Facebook: making stalking socially acceptable since 2004. (Or did it?)

“If you build it, they will come” seems to be the motto for Facebook’s latest changes and additions. Earlier, Facebook added new “Subscription” and “Friend Filter” options, hoping to change the way people add and categorize their friends. Today, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed — with more new features (including a new media and music-sharing platform) to come.

On first glance, the new News Feed looks like the love child of Google+ and Tumblr. Good-bye, “Top News” and “Most Recent” updates. Hello, one long, scrolling, “smarter” News Feed that features photos more prominently and adjusts highlighted content according to when the user last logged in. (For more frequent, regular visitors, the News Feed will simply show updates in chronological order, and users have the option to mark or unmark certain items as a “Top Story.”)

“Today’s updates are about not missing important updates in News Feed,” Keith Schacht, Facebook News Feed Product Manager, said to Mashable.

Okay, so that’s all fair and good. I like pictures and I want to stay in touch in my friends, so I appreciate the consolidation of updates. Efficiency is great. But here’s my issue with the new News Feed: all the creepiness is concentrated in the right-hand sidebar.

For convenience, let’s call it the Meta Corner.

Not only does the Meta Corner have Facebook Chat — which is only used by people you don’t want talking to you in the first place (otherwise you would have given them your number, email, or legit screen name) — and “People You May Know” (I’ll tell you who I know, Facebook), but it now features scrolling updates of every single action your Friends have taken in real time.  It is essentially “Most Recent” updates, except now it’s in your face 24/7.

Mashable describes this as a “news ticker.” But it feels more like a “TMI consolidator.” For example:

[Screenshot courtesy of Priya Mathew]

Clicking on any single item allows you to interact with the users, thereby creating “shared experiences with your friends,” Schacht says. (And company pages, I’d like to add.)

Or you can just sit there and passively monitor all your friends’ actions. I believe the proper term for this is “creepin’.”

]]> http://intra.rfistudios.com/blogs/left-brain/2011/09/first-impressions-facebook-meta-edition.html/feed 0 http://intra.rfistudios.com/blogs/left-brain/2010/07/mass-consumption.html http://intra.rfistudios.com/blogs/left-brain/2010/07/mass-consumption.html#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:53:52 +0000 Lucie Zhang http://www.rfistudios.com/blogs/left-brain/?p=843

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea.” — Cobb, Inception

Whether or not you liked the film quoted above, Leonardo raises an interesting point. In fact, the adoption of an idea is perhaps the goal of every marketing strategy out there. And if you are lucky/smart enough to create a campaign that people somehow connect to so much so that they are willing to spread it to others – virally — well, then that little idea can become pretty potent (and be worth a pretty penny).

Facezon (or Amabook?)

Amazon is one such company that’s trying to up it’s “shareable” aspect. Recently, it announced a new partnership with Facebook aimed at making its online shopping experience more social. Consumers who link the two sites together will be able to see recommendations from their Facebook friends on what to buy, have their Facebook profile picture show up on the Amazon site, and view upcoming birthdays and gift recommendations. Shopping activity on Amazon, however, will not be shared via Facebook.

Mashable has already called it “a perfect storm of recommendations” in its test drive of the new feature, while SocialBeat has noted how this partnership is a bigger deal that you might think.

Facebook Questions

In more Facebook news, the social networking site is gradually rolling out a new feature, called Facebook Questions. Like with Yahoo! Answers, users will be able to pose questions to their online network by hitting the “Ask Question” button on the homepage. Questions will also pop up on friends’ profiles.

Additionally, users will be able to ask photo questions (i.e. “Does anyone know what bar this is?”), take a poll, tag a question, browse questions based on topic, follow questions (in order to receive updates and new answers), and change the Facebook homepage. Yes, you read that last one right. Having Facebook Questions will let users add in a new bar at the top through which they can update their status, ask a question, add photos, or post a link.

LucyPhone

What’s one thing that will always kill a conversation? Being put on hold. And as someone who recently had to voice a complaint to ConEdison, I can definitely attest to the total agony of having the precious minutes of your day (your hard-earned leisure time!) wither away as you sit on the line with a recorded message that replays itself for half an hour.

That’s where the LucyPhone comes in.

Aside from just having an awesome name, the LucyPhone is built to be your savior from dreadful on-hold music. The service is free, web-based, and also available as an iPhone application. Essentially, you enter in the number that you wish to reach, give LucyPhone the number at which you’d like to be reached, and hit “**” when you inevitably get put on hold. The LucyPhone will then take over monitoring the call and call your phone back once an actual human becomes available to talk.

Brilliant. How was this not invented sooner?

Extra Bits

• Russia has blocked access to YouTube due to the site’s hosting of ”Russia for Russians,” a video they have judged to be extremist whose name comes from a racist slogan.
• CardStar has announced a new integration with Foursquare so that when a customer scans their club or loyalty card via CardStar at the checkout they will also be given the option to check in on Foursquare at that location. This integration will coincide with a few other updates CardStar is adding to its iPhone application, including having better card storage and scanning.
• The oldest Twitter user, Ivy Bean, passed away yesterday at 12:08 am in her care home in England. She was 104 years old and started tweeting on @IvyBean104 (…an oddly foretelling Twitter handle) when she was 102 years old.
• In case you didn’t know already, Isaiah Mustafa is marketing gold. Sales of Old Spice Body Wash have reportedly increased 107% in the past month and 55% in the past three months. “Since the ‘Smell Like A Man, Man’ campaign broke in February, Old Spice has month-over-month strengthened its market position,” P&G representative Michael Norton wrote in an e-mail to Brandweek.
• In honor of its fifth anniversary, Mashable did a look back on the last five years in mobile. Hard to believe that five years ago, all I wanted was a shiny, new Razr. Now, a flip phone even feels archaic. I can only imagine what we’ll be using in 2015. The geek in me is hoping it’ll be something kind of like this though:

“Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website],” Larry Freed, ForeSee Results’ chief executive, said in an interview by TechCrunch. “The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

So how are we going to get people to keep using these sites as frequently as they did pre-annoyance?

By making it look pretty and giving away free stuff, of course:

Flipboard

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare — if you’re into social media (which I hope you are if you’re reading this blog), you more likely than not have more than one social media account. And after so many, it can get complicated keeping up with all those newsfeeds/updates.

That’s where Flipboard comes in.

Flipboard, an iPad application, is “the first social-media magazine.” It aims to put all of your friends’ information into one, easy reading experience by pulling information, links, and multimedia from your friends’ updates and compiling it into, well, a “flippable” magazine.

Pulse of the Nation

 

Researchers at Northeastern and Harvard universities have collaborated to gage the mood of the nation during a typical day, as collected and inferred through tweets. To accomplish this ambitious task, the scholars created a word list to help them analyze over 300 million tweets sent out over three years. The result is an in-depth infographic and a video (above) showing the progression of moods throughout the day.

Along with being visually captivating, an interesting pattern these academics noticed was that that West Coast tweets are generally happier than East Coast tweets, even when accounting for the time difference, and that West Coasters’ moods didn’t drop as low as East Coasters’ by a significant amount.

Having to live amongst crabby people — guess that’s just one more thing to complain about now.

Free Stuff

Allure magazine has announced that for its annual Free Stuff issue this August, it will partner with Microsoft Tag (Microsoft’s version of a QR code) to give away $725,000 worth of beauty products to the first person who enters each contest. Starting on Aug. 2, readers who type in gettag.mobi into their smartphone’s browser will be able to download the Microsoft Tag Reader, scan the Tag on the magazine or on Allure‘s Free Stuff page to register, and scan the Tag to enter. An option to receive text alerts 15 minutes before each event occurs will also be available.

Extra Bits

• Google has updated Google Images to include a dense tiled layout, continuous scrolling between pages, larger thumbnail previews, a hover pane for an even bigger preview, a new landing page, and optimized keyboard navigation.
• The company has also signed a deal to power some of its data centers with wind energy for the next 20 years.
• Foursquare now has over 100 million check-ins and the company has also announced a new partnership with New York Magazine. Those who check into locations listed on the magazine will earn points and gain access to deals and discounts at that local business.
• Android phones now have an Auto-Tune application, MicDroid. Because everything is more entertaining when done like T-Pain.

Here’s a look at what companies, brands, and advertisers have been doing lately to use that organically-created discussion in their favor.

The Old Spice Man

Ladies, he’s done it again. Just when you thought the “Old Spice Man” (real name: Isaiah Mustafa) couldn’t get more irresistible, he’s followed up his “Questions” commercial with answers — personalized videos in response to fan input he’s received via Twitter (example video above). Intelligent, witty, good-looking, and attentive? He really is the perfect man.

Directed at everyone from celebrities to stay-at-home mothers to the Huffington Post, all of his almost-instantaneous replies are available for viewing on his YouTube channel, along with his famously hilarious commercials. My personal favorite? A marriage proposal he did for one fan, Johannes S. Beals (below).

(She said yes!)

And then (yes, there’s more), the Old Spice Man one-upped himself when he made a voicemail message for Pandarr on Reddit. This led to @knitmeapony asking for a voicemail message for ladies (when you give a mouse a cookie…), and within just a few hours an Old Spice voicemail generator popped up from Reddit.

Brilliant.

SocialAds

Twitter will begin hosting its own video advertising network, called SocialAds, on its video hosting site TwitVid. Meant to be an alternative to traditional pre-roll and overlay online video ads, SocialAds aims to help advertisers enter the social media realm and increase a brand or company’s number of Twitter followers and online mentions. Pricing for SocialAds will be based on a price-per-action model, where advertisers only pay once a desired action (such as retweeting an ad displayed in a video on TwitVid) has been taken.

So far, a private alpha test has shown that brands who participated in SocialAds got over 400 new followers in less than an hour. Additionally, SocialAds will have the ability to offer quantifiable data on the number of added Twitter followers and retweets an ad creates, an important advantage in a field where measuring ad effectiveness can get tricky.

Hauls

Hauls (short, look-what-I-got videos made by teens) are the latest trend in YouTube, with over 159,000 posted, and stores are doing their best to leverage their buzz-creating ability. J.C. Penney is the latest to join the likes of American Eagle and Forever 21 in incorporating hauls into their back-to-school marketing campaign. Some retail stores have even offered to cover travel expenses or give free gift cards to haulers to encourage them to feature their goods. Haulers are obligated under Federal Trade Commission guidelines to acknowledge when this happens, but either way, these influential videos have been shown to shape not only teens’ tastes but also the tastes of parents of teenagers.

Uncensored

Innocean Worldwide Americas has launched a new campaign for Hyundai Motor America. Called “Uncensored,” the campaign allows people who saw the cars at mall tours around America to test out Hyundai’s new versions of the Sonata, the Santa Fe, Accent, and Elantra for a month. The commentary will be, as the name implies, uncensored, and it will air on both cable and network television channels, with outtakes available on YouTube. Hyundai will also have 125 people who did not previously own a Hyundai car test-drive a 2011 Sonata for a month and document their experiences on Hyundai’s Facebook page. The campaign will last throughout the entire summer, meaning that Hyundai is putting a lot of faith in user-generated content.

Extra Bits

• Help spread awareness about the dangers of using fossil fuels by creating your own oil spill (virtually, of course). Enter in a URL and watch as that website gradually becomes covered in oil, until the entire screen goes black. Donate, sign a petition, volunteer, or share the site with friends afterwards.
• Walt Disney Studios became the first sponsor to have an exclusive offer at @EarlyBird, Twitter’s new deal-hunting tool. Followers of either @EarlyBird or @DisneyPictures have the chance to receive a special 2-for-1 deal on tickets to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
• Starbucks became the first brand to have its Facebook page reach over 10 million fans.
• Calvin Klein Jeans, known for their provocative billboard advertisements, has replaced three of these ads (two in downtown New York City and one in Los Angeles) with a QR code (below). Passer-bys who take a photo of the billboard with their smartphone will pull up a 40-second commercial featuring models Lara Stone, “A.J.,” Sid Ellisdon, Grayson Vaughan and Eric Anderson. Users can then share the code with their friends via Facebook or Twitter.

Love the use of social media to enhance real-life? Think it’s all a big ploy to turn communication tools into floods of advertising and brand talk? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Life in a Day

YouTube has launched “Life in a Day,” a project that attempts to document one day as seen through the eyes and cameras of people around the world. To be included, individuals must record a video of July 24, 2010 (preferably in HD) and upload their footage onto the official Life in a Day YouTube channel before July 31. There are no limits, no guidelines, and unfortunately no monetary rewards for those selected. However, those included in the final cut of the film will be credited as a co-director and 20 contributors will also be chosen to attend the film’s premiere at the 2011 Sundance Festival. Additionally, Ridley Scott will serve as the executive producer and Kevin Macdonald will edit this ambitious project.

Narcissus

Liubo Borissov, artist and assitant professor at Pratt Institute’s Department of Digital Arts, has created an art exhibit called the Narcissus Series, which captures thousands of human reactions that were seen via Chatroulette. For the project, Borissov used a software that diverted the incoming video feed, reflected it, and fed it back so that the person was confronted with their own, upside-down image (a reference to how the mythical character Narcissus saw his reflection in the water). He then sought to capture these “moments of self-recognition.” The result is a 10-minute video, “Narcissus Lament” (above), and three prints of 576 pictures each that are titled ”Regret,” “Redemption,” and “Remorse.” One can only wonder how many NSFW images Borissov had to witness during this process.

Mad Men Starring You

JibJab has created Mad Men Starring You, which lets users upload or import photos from Facebook, crop out the faces, and stick them onto the bodies of Mad Men characters Don Draper, Betty Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway (just like with JibJab’s Stars Wars tool). Once finished, the Mad Men video recaps what’s happened thus far on the popular TV show, which will enter its fourth season in 2 weeks and 3 days (if you’re counting).

Extra Bits

• Borders launched its e-bookstore yesterday, along with reading apps for both Blackberry and Android phones. Those who download these apps either tomorrow or Saturday will also receive five recent bestsellers for free.
• Chase Bank has added a new Quick Deposit feature to its iPhone application that lets individuals deposit checks with their iPhone by simply selecting an account, entering in the amount of the check, and taking a photo of the front and back of the check. The app also now allows for Person-to-Person QuickPay. Here’s hoping that a version for Blackberry phones is in the works (or that Chase magically decides to stay open past 6 pm on weekdays).
• Ford Motor Company is updating its SYNC technology to allow for safer cell phone use while driving. 2011 Ford cars with MyFord Touch will support a new protocol (Message Access Profile, or “MAP” for short) that allows for SYNC to read aloud incoming text messages over Bluetooth. Additionally, a “Do Not Disturb” button will let drivers block incoming calls and texts, but still make outgoing calls. I wonder as to how useful this will be considering there’s no guarantee that people won’t text back their responses (and a text message read aloud is pretty much the same as a phone call…), but still I applaud Ford’s efforts at encouraging individuals to stay focused while driving.
• Israeli soldiers dance to Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” in the streets of Hebron and get over 2.2 million views on YouTube.

Hope these news clips serve as a bit of inspiration. Now go to something interesting this weekend — and who knows, maybe you’ll be the one getting a mention on this blog next week.

Anyway, here’s what’s been going on in social media:

The Crunch Is Calling

Wheat Thins has started a new campaign, centered around the theme “The crunch is calling.” Hoping to stimulate conversations about Wheat Thins on Twitter, this project will feature a YouTube channel that chronicles the antics of a mobile team as they travel around delivering treats to fans who have tweeted about the snack.

Virgin America Toronto Provocateur

Victors & Spoils has launched a second project for Virgin America to promote the airline’s first international destination, Toronto. ”Virgin America Toronto Provocateur” seeks video submissions from those “riled and ready to rock the world’s loudest and sexiest airline.” Its website features the above video of Sir Richard Branson, who the winner will get to meet. Prizes for being the cheekiest Provocateur also include 12 free roundtrips to any Virgin America destination, a monthly stipend/promotions budget, a one-year Virgin Mobile Canada plan, a new HTC Legend phone, and more.

C-SPAN

C-SPAN is partnering with Foursquare to offer educational tips about U.S. public policy, politics, and government at public locations throughout Washington, D.C. Tips for other locations still have yet to be added, but those in the District will have access to an entirely customizable Foursquare homepage. There will also be a ”C-SPAN Digital Bus,” a virtual vehicle that will travel and check-in across the country while providing tips.

Extra Bits

• In other news, Mozilla has submitted a Firefox Home app to the Apple App Store. The free iPhone app will allow users to access their Firefox bookmarks, browse their history and open tabs. It will also feature an “Awesome Bar” that will list a user’s most-visited sites.
• Meanwhile, Yahoo launched Mail and Messenger apps as well as a Yahoo Search Widget for Android.
• The start of July means that Starbucks now offers free Wi-Fi (registration-less and limitation-free) in the US and Canada. Finally.
• A new study by Knowledge Networks, “Smartphone Apps: General and TV-Related Usage,” was released yesterday. It surveyed 1,004 smartphone users back in April and found that 1/3 of smartphone users were more likely to buy products from companies that use apps. iPhone users were especially receptive to advertising in apps.
• Adam Sherk, search and PR strategist for Define Search Strategies, has come up with a list of “The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases,” based on the number of times each word appeared in releases currently archived on PRWeb. The winner? “Leader,” with 161,000 mentions.
• Amazon has acquired Woot, a popular website that gives out one deal per day. To announce the news, Woot made a monkey rap:

And that’s all I got for today. Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday weekend and a happy Fourth of July!

- Lucie