My July Social Media Digest

Rather than continue letting my list of “things to blog about” grow this month, I have decided to compile everything into a single blog post.  Some items are new, others are old but still relevant. Here they are in absolutely no order:

• Facebook Lexicon: This is a great tool to follow language trends on Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers. Play around with it, it’s a great tool to add to your social media monitoring. When I compared “Harper” and “Dion” to gauge for political discussion popularity, this is what I got:

• Microdonations – GlobalGiving: I’m sure the concept of microdoantions is familiar to most of you by now, especially with the recent success of Barack Obama using this approach for fundraising. That being said, the non-political , social activism world has adopted the concept of microdonations with tremendous success as well. The GlobalGiving website lets individuals easily choose their cause and immediately make a small donation directly to the source.
• Rapleaf: Great tool for determining someone’s online reputation. I have thought about creating something like this for a while now, but it looks like they beat me to it. It’s far from perfect at this point, but I think the main idea is to be able to come up with an overall reputation score based on an individual’s online activity (where privacy settings are turned off). Standardization is going to be a big challenge of course.
• YouTube Annotations: A YouTube has added a feature that allows its users to add interactive commentary to their videos during playback. Very neat feature with lots of potential for 2-way public sector/non-profit marketing tactics. For example, imagine a MADD drunk driving video or second hand smoking effects video, where users choose how the story proceeds through multiple choices. This way the desired target audience can be a part of the message and actually think about how they would act in a similar situation.
• Google Lively: A neat little mini-3d world application where you can create your own 3d virtual environment in seconds. I have embedded my room , which is pretty abysmal , however I did spend about 30 seconds on it. That being said, the applicability of this in our industry will eventually be significant. Browse around some of the other rooms created on the site and notice the amount of visitors at any given moment on the more popular ones. You can mash-up items and integrate rss feeds into your room. Have a look at the Latinos Del Mundo Room, which has a plasma screen with user-specified YouTube videos playing on it. Once all the technology barriers are eliminated, this sort of thing will eventually be the website of the future. It already is for many organizations on SecondLife.

• AideRSS: This tool is simply brilliant. When RSS feed readers/news aggregators first came out, I considered them a godsend. Everything nicely came into one spot and I even managed to eliminate a good chunk of my email newsletters! The only problem was that over time , my list of rss feeds became quite large. As a result, keeping up with my favourite blogs and news sites became harder to do each day. Along comes AideRSS, a tool that analyzes the feeds you subscribe to and lists individual posts in order of popularity rather than in reverse chronological order. What does this mean? Basically, it allows you to focus your reading time on only the most important posts that came out since your last check. After all, the 80/20 rule applies to blog posts as well!
• Recent Economist Intelligence Unit Report: This 2007 study looks at the most recent Web 2.0 trends amongst major businesses and industries. The chart below shows how mash-ups have moved into first-place in terms of business applicability.

Ok, well that about clears up my little yellow Windows Vista Sidebar widget that I use to make notes. More coming soon…

Social Graphs and their implications from a personal branding perspective…

Although the concept of social graphs is nothing new, I recently became quite intrigued by an application for Facebook called Nexus , which creates a visual representation of your contacts and their relative relationships to one another. You can see mine below or click here to access it.

What I find especially interesting is that there is actually no new information shown, but rather the information is presented in such a manner that it creates an entirely new application with a specific purpose (mash-up). You can instantly decipher who the odd balls are in your network (relative to yourself) by looking at how far off from the centre they are. You can also visually group people by interests and look for 3-d visual linear patterns on the social graph. Naturally, this presents a huge opportunity for marketing research firms that can create effective behavioural models out of all of this.

So how is this different from traditional behavioural marketing research?

How about the fact that 70% of Canadians are on Facebook and spend an average of 20 minutes a day on it. How’s that for participation rate and sample integrity?

This really got me thinking about the whole evolving field of personal branding (or digital presence reputation management as I like to call it). This simple application can instantly paint a picture of an individual from both a personal and professional perspective (assuming of course, that they filled out their Facebook profile accurately).

Now imagine the possibilities if there was a tool like the quickly growing FriendFeed that would amalgamate your online social media behaviour in a visual multi-dimensional way as opposed to simply linear. What I mean is a virtual representation of a single individual formed from their digital presence (scattered throughout the web over years of usage). Anything you create online, no matter how private and secure you think it is, could one day be used to feed into this “assumed model of yourself”.

The big question is “Who will own it?” -especially seeing as how people sign off their rights each time they check the “I agree” check box on social networks, cloud applications, content uploads, etc…

Perhaps it’s time for a “social marketing” campaign to make modern internet users seriously modify their behaviours. Based on reactions I see at my workshops, there is little indication that people are aware of the potential future implications of their online actions. Especially considering the fact that my workshop audience is usually made up of communications or marketing people (the ones you would think would be aware of all of this).

Even just looking at it from the perspective of employment , the one-way fluffy, drum-beating resume is no match for an unbiased social representation of an individual accumulated over many years. And what about the employers themselves? Would they not have to be monitoring their own personal brands even more so than their potential employees/shareholders to avoid embarrassment? Lots to ponder about for a Friday! I’ll leave you all with that and eagerly await your comments…

Cheers,

MK

Military warns soldiers not to post info on Facebook

This just came in on my CBC news feed 30 minutes ago:

The Defence Department is advising Canadian soldiers not to post personal photos and information on social networking websites like Facebook, citing security concerns. The advisory was circulated in a memo obtained by CBC News. It warns soldiers not to appear in uniform in online photos and not to disclose their military connections. “Al Qaeda operatives are monitoring Facebook and other social networking sites,” the memo says. “This may seem overdramatic … [but] the information can be used to target members for further exploitation. It also opens the door for your families and friends to become potential targets as well.” -Read the full story here.

The first thing that came to my mind was “are you kidding me??!!!” Not only are members of the military apart from their families and friends enough as is, we’re now going to isolate them even more by banning their virtual networks. I then read on and felt some legitimate concern for the safety of our troops and their families. This was quickly followed by a feeling that this whole ordeal is nothing more than an attempt by the federal government to control the already scattered message its trying to convey to the public (in terms of the combat vs. peacekeeping role of our military) at this very sensitive time in Ottawa politics. So what’s the real reason? I have no idea, and quite likely, neither do you. What I do know is that banning Facebook will not solve anything (just look at the government of Ontario).

There are literally hundreds of other online social networks available out there for anyone to use. What good will banning a single one of them do? Does this mean the government is also going to ban any kind of content generation by soldiers? (i.e. uploading YouTube videos, writing a blog on WordPress, submitting a story to “Digg“, putting up photos on Flickr, Podcasting a niche radio show, etc…).

Many of these social media sites require setting up personal profiles that contain private information. If a modern “Al Qaeda” member really wanted to go through the effort of going after a particular soldier’s family (as implied in the article), they would likely start with Google (providing they don’t already have detailed military files on the individual they are after). Due to the ever increasing power of search engines, every bit of digital information (text, photo, sound or video) created by any given soldier over their lifetime would have to deleted from the internet to ensure his/her true safety. The only problem is, that’s impossible to do.

I personally think the government should put less focus on banning the online engagement of military personnel and instead think of ways to foster and encourage it! After all, unlike a lot of people (especially politicians around here), they might actually have something interesting to say! One can argue that opening up the channels of communication between the military and the Canadian public would actually improve the safety of our troops, since Canadians would understand the true nature of the role we are serving in Afghanistan (which would quite possibly help the troops attain more support, more equipment, improved morale and heightened faith in their military leaders).

My point here is that I simply do not see any point in widening the gap between military personnel and the Canadian public even further when there is already so much misunderstanding as to our role (i.e. over 70% of Canadians do not know that we are engaged in combat in Afghanistan–>they think it’s peacekeeping) .

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that military personnel already go through thorough training as to what they are allowed and not allowed to communicate to the public. The issue in this case comes back to the democratization of the web (web 2.0), and the shocking realization by “old guard” military high-ups that suddenly low-ranking officers have the power to not only influence public opinion, but control the messaging coming out of the top ranks!…This obviously threatens to turn the entire military institution as we know it upside down. It will be interesting to see how all of this evolves. Increasingly, the private sector is adopting the use of social media and the concept of “giving up control”. Mind you, it has a long way to go, hence why so many social media consultants are popping up everywhere I look, but nonetheless, they are reacting. Will the military follow suite, or will it go back to reading “The Art of War”?