This week foursquare announced API changes to eliminate privacy concerns and creepy stalker apps like Girls Around Me. So, what are they changing? Foursquare is removing the ability for users to see people (even those not on their friends list) who are checked in to a venue without being checked in to the same venue themselves. Akshay Patil (foursquare API evangelist) explains it further: “much like how the users could see each other by looking around in real life.” Users will still be able to see friend check-ins regardless of whether they’re checked in to the same venue or not.
Creepy apps like Girls Around Me (which got a lot of buzz in March) leverage foursquare data to display a list of people (strangers) who are checked in nearby filtered by gender. The API change will essentially render these apps worthless because users will only be able to see their friends.
On the flipside, eliminating this data also affects the less-creepy apps like Sonar or Banjo that connect strangers based on location, particular interests or mutual friends. Sonar leverages data from multiple networks including foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to suggest people nearby you should connect with, based on interests and/or mutual friends.
Banjo uses data from Twitter, foursquare, Instagram and others to display where people are and what they’re saying or doing based on check-ins or tweets, not interests.
The foursquare API change will be implemented in June to allow time for the less-creepy app developers to make some changes. The negative impact will be low for these developers, considering many of them use multiple platforms and are not 100% reliant on foursquare for data.
I am a big fan of foursquare and consider it a safe service when used properly. This change will make it easier for the cautious non-users to convert and give the application a try.
What do you think? Does this make you feel more secure about sharing your location? Does this make you want to give foursquare a try if you haven’t already?
*Blog originally posted on SMG’s site here: http://socialmediagroup.com/2012/05/11/foursquare-delivers-decisive-blow-stalkers/
Social media enthusiasts are gathering worldwide today to celebrate the third annual Foursquare Day. Foursquare Day is held every year on April 16th (i.e., 4/16) and was started as a grass roots event in 2010 by Tampa Bay fans of the popular location-based app, foursquare. The event quickly spread to communities all over the world.
I am a self-proclaimed social media addict, and have been on the organizing committee of Foursquare Day Toronto (#4sqdayYYZ) since 2010. Last year was a huge success worldwide for 4sqDay with 3,073, 635 check-ins, 781 parties and 19 real city mayors who issued proclamations.
Last year, our Toronto organizing team was proud to make Toronto one of the top ten cities worldwide for check-ins/attendees with about 150-200 attendees throughout the night. We’re hoping to exceed our numbers this year. (Check out the recap video below)
For those of you in the Toronto area, you’re invited to join us at 6 p.m. this evening at The Pilot Tavern at 22 Cumberland Street in Yorkville. Nat & Marie, Toronto’s sassiest sweethearts to take a byte outta’ the world wide web, will host the event. Sponsors of the event have provided multiple giveaways, including prize packs from Fairmont Royal York hotel, Jugnoo, iSkin and ContactMonkey. Creemore Springs Brewery has also been a huge support through securing the event venue and providing additional hospitality highlights.
Be there and be square! *insert cheesey music*
After years of envious tweets and serious SXSWi FOMO, I finally made it. 2012 was my year! I scoured the schedule for days before stepping on the plane to Austin, eagerly added every single nerdy Foursquare meet-up/event to my calendar and created a ‘how-to’ list for each SXSW/Austin-specific Foursquare badge. (I do that with every new city I visit. #nerdalert)
After Day One was complete, I was somewhat disappointed.
I think at one point I was certainly the SXSWi target audience, but 2012 was all about mass appeal, big companies and bigger sponsors. Opinion: SXSWi is no longer a hotbed for cutting edge new ideas or a small group of big thinkers. It’s a huge group of people looking to learn more (just like so many other marketing/interactive conferences.)
SXSWi 2012 was bigger than ever. According Austin360 the festival said its official paid attendance count for 2012 was 24,569, up from 19,364 in 2011 (nearly 27%) and 14,251 in 2010. (This isn’t surprising considering the over-crowded halls at the Austin Convention Center and the 3.5+ hour wait in line to pick up my badge.)
Pros:
danah boyd’s talk on The Power of Fear in Networked Publics was thought-provoking and inspiring.
Hearing Pinterest’s CoFounder Ben Silbermann talk about his vision for the platform and plans for the future was quite interesting.
Cons:
None of the sessions I attended that directly related to my day-to-day work provided new insights or takeaways. I had no “Eureka!” moments, no inspiring “I can’t wait to try that!” moments, not even an “Oops, I’m doing it wrong” moment.
Maybe I missed out on the really valuable sessions. At any given time, there were three or four sessions that I wanted to attend and had to choose but one. Maybe I chose wrong.
I have a friend who found great value in the mentor sessions and networking events and friends who had a blast at the parties. (Something that was lost on me because I’m sorta lame and need my sleep.)
Verdict: I’m not sure I’ll go back. If I do attend a future SXSWi, I think I will focus on networking, mentor sessions and the big talks/keynotes. I may not come away with huge learnings that apply to my field, but I’ll likely end up with some valuable new connections and perhaps a touch more inspiration than this year.
(Source: socialmediagroup.com)
ad·dic·tion/əˈdikSHən/
Noun: The fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing, or activity.
While standing in line to order the first coffee of the day, I check in on Foursquare then peruse my Twitter feed and Facebook notifications. The order is in and as I wait for my morning fuel to arrive I go back to Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter to see what’s new. Seriously.
According to a recent study led by Wilhelm Hofmann of University of Chicago’s Booth Business School, Tweeting and checking emails is a much harder addiction to give up than cigarettes or alcohol. The study was looking to measure how well people could resist their desires and, as turns out, it’s a lot easier to pass up that second glass of red in order to keep your hands free to send a status update.
Hofmann told the Guardian, “Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.” Hofmann noted that alcohol and cigarettes are more costly and may not be as accessible as social media and email. “So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”
Sure, we’ve all checked our Facebook notifications or Twitter feeds at inopportune (or sometimes inappropriate) times, and answering a text over dinner is becoming less and less of a faux pas (debatable). Some people even have Foursquare venues set up for their beds—not surprising considering a 2010 study found 28% of respondents said they update Facebook/Twitter before they even get out of bed.
Marla Bartoi, Ph.D., is a professor who teaches clinical psychology at WSU; her research interests include cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety disorders and depression and substance abuse treatment. She was recently asked to respond to a similar study on social media addiction and noted that MRI screenings have shown that some people are more prone to addictions depending on their brain chemistry. Other factors such as genetics can also factor into the likelihood of addiction, she said. According to Bartoi, addiction to social networking is possible, but it’s not something that she believes everybody is addicted to or will become addicted to.
So if brain chemistry and genetics play a role in this, maybe I’m safe. Then again, taking a quick look at my most recent apps: HootSuite, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and Foursquare are my top hits. Brings to mind a certain Simpsons episode, no Twitter and no Facebook make Karly go something something?
So is social media really an addiction? Technically social networking isn’t a new phenomena, it’s just another form of communicating. If you think about it as communication - would we go as far as saying someone is addicted to writing post-it notes or talking on the phone? If this is about consumption rather than communication, why are we worried about people being addicted to the internet/social media and not to newspapers or books? There could certainly be similar addictive behavior patterns. Maybe it’s neither, and it’s merely about instant gratification.
Whatever the reason, let’s try not to fear new technologies. We have a long history of concern over technological advances, from the old days of fearing the printing press and the radio (yes, really) to today’s social media zombies. What do you think? Is the worry about social media addiction really just a worry about new technologies?
*This was originally posted on the SMG blog here.*
Reposting my blog from today, published on socialmediagroup.com.
If you’re a regular SNL watcher you would have seen this past weekend’s ‘You Can Do Anything’ skit, poking fun at “the incredibly high self esteem of the YouTube Generation.” They featured bloggers, an independent filmmaker, a popular tweeter and a YouTube personality in the skit. You can watch the entire skit below. (Our Canadian readers may not be able to view the video, I’m sure they’re savvy enough to find a screener online though :))
This quote says it all:
Roger Knight (Independent Film-maker): Tell us about yourself
Taylor Dawn (Popular Twitter Personality): Well, I’m what you would call Twitter Famous
Roger Knight: Which means?
Taylor Dawn: Not famous.
Admittedly I did get a few chuckles out of it, but it made me think about how online influence is perceived not only to us in ‘the biz’ but to the general public, and how brands and agencies alike need to ensure they’re aligning with the right influencer partners when executing earned media campaigns.
Mark Schaefer wrote a post in March of last year about how important Twitter influence is (as it pertains to Klout score) and he basically told us there is little true influence on Twitter.
But wait, don’t freak out! That 2012 influencer campaign your client just approved isn’t about to fall apart. Twitter is just one (albeit integral) piece of the entire digital influence puzzle. Marketers should be looking at the whole picture when identifying influencers for campaign partnerships. What does that mean? It means Twitter, Facebook and most importantly – blogs.
A successful digital influencer campaign starts with top-notch high quality earned content—content that lives on the blog. Facebook and Twitter are both extremely important to amplifying that content and driving awareness, but it starts with the blog.
BlogHer’s April 2011 Social Media Matters report found that both blog readership and social media use are on the rise in the United States. BlogHer reported 40 percent of online Americans surveys said they read blogs (up from 37 percent in 2010).
In May 2011,eMarketer estimatedthe number of blog readers in the US would reach 122.6 million in 2011, representing 53.5% of internet users. Furthermore, they expect that number to reach 150.4 million by 2014, representing a whopping 60% of internet users.
Okay, okay, blogs are important. We get it, right? So how do we identify the right bloggers/influencers who will provide high quality content and increased reach through their social properties? Do your research.
Facebook Likes, Twitter followers and a high Klout score does not guarantee quality content or awesome ROI. It merely provides a benchmark for potential impressions and if the content isn’t good, the impressions won’t help. Influencers need to be able to offer companies and brands something of value in return for what they’re getting. For starters, they need to have awesome social media marketing skills, and know the rules of professional blogging inside and out.
Here are a few other rules of thumb:
You should have an evaluation system in place when it comes to identifying the perfect influencer(s) for your campaign. We use SMG Rank™ (SMG’s proprietary influencer identification and ranking methodology) when determining appropriate influencers for our client campaigns. It’s a pretty awesome secret sauce of metrics…not to toot our own horn ;)
So would Taylor Dawn, the SNL Twitter personality, make a good influencer? Not if his only claim to fame is a large Twitter following and his budding songwriting career. Remember, when it comes to choosing influencers for your earned campaigns, look past the Klout score, Facebook Likes and follower count to see what they’rereally made of before you pitch.
If you don’t follow the Social Media Group blog, you should. Here’s a taste of what you’re missing. You get one paragraph here, clickthru for the rest :)
Follow Maggie on Twitter.
Follow Michelle on Twitter.
“This infographic, created by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s non-profit craigconnects, examines the impact of Facebook and Twitter activity across seven types of causes — animal, children, cultural, disaster relief, environment, health, veterans/military and women” - mashable.com
So what did they find? The most talkative organizations are for animal causes. Veterans get no love. Disaster relief organizations have the most engaged followings. And, although women dominate social networking, women’s causes are still among the least talked about.
Have you ever posted something on Facebook or Twitter and felt immediate regret? Scrambling to delete something that truly cannot be undone? You’re not alone. From Charlie Sheen tweeting his phone number, to Anthony Weiner tweeting a questionable private picture, down to the recent tweet from New York Times’ Brian Stelter leaking news of Christiane Amanpour departing as host of ABC’s “This Week.” You know as well as I do that it’s not just the celebrities who have been getting themselves into social media hot water. I’ve seen people post the most ridiculous updates to their feeds, like the handful of Vancouver rioters posting Facebook updates bragging about the damage they’d done. For a real head-shaker, type “I lost my phone” in your Facebook search bar and see how many people are publicly posting their contact details. Recently, a friend mistakenly tweeted his credit card number and expiry date. This happened because his tweets are delivered to his iPhone in the same format as text messages, so he thought he was sending an SMS. Interestingly, he noted a few new followers (within minutes), one of which was a self-proclaimed hacker according to his bio. Yikes! I once saw someone post that social media was like a needy girlfriend: “Facebook asks me what I’m thinking, Twitter asks me what I’m doing and Foursquare asks me where I am.” It’s funny, but does sharing your likes, interests and whereabouts present you as an easy target to cyber criminals? A recent survey cited 15% of respondents admitting to posting their current location or travel plans, 34% their full birth date and 21% had posted their children’s names and one in five said they hadn’t used Facebook’s privacy controls. In 2010, Consumer Reports estimated that cybercrime cost American consumers $4.5 billion over two years. A few things to keep in mind when it comes to protecting yourself: Let’s talk about passwords for a minute. Is yours painfully obvious? Does it include the name of your partner, child or pet? If so, give yourself a shake! You likely don’t use your birth date as your banking PIN, so why do it online? According to Consumer Reports, 75% of Americans don’t use the strongest kind of passwords for their most sensitive accounts. Here’s some more food for thought: 32% of respondents used a personal reference in their passwords, 29% store passwords on a list they carry with them, near their computer, or in an insecure file on their tablet or mobile device and almost 20% used the same password for more than five accounts. Password 101: Strong passwords should contain at least eight characters and have a combination of upper and lowercase letters, a numeral and a special character. The inadvertent posting of non-sensitive personal information may seem innocent but there is a dark side to sharing your interests, location, and even favourite local pub. Studies have shown that we’re not choosing the best passwords, and the likes of Charlie Sheen, Anthony Weiner and New York Times’ Brian Stelter have proven anyone can make a bad social media move. Millions of people worldwide are constantly sharing personal and private information with friends (and strangers) on social networks. Think before you tweet and be smart about what you’re sharing. (This post was originally published on SMG’s blog)
Charlie Sheen’s Infamous Tweet
(No one was harmed during the faking of this FB status.)
SMG’s Online Security Bad Habits
A friend recently (mistakenly) posted a credit card number on twitter. It’s a long story but it had something to do with the tweet looking like an sms message on his iPhone - and off it went. I’ve been inspired to write a blog about it.
A few interesting things followed the fated tweet (which shall remain private until I post my final blog) but it’s intrigued me to gather stories and do some investigation.
That said, if you have a story or know someone who does please comment on this post and/or reply (and SHARE!) my short survey here.
Thank you in advance everyone!
Community management is a hot topic in social. In fact, there are 48,258 people who list Community Manager as a title or Community Management as a keyword on LinkedIn.
So it’s a hot space – I know this because I work with clients everyday supporting community management. I’ve got a bird’s eye view, so here goes my rant about what is a community manager.
Community managers have been around for years. Really, people have been managing digital communities in some form or another since the dawn of message boards and chat rooms. Not until the mass adoption of Facebook, Twitter and the like has it become a defined profession – and rightly so.
An active social media program in an organization disrupts traditional departments and silos. No one feels this more acutely than the community manager. Everybody (and their dog) has their own definition of what a community manager does because there are a number of demands and responsibilities that fall within the community management title.
According to the Community Management Round Table (in their State of Community Management 2011 report), the top attributes of a Community Manager are “The desire to be helpful, someone who is concise and credible, a sense of humor, curiosity, fearlessness, influential, persuasive, diplomatic, patient and mature. The expertise required for the role of community manager is strategic business acumen combined with exceptional communication and people skills.”
What do I think? A community manager is a passionate strategic thinker who is a content creator and a moderator, a listener and informer. Essentially, it is someone who encourages conversation and engagement around a product, brand, issue or cause. I asked my Twitter and Facebook networks to tell me their definition of a community manager. As expected, quite varied:
There’s so much juicy stuff in those comments from folks in my network. What’s your take? Is Community Manager a profession that’s here to stay or just a trendy job title for something else? When should (could) Community Management be outsourced?
This post was originally published on SMG’s blog 11/21/11
A quick update to the blog I posted about the recent study on third party APIs being punished by Facebook.
I just saw this posted on ‘Inside Facebook’ regarding a secret whitelist of companies that are exempt from this and are essentially protected:
We’ve now learned that Facebook maintains a secret whitelist of companies that are exempt from having content posted through their publishers consolidated across different Pages and clients. This protects them from a reduction in news feed impressions. The whitelist includes some top enterprise Page management tools from the Preferred Developer Consultant program including Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, Context Optional and Syncapse.
Take a read when you have a minute: Secret Whitelist Protects Top Facebook Page Management Tools From Engagement-Reducing Post Consolidation
So very good.
(via migueld)
I just came across this Applum/EdgeRank Checker study which reports an astonishing 70% less Likes and comments on brand pages that are using third party platforms for posting their Facebook updates. Why? Applum says Facebook Penalizes 3rd Party API’s EdgeRank and Collapses 3rd Party API Updates. Apparently it’s been a general consensus in the EdgeRank community that 3rd party APIs like HootSuite and TweetDeck are punished in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.
“We ran our analysis on 1,000,000+ Updates on 50,000+ Pages that influence over 1,000,000,000+ Fans. We took each individual post and analyzed the engagement (comment & likes) along with how many fans the Page had at the moment of updating. The result is a percentage that represents engagement per fan per post. Our sample size ranged per API, although we cut it off at the Top 10 APIs outside of Facebook.”
The study determined that compared to the engagement of posts published manually to Facebook’s web or mobile interfaces, the reduction in engagement ratios of the top third-party publishing APIs are shown in the image below.
The Facebook ‘punishment’ of third party APIs was news to me, but I’m now learning of other similar reports like PageLever’s study which indicated that Facebook Pages with more fans receive fewer unique Page views per fan.
For more on the Applum study, click here.
I saw a few posts recently about some platform testing being done by the Facebook folks. You may have already read these, but I thought I would share it.
Facebook Is Testing a “Translate” Button for Comments on Pages (Inside Facebook)
So far this is happening on Pages only, but there are some screen shots surfacing from comments in languages other than your account’s current language settings that include “Translate” button next to them. If you click on the button, the comment is automatically translated to your account language. The Translate button is then replaced by “Original,” which if clicked will untranslate the comment.
Facebook Tests Prompts For Page Recommendations (All Facebook)
Apparently Facebook is testing widgets that asks users whether they’d like to write a recommendation of a page — including a popups after they’ve clicked the like button. David Hutnik, social media specialist at PhotoBiz.com submitted these screenshots to All Facebook last week explaining that he first saw the recommendation prompt after he clicked like on a page he doesn’t administer, then proceeded to his own and discovered it also worked there — after he unliked and then reliked the page.
Interesting stuff :)
A little Monday night foosball with Jingles and pals.
Foolsball! @_topshelf @joshjingles (Taken with Instagram at Done Right Inn)