I'm currently working towards a career in advertising. Some of the things I hope to demonstrate through this blog include: my social media abilities, my ability to write, the ability to think strategically, the ability to think creativity and my knowledge of the advertising industry.
A rare occurance
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If you know me it’s no suprise that Nas is my favourite Hip-Hop artist.
I’ve mentioned in the past to Matt and Afran about how Nas is one of those
kind of ...
Attractive Struggling Artist + Internets = Magic
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Coca-Cola's recent partnership with YouTube and Facebook brings us a kick
ass advertising/entertainment/social media collaboration for Sprite called,
"Gre...
I'm not an avid South Park watcher, but some of my favourite episodes are the ones that cover current events and issues. The newest episode of the show, "You Have 0 Friends" is all about how serious Facebook can be. As an avid fan of Facebook humour (and a regular viewer of Lamebook) this episode was right up my alley. Stan is the guy who is forced into the Facebook world kicking and screaming, Kyle is a Farmville addict who quickly loses friends when he becomes friends with the unpopular kid and Cartman is in classic form. In particular, his segment on Chatroulette may be my favourite part of this particular episode.
With the exception of the Tron bits, I think I've seen or experienced all of these scenarios and behaviours since I signed up for the service years ago. I recommend checking it out here if you haven't already seen it.
You probably already know this, but come this Saturday at 12:01 AM, there will be a mad scramble of users trying to get their user name because they can't spend another day as Facebook ID # 103898908909022. If your name is John Smith, you might as well give up now.
Are you excited to finally not be a number anymore? No? Me neither.
Will I make a mad scramble like everybody else to get the name I want? Probably. Facebook says they're doing it to make it easier to find people, but I never really had a problem finding people on Facebook, and people who wanted to add me don't seem to have a problem finding me either. And I never access Facebook in a way where I need to check out specific profiles on a consistent basis.
The only reason I'm remotely interested in this is for the mad scramble that is bound to happen when the time comes. Will Facebook crash? Will Bob Joe in Kentucky take Oprah away from Oprah and charge her a gazillion dollars to get it back? Will it actually make a notable impact on the Facebook experience in the long run? Will anybody care within 24 hours of this launching?
Probably not. But I'll be here, hitting F5 over and over until I can finally get my hands on facebook.com/keyboardcat.
According to a post on the Nielson blog (which I found through Mashable) over 60% of Twitter users quit the service after only one month. All of the staggering growth aside, it seems as though Twitter may have a hard time riding out this momentum long-term.
From the Nielson blog:
Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.
image from Nielson
A 40% retention rate is not that great, especially compared to Facebook and MySpace, who years later still hover around 70%. Having people drop off the service that fast will not be good for growth or the future of Twitter.
Personally, I know a lot of people who signed up for the service, thought it was dumb and left. Part of that comes from the service being caught in the media hype-train. Part of it comes from the stigma of Twitter being the service to tell people what you just ate for lunch. Part of that comes from people who try it out and find out it's not for them.
I've become quite the Twitter fan, but having used the service for a couple of months now, I don't see it offering enough to ever catch up to something like Facebook or Myspace. Does it need to? Probably not. Right now, it's estimated to only have about 6 million users, which is still low, especially considering all the hype it's been getting. Do you think Twitter is going to make it through or is the high dropout rate proof that Twitter is the next social media fad?
With "only" 7.9 million users as of February 2009, I've noticed that most of my peers in the Creative Advertising program have yet to sign up for Twitter. Many of them hear about the service constantly and still don't know what it is. Others think that having a separate service for what is at its core the equivalent of a Facebook status tool is dumb. Before I signed up, I was in the latter group.
However, people are finding a lot of creative ways of changing the world 140 characters at a time. According to this article in Ad Age, Twitter is now Organic's main job-posting strategy. The article goes in depth on why this works so well for them on the company side. I don't know if this will ever become the go-to strategy for all job postings, but if you're on the fence about signing up, maybe Twitter's ability to help you get a job could be a reason to sign up. It's another way of finding a job. It's a more direct way of finding a job posting the moment it hits the web on a service you'll probably use for everything else. You may have less competition (for now) through a Twitter posting. It also shows employers (particularly those with vested interest in people with online skills) that you know how to operate the tech. Heck, we might not be too far away from the "e-elevator pitch" where you're asked to sell yourself in 140 characters or less.
I can't imagine Tom being terribly happy at the moment. With Facebook surging and MySpace falling behind, the former king of social networking and the entire web 2.0 movement is in dire need of a shakeup. When I saw that article a few days ago, I attempted to brainstorm some potential solutions to improve MySpace's position with no real luck.
According to an article I found on Tech Crunch, News Corp. has found the guy to turn the ship around. Johnathan Miller has been named the CEO of Digital Media for News Corp., which includes MySpace.
image from Tech Crunch
Does he have what it takes? It's too early to pass judgement, but according to Tech Crunch, he lacks the most obvious tool one would need in order to sell MySpace: a MySpace profile. One of the fundamentals of being able to sell a product is to know the product. Not just read about it or have people explain it to you. Use it.
Back in second semester of my Creative Advertising program, my group and I had to do an assignment dissecting a television ad for Stride gum. While it would have been easy for us to say, "Oh, it's gum. We know what that's like," we bought packs of Stride gum and all of its competition to help us get a feel of what's happening in the marketplace.
By actually purchasing the gum, we were able to gather insights we didn't initially see, such as the move away from blister packs into a more trendy paper package. And by searching Facebook, we saw that there was a contingent of Stride users that chewed the gum with the wrapper. As odd and awful as it sounds, you better believe we chewed the wrapper too to get the full picture.
While I can see why he would have no personal use for a page on a social network with a reputation of catering to high school students, creepers and emo bands, not having a profile doesn't bode well for consumer confidence. I'm not saying he needs to add 10,000 "friends" and have music from Fall Out Boy playing in the background on his page, but any sort of proof that he understands the product he's in charge of selling could go a long way.
When you run a Google search for my name, an Amazon review for the album "rear end" by Mercedes shows up that I supposedly wrote in 2001. In the review, I supposedly said:
"This is NASTY music! I can't believe I wasted money on thi- OMG! OMG! I WASTED (dollar ammount)!! GAH! neway, the beats (...), and the lyrics are just too raunchy and don't even make sense! She'd be better off in the porn industry. GO BACK! GO BACK! (and give me back my fourteen dollars)"
Nothing too bad. However, I don't want to associate with it. Especially since it's the very first item that comes up on Google when anybody searches me. The big problem with this review is, I didn't write this.
I didn't have an Amazon account until 2004. My friend Ahmed wrote this as a joke. He denies ever doing it, but if you look at "my" profile, the nickname is his real name. The bigger problem with this is: it's eight years later, he lives in Texas and even if he were to finally admit he did it, he doesn't remember how to log in to remove the review. Unfortunately, that review will probably forever stand as a "scar" to me. I hope that it doesn't negatively colour the perception others have of me, but it's out of my control now.
That was an isolated incident. For the most part, we have complete control over what we contribute to the Internet. However, most of us don't always take precaution before we post. And in the age of "Web 2.0", the problem only gets worse when it's so easy to Tweet too much information or post a picture you think only your Facebook friends will see until it "magically" ends up in plain view of everyone.
What if your mother were to find this stuff? What if a future employer found this stuff? Employers do look up potential new employees on Google to find things you may not want them to see. I remember sitting in an informational with someone at an advertising agency with hiring power. This person would regularly search the names of applicants on Google to see what they could find. If this person found anything bad, they would print it out, and when the applicant came in for their interview, this person would present all the dirt on the applicant they found and use it as examples of why they wouldn't be hired. Imagine sitting in a job interview where the interviewer was presenting drunken pictures of yourself that they found on Facebook. The agony!
To me, one of the highest profile cases of falling victim to your online footprint occured in the murder trial of Stephanie Rengel. The girl convicted of nagging her boyfriend to kill Stephanie left an online footprint the size of Big Foot for the prosecution to present to the court. MSN conversations, text messages and Facebook wall posts flew right in the face of her "I only said it a few times and never meant it," defense.
Not even the delete button can save a person (or in this next case, a company) from falling victim to their own online footprint. Back in 2006, a website popped up called "All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP". Supposedly, it was made by a bunch of guys who were trying to convince their friend's mom of buying her son a PSP. However, the Internet community got suspicious and revealed that it was in fact Sony that made the site. Sony deleted all traces of the campaign, but savvy users saved everything. To this day, the video remains as a scar on the face of the company.
I've spent most of this entry talking about the bad side of our online footprints, but the idea of an online footprint in general is fascinating to me. What about the millions of abandoned blogs? Most of those don't get deleted, they just stay there as "online artifacts" of sorts. Maybe I'm alone in this, but sometimes I'll read a blog that hasn't been updated in years and wonder, "What happened to the user?" Why did they stop? Where did they go? Where are they now?
We can even take this discussion into the afterlife. Odds are, everything you post on the Internet will stay there longer than you stay on the Internet. What then happens to everything online you left behind? There's been a lot of hot-button discussion as to what to do about social networking profiles when that person passes away, but we'll save that discussion for another day.
Before I go, I'll leave you with this question: what does your online footprint look like?
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