Ex Machina

What happened to Myspace, anyway? One day, it was a hot property, a Microsoft acquisition target, the next big thing. Now it’s the seedy outer suburb of social media, a place where movie theaters serve cheap rum and young professionals in aspirational demographics no longer go looking for a date.  And it happened really quickly.

Could the same thing now be happening to Facebook?

It’s easy to spot the overt symptoms of a social network losing its cachet. Tasteless profile customization, processor hogging special effects, and a preponderance of user avatars resembling anorexic Taiwanese betel nut girls were leading indicators in the case of Myspace. Facebook has largely avoided looking trashy by enforcing a dress code. Even the most obnoxious Facebook apps are confined to the staid corporate blue and white of the standard profile. Users who want to set the makeup gun on “whore” and point it at their profile have largely been kept in check.

But class is more than skin deep. Sure, there were users who bailed on Myspace because, in the words of one user, “Myspace has become a trailer park.” Where Facebook really won the social media war, though, was in keeping the content of the site useful and relevant by curtailing spammy user behavior.

Fan pages are the best example of this. A lot of people bailed on Myspace because every time they visited the site, they were seeing a dozen friend requests from bands, promoters, and porn sites. Facebook’s fan page model meant that if you made a band profile on Facebook, you couldn’t make it a personal profile without knowingly violating the ToS. And Facebook fan pages can’t go around randomly friending people they don’t know; fans have to opt in of their own accord. You can suggest the page to your friends, but that’s it.

So far, this has worked well for Facebook, but where there’s a spammy will, there’s a spammy way. In recent weeks I’ve become concerned that Facebook isn’t enforcing their ToS. I’m seeing friend requests from profiles that clearly aren’t people. I’m also getting friend requests from people with very large friend networks to whom I have no connection. Generally, they’re local music or club promoters. A burst of irrelevant, spammy messages every time I open up my inbox is exactly what drove me away from Myspace.

Facebook needs to enforce their ToS so that people who are on the site to do business stay in the fan page realm. Hopefully, they can do this in a more even-handed fashion than Twitter, a company that has alienated a lot of people by suspending accounts based on sweeping criteria that locked out legitimate users along with spammers. Facebook needs to work on this, and they need to do it sooner rather than later.

Even as the marketer in me strikes up a joyful tune with Google’s announcement that it will soon be including tweets in searches, the part of me that still thinks there might be such a thing as privacy (or a right to it) is battening down the hatches.

On one hand, the potential utility of a more searchable Twitter to marketers is huge. Suddenly, you can data mine the zeitgeist in a way never before possible. You also have a new and creepy way to stalk potential hires online. Of course, you could do these things before, but integration with Google (and it’s developmentally challenged cousin, Bing) makes it so much more convenient. And for busy people, convenience is a chief determinant of how deep they dig when searching on a topic.

My privacy concerns, too, relate to risks that have always been there. I’ve tweeted a few things that I wouldn’t necessarily want showing up on Google; a lot of us have. For many of us, the bet we’re making is that no one cares.

When Google steps into a new realm and makes it searchable, though, it changes the game. There are two degrees of private: that which is hidden, and that which just gets lost in all the noise. Until then, much of what was said on Twitter could fall into the latter category. No longer.

A debate I’ve seen trending today concerns how Twitter will implement this. Will you be able to opt out? If not, will many people suddenly start turning their feeds private to avoid being louder than they’d like? And if they do that, how will it affect the utility of Twitter? Some of the conversations I’ve seen lately suggest that enabling Google search will be a psychological game changer for many users. People who wouldn’t otherwise make their feeds private will do so, probably resulting in a decline in overall usage of the service.

Maybe Twitter should take a look at their declining traffic and think about some of the moves they’ve made that have had a negative impact on Twitter’s status as a giant conversation (along with some proposed fixes):

• Getting rid of visible @ replies from people you follow to people you don’t was a bad move. Turn this feature back on, and traffic will increase.
• Some of the limits on DM are not well thought out. What if you could allow DMs from people you don’t follow? More usefully, what if you could allow DMs from people you don’t follow on specific tweets?
• And most relevantly to this post, maybe Twitter should look at offering more choice in terms of who can see your Tweets. The ability to make Tweets visible to some or all followers, while other Tweets are 100% public, would be a powerful counter to the growing perception that Twitter will somehow become less private once it’s searchable on Google.

Photo credits for this post: Blue Jay (Kenn Kiser)

Hello from Mt. Webster!

Hi.

This is Jack Graham, writing the inaugural post for my new blog, Ex Machina. I’m an interactive producer working in Boston, Massachusetts (more about me here). When I’m not working on my own projects, I daylight at a well-established direct marketing firm in the travel industry. When the economy started to hurt their old way of doing business, my employers turned to new technologies to help them stay competitive.

Before last year’s downturn, things like blogs, mobile, and social media weren’t on my company’s radar. They were pet projects of mine, stuff I experimented with as time allowed. Our web site and direct e-mail were the focus of my work. Then one day, someone hyped Facebook to our management; suddenly, social media was a fundamental part of my job. Luckily, I was mostly ready. Mostly.

Ex Machina will focus on how people in my job – interactive producer – and related careers (such as interactive marketing directors, database marketers, copywriters, and interactive designers) can leverage new technologies to meet their customers and engage with them. This era is about having a conversation with your customers, not shouting your offerings at them. Things like blogs and social media are amazing tools in this respect; you can have that conversation that gets a customer ready to work with you. And you can have it with a lot of them, all at once, in a way that leaves no one feeling like they were just talking to a robot.

Thanks to my smartphone, I know how to cook collards.

Meanwhile, new mobile tech, particularly smart phones, is turning computer and internet access into something you wear, rather than a piece of furniture at which you sit down. This changes everything. Example: I bought a bunch of collard greens a few days ago. I would never have bought them, except for the fact that I had a smartphone in my pocket on which I could call up a recipe for cooking them that sounded good. Companies that want to stay competitive now have to figure out how to link up with customers who have the closest thing we’ve invented to ESP sitting in their jacket pocket.

5 Ways Small & Mid-size Businesses Can Start Integrating New Internet Technologies Today

1. Get a Twitter account. In fact, get multiple Twitter accounts.
   Not every company will want to dive in to full-on social networks like Facebook, but Twitter is an application like e-mail. Every company can use it for something, and probably will in the future. Jump on it now; the namespace is getting crowded. I’ll have a lot more to say on how to use them, but some areas where they can help you out include customer service, marketing, public relations, and vendor relations.
2. Set up a social network presence.
   Look at your demographic. Is it a Facebook or a Myspace demo? If you don’t know, you have some research to do on the two sites. Perhaps you’re in a position to do both. But if you’re not lucky enough to have boundless resources to throw at social media, do yourself a favor: focus on only one of the two if possible.
3. Keep a blog.
   Blogs are hard to understand as a marketing medium, but they have some real utility for small and mid-size companies. First off, provided you’re posting useful content (meaning stuff that people with no interest in your product or company would actually want to read), they’re a great SEO tool. For those providing services, they’re a way to discuss how you do what you do and sway a customer. If you’re using Twitter, blogs give you something to link to that has potential value to followers, rather than pure just marketing content. They balance marketing messages, which helps you to keep more followers. Finally, your customers may use them to communicate with you by commenting on posts.
4. 

   How's your web site look on this jeejah?

   Consider smart phones when designing.
   Everyone is going to have a smart phone soon. Learning about them now is a good idea. If you’re reading this blog, your company probably isn’t one that would benefit, today, from having a presence in smart phone application markets (unless it’s somehow core to your business). Smart phone users will see your web site instead. What are they seeing? Can you make a stronger showing with smartphone users with some minor redesigns?

5. Educate your organization about new technologies.
   Social media and related technologies suffer somewhat from what I’ll call the Twentysomething Factor. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard managers express a desire to hand off social media to “younger, more computer savvy” co-workers, I could buy a plane ticket to Chicago. This means if you’re working around my level in the rat race, you’re in the sometimes awkward position of selling your managers on best practices that they don’t agree with because they don’t quite get the medium. Meanwhile, many of your peers won’t get it, either. How do you successfully make them all get it?

I’ll be going into a lot more detail on all of these topics, so you can take this as an agenda for the subjects on which I intend to post. And I hope this blog will turn into a conversation about best practices with people on my career path and related ones.

Thanks for reading!

Photo credits for this post: Me (by me), Collards (from Wikimedia commons), Smart Phone (by Craig Jewell via stock.xchng).