socialmediocrity

It would seem that despite having almost 10% of all users on Google+ adding him to their Circles, one is not amused. Or is that +1 is not amused?

Not a single Post to say “Hello world”, or something equally profound. Nothing.

Rubbish.

No posts, no update, nothing.

Following the revelation published yesterday that Facebook user numbers are falling, in some of their originally strong-growth and key territories, we can today reveal that user numbers have DOUBLED on socialmediocrity.com in just a couple of days.

At this rate of growth, it will surpass MySpace user numbers in about 174 days. Reports of hurried preparation of an 8-figure IPO in the near future are “wide of the mark” according to a socialmediocrity.com spokesperson, despite increasing demand for anything “social”.

Facebook’s real-time targeting capability is on full display in the Recommended Pages box todayPosting details of a couple of pages recommended to me this morning, interestingly the recommendations changed to be, and in fairness very openly (“related to your post”), based on that update.

To be fair, I had no idea Park Ji Sung was a Tory. Who would have thought?

Some terribly clever McCann Erickson Israel people wanted to show the world of prospective new talent how good their imagination was, so they came up with what has been described as a “hack” to Facebook Photos.

I only hope they’re not hoping to attract any new talent with a pedantic eye for detail, or anything so silly. Even this hawkish amateur can spot that possibly the second most important aspect of any snakes & ladders board appears to be missing. That’s right. The numbers.

Oh, but hang on. They’re not missing entirely. You see, they have actually included them, it’s just that they failed to understand the medium they were working with and executed the idea in a laissez-faire kind of way so that they don’t actually show up when the punch line is delivered (in the photo album view) . Presumably they wouldn’t want a client to think that’s how they manage their projects either.

The concept appears to be based on a snakes & ladders board, and the “real-world” version (that’s real-world in facebook) of it can be seen here (which they may at some stage update to improve the execution)

If you do got to the real version you’ll be able to see that the individual picture views include the numbers but that the crop in the summary level kind of cuts them out.

Nice idea though. I might nick it and do it properly.

(Tip to the designers – just move the numbers that you photo-shopped into each image up a bit, and to the right a bit)

According to a report on InsideFacebook, Facebook have filed for a patent on inferential ad targeting.

And according to the report this goes beyond friend-connections targeting, as is currently available in the Facebook ad platform (allowing advertisers to target *only* connected friends of existing “fans” or “likes”), and covers the possibility of broader inference. What does that mean? Well, in a nutshell, that if you have infirmation missing from your profile, but amongst your hundreds of connections on the network there is some commonality or popular data item for that missing information, then it may be infered that you also share that piece of information.

To give a similar example to that in InsideFacebook‘s article, if you don’t publish details of your education, but enough of your friends have indicated they are all connected to the same academic institution, then it may be infered that you also came from that same institution yourself, and advertisers may target you based on that inference.

All of which sounds teribly clever, and in keeping with the notion that you are defined by the company you keep. However, there are a number of reasons why this approach can only suppress advertising effectiveness if utilised by an advertiser.

Firstly, accuracy.

I won’t for one minute imply that Facebook’s data is not accurate (indeed they would counter that by declaring it is not their data, but that of the user), but maybe, just maybe, the absence of the data is just the start of the story. I can imagine, for example, and to continue the same example, that students of celebrated institutions will *tend* to have a greater propensity to publish their affiliation than those that attend less well known and less envied institutions.

So consequently, and especially when we have developed professional networks that include people from all sorts of backgrounds later in life, the celebrated institutions become, logically, over-represented (if anything). Inference Targeting in this example, then, would only serve to exaggerate that over-representation, and presumably those infered ads *should* work significantly less well (diluting the overall effectiveness substantially). Algorithms to the rescue? Maybe, but not for a while, and not before a lot of mis-attributed inferences had been made (and reported)

Secondly, User-Suspicion.

Even if the inference was accurate, it is easy to acknowledge that an advertisers’ use of data that I haven’t published about myself could “spook” a user – and is unlikely to solicit a positive response. I liken it to the email I got from Alliance & Leicester yesterday, warning me of a security issue and inviting me to reconfirm my details by following their link to the security test area. (I don’t bank with Alliance & Leicester) If I did bank with them though, it is to me clearly a con trick, and I can entirely understand why users might get caught out by it from time to time.

My final offering would be that, users who consciously publish these details will, in part at least, accept that such information may be used to deliver advertising to them. They will have already witnessed it, consciously or not, and will be familiar with its’ occurence. Arguably, they have given expresss permission for others to use that information. Users who have intentionally not published that data then, again at least in part, have specifically chosen not to publish that data, and consquently are likely to be less welcoming of those ads. And from a privacy perspective, this could be dangerous new ground for Facebook to be forging.

There are surely many other reasons why the inference itself may be inaccurate, but there is only very little prospect of better returns for advertisers. The only real purpose for this, then, is to dramatically increase the scale of a prospective campaign, and consequently drive ad revenues up whilst decreasing effectiveness.The same thing happens all the time, and we have seen it time and again, with some direct similies on the way paid-for Search has evolved.

If, or when, it becomes available, buyer-beware. Facebook’s focus on revenue will increasingly pit them against user experience, and this development might see another battle erupt between user and provider.

Launched in something of a fanfare (though admittedly it took this scathing, anonymous blogger a few days to have come across it originally), the UK Government’s much applauded efforts to engage the public in spending cuts has, essentially, faltered despite self-congratulatory release of (super-cool) video conference chats with the King of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, proudly released here. And summarized here:

DC: Basically, we’ve got a huge problem here…. thank you for “engaging”

MZ: We’re really delighted to be in this partnership with you guys….to help harness the ideas facebook users have to help the UK public save money…..it’s a really innovative thing you guys are doing…to try to create more social change.

DC: Thanks for doing this…..a lot of people say: people are not really interested in how to make government cost less, not really interested in politics….because it’s always been up to now top-down, take it or leave it…….there’s an enormous civic spirit in this country where people want to take control….people really want to take part. But thanks Mark, because we couldn’t have done it without you, and getting this public engagement for free is a good start.

MZ: Glad to help

DC: Well thanks. This web conference thing is great, is it new? And great to see you the other day. Next time you’re in town, drop by

Allow me to highlight some of those phrases and ideas: “enormous civil spirit” exists in the UK; engaging for free on Facebook is going to help plug the deficit; the UK Prime Minister has never before used web conferencing.

Launched on the 9th July, the Spending Challenge website was designed to encourage the public to contribute their ideas as to how and where our newly elected, more in-touch Government could, or should, consider cuts in public spending. Harnessing the power of that “enormous civil spirit”, you might say. Well that’s not quite how it worked out.

The unelected government that the UK public find themselves with clearly promised much ahead of the election which they simply had no idea about how they would deliver against it. Which means any commitments they gave as far as reducing the debt were concerned prior to the election were at best disingenuous. In short, they lied to us all to buy a few votes. I will resist the urge to rant more about the Lib Dem u-turn, trading policy and manifesto pledges for ministerial cars.

Perhaps more unforgivably (as it required no special access to the public accounts), it also demonstrates just how out of touch even this newly installed government actually are. The reason for the process failing is that is became subjected to a level of abuse that they simply had not prepared for, and presumably therefore had not anticipated. It does not take a Bullingdon graduate, let alone a Cabinet full of them (here and here), to work out that given the opportunity, the public will respond with profanity, attack the unelected government themselves, or indeed that they would vent their frustrations at social minorities first, and in spite of the many thousands of constructive ideas offered, the press would highlight the few that were deemed offensive.

So following a number of offensive suggestions that attacked, specifically those with disabilities, and having failed to have removed the offending items even after they had been highlighted, what does the government do? Does it put in place appropriate monitoring and moderation processes to ensure that items like that are picked up, thereby ensuring that they continue to embrace the “enormous civil spirit” that exists amongst the UK public as they shoul dhave done in the first place? Do they continue to let the public review each others ideas, refining them with comments and suggestions and rating them? Do they shoot the people that advised them, built the website and failed to put in place the appropriate controls? Do they heck.

Instead, they effectively pull up the drawbridge. You can keep sending those ideas, kids, but the Government and its’ cronies will be the sole adjudicators from now on. So there. We’ll tell you what we’ve decided in a few weeks time.

It’s just like the good old days, when politicians got on with the jobs they were elected to do, and we got on with ours. Apart from the allegedly “free” charade of public engagement. FOI request submitted for more details.

As for web conferencing. Yes, Prime Minister, it is indeed very good. You should try it without a script next time. Like a normal person would. And try speaking to your own people, and not the next-best-thing to Obama, just because he won’t come out to play any more.

Interesting  comment from the NMA’s feature writer on Social yesterday, Charlotte McEleny.

In response to the IAB UK SMC’s I.A.B. framework for measuring social, it seems the feedback they were expecting was, as McEleny describes it, “mixed”. She goes on to completely fail to express any substantial opinion of her own, but rather concentrates on criticising the very people participating in the social space (albeit in a scathingly anonymous way) by blogging their own opinion, and in their own way trying to agitate the discussion to a more meaningful and ultimately valuable end.

The only solution proffered by our erstwhile journo? A call to ending criticism is the answer, to end the #FAIL culture, rather than acknowledge the failings and shortcomings of the industry and demand better quality of output and leadership. What has the world come to when ineffective trade bodies are supported by lazy journalism of this kind?

Given the subject matter, it strikes me as ironic that any negativity expressed in these social environments itself becomes the focus of criticism, almost as if to not support the views of the party (the IAB UK) is not to be tolerated. Somehow the blogging proletariat have nothing useful to say, or that whatever they do say should only be judged through the lens of the governing party’s own opinion. Is this really the writing we have come to expect from NMA?

I find it at best disappointing and honestly couldn’t think of a better way to demonstrate, as a journalist, that you really have failed to grasp the very concept of the subject you are meant to be a leading commentator on.

The mixed feedback is surely something to be welcomed. Goodness knows, as all practitioners will understand, to get any substantial, though out, considered consumer feedback is an achievement in its’ own right. Absolutely it should not be casually and aggressively dismissed, and I sincerely hope that the IAB UK SMC had their listening strategy in place and will have collected all of this feedback, in all it’s forms, to help inform future development of the I.A.B. framework, and are not relying on feedback from the fully paid-up member base.

And just to be clear, rather than intending to attack any one journalist, this is aimed at the wider journalistic community who all too often provide ill-considered opinion on a subject they often know little about, yet still demand to be revered.

I for one refuse to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator in the Social space. As outlined in my own scathing and anonymous attack on the IAB UK SMC’s I.A.B. framework, and my opinion remains firm, “Social” is far more than advertising, far more than just a concern for digital marketers, and to be taken seriously we must, as an industry, resist the temptation to flirt with “standardisation” of metrics which would imply to some degree a standardisation of desired outcome. If we point our guns at that particular enemy, then we will end up with an industry incapable of innovation, one that turns out mediocre work at best, and more often and more likely, socially neutral or damaging results for brands.

The IAB UK, and more importantly the IAB Social Media Council (IAB SMC) have proudly announced their opinion on how all social media should be measured, ingeniously missing the point entirely, and demonstrating (to this author at least) their ever decreasing relevance to the wider industry.

In a show of complete lack of original thought, the framework adopts the acronym I.A.B. – Intent, Action/Awareness/Advocacy/Appreciation, Benchmark. So actually that’s IAAAAB, but then would have been somehow more ridiculous, right?

As an aside, imagine if everything an industry body issued borrowed it’s mnemonic from the organisation’s own acronym – the mnemonic itself becomes oxymoronic as a concept very quickly in this case.

So anyway, the announcement goes on to completely fail to deliver against it’s own declared mission to help advertisers and agencies better digest the complexities of social media measurement. Instead, the notion that anyone in an advertising or marketing capacity needs to be told how to do their job is patronising in the extreme. Their framework essentially reads thus:

• INTENT: it’s a good idea to know what you want to do before you start doing it. Set some KPI’s, kids!
• AAAA: It would be good if you think about what you expect to happen as a result, and how you might measure whether or not that has happened. For this foresight, IAB, we are eternally grateful.
• BENCHMARKING: Once you’ve observed the impact, try and find a direct competitor that didn’t do so well, so that you can show how much better than them you all did. (groundbreaking, huh?)

This framework is entirely bereft of any real value in it’s current form, and the IAB (and especially their social media council), must be somewhat embarrassed I would think. It is with no small degree of mirth I noted their expectation that they might receive feedback from the wider industry.

Richard Pentin, IAB SMC member and Group Planning Director at Tullow Marshall Warren: “The days of whimsical experimentation are over….to be taken seriously it’s imperative we start making it much more accountable, and the IAB social media measurement framework is designed to do just that”. I can assure you, Richard, it goes nowhere near doing that.

The IAB’s call for more case studies to be shared amongst the industry rings as a hollow cry of “we don’t know what to make of it either – has anyone else worked it out yet?”. Far from the days of experimentation being over, they have only just begun for social media, and it is a terrifying prospect to think that we stop innovating and creating from here on in – the way the IAB UK SMC evidently have.

I am personally troubled by the way in which the push to find the holy grail, the golden measurement by which all campaigns will be judged, gets in the way of the actual objective (the “i” in the framework, if you remember). And as Richard himself acknowledges here, social media is so versatile, diverse, complex and multi-faceted, spanning many disparate objectives and many different platforms - no wonder we’ve struggled to find a common methodology which works across everything.

What the industry actually lacks is any opinion-leaders of any great value. Firstly, perhaps the IAB SMC should define social media. It sounds obvious, but conceptually “social media” transcends so many other traditional activities, that it might actually need defining  so that we know what it is your referring to exactly. Is it viral? Is it word of mouth? Is it customer service? It is all of these things, and so much more.

Secondly, it needs to be acknowledged that social media is not a discreet, silo’d activity, and to treat it as such is any advertisers’ or agency’s first mistake – we’ve learnt this before with digital, let’s not repeat it, purrrlease. A strong industry body should be taking the lead on this. Integration is no longer confined to the marketing team and referring to the media mix but instead affects every aspect of a business. The very nature of social platforms needs to be understood from the lower echelons of the boardroom up to the decision makers in the post room. Your customer will tell you if you are getting right – by buying more things, or using your service more.

By definition, then, social media is much much more than advertising alone. It is more than “interactive”, and it is for these reasons we must all reject the myopic framework published by the SMC sub committee of the IAB UK, and it’s contributors.

Even Malcolm Galdwell couldn’t make it up! It turns out that a “neuroeconomist” has found a way to prove that being on twitter makes you as happy as the day you get married. Apparently, the increased production of oxytocin in the brain, otherwise known as the cuddle chemical, is the big give away.

And in the process may have drawn a curious conclusion that suggests we value “social” interactions on Twitter and other networks as much as we value face to face activity with friends.

Now, I don’t know Paul Zak personally, the “neuroeconomist” or “Dr. Love” in question, but let me posit that what turns on him, or in fact anyone willing to be subjected to these tests, might be different to the things that turn me (and the other 7 billion of us) on – for lots of different reasons. I, for one, can barely spell “neuroeconomist”, let alone have the imagination to make that word up in the first place.

An extreme example might help: It is commonly recognised that it would take less pages of Sports Illustrated to turn on a pre-pubescent boy than it would a more worldly-wise Russell Brand, say, or self-confessed addict-of-love, Robert Palmer.

So could it be that the subject being studied in this case was merely responding to the thing in life that makes him happiest (twitter over girls?), and that far from drawing any conclusions that are worthy of publishing, the subject might have been well-advised to conceal this gritty revelation of his own relationship with real-world people?

Any suggestion that brands engaging in the social space therefore have a better relationship with their customers should be dismissed immediately. The only conclusion to draw is that the most successful company to exploit this insight in Social CRM terms will be the one that starts selling oxytocin in pill or soft-drink form, surely.

Facebook recently appears to have introduced “simple” pricing options for it’s advertisers. If you’re familiar with the ads platform, you’ll find the change at the end of the setup page, where you would normally place your bid type and bid value.

Facebook Simple Pricing

Despite having until now always defaulted bidding to “CPC”, in favour of “CPM”, and always default-setting the bid price to the middle of the range suggested, apparently that’s not simple enough and we have this new presumably simpler option.

What appears to happen when selecting this option is that your bid type is set to CPC, and your bid value is set to the middle of the suggested range – in essence it simply accepts, but hides, the default values it had originally provided.

What is not clear is whether the bid will change with the estimate. As any long term advertisers will have found out by now, whilst CPC bidding can provide lower risk in terms of the cost of the traffic it generates, it can fluctuate wildly as far as volume is concerned – and this is certainly in part due to the optimisation of delivery based on effective-CPM rates, and in part due to quality scoring. Facebook’s own revenues increase substantially if they can increase the CPM rates of the inventory available, so anything that increases CPM rates makes great commercial sense

But I’m not convinced it will. I doubt that these “simple” bids will be automatically changed after setting – that would surely require a significant change in advertising terms, and something that a former advertiser would have to actively accept rather than by implication. If anything this makes the buying of advertising  even less daunting to the first-time advertiser, and theoretically may lead to a drop in the quality of the ads being ordered – this based on the blunt assumption that the professionals will normally produce better “quality” ads.

In fact, it may lead to a high turnover of poorly-performing ads as advertisers continue to try out the platform for themselves. How many CPC ads, with bids set to the default setting are still running and receiving substantial volume of impressions, say, 7 days after starting.

Perhaps the belief is that with CPCs effectively being set by Facebook (or at least by their suggestions), they will self-perpetuate an increase. After all, if lots of advertisers start targeting the same audience with an auction-based CPC inventory, and start competing aggressively for each click, there will be an enormous rise in revenues, vis-a-vis Google. Which is true when you have single-vertical advertisers competing for a finite resource, but there is nothing scarce about inventory on Facebook.

It is possible that with a larger number of advertisers, and provided enough get their advertising and targeting right, then eCPMs start to climb rapidly. As long as enough advertisers are getting above average CTRs from their ads, this will begin to raise the foor-rate for CPMs as this will be determined by an average CPC bid (Facebook’s default), but factored by an above average CTR, leading to much higher inventory rates. But I am not sure that the link to “simple” pricing options is any more simple than the default settings provided.

There is undoubtedly more to come from this initial link, and given the potential impact on FB’s revenues, it will be interesting to see what measures it takes that in turn support the sites CPM rates in future.