Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

LIVE! Lessons From Going Live Around the World

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 16:10:36 +0100

[Https://bit.ly/sreespark](Slides used in the presentation)
[Https://bit.ly/sreetips](Sree’s Tips)

What I’ve learned from doing hundreds of live videos - my brand-new presentation at #spark in Copenhagen. THE SLIDES: https://t.co/2th9oZJMKs. • Meanwhile, my best social media tips on one sheet: https://t.co/XDfMkGqnaQ • Thanks, @FalconIO
— Sree Sreenivasan #smwknd (@sree) November 14, 2018

https://twitter.com/sree/status/1062726679804764160

People watching live video and who are attending Spark.

Don’t be an ask on social media. Connect with people and share their content. Use your phone as a collection device.

The last two papal transitions showed a great increase in the way we use technology, and who uses technology.It didn’t even take us five years to go into live streaming.

Live video means no homework, you don’t need to edit it, and the platforms you can use are in the hundreds.

There is too much going on online and today the scarcest resource of our century is attention.

Live video can help you cut through the clutter
Done well it’s a game changer
Done poorly it is just awful

An example, Ted Cruz doing a Facebook live with his phone horizontal. And that was the worse of the issues in the video.

Before you go live, promote it.

Three atributes of great digital projects (that also apply to live video)

Simple
Useful
Delightful

1. Live Video is a part of your digital strategy, it’s not the center of it.

Try the different platforms and use the one that makes sense to you

2. Why go live?

If it’s not going to be special, don’t do it.

3. Plan everything you are doing

There are multiple ways to get people to see your video, make sure to publicise before, during and after.

4. It’s not about your network

It’s about the network of the person standing there with you.

5. read, interact and respond

It’s more effective if you pay some attention to what the audience is saying. Otherwise you will be irritating the people who are watching you.

Get a digital wingman/woman that will assist you in sharing relevant links, keep track of comments and filter interesting questions from the audience.

Quick trick, always ask a question in the description of your live video. That will become a conversation starter for the two people on the facebook live video.

6. go for at least 10 minutes

7. what’s going on? Reintroduce yourself throughout the video and say what is happening

This will give viewers a reason to stay because they won’t be confused about what is going on.

8. There are two audiences, the live audience and the replay audience

Part of your job is to promote the video, before and after the live session. Get people to see what you did and where you were.

9. Practice, practice, practice

When you need a safe place, use the “only me” feature on facebook.

Winning in Times of Google Apple Facebook and Amazon (GAFA)

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 09:09:27 +0100

https://twitter.com/westermeyer

Today the world is dominated by platforms: GAFA. Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

European companies are in a difficult situation because the eastern and western companies are succeeding while they struggle to keep up.

https://twitter.com/rankenberg/status/1062652901921865729

.@Westermeyer showing the room a simplified version of the value of Chinese, European and American internet :) An idea to spark off his talk #spark pic.twitter.com/Jp9Z79chte
— Susanna Rankenberg (@rankenberg) November 14, 2018

One solution is to travel to broaden our horizons. Digital thinkers tend to travel to silicon valley to learn from the companies there.

https://twitter.com/marcus_stoltze/status/1062653257963716608

Every year 75000 Germans marketeers requests meetings with Facebook. And all they get is a lousy selfie 😉 #Spark #smdk pic.twitter.com/XPTGS8gSqH
— Marcus Stoltze (@marcus_stoltze) November 14, 2018

Their main takeaways do not change much more than what’s at the surface. The real learning is that what makes them different is the customer access. These 4 platforms are controlling customer access.

Then what can we do? Five ways to beat them

1. Go Horizontal

Zalando, 8Bn valuation.

They have been expanding their offer to include other areas, not just shoes anymore, also fashion, beauty and more. It’s a way for them to pay back the customer acquisition cost.

Uber expanded in the same logic with Uber Black, Uber Pop, Uber eats.

2. Retain your customer

It’s a logic step after we paid so much to acquire a customer to try to retain him/her as best as possible. A simple way to do this is a subscription model, like Dollar Shave Club and gym memberships.

It’s simple CRM but there are few examples of good CRM.

https://twitter.com/aikazikibay/status/1062655435256332289

How to be a rockstar in the age of #GAFA? One of @Westermeyer’s tip is to retain customers via CRM systems #Spark #digitalmarketing @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/XeXtnE23RO
— Aika Zikibayeva (@aikazikibay) November 14, 2018

3. Stand Out

Look for creative ways to make your brand stand out.

Naketano, they are building a world class brand on the back of sexual innuendo product naming.

Products
CEO as a brand

https://twitter.com/delay1/status/1062658013373349894

The CEO has to become a visible leader @westermeyer #spark @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/yrvze7m46F
— Matthias «Delay» Göbel (@delay1) November 14, 2018

https://twitter.com/sabrodriguez1/status/1062657519871553536

How to beat #GAFA? You need to stand out. And your CEO needs to be your brand. Icons create value and build trust. #Spark @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/S9slM1Ntc0
— Sabrina Rodriguez (@sabrodriguez1) November 14, 2018

4. Digital PR

We have to do PR in a whole different way. An example was the Tesla car put on a rocket and sent to mars. It produced a lot of traffic and earned media for Tesla.

This is a way to drive attention in this day and age.

Decoding Elon Musk

Frequency of tweets, 3 a day.
Absurdity
Agenda setting, he talks about the hot topics that are strategic for him.
Authenticity

https://twitter.com/rankenberg/status/1062659940802805760

.@Westermeyer is delighting the whole room by analyzing Elon Musk’s PR strategy, and adding “Look at his mom!” 👌😊 Talking about authenticity and _being_ authentic at the same time, is a-okay! #spark pic.twitter.com/ujUB6LQTfr
— Susanna Rankenberg (@rankenberg) November 14, 2018

The result, Tesla is mentioned 6th as one of most innovative companies by German managers. VW was not mentioned at all.

VW is the fifth company spending more in R&D, while Tesla is at 171. The PR stunts and communication skewed our perception of reality.

Events

Apple is clearly the most effective company in running events and having people talk about them during the following weeks.

https://twitter.com/rikardandree/status/1062662206234464257

Interesting presentation by @Westermeyer about pr and marketing on social media #spark #abepartners pic.twitter.com/a2VkYqFgDF
— R Andrey (@rikardandree) November 14, 2018

5. Be agile on all platforms

Google shopping

A company was able to get a better CTR with their photo for white sneakers.

Agile on mobile

Selling a shirt on amazon or instagram means a CPO of 8€. But on instagram you are able to ask for twice as much in price.

https://twitter.com/Lemberg/status/1062661916378701824

CPO on Instagram and Amazon are equally expensive. But people on IG will pay twice as much for your products. 🤔😲 #spark @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/PZAIyzCfuG

— @Lemberg on twitter

Agile on facebook

Groups. True fans create groups for you and there is room to leverage them.

Agile on brick and mortar shops

A champagne bar used a street art graffiti that draws in customers to take instagram photos.

Turning Strangers Into Friends: Pulling Up A Stool Next To Your Mates, Not Your Followers

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 18:07:45 +0000

Hanne Grainger

Jameson Irish Whiskey

There are so many brands that just talk about themselves. Jameson has been learning how not to do this by trial and error.

Consumer behaviour

Consumers will tell you they don’t follow brands on social media. They will tell you that they only follow friends, celebrities, sports, news, entertainment, meme accounts and others.

Customers don’t say they follow brands on social media, but the instagram followers for brands on instagram sum up to the population of Europe.

Users actually follow brands that don’t act like brands.

Jameson is competing with all the brands on social media, not just the ones in the spirits market. So how do they cut through?

1. Knowing who we (Jameson) are

It’s also about the tone of voice in their Copy.

We’re not flippant nor crass. We’re warm and knowingly clever.

2. How we interact

It’s all about two way conversations and getting to know the followers.

Just like a real friendship.

Interesting
Trust
Banter
Confidence (not cockyness)
Personable
Good listener
Know when to be quiet

DON’T

Narcissistic
Never arrogant
Talk for the sake of talking
Talk about the things you have a right to talk about

It’s not only about playing and engaging, it’s also about engaging with things they are interested in. An example is how Jameson interacted with buzzeed posts.

You can have fun on a shoe string budget

3. Where we interact

Our Personality’s Always The Same But Like A Person, We Tweak Our Behaviour Depending On Our Surroundings.

Jameson does not repurpose the content across platforms with copy and paste. That’s lazy.

Each social media channel has it’s own purpose.

Instagram: “Where we showcase the real, un-staged moments of our whiskey.”

Facebook: “Where we showcase the real, un-staged moments of our whiskey.”

Twitter: “Our mates are having conversations & we’re here to join in.”

YouTube: “Sit back, take a seat, grab a Jameson, we’re delighted to be spending that little bit more time with you.”

4. Our friends becoming our family

Jameson leverages their community to talk about subjects where it doesn’t have a right to discuss.

https://twitter.com/NGaberyAdams/status/1062696948703092738

Great insight from @hannegrainger @jamesonwhiskey - we are not only competing in our own category but with the whole internet with our #contentmarketing #spark @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/AFs9iXv9lb
— Nick Gabery Adams (@NGaberyAdams) November 14, 2018

Presentation Photos

How We Need to Remake the Internet

Sun, 06 May 2018 18:14:00 +0100

Since I read “You are Not a Gadget” that Jaron became a sort of thorn in my side. The good kind of thorn, the kind that challenges our opinion.

The views he expresses in the book are opposite to my sort of technocratic vision. In other settings, he stays true to those views about our lock in to formats, about how technology can impact how we relate with each other.

And he is right.

The NY Times has a good summary of the book “You Are Not a Gadget”.

In this TED Talk he does it again. Jaron presents his view on how corporations act as behaviour modification empires, and suggests an alternative to the advertising revenue model.

Fb Unseen

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 22:52:50 +0000

http://fbunseen.com/

Sometimes you just need some space, and you don’t need facebook snitching to your friends that you have seen their message.

This extension for chrome will take care of that.

How Joe bested Facebook

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 14:21:04 +0000

Joe Best shared a post with his friends on Facebook saying:

Twitter in Portugal is going limp. Five years ago I would see 1000 per hour. Now I get 300/400 every 12 hours. Logic says I should get much more because five years ago I had 1000 followers and now I have 7000.

The blue bird’s magic flew… to Facebook!

You can try to click here https://www.facebook.com/JoeBest66/posts/10204873624022288 and if you are in his facebook network you will see it gathered over 1000 comments and 123+ likes.

This was published in his profile page. Where he is followed by 415 people and has 4160 facebook friends. If you look at the stream of photos and updates that he shares it is obvious that not a single one goes unnoticed.

Joe also has a Facebook Page called DaCozinha with 3900 likes and where he sparingly posts the occasional update and photo about his business. Right now he hasn’t posted anything since October 15th.

That is enough background. I guess you got the picture by now.

What this means for Small Businesses

Joe proved that for a small business it does not make sense to invest time and content into a Facebook Page. Instead, tailoring your own profile page and personal brand until you reach the 5000 friends limit gives you more results.

Let’s avoid the technical differences between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page. What is important is the newsfeed algorithm and how it impacts them differently.

Content from profiles is clearly being favored, I see less and less content from brands in my newsfeed. This change became so visible that Facebook responded directly to the decline in page reach in the newsfeed. After all, we rather interact with a real person than a brand, right?

All this said … Joe’s blog is well worth your time if you enjoy good cooking: https://dacozinha.net/

Header photo source

Bring back my Web !

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 23:09:48 +0000

I remember a web before Facebook and before Twitter. It was a place built so that people could talk among themselves, share and collaborate to build things that would make everyone’s life easier.

Sure, you would also use to post funny pictures of cats or brag about your latest party. There was however a different way of doing things online that I can’t explain. Less ego and more community.

I still love that web, and I still think we live in that reality. (Even though it does sound a bit lyrical to say this.) Sometimes I do lose faith on that web, for a little while. Then something wonderful happens, like a new open source project on Github, a new and constructive subreddit, or a blog post to rally time and resources towards something worth doing.

Cidadania 2.0

Lately, it was Cidadania 2.0 that brought my faith back. It’s a conference on using the web to build social tools, forums and ways to practice citizenship and governance in a more effective and efficient way. This year it was filled with amazing new projects, blogs and platforms to help us understand what is going on in our own street or what we can do to improve our education system.

It is also a project built by the love and dedication of three people. Ana Neves, Ana Silva, and Vitor Silva work hard to bring everyone a free event, 1 day full with presentations and discussions and one morning to network with people who are behind new projects and look for partnerships and people to help.

And did I mention it is free to attend? I would gladly pay 50 euros or more to attend and meet so many interesting people. Yet, the team insists on keeping it as easy to attend as humanly possible. You would imagine that government institutions and other companies would jump at the chance to sponsor this initiative.

Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to happen, as this year I didn’t see many public institutions in the list of sponsors. It’s not that the content of the conference isn’t interesting to them. In fact, most of it challenges the status quo or proposes new models of governance and decision making. From where I stand, every city hall in Portugal should be ashamed for not to being present at Cidadania 2.0 and listed as a sponsor.

The people

Every good story needs a hero, right?

My friend Basílio decided to use the web and social media to pressure a number of public institutions into doing their job of making a street safer to walk in. It took him 2 years to get them into doing the job they are supposed to do anyway. Just think about it: they had to be pressured into doing their job.

I talked about this when I was in BledCom last year and you can find the slides in the end of this post.

Upload Lisbon

This is more about the future. Today mostly everyone from digital marketing and social media in Lisbon will be at Upload Lisboa. They will surely talk about Facebook, Twitter, the latest campaign and best practices. They will talk about what is new and exciting, because it is indeed exciting and interesting and shows great promise.

But I don’t think they will all be talking about this web I know and love. Where the main goal is to get people to talk and understand each other, instead of increasing the reach of a facebook post. I risk saying they will forget about the importance of 4chan in monitoring, how to take part in a community on reddit and worst, they may forget to mention why #blogs are still so important.

Well, some of them might but I am here to talk about blogs and about the web I grew up with. How it is still alive and showing great promise even to those who seem to have forgotten about it. And thanks to Pedro Rebelo I know I am not alone.

BledCom 2013: Towards a connected government from Bruno Amaral

Socialbakers, are teens still active on Facebook?

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 12:06:28 +0000

Someone over at Socialbakers is going to have to explain this to me very well.

Ben Harper published an article where he shows that content reach grew 29% among teens (13–24).

Content Reach and Active users are two different things altogether. Any website can lose active users and still see the content reach or time spent online grow as long as a segment of its users becomes more active.

Also, the data presented is segmented only by age. Other countries may have seen a sharp decrease or even have seen teens use Facebook more.

This does not mean the conclusion is wrong, I just don’t agree with the way it was reached and feel it is questionable.

Why Socialbakers’ Engagement Rate is not a solid metric

Fri, 27 Dec 2013 12:57:49 +0000

We have seen it before:

Socialbakers relies on the count of total fans in a given day to be able to benchmark different pages. There is however a hidden factor, Facebook’s edge rank algorithm. The overall organic reach is not equal for every piece of content published and over the course of a month it is very likely that the page will only reach a portion of its total number of “fans”. (“Subscribers” is more like it.)

Since Socialbakers can’t access the organic, paid and viral reach of a post it relies on the little public information it has about all pages, number of fans.

And yet, this is the only way we have to benchmark a page against its competitors: not taking into account the investment in facebook sponsored posts and ads or the impact that a particular piece of content might have in regards to the exposure of a content published by brands.

Photo by Frederico Casares

The grain of salt in Engagement Rates

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:44:31 +0000

The engagement rate for a Facebook Page is often used as a benchmark for performance against competitors and similar pages. It isn’t however so cut and dry.

Here is how socialbakers determines Engagement Rate:

Facebook does not show a percentage for engagement rate, instead they focus on absolute numbers for Post Clicks and Comments, Likes and Shares.

There are issues with both approaches. For the Socialbakers formula, it doesn’t take into account the fact that people do click links and go to a website where they can in fact learn more about the brand. This is more of a technological limitation, given that they have access to those figures.

Both formulas for engagement don’t take into account the different reach of a facebook post. From experience, we know that facebook shows a Page’s updates to around 30% of the total number of people who have subscribed to its updates, and this percentage is influenced by sponsored posts and other ad formats facebook offers.

Now imagine that every once in a while you sponsored a post aimed at people who subscribed to your page, in fact countering the edge rank algorithm. The obvious conclusion is that your engagement rate will rise, no matter which formula you use.

For me this is a symptom of a bigger issue, that the overall average of engagement rate will be in correlation with the overall advertising investment of brands in facebook. So if you’re benchmarking your presence on Facebook in relation to competitors or even the average of the sector, do use that information with a grain of salt, considering that there is a percentage of investment which is unknown.

Photo by Mike Scoltock

Open Formats and what that has to do with running

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 07:00:37 +0000

A while back at a party someone asked “Why can’t I look at a balance sheet on my phone?”. I took the questions serious but there just was too much in the answer for that time and context.

This is about proprietary file formats, ways to structure information only known by those who make the software to read it. For example, Adobe Photoshop uses a proprietary format to store information on the layers and effects that make up an image. Business software relies on proprietary formats for security reasons.

And it’s not just about balance sheets or your firm’s ERP data, it’s about a bunch of things in your personal life. With so many apps and ways to store our information we need open formats in order to be able to have the freedom to switch or move from one software to the other without losing data along the way. Closed and open formats to store information are found in files and in the cloud.

If you want your app or your service to be truly valuable, you need to allow your users to import and export their information. And there is a lot to gain in user behaviour when you opt for open formats.

What this has to do with running

I like to run and I began on my own, tracking my runs with the Nike+ app on my phone. It lets me keep track on much I have ran, how fast, in what time at what climb. It’s not that I am addicted to numbers or to running longer and faster each and every time, I use this information to keep myself motivated to run regularly.

The other day I managed to keep going for a full hour, 9.39km. It was amazing!

Part of me wanted to share it with everyone, including people who don’t use the Nike+ App or Runkeeper. And this is where It gets tricky. I can give you the link for my Runkeeper activity, and I can link to Nike+ but there is no way for me to embed the map here. Even exporting and importing this information between the two systems is a pain. Nike and Runkeeper keep my information in a closed format, fortunately some runners put their free time to use and built tools to allow for export of the data from Nike’s servers and both companies are making an effort to open their (my) data.

So, this is not just about being able to open files in any software, or allowing us to import or export our data in the cloud, but also to about letting us embed it on other online channels. You know, the places where we actually want to share and talk with friends. Blogs, facebook, tumblr.

Twitter, saw the benefit in allowing us to embed the information from tweets into other sites:

I just ran 9,51 km @ a 7'10"/km pace with Nike+. https://t.co/RukMdpTS80 #nikeplus

— Bruno Amaral (@brunoamaral) August 9, 2013

Even Facebook is opening up the possibility to embed posts outside of their service. Other services, like IFTTT allow you to automatically publish your content across channels and to pull and push information at will to make your life easier.

And what if I wanted to share with you the music I was listening to during my run? Then we would be moving into another problem of copyright and of the extent to which we actually own the songs we buy. And we all want to share the songs we love with our friends, through a smartphone or a computer, a website or a record player and a million other ways to listen to music.

mixtape_brinde_v1.mp3]6

Mixtape I by Orelha Negra

The simple thing that bugs me about the Instagram ToS

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:07:00 +0000

After the whole mess of unclear Terms of Service, Instagram replies. The whole thing could have been avoided if they had already shed light about what their future ad offering is.

What bugs me is the whole outbreak and deleted accounts on Instagram. Why didn’t it happen on Facebook as well?

Facebook’s Terms of Service read:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

This can be read pretty much in the same way as the Terms of Service that Instagram published.

The New York Times managed to avoid all the hype and outrage and publish a throughout piece about the whole problem.

And, were we really expecting Instagram to be free forever without some sort of compromise?

Those that migrated, have they read the Terms of Service on other sites, do they know what business model those new channels work on?

My Instagram account is staying just the way it is. The only thing that will get me to move is if the people I want to share with decide to migrate to another channel.

One last note

The photo above was taken by 55Laney69 under a Creative Commons License with Some rights reserved{#yui_3_7_3_3_1355916569925_468}. Most, if not all photos you find here, are used under Creative Commons with due attribution.

Facebook – Global Pages for Brands and Censorship

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:40:00 +0000

What if Facebook censored your newsfeed?

Well, it does. They call it the EdgeRank and you can learn a bit about it over at EdgeRank Checker.

And there’s more. Some brands opt to have Global pages and segment their updates by region. It sounds good on paper, but there are a lot of setbacks in this tactic. Read about it over at A Source of Inspiration.

Facebook is a closed system, meaning that the only way to read segmented posts is changing your location on your profile settings.

Recently Facebook announces that global you will be able to visit the page for Brand X and see only what the community managers of your country chose you should see. If a crisis breaks out somewhere else, you won’t know about it.

This gives amazing flexibility to Brands, and limits our access to information about what is going on around the world.

Read the full announcement over at Facebook Studio.

Facebook visitor insights

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:25:00 +0000

The other day I noticed the still recent Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK) for PHP. You can find it here.

Simply put, an SDK allows developers to work faster by making goals easier to meet. This SDK is so straightforward that anyone can use it to build a small script to pull visitor data from Facebook.

Imagine that you want to know who visits your website and what pages they open. Later, you may want to get more data from them, location, likes, interests or anything else from Facebook. The example showed on the SDK github page is easy enough to change and achieve this. I did just that as an example, the code is at the end of this post.

If you use it, in the end you get a text file with lines that look like this:

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 06:31:00 +0100;Bruno Amaral;/how-this-blog-is-going-to-work/comment-page-1/

It starts with a timestamp, shows you the name of the person and the page that person was browsing. It could also give you the visitor’s facebook ID, facebook profile, etc.

The caveat here is that for you to get this information, that person must first authorize access of your Facebook Application.

When was the last time you authorized a Facebook App?

Before you ask: This blog will not run any of the code below or collect information from your Facebook account.

On filters, Facebook and the lack of critical thinking

Mon, 21 May 2012 08:37:12 +0000

Foto por Ricardo Bernardo

“When we change the way we communicate we change society.” — Clay Shirky

I have always liked this quote and saw it as being true and positive. After all, our way to communicate can only get better, right? Wrong.

Just because we find new ways to communicate, it does not mean they are better or more effective.

But lets clarify. We are talking about new channels of communication and not just the improvement of existing ones. The Internet is a platform for a wide range of communication channels of this sort and they have changed society: The Web holds information that we can access in real time and thus guide our decisions, email changed the way we work and do business, twitter altered the way we coordinate small and large groups and the way we broadcast information.

Facebook changed the way we communicate with friends, family and co-workers.

What Clay Shirky fails to mention is that there are two types of filters at work in the web. Filters we control and filters we do not control and have no knowledge on how they work. Lets call them visible and invisible filters.

More so, from the little I know on usability and user experience, it is clear that the way in which we structure a website and its features conditions the way it is used. Think craigslist versus ebay for example.

Lets take this step by step starting with filters.

Whenever we search Twitter we are building a filter that will show us the most up to date tweets which include certain words and characteristics. It is a visible filter and you know you are applying that filter to the toatlity of tweets.

A Google search is another way by which we filter information. Only this time, we know Google will rank the information based on what it thinks we are looking for. Google’s search algorithm is an invisible filter, but one I can live with given the fact that as far as I know it will not keep information from me, allowing my search query to be adjusted until I find what I am looking for.

In both cases, it is up to me to decide how much or how little I trust the information I find. For every link or piece of information from a Tweet, or every search result I get from Google, I am forced to stop and think on how reliable that information is. This is an old discussion, so we won’t get into that. It is suficient to say that our own judgement plays an important role in these two examples.

Lets jump to Facebook. This is a communication channel which is closed by nature, as a means to protect your privacy and allow you to communicate freely with your social circles. (How much we agree or disagree on how this is accomplished and to what extent is not the question. Stallman has a very long post about this issue, some of which I don’t agree with.)

Everytime I login to Facebook it will show me the “Top Stories” and there is no way to ascertain how it selects these items. It is safe to say that the number of interactions in each post plays a big part in the way it selects the top stories. So everytime I login, I make sure that I only see the most recent posts from my network.

But what is bad is the way Facebook facilitates meaningful interactions while at the same time removing any judgement from the user. In a macabre example, I have seen posts on Facebook mentioning the passing of common friends with others clicking the “like” button. Of course they do not “like” it. Had a millisecond been given to thought and instead they would comment “that is terrible, my condolences”.

The same irreflected act is seen when people find a piece of information. It is normal and expected to see people sharing infographics or photos just because they thought it was interesting. But Facebook as a communication channel removes a great number of clues for us to ascertain how reliable and trustworthy that information is. Those images or posts rarely contain links or lists of sources, and sometimes the origin of a photo is completely lost in the numberos shares, thus being stripped of context and judge with little or no research on the subject.

Facebook is a channel that changed the way we communicate and is thus changing society. The way this channel works seems to favor quick reactions and little thought, not to mention that less savy users will be blind to the “Top Stories” and privacy filters.

I don’t mean to say Facebook is evil and should be erradicated, merely to state that we need to nurture and reward critical thinking when using any communication channel. That effort must be kept as an aim by a wide number of people. From developers to designers, including of course Public Relations and other communication professionals.

Because in the long run, we all want to build a society of new ideas and cooperation and not one that merely reacts to problems without offering any shred of insight or acting towards a solution.

Strangely enough, moments after writing this last paragraph I came across a post on my to-read list. It is written by Lucy Pepper and talks about this exact problem from a more human and social perspective.

Facebook Data team reveals research on Values Systems

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 19:24:18 +0000

Carla, a very good friend, was kind enough to point me towards the new Facebook Data article “What’s on your mind“.

The study and its findings come with no surprise to me and I am guessing David will feel the same way.

Simply put, the Facebook Data team revealed evidence that there is a correlation between the choice of words and the number of facebook friends, a correlation between age and choice of words and that we talk about different things depending on the hour of the day. Also, there is a link between what we write about and what our friends write about.

Back in 2009 I was in Cape Verde, sitting in front of the computer and crunching numbers and words “by hand”, these were taken from hundreds of blogs and eventually turned into a proof of concept presented at Bledcom. Later this research became the dissertation for my MA Degree.

The main difference is that the Facebook team used a technique called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, while I used a Latent Semantic Analysis tool. But in their essence the findings are the same, we form relationships based on a match of Values Systems, either at a personal or a group level, and we express these Values through our actions.

What is missing from the article on the Facebook Data page is Context. We use different channels of communications with different purposes and objectives in mind. This was pointed out by Edward Moyer on cnet when he wrote:

according to the data team’s results, the Facebookers with many friends tend to use fewer “emotional words” than do members with less friends. I’m not sure this means that people flock to those who are unemotional; it could just as easily mean that people who tend to form deeper, more-emotional relationships use Facebook in a different way (or not at all)–i.e., that “popular” Facebookers, with more “friends,” form shallow connections, or indeed, that the Facebook platform itself, as Zadie Smith recently suggested in The New York Review of Books, encourages shallowness

Article on cnet

What does this mean for business? Less marketing and more PR.

What the web is made of (and what that means for PR Strategy)

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:36:50 +0000

If we would ask David Phillips or Philip Young what the web is made of, they would tell us about Platforms, Channels and Context.

When we talk about the Internet we are talking about a series of technologies that indeed communicate among themselves, things like satellites, routers, servers and other infrastructures. Information can travel across the Internet in a number of ways, and to access it we refer to communication Platforms such as computers, mobile phones and tablet computers.

But Platforms are simply the objects we use to access information. We can access the same file through an Hypertext Transfer Protocol using a computer or a mobile phone, and we can do the exact same thing using a File Transfer Protocol that will in addition allow us to edit the file. We can also exchange messages through a number of ways, from Instant Messaging to email and twitter, using facebook or any other social network. These are Channels or as I prefer, online communication instruments.

Depending on the circumstances, we use different combinations of platforms and channels. Search engines offer maps that adapt to mobile devices because we look for directions and places to stay while traveling and companies look for ways to access updated information at any time. These are Contexts in which we use the Internet.

To the elements proposed by David Phillips and Philip Young I add Content, which can be seen as the sum of data to obtain information that will be applied to a Context. This post is content because it contains a number of data (ideas and concepts), organized to become information (given a logical line of thought) and given context to become content (Thus a post on Online Public Relations is born).

But what does it all mean?

Nowadays we use information and content in a number of ways and we want it to travel across platforms and channels as best as possible. That is why we have things like XML and Open Document Formats, mobile phones and laptops. We don’t just use these things because we want to work and collaborate in a more efficient and effective way, they are also a means to reach out to friends and relatives.

Building relationships is part of our nature and is one of the reasons that led us to spend so much time and effort developing Communication Technologies. And to communicate we share information and content with those that for some reason are close to us.

Thanks to the Internet we have produced more information and content that we can ever hope to be able to organize, that is why we are slowly moving to a Semantic Web. Simply put, we are finding ways for computers to understand that 9 digits form a phone number and that an address is composed of a street name, house number, region and country. In short, the semantic web is a way of telling a computer what that data you just entered is.

Before you let yourself be dragged by the current hype of the Semantic Web, take the time to read this article from December 2000 describing how Tim Berners Lee himself explained the concept.

So, we now live in a world where a wide variety of communication platforms allow us to use a number of channels to access and share information and content in a number of different contexts (at work, while traveling, at home…). The semantic web will allow us to use that information with even greater ease, but that is a subject for a future post.

Where does Public Relations fit?

We can use these four elements that make up the Internet and the Web to understand the changes in our way to communicate and to relate with one another. In the past we had access to a telephone and a fax machine, today we have a computer and a mobile phone and a number of other platforms to communicate. And if before we used these platforms in a work context, today we can use them in greater number of daily contexts.

When building a strategy we need to take into account which platforms and channels will our publics use to communicate and in what context. Each of them will impose challenges. Intranets may be used on-the-go and therefore require a mobile-friendly version; corporate websites need to be indexed by search engines and therefore must not use flash; our publics demand quick updates so we must opt for a microblogging platform; etc.

These questions will impact our budget, the way we measure and evaluate success as well as the procedures we apply to manage the different communication instruments at our disposal. But it does not end here.

Different communication instruments imply their own set of constraints, both in the way they work and in regards to the social contracts that we must adhere to in order to use them effectively. A clear example would be twitter and facebook, while twitter asks us to limit our updates to 140 characters, facebook asks that we respect the privacy of others.

The content shared across these instruments is also somewhat different, while twitter allows for text and links, facebook gives us the possibility of posting videos, photos, notes and even to play games. One can argue that twitter can also be used to share the exact same content as facebook, but it will always require an additional communication instrument such as posterous, a blog, or a youtube/vimeo account.

Even if we do not outline the scenario which is composed of platforms, channels/instruments, context and content, it is good to keep these concepts in mind as they will surely be useful to identify changes and to adapt our strategy.

Looking back to see what’s ahead

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:21:36 +0000

If you follow this blog or simply look at the archives, you will notice posting speed is down. And no, it is not simply because of my thesis or any other activity. I simply have not found a good topic to write about.

And recently it hit me why…

I still keep an eye on twitter and in a bunch of other portuguese blogs about public relations. Recently I compiled a list of a few portuguese blogs I read and Armando Alves was even surprised to find out he fits in that category.

Also, while celebrating their one year of blogging, PiaR wrote an interesting analysis regarding Public Relations Agencies in Portugal. My take on the post is that we are lacking a good amount of discussion. And if before we used to get good insight and dialog thanks to the newspapers who cover PR and Marketing in Portugal, that is no longer the case.

And as for blogs, agencies were quick to jump on but haven’t been able to catch on. What I mean is that blogs by PR professionals are being misused. What should be about listening and engaging in dialogue is proving not to be more than broadcasting and selling. I am not sure if anyone is buying…

Some agencies re-write press releases into blog posts, others focus on commenting the sector in an attempt to set their own agenda. And a few others are sticking to the formula that worked even though it does not work anymore. All is not lost, but I fear that less than a handful of authors are listening in and trying to engage in a conversation.

To aggravate the fact that these authors are outnumbered, several “experts” have popped up over the last 12 months. Correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn’t we start out as professionals and only then move on to being “experts”? (Whatever that means)

In the meantime, twitter and facebook are all the rage and the cycle is repeating.It is again more about broadcasting than about creating spaces for debate.

In a nutshell, all this means that this blog needs a new direction and I need a new perspective as to what it should be. One thought on my mind is if I should even continue to write in Portuguese.

All I can say is that this blog will not fade, nor will I move on to the next shiny new thing abandoning it altogether. So please, bear with me for a while.