Micro Persuasion: Social Networking Demographics: Boomers Jump In, Gen Y Plateaus

Micro Persuasion: Social Networking Demographics: Boomers Jump In, Gen Y Plateaus

Rubel calls attention to an Accenture study which shows the social technology adoption rate is plateauing for GenY. Is this a sign they're losing interest or that they're already connected enough?

Social networking can improve business | The West

"The use of social networking tools such as Facebook, blogs and even the online game World of Warcraft could improve business, a report based on the opinions of senior executives shows"...(read more on The West)

Cisco emraces social networking - others not so sure

A recent article on Times Online points out that tech firm Cisco actively encourages their employees to get involved with social networking. The company is reported to have built their own social networking and collaboration platforms that they claim improves innovation and speeds product development. Cisco management, the article suggests, is unfazed by the possible loss of productivty that has lead to many companies implementing a blanket ban on social networking sites.

Such a ban, the article reports, may be a knee-jerk reaction by people who fail to understand the business benefits. The author points out that banning social networking may be inconsistent in that many companies presume to invade on the private lives of employees through the Internet bringing work to a person's home - but the same companies have issues when people bring their private lives to work.

"Others make the point that bans on bringing one’s personal life into work time are a bit rich when companies now harness the internet to such effect that employees can never entirely escape from work."

The article also points out that the conflict between social networking and employment predates the techhnology that brought with it social networking sites. It shows that social networking - company golf days for example - has been an important part of business life for a very long time.

The long tail of social networking

I'm in the throws of reading Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, a story of an Australian bush kangaroo - kidding, OK? - and got to thinking that a power law may exist in the world of social networking. Such a power law (1/x) may show up in the amount of time spent on SNS activity and the threat to a business as a result of SN activity may follow a similar power law. For example the threat to a business of the most dangerous post is twice as much as that of the next most threatening and three times that of the following etc.

Not sure if this will go anywhere but thought I'd jot it down anyway.

IBM creates social software mashups

A report on Internetnews.com claims that IBM is merging business and social networking. Don't do one or the other says Big Blue, do both.

IBM's strategy places even more pressure on leaders and managers to wrap their heads around social networks and social software and formulate a meaningful strategy rather than waiting for their competitors to dictate the terms of engagement. Think back to 1995 when Microsoft switched their focus into making all their office productivity applications web-friendly. There's nothing more certain than a similar effort occurring but this time it will be around enabling human interaction.

Managers who miss the boat may end up participating very heavily in the next round of corporate redundancies.

Social networking a no-brainer for real estate

There appears to be little conflict between real estate and social networking in the real estate industry - or so it seems on the surface. According to a recent article real estate agents are jumping on the social networking band wagon in droves.

I wonder if there's going to be some big train wrecks down the track as agents shift between firms and possibly make negative comments about current and past employers. And what of the potential for agents to over step the legislative mark without the knowledge of their principals.

One wonders if the genie, once out of the bottle, can ever be recaptured.

What do we mean by "social network sites"

There appears to be a fair amount of confusion around what is meant when people refer to the term "social network/ing site". For many the first response is to equate the term with sites such as Facebook and Myspace. Dana boyd makes this observation and points out that such a narrow-cast definition precludes other platforms of interaction such as blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking sites. Can flickr and Youtube, for example, be classified as social networking sites?

I would contend there's a distinction between social networking per se, which can and does happen in real life, and social networking sites, social software, and collaborative software.

To give examples, social networking often takes place at a pub. You arrange to meet a friend, they bring along one of their friends, who you meet and with whom you form a life-long friendship. For me, a network can best be likened as a spiders web where threads connect and form paths to all other parts of the web. Meeting friends friend in this way creates a new connection and a new thread leading to other similar opportunities.

Boyd suggests that social networking emphasises the initiation of relationships and proposed an early definition of a social networking site that included mention of the ability of participants to interact with strangers. Certainly the meeting of strangers happens in a networking environment, but I would argue that social networking is very much driven by, or augmented by established relationships that encourage and enable the development of further relationship connections. Social networking, both on and off-line, is lubricated by a conducive environment.

Narrowing the definition down to "social network sites" Boyd points out that the term networking is problematic in that it indicates a much more active role of the initiation of new relationships between strangers than actually occurs on social network sites. Whilst new connections occur, she believes, the primary reason for people to be on a social network site is to maintain a relationship with people they already know. On most SNS's, Boyd observes, a participants profile is usually supplemented by a display of a person's contact or friends network; and it is amongst this group that most of the network activity occurs.

However, this argument also has it's problems. Certainly on "social network sites" by which I refer here to as the likes of MySpace and Facebook, there is a level of passiveness to the activity of networking. There appears, from my experience to be little in the way of any active efforts to become acquainted with perfect strangers. However, to use these sites as the standard bearers, whilst understandable, would preclude others where activity has a very different nature.

As examples, sites such as RSVP, Adultfriendfinder, Xtube, and a host of other adult networking sites - where the active pursuit of new connections is the expectation rather than the exception - would be precluded from boyd's narrow-cast definition of a "social network site". Such a preclusion makes sense if what we are attempting to research are those sites where the networking is much more passive and benign. I would question the value of research, though, that failed to take into account these more assertive networking fora.

Going further with this problematic term of "network" or "networking" is the difficulties faced when we begin to consider the nature of a blog. Some blogs, such as Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist, and Darren Rowse's Problogger, are heavily trafficked by a loyal readership who regularly contribute and debate via comments. The activity in which these people are engaged appear to be both in the nature of "networking", as in people attempting to create new connections with other readers through interesting comments, and "network", as in a network of bloggers.

Further still, there exist other platforms of collaboration and interaction, which create connections where none previously existed (with a nod and smile to dana boyd). Is it relevant for the sake of research purposes to exclude wikis and photo and video sharing sites from the field of focus? My instinct tells me no.

I'm still a long way from developing a definition, however I feel a sense that any definition that points to socially oriented human interaction on the Internet should necessarily be broad and inclusive. Only at the pointy end of the research might it be relevant to narrow the field down so as to achieve needed clarity and direction.

Schools begin to embrace SN

Watch out oldies, the schools of the future are on their way - to a social networking site in your lounge room.

A new service, Elgg, has developed an open source social networking platform that is targeted directly at the education market. As reported at Wired, the service allows users to create their own personal learning environment, complete with feeds from blogs and social bookmarking sites.

An exciting development is that, more than just knocking off the likes of Blackboard, Elgg is being looked at by a variety of businesses as a way of introducing SN as part of their operations.

Cleaning up a soiled reputation

So there's some concern about the manner in which data is near-permanent. This not-so-apparent feature of our online activities on SN sites can leave reputations in tatters. The fear being pedaled around the popular media circles is that future employers will use SNS's as a way to can a person's budding career.

My earlier post today suggests that this fear is not one shared by many in the SN scene, with few being concerned about long-term problems caused by less than well thought out posts to profiles.

That however hasn't stopped ReputationDefender who, for a fee, will apparently clean up the trail of destruction caused by pissy blogging and office party posts. Me thinks there's a chance they'll make some money tapping into the paranoia of a few.

Best of luck to them.

Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck

Here's a few comments on an article from Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore Vol 14(1): 13–20

Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck
Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence
danah boyd
Harvard University and University of California-Berkeley, USA

Boyd argues that changes made to the public feed feature on Facebook have significanly altered the dynamic of what is viewed as private. She uses the example of a party conversation where one needs to shout to be heard only to find that everything suddenly goes quiet as you're about to finish your sentence. What was a conversation protected in some way by the din of the surroundings, the need to be physically proximate, and the assessment that only those nearby could hear what was being said suddenly becomes a very public communication.

Boyd notes that a similar event happened when Facebook created the public feed and caused what seemingly were private moments and events - despite them being available if someone searched hard enough - into easily accessible public information. It is this disruption she suggests that is new in the digital world.

In the physical world we have become accustomed to ways to protect our privacy, notably walls, physical distance, volume of speech. However, Boyd points out that in a digital world these disappear and are replaced by search capabilities that make previously "private" information very public.

Privacy is all about control one has about information about the self, Boyd suggests. Information is private therefore, not because it is not known, but because it is carefully controlled. It is far more difficult to keep a secret then to not allow the information out at all. Some information, she opines, is only relevant in certain social settings, but Facebook's public feed obliterated the context of this "grey"area information and disrupted the way in which people approached their privacy online.

This collapsing of social domains has resulted in what Boyd calls "social convergence" where previously discrete social contexts are brought together through technologies and digitisation. This convergence raises a number of questions, says Boyd, and significant concerns about the future of privacy as people deal with these converged domains without any form of social scripts.

Social networking sites pose danger to law firms

By Kevin Lo

Damned if you do and damned if you don't by the sounds of what Kevin Lo has to say. Here he recommends that companies be vigilant about what information finds its way onto SN sites, such as FB. He recommends either banning mention of the company at all, or at the least setting up a policy on what can and can't be said about a company on a SN site. He suggests that FB is great, but building a company controlled SN site is better.

But Lo here, appears to take the side of the company. He fails to address the question of who has sovereignty - the corporation or the individual. One suspects he believes that, if the company pays the coin, they own the person. That somewhat flies in the face of basic human rights but it appears that commerce continues to seep into every pore of the free speech membrane.

Is there inconsistency in corporate SN policy?

With the rush of organisations banning access to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, I can't help wonder if there's more than a little bit of double-standards at work. Let's say for a moment that a worker participated on LinkedIn as a way of forming a better network, would they find this acceptable? If so why would this form of networking be acceptable and not the Facebook kind?

Simply because a social networking site is fun, does that automatically make it unproductive? And does the fun diminish the quality of the relationship? I'm a member of both LinkedIn and Facebook and can say that, as a professional, I get little out of the former, and plenty out of the latter.

It's time for businesses to consider the longer term ramifications of too much control around SN.

Do social networking sites really result in networking?

Dana Boyd claims that:

Social network sites do not help most youth see beyond their social walls. Because most youth do not engage in "networking," they do not meet new people or see the world from a different perspective. Social network sites reinforce everyday networks, providing a gathering space when none previously existed.

I can't see how this statement stacks up? How can Boyd say that "most youth don't engage in "networking""? If someone adds a friends friend as a friend, does that not amount to "networking"? Or is that something else? What if you started seeing that person offline? Still not networking? I guess a rigourous definition of "networking" might say no, but instinctively I'd say it was networking.

Then there's the bit about social networks reinforcing everyday networks, but then she says that it's a gathering space where none previously existed. That just doesn't make much sense to me. If they reinforced everyday networks surely the networks existed before.

Social networking costing business billions?

A recent article on ZDNet suggests that social networking is a huge drain on company resources. The article reports that the practice costs businesses $6.5 billion pounds caused by staff spending on average 30 minutes per day on social networking. Around 30% of this cost, it is claimed, comes from the consumption of band width.

Interestingly, the article reports a growing tension between network managers, who would ban social networking sites completely, and recruiters HR managers, who encourage the practice believing that such sites give them an opportunity without the need for interaction.

The article then sensibly asks the question; what about the benefits of social networking such as the deals that flow from an active network - particularly from sites such as LinkedIn.

Good question that.

Editorial: Convergence Culture

I never thought of media much before.

It's described here as a medium between people, communities, organisations, and industries. In the classic view, a few media organisations act as the medium but this is now changing as we see the democratisation of the means of production of media content. These changes have brought about a hybrid media that is no longer creates a homogenising effect as did big, monolithic media organisations. These media outlets are everywhere and include individual, government, groups, etc.

This blog is an example of a component of this hybrid media.

The authors call this "socialised media". Of course, the big media companies want a piece of this action and seek to regain control of this new social media through mergers and acquisitions (note the Murdoch purchase of MySpace and the WSJ).

The convergence of these media types is both bottom up and top down. Big media attempts to re-badge content and make it available on other sites and in other contexts as a way of earning further revenue, decrease costs, and improve brand awareness. On the other hand consumers attempt to control what media they do and don't see and this can create conflict and negotiation between the players.

This negotiation plays itself out in a way that sees business claiming to harness collective intelligence where the business gets something for free by providing the means for participation. On the one hand, these platforms for participation can help a business build a brand - note the hyper-viral way applications spread on Facebook - but this same viral effect can also damage reputations and cause harm.

Some businesses boast about how cleverly they've harnessed this collective intelligence, only to find that they have ceded control of their brand to an environment that will never yield them control they once had - and of course this doesn't always work out the way the business hoped.

In the one moment, businesses can gain and lose control of their brands.

Downloaded from http://con.sagepub.com by Peter Fletcher on January 21, 2008
Editorial: Convergence Culture
Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze
Convergence 2008; 14; 5
DOI: 10.1177/1354856507084415

Social networking for the pre-net gen-ers

Plenty of people of my vintage have yet to experiment with social networking sites. Amongst my friends there appears to be a very low adoption rate when it comes to Facebook, MySpace, and micro-blogging platforms such as Jaiku and Twitter. Why is this so?

For many life is simply too busy to be bothered with yet another "thing" to put into the schedule. As an example, a friend of mine has two kids and an already very well developed social network and she sees very little benefit in contributing to a social networking site. Would she enjoy more social outings as a result of a membership to an SNS? I doubt that would be possible.

My friend is far from an orphan. People of my age have grown up without SNS's as a support mechanism for their social activities. Put simply, they don't need the Internet or a bunch of overly-viral platform applications to keep their long-established friendships in tact.

So why would anyone pre-net gen want to participate? There are a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it's to understand. It's easy to knock what we don't understand. By participating we get the opportunity to make an informed assessment on what all the fuss is about.

Secondly, we may just pick up a really useful tip that has a real-world payoff. Whether or not the rumours are as good as they sound - and there are plenty of doubters - there are plenty of musicians and bands who are now rich and famous as a result of being picked up by a talent scout straight off MySpace (or YouTube, or Facebook, or...).

Finally, participation alters the way we interact with technology. The thinking that brought us to this point in our lives is not going to help us understand the thinking with which the net-generation (read here the world's future decision makers) will use to make choices about their own and our planet's future.

If all we have to lose is a few minutes of our day - and that's all it takes to maintain a SNS profile - it's a small price to pay for understanding and future proofing our minds.

Stars, Stripes, and Social Media - Business Website - Internet Customers

Stars, Stripes, and Social Media - Business Website - Internet Customers: "The analogy should be clear. Social media--blogs, text messaging, video, and social networking--are the legs of your online strategy. Your Web site is the belly of the beast, where you convert visitors into customers."

Is Yuwie.com a Glimpse into Future of Online Business?

I wrote about this last semester wondering when people would begin to want a share in the revenue that was produced in part as a result of contributions being made to social networking sites. It's been noted that a small percentage of power users produce a large percentage of traffic, and therefore revenue for social networking sites and the initiative by Yuwie.com to share revenues with users makes perfect sense.

Is Yuwie.com a Glimpse into Future of Online Business?: "Yuwie’s business model is based upon two core tenants: 1) End-user participation is free – no sign-up fees or subscription fees are required, and 2) Yuwie currently distributes well over half of the site’s advertising revenue back to participating end-users. Not only are Yuwie’s end-users paid for the traffic generated for their own personal page, but also for the traffic generated by friends they refer to the site, in addition to traffic generated from their friends’ subsequent referrals (for up to ten (10) layers or generations of personal referrals)."

Taking residence in virtual worlds | Australian IT

Taking residence in virtual worlds | Australian IT: "Rather than be tied up with the web 2.0, which he believes has a specific look and collaborative function, Robertson is more concerned with web-enabling technology and providing access. 'Web 2.0 normally implies two things. It's based on online democracy and collaboration, and uses AJAX-style technology to give a heavy graphical user interface client feel, even though you're still in a lightweight browser. 'That's the implication, but we're doing things like data sovereignty and workplace democracy and taking that type of approach, which isn't classical web 2.0 but still trying to meet the same objectives.'"

Danah Boyd on Social Networking sites
Mp3 audio

Persistence - what you say stays around. Conversations in a park disappears once the conversation finishes.

Search-ability - people can be found eg marketers, teachers, authority. People go to physical places to avoid people such as these. Can't escape online

Replicability - People can copy and paste conversations to a more public environment.

Invisible audiences - in real spaces we modulate our voices but online this tends to change

People have 'friends' online as a way of imagining the audience of friends - gives a sense of our audience. How can people be simultaneously cool to parents and friends online?

How are people creating who they are in an online public world?

Social networking becomes the primary place of public 'hang out' for teenagers in the US because there are less places in public for young people to hang out in the real world.