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An interesting look at Ohio State University Medical Center decides to respond to social media comments and questions.
Mike Allen shares in interesting report in this morning’s Politico Playbook from the Emerging Media Research Council analyzing social media usage in US Senate elections specifically looking at the Florida Senate race. The draft report outlines three winning social media strategies (which seem pretty much like common sense to me).
- Facebook – “Candidates who update their profile page regularly give fans a reason to return more frequently, resulting
in higher rates of interaction and larger fan communities.” - Twitter – “High rates of messaging result in greater absolute numbers of followers and a greater level of follower engagement.”
- YouTube – “The most popular political videos are campaign advertisements and position statements crafted specifically for the Web.”
First we had Please Rob Me outlining the best time to burgle your friend’s house from foursquare information. Now we have the IRS and the Justice Department training their agents on how to use social media to collect useful information about you.
I know this sounds conspiracy theorist, but it’s not. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has actually collected training documents from the feds detailing procedures.
- IRS training material on how to search social media, google streetview to investigate taxpayer’s and their business
- Department of Justice powerpoint slides detailing social media companies data rentention policies and how well they cooperate with investigations (facebook does, twitter doesn’t)
Also, I know that the feds aren’t the only governmental body using what you publish on the Internet against you. I personally know someone who was audited by the Arkansas Department of Revenue because of the professionalism of their web site (I guess we all know who is next after this post).
I’ve written about my rules of facebook before, but I just want to reiterate that research has shown that you really don’t have 5,000, 1,000 or even 500 friends on Facebook. Back in the ‘ 90sRobin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, came up with the theory that the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are. Basically these are the people that you come in contact with every year and 150 was known as Dunbar’s number.
Now, Dunbar is researching whether larger social networks (like facebook) have allowed people to stretch their Dunbar number. Dunbar told the Times Online, “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.”
An interesting aside on newspapers and Dunbar’s number: One of the concepts behind hyperlocal newspapers and web sites is that you must reach into all of your reader’s social circles– reach into group of 150 friends– and photograph, report on someone to keep your readers. That’s why you see all the photographs of your neighbors pet or cousin’s softball trophy in your small-town newspaper.
In the United States one out of every four pageviews is from Facebook. Amazing! Google only accounts for one in eight page views (15 percent).
Robert Scoble has an interesting conversation going on his blog looking at what happens to healthcare privacy as social networking moves into the medical arena (make sure you read the comments).
Scoble’s take on it is that the benefits of social networking and getting the crowds feedback on your condition, your physician and your prescriptions. I think it comes back to personal choice– if you choose to release your healthcare information, then you are free to accept the benefits and the consequences.
Here’s fourteen social media experts looking at what’s next in 2009. My favorites include
- “Intimacy touches emotion; emotion powers conversation.”
- “There’s a lot of fixing that needs to be done.”
- “Suddenly, being Facebook friends with your mom will seem less ridiculous than following 4,000 strangers on Twitter.”
Full document laying it all out on the jump.
Shel Israel has written a great case study for his new book Twitterville on how to use twitter to catch a PR disaster before it becomes nightmare and how to put it out quickly using twitter. Israel outlines how Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, catches a web site and the Ford legal team in a spat, get the real story out and helps settles the dispute.
The NY Times reports that the facebook connect service is finally going to start coming online this week as a number of prominent sites start to include it in their web of services.
In the past the decision for site owners was always whether to build your own social network or find ways to include your site in other social networks. Traditional online thinking advocated building your own to maintain your metrics, but of course that meant you had to get everyone and their friends to adopt your social networking tools. Lately, the pendulum has swung the opposite way with sites including links to “share this” on facebook, digg, etc (see the link below every post on this site).
Facebook Connect takes this sharing a step further and allows users to their “real identity” from facebook into other sites. Facebook is pushing connect as a privacy tool where a users facebook privacy settings can follow them across the web to other sites. At the same time site developers are seeing facebook connect as a way to gain more information about their users and create a better profile to service more targeted (read higher CPM) advertising.