Posts Tagged ‘facebook’
Should we ask employees to tweet client stories?
Friday, May 15th, 2009
Here’s an interesting ethical question: is it OK to ask employees to share company and client news through their personal social networks?
Here’s a hypothetical example. An agency has just launched a new ad campaign and posted the TV spot on YouTube. Is it OK to send an all-hands email asking people to share the link on Twitter and Facebook?
Let’s take it a little further. Is it OK to ask them to sign into YouTube using their personal accounts, and rate the video? It seems harmless enough, doesn’t it? You’re not telling them how they should rate it, after all.
But what if you asked them to leave comments? Any normal agency or client side social media policy will tell them that they have to disclose their relationship with the makers of the video. And you wouldn’t really want a whole bunch of comments that start “Hi, I work for the agency that made this ad and I think it’s really great,” would you? What makes the two things different?
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Tags: digg, facebook, networks, social media, social media policy, twitter
Posted in opinion, twitter | 10 Comments »
Mapping the social graph of weight loss groups
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
These are the graphs from some research on weightloss groups on Facebook. I’ve processed the data so that:
1) the size of dot is related to "total number of friends" – this only works where a user’s friends are publicly visible – quite often they aren’t, and I haven’t checked to see what the incidence of this privacy setting is generally and specifically
2) all isolates (i.e. those users who have no (public) personal relationships within the group have been removed.
This is the network graph of relationships on a personal weight loss support group. A college student set this up to support her own goals. She told me: " For my group, I just started it out by inviting all of my friends and then some people joined the group who found it in a search, I think. I am amazed by the amount of support I receive from random people who encourage me to keep on going. There are some spammers on the group who are just there trying to sell stuff and that gets annoying, but I know I can’t avoid them."
This is the network graph of relationships on an unofficial weightwatchers group on Facebook. You can see that there are hardly any member-get-member relationships here. My friend Valery (who has a professorship in this sort of thing at Wharton) says:
"It’s very common that organizations and interest groups become foci for personal networks. In fact, I believe that joint activities are the prevalent mechanism of tie formation. "
But it doesn’t look like it here. Looks to me that – while people may form relationships around special interests – they don’t mirror these on Facebook. Say I suffer from Meniere’s Disease (apparently true) and I participate in a Meniere’s support forum (not true at present), I don’t necessarily make those people my Facebook friends…
Another example of the "not many personal relationships" graph for a weightloss support group on Facebook.
How do people get information on weight loss? After a few interviews, I think the answer is like this:
1) Influencers are "pull", rather than "push" resources (I’m thinking of going on a particular product, so I mention it casually to several friends to gauge consensus/temperature. One or more of them tell me "oh yes, I’ve heard of that", and one tells me "yes, My friend tried that, and lost 20lbs") This is not an active market. Most people won’t be evangelizing, and evangelizing behaviour may even appear suspicious.
2) That said, people trust strangers to an extraordinary degree. Friend-of-friend endorsement is readily accepted, as is the anonymous commentary on boards & groups. Bloggers are slightly less trustworthy, it seems – because most of them have an axe to grind.
OK — so this really isn’t v. scientific. But compare this to the map of green issue member-get-member activity and you’ll see a huge difference.
Tags: facebook, influence, mapping, networks, research, social media, weight loss
Posted in networks | 4 Comments »
how to: perform free Facebook audience research
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
Facebook provides a free, useful way to interrogate its database of users. This can be invaluable whether you’re actually thinking about planning a campaign on Facebook, you’re looking for some quick-and-dirty audience research, or you just need some corroborative detail.
So where’s this tool? It’s all part of Facebook’s Social Ads platform. Here’s how you do it.
Step 1
Go to http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/. You don’t need a Facebook account to do this.
The page may look a little different if you’re already logged in, or if you’ve created something using the platform in the past.
Type in any URL. It doesn’t matter.
Step 2
Now this is where it really gets interesting. Play around with the various drop-downs and check boxes. How many Australians aged 25-30 have registered accounts with Facebook? How many of these work for the Macquarie Group?
Or ask Facebook how many of its UK users enjoy peanut butter?
If you have a Facebook account yourself, you’ll know that there are lots of places in your profile where you can answer questions.
So for example, it’s perfectly possible to dig around and find out what portion of the Facebook audience say, likes peanut butter enough to feel that it’s important that they tell their friends.
Or which age group most (publicly) enjoys Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Caveat 1
We’ve seen that (at May 6, 2008) there were around 9.7 m registered UK accounts aged 18+ (or approximately 16% of the total 2006 UK population). But – of course, we can be more granular than that, and look at specific cities. For example, we can see that there are around 2.5 m users based in London.
Of these users, 788 K are male. This should raise a few suspicions, because at first glance one might infer that the remainder (2.5 m – 788 K = 1.7 m) of the users are female. This would mean that (in London, at least) female users of Facebook outnumber male users two to one.
But when we add women into the mix, we see that women and men combined account for only 1.7 m Facebook accounts in London.
What gender are the remaining 900 k (2.6 m – 1.7 m) users?
Facebook can only tell you what its users have shared. If they have chosen not to share their age, gender, location, etc. you can’t see it. Double check your numbers, and bear in mind that the more granular you get, the more room there is for error.
Caveat 2
It appears that there are around 140 people aged between 18 and 19 on Facebook who like peanut butter enough to tell their Facebook friends.
Breaking it down a little further, we see that 40 of these are aged 18.
And 120 of them are aged 19.
Adding those numbers together, that’s 160 peanut butter lovers aged 18-19 , not the 140 peanut butter lovers we saw in the first run.
Running the exercise again confirms that twenty new peanut butter lovers haven’t suddenly signed on in the past five minutes.
There’s clearly some kind of rounding error. It seems that Facebook rounds to the nearest twenty. Bear this in mind that these estimates are intended for the purposes of estimating advertising audiences.
Tags: audience, facebook, research
Posted in how to | Comments Off
