About Friends, Facebook & Curfews

John Battelle, CEO of FederatedMedia and a long list of pioneering publications and books on new media and Search, posted about how he “blew it on Facebook” by exceeding the platform’s Friend limit of 5000. He goes on to comment about how his use of the platform has changed and a little about what the nature of friends are. In this post I’ll share some thoughts on these issues and about how I use Facebook.

Polling, The Shortform Killer App

Want quick feedback, input, engagement around a shared passion point or even just facilitate conversation around your brand/category? Hosting periodic polls are an easy way to engage with “limited outcome” results, meaning it doesn’t usually require moderation for innapropriate content and comments. A clear exception would be polls where you can enter your own values/fields (i’m testing one below). In addition to the learning and engagement potential, polling allows you content that can be loaded into a Content Management System (CMS) and optimized for twitter for added distribution. It’s a simple way to microformat content while sourcing from the crowd–maybe even getting discovered by new crowds.

We’ve played around with SocialToo and PollDaddy. Seems like these tools are still evolving and have lots of potential for better publishing and viewing customization. Do you have any favorites? Pls share and post why in the comments below.

And, take 5-seconds to answer the test poll below:

Hiatus Explanation

As those following me in Facebook, Twitter, delicious, slideshare and Friendfeed know, I’m not lacking in things to share, learn about and connect around in SocialMedia. And I’m spending the same amount of time as before, but the blog–an important platform for “Search Signals” and visibility in SocialMedia–has fallen behind. There was a recent NY Times article and a TechGeist follow that asserted that most blogs are ghost towns because the content is most often navel-gazing about mundane daily life. Funny, that’s what they’ve maligned Twitter with since it’s inception. In fact, my wife still calls Twitter the “wiping my posterior” medium in less polite terms.

My hiatus has been on account of time, prioritization, a little hunkermania and heavier use of other forms. But mostly the latter. Twitter’s replaced a lot of this activity and between @-replies on twitter and comments in Facebook and FriendFeed I get more immediate and frequent commentary than you’ll see in the area below. It also takes the commentary into some open spaces as well as behind the doors of SocialNets giving participants an opportunity to react in their preferred communication forms and levels of dynamic personalization.

So, while the blog platform’s been quiet lately the Search, SocialGraph and other SocialMedia channels have been as active as ever. Looking forward to connecting here and there. Cheers!

A Fresh Fish Story: Why Digital is Above The Line

Welcome to RedLobster.com

Sssssssssssshhhhpopsssssssssssss. It’s the sound of flames licking butter and juices dripping from your lobster tail. You can almost feel the warmth of the wood fired grill and smell the wood-fired lobster tail looking through your monitor into Red Lobster. Can digital be as emotional and drive desire and reappraisal better than a TV spot? See for yourself. In this post I’ll point out some of the guided discoveries Red Lobster is earning through the digital channel.

Don’t Freakout when Granny Friends You

Social Spectrum Visual

Your privacy is in your control. In other words, you can worry a little less about who friends you and if you have “to quit them” or not.

I’ve had quite a few conversations with clients and friends that hail back to a previous post where I proposed a Social Spectrum.  The post was in reaction to technical shortcomings for filtering and creating dynamic privacy–the situational rules you create for “you on display”–on SocialNetworks. Better tools are emerging, but they remain largely hidden and “opt-in” by nature. You have to actively place rules on your media SocialMedia, but it can be done.

The premise behind the original post was that everyone enters SocialMedia from different perspectives and experiences, around a variety of media and interests, with different expectations and comfort-levels about revealing parts of themselves to others and, ultimately, to the search cloud.  There are cultural, gender and age divisions that inform how active and open you might be as you approach and develop SocialMedia competencies.

For the purpose of addressing my closest colleague’s concerns, I divided the range of SocialMedia into an axis for private and public as well as one for personal and professional. This spectrum has remained relevant as I’ve discussed SocialNetworking connections with new clients, partners and vendors at all levels of seniority in their organization. Here’s a recent paraphrased example:

Me: I realized after friending several people in the organization that not everyone’s comfortable with connecting on Facebook. Most prefer LinkedIn for professional connects.

Her: Yeah, you’re still sitting in my pending list. I’m expecting a lecture.

Me: The lecture is mine. I should ask if there’s an interest in connecting in the invitiation message. Go ahead and delete. We’ll find other ways to share that you’re more comfortable with.

Some senior-level newbies to SocialNets are concerned by the appearance of intimacy and access beyond what they would allow in real life (IRL). Some, fresh out of college, are used to friending quickly but think twice when a tagged photo hits their socialgraph from a college friend. They haven’t had to modulate between friends and colleagues before. Some opt-out, ignore or block access to their socialgraph risking professional embarrassment of a lesser nature. Redefining their Social Spectrum becomes an active effort.

For myself, I follow the same rules I would IRL: I have appropriate and clear boundaries. I don’t accept friends or associates that I wouldn’t run into IRL through one of my many interests. I block when someone or something becomes inappropriate as you would expect. 

Unlike IRL, I don’t have to listen to an overly chatty person (which some have accused me of being based on an active twitterstream, btw). The great news is that technology offers you the ability to filter content and even people. Twitter reader/management applications like TweetDeck and DestroyTwitter allow you to group the people you want to hear from most. Facebook has added a “like” link on each item that shows up in your SocialGraph which will eventually optimize people and topics you like to see most from you friends. And, with a little work, you can also tune your Facebook settings to hear the right signal-to-noise for anyone or thing. As Facebook connect becomes more widespread you’ll be able to take these same privacy settings with you out in the wild of the web.

Below is a great tutorial on the subject. Enjoy and let us know what else you use for filtering in the comments.

Did you feel that?

In California, when we say “did you feel that?” we’re usually referring to an earthquake. We look around for others to validate the sensation or to scan other perception points for movement. In a way, our economy has us looking around for proof points and confidence too.

On January 5^th we asked, “did you feel that?” for a different reason. There was a palpable enthusiasm and optimism that entered the office that day. It was new car smell+first day of school+opening day kick-off+getting the band back together all rolled-up into one. It wasn’t just the reflection from a longer-than usual vacation, although that might have helped. It was the feeling of a team coming back together with good momentum and challenging work ahead that we love doing.

I encourage all of us to hold onto that feeling this year. Connect socially and share stories of your weekends, holidays and families. Laugh. Be excited about the work and the fact that we’re working. Be part of creating great value for our clients and their consumers so that their businesses remain healthy. Don’t suppress your excitement—no one does on the first day back. Don’t let it slip into routine. Be Great. Be the shaker that others feel good about having on the team.

And, yeah, you did feel that. It’s Real. Here’s to a transformational 2009.

Jobs To Be Done

Kara Swisher has a great appeal for sanity around the Steve Jobs press buffet in her “All Things D” blog today. As we learned about his health-inspired need for succession at Apple, all form of media weighed in with speculation, well wishes and a lot of fear. In her piece Kara expresses concern for “the reputation of a man who is one of the technology industry’s greatest icons–if not the greatest–having positively impacted the whole culture with a style and elegance that is unmatched.”

Kara also posted as I will below Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. It’s hard not to “connect the dots” as he says and draw comparisons with Randy Pausch’s last lecture (also below) in light of today’s news. In this classic speech Jobs encourages everyone to follow their passion, to live each day as if it were the last and to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” When filtered through the ultimate reality check and final certainty of death, fears fall away, new possibilities emerge and the issue of following your passion and folly is a clear and moral mandate. What fear has hold of you and isn’t it somehow related to that ultimate reality?

On a cross-country Virgin America flight I was fortunate to catch Benjamin Zander delivering his TED presentation where he takes the mandate one step further. He believes once you’ve realized your passion, there’s a responsibility to evangelize it. He had a realization at 45-years old while standing in front of his orchestra that the conductor doesn’t make a sound. He draws his power by making other people powerful. And that changed everything for him, he said. “My job was to awaken possibility in other people. And you know when you’re doing it? The eyes. When the eyes are lit, it’s working.” Benjamin was referring to live speaking, but you can find equivalent “lit eyes” in the comments and re-tweets/forwarded messages you create that are true. Zander challenges: “If the eyes are not shiny, ask question: who am I being?” His “Return On Investment” (ROI) is in reality R-O-Eye.

So whether we live another year or another hundred years, we each have jobs to be done. And we’ve got some amazing sources of inspiration to draw from. All three videos posted below. Enjoy and, if it moves you, pls post a reaction with what you believe to be your mandate.

Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Speech:

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

Benjamin Zander TED presentation

Too Many In-Boxes

"Something came whizzing down the kitchen chimney as he spoke and caught him sharply on the back of the head. Next moment, thirty or forty letters came pelting out of the fireplace like bullets. The Dursleys ducked, but Harry leapt into the air trying to catch one."

There’s a b-plan in your inboxes, or specifically in their consolidation and management, and the key may be SocialMedia.

I’m reading the first Harry Potter book to my kids at bedtime. Remember the scene where the letters wanted so badly to get to Harry that they came shooting through every open space in the house? It’s a good visual for the flood of information we have coming into our inbox, the contempt many have for it and the joy someone can experience getting just the right message created expressly for them.

Your home mailbox–the one that’s got your Netflix red envelope in it–is rarely bringing you anything personal except during special events/holidays. Your office inbox rarely empties of those declining rags still distributed in print in spite of  the economic realites. If your Outlook email inbox is like mine, it’s full of disappointments for lower-priority senders (sorry) whose bold-faced salutations remind me they have not been read. My phone buzzes to let me know a direct message arrived from Twitter. And the SMS/Message app has a lengthy inbox–at least these have been read. My Facebook mailbox, once an uncluttered, pure environment of friendly connections and smiles, now buries threaded conversations pages deep as the volume grows.

Sometimes I forget which inbox I received a message and it takes time to cycle through the services–email, txt, twitter, fb and a growing number of small, function or topic-specific socialnets–to discover and recover the interaction.

David Armano has content coming through the context of our crowds, not just an editor's selection process.

If email applications were transportation, we’d be driving off the road with intent. It’s a bad user experience made only slightly better by search. Not as dangerous as driving a poorly designed automobile, but hazardous to our health all the same. I’ve been reproached about my email management, as though it were my fault the tool didn’t work better.  ”If I just put more effort and commitment,” the logic goes, “I could get my inbox to zero.”

To illustrate my point further, did someone have to show you how to use Google? The iPod album flipper? Even this blog platform from which we’re engaging is intuitive enough to execute frequent saves as I write the post so I don’t lose my content/flow if the browser decides to crash (which it did).

The first time I saw a Mac in 1984 I smiled–it got me out of command-line navigation and green type for something that looked intuitively like the real world. Same with the browser in 1993, iPhone and any number of other innovations that recognized me as a human with better things to do than to serve it. Each of these got us further from code and more into interaction. They blurred the lines between real world type, content and now physics.

I’m convinced a better solution is near. As Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody,” says, “there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” I believe in the stronger filters. Already more robust algorythmic filters have gotten rid of much of my SPAM email. But there are also human filters to content: I follow hundreds of people on Twitter and friend even more in Facebook. In my twitterstream and socialgraph they’ve broken news more quickly than any other medium. My “crowd” also has better taste in selecting rore relevant articles in greater quantities for me than any issue of newspaper or trade can offer. This doesn’t completely solve the issues from “too many inboxes,” but it starts to prune the activity in my main channels.

The key may lie in initiatives we’ve heard announced and seen coming out of Yahoo! and Facebook lately, allowing SocialNets into their email platform and other “inboxes” to bring in SocialNets through their “Connect” program respectively. Built into their social platforms are features around what they call “Dynamic Privacy.” That means the system is aware or can become more aware about who you value more in your connections and how. With whom do you share or tag photos? To whom do you forward interesting content and do the click or pass it along? Is that a professional, university or family contact? Do you share common interests? These can become powerful enablers and filters in the context of the in-box.

Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others have all announced and are rolling out some version of their “Connect” programs. Many in the Valley have talked about this as a “single-user login” benefit for the consumer and owning the login or attention currency equivalent of “wallet.” It’s like not having to get carded everywhere you go, nor populate more accounts. I believe the single-user login benefit is huge, and I think that it may also be secondary in the long run to helping clear inbox proliferation.

Note: quick word of caution navigating the waters of people-filtered inboxes. The other day I pinged a professional associate who quickly informed me that they weren’t available in Facebook for connecting professionally. You have to respect the boundaries of how people want to use their inboxes, when and with whom.

Will close with this letter for my most bloated inbox: 

Dear email inbox, I’m not trying to be difficult, but you really don’t get me. And I think it’s time we take a little break. We’ve tried it your way for many years with pretty much the same result, now it’s time we try it my way. As of today, I’m taking a break from you. I need some space to redefine our relationship. I’m packing up my closest peeps and taking them with me over to the socialnets; that’s where you can find me if you need something. I’m going to throw away all the news articles, press clippings and stuff you’ve got stashed everywhere, so round-up what you need quickly and store it somewhere safe. 

It’s been a blast. I mean literraly. Most marketers still call you their “email blast.” They carpet bomb inboxes on time with an interesting item at best or with the randomness and relevance of an unwanted advance at worse. You’ve been loyally shielding me from the worst offenders, but my crowd gets me better.

If it makes you feel better, it’s not about you. It’s all me. I mean, you haven’t changed a bit. But I have. I found better, more interesting and related things from my crowd. I’ve grown to trust them and they helped me realize how far we’ve grown apart. I hope we can stay friends or at least professional. We still have all the business affairs we need to deal with. I think with time you’ll find this was really the right decision for both of us. Maybe with time you’ll slim down some, get active and grow in new directions. That would be really interesting for both of us. Here’s looking at you, kid.

From the Twitterstream this week: “Filing a cease and desist… against my inbox.” Chris Sacca.

When Every Little Bit Really Does Count

The Good Cause

Tonight at 9:12pm David created a blog post for a friend in need. Daniela, with her three youngsters, made the courageous decision to exit a physically abusive marriage. Now homeless and far from home and support, her friends came to her aid. David posted a picture, an entreaty for donations and included a widget from ChipIn–a PayPal enabled payment system–to raise money that would provide Daniela the means to rent a small apartment for her family. His target was $5,000 and within two hours it easily passed $7,000 in donations.

To be fair, David is just any guy. He’s David Armano,  or @Armano on Twitter where you may already be one of his 8000+ followers. I am. You should. He puts great thinking and creativity into the SocialSphere everyday through his Logic+Emotion blog, twitterstream, twitpics, flickr visualizations, slideshare decks, bookmarks and more.  David populates and prolifically fills his SocialMap with an abundance of original thought, discoveries and insights. So, when he finally asked for something in return, the community answered his call. When he posted to his blog, he also asked in addition to giving that people help him spread the word by “retweeting” his link. They did and the response was immediate.

The widget allows you to track progress and it’s clear by the decimal point movement that people were making payments of all sizes, including very small, but meaningful ones. Because with The Long Tail and micropayments, a little can add up to a lot. In this case, a families dreams of a better life. Currently 218 donors have raised $7,099.31 or $32.56 per person on average.

To bluntly and awkwardly bring this back to the business of digital marketing and Real Branding, here are some lessons David delivered tonight:

• Brands that create value have the right to make the ask on occasion and their fans will respond
• Micro is the new black. Sure widgets have been around for at least three years when RockYou put its code up on MySpace and started tearing at the walled gardens creating a distribution and value-creating revolution. But now they’re getting people elected, or into their new home
• Blog post alone isn’t the solution as Forrester’s Jermiah Owyang has recently discovered; need to add viral and urgency through twitter. Add a twitter url and hashtag for your followers to use, making it easier to promote, track, aggregate through search and measure
• We digital folks never fail to be amazed when our magic works for us–and it does

Thanks David and family for the lessons from the heart. Every little bit counts. You can help the cause by clicking over and making your donation now (I don’t know how to embed widgets in WordPress otherwise you would be able to do it right here; don’t tell anyone . Be Great.

Twitter Teaches Facebook How To Brand

Twitter alerts users to an emerging issue.

This weekend a Phishing scam erupted around Facebook and Twitter. For those fortunate enough to have not been introduced, Phishing is the act of acquiring someone’s information by misrepresentation as a trusted entity. In this case people received email messages from their friends’ Twitter or Facebook accounts who had been duped by the scam, clicked to a site that looked like your Facebook or Twitter login page and entered their name and passwords. Then all their friends got direct-messaged and solicited and so on. If it got you, don’t feel too badly; even some of the most experienced get scammed sometimes.

Quickly Twitter engineers and operations teams responded to defend their service integrity and community. They also alerted their friends at Facebook about the scam. And they whipped up a quick blog postfor reference/search benefits. Then a new slug of text appeared between the Twitter enter form and a user’s Twitterstream: “HEY!If you get an email masquerading as a DM with a link, it could be Phishing.”

Did they have to go to these lengths for their community? These issues come and go so quickly most people wouldn’t notice. To this point, the message was gone a couple of hours later. And, think about what it takes to make a change on your corporate website. Now consider what it takes to change the User Interface of a webservices application. Nothing changes that doesn’t absolutely have to. So to answer the question above, Twitter clearly felt they needed to do something for their community and brand.

I thought it was interesting that the community was also helping out on Twitter–and therefore in Facebook for those that update their Facebook Status with Twitter–by warning others of the threat. In a way, Twitter can counter viral activity because its citizens wish to keep it pure. In a way, it’s the “diseconomy” or “deviralization” of a person or issue at work. There are those that believe Multi-Level Marketers can better exploit a platform like Twitter, but I disagree. The community will gang up against exploitive behavior faster than it can regenerate.

Protip: If you think something’s not right on Twitter you can also “Follow” @spam to direct-message them with suspicious activities or accounts. They’re great at removing the weeds and debris from their garden and rely on the crowd to help with vigilance.

How Facebook could have responded to Phishing scam.

Meanwhile, the silence at Facebook was telling. By my count and without altering their current message carriers Facebook could have warned its community in half a dozen intuitive ways. In its socialgraph, inbox, activity notification bar, status feeds, profile alerts and even in its ad space it could have notified users of the emerging issue. Instead, it acted more like a large, traditional institution that either can’t marshall the resources and authorizations to react in real-time or won’t as a matter of policy.

I’d say for this round, Twitter acted more like the Real Brand and served a good lesson in brand-as-service for its larger SocialMedia bretheren. Here’s a good link if you want to take your own precautions against Phish feeding, courtesy of Twitter.

Update: CNET’s Rafe Needleman reports that this Phish situation is ongoing. Seen many tweets requesting to be notified “if you get a DM from me.”

Update: Brittany Spears gets hacked on Twitter by the Physhing scam.