Make Seriously | Design and Life

Facebook vs. Twitter

This shouldn’t even be a battle, but Facebook appears to be encroaching on Twitter’s status as THE real time social media application. Twitter has little (read: nothing) to fear from this change.

It’s clear that Facebook is attempting to update the way it operates to help businesses and advertisers get the same functionality from it that Twitter offers. Offering real-time updates on published items and dropping the friend limit both compete with Twitter’s real-time updating and unlimited friend number. Facebook is also making business pages more user-friendly by making them more like user profiles than a unique “page”. At face value, it seems like a competition is brewing. There are a few glowing disparities, however.

First, Twitter doesn’t offer the same capabilities that Facebook does. Sure, you can forward thoughts, images, videos and share links. But they don’t exist permanently in space in the sense that they’re posted to an organized board that everyone can see a month from now. It does not function with the same long-term abilities that Facebook has. Don’t count it as a bad thing though, there’s certainly value in the short-term messaging that Twitter allows.

Second, Facebook doesn’t have the same indexing power that Twitter has. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Twitscoop before, but it’s pretty awesome for tracking trends and news. It gives you a tagroll from the twitisphere, letting you know which words are popular at the moment. It’s actually really helpful, and generally you can put the links together before reading the tweets containing those words. For example, I saw “TO” “Buffalo” and “Bills” the other day get popular all of a sudden. Guess what? The Buffalo Bills picked up TO, and I knew it almost the moment it happened. Sadly, there was no trend for Illinois accepting Pluto as a planet.

Third, in general, Twitter and Facebook are used very differently. I, for example, use Facebook mostly as a private citizen (although MakeSeriously does have a page and a handful of fans) and use Twitter as a networking/trendf-ollowing/search-engining/random tool. Facebook is like home base, and Twitter is like a car. Facebook is comfortable and controllable. Twitter is a bit more spontaneous and I use it to take me places. They can have similar functions, but for now they’re still pretty segregated.

So there’s no need for Twitter or Facebook to worry, or for anyone to be terribly concerned that either is going away in the future. To see them survive going on in the next couple of years, they will need to learn to play nice; perhaps even partner. They can find mutual benefit from one another, and hopefully constructive cooperation will be the tone, not frantic scrambling to compete with someone who resembles your service.

Facebook is a scary place

… at least it can be. This clip from the BBC show Idiots of Ants does a really good job of showing the creepy-stalkery side of Facebook as well as demonstrating some of the largest frustrations and personal image issues. Best of all, it’s pretty funny:

The Best Facebook Integration EVER

Hey fellows. You know how once a month your lady gets… well… a little moody? Ever find yourself having a great time only to have it turn into a downpour of poop? With a side of crazy? Well, let me kill two birds with one stone:

1 | On the one hand, I want to promote the interesting, witty and creative use of social media integration.
2 | I want to help my fellow brethren.

So, let me introduce you to, perhaps, the most awesome use of Facebook integration to date: PMSBuddy. It’s an amazingly simple concept. You input the cycle dates of specific ladies in your life you’d like to track, and it tracks and sends you reminders. Not only will you know when the eggshells are on the floor to tread carefully, but you’ll be able to do it with a bouquet in your hands.

To take it even further (and perhaps elevate it to a level of even greater comedic genious) the makers have integrated it with facebook. So while you’re checking Josephine’s status, you can really check her “status”. It will let you know when “No, everything is fine” really means “No, everything is fine” or when it means “Why do you hate me you jerk? How could you be so inconsiderate as to not comment on the facebook status I cryptically addressed to you expecting a proclamation of love that I’ve been waiting 35 whole minutes for with my love going unrequited?!?!?!”

It’s amusing. It could be useful. It’s also maybe a little dangerous. Good job.

Some Really Awesome Tools to Commemorate the Inauguration

For those who aren’t keeping up to date, there are several cool visuals out there to help commemorate and share experiences from today’s historic inauguration. Regardless of your political sway, this is a huge moment in America’s history and in the advancement of civil rights. As such, people are doing all they can to share in the moment and to become a part of history. Their names won’t be in the books, but there is always the pride and joy of saying “I was there when America broke the racial barrier to the presidency”.

CNN is offering up Your View of History, which allows iReporters and laypeople to post their photos and reactions from their experience at the mall. Posters put their content at their viewpoint, and describe their experience from that point. There are definitely some great candid images and a lot of great visual descriptions of the emotional aspect of the event.

Even cooler, CNN is also offering the chance to rebuild The Moment using Photosynth. The short version: Live attendees post their images to the photosynth database, and it uses Microsofts crazy new technology to rebuild a 3D rendering of “the moment” of the inauguration. To get a good idea, here’s a moment and a description of the software. Reeeeeally cool stuff.

CNN is offering a third option for the tech savvy out there who can’t not check their facebook every five minutes: a live status update response to the events of the day as they unfold, without blinders to statuses across participating pages. In other words, you can see the updates without leaving facebook, without opening up your profile, and without the minor lunacy of message boards. I don’t have a link, but you can find it on their home page.

MSNBC is giving viewers a chance to brush up and compare Obama’s speech to others by offering the last 18 Inaugural speeches. Also pretty cool, and very informative. It’s interesting to see the approach each president has taken in his first address to the people, and then to look back at how they acted in office.

MSNBC also does an amazing job at allowing people to report their own reactions of the Inaugural by giving them the power to create their own clips. I’m pretty sure this is the web2.0 innovation of the day. It allows users to do what the news normally does, except without the need to be there with fancy equipment for capturing audio and video. It basically comes down to permission to make it what you will, and that’s a huge step for a media outlet like that.

Why Social Media is Important, and Will Continue to Be

Time and time again I’ve come across blogs and mainstream media writers discussing one of two things:

- The demise of social media
- Marketers “ruining” social media with advertising

Both of these cause an involuntary raise of the eyebrow, especially when the articles they are writing are bordered by the exact things they decry. You can, of course, visit any of these sites as you find yourself in the paradox of a form of social media supported by advertising decrying the use of advertising in social media. There’s a clear lack of symbiosis to say the least, and it seems both counter productive and counter-intuitive.

A study by Rosetta and released by PRNewswire (09/08) shows that 59% of retailers are using Facebook. And that’s significant, and it also raises certain questions. Why on earth would a business want a facebook and why would “facebookers” want to be friends or fans of these businesses. Well, for one, there’s the phenomenon of brand loyalty that can’t be overlooked. Consumers often want to show their support for a certain brand (I have an apple sticker on my back window…) or group, and this is one way to make a public endorsement of a company. It’s a give and take relationship too. The Apple Students group for example, offers periodic “samplers” for those who are a part of the group. Who complains about ads when you’re getting free music? More importantly, who even notices the “ads” when it’s free episodes of Tina Fey’s material from 30Rock and SNL, or music from your new favorite emerging artist?

What the doomsayers of advertising keep forgetting is that it’s not a bad thing. Yes, it’s pervasive and overwhelming. Yes, sometimes it can be a bad thing. But advertising is not inherently intrusive, and often people actually crave it to be a part of their every day life. As mentioned in the study from Rosetta, “It’s important that retailers don’t just slap up a page because everyone is talking about Facebook.” That’s true. Taking an “everyone’s doing it” approach to promotions will lead to market saturation and will prevent you from making a positive investment and prevent you from fostering client relationships. And that’s the value of companies using social media:

- It creates a way for advertisers to connect with clients/users without appearing as ads.
- It drives innovation. Burger King, while slightly disturbing, has shown that buzz can come from creativity and innovation, even if it might make you cry yourself to sleep at night.
- It helps you communicate new, interesting things to the people who clearly care. One of the most valuable business lessons learned in school is that new client relationships are less cost effective than improving existing relationships. If you can do both at the same time on the same budget through social media, you’ve just created value for all involved.
- It removes the stigma from advertising. I can vote for which ads I’d like to see more of and help Facebook target me for things I might actually be interested in (like new movies or Obama’s inauguration). Why on earth would I complain about news I want to hear? Because it somehow defiles Facebook? As though it had far to fall from “Stalkerbook” status…
- When done well, it gets rid of the chaff. Good ads and innovation force the hands of those taking the cheap route. Brand recognition is one of the strongest forces in decision making, so failing to effectively advertise in an increasingly more difficult environment will mean failure to establish brand recognition.
- Have I mentioned it drives innovation? When you crowd out the market with GOOD advertising and effective communications, you force people to do better work to compete. That’s also not a bad thing, especially when the thing our economy needs most right now is innovation.