Tag Archives: facebook

April 30, 2012 · 10:41 am

10 Years After

I was thinking over the weekend about what a very different place the world is going to be from a technical and media perspective in just a few years.  Of course, if you take a few minutes to think back and recall how the world was in 2002, just a decade ago, you’d be missing YouTube, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter, and hybrid cars.  Every one of those things is a daily part of my life and probably yours as well.

Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...

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What got me thinking about this was this:

New research from Leichtman Research Group finds that 38% of all U.S. households have at least one television set connected to the internet via a video game system, a Blu-ray player, an Apple TV, a Roku set-top box and/or the TV set itself. This number is up from 30% last year, and 24% from two years ago. Game consoles are the key devices within this category, as 28% of all households have a video game system connected to the web.

I spend some time each week watching Hulu+, Netflix, YouTube, and other services through my Xbox.  That time spent is not incremental to normal TV viewing – it’s content I find more interesting than what’s available.  That behavior ties in with the research:

  • 13% of Netflix subscribers would consider reducing spending on their multichannel video service because of Netflix, down from 21% last year.
  • 16% of all U.S. adults watch full-length TV shows online at least weekly, up from 12% last year.
  • 19% of mobile phone owners watch video on their phones on a weekly basis; while 9% of all U.S. adults watch video on an iPad/tablet.

So I sort of had this flash forward.  If traditional cable boxes become anachronisms, what else goes with them?  I think desktop computers will be history soon, as tablets and other mobile devices access cloud-based services and data.  Even though I have many computers in my home, I spend nearly all my time on a laptop and could very easily transition to a tablet with a keyboard.  Skype and Google Voice could replace my landline and just may shortly.  I’m sure you can add a few legacy technologies/services that need either to pivot or die.

In only 10 years, a lot of our behavior has been changed by a few services and technologies.  In another 10, it will all be different again.  Are you ready?  Is your business?

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April 24, 2012 · 9:37 am

Handing Over The Facebook Keys

By now you’ve probably heard of some employer who is asking potential employees for access to their Facebook accounts as a condition of employment. It’s become widespread enough that Maryland recently became the first state to prohibit employers from asking employees and applicants for social media passwords and login information. The law would prohibit an employer from taking or threatening any form of adverse action based on an employee’s or job applicant‘s refusal to provide a user name or password to a personal account.  Senators from New York and Connecticut are moving towards doing something similar on a national level.  Think this is just hypothetic?  A teacher’s aide in Michigan was let go from her job after a school administrator demanded that she turn over her Facebook password and she refused.  I have two thoughts and would love to hear yours.

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First – good for the legislature.  Second – how pathetic are the employers who would do this and how desperate have the folks become who feel they must acquiesce?

I’ve hired many people over the years, most of them before Facebook (or the Internet).  While I’ll admit there were a couple of duds in the mix, I wouldn’t have figured that out had I had access to their personal relationships, photos of them on their own time, or an understanding of what videos they watched, music they played, or articles they read.  To me this is the equivalent of demanding the keys to someone’s home to do a complete search of their wardrobe, their books, their medicine cabinet, and their kitchen. None of that is necessary to do a good hire and asking about some of it is already illegal.

Yes, it’s important to check out prospective employees, and that’s way easier today than it has ever been.  Most people are careless about leaving footprints in cyberspace and it’s relatively easy to find out if the candidate who says they are one thing are, in fact, something quite different.   For those who are careful, there are services available – as there have always been – to help with background checks.  Frankly, anyone evil enough to tell big lies about themselves is probably crafty enough to keep the lies off the web.  Besides – even if my buddy says you can check out his Facebook mail, I didn’t give you permission to look at what I sent him – that’s another set of issues completely.

What do you think – would you ever give up access to your account to get a job?  Would you ever demand that access before you hire someone?

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March 19, 2012 · 10:27 am

I Need To Call Dunbar – What’s His Number?

How many people do have in your Rolodex? Actually, do you even have a Rolodex or is the contact list on your phone your go-to list? How many friends on Facebook? How many LinkedIn connections? How many Twitter followers? How many folks do you know from the golf club or the gym or the playground where you take your kids who don’t fall into any of the above categories?

English: present model of Rolodex card file, c...

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For me, the answer is a lot, as in thousands, and I don’t even consider myself to be as socially connected as many folks I know. I also do have a Rolodex – actually four of them – that’s filled with business cards of people who, for the most part are not in the other databases.  Obviously, I am not trying to maintain on-going social relationships with each and every one of them.  That’s where my buddy Dunbar comes in.

Dunbar’s number is an estimation of the number of people with whom one can maintain a stable social relationship.  This theorem was developed way back in the digital dark age of 1992, before interacting with hundreds of your high school friends, and chatting to another hundred college buddies was something you did every five or ten years, not daily.  Dunbar set the number around 150.  Other studies have set comparable numbers at 231 and 290, a fraction of what any college kid has as Facebook friends alone.

Since this is a business blog, I’ll throw out the obvious question.  If we’re trying to engage our customers in conversation as we would friends, are we limited to the Dunbar number with respect to having those sorts of relationships?  Are we kidding ourselves if we believe that an individual will use one of their 150 or even 300 relationship slots for a business entity instead of a cousin?  Or maybe there needs to be another study on how businesses fit into the social ecosystem.

I think Dunbar was right.  When I think about it, the folks to whom I’m truly connected is a small fraction of those connections I have.  I know a network like Path is trying to create that subset by limiting your connections to 150.  What’s your take on that?  Is there an opportunity for a business to create a 150 person VIP network?

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