Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

photo credit: freezelight

I saw a couple tweets this morning which brought back to the surface something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.  I won’t link the user but here is one line:

“I block most new followers”

Their next tweet was about Twitter’s “block” feature having trouble, and they had this long procedure for getting around the problem.  They put a lot of work into just blocking a couple people.  I felt bad for this person’s wasted energy.

Let’s go over what Twitter is and how it works, to understand what I’m talking about.  I apologize for simplifying things, but this is close enough:

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Have you read my disclaimer?  Over on the side of my page?  These are not my employer’s opinions, I don’t speak for EMC, EMC doesn’t speak for me, and so on?

That might protect EMC if I were to go off the deep end legally.  They might be able to fire me, disavow all knowledge of my actions, and prevent themselves from getting in too much trouble themselves.  But if I were to do something legal but just plain stupid, do you think that disclaimer would prevent the EMC brand from being damaged in your eyes?  Of course not.

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One of my early and still-popular posts talks about removing a feature for what are probably good business reasons, and angering a vocal subset of your customers while doing it. We made this mistake with StorageScope, and Netflix made it with their profiles.

Netflix ended up restoring profiles, and StorageScope has been working to restore the use cases we eliminated ever since we redesigned the product.

What does this have to do with Twitter?  In what they call a “small settings update” Twitter has removed the ability to see @replies to people you’re not following.  This isn’t a small change, it fundamentally alters how Twitter works.  Here’s the problem.

I join twitter, and I follow two people I know in real life.  I watch their conversations, and I notice that they’re spending a lot of time talking to a third person I’ve never met before.  I click on their name, see they are interesting, and follow them as well.  My network grows slowly over time to include people my friends are talking to, so that I can talk to them too.

Now, this did get confusing at times.  You had the choice to opt in or out of this additional information, and Twitter had to write extensive help documents about how it worked because people got lost.  So they just removed the option, and made it so the simplest setting (you only see @replies directed at people already in your network) was the only option.

And what do you know, people are annoyed.

If you’re clued in with twitter at all, you’ve heard of the “cisco fatty” meme.  A user tweets about whether to take a job at Cisco they will hate, and Cisco responds on twitter, reminding everyone that Twitter isn’t private unless you make it private.

Yesterday Cheezhead posted another example, a sales rep for CareerBuilder whose tweets include cheering on the Bulls, commenting on America’s Top Model, goofing off at work, and hating her clients.  By the contents of her tweets I’m guessing Miss Adriane doesn’t know she’s about to be used as an anti-pattern in effective Twitter use.

At EMC we’re throwing a meeting soon to talk informally about how we use Twitter, and help get those who are on the fence about using it to understand why we think it’s valuable.  Because right now, CareerBuilder’s brand is suffering from their employee’s actions, and the employee’s brand is suffering as well.  You spread enough negativity around and it will come back to you.

If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all (about your job … on the forever-archived always-searchable Internet).

I was very excited yesterday by the potential of yesterday’s Facebook announcement.  Why?  Because up until now, all the information from Facebook has been visible only within their walled garden.  Opening up the “news feed” API means that I can write an application which acts on my behalf, pulls down that information, and lets me do something interesting with it.

What do I mean by interesting?

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I’m taking us to our conclusion today, because the idea of narrowing this field down to a single champion seems wrong, somehow. After all, the web isn’t about one company, or one person. Without a sea of individuals and innovative companies, it wouldn’t be a web, would it?

So, let’s collapse our Sweet Sixteen down to a Final Four, and start talking about more interesting topics again, shall we? Since I’ve already talked about each of these competitors multiple times now, I’ll just cut to the chase.
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With the first round completed, half our competitors are left out of the tournament.  In the next round we will begin to expose situations where matchups make even less sense than they used to.  So it goes.  Let’s see where this takes us?  Our sweet sixteen awaits….

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(Introduction to series here, round 1 matchups in these previous 3 messages [1, 2, 3])

This is the final set of matchups for the initial round.  In this division, celebrities who have made a splash on the social web will face off head to head until a winner is found.  I’ll preface this division by saying I based most of these picks off of twitter activity. As always comments on my ridiculous matchups are appreciated.

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(Introduction to series here, earlier posts in round 1 here and here)

I am falling behind, in comparison to the “real” tournament, but that’s ok.  While the companies/websites had very few upsets, I expect to see more shakeups in the people categories, simply because I wasn’t as careful when ranking them in the initial brackets.  We’ll start with Division 3, “Industry Contributors.”

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(Introductory post here, Div 1 Rd 1 here)

Time for another 16 teams to face off!  This is the second “Company / Website” category.  Again, some companies had to be moved around due to being owned by other competitors!  And, of course, comments are welcome.

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