hal thomas

This post first appeared on the bfg blog.

• Why Facebook Places will not be a Foursquare killer and the possibility of Foursquare-Facebook intergration.
• Self-service tools for advertisers.
• Hints at tweaks to Foursquare's game mechanics, specifically additional ways to compete beyond mayorship.
• Forthcoming refresh for Foursquare mobile apps.

This post first appeared on the bfg blog.

The co-worker Facebook friend request. To friend or not to friend—that is the question and it's one that we each have to answer in a way we can feel good about.

As general rule, I don't accept Facebook friend requests from co-workers (except when necessary to enable admin permissions for the brand pages we manage). My reasons are both practical and preventative; it has nothing to do with whether or not I like my co-workers. For the record, they all rock… well, maybe except for John. (Just kidding, John. I really do miss the updates about your favorite Elton John songs.)

Practical Reasons I'm Not Facebook Friends with Co-workers

Back in March at Ignite Savannah, I went on the record about the various social networks I use and the way each one fits into a tiered engagement strategy. I use this strategy to make it possible to maintain numerous connections across multiple social networks without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of connections. Watch the 5-minute video or stick with the Cliffs' Notes version as follows:

• On LinkedIn, I'll connect with just about anyone: business associates, co-workers, friends, people with whom I've traded business cards… There are very few filters here.
• On Twitter, anyone who wants to follow me is welcome to do so. For myself, I follow only a limited number of people—typically no more than about 150 (see also Dunbar's Number). The idea is to make it easier to engage more with the people I follow by following fewer people.
• On Facebook, I only connect with my closest friends and family.

As I say in the video, the purpose of this tiered connection strategy is simple practicality: to avoid the chaos of trying to connect with all the same people across multiple social networks.

Preventative Reasons I'm Not Facebook Friends with Co-workers

In what now seems like a previous life, I spent the better part of a decade working as a store manager for a large international retail chain. This particular company spent a lot of time and money training its managers How Not To Get the Company Sued. We dove into the legalities of HR issues like discrimination and harassment, and one of the things that was drilled into us was the importance of preventing the development of hostile work environments.

About the time I was old enough to start working I remember being told that it was generally best to avoid discussions of race, religion, sex and politics in the workplace—advice that I've never forgotten. Given the often deeply personal and highly opinionated content of people's Facebook pages, I find it safer to choose not to connect with co-workers on Facebook. In this way, I protect my working relationships from unintended damage by Facebook content that I or others may find insensitive or offensive.

Policies like this may not sit well with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's belief in the transformative power of Radical Transparency (a belief I share, in theory), but these are valid concerns nonetheless. I am convinced it is only a matter of time before we see legal precedent set that extends accountability for keeping conversations workplace appropriate into Facebook and social media as a whole. Simply put, if comments by one employee create a hostile work environment for another employee, the crux of the problem is the damaged relationship; it matters little whether the comments were made in the workplace or in social media.

Think About Your Audience(s)

I'd like to urge you to take a minute to consider the reach of your voice in social media. The more numerous and diverse your connections, the greater the chance that not everything you say will be interpreted the same way be every person it reaches. Learn to self-edit or, as I have chosen to do, segment your audience appropriately.

"How do I know what's good or bad? Are there industry benchmarks for determining how many Likes or Comments per Facebook post is good relative to my page's overall fan count?"

 I was at an event several weeks ago, and these were the questions being asked of social media monitoring and reporting.

The questions are understandable. Those of us on the front lines of social media face the constant challenge of justifying this new medium (and our the existence of our jobs) to people who don't always fully understand its significance. Yes, many of our constituents often get that they need to have "a presence" in social media—after all, it is the "hot new thing". But I fear the rush to create complicated measures of sentiment and to benchmark interactions is actually undermining our ability to prove social media's long term value.

Take, for instance, the plight of the individual whose questions open this post. This person manages, among other things, the Facebook page for a well-known celebrity chef. The fan page has almost 1 million fans and Wall posts regularly receive thousands of Likes and hundreds of Comments. Because Facebook Insights can quickly tell us that our Feedback score on a particular post is e.g., .26%, we naturally want to know, "Is .26% a good Feedback Score?"

When we default to this line of thinking, the innate assumption is that all Wall posts are equal. They aren't—most are filtered though the highly subjective personal biases of individual fanbase members, often soliciting an interaction based on something other than the fans' feelings about the actual brand. To use the celebrity chef example again, a Wall post for a shrimp recipe may yield a Feedback Score of .26% whereas a Wall post for a chicken recipe may yield a Feedback Score of .43%. The difference in the scores is most likely less a reflection of how people felt about the chef at that point in time and more of a reflection of the fact that a larger portion of the fanbase prefers chicken to shrimp.

This helps to illustrate that the key to maximizing ROI in social media is understanding that the value of conversations is primarily qualitative, not quantitative. Most of the frustration I hear is from people who seem to be approaching social media as if the value is primarily quantitative. Social media is like apples and they're frustrated because they can't get orange juice from it.

Listening Versus Measuring

In a recent Ad Age article, Matt Carmichael wrote:

"I had a conversation yesterday with someone in new business development for a major agency. We discussed the balance between knowledge of demographics and knowledge of sentiment. The theory goes like this: across a demographic you'll find a mix of lovers and haters of your brand. If you can find the ones who love it a) you can try to create a profile of them and b) regardless, you have found great target groups based not on age or income but what they think about you. That's powerful stuff. Used to be that was hard to come by but now consumers are blathering on and on about your brand in publicly-scrapable ways. How convenient for researchers."

If we really want to maximize ROI in social media, maybe we can start by teaching our constituents to ask better questions. Instead of being to quick answer, "Is x number of interactions a good number?", let's show the value of answering questions like these: 

• What can we learn from social media conversations?
• What are we doing with the data we mine from the interactions?
• How are we using social media to strengthen relationships with people?
• How are we leveraging the existing impassioned community (to do something more than just grow the community)?

This post first appeared on the bfg blog.

"The Last Exorcism", a film from LionsGate about—what else?—a girl possessed by an evil spirit has an interesting viral campaign making its way around Chatroulette. Though not personally a fan of Chatroulette, I have to tip my hat to LionsGate for crafting a campaign that fits the space really well.

Check out the following video of the campaign and the reactions it provokes. Note: Video contains strong language, so if that sort of thing is taboo in your office/home consider yourself forewarned.

This post first appeared on the bfg blog.

Let's face it, distilling meaningful messages into 140 characters is not always easy. Twitter's brevity is what makes it so challenging and so rewarding—there's only enough room for the choicest words. So consider the following grammatical tips when composing your tweets and you'll not only save character space, but you should also get more bang for your 140-character buck. NOTE: There may be a pop quiz on Friday.

Hyphens, Em Dashes and En Dashes

Hyphens (-) are quite possibly the most misused form of punctuation on Twitter. Frequently, hyphens are used when what is really needed is an em dash (—) or an en dash (–). What makes this error so egregious is that it actually requires more characters to misuse a hyphen than it takes to properly use an em or en dash.

People often place spaces on either side of a hyphen to help it stand out more - like this. But what this really calls for is an em dash, which requires no spaces on either side—like this. Proper use of the em dash claims only one character, where improper use of a hyphen requires three characters.

We see the same net character savings when we properly use an en dash as opposed to a hyphen for a range of numbers. Often we see event times written with a hyphen (e.g. 5 - 7 pm). But by correctly using an en dash for a range of numbers (e.g. 5–7 pm), we cut our character usage from three to one.

Ellipsis

Another great place to save characters is by using an ellipsis (…) instead of three periods (...). Visually it may seem like only a subtle difference, but once again we have used only one character by using an ellipsis instead three characters with three periods.

Handy Keyboard Shortcuts*

• Em dash: Shift + Option + -
• En dash: Option + -
• Ellipsis: Option + ;

 *No universal keyboard shortcuts for the PC could be found at this time.

 Happy tweeting! And just kidding about the pop quiz. Class dismissed.

This post first appeared on the bfg blog.

This post also appears on the bfg blog.

In the following clip, Emmy Award winning sportscaster Len Berman explains his transition from an old media personality to a new media personality.

While the clip is above is an old-timer in internet years (two months old), it's one that I've referred back to more than once when trying to explain the value of new media (like Twitter and Facebook) to people who are much more accustomed to old media (TV, radio and newspapers).

Sometimes it's advantageous to let someone your audience can better identify with explain things. Check out Berman's speech about the transition from old media to new media in the video below.

This post also appears on the bfg blog.