No, Twitter Use Is Not Costing Companies Billions

from the stop.-now.-please. dept

Not this again. It happens with every new internet fad. Some company trying to sell something (filters, consulting, training, etc.) comes out with some study claiming that the new popular internet thingy is "costing x billions of dollars" because workers are using it for some amount of time per day. All of them work on the same basic principle. Figure out how much time people spend using the service, and multiply it by how much people make per hour, and then voila. Of course, this assumes (incorrectly) that every minute not working is "lost productivity." Of course, if that were true then coffee breaks, lunch breaks, sleep and many other things would also be "lost productivity." But, we all know that's ridiculous and that the truth is those things make people more productive by giving them a break here and there to recharge.

So, please, please, please don't believe the latest ridiculous study coming out of the UK claiming that Twittering employees are costing UK businesses £1.83 billion. It's the same ridiculousness, calculating that the average worker spends about 40 minutes on Twitter, but making no effort to figure out if that actually negatively impacts productivity -- just assuming that it means 40 minutes of "lost productivity." How many times do we need to repeat that time does not equal productivity before these companies stop coming out with such bogus studies?

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Gartner Finally Realizes That Social Networking At Work Isn't Evil

from the could-have-found-that-elsewwhere-earlier... dept

It wasn't that long ago that Gartner was spreading FUD about the use of social networking tools at work, saying it didn't think the technology would be beneficial within corporations. It seems that Gartner has a new tune. Just a week or so after we pointed out how silly it was to block social networks at work, Gartner has come out and said the same thing, pointing out that such blocks don't really work, and most people now use such tools for important forms of communication, which would be harmed by IT decisions to cut them off. Of course, some of us have been saying that for years. Good thing companies are paying billions to Gartner for its advice, right?

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With Viral Media, It's The People Passing The Links Whose Brand Is At Stake

from the important-to-think-about dept

There's obviously been a big push by companies these days to embrace "viral media" that gets passed around. There's lots of talk about the value of "passed links" or "earned links" within marketing and ad agencies. The idea is that if a friend passes along links to content, that content gets taken a lot more seriously than if it's pushed out there by a brand. But, still, some of these agencies don't quite realize what's at stake. Tim O'Reilly points us to an interesting discussion on this topic by Mike Walsh, where he notes that marketers seem to forget whose brand is at stake when it comes to passing around links. They are, of course, focused on the company who is their client (or employer), but ignore that it's actually the person doing the passing:

Stunning art direction is useless if no one actually watches your ad. In a world of audience networks, people will only forward your content to their friends and followers if it makes them look smarter or cooler by doing so. Their brand, not yours is at stake. You would be surprised how few marketers take that into account and are left wondering when their viral campaigns are socially vaccinated before they get off the ground.

This works in other ways as well. We often write about the fact that advertising is content and content is advertising, such that smart advertising these days is good content. So, we're always interested in awesome examples of this in practice. Yet, we recently received a submission for a video, sent via a marketing agency's IP address, pointing to a cool YouTube video. The video itself was, in fact, cool and has been getting sent around a lot lately. But, the video was actually an ad. At the very end, a brand pops up. I don't mind this at all, because it fits with the recognition that content is advertising. If the marketing agency had sent it in making that point, I might have been interested in posting it. Instead, the marketing agency pretended to be some random guy (hint: we can check your IP address!) who had "just found this totally cool video." It was so transparently fake that it turned me off from the whole campaign (and that particular marketing firm). Passing on links is a reputation play -- and while it can do good for some people, if you're just out there faking it, it can do a lot of harm as well.

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Why Doesn't Amazon Allow Referrals On Passed Links?

from the keep-up-with-the-times dept

A few months ago, we were talking about the growing value of "passed links" or "earned links." These are links that to things that others passed on to you, via email or social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. As more people have been using these services, the value of such links have grown as traffic generators. And yet, some have just realized that Amazon doesn't reward affiliates for using such links. It's not difficult to understand how this came about, but it certainly seems like the type of thing that the company should reconsider. Basically, Amazon's original affiliate program was so that you could send people to Amazon from your own site. In order to become an affiliate your site had to be approved. But if you're just passing around links, then that has little or nothing to do with your site, and thus Amazon doesn't pay such referral fees. I would imagine that Amazon is also quite worried about potential fraud.

But given the growing popularity of things like Twitter and Facebook, it seems like Amazon might want to reconsider this policy, and recognize that if someone promotes a book via these services, they're equally as deserving of the affiliate referral fee than if they had simply posted the link on their own site.

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Morons In A Hurry Can Figure Out That There Are Different Facebook Mafia Games

from the kiss-of-death dept

Apparently, today's mobsters are intellectual property lawyers. Back in February, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit between the creator of an online game, Mob Wars, and the online creator of the game Mafia Wars, claiming copyright infringement. Of course, the whole claim was silly since the game itself is based on a rather common game concept that was around for ages before either of these games existed. Rather than fighting a silly court battle, why not actually compete on features? So now we've got a new battle, between Zynga (makers of Mafia Wars) and Playdom, the makers of yet another game, called Mobsters, with Zynga claiming trademark infringement due to the way Playdom is running ads for Mobsters.

But the details seem like this is an abuse of trademark law to harm a competitor rather than a legitimate complaint. Zynga's complaint is that Playdom put up an ad that read: "Like Mafia Wars? Click here to play Mobsters. Its [sic] got henchmen, mini games, message boards and sophisticated style." Zynga claims that this is somehow confusing because it doesn't include Playdom's name anywhere. However, it seems abundantly clear that the ad is for a different game and they're just targeting players of Zynga's game. That's not trademark infringement. That's targeted advertising. It's why Pepsi is allowed to run ads trying to get Coke drinkers to switch. You can use the name of your competitor in an ad.

What's especially disappointing is that some of Zynga's investors, such as Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, have long complained about misuses of intellectual property law to stop competition -- and now they're supporting a company that appears to be doing the same thing. It's a waste of money that should be going towards competing and making a better game, rather than worrying about what competitors are saying in their ads.

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Facebook Loses Infringement Lawsuit In Germany Over Copycat Site

from the competition-ain't-bad dept

This is a bit of a surprise, as it appears that Facebook has lost a lawsuit in Germany against a site it accuses of copying Facebook (but in German). It's certainly true that the sites look quite similar, but the German court basically says that looking close is meaningless. If there's no confusion in what site people are on, there's really not much of an issue. And while the sites do have a lot of similarities, being on StudiVZ it's clear that the site is different from Facebook. While this may just be a German court protecting a local company against an American competitor, it seems like a good ruling from a policy perspective. Let the sites compete in the marketplace, rather than worrying about who copied what from whom.

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Analyzing Labor Data Via Facebook Status

from the the-power-of-public-status dept

Sean over at the 463 blog has a cool post comparing mentions of "hired" vs. "laid off" on Facebook wall postings, and noticed a bit of a trend:

Who knows if it's really indicative of anything in terms of whether the "worst" of the recession is over, but what I found worth noting was how cool it is that we can even analyze such data. Traditionally, trying to get a sense of whether or not more folks were getting laid off than hired, you were pretty much limited to various official stats that would be released. But thanks to the fact that people now share such things via Facebook or Twitter status, you suddenly can get at least a proxy bit of data. Now, there are obvious caveats, including the fact that the population on Facebook is clearly not a representative sample of the wider population (and, many of those most impacted by layoffs are probably least likely to be on Facebook), so I wouldn't go tossing aside national labor stats just yet -- but it is a sign of the new types of data that can increasingly be built from the fact that people are now sharing status information publicly.

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Judge 'Friends' Lawyer During Case, Influenced By Defendant's Website

from the wow dept

So we've had plenty of stories about modern technology moving into the courtroom, but the issue is usually over jury members using Twitter, using Google or using Facebook. And there was the one case that involved witnesses text messaging each other from the stand. In all of these stories, the end result is the judge getting pissed off about the fact that the tech had been brought into the courtroom. However, this latest story is really quite incredible. Apparently a judge "friended" on Facebook one of the lawyers in an ongoing case (via Michael Scott). On top of that, the judge was found to have Googled information about the defendant, and even visited the defendant's own website -- which the judge admitted influenced how he felt about the defendant. The judge later disqualified himself from the case and has now been reprimanded for these actions. Still, while I can understand a jury member doing some of these things, you would think a lawyer would know better.

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Worker Fired After Calling In Sick, Then Using Facebook At Home

from the lessons-learned dept

Usually when somebody gets fired for their use of a social-networking site, it's because they say something about their coworkers or boss online. But a worker in Switzerland got fired after merely logging on to Facebook at home. The rub, though: she'd called in sick with a migraine and told her boss she couldn't use a computer and needed to lie in a darkened room. The woman claims she was accessing the site while laying in her bed on her iPhone, and also claims the company's story that a coworker noticed her updates and told her supervisor isn't true. She instead is blaming "a fictitious Facebook persona" created by the company that she became friends with on the site, alleging that its only use was to spy on her. It sort of makes you wonder why she friended the company's account, but regardless, her treatment does seem a little harsh. There's no word if the company has fired other people for playing hooky, online or off, nor is there talk of the employee's previous record, but firing somebody based on their Facebook updates seems a bit over-the-top. Would they have reacted the same way if she'd updated from a doctor's office waiting room as opposed to her home?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Fun With Headlines: Is Social Networking Good Or Bad For Friendship?

from the how-about-neither... dept

Headline writers for the press are always trying to generate some attention, but it's amusing when they present a headline that seems to go entirely against what's said in the actual article. Professor Nancy Baym, who has been studying the power of online communities, discovered this when her latest research was released. Marketwatch ran a press release about her research declaring: Social networking, not for real friends, which certainly seems attention grabbing, if it were not for the fact that her research doesn't say that at all. What the research actually notes is that you may have weak relationships focused on a narrow topic, with folks you connect with on various social networks -- but it also notes how that's a good thing. She doesn't say that social networks aren't for real friends, even if that's what the headline reads.

Amusingly, another article covering the exact same bit of research runs with a different headline: Facebook friend collectors 'are normal' -- (suggesting the opposite of the Marketwatch headline) and quoting Baym:

"You can ask somebody, 'Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?' and people will say, 'Oh, 30 or 40 or 50.' But what having a lot of weak-tie relationships is giving you access to are a lot of resources that you wouldn't otherwise have.... They can really open up access to resources that we wouldn't have otherwise."

That doesn't sound like "social networking isn't for real friends" at all. But, apparently, accuracy doesn't make for as good a headline sometimes. Then we've got USA Today, which seems to totally contradict the Marketwatch headline, by noting: For teens, a friend online is usually a friend offline, too. Apparently, the people at Marketwatch and at USA Today seemed to think they were reading different studies.

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Topical, Polemical And Short: Twitter? Or American Revolutionary Pamphlets?

from the don't-knock-it dept

Just as we're seeing the various naysayers of any popular new communications technology come out swinging against Twitter, Rick Klau does a nice job reminding people that this is nothing new. With every new form of communication, people freak out about how there's no "rules" and that some people are using it for bad things or (worse!) mundane things. Rick points out the following quote to prove his point:

"Twitter is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and "high-brow" than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since Twitter is always short, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, Twitter does not have to follow any prescribed pattern... All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short."

The quote comes from Pulitzer Prize winning historian Bernard Bailyn... except that's not the actual quote. Rick simply replaced pamphlets with Twitter -- as the original is talking about the use of pamphlets in the lead up to the Revolutionary War, and how they helped spread ideas. Yet, today, as then, people will complain that the content is "currilous, abusive, and seditious." Every time I see someone complain about how Twitter (or blogging) is somehow not valuable because of all the crappy, boring or mundane content found via those platforms, I simply wonder why the complainer follows crappy, boring or mundane Twitter users and blogs.

On top of that, the question of content being banal or mundane is really in the eye of the beholder. For example, many people point to Twitter messages about "what someone's eating for lunch" to show how useless Twitter can be. Yet, for me, just such a message has resulted in me getting to meet someone who I might not have met otherwise. And the more that I've used Twitter, the more and more useful I've found many of those same "mundane" messages. It certainly may not be for everyone, but I find it amusing that some can brush off the entire idea as being useless when so many people (including myself) have found it to be tremendously valuable and useful, if used properly. Are those who are brushing it off assuming that the millions of people who find it useful are lying?

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Whether Twitter, Blogs Or Mainstream Media... Breaking News Can Get Facts Wrong

from the it's-what-happens-in-the-heat-of-the-moment dept

There was a silly debate soon after the awful tragedy of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month, where people started questioning whether or not Twitter was a legitimate news source. There were many reports from people on the scene via Twitter, and it was a fascinating (if somewhat depressing) "real-time" way of keeping up on some of what was happening. But some criticized the reliance on Twitter-as-journalism by complaining that it wasn't journalism because Twitter reports got facts wrong. That sounds good, but if that's the actual standard, then, well, pretty much nothing is journalism. As Slate is reporting, early reports from the mainstream press seemed to get much of the story wrong as well.

In the heat of an ongoing crisis, it's no surprise that details and facts are somewhat cloudy, and sources aren't (and often can't be) checked, but in the rush to get the news out, information, whether or not it's accurate, is going to get reported anyway. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- so long as it's clear that the information hasn't yet been confirmed. It's better to get the information out there. However, as the Slate report notes, what newspapers could do, is do a much better job cleaning up after the fact -- as we suggested in our story last week about a newspaper's incorrect report that quickly spread around the internet. Rather than put up a correction, the newspaper simply deleted the wrong article and pretended it never happened.

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Facebook? Suicide? That's All I Need... Don't Bother Me With Facts...

from the bury-the-facts dept

Last week there was a lot of ridiculous buzz trying to connect Facebook to a series of suicides in the UK. It's the sort of thing that newspapers love to run with. Facebook is popular, and parents are already worried about it, so link it to suicide and *bam* immediate interest in the story. Of course, an equally accurate story could be "Paper Industry Linked To Suicide After Many Victims All Leave Notes!" Yet, that doesn't stop some people from trying. Con von Hoffman writes in to point out that the UK story has migrated down under, with an Australian newspaper warning parents about Facebook suicides in the UK. The only problem, there doesn't seem to be any support to the actual story -- as even the Australian article notes... though, buried down in the fourth paragraph: "a police spokesman in Bridgend said there was no evidence to date of a suicide pact and that the theory did not come from police." Despite that, the article still says that "experts remain concerned there may be a connection between the suicides and social networking sites." Meanwhile, the article also quotes someone saying: "The more stories that appear about young people having killed themselves in your area, the more it might appear to you to be a reasonable response to a particular kind of crisis." So, perhaps the Australian paper is trying to turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Nissan Builds Internal MySpace While Sun Builds Internal Second Life

from the social-media-inside-the-enterprise dept

There's been a lot of talk over the last couple years about "enterprise 2.0" efforts to bring the types of applications in the "web 2.0" world into the enterprise. How successful those efforts have been is still an open question -- but companies keep on looking for such solutions to improve internal communications. Two stories today suggest exactly how that's happening. Business Week has a story about how Nissan is trying to build an internal "MySpace" to get employees more connected with each other and make the flow of information and the sharing of ideas more useful. Meanwhile, Sun, who has been trying to push more workers to telecommute for years, is now trying to build its own Second Life-type virtual world for employees from around the world to interact as if they were in an office together. While it's worth noting both of these experiments as clearly taking a consumer internet service and moving it into the enterprise, there's still a huge question of how useful either service will be. They both make nice stories for the press, but that doesn't mean either will get enough adoption to really be useful. Lots of companies have had internal intranet-type collaboration services in the past that don't get any use. Repainting the same thing with the broad 2.0 brush won't automatically make them useful.

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Why OpenSocial Is Unlikely To Dethrone Facebook

from the where's-the-networking? dept

The announcement of Google's new OpenSocial API has generated a blizzard of commentary around the blogosphere. Yesterday Mike argued that it was a smart move on Google's part because it creates a broader web platform that will be more attractive than any one social network could be by itself. However, the various news reports I've read suggest that OpenSocial is missing probably the most important element of a social networking site: the networking. Most people don't join Facebook because they want to use the latest Facebook widget. They join because that's where their friends are, and because it offers basic functionality like messages and photos. Widgets are just icing on the cake.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Spying Goes All 2.0

from the pssst,-slip-me-some-ajax-in-the-dead-drop dept

While the US intelligence community has a long history of expensively botched computer systems, it does seem like they've suddenly became Web 2.0 believers. Last year we wrote about the internal Wikipedia-like offering called Intellipedia, that would let members from different agencies in the intelligence community share information more easily. It appears that things have progressed beyond that as well. They now have a social networking app just for the intelligence community, called A-Space, along with a del.icio.us clone and internal blogs. Of course, it seems like some in the intelligence arena (especially those who happen to be undercover) aren't entirely thrilled with the concept -- but it will be interesting to find out how it develops (as if we'll ever find out). What would be really nice to know is how much these efforts are costing compared to the $600 million that was thrown away on useless computer systems.

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Inadvertent Online Resumes Continue To Cause Some Problems

from the broken-off dept

It's pretty common for people to do Google background checks on prospective employees (or potential dates) these days, so it's a little surprising to see people still put all sorts of information that could harm their job prospects online. A substitute judge in Las Vegas lost his position last week, after some people noticed that his MySpace profile listed his personal interests as, among other things, "Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's ass ... and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's ass." A local district attorney alleged that this displayed a bias against prosecutors, and asked that the judge be recused from his criminal cases, but court administrators went a step further and decided not to use his services any more. The judge, or now ex-judge, says that, basically, he was trying to be funny, and that the overstatement on his page was obvious. That may be the case, but given his position -- and his political ambitions -- it's hard to imagine that he couldn't foresee any problems from putting the comments up online.

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MySpace Turns A Profit, Barely

from the not-even-in-the-tweens-of-millions dept

Ever since News Corp. bought out MySpace, there have been lingering doubts about the social networking site's profitability. The deal that the company signed with Google did put some of these doubts to rest, as it seemed likely that News Corp. would comfortably recoup its initial outlay. But the fundamental issue of whether a popular social networking site is necessarily a cash cow remains up in the air. Yesterday, News Corp. announced that in this past fiscal year, the company's interactive division (which is mainly MySpace) turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million. These are incredibly paltry margins. This division is still growing rapidly, so it's understandable that it would be putting a lot of money towards new investments. However, the figures include money from the Google deal, which should drop right down to profits. In other words, while the company may be crowing that the unit is now profitable, it's far from showing that things are truly successful.

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Content Scares Advertisers Away From Social-Networking Sites

from the this-offensive-content-is-brought-to-you-by... dept

Thanks to the extensive use of ad networks and other middlemen, it's common for companies to not know each and every place online where their advertisements appear. For instance, a lot of big companies claimed ignorance when their ads showed up through adware products, saying that they had no idea they were supporting the practice. Last week, a number of British companies became alarmed with their ads on the Facebook social-networking site appeared on the profile pages of the British National Party, a far-right wing political party that's generally seen as racist and fascist. The companies yanked their ads from the site, and now the British government says it won't advertise on user-generated content sites for fear that its ads would run alongside contentious or undesirable content. This is a serious concern for many businesses, which don't want to be seen as supporting or associated with certain groups or types of content. But it's a potentially bigger problem for Facebook and other social-networking and user-generated content sites. These sites' major challenge is figuring out how to monetize the massive amounts of traffic they get, and their poor click-through rates are already one factor that holds down the rates they can charge. Couple those low rates with a dearth of quality advertisers scared off by the sites' content, and it sounds like a vicious cycle for social-networking and UGC sites.

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Lawsuit Alleges Facebook's Founder Built The Site With Stolen Code and Ideas

from the we-want-some-money dept

ScaredOfTheMan wrote in with the news that a lawsuit alleging Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the original code for the site is coming to a head. Zuckerberg worked as a programmer for another social-networking site, now called ConnectU, while a student at Harvard, and the sites founders allege that during that time, Zuckerberg took ConnectU's design, source code and business plan, and turned them into Facebook. If he actually did steal the business plan, you sort of have to wonder why Facebook is now being mentioned as a billion-dollar buyout target, while ConnectU remains pretty much anonymous. While this dispute originally began back in 2004, it's taken on added urgency as Facebook has become more popular, and those high-dollar buyout and IPO rumors build -- particularly as the ConnectU founders want full control of Facebook turned over to them. A judge will rule on July 25 on Facebook's motion to dismiss the case, but it's hard to believe that will be the end of the matter. As long as huge amounts of money continue to swirl around the social-networking space, so too will the lawsuits.

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