Imagine Your Reality

While it’s become clear that information, to some degree or another, is the currency that social networking sites run on, its also clear that how they use that information can get them into a lot of hot water. Certainly Facebook wouldn’t be getting all the negative press and user complaints if they did a better job of explaining how they use the information. Twitter, on the other hand, has taken a minimalistic approach toward getting personal information, favoring instead an approach that records interaction.

Personally I favor Twitter’s approach because it emphasizes relationships over the collection of information. Instead of having to share what high school I went to or where I work, or any number of other details, the focus is on the conversation and interactions that people have. The way that twitter collects data focuses on the trends people talk about. On the whole, it’s a much more ethical approach to collecting data.

Relationships are also much more dynamic. Your high school and even where you work are fairly static data. There’s not nearly as much information in such stasis, but conversations show changing interests, emerging personalities, and also enable an understanding of how a person has changed over a period of time. Conversations are mutable data and provide snapshots of a person’s life, and can provide some personal details, but nonetheless don’t need to be as invasive.

Interaction is what makes social media successful. Without interaction social media can’t be social at all, and there’s no reason to be on it. But what draws people to different sites is the opportunity to connect with each other, to share information, and also create and maintain relationships with each other. It’s the conversations that keep me on social media. What about you?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about opt-in and what is and isn’t, especially with the advent of Facebook like buttons. As you may know you can put a like button on your website and if someone chooses to press that button, then you can not only see if they liked what the button was connected to, but you can also post a message to that person’s wall. This brings up the question of whether the person has really opted-in or not.

To understand that you need to understand that opt-in involves making a user aware that s/he has a choice, in terms of choosing to be contacted by someone abut that person’s services. Facebook’s like buttons seem to be opt-in on the surface, but really aren’t. While you’ve certainly opted to like a something, you haven’t knowingly opted to be contacted by a business, but Facebook assumes that by liking something you want to be contacted about it.

Opt-in is an ethical issue. By notifying a person that you may be sending that person information, if that person chooses, you are ethically respecting that person’s ability to make a choice. It’s important, if you run a business where you could be contacting people about your services, that you include an opt-in statements that make people aware that they have a choice to receive your information.

There’s been a lot of noise raised about the privacy issues that Facebook has created because of some of its changes. These concerns are valid one to have, but people do need to remember that although they aren’t paying money to Facebook to have an account, they are paying in data to have that account, specifically their own data, which Facebook uses to provide information to companies that use their services. The most obvious application of that is the ads that any business can create, which allow businesses to target people in specific demographics if they so choose.  The like button is another example, where if you choose to like something, a business can then send a message to your wall adverting their services. However while you may not have much control over your privacy settings on Facebook, unless you delete your account, there is something to be said for self-regulating, when it comes to what other people.

Recently I saw a picture of an acquaintance and she posted a message under it asking that someone be de-tagged from the picture because that someone didn’t want to be tagged. And what interested me about it was that there was this effort to protect that person’s privacy, as much as could reasonably occur on a site such as Facebook. It’s significant because it shows that users can, to some degree, create their own rules when it comes to their own privacy. While the tagged person has no guarantee that she’ll be de-tagged, the fact that people are speaking up about it indicates an awareness of these kinds of details.

So what can you do with this? It is up to each person to own his/her own online identity as much as is reasonably possible. This means that while you can’t necessarily control how companies will use your data, if you login to their sites, you can set up guidelines for how people connected to you can or can’t refer to you. Also there is nothing wrong with choosing to delete an account. While many people claim it’s important to be on different social media sites, I think its more important to claim your online identity and decide what you want to do with it, up to and including choosing not to participate on different sites.

Even in this age of social media, with so much information being passed around and shared you still have choices with what you can do about your information. Deleting an account is an option, as is telling people if you would them to de-tag you. Don’t hesitate to speak up, because it is your data after all.

Justin Kistner of Webtrends posted about the new Facebook Like buttons, which are set up so that if someone clicks a like button on your website, they are sharing their personal data on Facebook with your business. The business can then post a message to all the people who chose to like something. In other words, you no longer have to “like” a business page to be reached by that business. As long as you like a product or service the business has, then a business can choose to send a message to you, even if you never liked the business page. And while this is seemingly marketing heaven, it also shows that Facebook once again has been very short-sited (pun intended) in understanding the social implications of their changes.

To be fair, Facebook has definitely capitalized on the psychological manipulation that is involved in using the like button. They undoubtedly reason that if a person chooses to push the like button about a service or product on a business webpage, then they will be accepting of being contacted by that business. There are two problems with that reasoning however:

1. The like button doesn’t use double opt-in, which makes it spammy. How we know that Facebook isn’t using the double opt-in feature is simple. Once you click the button you’ve given permission for a business to contact you. But with double opt-in, what should happen is that the like button is pushed, and a small window opens asking the user permission for the business to contact. If and only if the user clicks a second time indicating that it’s permissible for the business to  contact them, then it actually be said that the like button is not a spam feature.

2. Facebook shares the user’s private data with the business. Given how much outcry has already occurred about how Facebook has intended to share user information with third parties, this move demonstrates that Facebook isn’t concerned with user private data. The fact is, Facebook has already moved into the gray area of sharing user data with third parties.

And there’s a third problem, namely that Facebook is trying to capitalize on the psychological benefits of “like” This is blatantly manipulative on their part, because what it assumes is that just because someone indicates they like something, then that means they wanted to be contacted about it, when in fact they may simply like something, but not want to be contacted. By making that assumption Facebook is risking a lot of user ire and unhappiness. And eventually users will go elsewhere. Justin Kistner thinks Twitter has a good shot at being a contender to Facebook, and I do as well, because there is not near the amount of privacy issues with Twitter as what has occurred with Facebook.

Facebook is continuing to make major changes in what it does and what it offers. Most recently, you can longer become a fan of a fan page. Instead you choose if you will like it. I’ve already written about why I think the move of word choice from Fan to Like is a bad idea, but another problem with Facebook, and in my opinion, the big problem is the weird blend of personal accounts and fan page accounts that hasn’t been fully separated, and probably never will be.

If you want to open an account for your business on Facebook you need to get a fan page. However, to do that, you have to get a personal account first. Once you’ve set up your personal account, you can create a fan-page account, but there are still problems that occur, because your fan-page isn’t truly a separate account. For example, if I create an event on my fan page, and want to invite people to it, I can’t invite my fans. Instead, I end up inviting my friends from my personal account, even though none of those people might be my fans or interested in what I’m doing. This makes the event tool less than useful and also creates potential spam issues with your friends.

And if you want to get notifications for your fan page, you can’t get those notifications. The only notifications you can get are for your personal profile. This means you need to check your fan-page, as opposed to getting notifications about it. It’s not a very convenient feature for busy business owners who don’t always want to check in on their fan-page just to see if some activity has occurred.

Even putting aside the functionality issues, the core problem is that while Facebook is integrating everything into the internet, it can’t get it’s own internal in order in a way that’s actually helpful to its users. So if it can’t effectively create functionality on its own site that streamlines the user experience, what makes Facebook think it’ll do any better on the internet at large? Facebook, if you’re reading this post, fix it so we actually have separate accounts for our personal profiles and fan (excuse me like) pages and so we can get the same level of functionality on both accounts instead of on one.

Here’s a really good article on how to improve your basic security on a wordpress install.

By now, you probably know just how complicated Facebook can make it for people to find and use all the features it has to offer, and if you have a fan page with at least 25 people on it, you might be interested in knowing how to create a personalized url for your fan-page.

First go to http://www.facebook.com/username/

If you’re already set the personalized url for your personal account, you’ll be able to see that. at the center of the page. For example, my personal url is facbook.com/taylor.ellwood Underneath that you can also set the url for your pages, by clicking Set a Username for your fan pages (See screenshot below).

Once you click that link, a new box will appear, which will allow you to check the pages you’ve created to determine if they can have a personalized url. You’ll need to choose a page from the pages dropdown box.

If your fan page doesn’t have enough fans, Facebook won’t let you choose a personal url for the fan page, but if you o have enough fans, you’ll be able to enter a name for the url and then select check availability to determine if that url is available.

The url may not always be available. For example, when checking the availability for The Green Wolf, it turned out that someone had already picked that url up, as well as a variant of it. In the end I ended up choosing to use the name of the store and name of the owner, which worked.

Before hitting confirm, make sure you read over the information and then select confirm. You now have a personalized url for your fan page.

The benefits of having a personalized url are several. Your fan-page will look more professional and when people search, whether on Facebook or on a search engine such as Google, it will be easier to find. It also improves the SEO for your website, because it shows up as a related backlink.

Facebook recently made some new announcements about possible upcoming changes to the site. One of the more controversial features is the possibility of Facebook sharing personal user information with third party applications to customize Facebook’s user experience, unless users opt-out. This has been met with a lot of comments from unhappy Facebook users. Two such comments are included below:

“You have to stick to the promises you gave to people who logged in thinking that they access a secure social network. – Piracy and identity theft are everywhere but you are on the way to ‘legalize’ it, while we all become victims.”

“It blows me away how FB continually wants to alienate its users. If this “opt-out” only information sharing passes, I will definitely be “opting-out” as a FB user.”

The problem here is pretty simple. Facebook is turning into more of an opt-out experience, or in other words into an advertising site, as opposed to a social media site. One of the key points to remember about social media is that it ultimately is opt-in, which means that people choose whether or not they want to access a feature. Facebook, because it’s gotten so many people on its site, has forgotten that. But as it continues toward this route of opt-out, inevitably it will become another MySpace, with people leaving it in droves because they feel they are being advertised to.

It is a fine line for a social media site to walk. They need to somehow find funding that enables them to host and maintain the site, but also do it in a manner that makes users want to be on the site without having to contend with a lot of advertisement, or sharing of personal information with third party platforms. We already get so much spam in our email from those same companies. Adding that kind of spam on a social media site not only forces more that information on us, but also creates more resentment.

Social media sites need to stick with an opt-in platform. While it may not be an easy way to bring in income, people want control over their choices, and more specifically want control over opting-in instead of having to opt-out. When the opt-in choice is taken away, people will opt-out of the actual site, and eventually Facebook will become another MySpace.

I’ve always found word choice interesting because it can indicate so much about what motivates someone to do something. Evidently Facebook does as well, because they are changing the wording for joining a fan page from “Become A Fan” to “like”. I’m not sure this is the best move and I’ll explain why.

It might seem a good idea to use the word like as an indicator that you like a fan page, but I can’t help think of a conversation an associate and I had, where he told me that he’d been given the advice to get on Facebook and make lots of friends, which struck him as somewhat bad advice, because what he wanted was a distinct and different profile for his friends and family and a business page for his fans.

When we use the word like it generally can denote a belief of liking something, or someone and in the case of someone wanting to be liked back. The problem, in the internet universe, with the word friend or the word like comes down to a realization that people form more personal attachments meanings to those words than they do to fan, which means that while they might become a fan of your personal there is awareness that being a fan doesn’t automatically make you a friend. When the word like is used however, there is a connotation of more personal connection. In fact, this issue has been raised before because Facebook only allows people to like statuses. So you can’t dislike anything written, which may of course spare some feelings, but ultimately creates an artificial sense of closeness as well.

What do you think? Should Facebook stick with “Become a Fan” or switch to “like”?

Carri Bugbee pointed me to this article about the suckiness of Facebook customer service, when she noted on her twitter stream recently that they had yet again complicated the User Interface (UI) by requiring users to add a plug-in in order to upload pictures. My guess in regards to the plug-in is they want to get more data, but needlessly complicating the UI in the mix just seems to create more problems and potentially gets people to leave Facebook. So why doesn’t Facebook care about what its users have to say?

My guess is they’ve gotten too big and like many other big companies they don’t think what the user has to say actually matters. It seems rather odd that its a social media company that thinks this way, if only because social media has proven that if enough customers speak out, the company will feel the pain and pressure. Than again, for that to occur, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s important to get enough people with substantial social influence to speak out, so that their followers accordingly bring the pressure to bear on the company.

At some point, the continued changes that Facebook makes to the user interface, which are done in a manner that inconveniences the user, will catch up to Facebook and more people will leave then join. It might be useful for Facebook to remember that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and to also remember that good customer service engenders the loyalty and trust that keeps people using the site.

Realistically, customer service can’t solve or satisfy every customer, but ideally the majority of people should come away feeling that the problem was addressed in a manner that showed them the company cared. When companies don’t handle customer service responsibly, it may for the moment cause the customer to leave frustrated, but in the age of social media, it can bring the torches and pitchforks to the gates, while causing current customers to start questioning whether they will really be taken care of.

Hopefully Facebook will appreciate that and improve their customer service, especially as there business is based on the very medium that so many people are starting to use to get their voices heard by big companies who’d rather ignore them.

Inevitably the interfaces for social media sites change as designers and developers think of news ideas to improve the technology and occasionally confound the end user. Recently Facebook and Linkedin changed their interfaces and in the case of Facebook, as always, there was an outcry against the change.Eventually people will get used to it and not think about it, until the next time the interface changes and they have to relearn how to do everything.

Instead of complaining about the changes, it’s better to spend a few minutes learning the new interface and then get back to your regular social media activities. So what do you do, when the interface changes and you login and you don’t know what to do?

First, spend some time exploring the site. Look at each tab, or icon and see where it takes you and what it does. Don’t be afraid to test something new.

Second, determine what changes you need to make to your processes for using that site and document them accordingly. Once you know how to do what you usually do, in the new interface, then its easy to ignore anything, which isn’t relevant to your social media activity.

Those two easy steps will make it very easy for you to learn the new interface and get back to what you usually are doing on those social media sites. And best of all, you don’t need to complain anymore when Facebook or some other site changes its functionality.