Tag Archives: Social network

December 4, 2019 · 5:21 pm

I Can’t Quit

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. It’s one of those times when your focus is truly on family and friends and not on the more mundane things that tend to tie up the bulk of our lives.

One of those things has become social media and specifically Facebook and its family of products. I think that if it was a drug, it would be among the worst drugs ever and should be heavily regulated at least. Let me explain why.

I was an early user (does that make me a long-term addict?). I signed up way back when you needed a .edu mailing address to join. At first, it was fun and getting back in touch with my college and high school classmates was great. I’d accept friend requests from people I barely knew and rarely spoke to from way back when. It made reunions less jarring since I already knew who had gained weight, lost hair, or, as in my case, both.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I limit my “friends” to people who are really just that. Acquaintances don’t make the grade and very few business-only relationships are part of my friend group. Unfortunately, some business associations in which I participate have chosen to do their communicating via Facebook. I also have consulting clients from time to time that want my expertise on using Facebook both for content and for advertising. If those circumstances ever change, I’ll be gone the next day.

I’m sure you’re aware by now about Facebook’s utter disregard for your privacy. They track you pervasively (I use a browser extension to limit that). They sell your data, accurate or not, to scammers and liars as well as to legitimate marketers but they don’t try to distinguish between them. I wrote in 2010 that they just might fail because of their disregard for security and privacy. I could not have been more right about what they were doing and more wrong about their success.

Why do we all seem to hang around? Metcalf’s Law, which states that the effect of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. There were alternatives and still are, of course, but unless and until your real friends, family, and business groups move someplace else, you’re kind of stuck. It’s why I post the screed on Facebook as well as on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Fish where the fish are, right?

My first resolution will be to use Facebook less in 2020 and beyond and to reach out via phone and email to people more often. It’s not just about maintaining privacy but about helping my mental health. Do I think I’m striking a blow for privacy and responsibility? No, not being one of 1.6 billion daily users. I’ll still be on Facebook – it’s the easiest and best way to keep up with old friends and I need it for business. But you can bet I’ll be a lot less active. Don’t take it personally. It’s not you – it’s Zuck.

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September 18, 2019 · 10:06 am

Living For The Likes

I’ve been meaning to mention the thing that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all either testing or have deployed outside of the USA: killing the like count. They’re not eliminating the positive feedback (or any other kind) that people reading your content provide. What they’re doing is deemphasizing it by not showing total like counts. I, for one, am a fan and I’ll tell you why.

Actually, I won’t tell you. I’ll instead quote a Wired piece on the subject of living for the like and tailoring your message and tactic accordingly:

These tactics are attracting increased scrutiny, about their impact on the health of the internet and on society at large. Publicly measurable indicators—including views, retweets, or likes—are “one of the driving forces in radicalization,” says Whitney Phillips, a media manipulation researcher and associate professor at Syracuse University. It works both ways, she says. A user can be radicalized by consuming content and a creator can be radicalized by users’ reactions to their content, as they tailor their behavior around what garners the most interest from their audience.

Unfortunately for marketers, it also eliminates a metric that many marketers use to guide both their spending and their own content. While a minor disturbance in the marketing Force, they’ll get over it and move on to something else. My hope is that it destroys the “influencer” world. I’ve never been a fan and if this hastens its demise, I’m all for it. These are vanity metrics and not real measures of engagement which can be tracked in other ways. It’s also the final solution to those scam artists that sell fake “likes”.

The real issue for me is that many people – especially young ones – seem to develop feelings of inadequacy if they can’t generate sufficient “likes.” Maybe it even deters them from sharing anything in the first place and withdrawing.  For those of us that were there when all of this social stuff began, it’s been hard to watch it go from a great way to stay in touch with your friends and family to a weaponized space where trolls proliferate and it’s often hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.

I’m sure there are some selfish business reasons behind these moves while remaining hopeful that it’s really the start of the social media company’s coming to grips with all of the downsides of their worlds. When you like these screeds, do I see the counts? Sure. Do I change what I have written? In broad strokes, yes, but not based on the likes as much as on the overall readership and responses. In the 11 years I’ve been writing the screed, things such as a regular post on music (TunesDay!) and blogs about research (only rarely now) have gone because you don’t read them. Would I still write on those topics if I thought I could produce something that would interest you? Of course, likes be damned.

Live for today, not for the like.  You with me?

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February 20, 2019 · 12:52 pm

Fending For Yourself On Facebook

We used to be awfully smug when I was working for network television. After all, if an advertiser wanted immediate national reach there were no other options. If they didn’t want to go through the hassle of buying dozens or maybe tens of dozens of individual markets in spot television, then they had to come to one of the big networks. Over time, cable TV cut into that dominance but adding a few broad reach cable networks into the mix didn’t hurt us too badly. Until it did.

Today, the audiences for network TV are big but they certainly have been bigger. More importantly, there are many others with comparable audiences and advertisers have a lot of choices. More often than not, when the channel of choice is digital, the medium of choice is Facebook. They bill themselves as a content platform but that’s not really true. They’re a publisher. They curate content from others and control the content that appears, just the way the TV networks used to do before they started creating many of the shows themselves. Slowly, they’re learning that they are responsible for the content that appears on their platform since they’re picking and choosing. Publishers (think the Times or Journal) are responsible when their publications (platforms?) are used to spread lies or infringe on copyright. There is one area, however, in which they claim no responsibility at all.

This is from an Ad Age article:

When Facebook’s Campbell Brown addressed an auditorium full of magazine executives in New York Tuesday, she did not mince words: The social network is not here to save their businesses…It was a sobering and frank message for an industry looking for answers. Facebook has endured criticism from media companies for encouraging them to invest resources into its distribution platform. Facebook has persuaded publishers to push into live video, fast-loading Instant Articles, longer Watch videos and other offerings, for example, but none have reaped significant returns.

In other words, while we encouraged you to invest in our platform and grow our engagement with audiences using your content, you’re on your own when it comes to reaping the rewards. In fact, it’s worse than that since Facebook now demands that publishers pay for any significant visibility. Facebook is in a position analogous to where we were at the TV networks 30 years ago. We didn’t realize at the time how tenuous our grasp on our audiences was nor did we do a good job of working in a balanced partnership with our advertisers. Facebook manages to piss off the marketing community almost as often as they do privacy advocates. As one analyst note said, “Facebook is at risk of being massively unfriended by its 7 million advertisers.”

Personally, I’m wondering why they have as many as they do, given their attitude to their audiences, to content providers, and to marketers. Yes, I get the numbers but I also know that there are many other choices in marketing today. Maybe the digital platforms of the TV networks? Remember them?

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