A Wish List

During my long winter break I considered posting a list of New Year Social Media and Networking predictions. But before I had even licked my pencil I had been overtaken by several unforeseen events which convinced me that the predictions circus was a mug's game. If you are proved right, then, despite the vanity gold star you award yourself, to the rest of the world it was obvious, wasn't it? And nobody even notices. Alternatively being proved wrong only demonstrates how far your finger was (and by implication probably still is) from the digital pulse. Your predictions are in danger of becoming the objects of ridicule, rather in the way the Tomorrow's World [BBC] episodes from the Sixties are often unkindly laughed at for having been way off the money.

So to avoid the elephant traps I have a Social Media and Networking Wish List instead - much safer ground and hopefully more useful. Just two wishes for the Common Man: for somebody with a proper job and plenty of Internet adeptitude, but somebody who simply doesn't have the time to spend twenty hours a day in congress with the Internet.

First Wish

Twitter. I have one wish that would make my experience of Twitter far more satisfactory by thoroughly speeding up admin. I like Twitter a lot: I find it an excellent feed-reader alternative and combination news/info propagator and harvester. However, a lot of slime-dwellers also imagine Twitter to be wonderful for their dubious and spam-ridden activities too. 95% of accounts that try to follow me fall into this category, it saddens me to say. I don't want to discourage the genuine and friendly 5%, so I allow people to follow my accounts and I get an email announcement to that effect. However, this is what the email looks like:



It can be seen that the only information provided about the new follower is their Twitter handle and the numbers of their followers and followees, and their tweets. Of course if they have only made one tweet and are following 943 and are only followed by 7, then I know instantly that I am going to block them. I do follow my own Twitter Rules! However there are plenty of people with an apparently reasonable balance between following and followed and a healthy number of tweets who I will block immediately I see their profile bio and site link (or lack of same).

So, dear Twitter, my wish is this: put the potential follower's full profile in the email so I don't have to log on every time to see what they are up to. And while you are at it, stick a 'block' link in the email too - rather like the 'unsubscibe' link in a group/forum/discussion board email. Then I will be able to perform all my admin duties straight from my inbox, saving one or two of those valuable clicks.


Second Wish

Social Networking (no, not just Facebook).

A 'given' about email: If you have an email account you can send to, and receive from, anyone else who has an email account. Blindingly obvious. That's how it works.

But if you want to 'social network' you must sign up with a seperate provider, Facebook, Myspace, Google Buzz, Wave or - probably - Tsunami. I actually suspect all these things are becoming way too complicated and particularly time-consuming for my Common Man described above. Google Buzz and Wave are, or are going to be, very clever, but it seems to me I would have to live there the whole time - and so would my friends - to make use of them. I want email. And then I want an SN service for family and friends and colleagues where I can share photos and video and gossip and a bit of blah-blah. In my own time, when I want. I am sure my Common Man feels the same way.

In Germany there is an SN service called StudiVZ which started in very much the same way as FB - social networking for German speaking students. My step-daughters started SN with StudiVZ and then joined Facebook as well when they realised that if, for example, they wanted to be 'friends' with me or their mother, or my sister, or a bunch of people in Greece, they had no other choice. And a lot of their 'friends' at StudiVZ are in the same position. And the same applies to LinkedIn, the business and career-orientated social network. Yes, it is now possible to squirt different social networking news feeds into other services, or use one of numerous consolidation sites which put all your social networking stuff on one page.

But why? Why is this necessary? Why do I have to have all these accounts and spend hours fiddling about getting the whole bag-of-mashings set up just how I want it (or maybe failing to do so)?

No one would tolerate this situation if it applied to email - it would be a joke.

My dream is about a generic 'social networking facility' linked with all webmail accounts. When you signed up for a webmail account you could automatically get 'SN Access', just like the way Google gives you access to Calendar, Books and so on (including their own Buzz), when you have a Gmail account.

If you chose not to activate or use it, you wouldn't have to. If you are already an account holder at Facebook you would tie your email identity to your FB one so that all your FB stuff was sucked into the SN skin in the tab next to your email. And your LinkedIn account, and StudiVZ... The skin and use of apps would be totally customisable. The only thing you would have to accept would be targetted plain ads in the right column, à la Google. (These ads would be sold and placed by your particular email/SN provider. And if you wanted to pay for your account you could avoid the ads altogether.)

But if you didn't already have any of the individual branded SN accounts, the fact that you had activated the SN part of your email account would automatically make it possible to be friends with anyone from any of the individual SN sites. Conversely they could search for you and add you to their Facebook account or their generic 'SN account' just like yours.

So, to put it another way, having an account at Facebook, Myspace or StudiVZ would be the social networking equivalent of having an email account with AOL, Google, Hotmail, Talktalk, Btinternet, &c. &c. But in the end of course, all the individual SN sites would become redundant because SN would simply become a sibling of email. Note: I am not advocating that email and SN should be mixed up on the same page in the way that Google seem to be heading - their roles are too distinct in my opinion. Tabbed would be fine. And within the SN tab you could of course tab or group (ring-fence if you like) your contacts according to status: family; friends; business; hobbies, although individuals could be in more than one group. (Think of it graphically like a Venn Diagram). For instance, you might have a sister-in-law who is in the same line of work as you, so she would be in your 'family' and 'business' groups, but her other business contacts couldn't see her family contacts or feeds - or the family-related part of her profile.

And you would of course have total control over exactly how much and which personal info goes into each part of your profile.

This is my wish for Social Networking for the coming decade.



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The Horns of the Dilemma

On December 3 2009 news gatherers reported that the General Motors (GM) Facebook page had been subjected to a vitriolic post from the alleged daughter of an allegedly sacked executive. This is the BBC version.

GM removed the post, but not before it had been captured and re-posted across the web. Apart from the mildly patronising tone of the GM damage limitation statement below (quoted from the BBC's report), one might think that this would be the end of the matter, apart from a bit of temporary huffing and puffing and a lot of people having a chuckle at GM's embarrassment.

"We consider children of GM employees to be private citizens," GM said in a statement. "We do not believe a brief Facebook post by a child who had no actual knowledge of critical business issues, and which was removed almost immediately, moves a person from 'private' to 'public' status, and makes her a legitimate source for a major global business story."

However unfortunate for GM, this was a very small incident in what everybody knows has been an annus horribilis for them for all sorts of far more serious and threatening reasons. But I bet the thought must have crossed the minds of a least some GM executives: should we bug-out of Facebook? They won't dare do it, but I'm sure somebody must have thought it.

But I believe that in time this sorry incident may come to be seen as the turning point in a lot of big corporations' relationships with Facebook. Because whatever GM spin doctors do or don't say, or however many tweaks they make to the way they use Facebook, the incident has been a PR failure. And, because of the nature of Facebook, there is nothing anyone could have done to stop it. It was a failure because it drew salacious and prurient attention to General Motors and the fact they have a Facebook page: people with Facebook accounts who would never dream of going anywhere near such a page have been drawn in like hyenas around a dying wildebeest. I am one of them. And I bet there have been plenty of people who wouldn't even dream of having an FB account in the first place who have been drawn to the page too - just once for a little look to see what all the fuss is about, you understand.

And what have we found? To the disinterested outsider the whole GM Facebook presence currently has the appearance we would expect. Plenty of complaints about everything to do with GM from financial and boardroom shenanigans, through criticism of dealerships to the "I bought a lemon" variety. But alongside that there are a certain number of puff posts; plus those with sensible advice for owners with a problem; and those simply passing on company news. And there is quite a lot of reasonable discussion about the problems facing GM and the decisions they are making to deal with them.

So really not so bad, then?

No, apparently not so bad.

But wait a minute: General Motors are roughly the 18th largest corporate entity in the world and something like the 3rd or 4th biggest automobile builder, selling those cars in about 140 countries worldwide. Until very recently they were the unchallenged biggest motor vehicle builder year after year.

According to OICA GM produced over 8.25m vehicles of all types worldwide in 2008. That's produced in one year. Not the total GM vehicles driving around on the planet. I can't find even a rough estimation for that, so I did my own unscientific one. The total number of all types of motor vehicles in the world today is something between 800 and 1000 million, depending on whose figures you use. And sifting through motor industry statistics, it seems that GM have nearly 10% of the world motor vehicle marketplace.

If it is vaguely acceptable to relate share of marketplace directly to percentage of vehicles driving around, then one could guesstimate that there are more or less 80 million GM-badged vehicles on the planet today (10% of 800m).

There are now 350+ million Facebook users. The main GM Facebook page has just over 100,000 'fans', and I will bet GM's bottom dollar (if they still have one) that a very large percentage of that number are typical passive or inert Facebook page fans. Those are the ones who, when they first get an FB account, become fans of a number of pages just because they feel they have some kind of connection to those particular businesses ("My dad used to own a GM pick-up," or "I always wanted to own an old Chevy."). However, rarely, if ever, do these 'fans' return to the pages, and they tend to forget that they ever clicked the button. It is one of the basic facts of life about Facebook, and it describes most 'fans'.

And, however inaccurate my stats are, 100,000 (passive or active) Facebook fans is a piddling number for an outfit the size of General Motors.

Just as we would expect, GM have a pretty decent corporate website at www.gm.com/ with all the right kind of stuff including links to various blogs. But not a mention of their FB page that I could find... All this tells me that GM have an FB page because, well, it's the trendy thing to do. They would feel a bit silly without it, and the world would think them odd or old-fashioned without it. And they can't exactly give it up, even if they'd like to, for very much the same reasons.

But they really don't need an FB page: GM's web presence is so long established and so widespread, both official and unofficial, that they can't possibly provide anything extra at Facebook that isn't already much better covered elsewhere. And I have already suggested in a previous post Is Facebook (or will it ever be) any good for business? that unless you are considered a real 'lifestyle' brand by the Facebook public, there's no real reason to have an FB page for your business, other than to occupy real estate and prevent others doing it for you on the sly. But the fact remains that Facebook is high profile - in good times and bad.

Think on this: if you wanted to find anything out about General Motors - and I mean anything, from boardroom musical chairs, through press releases, to the nearest available new transmission for your pick-up, or to let off steam on a discussion board, then is your first thought to go to their Facebook page? Somehow I doubt it, except possibly for my last example.

And that is the Facebook dilemma facing business.


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