The Social Media Equivalent of Picking Rotten Food Off the Ground and Eating It in Front of Your Friends
Recently on Facebook, friends have tagged me in a “Friendmatrix” photo. FM is an app that takes photos of your Facebook friends and makes a collage out of them. My first question, as someone who is always looking for useful Facebook applications, is “Is that all this does? So what?” (technically 2 question, I know). The answer, as far as a I can tell, is, “Yes.” It does nothing else besides having a new cute way to linkbait your friends on Facebook. If I wanted to do something that useful and ego-stroking, I would go to the much nicer-looking Intel “Museum of Me.” I have no time to pursue empty apps, though a few people in my industry apparently do.
Next, I was slightly alarmed at reports that FM may be a phishing scam. This link shows the site and app have a “poor reputation,” for security and privacy, though with 2 million users. Is it a scam? I don’t know, but I’m staying away until I know it isn’t it.
Back to the people in my industry- did they vet the site or application before trying it? I would shudder to think what my colleagues at Voce Communications or worse, my clients, would think if I were publicly trying out apps that could potentially be malware or phishing scams. It’s the social media equivalent of picking up rotten food from the ground and eating it for everyone to see. Who would want to do that and be taken seriously?
They’re Here, They’re QR Codes, Get Used to Them
I’m not sure Dave Wieneke, author of this Ad Age piece on QR Codes really means they are “Dead” (such a pet peeve of mine) but he does refer to them as a “dead-end technology.” OK, so I am angry to be deprived of the opportunity to rant against a “this technology is dead before anyone got a chance to use it” post. While I do agree that not everyone with a smartphone magically know what a QR Code is, and also agree that a thoughtless campaign based on an unexplained QR code display just because QR’s are “cool” are themselves dead-ends.
I fear that people will take pieces like this and declare the technology dead before they got really interesting. This isn’t RSS- a back-end technology that has no real business trying to explain itself to the average consumer- it’s an evolution of something very familiar- the bar code, that people have already been trained to scan on their own in supermarkets. The familiarity is not far off, and the adoption is already there- even by small businesses- I was in a party store the other day to buy cupcakes, and by the register was a small sign with a QR code and the simple note “scan this” promising more information on the store and its products.
Patience, people.
Twitter, Facebook, Social Media and Measurement
I’m sorry I had to miss Tom Webster’s presentation at Blogworld, and this post urging people to rethink how people consider brand effectiveness on social media is why. No one should be surprised that Facebook is more popular than Twitter, and I’m certainly not surprised that people engage with brands on Facebook more than Twitter, but the magnitude in Tom’s research is a bit surprising. It merits further consideration, at the least. I would like to see if this information is repeated in other studies.
Dunbar Strikes (Feebly) Again
“Dunbar’s Number,” usually quoted as 150, is the standard for the maximum number of relationships one’s brain can hold. A new study, detailed in this post, shows that limit again. I understand that, and always have. What I expect is that a new round of people is running around trying to shame and shush those who would dare to follow more than 150 people on any given social network. Rubbish. I still stand by my contention that attention can be compartmentalized and that my notion of “baby dunbars” applies to the ability to focus on a certain number of relationships under a given context or time, and another set of relationships under another.
Do I follow thousands at once? Not all at once, silly.
Call Yourself a Guru, Get Followed by 100 More… What, Exactly?
I enjoy Dan Zarrella’s metrics-driven studies on social media, calling out, for example, that saying “please gets more responses on Twitter, or what day or time of day is the best to post to get Retweets on Twitter or Likes on Facebook. His latest was a head-scratcher for me: those adding “guru” to their Twitter profiles have 100 more followers on average. My question is “what kind of followers would those be?” Bots, spammers, the gullible. Further study on the kinds of followers “gurus” get would be interesting (no, I’m not volunteering to do it).
By the way- Dan, in his post, refers to “don’t call yourself a guru” as a “unicorn” myth. I still stand behind it, because applying any high-falutin’ title to yourself and asking people to believe it is high-level ass-clownery (Dan’s “social media scientist” is an exception in my book., by the way)
Photo Credits:
1. Rotten To The Core by pupski, on Flickr
2. QR Code Cupcake by clevercupcakes on Flickr