Mark Kolier’s Blog

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

The old saying that ‘information is power’ is true, except when it’s the wrong information. Among other things social networking allows communication to large numbers of people by one single individual. A very cool feature indeed but with that comes a responsibility (at least as far as I am concerned) that the personal information posted about other people is correct.

Last week I received a message from a friend noting that there was some less than flattering buzz going around on Facebook regarding something my wife was being accused of doing (she didn’t). Apparently someone we do not know had been ‘wronged’ and tracked the wrongdoer to a physical address – in fact the address where we used to live, having moved out three months ago. The affronted party got the home address from the police and checked it in a reverse lookup. Of course we were still listed as living at our old address as records are not always updated promptly – no surprise there. It went downhill from
there.

Thinking that the offending party had been found out this person went on a social network and began to post a vitriolic rant on how my wife was a terrible and horrible person and that the police were involved. Naturally my wonderful wife was shocked and had no idea what was going on – at least not at first. By piecing things together she was finally able to figure out what took place.

My wife tracked down and contacted the person who had been posting the incorrect information. She received a lukewarm apology but without any or at least enough contrition.
You’d think that a person would be horrified at erroneously accusing an innocent person of wrongdoing in a public forum like a social network. But the idea of going public in the first place to embarrass someone due to a personal grudge is unfortunately not all that uncommon these days.

What I am suggesting is that if you are going to go the route of publicly calling out someone for wrongdoing in a social network or other public forum – AT LEAST GET IT RIGHT! But in my opinion better if you don’t do it at all and approach the person one to one first. If then you are not satisfied and want to go public – do it at your own risk.

Carol Bartz has been gone from Yahoo for nearly two months and there has been spotty news on management other than Timothy Morse being named interim CEO and Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo remaining ‘chief Yahoos’. Wednesday of this week David Kenny resigned as president and director of Akamai Technologies. Mr. Kenny is already on the board of Yahoo and there is speculation that he could possibly be the next chief executive.

This all comes as a backdrop as Yahoo appears to be both on and off the market. Last week Jerry Yang Yahoo.com co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang said that while Yahoo’s board is famously exploring all its options, it’s not necessarily up for sale. “The intent going in is not to put ourselves up for sale. The intent is to look at all the options,” Yang said on stage at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong. http://bit.ly/vGcKmQ

There are apparently many potential suitors interested in Yahoo and Yahoo’s still impressive reach. The list moves from AOL’s Tim Armstrong, to Microsoft, to Jack Ma of Alibaba.com (Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba.com, a stake that Jack Ma had been trying to buy back from Ms. Bartz before her departure).

The real question many people (including me) are asking is, (despite what Mr. Yang is saying) does Yahoo have an independent future? Or will it need to be part of another company’s platform? In the case of Microsoft (think Bing) – Yahoo and Bing would together comprise nearly 35% of the search market (the balance is nearly all Google) and would be a formidable player in the search marketplace. I don’t see as good a fit with AOL (two somewhat tried and tired brands) or Alibaba.com but they have their reasons for wanting a piece of more than 100 million Yahoo unique monthly users (includes email).

Right now the valuation to buy Yahoo is as much as US $20 billion. The three leaders as noted above all have the wherewithal to make it happen. And of course Mr. Yang is a potential buyer himself.

How will this play out?

Companies who develop a strong Twitter following online have a better chance at increasing sales according to a recent study conducted by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey – http://bit.ly/tZIZql.

The survey studied the buying habits of fewer than 1,500 people. A fairly good-sized sample and the results were that 50% of people who follow a brand are more likely to buy that brand’s products. The article also notes however that it is not all that easy to get a Twitter user to follow a brand. I would agree with that as I am not one to follow a brand on Twitter although I have done so on Facebook to some degree. In fact only 21% of Twitter users follow brands.

Also significant was the statistic that 75% of people surveyed said the never ‘un-follow’ brands after making a ‘commitment’ to them. Although I don’t really understand how following a brand shows my commitment exactly.

Mashable lists the study’s five main reasons for following a brand on Twitter:

• 64%: I am a customer of the company
• 61%: To be the first to know information about the brand
• 48%: To receive discounts and promotions
• 36%: To gain access to exclusive content
• 28%: To receive content/information to retweet and share with others

The article also noted that Twitter’s follower numbers closely mirror a Facebook study that also found that 56% of users on Facebook who like a brand’s fan page are more likely to recommend that brand to friends while 51% of consumers who like a brand Facebook fan page are more likely to purchase that product. I expect that this comes as no surprise to anyone.

Twitter continues to evolve (check out Simon Cowell’s comments on his personal turnaround on using Twitter as a listening device in today’s New York Times http://nyti.ms/vuE6dT), and personally I find myself following fewer overall people and culling out people I am following if they don’t put out tweets of interest to me. I am following over 900 people and there’s no way for me to sift through that many people’s tweets.

Brands are doing a better job of leveraging social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. For me it starts and ends with what kind of engagement the brands offer, as well as what kinds of offers the brands offer!

But there’s still room for improvement don’t you think?

I have been familiar with and have used Tim and Nina Zagat’s restaurant guide for more than twenty years. I’ve long since given up the printed books for an on-line subscription which offers me access to Zagat reviews for restaurants all over the world as opposed to one city, state or area in a printed book.

AdAge released a pretty thorough overview yesterday – http://bit.ly/o6Mdv1 noting that Google’s reasoning was that Zagat was truly local and this fits with Google’s desire to elevate Google Places to a higher value proposition. The New York Times called Google’s purchase of Zagat a ‘consolation prize’. I agree.

While Zagat has a good history of delivering solid user reviews I have become accustomed to Yelp’s easy to used location based application and am dubious that Zagat and Google can improve upon the user experience provided by Yelp – http://www.Yelp.com.

Zagat does not cover many places I visit and consequently it would be of no use to me in a small town that Zagat does not cover. However that’s not the case with Yelp. Yelp’s main drawback as far as I am concerned is the paucity of user reviews when it comes to individual restaurants. The sample reviews are often too small to trust.

When it comes to Yelp I do love the amount of choices that the location based service offers me – the distances to the locations are very helpful, and Yelp goes far beyond restaurants – bars, attractions, movies, museums and much more. Did I mention that the downloaded Yelp app is free?
Google did ‘try’ to buy Yelp a couple of years ago for $500 million. (The terms of the Zagat sale to Google were not released). The article in AdAge notes there are conflicting reasons why the sale did not go through. Rest assured if Google really had wanted to buy Yelp the deal would have happened.

I can see the deal making sense from the family owned perspective of the Zagat’s. It probably is exactly the right time for them to cash out and work on other things as the company they started 32 years ago is in a much different marketplace today. I am betting they would rather spend their time (and money) doing other things.

Google has made a lot of really smart moves (see YouTube and Google+ for instance). However I think they bet on the wrong horse in this race.

How do you find places to eat when you go to a new city – or want to try any new restaurant?

It took our now college age daughter to suggest using Facebook video chat instead of Skype. Up until now Skype has been my video chat go-to option. Two nights ago we video chatted on Facebook and it was impressive in many ways. It is simpler within the Facebook application since permissions are already taken care of. If you’ve not tried it – you should. I learned later that Facebook is using the Skype platform for the service and I cannot understand how the results could be so different.

The download was fast and easy – we were actually corresponding while entering the request for video chat, and the download took less than one minute. The next thing I saw was a real-time video of my daughter and the quality was the best I’ve experience when it comes to video chatting. It was as if we were looking at each other right in person.

There is also a group video chat function that works just as well. Important to remember is the fact that you need to be FB ‘friends’ in order to engage in FB video chat – so it’s not as if it will replace Skype or other video chat applications (like ovoo.com), but for my friends that I wish to video chat with, Facebook has become the new default choice.

Here’s a questions – why doesn’t LinkedIn have a video chat option? It may not be appropriate for most LinkedIn interactions but it seems like it would be a simple yet high value enhancement for that platform. Keep in mind that should you wish to not video chat, you as the operator always have the option to decline to video chat.

But for family and friends that are not nearby, video chatting is better than – well than not having video chat. Facebook has done a really good job here and I am very surprised as to how I was unaware of that feature up until now.

How about you? Have you used video chatting? Do you like it? Is Skype your normal choice? Have you tried FB video chat? And if not what else might be you be using?