An anonymous reader writes “Facebook already shares its Law Enforcement Guidelines publicly, but we’ve never actually seen the data Menlo Park sends over to the cops when it gets a formal subpoena for your profile information. Now we know. This appears to be the first time we get to see what a Facebook account report looks like. The document was released by the The Boston Phoenix as part of a lengthy feature titled ‘Hunting the Craigslist Killer,’ which describes how an online investigation helped officials track down Philip Markoff. The man committed suicide, which meant the police didn’t care if the Facebook document was published elsewhere, after robbing two women and murdering a third.”
As virtually every form of media from newspapers to television shows becomes more socially aware, the book remains stubbornly anti-social. Despite the rapid growth in e-books and the launch of a number of services designed to add social features to books, the act of reading is still a fairly solitary thing. Author and tech blogger Clive Thompson says he sees a future in which books become just as social as other forms of writing, with comments and conversations integrated into them or revolving around them — but is that what readers want?
Thompson, who contributes to both Wired and the New York Times magazine, is one of the most thoughtful writers around when it comes to how technology affects us as a society, so it’s worth paying attention to what he has to say about the future of books (Disclosure: Thompson is also a friend). Although as a technophile he may be more of an outlier than a mainstream user, the Wired writer says that he full expects books to become more social, just as every other form of media has thanks to the web:
Every form of media has migrated online and benefited from conversation. The newspaper is broken into articles that get blogged and get turned into conversations. We’re at the point where the most interesting thing you can find on the Internet is the conversation in the comments on a blog after someone excerpts an article. I will read an article in the Times in paper, because I’m old-fashioned, and then I will go online to see what people blogged about it.
Not everyone is going to agree with this view of the value of newspaper or blog comments — especially those who have decided to shut them down, or hand them off to Facebook because they see them as a magnet for trolls and other internet low-lifes. But Thompson (who is currently working on his first book, about the future of thought) says that he believes books can attract a higher quality of conversation:
Books are going to provoke the best conversations because people think really deeply about them. And people bring a certain level of intellectual seriousness to them that they don’t even necessarily bring to newspapers. I am absolutely convinced that being able to see what other people have said about a book and to talk about it and respond to it is going to be a freakishly huge boon for books.
We’ve written before at GigaOM and PaidContent about startups that want to add social features to the reading experience, including Findings (a service for sharing highlighted passages in books, where the interview with Thompson appeared), as well as Readmill and Goodreads. And Amazon has made some attempts to add social elements to its e-reader, such as the @author program that allows participating writers — such as Tim Ferriss and J.A. Konrath — to take comments or questions from writers directly through the Kindle platform. But none of these have really taken off so far, it seems.
Is that because most people still see reading as a fundamentally solitary activity? Whenever social features come up, I hear friends say that they have no interest in making their books more social, and some even say they prefer reading on a Kindle or Nook because it just has text, and therefore they don’t get distracted by other things while they are trying to read. But surveys of younger users show that many don’t like reading on e-readers precisely because they *aren’t* social, and social media has become a way of life for them.
In any case, just because social features exist for e-books doesn’t mean that everyone has to use them — even Thompson says he foresees them as having an on-off switch for when a reader doesn’t want to see comments, etc. But given the success that some authors have had with social ventures such as the 1book140 project and other ways of making their books more social, I’m surprised we are still so far away from the future that Thompson envisions (the rest of his interview is worth reading as well).
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and Marya
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Last November after our paidContent Entertainment conference in Los Angeles, I got to talking with a gentleman in the advertising business who went off on a bit of a wine-fueled rant regarding some mobile advertising executives. “They think they can just slap a QR code on a print ad and say, ‘There, that does it, now we have a mobile strategy’,” he said, going on to bemoan how stupid all those other ad executives are but leaving me with an important point.
Following Facebook’s advertising event in New York (covered ably by Ryan Kim here) I was reminded of that conversation. Rather than presenting some sort of new innovative mobile ad unit or technique, Facebook’s first mobile ads will simply be an extension of its Sponsored Stories ad product to the mobile screen.
That’s not really a mobile strategy: it’s a desktop strategy that’s moving onto the mobile screen because of looming pressure from investors and desperate brands looking to reach consumers on their mobile devices, where they are spending more and more time.
As Facebook knows as well as anyone in mobile, with 425 million mobile users and a far-reaching plan to build out the mobile Web, mobile advertising has huge promise but no one really has any idea how it’s going to work. About $4 billion will be spent on mobile advertising in 2012, according to IDC, but display advertising on mobile is a very difficult proposition given the limited real estate that marketers have to utilize. The market is so up in the air that the Internet Advertising Bureau held a contest to pick five innovative mobile ad formats and received a wide range of submissions.
So it’s not entirely fair to ding Facebook for deciding to just move Sponsored Stories into mobile: as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD points out, Twitter is basically doing the same thing. There may not be a better way to reach mobile consumers at this point, but this is something that may not sit well with Facebook mobile users, who tend to freak out when the company changes even the smallest feature.
There is a huge opportunity for someone with Facebook’s size, reach and mobile expertise to develop a killer mobile advertising strategy, much the same way Google changed the way online advertising was bought and sold with its search engine and ad auctions. Unfortunately, what Facebook rolled out Wednesday falls short of that goal.
What’s true, however, is that the Sponsored Stories move will buy Facebook some time to really nail the mobile advertising experience in a way that turns on advertisers without turning off consumers. Just don’t call it a mobile strategy.
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Facebook is planning to make a bulk of its money from advertising, that’s no secret. When you’re logged into the social network you’ll see display ads on the right-hand side of your Newsfeed that loosely fit your interests. The company is also dropping “Sponsored Stories” directly into your Newsfeed as well, so it seems like nothing is off-limits at this point.
In the past, the company has used your web history for ad targeting and with the whole Beacon debacle, turned your purchasing and liking into “social ads” that freaked everyone out. It seems like we’ve come full circle since Beacon, as one user has explained how he became an unexpected spokesperson for an item that would make some people blush.
Nick Bergus is like any other Internet user, he found something funny online and posted it without thinking twice. If it’s funny it’s worth posting on Twitter or Facebook to get a laugh or two from your friends. You might even get a bunch of likes.
Little did Bergus know, his funny post would be turned into an advertisement paid for by Amazon.
55 gallons of what?
If you’ve ever spent some extra time surfing around on Amazon, you know that there are some really odd things you can buy on the site. Up until a year ago I didn’t know that you could buy toilet paper in bulk on Amazon, but alas you can. Bergus found something else I didn’t know you could buy on Amazon, personal lubricant. But not just a little tube of personal lubricant, a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant. I’m not sure how he found it, but obviously he was stoked that he did.
On Valentine’s Day he thought this would make a great tweet and Facebook post along with a link to the item:
A 55-gallon drum of lube on Amazon. For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.
A week went by and then one of his friends noticed that his post made a return visit as a Sponsored Story next to his Newsfeed:
This isn’t just a one time showing though, as his friends are telling him that they see the ad every single time that they log into Facebook. Oops. Facebook clearly saw the post by Bergus as a popular piece of data when it came to this product, so Amazon is now paying to have it featured. There’s no telling how many people have seen this ad and recognized him in the photo, but it must be pretty embarrassing for him.
So be careful of what you post on Facebook, or you just might become the next spokesperson for it.
Bonus material – This review for the product on Amazon is too funny not to share:
A little over a decade ago, I bought my 55 gallon drum of lube. I never thought I’d use it all but a few days ago the pump finally ran dry. I’ve had a lot of good times with it. My wife, too. And not just what you’d think. One day I just hosed down our hardwood-floored hallway so I could use it as a slip-n-slide. You shouldn’t think of this as a ‘purchase.’ It’s an ‘investment.’ An investment sure to pay off in spades.
You’ve probably noticed it over the years; I certainly have. You’ve seen the companies who are way too friendly on the web. You click on their website and it’s stuffed with messages like “Yay!” and “w00t!” You look at their Twitter accounts and they’re asking what crazy capers everyone got up to this weekend. On Facebook, it’s all “why not look at this funny cat video? LOL!”
It’s everywhere, and it drives me crazy.
Katy Lindemann, a friend of mine who’s a communications strategist in London, made an interesting point about the growth of this approach in a recent blogpost. Too often, she says, companies simply decide to let their standards slide when it comes to social media, opting to drop their usual voice for one that I call hypercasual.
She refers to one example noticed by U.K. developer Phil Gyford. He spotted that his bank, Smile.co.uk was polling web users on a topic that felt oddly casual.
“Smile.co.uk, I know you want to be friendly,” he said. “But is a poll on the front page about your favourite A-Team character appropriate for a bank?”
I’m not entirely sure when this extremely casual voice started being used by companies online, but I remember when it seemed novel: back when Flickr launched, for example, using a playful, personal voice that seemed like a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t pretending to be a person, exactly, but it had a personality. In Britain, we had Innocent Drinks, a company that has spent the last decade making a virtue of its cute copywriting.
Through the Web 2.0 boom, the friendly voice was rapidly copied. In fact, it became synonymous with social media presence — even though it was rarely done as well as those who led the way. Now it feels as if everything is trying to be friendly, from fashion outlets to banks to your kid’s school.
But it doesn’t always work. As Lindemann puts it, it’s the result of people getting their “content strategy” wrong:
It’s partly the Innocentification of cutesy, zany copy where it’s just not plausible or appropriate for the brand… But it’s also suggestive of a complete lack of content strategy… Of not really understanding what kind of relationship the people they’re trying to engage want to have with their brand. Whether they want a brand to be useful, helpful and deliver against their brand promise – or whether they want a brand to be their mate.
The question of tone is important because sometimes the hypercasual approach ends up not simply being inappropriate, but downright offensive. Remember when Kenneth Cole made an inappropriate joke during the Egyptian uprising? Or when Microsoft urged people to buy Amy Winehouse downloads just hours after the singer was found dead? There are dozens of examples of companies getting it wrong in social media.
And while some of these problems are individual failings — giving the wrong person the ability to post messages on your company’s behalf, or posting to a company account when they mean to post to a personal one — they are all, on a broader scale, the result of trying to take a hypercasual approach.
The discussion reminded me of a recent New York Times piece arguing that the late novelist David Foster Wallace was really the man to blame for over-casual. In the article, writer Maud Newton argues that Wallace’s popularity was emblematic of the language that evolved from the web; the equivocations, the postmodern inflections of IIRC and IMHO.
While the argument itself is a little tricky — I’m not sure whether she’s suggesting that a large proportion of bloggers have actually read David Foster Wallace, or merely that he captured the voice of a generation — she is right to point out that his prose is full of the sort ofs and pretty muches that define hypercasual. He is, in some ways, its patron saint. From the article:
I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon… It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread.
When the hypercasual is used properly, it can be very powerful. Betfair, a British gambling website, started experimenting with a new Twitter voice earlier this year. The result was a riotous stream of consciousness, jokes about corporate life or tales of dogs and strippers. It was the manic, unbalanced voice of somebody on the verge of madness, trying to escape office life through the magic portal of Twitter. It was great.
So perhaps these clunky examples of the hypercasual voice — the A-Team polls and the bad taste jokes — are actually part of a strategy. It’s just a strategy that has gone wrong.
More likely, I suspect, they are merely evidence that many people companies confuse being friendly with being flippant. Trying to “do social” means trying to be friendly, which in turns means sounding like an ordinary person — and it’s very easy to imagine that the best way of sounding like an ordinary person is to simply let an ordinary person take over your Twitter account and do whatever comes to mind.
But thinking that hypercasual is synonymous with not trying is a terrible mistake. David Foster Wallace didn’t just write the first thing that came into his head; he agonized over the text. Flickr’s playfulness with words represents something of the company’s culture, even now that it’s part of Yahoo.
Lots of businesses want to be friendlier, but that doesn’t mean you can just slap up a few jokes and I’ll be your lifelong buddy. The truth is, I don’t want brands to tell me what they were doing this weekend or share funny video mashups with me. That’s what my real friends — what real people — are for.
Photograph of Yay! sticker from Moo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Richard Moross
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