September 2010 Archive

As the old saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover. Likewise, don’t judge a person by his/her Facebook profile.

The paradox of social media was probably put best by New York Magazine in a review of the recently-released documentary Catfish when it said: ”[the Internet] has made us all so much closer to one another yet created so many more ways for us to misrepresent ourselves.” Just read the profile of Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, in The New Yorker, and the awkwardness of “openness” can be cringe-worthy. What isn’t said (such as someone’s sexual orientation) can sometimes be just as important as what is said, and often what is said is TMI.

So it’s interesting that businesses have entered in the one-click, ”like it” world of social media with the hopes of earning consumer loyalty, defined as they see it as an ubiquitous sense of affiliation that then dictates all future purchasing decisions. Yet, if they believe that an individual both equally “likes” and “likes” only that which is an accurate reflection of their personal tastes, businesses oversimplify how and why consumers interact with brands online.

“Facebook is becoming the loyalty card of the internet, just like your key chain,” said Tom Wentworth, the vice president of web solutions at Ektron, in an article by Advertising Age. However, when it comes to personalizing search results and online advertising, he cautions, “If you personalize too much, it can be dangerous. You don’t want to make premature assumptions about somebody.”

In fact, in a recent study of 1,500 Facebook users, ExactTarget concluded that 38 percent of all American Facebook users “like” a brand on a social networking site. Of these:

• 40 percent “liked” a brand in order to receive discounts and promotions
• 39 percent to show support for the company to others
• 36 percent to get a “freebie”
• 34 percent to stay informed about the activities of the company
• 33 percent to get updates on future products
• 30 percent to get updates on upcoming sales
• 29 percent for fun or entertainment
• 25 percent to get access to exclusive content
• 22 percent because someone recommended it to them
• 21 percent to learn more about the company
• 13 percent for education about company topics
• 13 percent to interact

While this seems to imply that users who “like” brands are not entirely unreceptive to marketing messages, more so it demonstrates how brands’ Facebook pages should offer various content, thereby reflecting how consumers come to a page for different reasons. Moreover, this data further cautions against brands “personalizing” search results and online advertisements strictly according to the pages a user has ”liked” on his/her Facebook. True to this trend, in an earlier survey, ExactTarget did indeed find that 70 percent of Americans believe “liking” something should not mean “opting in to marketing.” Ultimately, to gloss over the multifaceted personalities of individuals would be to flatten them into one-dimension, putting more emphasis on what they’re buying rather than how they’re using it.

The good thing about social media is that it makes you stay connected with your social network. The bad thing about social media is that it makes you stay connected with your social network. And by doing so, it makes you constantly reevaluate who is in your social network.

Going through my Facebook newsfeed can sometimes make me feel like I’m sifting through shifting friendship ranks in order to weed out the updates I care about from the ones I don’t: “she’s my BFFL, he was in my dorm sophomore year, she’s an acquaintance I studied abroad with, …wait, I have no idea who that is.”

As a news source, social media falls short by limiting our abilities to prioritize and categorize the floods of information that come from our “friends.” Recently, Google has offered a new tool to help us sort through the clutter by creating a Priority Inbox, which separates your email into 3 segments (Important, Starred, and Everything Else) and automatically sorts incoming, unread mail into either “Important” or “Everything Else” to a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. The creation of the Priority Inbox directly draws from recognition of a growing trend: as social media has caught on and our networks have expanded to include those from literally every aspect of our lives, our friends are also becoming, in a sense, a new breed of not-quite-spam. As we are prompted to share information with one another, often that sharing comes in the form of funny videos, silly links, enlightening articles, donation/favor requests, and other miscellaneous bits and pieces. It’s “important,” but not really. It’s just “everything else.”

Businesses and marketers alike have hit on the fact that friends influence their friends’ buying decisions to a remarkable degree, but the power of word-of-mouth really depends on the source. In fact, Advertising Age reported earlier this year that, as a result of the “friending” culture that has emerged, consumers are increasingly trusting their peer network less. According to Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer, only 25% of consumer believe their friends and peers are credible sources of information about a company, versus 45% in 2008.

As explained by David Berkowitz, director of emerging media at 360i, in Advertising Age, “When you’re seeing so much noise, it’s very easy to dismiss a lot of it, and that’s a problem marketing messages have had for a while now.”

“Facebook really exemplifies this with the live-feed and news-feed options,” he said. “If you use the live feed and have a few hundred friends, some kind of peer recommendation, whether it’s explicit or not, appears every couple of minutes and sometimes they come in a matter of seconds. If you’re seeing all of that come in, it can be overwhelming.”

Moreover, it can be downright annoying, prompting some to defriend particularly loquacious acquaintances. But for the most part, defriending (now an officially-recognized term by the New Oxford American Dictionary) carries a certain degree of stigma. “Emotionally, it can be the same as being dumped because it’s one-sided,” said Irene Levine, a psychiatry professor at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, in a recent article by The New York Times. “While the defriender may have been grappling with the decision to defriend for some time, it comes out of the blue for the person defriended.”

As The New York Times points out, there isn’t a very tactful way to tell someone you no longer want them in your social network. Sure, you can block a person’s updates from appearing on your newsfeed, but privacy concerns also come into play with who can and who cannot be “friends” with you. In the end, it all comes down to just how polite you really want to be about the fact that you’ve grown apart (or, in some cases, never really knew each other to begin with).

“If there’s one major flaw in social networking right now, it’s that it doesn’t really provide a nuanced way to defriend,” said Aram Sinnreich, a media professor at Rutgers. “The two ways are either to announce it to the world at large or to do it totally in stealth, so even the defriended person isn’t aware of it. Neither of those is a particularly socially positive approach to the situation.”

Thus, while the Internet can be devoid of many of the nuances of face-to-face interaction, it still has its own “netiquette.” In an interesting essay on the popular game Farmville, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, the assistant editor of digital, visual, and sound poetry at Anti- and instructor and student in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, argues that “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.” That is, people are playing Farmville not necessarily for the game itself but because they feel obliged to engage with their friends on Farmville.

He writes:

Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

By making the task of keeping in touch instantly achievable, has social media therefore heightened our sense of social obligation to our social network? Or, are Liszkiewicz’s arguments only a reflection of the symptom and not the cause, which is that we instinctively filter through the chaos of a hyper-connected world in order to pay the most attention to those with whom we truly share a connection? Arguably, this is what humans have done for ages — but social media now makes our subtle signals publicly obvious.