the digital den

Starbucks – “When was the last time you talked to your best friend?” Brilliantly simple. 1833 comments 13,148 likes

I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes getting my head around what the new Facebook timeline will mean; you all need to, it’s on its way very soon. It’s hit New Zealand already.

Look I’m not a power user nor do I have the social life that needs this level of managing – sadly – but I’m really unsure about the new timeline. I think the uptake will be limited but even if you don’t want to play with it or in it, you’ll still need to get your head around it.

For mine I do not see it appealing to the majority of Facebook’s 800 million users. Publishing my life’s story for all to see is just to transparent and egotistical. But that’s not all. You’re going to have to keep your wits about you when it comes to this new world of ‘frictionless’ sharing.

There’s going to be a lot to learn and if you want a great head start, visit these links for the low down.

Facebook Timeline: The Complete Guide

The new Facebook: How to Take Control of Your Privacy

Thank you Eye Track Shop and Mashable

We’re gaining greater insights into to what matters on Facebook in terms of brand engagement. It used to be all about the number of ‘likes’ but we soon learned that this is meaningless if people do not connect with the brand beyond the initial seduction. We see this on twitter. You’ve seen this, 14 tweets, 17,302 followers, 18,543 following. Really! What’s the point? Facebook recognises that its’ the depth of the engagement that makes for a greater user experience which in turn will translate into better results for businesses.

We’ve recently seen the addition of the metric ‘People are talking about this’ and now we see a new metric of ‘virality’, which allows for insight into how viral a particular post is. Virality is determined by dividing the number of “people talking about this” by the reach (the number of people who actually saw the content). Diana notes that because virality is a percentage, whether a business is large or small, the metric “can be used to compare across all Page posts.” The virality metric allows page admins to analyze the success of individual posts and will hopefully lead to an improved page strategy through a better understanding of the audience.

To read more go to Mashable.

Thanks Mashable

And what about the average number of friends? News stats have just hit….oh yea, the answers are 38 and 229. Five years ago the ave user’s age was 33.

Read more at Mashable

Love the infograph too

Our attention spans are getting shorter. Here’s an example; even the generally long, very long Indian movies are being reduced to 90 minutes. Seems like we’re loosing our ability to stay on task. If you can’t get us quickly then get out of the way because here comes a tweet that can.

While the number of blogs on the Internet, as tracked by BlogPulse, rose just 21% from 126 million in 2009 to 152 million in 2010, the Tweets on Twitter were up 160% over the same period, according to Internet monitoring website pingdom.com.

Read more here (that is if I haven’t lost you already)

Thanks The Economic Times (appropriate name me thinks!)

Well this tiny Swiss hamlet with a population 79 has had over 60 million facebook views; more than St Moritz and Florence. There’s great democracy on the net. All you need is a little creativity, stroking people’s ego and ……… well perhaps a bit of luck.

I was thrilled last week that I received a call from a school seeking some assistance about their recently established Facebook page. I wasn’t thrilled that they had an incident, but more that they had gone ahead and got their Facebook page up and running; that was the ‘thrilled’ bit. But I was also let’s say moderately thrilled that here was an opportunity to provide some learnings for all schools implementing a Facebook page. Here’s what happened.

The incident involved a parent that had an axe to grind and used the school’s Facebook page to vent their spleen. The school did the right thing with the administrator notified via email as soon as the wall post went live and subsequently deleting the post. The incident did raise a few issues. Firstly, the parent was able to write directly to the wall. It appears that the school hadn’t un-ticked all the boxes in the admin settings. Below are the best settings for a school starting out. This set-up means parents can only ‘comment’ on a school’s wall post. While this is important, it still doesn’t stop an aggrieved parent going off topic and using their commenting access to have-a-crack.

Given that the parent had clearly breached the Code of Conduct, the school could have not only deleted the post but also banned the parent from further access. When I asked them why they hadn’t done this, and it was clearly their intent to do so, they said the parent hadn’t ‘liked’ the page so therefore was not in the database to delete. The inevitable question then followed. “I thought you said at the Facebook PD that people can only comment on a page if they ‘like’ it first.” They were right. That’s exactly what I said….but. Only a day or so before the PD,  Facebook changed the ‘like’ process. Today, anyone can comment on your page and they don’t have to ‘like’ you to do so. However, you can still delete them.

Click on the link here Anyone can now comment it’ll show what is presented to an administrator when deleting a post and how to ban a user.

So what are the learnings from this incident?

Step 1: Set-up your facebook page as shown in the image above. Very conservative.

Step 2: Ensure your community has been made aware of your code of conduct.

Step 3: Understand that now someone doesn’t have to ‘like’ you to comment on your post.

Step 4: Keep going and forge ahead with your social media journey.

Step 5: Subscribe to the digital den and keep up to date with great tips for schools (and government) on social media.

Funny and sad all at the same time