Why social media?
A Pew Study out this week tells us something most of us would have assumed naturally: The majority (66%) of Americans who use social media do it to stay in touch with friends and family members. Interestingly, 18% of older Americans (54+) use social media to conenct with new people who share similar interests, vs. 10% of the younger group.
For all the fretting about how the internet is changing relationships, and how “real life” is falling by the wayside, about how we can’t truly have as many friends as we do on Facebook (we don’t, and that’s okay), it’s clear that social media actually strengthens relationships rather than weakens them. It’s a tool to stay in touch, to deepen a connection, rather than make another superficial one. I find that very heartening, but not at all surprising. If you spend any time on Facebook, it’s clear it’s a tool to keep relationships familiar and strong.
According to the study, most people who use social media don’t specifically use it to connect to public figures, and many of the ones who do use Twitter. Again, this isn’t very surprising, but it does underscore the difference between Facebook and Twitter.
What does this mean for brands and marketing? It seems to me the most important thing is to understand and respect how people use social media. On Facebook, people are there to connect with their friends and family, not necessarily have a deep relationship with your brand. On Twitter, they may be there for news and public figures, but it’s also about friends and family connections. It’s critical to be authentic and embrace your role as a brand. Be friendly, but not too familiar. Keep it casual. Offer discounts and coupons. In other words, don’t try to force yourself into the fundamental friends/family relationship, but rather focus on how you can best complement it.
Twitter Sins
This list of Twitter sins from Hubspot is great:
- Thou shalt not spam.
- Thou shalt not drift. (AKA: Show up and be active—I’ve been remiss on this blog, hence today’s post…)
- Thou shalt not blatantly self-promote.
- Thou shalt not use only 140 characters.
- Thou shalt not bash.
I’d add a couple more to the list:
- Thou shalt not ghost-tweet.
I’ve heard folks on the executive level talk about trying to have an assistant run their Twitter account and tweet in their place. Online identity is about authenticity, and it’s a big mistake to misrepresent yourself on social media. There’s no substitute for your own voice, and there’s no denying the anger of people who find out they’ve been misled. Leveraging social media to build relationships takes work, but it’s worth the time.
- Thou shalt not tweet in the heat of the moment.
No, I don’t mean mid-coitus. Rather, I’m talking about where you’re upset or worked up about something. Take the time to cool off and think about what you’re going to say—it’s easy to fire off an angry tweet, but no matter how quickly you delete it, some eyes will have been lain on it, and you can do a lot of damage!
What other sins would you add to the list?
Transformative Change That Begins Online
Union Square Venture’s Albert Wenger posed a fascinating question recently on his blog: “What is your favorite example of something that is already happening on the Internet today, that is a clear indication of the massive transformation to come?”
It may not be as new to us as other trends, but to my mind one of the most astonishing recent uses of the internet has been social media’s role in the Arab Spring uprisings. As many people have pointed out (or punned), the revolution may not be televised, but it will be tweeted.
I think there are two transformative trends at work here. First, it is part of a broad institutional shift: from secrecy to transparency, from suppression to freedom. We see this in marketing, as companies are forced to deal with customers, accusations, and complaints out in the open. (This post on Forbes has some great insight about what transparency means for businesses.) And it’s truly staggering to think that social media can help effect real political change, as it did in Egypt. The power of social media to give a voice to those who have had little opportunity to be heard will only grow—and continue to spread.
The second shift relates to the spread of technology to places like Africa. As internet access becomes more widely available worldwide (especially thanks to mobile), new populations are joining the online community in large numbers. This means that new internet users have access to new opportunities, and the online dialogue gets richer.. (And, of course, there are new advertising opportunities.) I think the growing online presence of populations in Africa, Asia, South America, and elsewhere amplifies the real-world shift to a more inclusive global politics—a trend perhaps best represented by President Obama. It will be fascinating—and essential—to watch.
Continuations: Curious About Circles
Albert offers some great thoughts about why Google+’s Circles are so interesting. In particular, if Google+ takes off, I think Circles will likely make people feel even safer sharing information online than they already do in Facebook’s walled garden—and as we know from countless trend pieces, people (in particular young folks) are prone to oversharing, thinking they are 100% protected by privacy settings. If it’s on the internet, and it’s not a 1-to-1 message, your expectation of privacy should probably be slim to none—even if you just share it within your inner circle.
I am excited on many levels to see Google release Google+. First, it was about time that Facebook faced some head on competition. If nothing else it will make Facebook better. Competition is a healthy thing. Second, I like the idea of trying a different cut on how to organize people and relationships. We have had friends and followers, groups and lists, and now we have circles (incidentally, Etsy has had circles for a while).
There are two important issues that I am really curious about when it comes to circles.
Circles is apparently a super easy drag and drop interface (despite an invite, I am not in yet so relying on the descriptions of others). Nonetheless, Google+ still separates the creation of relationships (circles) from specific services. It will be interesting to see if that’s how people want to organize relationships as opposed to picking relationships within specific services (eg people I want to share my location with on foursquare, people who I want to shop with on Etsy, etc).
Second, I am curious about what kind of privacy expectations emerge around circles. Google is promoting these with the following language (from the Google+ site):The easiest way to share some things with college buddies, others with your parents, and almost nothing with your boss.
In other words, Google suggests that circles will allow people to share with a higher degree of control over “reach.” Since circles don’t have a “friends of friends” problem that seems reasonable at some level, but might also wind up being misleading on another. We have a fairly clear convention around one-to-one messaging (e.g., email, Twitter DM, SMS): assumed private (although a service like Bnter runs against that). The public broadcast model of Twitter and Tumblr is also easy to understand. But what should my privacy expectation be if I share something with a circle of “college buddies”?
To be clear, I am not suggesting hat Circles can’t or won’t work. Simply that those are the two issues with regard to circles that I am most curious about because they have tremendous implications for all services with a social component (meaning: all services). Now I can’t wait to actually get into Google+ so that I can experience circles for myself.
Steve Rubel: ¶ Tumblr is the Next Great Social Network
Love this: Tumblr is “a social network for content.”
Brent Simmons sees a natural evolution for blogs…
“New blogging systems like Posterous and Tumblr seem to be pretty popular, and they fill a nice middle ground: short content, easy sharing, social stuff. They’re cool.
But try to imagine replacing Daring Fireball, Scripting News, Apple Outsider, Shawn Blanc, or any of a number of great blogs with something like Twitter. You can’t. You’d have to invent blogs so that these writers have somewhere to write.”
Brent is right. Blogging, once again, is evolving. But he’s a bit off in portraying Tumblr this way.
Tumblr, to me at least, isn’t a blog platform but something new entirely - a social network for both original and curated content that is longer than a tweet and often more visual in nature. It’s a hybrid.
This nuance is lost in the news that Tumblr now has more blogs than Wordpress.com.
Consider this: over breakfast last week Mark Coatney from Tumblr shared with me that most of the platform’s billions of page views take place inside the dashboard rather than on the individual domains. That means that Tumblr is less like Wordpress and more like Twitter or Facebook - a social network for content rather than a blogging platform.
A huge part of Tumblr’s appeal is its community. Like Twitter and Facebook you don’t have to attract an audience, you just need to get them to subscribe. And while RSS is baked in, subscriptions are disguised simply as follows on Tumblr, making it all the more simple.
The more people start using Tumblr Dashboard as an aggregator, the more they create, share, comment and reblog. The network effect takes over and the platform grows.
When you add in the fact that the media is increasingly using Tumblr, you have an engine in place that can drive additional growth.
All the forces are in place, to me at least, to propel Tumblr as the next big hub. However, it’s not blogging that will do it but - like Twitter and Facebook before it - the community that’s driving the network effect and its meteoric growth.
Love this pic of @Biz getting Twitter ready for the royal wedding. (Also, three servers for Bieber?!)
(Source: Flickr / twitteroffice)
Continuations: Mark Zuckerberg as Bill Gates
Literally had a conversation with a colleague today about how Facebook seems to be growing, innovating, and dominating our conversations—and Google, by comparison, has dropped off. Albert’s take below is really illuminating and, I think, spot-on.
Listening to Mark Zuckerberg yesterday at W2Summit was fascinating. First, I have seen Mark’s performance on stage go from awkward and tentative three years ago to assured and compelling now. Second, it couldn’t be clearer that Mark is singularly in control of Facebook and aggressively building an organization that can deliver at top speed and scale. Third, Mark’s ambition and sense of what’s possible for Facebook are huge. He is very clear that getting to 500 million active users is just the beginning. Fourth, Mark’s vision of everything we do online being “socially enabled” (which for him clearly means Facebook enabled) has the same clarity as “a computer on every desk.” That of course was for many years Microsoft’s vision. And so I came away from yesterday’s session thinking that Mark will be to the Internet what Bill Gates was to desktop computing. At the same time I was struck by how I don’t have much of a sense these days of what Larry Page and Sergey Brin are thinking and how engaged (or not) they are in Google’s fate. That is a bit worrisome as it reminds me of what happened at Yahoo.
