Tag: social media

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So You Want Me To Switch To Google+?

So I got an invite a couple days ago to Google Plus, and generally, I’m pretty happy with it. I’m not leaving twitter any time soon, because I like it as an aggregator and a public discussion forum.

But I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for it. I was never really a big fan of Facebook in the first place. When it was really taking off, I would read about it– being a grad student in Boston, interested in technology and culture, I was really curious. But I couldn’t access it. The Winklevossian commitment to exclusivity that was baked into it from the start saw the school where I was doing my MA as not worthy of inclusion. I think UMass Boston students had Facebook opened up to their .edu addresses a couple weeks before it just opened to everyone and their grandma. I ended up only getting a Facebook account once I started TAing while working on my PhD coursework, as a way to try to put the names of some 150 students with faces. So while I’m a pretty frequent user of Facebook, I’ve never felt much fondness for it. I’d be glad to go.

So– you there, over at Google! You want me to switch over to Google+, and drop my Facebook account all together? I’m ripe for it, and I’m not asking much in return.

All I want is this: we need to start a real discussion about what DATA EXPORTABILITY looks like for social networks.

I know Google has a great record in terms of data exportability and open standards compared to any other tech company its size. And I know that, from the get-go, Google+ has come with a way to export your data in a fairly granular way, and that’s a good start. I want more, though. I want a discussion.

You see, Facebook has a way to export your data, too— go to Settings, and scroll down to Export Data. And at least Google gives us a human-readable, stable URL for this process.

And I believe Eric Schmidt when he says that he thinks there’s room for multiple Social Networking platforms, and that Google’s trying to play nicely with Facebook and Twitter. I believe that because Google’s model has long been to improve the overall internet experience, to keep people online more, so they keep coming back to Google and its ads, as opposed to Facebook’s walled-garden approach.

But again, all of this is not quite enough. We’re at a major turn, here. Integrating social will be a huge boon to Google in terms of personalized search and finding ways to leverage the social graph. And I’ll get on board right now. But in return I want a discussion to happen, here.

What do I want this discussion to look like? It’s pretty simple. I want Google to invite outsiders to the table to have an honest discussion about what users might be able to expect in return for granting Google access to their social graph. Our social data is going to help drive search– social is going to influence how much of that fabled “Google Juice” a site or a post might have. When will that weighting data fall under the company’s commitment to data exportability?

And when will that commitment lead to them using Google+ as a platform to help create open data standards for social? Because exportability without standards is of very limited utility. Once I can export my data and migrate it to another platform– maybe even one that could still interact with Google+– that’s when we’ve really got data exportability that means something.

Google has a good record with standards, and I think that this would undergird Schmidt’s point. I think it would be in their interest, as traditionally defined– keeping people on the net by making the internet better– and it could potentially force Facebook to rethink its closed approach or risk irrelevence.

So yeah, Google– let’s get this conversation started. I’m ready to switch.

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Radical Trust Starts At Home

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the Smithsonian’s most recent Educator’s Exchange, a program primarily oriented to the Education departments of the various Smithsonian museums. The topic of the roundtable discussion was cooperation between departments, focusing primarily on education and web staff. Now, I’m in a curatorial department, a historian, but given my interest in both education and new media, I had to attend.

Coming in to the Air and Space Museum’s very impressive Moving Beyond Earth Gallery, I felt a little like an interloper, but I’m new enough to museums that I feel like an interloper most of the time anyway. During the lunch and discussion section, the other attendees were more than inviting, however. And the roundtable discussion was fascinating.

While the conversation rambled along, covering more topics than I could manage to tweet, the one takeaway I really got from this session was a better appreciation for and understanding of the notion of radical trust. It’s a term I’ve heard batted about a decent amount in recent months, but haven’t always had the clearest sense of what it meant.

Radical trust is, simply put, the decision by an organization– a library, a museum, what have you– to trust online communities, and to be sincerely open to their input. It’s trusting your visitors and your users to actually know what they want to see, to be informed engaged participants, rather than passive consumers. It’s making decisions that take into account the feedback people are volunteering.

One irony of the phrase is that “radical trust” isn’t particularly radical. It’s how many of us engage with others on the web every day. You get your friends’ opinions about a coat you want to buy via Facebook, for example, and then actually consider their opinions when making the purchase. You don’t simply put up your Facebook page to appear to be engaged. You actually interact. “Radical trust” is really the radical notion that organizations need to treat the people they serve like people.

What makes it so radical is that organizations, while made up of individuals, are not people, and do not act like people. Institutions have different instincts from (healthy) individuals. They’re highly compartmentalized. High barriers can exist between one department and the next, even when their actual missions overlap.

If you were to do a survey of the most vocal opponents of blog comments, tagging, wikis, crowdsourcing and the like on museum websites, I’d wager some of the loudest would be in curation. Curators are perhaps the most vested in the museum’s air of authority, in the implicit trust people give respected museums. This is natural, as their job is to be the arbiters of information, and to guard that trust. The job of the curator is to make sure that what is presented is accurate, interesting, valuable, and legit.

But when one of the panelists asked for a show of hands to a couple questions about interdepartmental cooperation, something became abundantly clear– curators are also being locked out of the process. In many museums, it seemed, the curators themselves were not being given access to the back-end of online projects. Is it any wonder that they would be trepidatious about allowing something they can’t even access themselves to be opened up to the whole wide world?

Radical trust can’t begin with opening up your project to the entire world. It has to start with opening up your project to the guy in the next office. If people in your organization are resisting the kind of openness that you think museums need to embrace, you have to ask yourself: how open are we being within the museum? Do curatorial, collections, education, and the like all have access to the back end of your websites? Are they being given enough administrative rights to actually do something on the back end, to contribute, and to add their own specialized knowledge? Are other departments brought in to meetings to strategize about what new technologies you should adopt?

If only the museum web team is participating in the creation of content for social media and engaging with the public, you already have a problem. Bring the whole family to the table, and make sure everyone has a seat, before you invite company in for a meal.

Radical trust starts at home.

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Facebook Fans Are Meaningless

In a meeting recently at work, we were talking about the use of social media, how to get people to come to the museum, and one person said something to the effect of, “Well, we all can agree that we want to have more followers.”

We all nodded in agreement. No matter the strategy, we all want to have more people “Like” (formerly “become a fan of”) our institutional Facebook page. The more people who do that, the more people see what’s going on, come to the museum, participate in building community, etc. Right? I mean, that’s the metric.

Then it hit me– No. It makes absolutely no difference how many people “Like” your Facebook page.

I’m overstating it slightly, but that’s what I thought at the time. My realization was– and this may be obvious to others– the number of people who “Like” your FB page is an essentially misleading, and almost meaningless metric.

But whether you’re a nonprofit museum, an activist organizer, a brand manager, or a guy with the most amazing Spin Doctors cover band you’ve ever seen, it’s the only metric you get.

The thing is, most of the time, nobody but first-time users visits your FB page. Most of the actual page traffic is going to be people just encountering what you have to offer on Facebook for the first time, exploring. After that, what really matters is not how many people Like your page, it’s how many people’s News Feeds you show up on.

The News Feed is the primary vehicle with which we explore the FB universe. It’s your firehose of information. But it’s not a firehose. At least it isn’t for many users. You see, Facebook defaults to “Top News,” not “Most Recent.” So for many users, the News Feed is curated for them by Facebook’s algorithms. And from what I can tell from some looking around, nobody seems to know much about those algorithms. Well, the engineer who designed News Feed just explains it by saying it’s a robot, but that just makes me feel talked down to.

Facebook has created the new Google Juice. Let’s call it FACEJUICE.

The beauty of FaceJuice is that it eliminates Search Engine Optimization, at least for the immediate future. You can game a search engine, at least somewhat, no matter how complex, as long as it behaves the same for every user. And while Google personalizes for those who log in, only a portion of their business is from users with accounts.

Basically everyone who uses Facebook, on the other hand, is tracked. They’re a member with an account. If you use it at home or at an internet cafe halfway across the globe, you’re going to log in before you get a really useful experience.

And because of that, the FaceJuice flows freely, the “robot” assigns value to every object a little differently, and Search Engine Optimization just can’t factor for every person. This is good for the individual user– it means that your news feed tends to be the most interesting, controversial, amusing, etc. posts from the people you interact with the most. It’s The Best Of Your Friends. And that’s nice. For the most part, nobody’s trying to game the system to sell you something.

And it works well for Facebook, because the only way to beat the system, to overcome the unpredictable rapids of FaceJuice, is to game the system by simply paying Facebook. Become an advertiser. Then, your FaceJuice doesn’t matter. You get guaranteed views, if not click throughs. And as an advertiser, you get more detailed metrics, analytic data, etc. So you can track if you’re actually connecting with the people you’re trying to sell to.

The one place where FaceJuice is not really an added value, but actually a major problem, is in group community building, organizing, and outreach for people who aren’t in it for the money, and don’t have the ad budget.

If you’re trying to organize a rally at city hall or promote your town’s local history museum, FaceJuice actively works against you, at least if you’re trying to use Facebook to get people interested and involved. You have no way of knowing how many of the people who “Like” your page actually get a given post. Or any of your posts. Probability would indicate that the more Fans you have, the more people’s News Feeds you’ll creep up onto, but there’s no way of knowing which posts are having the desired effect, getting the word out.

Did the last thing you posted on Facebook get zero responses because it wasn’t compelling to your followers, or because it was buried in FaceJuice? You have no way of knowing.

Since I’ve already brought up the Google comparison, let’s look at another part of the Googleverse– Youtube. Youtube has a nonprofit partnership program that adds value for nonprofits who want to use their platform to promote their causes, build their community, etc. Facebook seems to offer no such program. Although I’m sure they’re free to advertise.

All of this is all the more reason for nonprofits, organizers, and educators to not play in their garden. Right now Facebook is basically the only game in town– although that may not be true soon with the unveiling of Google Me and Diaspora. But even so, try to point as much of your content outside, so you can actually have analytics, and at least judge somewhat what the value of your participation on Facebook really is.

And stop counting Facebook fans. That number means nothing.

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