Facebook

Jason Spencer is the managing director of Millward Brown in Shanghai. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed customer experience and digital marketing in China. Read more…

Earlier this month we saw the second Facebook home page redesign in less than a year. Nearly 800,000 users voted in a Facebook poll on the new design, 94% saying they did not like it, while around 1.7 million users joined the “Petition Against the New Facebook” group. Admitedly this is a tiny proportion of the alleged 175 million Facebook users (~1%) and it is generally only the most agrieved users who offer feedback by these methods, so presumably the other 99% are either ok with the design, indifferent to it, or simply didn’t provide comments as they were doing somthing else with their time. Read more…

For any of you doubting the power of the interweb as a media channel, since the story of Facebook changing their terms of use was first reported by the Consumerist blog on Feb 15, it has been one of the most talked about issues across the world: “Facebook Privacy Fallout Goes Nuclear” The key thing I take from all this, is that it represents tangible proof that at least one person in the world reads the terms and conditions. Pretty much all of us suspect EULAs (electronic user licence agreements) or ‘click wrap’ as they’re otherwise known, are chock-a-block with weird and wonderful legal weasel words but that doesn’t mean we read them before clicking or ticking the “I have read the terms and conditions…” box, so clearly we’re not that bothered by it.

In a nutshell, the big change to the Facebook terms of use grants them the right to hang on to (and potentially “use”) archived copies of your stuff if you cancel your membership on the site. This “use” is defined in numerous ways in the fine print but one of the terms that seem to have the world’s collective panties in a bunch is “sublicence”: effectively Facebook can sell your content to a third party.

So what’s all the fuss about suddenly? Facebook can already sell your stuff right now if they want to…you gave them permission to do so when you signed up. The word “sublicence” appears in the old terms of use (hands up how many of you read it); the only real difference in the new version is that right exists after you leave. What I think annoys people is the idea that someone is able to make money off something they “own” which possesses no obvious commercial value, or which they lack the ability to monetize themselves. Frankly, the majority of us have little to worry about. The bulk of user content on Facebook is photos, and bad ones at that. I don’t want to see pictures of a hairy Irish guy in a PVC nurse outfit let alone PAY for the privelage (I’ll mention no names so their dignity remains intact).

Perhaps it comes down to a definition of ownership. Facebook have stated that they have never claimed ownership of their members’ content, but when you put your “property” into a big communal bucket you’re pretty much giving it away to the world and are clearly not seeking to make any money out of it, so why does that change if you’re no longer a member of the site? Once it’s out there it’s out there. In the words of Joe Garrelli from NewsRadio: “Getting something off the internet is like getting pee out of a pool.”

Other social networking sites have found ways to make money from user content, such as Flickr (where users’ photos can be sold to third parties and the user receives a royalty), and Threadless (essentially an enormous t-shirt design competition where artitsts submit their designs for the community to vote for and, ultimately, buy). Neither of these sites actually create anything, they merely provide the mechanism for users to submit and interact, and cream a percentage off the top. They have tapped into an enormous global market which effictively comes to them with little or no effort on their behalf. Both potentially make a lot of money, sure, but they are fostering and rewarding the creativity of people who ordinarily would have no means to commercialise their work.

Update: Facebook have reverted back to their old terms of use while they “resolve the issues that people have raised.” Facebook backtracks.

The balance between privacy and personalisation has always been a delicate one. When you visit a web site, you want to see things that are relevant to you. However, the methods used to allow this are often controversial or ineffective. On one side sites can allow users to customise their experience by personalising the home page or choosing types of content. On the other side, behavioural profiling can be used to push relevant content.

Each approach has its benefits and its drawbacks. At the end of the day very few people can actually be bothered to personalise a web site, unless they use it extremely frequently. And if they do personalise the contents, they may miss out on other tangential topics. Behavioural profiling relies on tracking an increasing number of interactions that the user has with the site or sites, and as such is controversial.

Behavioural targeting is in use by a number of Ad networks, where behaviour on content specific web sites, determines the type of adverts that a person will see when they visit content generic web sites. There are numerous technical challenges with this, but privacy tends to be the focus. The idea that website ‘B’ know what I did on website ‘A’ can be a bit off putting for many users, particularly if they don’t receive any benefit.

Over the last 12 months, facebook has been in the press regularly for their deployment of behaviourally targeted ads. There has been a significant end user backlash against the monetisation of the social web site, with many against the idea of targeted adverts. But in June of this year facebook has turned the model on its head by allowing users to vote on the adverts that were displayed (link to story). In my opinion this is the first example of a more general trend in online advertising. The ability to vote on ads instantly changes the simple concept of display advertising to a far more semantic engagement. Even if a visitor votes negatively, their engagement with the advert has significantly increased. This increased engagement requires additional thought and will therefore improve awareness and more importantly retention. As the old adage states “all news is good news”.

In addition, eye tracking studies conducted by behavioural targeting company Tacoda have shown that behavioural targeted adverts result in 17% more engagement when compared to contextual targeting (adverts based on the contents of the page). Further more, it was found that following the first exposure the advantage increased to 54%. This was supported by an experiment conducted on the FT.com website, where they found 193% lift in awareness and 178% lift in recall for behavioural targeted adverts when compared to simple run-of-site adverts.

However, it is vital that the relationship is transparent and built on trust. The customer must remain in control or else the company risks alienating the customer. Behavioural profiling companies, such as Phorm and NebuAd have suffered significantly in the press following concerns over public acceptance. NeuAd’s CEO has recently stepped down, with the company looking at alternative strategies. Phorm has seen a significant drop in its share price, and its trials with BT remain extremely controversial as the behavioural profiling is at the ISP level without any customer control.

The technology now exists to allow highly targeted forms of marketing. Companies can effectively merge their marketing and communication strategies, allowing them to selectively contact people about products they might actually be interested in, rather than forcing marketing to everyone via broadcast techniques.

It is clear that behavioural targeting can be extremely successful if deployed correctly. It can be beneficial to both sides: the consumer is exposed to adverts or products that will likely be of interest to them; and the company improves the return on its marketing investment by targeting people that are more likely to respond.

The key to success lies in trust. The consumer is king and their experience is vital. In the current economic climate retention of valuable customer is important, and in the fickle world of the web experience is everything.

The title of this article does not relate to new privacy measures introduced to protect Facebook users. Instead, since this incredibly popular community’s new look appeared a few weeks ago, Facebook has changed into something a lot more complicated and unusable.

Many people use Facebook with alarming regularity. For others it has become a convenient way to keep up to date with a social network, something to be dipped into rather than focused on. The new design does not seem to reflect this. I would argue that a large percentage of people use the site to snoop on other people, and they do so in three main ways; reading their friends’ messages, looking at their friends’ photos and reading their status updates. It is these actions that have been made particularly difficult by the new design.

The redesign offers more choice to users by enabling them to comment on all site content while providing more shortcuts, but it also forces them to do a lot more work to get even the most basic information. The most immediately noticeable change with Facebook is the move to a wider screen format, and the total overhaul of navigation. This is the first point at which complications arise, as there are now multiple navigation points across every page, as well as tabs within the page.

The site is also now full of jargon. Facebook does not seem to feel the need to explain itself, its new wording, or the new design. The homepage opens with ‘Top Stories’, but how stories qualify as top is unclear. The site uses proprietary phrases such as ‘Log mode’ and has the title ‘Boxes’ as a profile tab.

Emphasis has been placed on odd features of Facebook, such as the large space dedicated to ‘Bookmarks’ on the ‘home’ page, and the extremely large ‘What are you doing right now’ text box as a call to action to provide a status update. This means that quirky features such as the three latest status updates have been taken away, and instead of a quick glance at a page to receive updates of friends’ activities, users now have to actively go into a status updates tab.

In some ways the user is now given too much choice, by being able to comment on everything that is shown, even whether they like adverts or not. However, how to provide this input is not obvious, with the hidden ‘options’ boxes at the side of every story being hard to notice. With all this space for user feedback, Facebook has taken away the choice over where items are placed. Users are no longer allowed to move boxes within their profile, and therefore Facebook now appears to decide what is important on each user’s page.

The profile page is also extremely confusing. All of the content is mixed together, which makes it harder to see anything. It is true that filtering options are still there, but a mixture of wall posts and mini-feed items makes it hard to focus on any information. There are also a few major usability problems here, for example with internal tabbing. ‘Add photos’, for instance, adds a box to the page within which you enter the content. However the page then gives no ability to undo these actions if you change your mind. There is no cancel option, so the box stays on the page until you navigate away from it.

Facebook has made its core functionality more complex by making information searches on people more difficult, and by taking away the simple and orderly layout of the old design. With functionality more confusing, the other changes to Facebook become less interesting. This is a prime example of how user input and feedback is essential before any kind of redesign, because even a site with such incredible support as Facebook can get it wrong.

By Mark Gristock

The Daily Telegraph (a UK broadsheet newspaper) reported a story on 16 June 2008 regarding a High Court ruling that required an ex-employee of Hays to hand over business contacts built up on the social networking website LinkedIn.

The story has since been picked up in various publications including Brand Republic and Computer Weekly but none raise the obvious, more expansive question of what the repercussions of this ruling might be for the rest of us? Computer Weekly does make reference to a legal specialist that advises employers to add clauses to employment contracts and to ask employees to set up business-only networks, but I think this misses the point.

Social networks are just that – social. The dictionary definition of ’social’ is: “living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone”. These networks don’t have boundaries and certainly don’t separate colleagues from friends. In many ways if they did, it would defeat their object. For many, however, this level of transparency is unnerving.

I had lunch with a customer recently who talked about her younger sister connecting with her on Facebook. I have a similar scenario where I am connected to my niece and nephew. They have very different interests and circles of friends to me, being as they are, about 25 years younger. But what is my alternative? Deny their existence? Compartmentalise them?

Only five days earlier (11 June) Times Online ran a feature that advised people to keep their social and business networks separate. This is an interesting idea and there were various suggestions made by different people – all in recruitment (or ‘talent management’ if there is a difference). One suggested he used a nickname on Facebook that only his friends know, and then used LinkedIn for business contacts only. I don’t see how this can work. There have to be crossovers. Otherwise, what happens when you conduct business with family members or if your business contacts are among your best friends?

The article concluded with a suggestion that soon software will simply track you down by making connections between you, friends and colleagues, then bingo – your profiles are connected for all to see.

What this really means is we have to get ready for a time when virtually everything we post online will be attributable to us. Potential employers will be able to see our connections with dodgy friends and family members and start judging us across a wider set of values. Is this good or bad? I am certain there will be losers as there always are, but I think this is akin to businesses getting used to corporate blogs – which of course many have yet to do.

There are countless examples of businesses gaining stronger brands as a result of honest information about them going up on blogs. They are measured by how they respond to negative comments about poor performance. People realise that no business is perfect and actually, if you can see them warts and all, you tend to trust them more. The same will surely happen for individuals and I think it will be refreshing.

I predict that the transition will be ugly, but when we get there we may see a levelling of the playing field on a scale never seen before.

On Monday 9th June I attended the EDM08 conference. It was a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 delegates, but they had travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic region and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. I had little idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending, but soon discovered that it was all to do with the delivery of information services, leading to this year’s theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short, director of R&D at O2 and a man with impressive credentials in the mobile arena. Chair of the mobile data association (MDA) among other things, Dr Short has spent 20 years in the mobile and wider telecoms industries. He shared plenty of industry stats and previews of O2 research to be published in July, both of which I can summarise here for you in a few bullet points.

General statistics:

• There were 2.95 billion mobile subscribers globally by June 2007.
• The forecast for the end of 2008 is 3.3 billion (source: The Mobile World).
• There is 115 percent mobile penetration in the UK, equating to 69 million handsets.
• There were 57 billion SMS and 449m picture messages sent in the UK in 2007.
• The mobile internet was accessed by 17 million UK individuals in 2007.

From O2′s research:

• Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile.
• Trials which combined mobile SIMs with Oyster and Credit cards (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success with Oyster cards than credit cards. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this, as it seems to me that it is a moot point because ultimately they will all surely be combined anyway.
• Mobile development began at phase one with voice and text. Present
  day is phase six which is the ‘content’ phase. He believes that the next stage, phase 7, is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there was a range of presentations, discussions and some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was plenty of debate around the importance of mobile compared to PC. James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click-through rates online were currently at about two percent on average but predicted mobile would achieve four percent click-through rates in the near future. Mobile search currently represents two to four percent of desktop search globally, with the exception of China where mobile search accounts for 25 percent. Google predicts that the crossover point, where mobile search overtakes desktop, will come within four years, then rapidly grow to double the desktop search share.

To provide a little more context to this, it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob, the world’s largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell currently estimates that Admob sees three billion page views per month on its network, on which they serve ads today. The largest contributors to that number, notably all in the English language, are:

• US = 50 percent
• India and UK = 10 percent each
• South Africa = 5 percent
• Indonesia = 5 percent

Other presentations gave me some interesting nuggets worth noting, such as: “In ten years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile.” Or: “The fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is seven to eight year olds. All exciting stuff, but I was most impressed by Simon Grice of www.ideas.org. He managed to rattle off more concepts and ideas in ten minutes than I have in a decade. The few I managed to grab were:

• Information is the new pollution. In a conference focusing on information services and directories Grice argued that in the future this will be too much and humans won’t be able to deal with the flow of info.
• Search will become useless because the range of results will be too difficult to filter. Grice suggested that when people get bogged down with information they ask people they know for advice and in this way sites like Twitter and Facebook become the information services networks of the future.
• Discovery as opposed to search. Search is fine if you know what you are looking for but what if you don’t? For example your local pub is holding an Italian night. If you don’t search for that you may not find out so you need to be told or have a way to discover it that is not necessarily advertising. Location based services have a role to play but it is not clear what role at this stage.

All of the great new ideas discussed at EDM08 are definitely worth exploring further, which is exactly what I intend to do now.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and in business that’s always been true. Most deals result from referrals, recommendations or informal networking. We’ve had LinkedIn for years, a kind of a ‘friend of a friend’ recommendation system, but with the rise of MySpace and Facebook, there are lots of new social networks targeting business users.

In February, the Financial Times announced that it’s setting up an exclusive social network, for which members will be expected to cough up £2,000 per year. They’re vetting applicants and say they’re only interested in members at the level of CIO or board member. There’s a big question around whether people at this level have the time or inclination to take part. I’m sure they’d rather be skirting around a delicate negotiation on the golf course than poking a prospect online. Read more…