list is still intact. There are, I think, still fewer than 2000 members now, but it’s a pretty juicy group in many respects. Quite a few “Tigers” (ugh) have found lateral or other employment through Princeton-Lawyers; far more have found local counsel; and quite a bit of decently learned discussion has taken place over the old-fashioned email medium. Last year I set up a companion group on LinkedIn as well.

There’s a lot I could talk about in terms of my experiences as nominal “admin” of Princeton-Lawyers, and if I have the time I would like, at a later date, to excerpt some discussion we had last week about the concept of an “impeachment” of George W. Bush. But that raises, for me, what is another particularly acute point, and one that was obvious within a week of the approval of this list by Princeton’s Alumni Council: The unique impatience, bordering on arrogance, of a certain percentage of this particular breed of cat for, well, discussion groups that have discussion.

Right off the bat, shortly after we started out and were feeling our way around what we wanted the “list” to be, a number of early members loudly announced that there was entirely too much chatter, too much noise, and that they were quitting. This happens periodically, and it did again last week when some of our more boisterous participants — including one who graduated from Old Nassau well before most of us were born — perhaps broke through the delicate membrane of professional detachment and got into some good, old-fashioned political roughhousing.

I’ve been on various Princeton lists for a long time, though because of the University’s insistence on protecting one particularly well-connected, left-wing alumnus spammer, I dropped most of them, because he generated so much noise, distraction and ill will. (This included a phone call from a University dean to yours truly, an otherwise unremarkable and relatively penurious alumnus of no interest to Nassau Hall, telling me to lay off the mysterious “Harold Helm” or I’d be the one tossed off TigerNet.) Now, I saw that people on all the lists would, from time to time, announce their departure from a topical group with a bit of melodrama — I’ve done it myself. (Heh. That includes the time I realized that an organized effort was being made on the left-wing Princeton-Writing group to shun me by ignoring all my posts or comments, because of my consistent challenges to that political orthodoxy that reigned there. This was later confirmed to me to have been exactly what happened.) That’s one of the things you see in that online social environment.

But something is different about the lawyers’ list. It’s the one where people quit, and usually announce the fact, solely on the basis of being offended by the volume of emails on the rare occasion when a topic actually gets some legs. And not just, “Gee, I don’t think I have time to read or archive or filter this many emails — sorry, see you, guys.” Rather, it’s an angry expression of offense, of outrage, as if some bounder had actually had the nerve not to powder his wig thoroughly before beginning oral argument.

What is that? Is it “lawyers”? Is it “Princeton”? Is it “Princeton Lawyers”?

Posted in Heart and spirit, Social networking | Leave a Comment »

Disappeared

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 25, 2009

Scobleizer:

I refuse to use Facebook to conduct business and don’t upload many videos or photos there because I don’t support companies that “erase” MY data without my permission. I know of no other social network that does this in this way.

Of course, Facebook believes it can get away with it because, at this point, it is pretty much the gold standard in social networking. But I had something a little bit like what Robert Scoble describes here — a kind of deactivation due to basically too much legitimate social networking — happen to me too when I was an active account holder. I was locked down without explanation; I got mainly boilerplate responses to my inquiries; a bit of panic set in — I had uploaded a lot of stuff.

In my case it came and went in an hour or two. But it was odd. Even more odd, though, is that I was not deactivated the way he describes. In fact, what happened to me sounds almost exactly like what he describes here as what he believes, and quite logically, would be a much better policy:

If I were in charge at Facebook I would have a “jail.” If you broke the rules I’d move your account into “jail.” Everyone would be able to get to it, although you might have an icon that indicates the account has been thrown into jail. I would also turn off certain features on the account. I would just turn off messaging, for instance, if that person was abusing messaging. Or, turn off his/her ability to write on wall posts if he’s abusing privileges there.

I’m pretty sure I was, in fact, in jail. But in all seriousness, I can’t fathom how this could have been the case if a plugged in guy like Scoble doesn’t think it can.

Then there was the odd message I got that one time about being an “alpha account” or something and was therefore being allowed to have a video response to video message I had sent show on my wall? I wish I’d screen-shotted that one. No one has ever been able to tell me what that was.

Facebook and other social media are, like Google, becoming de facto jurisdictions unto themselves, which libertarians should like — and on issues such as this, I am one. But it can be a weird new world out there.

Posted in Nuvo-Techno, Social networking | 1 Comment »

What I’m doing, and what I’m not

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 2, 2009

Last week I laughingly linked to this post from last year wherein I asked myself, what on earth would I want to do with Twitter? I had ignored Dean Esmay‘s invitation to join Twitter, though a little later a mutual friend convinced me to give it a try. As I explain in this post from yesterday, I didn’t even really do anything with it until about six weeks ago, when I finally forced the issue on that friend’s urging as a way to increase traffic here.

I got the hang of it (update: linked to old profile, now deleted, showing massive teeming following — RDC).

In almost no time I had attracted over 500 “followers.” And, counting for “quality,” I now have at the time of this writing a score on Twitter Grader — one of several metrics, mind you, not of all of which would show as high a score — of 98.8 out of 100. By their scale, as of this minute I am was ranked 8,965 in the galaxy out of over 850,000 users. And that’s with being resolutely refused mutuality of followship by James Lileks.

With this, together with my mega-special Facebook page, I revealed myself to be, with my natural glibness, broad education and technological facility — yes, and of course that famous characteristic modesty — a true social networking genius. And blog traffic, as well as links and mutual blogroll relationships, did increase. I even got a couple of direct inquiries for legal services!

Today I deactivated my Facebook account.

And I’m doing the same with Twitter. Now, because Twitter is a little more personal and dynamic, I am going to take a couple of days before unplugging that… say some goodbyes to all that, at least goodbye to tweeting. We can read each other in the funny papers.

But this has taken over my life. The fact is, I’m too good at social networking for my own good. If eating all the candy you want means that you eat candy three meals a day, you have to be someone who doesn’t eat candy at all, no matter how much energy it gives you.

I have real things to do, and not nearly as much time to talk about doing them as I’m spending. And I don’t necessarily have any good reason for talking about those things, and other things, too, with some of the people with whom I’ve been talking.

I have a couple of good blogs, guest slots and privileges on some others, a lot of great clients, fine partners, countless friends, and priceless family members to live with. Not virtually, really.

That’s what I’m doing.

UPDATE: I reestablished my Twitter account as a place holder immediately after “quitting” Twitter, and merely used it as a feed for blog posts. I hardly expected anyone to follow me there, though a few have. I am only slowly beginning to, sparingly, utter any personal tweets, and I have structured my social cloud so as not become the sort of “social scene” it had for me last winter. It’s now social, but in the business social sense.

I also reopened my Facebook account but use it in a far more focused than I was doing last year. It’s something that exists in my life now — as opposed to being my life!

Posted in Blogophilia, Futurama, Heart and spirit, Narcissus Rex, Nuvo-Techno, Social networking | 11 Comments »