Do you buzz? If you tweet, facebook, or even blog, you may want to buzz too. Google took on social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook on their own turf by launching Google Buzz.
If you have a gmail account, you couldn’t have missed it, the first time you have to click through an interstitial buzz setup page on the way to your gmail inbox, and once in, the colorful buzz icon is on the left nestled in among your folders.
The initial launch caused some privacy alarms, and google backed off from automatically linking your other google activity, such as Picasa to Buzz.
It seems to be catching on. I already got two buzzes from one of my gmail chat mates and I noticed that Joel Comm is publicizing his Buzz profile. And Mashable, the venerable social media blog, already has a new Buzz icon next to it’s Twitter and Facebook icons.
I went ahead and created a basic profile so I can join the party but deliberately left many things inactive or blank, I’ll watch how the privacy debate unfurls first.
It starts out by getting requests from people, at first a few, then more. You give in and build your Facebook page, or recruit the kid down the street to help you do it. Then you start looking at other people’s profiles and see people you know. Next thing you know you are connecting to people you haven’t talked to for years and it all snowballs from there.
It’s no wonder that Facebook attracted 25 million new users in the last month alone.
Facebook, a phenomenon that started with the under 35 set, is maturing in both demographics and uses. Facebook was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and originally only for college students. A year later, high school students were allowed in. In 2006, Facebook got rid of its gatekeepers and began letting anyone in.
Over the next year, it grew from 12 million to 50 million users. Then it launched versions in Spanish, French and German. Today about 175 million people are on Facebook.
While most Facebook users are younger than 35, so many older people are now using it that the portion of the college-age users has dropped to 41 percent. Robert Scoble, a blogging and social media technology expert, says eventually Facebook’s popularity will slow — but not any time soon. And it remains hip with the college crowd.
“Having older people there doesn’t affect your experience,” Scoble said. “It’s segregated. You have your friends and your whole experience there is based on who your friends are.”
Of course some overlap occurs. Parents are finding that Facebook is a good way to keep in touch with their college age children who previously forgot to email or call. Of course some young people in college may be a little wary of their parents keeping tabs on them that way, however most just remove a few pictures that the parents might not appreciate.
The older crowd is here to stay on Facebook, in fact UC Davis is examining the “effectiveness of social media used by the higher education sector to communicate philanthropic news”. In other words, UC Davis thinks there might be enough people on Facebook with enough cash to help fund higher education. Since Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, which heavily leveraged social media, it has become acceptable to run social media fundraising campaigns. Entrepreneurs are following suit and are using it to reinforce and create new business connections.
Think about the essence of a marketing campaign. You decide on your messaging and branding and with certain key activities you build momentum and buzz towards your event. This translates well to Facebook. Your Info tab .. or even better your business page, informs everyone about and even brands you and your business and your Facebook activity builds momentum towards the event you are marketing. It’s a natural fit.
Whether you plan to use the internet purely for personal reasons or you are looking for professional networking, Facebook will open doors you didn’t even know were there.
The Economist recently had an article noting the rise of the “faceless bosses”. Outsized personalities such as Jack Welch and Robert Nardelli are gone or retired. Carly Fiorina has turned her attention to politics.
While clearly, in today’s turbulent times, keeping your head down is attractive, I found this article an odd juxtaposition with the revolution in branding that social media is creating. Corporate branding, ho hum, personal branding is what is hot. If you haven’t figured out, you are brandU. What we say and do on twitter, facebook and our blogs becomes part of the gestalt that defines the online perception of who we are and what we have to offer.
So what does your brand say about you? Is it disorganized and not clear? Show me yours! As someone whose brand is not as together as I would like, I would love to see a a great example. Just post your URL or social media handle
below.
As I begin to wrap up my first child theme using the Thematic framework, I must admit that I’m beginning to really appreciate the power of theme hooks. At first I was modifying the css to get where I wanted to be, for example altering margins, using the background url directive to add my custom header image. But when I got to the point where I wanted to suppress the display of the blog title and description, that is when I first found out about Thematic add and remove actions.
Oh sure I could have just used “display: none” in the css blog title class/ids so that the blog title didn’t display over my custom image, but that’s kind of ugly. Using remove_action in my functions.php file is much more elegant.
function suppress_header_elements() {
remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogtitle',3);
remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogdescription',5);
}
add_action('init','suppress_header_elements');
And the bonus is that the blog title description value still populate my title and meta description tags as desired for SEO optimization.
Theme hooks is not a concept unique to Thematic but embedded in Wordpress itself. Using theme hooks in your child theme, the idea is that you can isolate your customizations in a single file in a functions.php file (it may be called something different such as custom_functions.php with other frameworks).
Although I had altered the css to add my image, I wanted to additionally add clickable button images as well that I already had defined in a css file. No problem, I just created a new function called add_buttons in my functions.php file, echo’ed out the HTML and then added the add_action line:
function add_buttons() {
echo ....
}
add_action('thematic_header', 'add_buttons');
It wasn’t completely smooth sailing as I ran into this error when I tried to use the admin (error text modified to remove site identifying info)
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/mysite/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/childtheme/functions.php:43) in /home/mysite/public_html/mysite.com/blog/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 865
Most of the information you get googling this error suggests there is extra spaces prior to the php start tag in the wpconfig.php file. That wasn’t the case here, but it was a good clue. Turns out I had an extra blank line after the closing php tag in my functions.php file. When I finally figured out to remove that, the errors went away.
This just in. I just heard on NPR that the FTC has released new guidelines regarding blogs that “endorse” products. Product reviews is a common blog post, popular with searchers who are researching a potential purchase, and yes bloggers sometimes get paid for the reviews or at least get free stuff. The FTC thinks these relationships the bloggers have with companies, need to be fully disclosed. Fines can be pretty hefty, up to $11,000 per infraction.
What’s next after Web 2.0? Cloud Computing? Maybe. The Semantic Web? Possibly. The problem with defining what’s next, is that Web 2.0 wasn’t a distinct new technology but is better described as a social movement. The technologies that sprung up to facilitate this new model of user interaction were a collection of re-purposed old technologies with some new, but I can’t think of any that were fundamentally paradigm shifts.
A few months ago I was hiring. I was looking for some engineers for a contract. One resume that crossed my desk listed as a skill, “Web 2.0″. I posted to facebook, what does this mean? The answer from one of my friends, “it means that they surf all day”. Given the ease one can lose hours to “facebooking”, there is a ring of truth in this. 1 in 8 couples married this year met through social media. Think about it.
My point though, is that Web 2.0 isn’t really a technical skill set. Perhaps the job applicant meant to say AJAX or Drupal. But there isn’t a technology one can put their finger on as *the* Web 2.0 technology.
The wikipedia entry for web 2.0 is a good read. The Criticism section points out that many of the ideas that Web 2.0 were already implemented. The article in general supports my contention that web 2.0 is a social revolution not a technological one. Content creation power was placed into everyone’s hands. Networking online got taken up to a new level.
So what’s next? One thing I think bears watching is the possible fragmentation of the web, at least from the search perspective. Google web search is only one way to find things. You can discover sites through social networking, youtube and twitter search. Communities that focus on niches are becoming more prevalent (although they have always been there).
Regardless, it will take us a while to digest Web 2.0 and the next really big thing could be some time in coming. Although I’m sure there is someone out there working to prove me wrong.
Twitter is certainly having a momentous summer. There was the recent DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, that rendered it inoperative. And the battle lines between it and facebook became more clearly drawn. Twitter is definitively morphing before our eyes, as I recently alluded to in my “lost its shine” post, but the question is into what?
The two trends to watch are use of twitter for branding, as Martha Stewart has, and the its search engine.
For a guide to many of the web 2.0 sites out there, check out the go2web2.0 application and tools directory. It’s an overwhelming list but an interesting browse. Unfortunately there is no real indicator that separates out the relevant and “must know about” from the obscure. For example, in the social category: digg is lumped with a bunch of other sites I have never heard of. The lesser known sites tend to be very niche focused (for example: steepster – tea drinkers unite)
If you click through the site icon, there is a short description and you can get a sense of the buzz about the site, as tweets, blogs and youtube videos that reference the web2.0 site are displayed. If you are willing to spend a bit of time, you can discover all sorts of interesting sites.
Interesting thing about observing trends, you can watch move them through groups as a wave. Let’s take twitter for example, it first became popular with the tech hip as a cool way to share just about anything, in 140 characters or less. I loved twitter at events such as the Web2.0 expo, following the instantaneous commentary on the speakers, and of course knowing where the cool party was.
But twitter has recently become less fun to use, at least for me. It seems like every day I get a follow request from someone that has less than 40 updates (boring!), or even worse, zero. And people that I chose to follow, immediately DM’ed me with a tweet with a link to their product. These get unfollowed really quickly.
On the other hand, facebook which I initially didn’t like much has become a better place to hang out, I have enough friends who post interesting things to catch my interest. The walled garden aspect of facebook, derided with frustration by some, seems to keep the riffraff out, the quality connections in.
And surprisingly, teenagers, a group you would have thought been the early adopters, don’t use twitter either. As my son’s sniffs “my Dad uses twitter”.
So if you have never used twitter, is it safe to ignore it now? Absolutely, not. Twitter is still a major force to be reckoned with. As evidenced by the recent Iranian election unrest, twitter is where the news breaks first. Fast breaking events that grab broad interest is where twitter shines, and it can be an excellent way to search for news. And there are influencers in the twittersphere that can direct significant traffic, if you want to play in the twitterspace for business reasons, at the very least find the ones in your industry to keep a pulse on your market.
And if you didn’t know what a DM was, it’s high time you figured it out.
