Stopped using FaceBook Events

Why I stopped using FaceBook Events: "The only time I got any traction on a Facebook event is when I posted a link to the FB event to my 4.6 million Pinterest followers. As soon as I did that, a bunch of people signed up. I’m sure there is a big overlap in Pinterest and Facebook users, but none of those Facebook people would have found out about it unless I posted it on Pinterest! There a few other x-factors in Google+. One is that it is integrated with the whole Google email and search world. So, if people use Gmail (who doesn’t???) or do a search in Google (who doesn’t???) then it is easy to find events that are happening near you and get invites from your friends. There is much less friction to sharing an event. And Facebook search is horrible! It took me forever even to find my previous event. I did a search for “Paris Photowalk” and mine did not appear — another one appeared. Plus, I know there have been many many photowalks in Paris, and only a random one appeared."


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Facebook era ending?

Even Google won't be around for ever, let alone Facebook | Technology | The Observer: " . . . If you put your faith in network effects, therefore, Facebook looks like a good investment because it'll be around for the long term. If people want to do social networking, then it'll be the only game in town. Facebook users will constitute a captive market and will be correspondingly exploited. And the company will be regulated as a monopoly. Which is where "stickiness" comes in. How much exploitation will users tolerate before they decide to quit? We know a lot about network effects but relatively little about this, which is why a new study by three scientists at the Swiss university ETH Zurich makes interesting reading. They examined several social networking services, seeking to identify what makes them resilient and what could cause them to decline. And they performed an empirical autopsy on a failed service – Friendster – using data gathered just before it closed. The key determinants of success or failure were (i) the average number of friends that users have and (ii) whether the difficulty of using the site comes to outweigh the perceived benefits. Facebook is doing OK on the first of these criteria but – in my experience – becoming increasingly vulnerable on the second as the company tries to "monetise" its users. If Mark Zuckerberg's empire can't square this circle then not even the power of network effects will save it in the long run."


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Why He Quit Facebook

Why I'm quitting Facebook - CNN.com: " . . . Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time -- our "social graphs" -- into money for others. We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information, Facebook and the "big data" research firms purchasing their data predict still more things about us -- from our future product purchases or sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even terrorism. The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we -- and the young, particularly -- spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation. . . . " (read full article at link above)


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Pinterest Founder on the Human Indexing Machine

Pinterest’s Founder: Algorithms Don’t Know What You Want | MIT Technology Review: " . . . We often talk about Pinterest as like a human indexing machine. Google built these crawlers that would go out, and these amazing algorithms. We give people tools that let them organize in a way that makes sense to them, and in doing that they organize in a way that makes sense to other people. It just sort of respects our philosophy of how we want to achieve our mission, by helping people organize things. That organization is different than the approach you would take if you were only using machines. Many people think or assume that Pinterest is mostly used by women. Is that the case? It’s not how we think about the site; we try to build things for the whole world. That said, most of our users right now are women. I think that’s a function of how the site and the service tend to spread along interest categories. We’ll see an area like interior decorating, and then an adjacent interest will open up. It’s becoming more diverse. I would guess that when camping opens up as an interest, fishing would be an adjacency. . . ."


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Social Media in Brazil

Brazil: The Social Media Capital of the Universe - WSJ.com: ". . . .  the growth of social media in Latin America's biggest country. Brazil's expanding middle class is increasingly going online, and social media are particularly popular because of Brazil's hyper-social culture, social-media executives say. That makes Brazil a bright spot for social-media companies as they seek more growth outside the U.S. and Europe. Brazil is particularly appealing because China, the world's biggest emerging market, currently blocks sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, preventing the companies from cashing in on the nation's fast-growing economy. Facebook Inc. has some 65 million users in Brazil, which makes it the company's second largest market after the U.S. by number of users, according to social-analytics company Socialbakers. By the end of 2012, Brazil was also the biggest market outside the U.S. by number of unique visitors for Google Inc.'s GOOG -1.70% YouTube, and one of YouTube's top five markets by revenue. . . ."


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Branding the Visual Web

Branding the Visual Web | Digiday: "It’s a similar story at Ford, which posts photos of cars on its Facebook pages and on Twitter. Every single Ford post in social media is supported with either an image or a video. “As we’ve seen the shift from words to images on social platforms pick up momentum, we’ve found ourselves using images to support almost every story, fact or other piece of content we put out, which means we have more requests for original visuals as well as a need for more and more varied assets we had already been using — like photography,” said Karen Untereker, U.S. social media manager at Ford."


Change.org: A Powerful Adversary For Brands | LEVICK - JDSupra: " . . . . Thanks to Change.org, big brands such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and myriad others are finding themselves hurled into the center of high-profile debates about acceptable corporate behavior. The foremost reputational challenge is that these are not debates in which both points of view can be expressed. The website’s format does not allow companies and brands to defend themselves. In many cases, all a company in the crosshairs can do is watch as signatures multiply. Change.org and similar petition sites are gaining prominence in a Digital Age when everyday citizens can leverage social media as force multipliers that amplify their concerns. But there is a catch where Change.org is concerned. The site charges groups for the privilege of sponsoring petitions that are matched to users who have similar interests. When signing up, users are given an option to “Keep me updated on this campaign and others.” When they opt-in for updates on certain issues, sponsors can then reach out to them directly via e-mail. . . . "

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8 Mistakes You Should Never Make On LinkedIn

8 Mistakes You Should Never Make On LinkedIn - Forbes: " . . . Another photo blunder: Misrepresenting your appearance. “I see older people who are worried about age discrimination use a photo of themselves in their 30s, but an interviewer wasn’t expecting them to look so different. And instead of listening to your answers, the interviewer will think you’re deceptive,” Williams confides. “Unless you’re getting hired for a modeling gig, people are just looking for energy, which you can communicate through great posture, open eyes and a smile.” . . . ."


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Teens losing interest in Facebook

Report shows teens are losing interest in Facebook | Digital Trends: "Hidden away in Facebook’s 10-k report, as first noticed by The Verge, is the fact that its younger users – A.K.A teens – just aren’t using Facebook as often as they used to. Here’s the specific nugget that Facebook tried to somewhat keep under wraps:

“We believe that some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook. For example, we believe that some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and services such as Instagram. In the event that our users increasingly engage with other products and services, we may experience a decline in user engagement and our business could be harmed.”

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/teens-think-facebook-is-so-yesterday/#ixzz2MhSF0ki2


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Twitter Could Be Worth $10 Billion Or More

Is Twitter Really Worth $10 Billion? - WSJ.com: " . . . Companies love touting themselves as "platforms," but in Twitter's case it happens to be true. The company must spend to maintain its plumbing and constantly improve its interface, but once that's done, it stands back and collects its middleman money. That means getting to massive scale at relatively minimal cost. Twitter won't divulge figures, but people in the venture community, including some Twitter backers, say its margins are as high as 30% to 40%. For simplicity's sake, let's reduce Twitter's net margins to Google's, which are a gusher-like 21%. Value all those earnings at Google's 17-times-trading multiple, and, voilà, Twitter has a value of $12.5 billion. And you needn't tweak conditions much to get a higher number. What could go wrong? The major worry is international growth. Advertisers may also have a natural limit on their Twitter spending. Unlike many users of Google or even Pinterest, Twitter users aren't browsing with a clear intent to purchase. And then there is Twitter fatigue, in which users may feel deluged by information. The company will have to invest to prevent this. Late-stage venture investing "is the hardest time to think about a company," adds Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark Capital, an investor in Pinterest, which just earned its own $2.5 billion valuation with zero revenue. "You're in between. It's not small enough to be completely speculative and not broad enough to know growth rates or earnings margins. . . ."


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Facebook, Google+, YouTube

Watch Out Facebook, With Google+ at #2 and YouTube at #3, Google, Inc. Could Catch Up - Forbes:
In another post from Trendstream, Google is compared to Facebook’s new Graph Search. Its data indicate a marked decline in the percent of Facebook users who are actively sharing information about their daily lives—a significant source of data for Graph Search. GWI observes that, “Growth of active usage is concentrated in passive or frictionless sharing actions and behaviours, like “purchasing a product or service” or watching a TV show or film, which have grown massively through 2012.” The post concludes that, “The future of social is far more passive, less about interacting with friends and more about watching or utilizing the social data to navigate and discover the web as well as the world around us. This means the data will not be user contributed but, aggregated about the user. This leaves Google with the upper hand (italics mine).”
In terms of Facebook’s Graph Search, Trendstream’s Tom Smith writes, “It is far easier to lay social and personalised data over a search product that aggregates the entire internet and links that to users. Facebook is only aggregating what exists in the Facebook eco-system or what consumers have opted into share. To bring this data, which will be coming from Facebook’s partnership with Bing, into the Facebook’s Graph Search will be a far bigger technology challenge and most crucially, an immense privacy challenge.” . . . "


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Minimalist Guide To Social Networking

The Minimalist’s Guide To Social Networking | Soshable | Social Media Blog: "Some Tips For Quickly Maximizing Your Social Impact: Fill Out Your Profile Completely—If the goal is to network and attract business, then you need to give potential customers and clients the best idea possible what it’s like doing business with you. This means filling out every section of your profile, and posting a picture. Yes, people who may want to pay you money definitely want to know what you look like.  It’s a trust thing. Make Yourself Useful—Your readers want to learn about your industry. They’re not looking for a hard sell. They’re looking for easy to digest information. If you can teach them something in an entertaining manner, you’ll both win. How about posting quick suggestions or thoughts on your industry? It doesn’t take a lot of time and it may be useful to others. Social’s Not Your Full Time Job—"


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Facebook bound to fall

Why the Facebook and Apple empires are bound to fall | The Raw Story: "Then there’s the social network Facebook with its billion users, which is likewise the focus of much hyperventilating comment. Recently, the Mark Zuckerberg empire launched its latest deadly weapon with the catchy name of Graph Search – as in “social graph”. . . . Actually, it’s Facebook’s latest attempt to become the AOL de nos jours. And, in the end, it will fail for the same reason that AOL’s attempt to corral users within its walled garden failed: the wider internet is just too diverse, innovative and interesting. But because Facebook looms so large in the public consciousness at the moment, it’s difficult to keep it in perspective. Which is why Kennedy’s book makes such salutary reading. So what we need to remember as we wade through the current overheated commentary on Apple and Facebook is that nothing lasts forever. . . ."


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Global Social Platforms dominate

GlobalWebIndex: "Data collected in GWI.8 (Q4 2012) demonstrates the continued shift in usage from localised social platforms to global ones with huge growth for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. The fastest growing network in 2013 in terms of “Active Usage” (defined as “Used or contributed to in the past month”) was Twitter which grew 40% to 288m across our 31 markets (approximately 90% of global internet population). 21% of the global internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis. This compares to 21% actively using YouTube, 25% actively using Google+ and a staggering 51% using Facebook on a monthly basis....The trends we’ve seen remain and are becoming ever clearer as we move forward."


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