Zuckerberg – “morally challenged geek or misunderstood genius” – Peter Foster, Financial Post

January 7, 2011

There is a fantastic article, Mark Zuckerberg’s close-up,  by Peter Foster in today’s Financial Post – definitely recommended reading for anyone who has seen The Social Network movie and is fascinated by the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg.

Peter reviews Mark vs. the Mark portrayed in The Social Network movie and in doing so gives a run down on the current financial situation facing Facebook.  Eloquently written, Peter reminds us that the ‘moral’ issue today is Facebook’s business model that proffers users information to buyers.   He writes:

A more fundamental “moral” issue, however, relates to the nature of Facebook’s business model, which is based on the exploitation of networks of alleged friendship to sell stuff. Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/06/peter-foster-mark-zuckerbergs-close-up/#ixzz1AP8173l9

Note:  I haven’t figured out why the SEC would force an IPO on Facebook – is this because of Goldman Sachs?

I see Mark Zuckerberg as the misunderstood genius – what I can’t tell from the movie is just how much of an idea was shared from the Winklevoss twins.  If it was only a conversation in a fancy private club, as depicted in the movie, then the $65M for a conversation is a pretty good return given they didn’t execute.  If they paid MZ while he blew them off looking at the code he did not use, then arguably the issue is larger.

In MZ’s defense (and I can’t help likely a smart a** who would re-calculate 18K + 1K = $19K for a condescending lawyer), the right idea is important but development and refinement of the idea to create a business and its online execution or activation is extremely difficult to nail.  I guess that’s why Mark Z is person of the year.   Now take time to read Time’s article – it certainly depicts Mark in a completely different light and at the same time, explains just what an amazing accomplishment facebook really is.

2 Comments | Facebook | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

The science of sharing

November 4, 2010

I’m exploring the science of sharing lately – that is what to do to absolutely maximize the sharing (conversion) of your material – this cuts across facebook, twitter and youtube.

Some quick observations that I’ve made:

Twitter

  1. Keep your tweets below 110 characters so that re-tweeting RT is easier to do.
  2. Do your follow Fridays early in the day – not late on Friday – since those you #FF are more likely to retweet you.
  3. Consider your audience and the time of your tweets.  I get a lot of replies and RTs early in the morning and late at night.  Lots of great studies on the best time for tweeting.
  4. Use hashtags.    I put hashtags in my profile description!  Some hashtags are autopicked up and retweeted like #toronto.  Additionally – for us campaign or event tweeters – here is a great blog post by Amanda Miller Littlejohn that I’ve come across that gives tips on using hashtags.  My experience (see Lessons for live social media coverage) are that you can not always pick your hashtag – but if you can seed it and it sticks then Amanda’s tips go a long way to making your hashtag more effective

Facebook

  1. On Facebook – instead of adding a picture, add a blog post with the picture.  This gives you a better use of the wall post real estate as pictures end up leaving a lot of dead white space and blogs allow more content sharing around the photo.
  2. On Facebook – if posting a video to your wall, be sure to add a comment including the run time of your video – again using the real estate on the website to your advantage.   I would say that Facebook itself (the fan pages for any official Facebook page) demonstrate best practices on wall posting for videos & blogs.
  3. On Facebook – in your wall posted videos – add an embedded link back to your facebook page.

Youtube

  1. Use the Youtube player to share, if you can.  All the sharing is built into the player.
  2. In your videos for youtube – try not to have the video die a slow death e.g. black out to a long standing logo with a run time of more than a couple seconds or else viewers will skip off before ending the viewing of your video.  Its at the end of the video that the sharing features appear.

Beyond these specific tips – I’ve been working with JWT Minneapolis on the measurement of sharing – how many visitors are generated by each social media tool.  How can we position and content encourage the most sharing.  Its a science that I still have much research to do.

I welcome your thoughts!

 

3 Comments | share, social networks, strategy | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

Don’t be impulsive on the impulse for social media

February 2, 2010

I’ve had a series of interesting meetings in the last few weeks with rather large organizations – belonging to three different industries including health care, big ticket consumer goods and, an old favorite, home building (condominium development/real estate).   And although the needs were different, there was a common veil and almost desperation to do something in social media.

In all three meetings the marketing leadership knew that social media was upon them and was required in their marketing planning.  And yet, there was no real understanding of where to start or what to budget – and sometimes, what questions to ask.

I’ve had past clients assume that step one would be setting up a corporate facebook fan page – which is not always the case.  Before rushing in.. I always like to start with tried and true…. for instance

  • what are your business and marketing objectives and how does digital feed them (which is often my question to answer)
  • what are your target markets, their needs, wants and behaviours?
  • What loyal and sizable networks exist today that need a place for loyalty (and so potentially for social networking)?
  • What pain points exist in your customer experience?  What creates churn and loyalty in that experience?
  • How well are your current digital efforts serving you? (which leads to analytics and performance evaluation)

There is more to do than what I suggest above as I haven’t touched on organizational readiness nor a technology tool set review.  But importantly, I do advise not to jump to social media vehicle selection before understand what goals are to be achieved.    Its a wild west out there – and strategy has to lead.

1 Comment | metrics, social networks, strategy | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

Keeping your personal life private on Facebook using limited profiles

December 4, 2009

I was starting to accept that my Facebook personal life would careen into my business life.  Though I’ve worked hard to keep my personal and business lives separate, my use of “Friends only” in my privacy settings was starting to lose its effectiveness.  I fell into awkward ground this past July when I started to manage corporate Facebook fan pages on behalf of clients.

To manage a clients’ page, I have to be befriend the administrator on Facebook.

The reverse holds true as well.  For me to provide administrative rights back to clients for pages I’d set up, I can not do this until we are “friends”.  And though I do truly like all my clients, having instant deep friendship presents its awkward moments.

But there is a fix for all this.  You can add your business connections to Facebook and keep your privacy too.

As heavy social networker, I definitely use Facebook to hold pieces of my personal life.  I mostly connect with friends and family, and a number former colleagues with whom I share a healthy, personal respect for.  Like many people, Facebook holds my wedding photos, major milestones my children’s lives and really bad high school pictures.  I’ve even used Facebook to reunite my 14 cousins through a group and there within we share all our vintage photos of our mutual grandparents.

But there is a fix for all this.

There is a little known Facebook feature called a limited profile that can provide greater privacy.

Creating limited profiles and managing them is not intuitive so up till now I’ve added people to my limited profile but have not specified what this limited profile can and can not see.  And worth noting is that if you do not take an extra step to exclude your limited profile from key information, then your ‘limited profile’ friends see just as much as your regular ones.

As my business keeps creeping in on my personal life, and local politicians want to become ‘friends’, I decided to master this feature.

Here are a the steps:

First assign a friend to the limited profile list.

You can do this one of two ways:

  1. When you accept the friendship of someone, you have an option to add them to a list.  There will be a Facebook added list name (or tag) called ‘limited profile’.
  2. Alternatively, you can go into your ‘friends’ section and choose ‘limited profile’, a menu pick on the left hand side, and then add friends to this list.

With a list of limited profile chosen people – you then need to identify what this list will NOT see in your Facebook profile.  Remember, the default is that they can see everything your friends see until you specify what they can not see.

Indicate which profile sections are excluded from your limited profile.

In Settings (top right hand corner), choose privacy settings.

Customize limited profile Among your privacy settings, choose “profile”.  Under ‘basic’, you will see a number of sections of your profile.

Using the pull down menu, choose ‘customize’.    [that was always the menu pick that trumped me .. it was not obvious that I had to customize to specify limited profile]

You will get a little popup box asking who can see this section.  Go to the red “except these people” section and start typing “limited profile”.

Exeception limited profile

The information you may want to hold dear are:

*  Status and links
*  Some photos tagged of me
*  Some photo albums
*  Videos tagged about me

Note – you can also exclude your limited profile list from contact information section too. Just follow the same logic as above.

And voila!  You now can mix some business with pleasure on Facebook.

Do note:  For those who want to delve deeper into Facebook privacy, I found an excellent blog post about this a while back called 10 privacy settings every Facebook user should know by Nick O’Neill.

HeadshotThis original post was submitted to the Community Marketing Blog’s Blogging contest

Laurie Dillon-Schalk is the Chief Marketing Strategist and founder of Social Wisdom - a Toronto based digital marketing agency that helps firms and individuals use social media and the web wisely.

You can find Laurie on Twitter at twitter.com/Ldillonschalk or on her blog at Socialwisdom.ca

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Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

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