Social networking sites: friends or foes?

In an article in a Dutch newspaper of July of this year (Nederlands Dagblad, July 22, 2010), several large companies spoke out against free use of social networking websites among their personnel. Big names such as IBM and Imtech were named, among others, as attempting to construct a social networking policy for anyone working for them. Not just in regards to using social networking websites while at work, but also to explore the possibility of policing the profiles employees create on such websites. In essence, certain companies are openly wondering: "what kind of profile fits our company and can we make an employee adjust their personal profile on website X when it doesn't meet our standards?"

Apparently they are not the only ones trying to figure this out. A simple Google search for "social networking policy" renders over ninty-one thousand results. Some are more relevant than others, but all together they show that this is definitely becoming somewhat of a hot topic.

Phoenix Taylor's "No Sleep" book : quality product or quick cash generator?

"No Sleep - A look into the non-stop life of Jackson Rathbone" is a photo collection by Phoenix Taylor, who spent several days with the band 100 Monkeys while they were on a tour and put together some of his photos for the band's fans' viewing pleasure. For this posting, I am going off a first edition collectors version of the book, which arrived on my doorstep last week. Everything I write here is based on my own experiences and my own opinions on what constitutes a quality product or service. You are in no way obligated to agree with me on anything I share with you today, or any other day for that matter.

Bavaria: letting social media do the work for you.

So, who outside of the Netherlands HAD actually heard of Bavaria beer before the world cup?

The orange dresses the beer brewery introduced for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, caused quite the hype. Prior to an incident involving the eviction of a group of women in the Bavaria dresses, from a stadium where they were wanting to watch a Netherlands - Denmark game, the dresses were mostly of interest to Dutch women wanting to support their national team, and some women whose men liked the low cut of the dress on their girlfriends. However, when three women were arrested for coordinating the event where thirty-six women showed up at the stadium in the Bavaria Dutch Dresses, the press caught on fire.

This wasn't the first time for Bavaria to battle with FIFA over whether their World Cup gadgets went against advertisement regulations. At the 2006 World Cup in Germany, prior to the Dutch game against the Ivory Coast, people were asked by stadium staff to remove their so called 'Leeuwenhosen', to be replaced by orange shorts without a brand printed on it. The Leeuwenhosen were donned an act of ambush marketing, with Bavaria getting called on it by the FIFA for not having paid to be a corporate sponsor or official event partner, to be allowed to market their own brand.

Why is it that we barely remember this incident in 2006, which is after all only four years ago?

One possible answer is: social media. The 2010 incident with the Dutch Dresses might not have been much more than an incident, if it hadn't immediately set social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and the popular version of the Dutch MySpace, Hyves, on fire. News has never traveled faster as it does nowadays, with just about anyone being able to launch a tidbit of information onto the world wide web, only to have it spread like wildfire. With so many tweets, Facebook posts and Hyves comments and updates on Bavaria's Dutch Dresses, Bavaria got more marketing done in a few days than it could have paid for during the whole World Cup month in total.

In the end, FIFA did Bavaria a favor by telling them they couldn't market their brand in the stadiums by having large groups of people wear their dresses. Whether Bavaria intended for that to happen or not, didn't matter much to the FIFA organization. Bavaria settled the case of the arrested women out of court and they were released moments later. Another Bavaria marketing scandal put to rest... everywhere, except on the internet. A search on Twitter shows people are still tweeting about the dresses, showing off the Bavaria logos in photos, manipulated photos and other such popular internet mediums to get a message across.

You have to wonder if Nike isn't hoping someone will notice people wear their shoes to matches in the South African stadiums, while they're not an official sponsor of the event this year, either. Someone launch a tweet debate about whether or not this is breaking FIFA marketing rules, and watch social media work some more unpaid marketing magic.

Facebook: profit or pleasure?

A while back, Facebook decided it wanted to try something new to connect companies and brands to ordinary people. Where profiles had been lists of favorite movies, books, bands, quotes and other assorted fun tidbits, they were now to turn into a page full of links to interests. Virtually without regard for privacy, Facebook linked every interest someone had punched into their profile, into a link to a page created as a 'collective' for all things to do with that interest. At the same time, they extended this policy to status updates as well, where an update mentioning a certain interest would allow it to be linked on a collective page the exact same way as profile interests are.

This sounds ideal in theory. Making sure that lots of people get connected through shared interests. People able to get updates on their favorite bands or movies from a single page where all the information gathered and shared by others in status updates and the like. But the reality of it didn't go off without a hitch. People with interests like drawing suddenly found themselves linked to pages about graffiti, and people who were previously set on protecting their status updates from being shared with anyone but their friends, saw their messages appear on collective pages anyway, opening them up to comments, both positive and negative, from other Facebook users.

To make matters worse for loyal Facebook users, this move wasn't done with their user experience in mind. What Facebook really wanted, was to collect more cohesive data for companies to be able to search. To pick through looking for ways to target an audience more specifically fitted to their product or service.

To an extent, this already happened with normal advertisements on Facebook. Being from The Netherlands netted me an advertisement on housing in my country. As well as a website dedicated to cheap women's clothing, also operating from my home country, which suggests information about my location and my gender were combined to provide me with a link to cutesy little dresses. This was just the one time I checked on a browser not my own, as I normally have my own browser locked tightly and no advertisements have been able to penatrate my defenses on Facebook or elsewhere, yet. So I can only imagine what other Facebook advertisements the website has in store for me. What information they leech off my profile, which is technically supposed to be locked to everyone except added friends, and how they use it for third party advertisements.

It's clear that companies have by now recognized the potential social media websites like Facebook carry. Facebook advertisements aren't cheap to buy in, a lot of the costs usually hanging on the amount of clicks you get. Why? Because getting a lot of clicks tends to be guaranteed when posting an ad on Facebook. According to the website's own statistics, Facebook has over 400 million active users, who together spend over 500 billion minutes on Facebook EVERY MONTH.

These staggering numbers have caused more and more websites and web-based companies to link themselves to Facebook's platform. More and more often you can find a link on any given website, to 'like' something for your Facebook friends, automatically linking everyone receiving your updates on their news feed, to the website, part of that website, post or product you liked. Imagine the amount of people you can reach once one person clicks 'like' on a product of yours. Not to mention the chance of people seeing their friend 'liked' something, being interested in the same sort of things, being a lot bigger when they've all added each other over shared experiences, shared interests and the like.

It is a system with a lot of potential. Sadly, it's mostly interesting for companies trying to get people interested in their products or services. Generally speaking, the user experience for the average Facebook user has not particularly improved with these changes to Facebook's way of dealing with their personal information. The question now becomes: how much of your privacy must you accept to give up on, the moment you simply sign up for a social networking website to do just that: connect with friends, family and other loved ones? How much invasion of your browsing experience do you have to allow, just on the off chance someone might throw an advertisement at you that both interests you, and WASN'T something you would have gone looking for yourself through search engines or simply in stores or by asking friends?

In the race to make money off social networking services on the internet, what should the companies behind those websites be most concerned with? The profit third party applications make off their users and any of the information gathered from those users? Or the users themselves, and the pleasurable experience they have, using the website to network in peace?

Twitter: advertisement tweets. Spam your way to profit?

Twitter: one of the most explosively growing social media applications on the world wide web. The website, which allows people to create an account and post 'microblogs' containing up to 140 characters, reportedly had over 100 million users earlier this year. The people behind Twitter, while previously naming the improvement of the user experience their main goal, are now suggesting the primary goal should be to figure out ways to make money with the microblogging service.

This of course begs the question if the amount of money to be made through Twitter, by Twitter, is directly proportional to the amount of annoyance the website's users will experience. Already companies are trying to advertise themselves on Twitter, searching 'tweets' either manually or with computer software, for certain keywords. Once these keywords are found any user unfortunate enough to have unwittingly used them, gets added by the company's/website's/attention seeker's account and/or gets tweeted information on products or services they never asked for. Often both.

More often than not, these search-and-add techniques are done by computer software, resulting in people getting spammed with messages full of products and services only marginally related to their own interests or conversations. A conversation with a friend as skinny as I am, about the fact American clothing sizes are bigger than most European ones, by default, and us wanting some smaller sizes from certain sellers, resulted in both of us getting added and spammed by a twitter account set up for a clothing store dealing in big sizes only. A tweet about a tattoo got me added by the account of a tattoo parlor situated in Florida, while my Twitter profile clearly lists my location as being the Netherlands.

Imagine Twitter taking it upon themselves to spam you with their money schemes. They could allow companies to buy in any amount of commercialized tweets. Maybe they could show up on people's tweet feeds in funky colors like purple with yellow text or something else headache inducing. If the company pays premium, tweets will show up on protected accounts' feeds too, because Twitter can search all tweets for keywords, even protected ones.

No one will be safe. The only way left to combat the unwanted tweet spam is by coding your messages in such a way that even your closest friends will need a special decoder ring to decipher what you are trying to say. "TBAFATW" will stand for 'the birds are flying against the wind' which will be code for dinner plans being ruined by unexpected overtime at work. Twitter users already fluent in 'chat-andtext-speak' where whole sentences are abbreviated into incomprehensible gibberish, will find the switch quite easy, while everyone else will struggle worse than their grandmother figuring out e-mail.

The worst thing about Twitter advertisements is that there is no real way to block them. One has to manually go over the list of followers and block and/or report them for spam, and even then, the promoter's goal has already been reached. You have already seen their product, the link to their website, their tweet, their profile, their brand, or anything else they might have thrown at you in a tweet or even just their suggestive account name. Users can lock down their account so that their tweets are shared only with those they allow to see them, which effectively stops most software from searching your tweets for keywords. Of course, someone retweeting your tweets, or even just responding to you in an unlocked reply, can cause sneakier programs to pick up on you after all. Basically, just locking your own tweets is not enough, you'll have to get all your friends and other followers to do the same.

For a communication service based on sharing with the world, it sure is sad to see the only way to combat unwanted commercialized spam is to stop sharing so freely. I'd like some numbers on how much profit random companies make by spamming their products and services on Twitter, to people who never asked for their information. It would be good to know if annoying people in this way actually pays off for them or not.