A few weeks ago I wrote a post about what I referred to as status updating and digital publishing:

So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

Status updating is a more recent development than digital publishing. For evidence of this just compare the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Both saw plenty of blogging (both by private individuals and by professionals on behalf of publications), but only 2008 saw a huge role for realtime communications (again, and perhaps even more surprisingly, both in terms of individuals and organizations). The previous post linked to above also has some compelling numbers on this questions.

And all this realtime stuff has gotten a lot of attention, particularly from people who think about the evolution or technology and its social implications. Nick Carr⇒, for instance, started a series of blog posts called “The Realtime Chronicles” almost a year ago in which he (somewhat facetiously) announced that “Real time is realtime“:

I’m glad to see that “realtime” is officially one word now rather than two. It’s an update long overdue. That space between “real” and “time” had become an annoyance. Looking at it was like peering into a black hole of unengaged consciousness, a moment emptied of stimulus. It was more than an annoyance, actually. It was an affront to the very idea of realtime. As soon as you divide realtime into real time it ceases to be realtime. Realtime has no gaps. It’s nonstop. It runs together.[...]

Realtime is our natural state – it’s what we share with the other animals – and now at last we’re going back to it. Listen to the birds. They’ll tell you all you need to know: realtime is a stream of tweets. Yesterday, when he announced the twitterification of Facebook, the realtiming of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are going to continue making the flow of information even faster.” The first one to remove all the spaces wins.

I think Carr may have been a bit premature, but only slightly. Realtime arrives for real when the technology is in place to make that flow Zuckerberg describes really and truly fluid. That’s finally starting to happen, though it’s still sort of around the bend for the vast majority of users.
To put it simply, realtime requires “push” information delivery to become ubiquitous and standard. What that means is well-illustrated by looking at how RSS (Really Simple Syndication⇒) usually works. Typically, an RSS feed reader will periodically “poll” the feed source to see if anything new has been added. Feed reader applications allow one to set how frequently such polling is done. It can’t check all the time because it consumes bandwidth for the client and, assuming many clients, would impose an unmanageable number of requests on the server, such that it would almost certainly crash some sites.

For example, the popular Mac RSS reader application I use, NetNewsWire, has “every 30 minutes” as its most frequent setting. That’s much too much time between updates to be really realtime. The NewNewsWire iPhone application doesn’t even poll for updates on its own, it has to be activated (something I frustratingly routinely forget to do before entering the signal-less New York subway).

Now, some might ask why one needs a desktop feed reader. Why not just go and check the actually sites? Well, that’s horribly inefficient and hardly realtime either unless one does so continuously. And it obviously doesn’t solve the problem of on-the-go blog update notification on one’s phone. Of course, a lot of people might find that an unwelcome burden, but if the realtime trend continues it’s fair to assume that it’s inevitable.

So what does an alternative approach look like? A good example is a service called Superfeedr. Superfeedr is, in the words of its own homepage:

Real-time Notification

Give Superfeedr your feed urls and new entries will be pushed to you. By combining several technologies we can notify you in less than 15 minutes (or it’s free).

No More Polling

Don’t waste your time and resources fetching old data and getting “new” data too late. Superfeedr’s parser frequency is constantly readjusted each time a feed is fetched.

15 minutes might not seem like much less than 30, but that’s just the guaranteed maximum wait. Look at the language here (even though they hyphenate real-time): The concern is wasting time and not getting new data before it’s “too late.” Yes, this is definitely the realtime imperative Carr was discussing translated into new technological infrastructure for the social Web, and it’s far from the only example.

In fact, Superfeeder combines a number of technologies and techniques for delivering these up-to-the-minute updates. One of them is the wonderfully named PubSubHubbub⇒, helpfully explained in the following presentation (it’s really very short and simple):

So hubs are used as intermediaries between publishers and subscribers to facilitate faster communication with a smaller load on the computers involved by centralizing the process of figuring out what is new when and letting concerned parties know rather than the current situation in which everyone asks everyone. A bit humorously, this is a technological displacement of they typically Web 2.0 “many-to-many” communication model in favor of something more centralized and hierarchical.

Another key technology here is XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol⇒). It’s what several instant messaging services like gChat and Jabber (where the protocol originated from in fact) are based on and also the basis for the protocol behind the much-hyped Google Wave, a totally different paragon of realtime-ness (read a pretty good anecdotal explanation of how here).

But the most invasively realtime of the technologies involved, though not actually part of Superfeedr’s infrastructure, is the iPhone’s support for push data. Specifically, this post from the Superfeedr blog explains how to hook up that service to an iPhone app called AppNotification in order to get Superfeedr’s super-quick updates pushed to one’s iPhone, thus getting immediately updated of any new feed items.

Still think that might be overkill? I really love this Tweet response to the post (which I get to see because of the DISQUS “reactions” at the bottom of the page—I told you that would be big!):

We’re really close to the perfect iPhone RSS experience… but not quite? Push notifications yes; two-way sync, no? http://bit.ly/22yHz1

Realtime social Web users can be pretty demanding.

Think about all this really realtime stuff along with the location-based social services like Foursquare (here’ s some recent Mashable hype on that) and the rapidly improving world of augmented reality⇒, and you can start to see the outlines of what the next generation of the social Web might look like. It’s one where a mobile interface with the realtime Web is sufficiently advanced that one doesn’t need to be deliberately accessing the social Web to be a well-timed participant in it, and as a result the Web more easily folds together with ongoing “offline” day-to-day activity.

Nick Carr seems to disagree that those things fit together so well. In a post tiled “Realtime kills real space” he writes:

Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen – the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.

Maybe he’s getting a little vague there, but the point is there’s already room for debate about the relationships and tensions between these relatively new social technologies. That’s an indication that they’re maturing rapidly and that there’s also room for people to take sides in these debates in a more practical way—in terms of how they deploy and leverage these tools.

Our new address is 285 West Broadway, Suite 250, NY NY 10013.  Right off of Canal.  The phone number is the same. (212) 334-0242.  Stop by if you are in the neighborhood. We love visits!

I missed this in the LA Times, this past November, but apparently there’s a scale available called the Wi-Fi Body Scale that sends weight and body fat info directly to Web pages and mobile devices.   It now connects to Twitter. Oh, and it only costs $159.

Today in the BayNewser courtesy of MediaBistro, there’s a story about how a sheriff in Texas is tweeting the names of people arrested for drunk driving. Wow.

]]> http://snapdragonconsultants.com/twitter/twitter-equipped-bathroom-scale-twitter-for-shaming-drunks/feed/ 0 http://snapdragonconsultants.com/new-technologies-and-tools/getting-your-company-started-with-facebook-pages/ http://snapdragonconsultants.com/new-technologies-and-tools/getting-your-company-started-with-facebook-pages/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:59:36 +0000 Robert Gonsalves http://snapdragonconsultants.com/?p=1208 Facebook has the ability for a business to create a unique page for your company.  Officially called Pages, they have acquired the common name of  “Fan Pages”.  Should you create a Facebook Page for your business?  What should you consider if you build this type of presence on Facebook?

Benefits of Facebook Pages

Remember, Facebook Pages are public.  This allows search engines to search and index these sites.  So people can use search engines to discover your Facebook Page, and it becomes another opportunity besides your main site for customer to discover your business.  Pages can also include links back to your main site, and this helps you with building off-site in-bound links to your main site.

Another benefit of Facebook Pages I the ability to send updates to people who follow or becomes “Fans” of your page.  This ability to communicate with your Facebook Fans is an important engagement method.  Regular updating and new content is a requirement for successfully building the number of your Facebook Fans.

One viral marketing advantage for Facebook pages is that that when someone joins, it is published in their News feed and shared with their friends (unless turned off).  This allows your updates to be seen by the friends of Fans on Facebook, which leads to more discovery by others.

Two way Interactions

In programming your Facebook Page, remember social media is about people interacting with each other.  Make sure your strategy includes giving something to your participating consumers (offering instead of asking).  This is a great way to have people to become fans and remain involved.

Think about offering coupons, weekly deals, limited offers (free shipping) and other product items that are unique or first offered to your Facebook Page audience.  People like to feel special, and you are part of their social circle.  Friendship is a two way street.

While starting a page is free and easy, Facebook Pages also let you add Facebook Applications to your Page.   Some of the best companies pages (CocaCola) utilize Facebook Apps to help create a rich and sticky environment. Keeping away from the standard Facebook Page layout can make a big difference to encourage people to become a Fan of your Page.  The best Pages use rich graphics, strong creative and engaging content, encourage fan communication, and makes strong use of videos and images.  This is not your official website, so you may want to play with the Page editorial voice and tone to match the medium.

The ongoing care and feeding of a Facebook Page can build a rich and rewarding engagement platform with your customers, but this also requires you to address the concerns and challenges that people post about your company on your Facebook Page.  It is important to have established an practice strategy about who and how at your company will address any problems or concerns.

Analytics – Measuring your Success

Besides two-way interactions, measurements are the core of interactive marketing.  The Facebook Pages insights tool includes your Fans’ engagement with posts from your Page.  You can see how many comments Fans make on your posts, and also track the Fans’s viewing your posts in News Feeds.  By watching your posts and Facebook Page analytics, you can see what type of content and interactions your Fans like the most on your Page.  This can then be used to change and improve your ongoing content strategy.

Don’t stop at a Facebook Page

While Facebook Page is a great way to interact with your customers who are on Facebook, don’t ignore the other social networks.  Connecting multiple social platforms through your main website as a hub can help connect and direct your customers across the web.

Make sure you focus on the demographics of each site.  Quantcast.com can give you demographic information about the various social networks.  Facebook has a much different user compared to Linkedin.  Depending on your business, you will want to develop a unique social network presence at multiple networks to help grow and expand your customers across the different social media networks.

Get Started

Before you get started, you should be clear about your campaign needs and goals. How will you define success with your Facebook and other social media presence?  What is your ongoing content programming strategy?  Who from your company will be responsible for the two way relationship building?

We can help.   We help our clients reach this growing audience through creating highly customized Facebook experiences that engage and impress their visitors. For organizations that have a beautiful site or a promotional campaign running somewhere else on the Web, we can build a complementary presence within Facebook to help drive traffic and spread awareness. PS: Ask about our Facebook Connect solutions as well.

Twitter didn’t become the most important thing on the Web in 2008, but sometimes it feels like it did. Twitter didn’t overtake Facebook in terms of users (or even come anywhere close), but 70% of current Twitter users joined in 2008. [...] Maybe the real question is whether 2009 will be the Year of Micro-messaging.

Well, both Twitter and Facebook have kept on growing. So too has Tumblr, the light-weight, socially-oriented blogging platform that I wrote about here as part of the 2008 retrospective. And they’re all growing at sort of close to the same rate:

OK, so maybe not that close to the same rate. These type of stats are always somewhat suspect anyway (I’m going with Wikipedia for these, but that doesn’t deal with inconsistent and often opaque methodologies) and the point is just that the rate of growth averages to something in the neighborhood of doubling over the last year. In a bit more rigorous manner, the Pew Internet & American Life Project came up with roughly the same result:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

What I have referred to as micro-messaging and micro-blogging is called “status updating” as far as Pew is concerned. The survey this data comes from only mentions Twitter by name. The question asked was: “Do you ever use the Internet to…use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?” But sharing updates about oneself and seeing ones from others has increasingly taken center stage on Facebook too. Wikipedia even includes Facebook in its comparison of micro-blogging services.

So regardless of the language one uses or the angle one comes at the question from, it looks like over the course of 2009 the popularity “status updating” has doubled from something a tenth of the Internet using population does to something a fifth of it does.

Does this mean that 2009 was in fact The Year of Micro-messaging? Well, I suppose that depends in part on how 2010 turns out. Especially because the coming year might see the other half of the picture come into focus: what all this means for regular old macro-blogs.

That might be a confusing and overly narrow way to put it. Instead let’s make a category for more serious (for lack of a better word) content production: “digital publishing”. So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

The difference between these two can get fuzzy. What separates a personal blog that’s serious enough to be digital publishing from a fairly elaborate Tumblr? Well, even though Tumblr does publish directly to the Web, it is still organized around a defined community (users follow each other in a manner similar to Twitter). Moreover, Tumblr recently announced that their API (the service’s interface to third-party applications) is going to start supporting interaction with tools originally designed to work with Twitter. In explaining how this will work, their announcement highlights the similarities between these services:

The really cool thing – because our following models follow a lot of the same principles, we’ve been able to take advantage of a ton of native features:

• Retweeting = Reblogging
• Replying = Reblogging w/ commentary
• Favoriting = Liking
• “@david” = ”http://david.tumblr.com/”
• Conversations = Reblogs

A lot of the client applications this will enable are for mobile devices. That’s significant too: status updating can be done from your phone. These are usually short messages and a typo every so often isn’t the end of the world. Digital publishing is much more of a sit-down-at-a-desk sort of affair. And this is even somewhat supported (or more accurately suggested) by the data from Pew indicating that individuals who connect to the Internet from their mobile device is a key group responsible for driving this year’s increase in status updating.

Meanwhile, digital publishing continues to define itself. In the past few months especially there has been a lot of buzz about magazines and newspapers potentially shifting to tablet computer devices (Mag+, Sports Illustrated, the elusive and magical Apple tablet, among others). Online-only outlets like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast become more established each day. Most interesting of all might be a “post” from Smashing Magazine, the online Web design publication, about “the death of the boring blog post“. It’s a call for Web sites to start laying out individual pieces separately with their own content-appropriate graphics—to make what they call “blogazines.”

There is, as always, a lot more to this. Where do comments fit it? A lot of status updating is about responding to, discussing, or sharing digitally published material. A lot of people who write that material are avid status update types and even use such services to find things to cover. And there’s a lot more to say as well about the similarities, differences, and data-exchange possibilities of Tumblr, Twiiter, Facebook, and all the other services that might fit into the micro-something category.

Nevertheless, I think it is possible to see the beginning of a convergence of social technologies around certain styles of often informal communication. At the same time, more formal content creation and distribution on digital platforms has become an urgent matter for publishers and an active area of innovation. How money will be made is a whole other can of worms, but significantly it’s not an issue for status updaters. For the platforms that are used for status updating monetization is certainly still an important matter, but not for the people creating and communicating. That’s a very different dynamic. Ads and premium services might play a role in both arenas, but in quite different ways.

So 2010 (like 2009 and 2008) will probably be a Year of Micro-messaging. Will it also be a year of tablets and blogazines?

Google makes a lot of blog headlines and even some old-school journalism headlines when it does things like announce a revolution in their core capacity (real time search), a new operating system (Chrome OS), or something that defies categorization (Google Wave). In the midst of all that marquee activity little developments can get lost. For example, today ReadWriteWeb reports that “Google Groups Joins Google Apps in Battle for the Enterprise“:

Google Apps is adding Google Groups to its enterprise suite of applications, another example of Google’s commitment to developing an online application environment that is compelling enough for users to move off the Windows platform.

Google Groups has to this point been a consumer service. As part of Google Apps, it now integrates with Google Docs, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Sites and Google Video.

Google Groups is a very useful and very popular way to communicate and collaborate. It’s basically a tool for threaded conversations with many participants, but there are strong additional features like (not surprisingly) search, user rating of posts, tracking of flagged threads, email privacy protection, and public Web pages for groups that function sort of like Wikis. Groups might not have a place in every business or organization that might consider deploying the Google Apps suite, but it will no doubt be quite useful to some of them.

And I think that’s an important shift in the tone of the whole Google Apps issue. It’s not about Google just providing cloud-based alternatives for core IT functions. It’s about Google reorienting enterprise IT towards a more diverse range of potential solutions. RWW includes the following useful illustration in their post:

(It’s not entirely clear, but it looks as if this may have come from a Google slide deck, or some similar origin…)

That’s a lot of additional value in just two years, and for no additional dollars. Of course, most of those tools existed before as free consumer versions—it’s not as though these are all new products.

But it’s not just an increase in quantity, it’s a difference in kind. Groups might be great, but Google Apps could have a case as an enterprise IT solution without it. That’s certainly not true of Email and arguably not true of a calendar tool and word processor/spreadsheet application. The three icons listed under 2007 are much more critical that any of the ones added since. Moreover, they’re likely to come in handy in almost any deployment. The rest will probably be found useful by some but extraneous by others.

Doesn’t that make packaging it all together a bad deal? Shouldn’t Google offer a lower rate to organizations that only want a limited feature set? Why aren’t things like SSL security or video priced separately so that only those that need them have to pay for them?

Well, that wouldn’t be as simple. That’s important to Google’s goal of an evolving market for IT solutions for at least two reasons. First, Google is asking customers to make one big decision—to migrate important functions to the cloud. Stacking a bunch of little micro-decisions on top of that only reduces the chance of getting people to make that (potentially radical) change. It would almost be like giving those who might be nervous about the proposition an excuse to dawdle.

Second, Google doesn’t want “customers.” They want people to pay them money for their products and services but they don’t want to be taking calls, whether about upgrading accounts or providing tech support. That might seem like a strong claim, but the fact that Apps users who run into trouble are directed towards third-party “authorized resellers” for support provides decent evidence for it.

This sounds a lot like the “large-scale utility model” that Nick Carr has described as the inevitable direction of the could computing industry. For one flat fee you get Google-power piped into your organization. Don’t know how to use it right? That’s not Google’s problem, call a contractor. You don’t call the water utility when your drain is clogged either.

This is very much an story still in progress and we’ll have to see how it unfolds. One thing that is clear, however, is that Google is establishing its own model for how to operate in this space.

Before we started the class, each person talked about their own social media preferences and habits.  The most interesting commonality was that none of the students read or really seemed to care about the NY Times.

Bob also asked me to give the students an assignment.  So back at SnapDragon, we put together two assignment briefs for the students: one is for a new client, Marblehead Greens. This company is the maker of gorgeous green khaki boating pants that are being positioned as an alternative to the uber preppy Nantucket Reds. The other brief was for a somewhat controversial political organization that we are in talks about doing a social media project with. We set budgets for each assignment and asked the students to come up with both strategies and designs.

I’ll share more about what the students put together—and hopefully will be posting some of their work on the blog.

Robert and his wife, Stacey Attanasio, are old friends of mine—years ago, Robert was the first person to really explain just how the worlds of media, entertainment and advertising were going to change—and it turned out that he was absolutely right. I’m very grateful to Robert for these early and generous insights and excited to now actually have the opportunity to formally collaborate with him. So in many ways, making this announcement feels less like someone new is coming on board and more like an evolution of discussion with an valued friend.