Jan 1013
Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has gotten a lot of flack lately for his pronouncement (during an interview with TechCrunch) that privacy norms have evolved over the years and privacy is essentially dead. I watched the interview myself and think the criticism is overdone. I think that Zuckerberg has correctly described the times and his company is taking advantage of our voyeuristic culture. Facebook did not create this culture. I think it started with the first reality show on MTV back in 80s. We watched the teens living together and reveled in their pranks and arguments.
Does the social Web mean the end of privacy? Are MySpace and Facebook to blame for all the personal revelations we spew out every day? Or should we blame Google and Bing, which manage to index the Web and let anyone find out gobs and gobs of information about each of us? When I Google my name (Joanna Pineda), I find lots of information that I WANT the search engines to find and index. But I also find pages that have my address, my political contributions and address, yada, yada. I’m not happy that Facebook changed its privacy settings and defaulted some of my information to be available to everyone, but I actually appreciate the more granular control that I now have over my posts, link and photos.
What do you think? Is privacy dead? How much do you reveal on social networks? Are you doing anything to keep out of the search engines?
Jan 1005
On December 9, Facebook rolled out new privacy options to its 350 million users. When I logged onto Facebook that Wednesday, I was greeted by a message that asked me to review the new privacy policy and review my privacy settings. Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg blogged about the new changes, which were greeted with raised voices on both sides. Here are some of the major changes:
- You have always been able to limit what information from your profile was public and private. But now, Facebook lets you control access to every status update, link, photo, video, etc.
- When controlling access, you can grant access to different people or groups: Everyone (as in the world), All Friends, Friends of Friends, and specific friends or lists of friends, or deny access/hide from specific friends of lists of friends.
- Facebook eliminated regional networks, which allowed users to unwittingly share their profiles to entire cities, states, countries, etc.
Advocates for the new privacy changes praised the simplified settings and the increased control over every single post. Critics, however, are livid over the fact that the default option was to make nearly everything on a person’s profile available to Everyone (that is, until users edited their settings and posts) and the fact that some information is strictly public and can’t be edited. For example, you can no longer limit who can see your list of friends and your public profile always shows the Facebook pages that you are a fan of. I know I was ticked off that even though I edited my privacy settings so that my photo albums are globally only available to Friends, Facebook made my existing photo albums publicly available until I edited each one manually.
If the new privacy settings and changes confuse you, here are my recommendations:
Dec 0909
Over the past year or so, I’ve seen more and more non-profits and companies create Facebook fan pages for their organizations. Facebook calls fan pages “a customizable presence for an organization, product, or public personality to join the conversation with Facebook users.” Fan pages are great because they are designed for organizations, but they work a lot like personal pages. You can customize them; you can post status updates, links, photos and videos; and updates show up on fans’ streams.
So, you’ve set-up a Facebook fan for your company, now what? Here are some of my favorite Facebook fan pages and reasons I think they’re terrific and effective.
Stanford University – http://www.facebook.com/stanford
- The status updates are a mix of campus news, alumni news, sports updates, research and university news.
- The page has a good mix of updates, links, photos and videos.
- I love the office hours with world-renowned professors. Each week, there is a short video of a professor discussing some important work; the professor takes questions from fans throughout the week.
- I also appreciate the handy list of Stanford Web sites and the photo albums.
Dunkin Donuts – http://www.facebook.com/DunkinDonuts
- When you visit this Facebook fan page, you are not taken to the Wall by default, but rather to a promo.
- This fan page uses a custom Tab for Maurice, the Dunkin Donuts mascot.
- Dunkin Donuts encourages fan posts to the Wall; there are even videos posted by fans.
- To manage fan posts, “DD Facebook Etiquette” is posted right on the front page; this makes it clear that DD welcomes fan interaction, but within specific parameters.
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Nov 0918
I was talking to one of the Cat Herders (Project Manager) at Matrix Group today. She said she was trimming her Facebook friend list and unfriending some people. Unfriending. It sounds so… ummmm… unfriendly.
Facebook says that the average user has 130 friends but I know people who have hundreds, even thousands of friends. 500 friends? I can’t imagine many people who have that many friends with whom they would willingly share personal updates, photos, even their full birthday. So I asked around and got some good insight into the friending and unfriending business. These findings don’t represent a large group, just my friends! :-)
- There is a group of Facebook users who will accept friend requests from anyone and who actively try to expand their friend network.
- There is another group that views Facebook as a place where they can communicate freely so they only connect with true friends. For these folks, Facebook is a place for personal communications, often about self, family, kids, friends.
- There was a general consensus that the new Facebook homepage, which splits updates between News Feed and View Live Feed, makes it harder to see updates from your entire network of friends, which makes it more challenging to have a large network.
- Many people have been cleaning up their lists on Facebook, Twitter, and other social network recently. They’re actively unfriending people so they can manage the communications and flood of updates.
- Even if a person has a large network on a platform like Facebook, they are more than likely only interacting with a small subset of friends. Indeed, the Facebook sociologist says that no matter how large their friend network, Facebook users tend to “comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends.”
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Sep 0929
I had the pleasure of being part of a panel at today’s Grow Smart Biz conference, sponsored by Network Solutions. Our topic was “Integrating Traditional Marketing with Social Media.” Despite being the last panel of the day (we started around 4:20pm), I estimated that over 80% of the conference attendees attended the panel. And by the number of questions raised, this is a hot topic for sure.
You can read a nice recap of the panel on the Solutions are Power blog, but here were my take-aways: Read the rest of this entry
Aug 0927
I was on LinkedIn yesterday and the LinkedIn search engine helpfully recommended a couple of people for me to add to my network. The list included a couple of people who currently work at Matrix Group. While it’s every CEO’s dream to have a large network, I did not invite the staff to get linked up. Why? Because I think that for bosses, managers,and CEOs, there are unwritten rules of netiquette. Here are some of the rules I abide by when using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks.
- Except for a few direct reports, I don’t invite staff to be my friend or get linked up. I imagine that some staff would view an invitation from me as wanting to know too much about them; at the very least, it could be awkward if they don’t want to get linked up and they have to turn down a request from their boss.
- I do accept invitations from staff to be my friend or get linked up. If they’re staff, they’re part of my extended family.
- I don’t accept an invitation to get connected unless I actually know the person. Even on LinkedIn. Random strangers are NOT going to get access to my network just because they want to link to me.
- I do ask staff to follow this blog because I’m communicating with their clients through the blog and it’s always good for staff to know what the boss is broadcasting. :-)
- I do ask staff to follow or fan the company’s pages on the social networking platforms. I’m not asking for them to friend me, but I am asking them to support our social networking efforts. Read the rest of this entry
Aug 0925
From homemade movies on YouTube, to movie and book reviews, comments on blogs, and entries in Wikipedia, user-generated content (UGC) has changed the Web forever. I can’t imagine the Amazon shopping experience without comments and ratings from other moms, the posts from the 500 or so people I follow on Twitter could keep me occupied and interested all day, and I thank God every day for the thousands of homemade Thomas the Tank Engine movies on YouTube that keep my five-year old enthralled on a rainy day. Mashable reported that more than 82 million people in the US created content online in 2008.
So how come most organizations shy away from incorporating UGC on their sites? Read the rest of this entry
Aug 0913
I called a friend last Sunday to say hello and her husband said she was deep in Facebook, and had been for several hours. Several hours! This is a woman who holds a challenging job, has an 18-month old, and even has hobbies on the side. Facebook for several hours? And I know she’s not alone.
Facebook says that it has 250 million users, of which 120 million login once a day, and spend 5 billion minutes doing “stuff.” Just what what are we all doing on Facebook and why is it so addictive? Here are my thoughts: Read the rest of this entry
Jun 0930
One of the people I’m following on Twitter (who shall remain nameless) recently commented: “Prefer getting updates from my friends via Twitter. Much more efficient and I don’t need to see them.” Hmmm….
I don’t know about you, but even though I love Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, yada, yada, I still really like getting together with my college buddies, grad school buddies, fellow DC Web Women, fellow volunteers for Doorways, etc.. Yes, it’s “efficient” to get updates from friends in far away lands via their social network pages, and I have strengthened ties with folks via Twitter and FB, but will my social networks ever trump my traditional networks?
I don’t think so.
A recent article in The Economist maintains that “(o)ld-style networks… are usually stronger than online ones, , and the trust between their members facilitates transactions of all sorts.” Transactions like doing business together, hiring staff, and lending money.
For me, however, it’s not a black and white issue. Here’s what I think is happening:
- Family networks will probably trump all networks because “blood is thicker than water” although we all know that families are also our craziest and most dysfunctional networks.
- School, fraternity and work networks will remain the strongest because these are ties that get developed over time and involve shared efforts. So for me, my Stanford and Matrix Group networks will continue to be my strongest networks.
- Offline networks that involved shared interests will remain strong because members have a common interest. These networks, however, will be expanded to include online members. In fact, I expect these networks to be strengthened by the ability to connect with others worldwide, in different languages. Read the rest of this entry
Jun 0911
Whenever I sign up for something, I try to get jpineda@matrixgroup.net as my username and jmpineda as the account name. I’m jmpineda on Twitter, Yahoo!, Delicious, FoodBuzz, FriendFeed, etc. For example, you can browse my Delicious account by going to http://delicious.com/jmpineda. You can follow me on Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/jmpineda.
But on Facebook, currently I’m http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=716098588. Ugh. Not exactly a memorable URL. But all this is changing at 12:01am this Saturday, June 13. At that time, you’ll be able to create a vanity URL for your profile. You guessed it; I’m hoping very much to be http://www.facebook.com/jmpineda. Perhaps more importantly, I want a vanity URL for the Matrix Group fan page, which is currently at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Matrix-Group-International-Inc/48658676723. (The Matrix Group Facebook fan URL is so long and unfriendly that I have to access my bookmarks to share it with others.)
Vanity URLs, also known as addressable identities, will sure make it easy for all of us to share our Facebook profiles with others and encourage friending and fanning (are friending and fanning real verbs these days?)
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