Posts Tagged facebook

Sunday Column (73) – communication on Facebook?

Posted by Volker in Sunday Column, personal on 18/07/2010

Now, this week there is so much to talk about that I save it for next week. However, there is something I thought I write about, and that is social media. Again, you might think.

My wife ALWAYS makes a point of telling me anything that is going on with Colin prior to putting it on Facebook. And, I appreciate that very much. However, I am sure there are a few dads/mums out there that see their child grow up on Facebook.

So this is not about having a go at anyone but a general question of influence of social media towards our lives. Now let’s think of the following situation: a husband leaves the house in the morning after changing his daughter’s nappy around 7:30. He comes home around 7 pm from work and feels exhausted. By that time his wife had a busy day with the daughter, seeing her speak, walk, and grow up.

Dad however thinks that he is losing out, so during the day he logs on to Facebook and discovers that his wife keeps posting videos of first steps, pictures and many comments on other babies’ sites. It looks to him as if his wife is enjoying herself, sees the daughter grow up and has all time in the world to comment on other mummy and baby sites. However, he also only sees on Facebook how his baby daughter is developing.

How do we live these days, and what is it I want to communicate with this story?

It is simple. Life is getting more and more complex. We (generally) don’t have time to meet with friends, exchange notes and sit down to discuss things. Instead, we are always busy, striving for more action and achievement. Hence we are trying to fit our social life in a little box which currently is Twitter or Facebook. That is where we share, connect or download the information we are in control of. It becomes our newspaper, our blog and our website, our “shout out place”.

And to talk about a child growing up is nothing different. Life is for sharing, isn’t it? But if one person uploads all the information, e.g. videos, pictures and the other person is only downloading the information due to lack of time, one person loses out. The person that cannot physically be there because life has gone too complex to actually be there in person to see his daughter grow up.

These thoughts make me chuckle and worry at the same time. On the one hand it seems nice that we have the ability to download any information, including death of relatives, growing up of children or first / last steps from a website. But, on the other hand, I am worried about the relationships we create, the relationships between people.

The classic and basic communication model suggest that you have a sender, then disturbance, and a receiver. If this disturbance might become Facebook, or communication changes completely to “Sender-Facebook-Disturbance-Facebook-Receiver”, you end up with more factors where communication can go wrong, and does go wrong.

To all those couples where the partner is not as sensitive as my wife, please think about the above. Think about what you share on Facebook and how it may be perceived. Our information surplus and our need to communicate make social media websites strive, however, that doesn’t mean that you can live a relationship through social media or see your kid grow up on Facebook. Because you cannot make them there either :-)

Have a good week with some human touch.
Cheers,
Volker

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complex life

Posted by Volker in personal, social media on 20/08/2009

Now I hope you will enjoy this post. I want to talk about complex life. We have less time, more information and more things going on – all the time. This makes life very complex in my view.

For years I have been one of those people that needed a Blackberry, a mobile device, needed to extend their followers on Linkedin, Twitter, Xing, Facebook and make sure that all contact details I had from people were up to date. I was always on top of things. But then, life got even more complex.

complexity I noticed 3 years ago that I cannot just add every person I met in my life into a database that already had over 1,000 people on it. Every time I synchronised my phone it took almost an hour, and some people never made it to my list of “friends”. Even 5 years ago when I bought my last laptop, I thought I needed to evaluate every single option of the laptop and every feature to make sure I always have the most up to date equipment. Someone I know just admitted to research weeks (!) what kind of new TV to buy.

Over the years, not only thanks to my wife, I have realised it is not always important to actually have the best and knowing everything. I suppose with Google being available all the time (thanks to my Blackberry that is), you can look things up all the time. Actually LinkedIn and Twitter make things easier in a ways as you have your friends contact details on there and if not, you can send them a DM in order to find out. Or you just update your Twitter or Blog and everyone knows what you are up to. It makes it easier not to phone or talk to people.

I suppose Facebook is the same. You upload your pictures, you update your status that you are at home watching after the baby, get a comment or two and your “social life” is done. And, up to a few months ago, I absolutely loved it. Easy, isn’t it. Blackberry, on the road, updating Facebook, Twitter, coming home, day and job done. You can even poke your wife whilst being on the train and she is at home. Or just throw a sheep at her!

Actually I realised when changing phone contracts how little I use my phone. I haven’t called up my friend in Aberdeen for a while, although we exchanged numerous emails and read each other’s blog. We haven’t been down to Winchester to visit our friends and always found good excuses not to meet up. However, I would really like to but have I not seen their holiday pictures already on Facebook, and their new flat and….

I think social media is great. I live for it, I work for it and I enjoy it. However, and that is where I am a bit struggeling at the moment (hope that is not too honest), how many of those Facebooks we need? How much more time do we need to spend online to update our status and talk to our neighbours? Why not pop over for a cup of tea and have a chat?

Really, because it is easier. But it is actually less social. Instead of trying to keep up to date with 500 followers on Twitter, I decided to reduce the amount of people I follow. I am sorry but I rather start keeping up with less people and do it properly than with more and not really at all. And, if you are part of the ones I un-followed, please accept my apologies and feel free to add me on Facebook instead.

Or, add me on LinkedIn. I think I need to reduce my involvement online just a bit and concentrate more on other projects. My Buddhism and Management project has been neglected, I have to spend more time with the family and want to read more books. commute

I will use the commute, as I have done in the past, to wrap up work at night and answer emails that I didn’t manage to get to during the day – personal as well as work ones. And, in the morning, I will read a book on the train. But, when I am home at night and the weekends, do I really need to constantly update my Twitterfeed, talk about that I “cut my grass” on Twitter? I don’t believe so anymore. Of course that might change :-)

And, of course, I am still a big advocate of Social Media, and there are more things to it than the above networks. Watch this space and let me know what you think about the complexity of life?

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Social Media Summit

Posted by Volker in Marketing, SEM on 15/05/2009

Good morning ;-) I am just back from our International Search Summit focusing on Social Media. And, I have to say, it was a great event.

I don’t really have to say that but thought that WebCertain put on a great summit with high calibre speakers. Let me re-cap:

Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink discussed Facebook once again. She highlighted some key facts and shows that Facebook is a global player for social media. However, do not forget there are some other local networks out there that take on market share and are bigger than Facebook. More about that later. Anne’s research is great and I had ongoing discussions with her afterwards on how to use Facebook with applications and then roll them out worldwide.

Jenny Simpson spoke about Opportunities and Threats for Marketers through Twitter. She had a rather critical view on what Twitter is all about and how it can be used. I remember my first Twitter recap back in January. I understand why people like it, and I add new followers everyday. However, it could just be another hype and, as Jenny pointed out, do not put all your eggs in one basket, do not ONLY rely on Twitter. Surely the advantage is that Twitter offers real time search results and that people recommend things. And, if they are genuine, you get a new engagement with your clients (as a brand) and you are able to turn negative feedback into customer service and positive branding.

The 2nd part of the Summit was about Opportunities for Bebo and AOL. It was a nice presentation to show how to integrate different products. Unfortunately, I didn’t take too much out of it. However, Regina Bustamante of Plaxo spoke about the right localisation and translation, the adoption of local culture to grow an international network. Plaxo is catching up on that and for a small company they have made a huge progress on their internationalisation efforts. I believe we will see more from them in the future. I have been using Plaxo for over 5 years and have to say that I might not see it so much as a social network (definition social network?) but more of “backup tool for my outlook”. However, a very very useful tool.

Peter Crosby fromViadeo spoke about the approach they are taking. As a French company they created local networks in major countries: Germany, France, Spain, Italy, UK, Mexico, India….and they are growing. Connect on a local level is their idea, and I was encouraged to sign up for their network. We shall see, if I do – I will let you know what I think. Any incentives Peter ;-)

Unfortunately I missed the panel debate but what followed in the afternoon was very interesting, particular for bloggers.
Vasco Sommer-Nunes from Mokono, maybe better known for their blog.xy sites, e.g. Blogs in Germany, he pointed out how to monetise blogging. Followed by Sante who spoke about international blogging and later Massimo Burgio who spoke about Social Media Marketing and Blogging.

Highlights, from my point of view were Alex Burmaster’s presentation on the key trends of riding the wave of social networking! Coming from Nielsen he presented data that was just amazing. You can download some reports on their website and I will posts links as I get them. However, one fact stuck out to me and that was that more and more older people, age 60+ are joining Facebook in the US. That means we will have a similar pattern in the UK soon, then across Europe. Brands should start thinking on how to cater for these demographics and start building applications. We already discussed first ideas!

Then there was Tom Smith from Trendstream. His presentation can be found on Slideshare already. He spoke about the International Social Media Trends, warning about neglecting the amount of Chinese people in local networks that by far growing quicker than Facebook. So our Western answers on Facebook might not be able to be applied to the Asian Market. Similar things are true for Russia. So it is not all about Facebook (sorry Anne ;-) ) but for brands a lot about “where to I find my target demographics in which country” – and the Chinese platform seems to make a profit too.

Oscar Carreras spoke about what I would call “Inbound Marketing“. However, his Social Media Optimisation and his knowledge of SEO paired of the understanding on how to utilise social networks as well as using them to engage with your clients was very fascinating. His blog on International SEO picks up on these topics too.

Last but not least was Martin Belam from the Guardian. Whilst there is a hot discussion on how publishers and newspapers can or cannot survive with more and more content being available for free, he pointed out ways on how to use social media to drive traffic to your site. Again, I believe that the overall topic of driving traffic is great but what do we do with the traffic once it is on our site?

The overall summary for me is that we have our networks we use in the Western World, namely Plaxo, Linkedin, Facebook etc. and that we seem to neglect some international networks which we shouldn’t. Also, we see Twitter as a great way of broadcasting news and company information. Again, we drive traffic to our site but the conversion and the monetization of the traffic is still something we need to solve. As so often in the online world: we have the data, but we are not quite sure how to use it.

Stay tuned.

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