Unless you live under a rock (or are part of the ever decreasing part of the American population not on Facebook) you have probably heard the news about Facebook Places. On the surface, Facebook places is the social-behemoth's attempt to take over the growing market being pioneered by companies like Gowalla, Foursquare and SCVNGR*. The success of Facebook Places is yet to be seen, we've all seen other companies stumble when trying to move into other markets (see: Google Wave) and Facebook hasn't yet made a dent in Craiglist with its Facebook Markets.
It's certainly not a foolish move. The fact is, many large companies are trying to get their hands around location-based services. Even Major League Baseball. I noticed that my MLB iPhone app has a feature buried deep in its functions that lets you check in at ballparks. I'm not sure what they're planning to do with this functionality, but now that Facebook has moved into the market they can probably sync up with the big boy.
But let's take a look at what's good and bad about the way that Facebook currently has this configured.
The Good
Places opens up the idea of location-based services to a much larger audience than Foursquare could reach. At its heart, Facebook is about connecting with friends and finding out what they are doing with their lives. Why wouldn't location play a role here? Don't we all love the surprise meetup? Case in point: one night my wife and I were out to dinner in Brookline. While walking by a Thai restaurant we heard banging on the window, and there were friends we hadn't seen in a while. We talked and ended up getting dessert together. It changed an evening that probably would have ended early to a fun evening with friends.
Now imagine we checked in at our restaurant earlier and were informed that friends were nearby. Now it's not so spontaneous, but we can actually seek them out, or avoid them. Either way. But in this case Facebook is about connecting friends, not just online, but face-to-face.
The Bad
I can't imagine what my newsfeed will look like once people start checking in. If the Facebook newsfeed becomes a noisy mess, the utility it brings me drops and my use of it will as well. So this is something Facebook will need to manage.
Also, I'm wondering about the impetus for people to check in. I believe that the market of people who want to earn badges is relatively small, certainly not the mass audience that Facebook reaches. So it will be interesting to see what drives the checkins and whether Facebook can utilize relationships with advertsers or local merchants without alienating its users.
Finally, I'm not thrilled with how Facebook continues to apply its features as opt-in rather than creating an automated "asking" process on a login. Lifehacker has a great article outlining how to adjust your privacy settings. Facebook should take note that when Lifehacker puts out an article specifically telling people how to TURN OFF a feature, it may not be something people want.
The Ugly
The idea that someone else can check me into a venue is a horrifyingly bad idea. In a wonderful perfect world where everyone is actually friends and no one plays practical jokes, this would work. And if you live in a place like that please let me know.
But I'm not interested in letting people decide to tell the world where I am. That's a decision that is mine and mine alone. Facebook should disable this feature immediately, and in lieu of that, I suggests that everyone disable it in their privacy settings.
* It's worth noting that SCVNGR has funding from Google Ventures.
I don't share my information with Facebook and I bet you don't either.
I share my information with my friends, I just happen to use Facebook to do it. It's a distinction that I wonder if Facebook really understands. Today in a conference call, Mark Zuckerberg pointed to Facebook's continued success by noting that people are still members, the mass quitting that so many discussed never truly materialized, though "Quit Day" still lies ahead. "We have seen no meaningful uptick in the number of people who deleted their accounts," he said.
And I doubt it ever will. But what I'm hearing anecdotally is that with each privacy concern, people share LESS on Facebook. The problem for Facebook is that if people put up less information, then I have less of a reason to go there to see what people are doing, and so do you. Think about how you use Facebook. If you're like me you log in, check out the newsfeed and see what's in people's lives. If that newsfeed doesn't interest you, and continues to be uninteresting, then you'll slowly move away. It'll become a place to grab some basic information (birthdays, locations, jobs, etc.) but its true utility will be gone.
I believe that Facebook is measuring the wrong thing. I believe a better metric would be the number of posts per person over time. You would have to examine their activity and create a standard, then measure how each user stacks up against that.
A drop in this usage would be the biggest threat to Facebook; it would be death by a 400 million cuts to the information we put out. If we stop sharing, Facebook stops existing. Not tomorrow, but slowly, over time, until it's that site you used to visit but doesn't have much pull any longer.
Will the privacy controls unveiled today keep people from fleeing? I'm not sure. In conversations with friends, mostly non-techies, their trust in Facebook has been shaken. While a change could help, rebuilding trust will take much longer and include many, many more steps. We all now realize that we're sharing with Facebook as much as with our friends, and that little change will change our behavior.We'll see what impact that action has on Facebook itself
Trying to figure out what all the Facebook fuss is about? Considering signing off of Facebook for the last time yourself? Here's a video roundup of the Facebook fiasco, courtesy of Greater Boston (and featuring our own Chuck Tanowitz):
Chuck I think makes a very good point: "Facebook is a business and it's sitting on a treasure trove of valuable information ... demographic data that the advertising industry has been asking for for generations." As the Australian Broadcast Corporation's Stilgherrian points out:
Facebook's business model is best served by exposing your personal information as widely as possible. To advertisers, so they can target advertising more accurately and pay more for the privilege. To other users, to encourage them to share more as well. To search engines, to bring more traffic to Facebook. To anyone who wants to pay.
Last week I was invited back to a panel at the ninth "Marketing to the High-End Bride" event, held at the newly-opened W Hotel in Boston -- you can hear the audio and see some photos on the WeddingProf site. At the event, I finally got to meet Scott Smigler of Exclusive Concepts. I really enjoyed our conversation -- both on the stage (where we disagreed about ghost writing but agreed on most everything else) and after the event. Scott's organizing an upcoming event for SEMPO Boston, and asked what I thought about the intersection between search and social these days. Here's my response -- I hope to be able to share my perspective at the event -- I'll let you know as soon as it's organized.
In Fresh Ground's opinion, there are two approaches to social media: proactive and reactive. Proactive social media is content-driven, reactive social media is conversation-driven.
Either way, search is often a second thought -- most practitioners take a "if you build it they will find it" attitude when it comes to social media and search. They figure that either way -- by virtue of good content, frequent updates and a large community -- search will just happen. This is partly true, but there's still a disconnect between these two fields that can only be bridged through analytics and metrics: understanding the direct relationship between social, search and web traffic.
I think most social media people don't think about the other way around -- that search can drive social. This negative bias was reinforced recently when Facebook overtook Google in terms of site traffic sources. We perhaps need to be reminded that it's still a two-way street, and that a stronger emphasis on search can still be very rewarding.
Facebook continues to be on my list of companies that people seem to love despite every effort on their part to the contrary (that list, for the record, also includes Apple, Google and occasionally Twitter). Their latest attempt to alienate me involves the changes they've made to their privacy policy and mechanisms, which overall give you less privacy, not more.
Here are five things you need to know about the new privacy and security settings on Facebook:
Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a "fan" of — as "publicly available information" or "PAI." Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated.
Visit All Five of the Privacy Settings Pages
Visit all five of the privacy setting pages. There are settings buried in all of these pages, so make sure you take a few minutes to peruse all of them to make sure.
Keep your friends close and your pages closer. You've heard of the Facebook "gaydar" project, right? People can tell a lot from who you friend. While sharing who your friends are can help you get more friends, it may reveal more information than you know. The EFF again:
[A]lthough you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting ... has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.
You can now tweak who can see your friend list by going to your profile and clicking on the pencil on the top right corner of your friends box. What you still cannot change is who can see the pages you are a fan of -- there is simply no way to remove that information from your public, searchable profile unless you make your profile not searchable by anyone, a rather harsh setting that will significantly limit your ability to grow your friends network. If you're a little embarrassed by your fan pages, delete them.
Create a dummy test account to test all your settings. While the "Preview My Profile" button is helpful, the interaction between the various complicated settings is sometimes surprising and the best way to test all possible settings is to create a temporary fake account. This is relatively easy to do, and last I checked, doesn't even require a valid email account to accomplish. Use it to test how viewable and searchable your profile is. For instance, it's not completely obvious how to turn off your Wall to non-friends, but this can be adjusted in the "Posts by Me" section" (which I was surprised to see defaulted to "Friends and Networks" -- umm, no, thank you).
CUCme? Remember playing that game with a child young enough not to realize that if they cannot see you, you may still be able to see them? The same holds true in Facebook -- there is no reciprocal privacy on Facebook, so just because you can't find somebody else doesn't mean that they cannot find you. If other people have their search privacy settings more constricted than you, they will be able to find you while you may not be able to find them. The most problematic effect of this could have to do with banning other profiles -- in order to find the person you want to ban, they have to be searchable by you, so banning only effectively works while you're still friends with someone. This seems strange, because -- not that I'm in the practice of banning lots of people -- banning is typically an afterthought that occurs to Facebook users after they unfriend someone.
The Boston Herald today kickstarted a local discussion about social networking at work. In usual tabloid fashion the Herald created a sensational story about the fact that some city employees, like Amy Derjue are updating their Facebook status from city-owned computers, some even going so far as *gasp* playing "Mafia Wars."
It's easy to find people who will be outraged by this, saying "my gosh, how can people do that?!?" But honestly, if you think about it, the time it takes to update a status is little more than a few second out of every day.
From the macro-level, the idea of using employer resources (computers, internet access, etc.) for personal use is nothing new. But a spate of studies out recently try to make the point that social networking use at work reduces productivity, causing many to completely ban social networking.
The studies, such as the one from Nucleus Research making the argument that a few minutes a day on Facebook amounts to lost productivity, are based on the idea that if the people weren't on a social site then they would, by default, be productive. Anyone who has ever worked in an office can tell you that's simply not true. Also, it assumes that because of social sites that work isn't getting done.
Many of these companies also hand their employees Blackberries and laptops so they can work from home, on time that used to be called "personal time." The line between personal and work time are certainly blurred, so giving up a few minutes during the work day to Tweet or update Facebook certainly seems to be a fair trade-off.
This is, however, a management issue. If, as a manager you see that an employee isn't doing work, then it's your job to figure out why that work isn't getting done. If an employee spends an hour on the phone with their girlfriend everyday, do we take away their phone? Of course not, because it's a useful business tool. The same goes for social networking sites, they can offer a lot of value to organizations if used properly.
The answer is to work out a policy that clearly states what's accepted and what is not and also to have a little trust in the employees.
Today I heard about a running store called Greater Boston Running in which the owner, Steve Meinelt, has encouraged the employees to get on Twitter and Facebook. The employees, also runners, were given direction about how to search for the right discussions and interact with others, then told by the owner to "be smart" and not use this opportunity to fool around, but help the store.
Inside a Greater Boston Running Company store
In this instance social media is as much a part of their job as folding the shirts or stocking the shoes. Employees know not to get caught up on Facebook when they should be helping customers, they've learned a balance. The result is a few sales that have come through Twitter and even an increase in community. For example, if employees are going out for a run they'll tweet about it and some customers may come by to join them.
They managed to take the expertise of their workers and turn it into a marketing asset that extends well beyond the confines of the store.
Yes, there will be companies that work in fear and shut down access for a variety of reasons, including legal issues. That doesn't mean they'll cut off access, as many employees will simply pick up their mobile phones to do the same tasks.
However, I believe the CEOs at these same companies are turning to their communications teams and saying "how do we better utilize social media for marketing purposes?"
Truth is, they're probably shutting down the answer.
Unless you live under a rock (or are part of the ever decreasing part of the American population not on Facebook) you have probably heard the news about Facebook Places. On the surface, Facebook places is the social-behemoth's attempt to take over the growing market being pioneered by companies like Gowalla, Foursquare and SCVNGR*. The success of Facebook Places is yet to be seen, we've all seen other companies stumble when trying to move into other markets (see: Google Wave) and Facebook hasn't yet made a dent in Craiglist with its Facebook Markets.
tabloid fashion the Herald created a sensational story about the fact that some city employees, like 
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