Disruptive Conversations

With all the hype about Google+ lately, a lot of people have been seeking to understand how it is different - or not - from Twitter and Facebook. The folks over at Rocketboom came out with this video that does a nice job of explaining the differences - kudos to the team!

And yes, I'm naturally on Google+ these days...

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This = VERY cool!

I just visited several of the Facebook Pages where I am an admin today and noticed that in the right sidebar there is this "Notifications" drop-down menu... with the number of new notifications visible if there are any.

This is way better than the ability to "Use Facebook as a page" rolled out in the Facebook Page updates back in February (that I covered with a detailed walk-through). With that update, you could see notifications of new interaction with your page... but only if you switched to using Facebook "as the page".

Now... this "Notifications" menu is very nicely displayed on the page when you simply visit as yourself.

Nicely done, Facebook... as Page owners, we are now a huge distance where where we were (with no notifications whatsoever) last year.

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“There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!”
- Cosmo in “Sneakers” (1992)

I could only reflect on this quote as the news exploded last week that Facebook had hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to spread negative stories about Google, and then continued in almost Keystone Kops-fashion with both Facebook and B-M competing to see who could throw the other under the bus the fastest... complete with silly aspects like Burson-Marsteller deleting posts from their Facebook page (they have stopped doing that, as is obvious from their page now).

In the midst of all this there was the predictable outrage from so many in the PR / communications industry, with statements about clear violations of ethics and so much more. Neville Hobson provides a solid summary over on his blog along with some recommendations for B-M.

My only real thought through it all was...

is anyone REALLY surprised?

If anything, my surprise was only that the Burson-Marsteller employees were amateur enough that they got caught!

The War

The reality is that the quote that Ben Kingsley's character Cosmo said to his friend Martin (Robert Redford) almost 20 years ago is if anything only MORE true today.

There's a war out there.

A war for our eyeballs.

A war for our attention.

A war for our dollars.

... and we're not talking petty cash... we're talking billions of dollars.. maybe trillions.

Take a look at what you do every day. Take a look at the tools you use. Where's your email? Where's your blog hosted? Where do post status updates and connect with friends? Where do you post your photos? What do you use to write documents? What do you use to find your way from one place to another?

Odds are that for almost all of you reading this, the answer is...

the Cloud.

Online.

Somewhere... on someone's servers... on someone's service.

Even for documents... Google Apps, now Microsoft's Office 365, and more and more and more...

We are evolving into the Cloud.

And therein lies the war.

The war is about who controls the information... it's about "what we see and hear, how we work, what we think".

It's about who actually runs the "cloud"... who controls the servers where the data actually resides. It's about who owns the plumbing down underneath.

It's also about who controls how we access the "cloud"... who controls the tools we use... the interfaces we use... the services we use... even the bandwidth we use...

It's a world war...

It's THE war that will define our future... and whether that future will be in the hands of closed, proprietary "walled gardens" controlled by a few corporations - or whether we will have a more open Internet where we all have more choice and control.

Oh, yes, and it's a war for BILLIONS of dollars...

In That Context...

The other reality is that this Burson-Marsteller "kerfuffle" between Facebook and Google is only a minor skirmish in the larger war.

The battles are playing out all around us... online with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft and everyone else who would like to be in that game... in the mobile sphere with Apple, Google (Android), Microsoft and everyone else... in the underlying plumbing with the telco/mobile carriers (AT&T, Verizon, a zillion others), the cable providers (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, a zillion others), the other ISPs, the other wireless providers, Google, and everyone else...

... and in so many other facets of our lives. Pick an area... and there's a battle going on as part of this larger war.

In that context, the fact that Facebook engaged a company like Burson-Marsteller to spread rumors and stir up negative publicity against an opponent is not at all surprising.

For many engaged in this war, they live by a simple premise:

The ends justify the means.

And with that world-view, such quaint views as "ethics" don't matter. All that matters is...

Winning

By any means.

Was what Burson-Marsteller and Facebook did sleazy and unethical by the standards most of us hold?

Absolutely

Will Burson-Marsteller's actions once again hurt those of us who take pride in the PR / communications industry and would like it to be viewed more positively?

Absolutely

Will those of us who do abide by a code of ethics in our PR / communications efforts once again have to endure having our reputation tarnished by those who don't?

Absolutely

Will will see more of these kind of sleazy actions, perhaps not from Burson-Marsteller but from other firms?

ABSOLUTELY

... but odds are that others will look to cover their tracks more and not get caught.

There's a war out there, my friends, a world war...

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Oh, Tweetdeck, say it isn't so... rumors have been swirling for months and now appear to be confirmed by TechCrunch that Twitter will be acquiring TweetDeck for $40-50 million USD. A zillion other sites have written about this in the 21 hours since TechCrunch posted their piece (well, all the ones that weren't engaging in the feeding frenzy about Osama Bin Laden), but here's my view:

I fear for my TweetDeck!

You see, TweetDeck has become far more for me than simply a "Twitter client". It is more my "social media command console". When I'm in my home office I have it running on a large iMac screen, complete with all my various Twitter lists, Twitter searches, Facebook updates and so much more:

As you can perhaps see at the very bottom of that screenshot, I have a ton of columns in TweetDeck, lining up with various searches, lists, for different accounts. I've arranged the columns so I can easily move back and forth to scan what is going on with various areas of interest or for different accounts. It works great. Sure, it's an Adobe AIR client, so it naturally sucks up more CPU and memory than I'd like... but the convenience and power of the app make it such that I'll live with the drain on my system and hope that maybe some day AIR will suck less.

When I'm on the road, TweetDeck is fired up on my laptop providing me a mobile command center. I was even using it for a while on my iPad... although there were too many crashes and I actually tried out the "official" Twitter client for the iPad... and have admittedly come to like that client on the iPad.

Part of TweetDeck's strength is its support for multiple accounts. I'm currently using it to manage:

• 5 Twitter accounts
• 1 Facebook account (my own)
• 1 Facebook page

The beauty of TweetDeck is that you can so easily post out to multiple accounts... or retweet from multiple accounts. If I post something to one account and then want to retweet it from other accounts, it is a simple matter of clicking the "retweet" icon for a tweet and then clicking the buttons associated with the accounts I want to retweet from. I've yet to find a Twitter client that rocks the multiple account feature better than TweetDeck.

Ditto the support for the "classic" retweet (that you could edit) and the "new" retweet (that is a pointer to the tweet). TweetDeck gives you the option to choose between the two approaches and, if you don't set the choice in your options, you get this box each time you retweet, giving you the flexibility to choose right then what kind of retweet you want to do:

I love it! It works perfectly for me.

Add to this the ease at spawning new searches... viewing profiles... launching new columns on hashtags.... and on and on...

It is, indeed, my social media command center.

So Why The Fear of Twitter?

So why my fear? I mean, on one level this is great for the TweetDeck gang... kudos to them for making a product strong enough to be acquired! (And I mean that, seriously... they are great folks there!)

But that strength is my concern... I worry that:

1. TWITTER WILL KILL TWEETDECK - Twitter already has an "official" Twitter client, at least on Mac OS X. Why does it need a second? If, as the TechCrunch article suggests, this is a purely defensive move by Twitter, will they truly invest in keeping TweetDeck alive and improving?

2. TWITTER WILL STRIP THE NON-TWITTER FEATURES FROM TWEETDECK - Note that I said above that TweetDeck is my "social media command center", not my "Twitter command center". One of the great aspects of TweetDeck is that it also lets me bring in my Facebook status updates, my LinkedIn updates, my FourSquare updates and, if I cared, updates from MySpace and Google Buzz. I've come to really only use the Facebook updates... but it's excellent to have both together in the same client. Particularly in that I can post to both using the single client.

Why should Twitter keep all this non-Twitter functionality in the client when all they really care about is.. well... Twitter?

Sure, they might not immediately remove it, but will engineers really spend time improving or fixing the non-Twitter features? When they have so many Twitter-related improvements to fix? I have to question how long the answer would be "yes".

3. THE THREAT TO THE LARGER TWITTER ECOSYSTEM - On a more macro level, I worry about the acquisition of TweetDeck putting even more of a chill on third-party development than is already there. Twitter is at a point where they really have to choose between being an "open" platform or being an entire solution or service. They certainly seem to want to be more of the entire solution... and further client consolidation is only going to drive that.

And we, as users very definitely lose if there is not a broader ecosystem.

In the end...

Ultimately it may be that TweetDeck needs this acquisition. I don't know their finances or what they are trying to do. It may be that this is their best path to growth.

And maybe my fears will be unfounded and Twitter will let TweetDeck thrive and grow as the multi-service command center that it is.

And maybe the rumors of the acquisition may be completely unfounded...

It just does cause me to be concerned.

What about you? Do the rumors concern you? What concerns you most about a potential acquisition of TweetDeck by Twitter?

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If you spend any time on Facebook, odds are you've had more than one occasion where you just had to go "HUH?" at the ads that are shown to you.... a few moments ago I had another one of those moments:

Some how I'm thinking the ad targeting mechanism was a wee bit too aggressive on that one... :-)

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Lately, several friends and others whose opinions I value highly have started to play "Empire Avenue", a new social "game" where "Everyone's For Sale" and you can buy and sell shares of "people" who are on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

No big deal, really... I mean, hey, we all need breaks and escapes and if that is how they want to spend their time, that's perfectly fine by me. It's undoubtedly much tamer and better than half a zillion other activities, and being personally a big fan and player of traditional board games, Empire Avenue sounds a whole lot like Monopoly or another similar game.

What's my issue?

All the Empire Avenue updates pollute my Twitter feed.

Suddenly I'm scanning down my tweet stream and keep seeing tweets like this:

Grammatical error aside (Hello, Empire Avenue? You need to do a basic check of "if number = 1, use 'share', else use 'shares'.), here's the thing:

I don't CARE if you bought a share in someone!

Really and truly... I don't.

Do I Care About Your (Virtual) Cow?

Which is where I'm getting the flashbacks to Farmville. When it first started in Facebook, suddenly we all saw messages in our Facebook NewsFeed about:

• how so-and-so bought a new cow; or
• how their plants needed to be watered; or
• that they had plowed X new fields; or
• that we could help them out by buying them a pig.

And either you loved the idea and started playing the game yourself or you hated seeing the updates and wanted to get rid of them.

The Fundamental Difference

Which serves to highlight a fundamental difference between Facebook and Twitter:

On Facebook you can hide updates from an APPLICATION, whereas on Twitter you can't.

As most all of us on Facebook now know, you can click on the "X" next to an update in your news feed and if it is from an application you can "hide" updates from that app:

Once you do this, you never see another update from that application until you go and unblock that app. (And do any of us really remember where that unblock option is?) So for me personally, Farmville, Cityville and all the animal and jewel games have just gone away... they no longer "pollute" my Facebook newsfeed.

The issue, of course, is:

We don't have this blocking option in Twitter.

Twitter is a much simpler system and in that simplicity is really a great part of its beauty and the reason, in my opinion, for its great success.

The process of using Twitter's API is drop-dead simple... and there isn't any complex process behind it. Anyone can create an app that connects to your Twitter stream... and there are loads of toolkits and services out there that will help you with that.

But you can't easily block updates from an application that someone is using. You have to either "unfollow" the person...

or just learn to ignore their updates.

Which, to be honest, is what I've done with FourSquare updates that many of my friends publish out to their tweet streams... and is obviously what I'm going to be doing with regard to Empire Avenue tweets.

I don't expect Twitter to offer us a solution - although perhaps some of the third-party Twitter clients will offer that option (since they can gain access through the API to what app is posting the tweet and could conceivably block on that app). Of course, with Twitter's recent war on third-party clients, we may never see this kind of innovation, but I digress...

It just highlights a fundamental difference in the level of control that you have between what you see in your feeds for Facebook and Twitter.

P.S. I Could, Of Course, Be Wrong

I should note that I'm still trying to stay open-minded about Empire Avenue itself. I haven't signed up yet (Hey, I was on vacation last week building garden beds and writing :-) ) and I've read what Jeremiah Owyang, Scott Monty and others have written, as well as an interview with the Empire Avenue CEO:

• Empire Avenue Provides Social Gaming Opportunities –and Challenges– for Brands
• The Gamification of Social Media
• Empire Avenue CEO Dups talks about The Game Layer, Influence, Network Value and Foursquare

I'm still reading and watching. My initial reaction is what I wrote above... maybe that will change over time... maybe it won't.

Meanwhile, I do find myself wishing I could just hide all updates from some apps like this in my Twitter stream..

What do you think? Do you wish there was a way to NOT see updates from games or apps in your Twitter stream? Or have you just gotten really good at ignoring tweets like these?

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Remember back in December when we were talking about how to "claim" a "Community Page" on Facebook? And then in January when it appeared Facebook was reneging on our ability to claim community pages?

Despite all that, I was proceeding on good faith, assuming that at some point someone in Facebook might see the request I file back in December and act on it.

Someone eventually did.

They DENIED my request.

And in typical Facebook style, there was no word of an appeal and instead a pointer to a useless FAQ page that had no info that I could find about community pages.

Here's the email I received today:

As text:

Unfortunately, after further review, you did not meet the requirements to take over the Page in question. At this time we will not be able to provide you admin rights to this Page. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

For more information about this feature, as well as answers to frequently asked questions, please visit Facebook's Help Center by clicking the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=175

Follow that link, please, and see if you can find mention of "Community Pages" anywhere? I couldn't... but maybe I was just too tired. Can you find a mention? (In the links on that page... not by going into the search box.)

Backing Up For Some Context

To review the issue here, which I covered in my December post, Facebook for some reason rolled out "community pages" back in April 2010 and created a "community page" for companies and brands, even those that already had invested time and resources in creating their own Facebook page.

The impact of this is that on places like my own Facebook profile page the link to my employer, Voxeo, does NOT go to the page that Voxeo has create at:

http://www.facebook.com/voxeo

but instead to the "community page" that Facebook created at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Voxeo/112160428800521

Which is simply an import of the Wikipedia page for Voxeo. That's it. (And there's no way to edit a community page.)

Now obviously in an ideal world, as one of the people responsible for Voxeo's online presence, and specifically the one doing most all the admin for Voxeo's Facebook Page, I'd like to either merge the pages together or replace the community page with our page.

At the very least I'd like to update the community page with a link over to the Facebook page that we maintain.

So when the opportunity appeared back in December to "claim" a community page, I naturally went ahead and submitted a request.

Not Authorized?

Fast forward to today... almost four months have gone by without a peep out of Facebook... and it's with a denial. I "did not meet the requirements to take over the Page in question".

So please, dear Facebook, kindly explain to us...

What precisely ARE the requirements to take over a Community Page?

Is the requirement to take over a company page that you NOT be affiliated with the company?

That's about the only reason I can come up with for why you wouldn't authorize my request.

Because, Facebook, if you do allow a company representative to claim a "community page" in the name of the company, well, let me count the ways I'm authorized on Voxeo's behalf:

• I head up Voxeo's social media efforts, including being the primary blogger on our many blogs and being in the prime on our @Voxeo Twitter account.
  
  
• I'm an admin on Voxeo's own Facebook Page!
  
  
• I'm our prime spokesperson to media, industry analysts and others.

I could go on... but you get the point. I'm not the CEO (or any CxO), but from a brand management point-of-view, that's what I am employed to do for the company.

If *I* don't meet the requirements to take over a community page for a company, who does?

(And if the point is that Facebook wants someone "neutral", fine... I can understand that (even if I don't agree)... just tell us!)

Back To The Original Issue...

The larger issue here, though, comes back to simply this:

I WANT TO CONTROL WHERE I LINK TO FROM MY FACEBOOK PROFILE!

On my Facebook profile, I cannot control the fact that the link on the name of my employer goes NOT to the page I want it to go to (Voxeo's own page) but rather to this community page that Facebook created.

Why, Facebook?

Why can't I control which pages I want to link to?

If we had that control, this whole "community page" issue would be a moot point. I - and other Voxeons - could simply choose to link to the "real" page that we maintain and that shows what Voxeo is up to today.

But I can't control the links on my Profile. I'm locked in to Facebook's walled garden and the rules that they make. If I don't like them, I can of course leave Facebook (and I know some who have).

So it goes.

Perhaps in the next profile redesign that Facebook will do to make our info even smaller so that they display even more ads in our faces... perhaps then maybe, just maybe, they might change their linking policy.

But I'm not holding my breath...

Meanwhile, I'd really just like someone from Facebook to offer a clear explanation of who would meet the requirements to take over a company Community Page. That's it. How about it, Facebook?

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Once again, Facebook amazes me with some of the broken abilities around importing a RSS feed into a Facebook Page. Gee, what's wrong with this blog post imported into a Facebook "Note"?

If you look at the original post on Voxeo's blog, you can see that the images look fine there:

And in the RSS feed, viewed in a browser, the images look fine, too:

What's the issue? I'm sure some of you have figured it out by now... the image we are using for Tobias Goebel is in fact a larger image than we are showing in the blog post. The image is 302x420 pixels. We are then using the width and height attributes of the <img> tag to reduce the display of the image to the smaller size. In the IMG tag, we have these attributes:

width="89" height="123"

And sure, we can get into a philosophical discussion around whether this is the right thing to do or not. I personally do not do this in general because from a speed point-of-view you are sending a larger image file than you need for a display. I resize my images to the size I want before uploading. In this case, I grabbed a link to the image from another post without realizing it was doing this type of image resizing via attributes. My mistake.

Be that as it may, the point is that the post is out there... it is published... and...

FACEBOOK IS IGNORING THE HTML ATTRIBUTES!

Facebook is simply ignoring the width and height attributes.

HUH?

Given that we as authors do often use those attributes to specify the size of our images, why wouldn't Facebook render them correctly?

This of course makes me wonder... what other attributes is Facebook ignoring? Do I have to be checking every single post that gets imported into Facebook to make sure it looks right?

Thinking that I could just simply go into the text of the "Note" and change this, I naively went into Facebook, used the "Use Facebook As Page" feature to switch to "Voxeo" so that I could edit the www.facebook.com/voxeo page... and promptly found a completely blank Wall:

Nice, Facebook... really nice. :-(

I tried it in both Google Chrome and Firefox. No joy.

This is for the entire Wall of the Page. I see... nothing. I'm not even looking at the specific post yet.

I can switch back to "Use Facebook as Dan", of course... but then the only option I seem to have is to delete the post. There is a "Edit" button, but that just lets me add tags to the post.

So for the moment it appears that Tobias is going to be stuck with a huge image until I can go through the process of:

1. Deleting this "Note" out of Facebook.
2. Changing the original post to have a smaller image of Tobias.
3. Re-importing the post to Facebook either as a Note or as a link.

Multiple steps that could be completely avoided... if only Facebook respected the HTML attributes of the original post.

Ah, the fun, fun, fun of living in the Facebook world...

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Have you wondered why you haven't seen anything from certain friends on Facebook in a while? Have you thought perhaps some friends just aren't using Facebook any more? Maybe they are too busy? Have you been feeling like you've been seeing a lot of messages from a certain circle of people?

Guess what?

Facebook is filtering out many of your friends!

If you scroll down to the bottom of your NewsFeed and click the "Edit Options" button:

You will see the option "Show posts from":

With the option set by default to "Friends and pages you interact with most".

What this means is that if you don't "Like" or "Comment" on updates from a friend or a Page over a certain period of time... then updates from those friends and pages will STOP appearing in your NewsFeed.

The fix is, of course, to simply change the option to "All of your friends and pages".

To Be More Relevant?

I am guessing Facebook did this in order to help your NewsFeed "be the most relevant to you". After all, if you are interacting with certain friends and pages, it would make sense to show you their posts. But in my mind...

this is what the "Top News" link at the top of your NewsFeed should be for.

However, this default option removes people from your "Most Recent" NewsFeed as well as the "Top News".

Facebook is effectively disconnecting you from your friends, or, at least, the ones that don't write much or with whom you don't interact much.

The thing is that while I do interact with a certain subset of people, I enjoy reading updates from other people, particularly some who may not post updates all that often. I may not "Like" or "Comment" on them, but I enjoy reading them.

Screwing Page Owners Yet Again

Notice, too, that this is also for Facebook Pages. So if you are a company or organization that has invested time/energy/money in building out a Facebook Page... guess what? Many (most?) of the people who "Like" your Page are probably no longer seeing your updates! So it doesn't matter if you have 1,000 people who like your page, because maybe only the 20 that have either "Liked" or "Commented" on a recent item on your page will still be seeing updates from the Page appearing in their NewsFeed.

Nice going, Facebook.

The only good news for Facebook Page owners, I guess, is that you do have the ability to send out an "update" via a Facebook message to everyone who "Likes" your page. Of course, it shows up as an "update" type of message and may be ignored by many. But at least Facebook Page owners have a way to notify "Likers" that they may be missing any updates.

Facebook's Communication Black Hole

In typical Facebook style, I don't remember ever hearing about this change in settings. Was this perhaps a subtle change in the new profile layout that was forced upon all of us?

Did I miss some notification? I only learned of this setting when I saw a Facebook Note that was shared by a friend (Evan Leibovitch) who still does show up in my NewsFeed.

Why wouldn't Facebook default this the other way... and give me the option of enabling this filtering?

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Woohoo! Facebook today finally provided some much-needed capabilities to "Facebook Pages" that many of us have been wishing for ever since Facebook first rolled out Pages. In the Note today about Facebook pages, the Facebook team talks about better communication, etc., but for page admins, the biggest thing is probably:

NOTIFICATIONS!

Yep... we finally get them!

For those not wanting to blindly upgrade to the new format (which, as I note below, all pages will move to by March 1, 2011, regardless of whether you want to or not), I upgraded one of my pages and took screenshots along the way. (The page is for my latest book... it gets the least traffic of any, so I upgraded it first.)

First I'll show you Facebook's "Tour" of what you will get, followed by the upgrade process itself, and then dive into the new settings a bit.

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The Tour

You should be able to go to

http://www.facebook.com/pages/status/

and see a list of all the pages for which you are an admin and their upgrade status. There is a "Tour" button next to each page which will show you these next screens.

You now have photos on the top of your page, just like a user profile:

Navigation controls are over on the left side now:

The filters on your Wall are now simplified to two options:

As was hinted in the preview some of us briefly got back in December, there are notifications now for your pages:

And there's a new way to edit the settings for a Page:

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The Upgrade Process

The actual process of upgrading is straightforward... you click the "Upgrade" button on a page that takes you to a list of your Pages and their current upgrade status:

You click the "Upgrade" button next to the page in question and you get this warning:

That's pretty much it... and then you have the new page!

Note, by the way, the text in that warning:

All pages on Facebook will appear in the new layout beginning March 1, 2011.

In other words, you can choose NOT to upgrade your pages right now, but you will have to by March 1, 2011, anyway.

Welcome again to Facebook, the land controlled by Facebook... you abide by their rules... or choose to leave.

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The Settings

Of all those features, the new settings seem to be the biggest benefit for Page admins. When I clicked the "Edit Page" icon, I wound up on the "Manage Permissions" tab:

But where I got excited was the first "Your Settings" tab:

Don't know if you can see that on the image, but the second line has a checkbox next to:

Send notifications to .... when people post or comment on your page.

WOOHOO!

This is something that we who have been Facebook Page admins have been requesting really since the pages first came out!

The "Featured" tab shows that if you do the new "Use Facebook as Page" feature, you can "Like" other pages and have them show up here... allowing you to then link in other similar pages:

I switched to that mode, liked the page of Syngress, the book's publisher, and went back into the settings (still using Facebook as the page). I then saw I also had the ability to feature owners of the page:

Predictably, the "Marketing" tab lets you see the ways you can promote your page:

The other tabs are similar to the existing settings that we have.

All in all, it looks like a great upgrade to the Facebook Pages features and functionality. I'll write up more as I work with the settings more.

If you've upgraded your Pages, what have you found that I have captured here?

P.S. Hat tip to my friend Bryan Person who alerted me (on Facebook, naturally) that these new capabilities were finally here!

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