Visualizing Friendships infographic by Paul Butler

The evening began with a video, then an infographic. The speaker, Facebook evangelist Paul Borrud awarded generous prizes to reinforce the stats:

• 62% of users log in everyday
• Average usage is 27 visits per user per month
• 3 billion photos are uploaded per month globally

Then a history lesson:

• The 90s web was organised around browsing
• The 00s was the decade of search
• The 10s sees the web organising around people, and industries organising around people, and shopping organising around people, and news and so on

This is all familiar stuff for anyone who has been following Google versus Facebook analysis. So perhaps the pitch of the night really was spend your ad dollars here, with us, not there, with them.

The evening was a sales pitch delivered to a room of mostly marketers who already know the proposition:

• Marketing is a mix of paid (print, TV), owned (web, store front) and earned (PR, word of mouth).
• Facebook lets you create earned at an unprecedented rate
• Scale marketing efforts with the social graph
• The targeted ads are deliberately simple
• The algorithms display those friends closest to you (e.g. with “like” endorsement pages)

Social hooks: Running Facebook campaigns

I’m pretty sure everyone has clients that its almost impossible to sell a Facebook campaign too. Everyone in the large room needed to give up their seats for those for whom the social web has passed them by so they could hear the social web mantra that Facebook is not a traditional micro-site (30% of content is created by brands; 70% of content is created by users). Some choice quotes from the evening:

“You don’t have to respond to everything”

“Listen without fear. Have big ears”

These points were illustrated with a number of case studies: Toyota’s Erica’s Surprise, Old Spice, Vitamin Water. The most interesting case studies were from Chase Bank and Nike.

Chase Bank social product design and community giving

An example of product design through social networks, Chase asked US college students what they wanted from a credit card. Students wanted something that looked exclusive (black plastic) but offered a way to leverage modest points. This resulted in “karma” points that could be pooled together and shared with friends.

Students did of course pool their points together for collective reward and to help each other out. There were also 9 million recommendations to donate to charity. The product was iterated as a result to make it even easier to be philanthropic with reward points. Chase gave 5 million dollars to 200 local charities nominated by Fans as a result.

Nike World Cup Facebook campaign

The Nike World Cup campaign demonstrated that Facebook is the new terrain for guerrilla marketing. Adidas had the official sponsor status, and Nike went to Facebook advertising simultaneously across 24 countries over 1 day and became the unofficial official sponsor or sports brand of the event as a result.

New Facebook product announcements: engagement ads

Joining the Facebook product suite of like ads, video ads, polling ads and sampling ads will be:

• Sponsored stories – “a new product to drive word of mouth at scale”; and
• Deals  - Facebook leveraging Places for Groupon style group purchasing with more of a  flash mob feel i.e. check in and score a deal.

There were no details as to how “Sponsored Stories” would actually function. Deals seems pretty self evident. H&M, Starbucks and The Gap have trialled it and the product will launch soon in Australia.

Authenticity

Paul Borrud threaded authenticity as a theme for the evening. He noted that the days of kooky email addresses are gone and that:

“Its pretty unimaginable to not put your real ID online.”

Before there was no driver to update personal information, but the web has moved from the anonymous web to the authentic web. This is all true of course, but it is also priming businesses for the chaos that is social networks and a more important message that if they want to play in the space, they can’t hope to control it. The theme of authenticity went only so far though. Of course there was no discussion of vanity status updates, or other more unpleasant social phenomena on Facebook and the audience question of why there was no Dislike button was managed rather clumsily. But this is Social Media Club, not a sociology class. So on that note I will leave you with the video that began the evening.

Facebook wall populated/polluted with Branchout status updates

See all those horrible, horrible application status messages. I like to think of myself as pretty web savvy but I lost some serious web cred today when I inadvertantly spammed countless friends.

How I became a web idiot

After returning from a workshop I was feeling pretty tired and looking for any semi legitimate opportunity to avoid actual work. Then I got a Facebook message from Ahmed my workmate. OK it was a Facebook message – but he’s a colleague, so its kinda work related, right? I could be missing an office meme here! OK. Click.

Then I am faced with a question. “Who would you rather work with? Ahmed or Ari?” Now here’s the thing. I work with both these guys, and a whole other bunch of adorable folk. We joke around a lot, and Ahmed and Ari in particular. I was thinking this was a deliberate cute game for Ahmed to rack up some teasing ammunition if he could get more people to “vote” for him than vote for Ari. Thats what it looked like anyway. Faced with a choice, I noticed an option to choose both. Joy. Diplomacy wins. I have no favourites.

Branchout being douche bags and the self selecting check box

After this I was faced with 2 more choices of friends I would rather work with. Both. Then 2 more. Both. Then 2 more. Both. Then 2 more – actually I would rather work with you. Then 2 more – oh, there’s Angela from high school, she’s really smart, sure I’d love to work with her! Then I noticed the check-box. Shit. Had I been spamming my friends all this time? I unselected the checkbox not wanting to promote BranchOut to anyone else without knowing what it was about. In my tired stupor and like an hypnotized pokie addict I played on. And on. Oh and a few more selections. Until I noticed that the check-box I had unselected defaulted back to select state with the presentation of each new pair.

Its evil mechanism is explained in this message between my friend James, who got spammed by me being gamed by Branchout.

Me explaining myself to receiver of spam-like branch wall post.

F*!k you BranchOut. You are winning no friends, fans, connections, branches, leaves or whatever stupid metaphor you’re going for here.  Clearly the clever designers know how to employ game strategies to lull people into joining their application. That’s OK but only to a certain extent. A line was crossed! Yes, both James and I were “intrigued” and clearly, I am an idiot. But that check-box is a small call to action, and not only that – it re-sets itself to be selected when any normal sane person would assume that once they had interacted with and changed this setting, that the setting would apply permanently. Not so. To all my friends, sincere apologies for polluting your wall with rubbish.

What was most interesting to me, was the discussion and difference of opinion on whether social media spaces like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are publishing or conversation. Damien Damjanovski was a conversationalist; Sam North was of the opinion that as soon as you put something online you are publishing, and by entering the public domain you are availing yourself to be quoted, scrutinised, sued for defamation and have your Facebook photos printed in the Sydney morning Herald. Renai LeMay from Delimiter was a journalist trying to toe the publishing and ethics line. While he would freely quote a public figure’s tweet in an article he would only use an image found online if it was published under creative commons. He added that a journalist should go to the primary source of material they are using to verify its accuracy if nothing else. So at this point in the night the debate became one based on the premise that if we are putting ourselves out there publicly how can this content be used and how do we feel about that use (and vulnerability).

I side with the publishing angle myself and by that I mean that posting something online is a form of publication by its inherent distribution. Having said (and contradicting) that, I feel it is completely inappropriate for a newspaper to obtain a photograph from a social network because that photograph is from an entirely different context to the story. Who is the publisher? This was not explored in tonight’s discussion at the event but it did get me thinking. Part of the reason why the likes of Facebook and Tumblr claim copyright on your material is so that they can have the right to distribute your material which is what they are doing when you post content to them. While I think it is wrong of newspapers to delve into Facebook for pictures to illustrate their stories I think that the users of these platforms should take issue with Facebook as much as they may take issue with the journalist and the newspaper. Surely it is Facebook’s responsibility to protect its copyright as a means to protect its users. What should users expect of the social networks they participate in?

I could go on but I think the debate will continue at the next Digital Citizens event.

N.B. The hashtag for this event was #digicitz. The title of this post is paraphrased from a tweet on that stream.

Go to a group in Facebook and have a look at the members list. In a group with 12,504 members you can only progress through the list with previous or next links.

Facebook Group Member list

Go to albums, or to a particular album. While the extent of content is revealed the total number of pages isn’t, not until you get to the very end.

Facebook Album Progressive Pagination

The approach to pagination differs at the Mayo Clinic, a medical information site. Conducting a search will reveal the total number of search results and the total number of search result pages. In a large search result list, this will hopefully prompt the user to narrow their search terms.

CMS search result pagination

Google invested so much in pagination that they married their logo to the number of search result pages. As we are all well aware, the Google logo itself helps to illustrate the vastness of the search with added O’s that stretch the length of the logo to match the length of the search result. Google has a hybrid approach to the two patterns of pagination discussed  above.

A search for “cancer” yields approximately 198,000,000 results but at first only 10 search result pages.

Google pagination showing 1 to 10 of about 198,000,000

Clicking next reveals the 10th, 11th, 12th page and so on. As you progress further the pagination increases by 10 pages. The total pages are never revealed.

Google progressive pagination

From memory, Google use to indicate the total number of search result pages, but I could be wrong. This could be due to the fact that it is not worthwhile doing the calculation. It has been well tested and documented that people are likely to only look at the first few search result pages. Google’s approach to  initially show 10 pages  may just encourage people to search deeper, stay on their pages longer and have more eyeballs on sponsored links.  I am not sure if I should consider Google’s 10 page pagination approach as cynical; it could be both a matter of usability and a revenue raiser. It is obvious that in large search results there is no point in even offering the user access to all the pages.

Admittedly the purpose and technologies behind these three sites are completely different so it is no surprise that their pagination is different. The Mayo Clinic is a vast website and information resource and runs on a CMS. Google of course is a search engine and anyone faced with large search results is likely to refine their terms.

Facebook on the other hand clearly defies the web conventions we have become accustomed to. It never offers us the total number of pages and teases us with progressive page numbers. Nor does is offer links to the first or last page. This is the case in albums, groups, search result pages, throughout the application it seems.  It is a clever strategy albeit one that reminds me of shopping centre architecture—deliberately designed to get you lost, make you wander inside and lose your sense of time.

References

For a more thorough discussion on pagination and pagination patterns see http://justaddwater.dk/2008/01/03/usability-of-pagination-links/

Screenshots taken and annotated with Fireshot.