Social Media is Evolving. Are You?

I have quite a few friends and acquaintances who are steadfastly resisting any temptation to join Facebook or Twitter. When I ask them why, I usually get some version of “I don’t care about what people are having for dinner”. That’s actually interesting because I do vividly remember the times some 2-3 years ago when both Twitter and Facebook were flooded by such mundane updates. But that has changed.

In fact, I rarely see any message about what people have for dinner anymore. Sure, there is the occasional picture of a spectacularly prepared dish or a cool looking drink but those are usually somewhat interesting. Thanksgivings, of course, comes with dozens of pictures of dead birds on Facebook but that’s part of the spirit - kind of like Christmas decorations. For the most part, the “what’s for dinner” updates have disappeared today.

One or two years ago, most of my running friends including myself were diligently sharing daily updates about our training runs. As a runner, nothing motivates me more than knowing that my friend Joe in Boston is ahead of me in weekly mileage or that my friend Andreas in Germany will compare my pace to his. But I got the message from my non-running Twitter followers and Facebook friends - sometimes rather explicitly - that they don’t care about that level of detail of marathon training. Once, I was even asked how I lost all that weight while getting the unsolicited advice to reduce those running updates in the same conversation... I reduced my training log updates and I noticed that all my running friends did so as well.

What happened is that we have evolved in the way we use social media. What appeared like a great idea and initially received positive responses from our followers, became less interesting and eventually perhaps even annoying. Ultimately, that made us figure out that this is not the right use of social media...for the moment. You can rest assured that the way social media is used today will likely be different a year from now.     

I wonder about those “denialists” who decided to ignore social media altogether. One day, they may join after all - likely when looking for a job - and they will go through the same learning curve - but years behind. I also worry about all of the marketing departments who are fine tuning their marketing campaigns assuming that the way we use social media will remain the same. Well, it won’t. Because social media is evolving. Are you?

PS: When you don't have something interesting to say on social media, it’s OK not to say anything...

Social Is Now a Noun

Inspired by the tremendous growth of Facebook and its endless ability to compel users to share, communicate and engage, companies have been trying to convince their employees to do the same at work. They hope that the same type of technology will help employees to share, communicate and engage inside the enterprise just as they do in the consumer world. Sometimes it works, although many companies are learning that just because you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

Social software is a very hot space right now.

What’s interesting, though, is how the industry struggles to find the right way to describe what it is we are doing here. The idea is not new, actually. Collaboration has been around for well over a decade and the benefits this new breed of social software offers is very similar to what collaboration did back in the early days of eRoom and OpenText Livelink. Heck, Lotus Notes has been called collaboration - the history of collaboration goes back to 1989! But of course we can’t use the old name ‘collaboration’ for this new hip, social software, can we?

Dedicated collaboration/social software is becoming rare

So the industry went on a long journey, searching for the right term. We started with extended collaboration, extended enterprise collaboration, collaboration software for the enterprise, team collaboration, and content collaboration and that apparently wasn’t cool enough, even though all these terms are still being used by various vendors. Then we borrowed the term social networking since that was how we used to refer to the thing we did on Facebook back then. That didn’t last very long and new terms came along including social software, social communities, social workplace, social business, and social collaboration. At some point, the industry even briefly toyed with the idea to seriously call this software category the Facebook for the Enterprise.

That, thankfully, didn’t take hold and so the journey continues. The latest trend is using just the word ‘social’. Yeah, I know, it is an adjective but old rules like grammar shouldn’t stand in the way of progress and world domination. And so, social became a noun.

More and more, social capabilities are built into enterprise applications

Well, maybe, the search will be over soon. It is becoming increasingly apparent that ‘social’  is becoming a feature rather than an industry. Social capabilities are increasingly becoming integrated into other enterprise software - from content management, business process management, customer experience management, to CRM and ERP. So, perhaps we don’t have to worry about what to call the space because it is not a space at all - it is an integral part of enterprise applications.

Abstinence is not a Solution

Facebook just announced 1 billion active users last week. One BILLION is an incredible number. There is hardly any other product in the world that has 1 billion customers. OK, maybe Coca-Cola but I don’t drink coke, I do Facebook...

We all know that Facebook and other social media revolutionized the social interactions between people. Social media enabled us to be much more connected with friends and create relationships with new people. Facebook makes things possible and easy that were not possible before. The announcement, however, prompted me to think about a neglected factoid: There are 7 billion people on the planet and if only 1 billion are on Facebook, what the heck are the other 6 billion doing?

Yes, sure, among those 6 billion are many babies and other folks who are not using any computer. But still, there must be at least 3 billion people that have so far resisted Facebook. WHY???

I have many such Facebook abstinents among my friends and no amount of encouragement has moved the needle so far. Usually, they tell me that they don’t want to waste their time on frivolous conversations about what people had for dinner tonight. Another common argument is the narcissistic nature of many of the Facebook posts - it is more about advertising yourself than any other cause. Yet, the most frequent argument against Facebook is security and privacy. Disclosing any kind of information in such public forum will ultimately compromise your privacy and security. Won’t it?

Well, I have some news for you, dear Facebook abstinents. One of the greatest security threats that you can expose yourself to is not being on Facebook. Surprised? I’m serious!

If you don’t claim your own identity on Facebook (and other social sites), you expose yourself to someone else doing it in your name. It is really easy today to join Facebook as John Smith with a validated email address on Gmail or Yahoo Mail. The bad guys can establish a pretty decent profile with pictures, engage with your colleagues from remote locations, and collect a lot of personal data about you from others. Before you know it, they can pretend to be you. This is social engineering in the social media world.

With Facebook Connect, it gets even scarier. Facebook Connect is increasingly the preferred method of authentication to many other sites and services. Now, the perpetrator who has stolen your identity on Facebook gets access to many other sites on the Internet - as you!

The moral of the story is very simple. As much as a you may not be a fan of Facebook, it is important to establish your own identity online. Because if you don’t do it, someone else might do it for you...

What Happened to Don't Be Evil?

Don't be evil?

Google is changing. It was and still is one of the amazing success stories since they have built a highly profitable business based on their search service. In addition to making a boat load of money, Google attracted a lot of positive karma by providing fantastic service and by proclaiming their mantra “Don’t Be Evil”. Ten years ago, they even lived by it.

But, fast forward to January 2012. Google is now a publicly traded company with the typical Wall Street pressure of quarterly earnings. Search-based advertising is still a giant money-making machine and Google keeps innovating by coming up with new ways to make advertisers part with their budgets - i.e. local search, mobile search or map based search. But an important thing has changed since - Google now has competition!

Google’s mission, as stated on their Web site, is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That’s a noble goal that benefits mankind while allowing Google to make a ton of money along the way. But Google is not true to their mission anymore. For instance, there is a lot of information on Facebook and Twitter and Google is deliberately not searching for it. Is the information on Twitter not part of the “world’s information” that should be universally accessible and useful?

A few days ago, Google escalated this game to another level when it changed its search ranking algorithm to prioritize the information found on its own social network, Google+. This prioritization has little to do with actual relevancy which is supposed to be at the heart of the search ranking algorithm. Instead, it artificially promotes Google’s own fledgling social network which represents another source of advertising revenue for Google. Information posted on Google+ ranks relatively high, often even higher than Web sites to which it points to. Information posted on Facebook and Twitter is not available at all.

This was when Google discovered it had competition.

Now, let’s consider advertising - Google’s primary revenue source. Advertisers who want their content to be visible in Google search will have no choice but to promote that content in Google+. As a result, Google+ will enjoy more traffic and more user interactions while fueling Google’s revenue engine. Pretty clever, actually. Well, diabolically clever if you ask me. By unjustly promoting its own content and suppressing content from its competitors, Google is double-dipping by cross-promoting two of its services. No, Google can’t claim that this is not evil.

This is very evil, indeed. Google has sold out its beliefs. Instead of providing customers with the best possible experience, Google delivers the experience that maximizes its revenue. What’s next? A YouTube video will rank higher than a more relevant video on the Discovery Channel’s web site? You bet! What Google’s doing to Twitter is no different from what Microsoft did to Netscape back in the 90s. Microsoft ended up as the target of a huge anti-trust lawsuit that has had a massive impact on Microsoft’s pace of innovation. Google is marching down the same path now and nobody will like the end of it.

Curiously enough, it is none other than Microsoft that provides Bing, the search engine that can stand up to Google. I’m not trying to portray Microsoft as the angel while calling Google the devil. But Bing can search information on Twitter and while it doesn’t appear to be searching Facebook today, it probably could since Microsoft has a stake in Facebook. Bing still has a relatively small market share compared to Google but that could change.

Because now, Google is evil.

When Algorithms Go Wrong

Earlier this year, PC World published an interesting article about the key algorithms that rule the World Wide Web. These algorithms include everything from the Google search and Facebook friends stories, to Amazon’s recommendations and even the eHarmony’s matchmaking algorithm. Very interesting stuff, particularly when you consider the economic impact of such Internet services today.

One of the algorithms is the algorithm that drives ad presentment - the idea is to present you with the most relevant ad based on your profile date. Or, actually, with the ad that you are most likely to click on. But a few weeks ago, I had an interesting experience with Facebook. First, Facebook decided, for no particular reason, to present me with ads all in German. My first reaction was actually positive. Among the few bits of information that I have volunteered to Facebook is the fact that I studied at an university in Germany and occasionally, I even respond to a friend’s post in German. And so I thought that Facebook is so smart that it is trying to appeal to the ‘international-man-of-mystery’ side of me.

But last week, all the ads turned into French. Well, I do happen to get by in French but I am pretty sure that I have not volunteered any info about my French connection to Facebook. Sure, I have friends all over the world, including France, but that’s not enough for even the smartest algorithm to label me as a target for French ads. Besides, I could hardly be expected to act on an ad offering me a skydiving experience in France next weekend. Clearly, something has been going wrong with the Facebook algorithm.

When an algorithm serving ads goes wrong, it is perhaps a laughable matter. After all, nobody gets hurt, right? Well, nobody, except for the companies that paid a ton of money for their ads to hit the right audiences. There have been plenty stories in the past about the innocent looking algorithm changes in Google that end up having a devastating effect on many businesses. If you build your online business that depends on the organic Google search driving your traffic, you can find yourself very quickly out of business when that stops working.

With their tremendous reach, it is perhaps time for the Web's Major League players to start realizing the economic power they have. With thousands and often millions of companies depending on them, Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. have to take their responsibility seriously.

This responsibility starts with the profile data integrity, customer privacy, information security and also the algorithm dependability. Algorithm changes can be very controversial as we've seen when Klout changed its algorithm a couple of weeks ago. It’ one thing to gamble with your own fortune, quite another thing to gamble with the fortunes of those who depend on you. Too many livelihoods are at stake. Abusing this responsibility may be perhaps the greatest risk Internet businesses face today.

What's Missing in Google+

Google’s foray into social media, Google+, has been busily adding users and receiving great reviews for its innovative design and capabilities. Everybody is raving about circles, the cool picture albums, and the way Google integrated its other properties. After having attracted over 750 million users, Facebook is now finally feeling the heat. Or is it?

Google+ has quickly attracted millions of users, enjoying what’s perhaps the fastest growth in history. However, when I look at the type of communication on Google+, I mostly see my professional ‘friends’ posting links to their own blog posts and articles. I do the same - we have all quickly jumped aboard since we understand the power of social media and we use Google+ as a free advertising tool. In fact, out of all the people in my Google+ circles, the only one posting something personal is Sergey Brin.

There is one fundamental challenge that Google+ has and it is not the features or design. It is a great tool but it doesn’t connect me with any new users. So far, I have been only connecting with the same folks I am already connected with on Facebook or on Twitter. And since we all are already connected on those networks, we continue using them since they work just fine.

When I started using Twitter after I was already on Facebook, I was able to ‘connect’ with many new people. The connections are of different type. I am connected with people like Richard Branson and Pete Cashmore on Twitter even if they don’t know me and care about me. Twitter makes it easy to connect with such people since it allows unilateral connections via “following”. On the other hand, my friends on Facebook know me and I know them - it is a bilateral connection where both sides agreed to connect. There is a difference between those two tools which is why I am using them both.

Google+ is not different. Sure, I have joined just like everybody else who’s actively using Facebook or Twitter is going to do. Curiosity drove me there and perhaps the urge not to be left behind. But it will be hard if not impossible for Google to throw enough new features at me to make me move at the cost of Facebook or Twitter. To do that, one of two scenarios would have to occur:  

1. I would start using Google+ actively if all my contacts would use it as their primary social network, at the cost of Facebook and Twitter. That’s a hard one to achieve since both Facebook and Twitter are thriving and continuing to add users and - more importantly - traffic. This is the challenge with social networks - according to the Metcalfe’s Law the networks become more valuable as more users join in. But that means that a network replacing another one becomes only useful if it reaches a critical mass of users. And “users” means not people who have signed up but people who actively engage.

2. I would start using Google+ actively if it allowed me to connect with new users with whom I am not already connected with on Facebook or Twitter. There are plenty of people I know who are not on Facebook or Twitter and there are plenty of interesting people out there I don’t know at all. Google needs to find a way to connect me with those folks. That’s what Facebook and Twitter accomplished due to the different type of connections they allow. Find a way how to engage the social media skeptics through some new, must-have services. Or find a way to suggest connections with people who could be interesting to know through a new type of connection. But don’t copy Facebook and Twitter.

Of course there is a third scenario possible, if either Facebook or Twitter stumble. They could become sleezy and offensive like MySpace did or nerdy and lame like what happened to Second Life. They could implode due to lawsuits, privacy invasions, availability issues or talent drain. They could go public and start making irrational moves under the pressure from Wall Street. All of that is possible. But on its own, Google+ needs to make happen one of the two scenarios above. And that’s not happening right now.

Email Isn’t Dying Yet

For a while now, social pundits have been tolling the bell for email. Pointing out that email is ineffective and out of control, they proclaim the upcoming demise of email which is to be replaced by social software. I agree that email has been used and abused by many people to do many things that it has never been designed for. Indeed, email is not a suitable team collaboration tool and yet we all have probably attempted to use it for team collaboration at some point - often with frustrating results. Email has also not been designed for file sharing and still we all keep sending out attachments every day. However, email has several things going for it that, I believe, will keep it around for a long time:


1. Unique identity
The world of social media is pretty messy when we consider identity. I have an ID on Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Xing, Ping, and many other social services. None of them talk to each other well and having to create my identity with yet another profile on each one of the services leads to severe limitations in my experience. While there have been attempts to establish a common ID (e.g. via the Open ID Foundation), those attempts are still in their infancy. In the end, all the social services fall back on my email address because that is a unique and consistent way of identifying me.

2. Single inbox
With all the services that I subscribe to, I am expected to regularly check in several times a day to catch up on the news from my social network. I may actually do that several times a day on Twitter and Facebook but it is hardly realistic to keep track of multiple accounts. In the enterprise, the situation is similar with all the different social services such as Dropbox, Box, Yammer, SharePoint, Lync, Salesforce Chatter, SAP StreamWork or OpenText Pulse.  That’s why all these vendors rely on email alerts to inform me that someone has posted a note for me on a social site. In fact, Twitter recently expanded the use of email alerts which indicates that social networks aren’t winning this particular battle. Email has managed to achieve what no other software managed to do yet – it trained me to come looking for new messages on a regular basis.

3. Targeted messages
Email is not a very good collaboration tool. Collaboration is about multiple persons jointly working on a task. When you receive those endless and frustrating email threats that keep CCing everyone, whether it’s relevant or not, you know that someone is using email for the wrong purpose. Social software can improve such collaboration significantly. However, email is a very effective way for any one-to-one and one-to-many communication. If I don’t expect a task to be worked on by a team, email is the right way to communicate to that team. Sure, I can send a “message” on Facebook but that’s really just email. Besides, Facebook sends me a real email to alert me about this message. Maybe, the new generation of millennials can do all their work on Facebook and not use email at all. But there is nothing wrong with using email – when used for the right type of communication.

While I agree that email has many shortcomings, social media is not a panacea. I keep hearing complaints from people who get too many emails. Well folks, sorry to tell you, but you can just as well get too many messages in your social site. You can find a lot spam in your social networks and, if you are a poor communicator, social media isn’t going to save you. Social software has created tremendous opportunities for team collaboration but no, I don’t believe that it will make email obsolete anytime soon.

The Social Disconnect

There is a developing crisis in the enterprise 2.0 world. With every vendor rushing to grab a piece of the enterprise social pie, I as a user am finding myself in a situation where I am expected to be social in too many environments. This picture tells the story:

Where should I update my status now?

The picture shows the different social applications on my iPhone. Each of these applications is expecting me to be social and active to help harness the collective wisdom of the organization. But the practicality gets in the way: in how many environments can I feasibly update my status regularly? In how many environments can I really socially interact with my friends? I’d argue, only in one.

I use Twitter as the primary environment for my status messages. They are automatically syndicated to LinkedIn and to Facebook via Selected Tweets. I also update my status on OpenText Pulse which is our internal, secure and compliant social tool. But because it is secure, compliant, and work-related, my activity here is less social and more professional than on Twitter where I let my free spirit show its true face. All the other social environments don’t get any interaction from me other than sharing documents or answering questions. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I use Yammer and Box.net through my association with AIIM because that’s what AIIM selected - both are free for our purpose (or pretty cheap). We are not really using Salesforce Chatter but since my company uses Salesforce.com, I wanted to check it out. Same for SAP StreamWork. None of these social environments get much activity from me - they are being used more as a traditional group collaboration tools than the “Facebook for the Enterprise”.

The bottom line is that enterprises will hardly succeed to convince users to be active in multiple disconnected social environments. There will be need for integration and there will be some winners and losers. And the likely winners will be the ones that touch the most users across the enterprise. In any case, it will be interesting to watch!

Will Social Media Replace Email?

One of the frequently touted benefits of social media is the avoidance of email. Email is a powerful tool for individual communication but it crumbles quickly when a group of people start communicating in a common thread. The replies from different individuals start coming back at different times, often responding when the issue has already evolved. Email is a great communication tool but a lousy collaboration tool.

Social media (and its predecessor, collaboration software) makes it possible to see all the replies and conversations in a single place, in a logical order and visible to everyone who should see them. Social media is clearly a better choice for team collaboration than email. But the big question is:

Will social media replace email?

I don’t think so. At least not that soon. One of the major achievements of email was the concept of inbox. The inbox became the one, single place to look for what’s going on. This is the one place where you find everything. In a way, the inbox serves as a task list. The things to do are right there.

In fact, workers are automatically drawn to their inbox when they have a free minute - and the inbox tells them what to do next. This type of work habit is probably not the most proactive and productive, but it happens all too often.

Right now, every vendor is adding social capabilities to their system - ERP, CRM, sales force automation, enterprise content management, office infrastructure - everybody has a story. And as organizations run most of these systems, they are ending up with a multitude of social media deployments. Today, there is no such thing as a common social inbox.

The big success of email was the establishment of a single inbox and social media will need to come up with an alternative to seriously challenge email. Facebook understands that - at least it appears that way. Facebook Connect allows users to log into Facebook through other applications and that could be the basis for Facebook becoming the communication center of the social universe.

Facebook, however, is not an enterprise solution and enterprises need a secure alternative. In the mean time, email remains the common denominator and all social media solutions rely on email notifications to get the users’ attention. That makes social media hardly a replacement for email.

Perhaps, email does not need to be replaced.

Did Foreigners Help Obama Win?

I wrote about Content Without Borders a few months ago, wondering why media companies continue to create artificial borders on the Internet. Right now, I am sitting at the Zurich airport in Switzerland and my Netflix is telling me that I cannot watch any movies even though I pay a monthly subscription. And so I have to write another blog post. This time, I will touch upon politics although the topic is really social media.

Much has been written about the role of social media in the 2008 US presidential election. The Obama camp has skillfully used Facebook and other social media tools to amass a huge number of supporters, donors and volunteers. Their eventual victory has been at least partly attributed to this social media campaign and since then, marketers have started to take social media very seriously.

What has not received as much attention was the role of foreigners in the 2008 election campaign. Indeed, people from around the world had been widely supporting Mr. Obama as a presidential candidate which became clearly obvious when he received a Nobel Peace Price just weeks after being elected. In 2008, however, the foreign nationals didn’t have to just cheer from the side lines. Thanks to social media, they were able to participate. Sure, foreigners couldn’t vote but they could and did endorse and support their preferred candidate – without any doubt influencing the eventual choice of at least some of the registered voters in the US.

Just think about the implication of this. Technically, these were groups of foreign nationals interfering with a democratic election process of a sovereign nation. And that nation wasn’t just some 3rd world dictatorship; it was the very US of A. Their support in form of public endorsement and sometimes donations was something that wasn’t possible ever before – at least not overtly.

Sure foreign governments were always supporting change in other countries if that suited their interests. Just think of the French support of the American Revolution or the German support of the October Revolution in Russia. But all such support was done either covertly or as part of an open conflict. This time, however, there was neither conflict nor a clandestine government intervention. In fact, the governments had nothing to do with it – the people did it on their own.

This shows that the Internet really is without borders – and it should be. The people of the world are clearly impacted by the domestic and foreign policies of the United States and they should have a right to voice their support – even if they don’t have a right to vote. The Internet natives are changing the rules of life as we know it and politics will not be an exception. Who knows - one day we may need to rethink the definition of voters and of citizenship.

However, I will leave that up to the politicians to figure out. I’m just excited to have the entire world at my fingertips. That is except for my Netflix movies…

About Italy and the Correlation between SMS and Twitter

I have had some interesting discussions about the use of social media in Italy. Of course Italians are very social people – they love to communicare and exchange personal information. This is not just a stereotype. Italians like to hang out with each other and if they can’t do that in person, social media comes in handy.

According to a March 2010 report by Nielsen, Italians are the world champions in spending time on social media - on average, every Italian has done so for 6 and half hours per month. Facebook has effectively become the virtual piazza, where Italians go to meet with each other and sip on a virtual amaretto.

However, when looking at Twitter, Italy is punching in a much lower weight category. According to the research by Sosomos, less than 0.5% of tweets are being contributed by Italians. Twitter is clearly not particularly popular in Italy which might come as a surprise considering the strength of Facebook.

Originally I thought this was because of the forced brevity of Twitter messages. After all, you can’t speak with your hands on Twitter and, really, how much emozione can you fit into 140 characters? But that argument fails given the massive popularity of SMS messaging with a 160-character limit which Italians use heavily. Italians SMS almost as much as they talk on their mobile phones, which seems to be all the time. (I found a Nielsen report from 2008 that says that only the Russians and Swiss text more than the Italiani).

So maybe it is the apparent lack of personal communication on Twitter. After all, SMS messages are one to one while Twitter posts are one to many. Facebook relationships are bi-lateral while Twitter followers are unilateral. I follow Eric Schmidt but he doesn’t follow me (by the way, why not, @ericschmidt?). The public nature of Twitter posts might seem to be more akin to public speaking than to a dinner-table discussion of Facebook conversations. After all, the heaviest users of Twitter are Americans who love public speaking. The Italians are more into looking good, making a bella figura, over being popular.


I am speculating, of course, and the real reasons may be very different. But I find it fascinating that there are such differences in communication between countries and I also find it notable that there appears to be no correlation between the popularity of SMS and Twitter.