I held out for as long as possible, but a few months ago, I allowed my 11yr old son to open a Facebook account (their ‘terms of service’ state they have to be 13). Frankly, I was just as concerned about the necessity of lying about his age as I was about the safety issues, and even more so about the temptation to spend yet more time in front of a screen.
So why did I do it? He was leaving his old school, upset about losing touch with his friends, and wanting to make new ones easily. I wanted to ease the transition for him and so agreed as long as I could be his friend. I now monitor his usage and trawl through his friends making sure I know (or at least he knows) them all. I don’t feel good about it, but at least I have so far resisted the demand for a Smart Phone, which the vast majority of his friends already have.
The issue of underage use of Facebook was raised again in the press last week. It crops up every now and then, as one of several ritual ‘bash the parents’ themes.
The problem is simple. Parents have long memories; most of us remember only too well the pain of being left out by peers at school if you didn’t quite fit in (my mum refused to let me watch sitcoms in the 1970’s. I didn’t get to play the Liver Bird game recreated in the playground. I am still getting over it…). We give in because we fear the alternative; isolation.
So we need help. Yes, we can be responsible parents and monitor kids’ usage, but in the same way that I pleaded for manufacturers (if not the Government) of video games to take more responsibility, we also need mobile phone or ISP providers to back a campaign aimed at kids – by flipping the situation and educating kids about social networking from a young age, the incessant nagging and guilt that parents are subjected to may never happen. By and large, tween kids have yet to find their individuality. If something is perceived by the majority as ‘not done’, then it’s ’not done’.
Persuade BBH to provide the ads at cost and Jessie J and Tiny Tempah to front it. These are not new ideas. They are tried and tested, (they worked to simultaneously persuade kids to drink both more milk and less alcohol). Hey, they could even throw in the dangers of cyber bullying too – yet another issue only just round the corner for me.
Parenting is a tough job, never more so than today. Am I wrong to be asking for help?
Facebook has launched a campaign with the UK and US organ donation services to encourage new donors to register and post on their Timelines.
While the decision to become a donor is a very personal one, sharing it seems natural. Why wouldn’t we want others to know we’ve signed up, especially if it might motivate them to do the same? Considering the psychology behind sharing, broadcasting donor status is a classic act of public altruism – and one we’ll only be held accountable to after death.
But when does sharing become TMI?
Health can be a minefield. Know anyone who makes known their diabetes, epilepsy or heart condition on their Timeline? In theory this would be a sensible step, so that family, friends and colleagues can be prepared in the case of a medical emergency.
But there’s something about that which still feels odd. It’s too personal, too private. Anything that hints of weakness or vulnerability is hard to share with the world. But how many people would it take to start sharing this information before it lost its stigma?
And what about politics? Only a few years ago admitting which party and candidates you supported felt like an open invitation to attack. But in the recent London elections Twitter was awash with #voteken and #voteboris messages, our allegiances – once hidden by the curtain of the ballot booth – on full display. When everyone is naming their chosen candidate, not joining in can feel like copping out of your public duty.
Sometimes we share and sometimes we don’t, and we all have different comfort zones – but the personal stakes seem to be getting higher. The technology behind Facebook’s much trumpeted frictionless sharing is pretty uninteresting compared to the question: what sort of opinions and information will be sharing three years from now?
Will our need to follow the crowd keep pushing our sharing limits? Where would you draw the line?
But if one of the platforms we use every day changes, it opens a big opportunity to do something slightly out of the ordinary – and of course there’s usually a race to be first too. Did you all hear about Facebook changing the character limit of a status update to 63k odd characters? What’s the point of that?
Whatever the reason for the change, we thought it would be fun to team up with Nokia and be the first to make use of all that space and produce The Big Nokia Status, powered by Nokia’s worldwide fans…
“Welcome to the Big Nokia Status! We asked some of our fans to tell us what they thought about Nokia, this might be the longest Facebook update ever”.
In total the update consists of 63,157 characters featuring close to 20 passionate bloggers. Who knows… maybe it’s the biggest Facebook update so far, ever?
If you work in a HR role, it’s all too easy to get caught up in daily process. It’s all too easy for you – and those around you – to forget that there’s as much discussion, development and innovation in HR as within any other business field.
Social is, of course, one of the big topics currently circulating in the marketing and HR world. How is social used and monitored in a business? What rights do employees have when using social media? There are hundreds of blogs, articles, and even conferences on the subject.
But lets take it as a given that our employees are using social media and move on to a more practical question: how we can use what our employees are already doing socially to help drive recruitment?
At its best, social media is highly individual and personal. So lets try and harness – not try and deny, resist or constrain – this insight into a tool that benefits the business as a whole.
I recently attended the #trulondon 5 Unconference during Social Media Week. Set up by Bill Boorman, #tru events take a fresh approach to the traditional conference format, offering several discussion ‘tracks’ running concurrently. Boorman’s ethos is built around the idea of people working together to explore a discussion topic, and attendees can move between tracks whenever they want to join a new conversation.
This social approach is itself a great way of involving a mixed demographic and using their sometimes-disparate viewpoints to develop more exciting collective thinking.
Social media are the ‘How’ – and there’s more to life than LinkedIn
Only 21% of recruiters currently use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter together, most opting for LinkedIn as their only platform. Understandably, LinkedIn is a comfortable fit for the recruiter, but that shouldn’t diminish the importance of other social media, especially as a means of presenting potential employees with a well-rounded view of your organisation; not just the one you want to promote from an employment perspective.
The business is the ‘Who’ – so who is the business?
People want to understand an organisation – its purpose, ethos and culture – before they start thinking about the specifics of a job. Building brand awareness (using a blend of platforms) and sharing what makes you different (and special) creates the context for the right conversations to happen.
Giving it a purpose for your business is the ‘Why’ – why are we socially recruiting?
This is where we come full circle. The crux of social recruiting is harnessing your most valuable asset: your people. If your team buys in to the social recruitment process, they’ll do a major part of the job for you. If they buy in to the business’s ethos, ideas and goals, they will become natural advocates, spreading the word through their own networks and communities in a hugely powerful way.
Social recruitment is an evolving concept, much like social media themselves, so there’s plenty more we can share. The challenge – and the opportunity – is to understand how we can use the very nature of social to our advantage as recruiters; rather than trying to change social to fit what we do.
This week, I claimed that companies like ours are the agencies of the future but somebody put me in my place by pointing out that 1000heads is a child of the last century. Day to day work normally gets in the way of reflection, but this made me pause for thought and consider the journey we’ve been on and the journey that lies ahead.
It was indeed in 1999 that plans to launch 1000heads were first laid. To put this into perspective, there was no Facebook (can a $100billion business really grow that quickly?), no Twitter, no YouTube, no MySpace, and social media meant no more than sharing a newspaper in the park.
We may not have partied like it was 1999 ever since but it’s been an action-packed, white-knuckle ride from our early days in a (thankfully converted) cowshed in rural Oxfordshire. We now have around 75 talented and inspiring people working out of our offices in Soho, we have a dozen more in New York under the leadership of North American CEO Mike Davison, plus growing teams in Australia and Germany.
As the grizzled veterans of social media, we have seen a global industry grow up with us, and around us, and we are proud to be a part of it.
In addition to clients such as Nokia, whom we have had the pleasure of working with for the last seven years, we are delighted that Mars Petcare, Skype, Toyota, Rebel Sports and Gala Bingo, to name but a few, have recently joined the 1000heads family.
Social media is in our DNA but today brands want so much more. We talk a lot about social communications, helping brands’ stories to travel further and faster. People talk and share information wherever they are, whatever they are doing, and whoever they are with.
Meeting that challenge is sometimes scary but always exhilarating and I’m delighted that we are able to welcome some fantastic new ‘Heads’ to the fold, as well as promotions for existing Heads, who together will be part of the leadership team taking 1000heads forward.
Joanne Jacobs takes up a position as Chief Operating Officer in our Sydney office from March 1st. Joanne describes herself as a ‘geekgirl’ and has a passion for all things social. A former lecturer in the MBA program at the Brisbane Graduate School of Business at Queensland University of Technology, Joanne is returning to Australia after a four year stint in London during which time she was Client Director for Xenial and more recently Chief Operating Officer for Hibrow, an online arts offering from British-based film-maker Don Boyd.
It’s a real coup to have Joanne join us and I know she will build on the great success we are already starting to see in the Australian market.
Here in London, Phil Borge has been appointed to the newly created role of Strategic Planning Director. He joins us from PR agency Eulogy! after 10 years of service, where he was most recently Senior Account Director and strategic lead within its marketing services division.
In short Phil is a guy who gets things done and he will be responsible for developing the agency’s approach to client strategy, working with the insights, project management and creative teams across multiple projects and campaigns. He will also spearhead the addition of PR activation within client campaigns.
He will be working alongside Frank Grindrod, previously Group Account Director, who has been promoted to Client Services Director. Frank has been with 1000heads for six years and while ‘social media guru’ is a term he would shrink from, we call him it anyway.
Simon Adamson, another long-serving ‘Head’, has been promoted to Group Account Director and will continue to keep calm while all around him ‘chaordic’ enthusiasm reigns.
We also shortly hope to be announcing the appointment of our first Community Director, another key hire for the business. The Community Director will be responsible for our 20-strong Community team, running social presences, advocacy programmes, and community events.
Our journey may have started in the last century, and it may feel like we have been travelling 100 years at times, but the reality is that we have only just left the station and the tracks are infinite. We are delighted to welcome our new travelling companions on board.
I am currently attracting more sulky looks than usual in my house. They are coming from my 12-year-old son, who feels that my level of strictness has reached stratospheric heights, and that I am in risk of damaging our relationship permanently.
Of course I am not alone in this – every parent the world over would sympathise – but whilst my son has always accepted most boundaries with resigned equanimity, it is my new ‘Technology Rules’ that are causing the strop (which of course, merely serves to mitigate my actions).
The problem is that while I am a big fan of technology, fiercely defending it against those who declare that it destroys family life, social skills and kids’ brains (not if it’s employed sensibly and productively), I can’t keep ignoring the studies which point to the dreaded possibility of addiction and, I hate to say it, what look like the early warning signs in my son (ref. the excessive strop).
via softpedia-static
When he started secondary school recently, I finally allowed him to join Facebook. This really did help the transition (he was more worried about losing touch with his old friends than he was about making new ones), but he began feverishly logging on every morning after a rushed breakfast. Playing his pals on the PSP every night was also becoming more important than his homework. That is, until the ‘Technology Rules’…
What I would really appreciate is some help in all this – and I’m not talking just PHSE classes in school or government guidelines which are frustratingly and peculiarly absent in spite of expert pressure to introduce them.
No, I’m referring to brand involvement. My research shows that not one of the gaming or social media brands is taking the opportunity to engage with kids or parents about this. No social networking sites or games producers are addressing this issue in their CSR plans. Nor are they producing content to help kids and parents make sensible choices.
Crucially, it helps educate kids not yet tainted with commercial cynicism to make healthy choices independent of their parents’ nagging.
Is it really such a huge risk for technology companies to admit and take some responsibility for what appears to be adversely affecting almost every family I know?
Yesterday, Facebook announced some fairly major changes to its Pages Insights product.
The ‘People Talking About’ feature is a major step forward and attempts to value brand engagement in a more meaningful way than a mere ‘Like this’. Facebook’s defining this new feature as stories people create about brand pages and could take the form of comments, shares, check-ins, RSVPs and @Mentions.
What’s more, it’s going to be placed right underneath the ‘Like’ statistic so you just know it’s something we’re all going to be paying attention to.
What’s interesting in the grab above is the relative scale of the ‘People Talking About This’ number. It’s going to be far smaller than other metrics.
This is a good thing.
Engagement has been a difficult sell-in for some time. True measures of p2p engagement have been dwarfed by reach and impression googolplexes and often dismissed to the cutting room floor come board level report time.
The obsession with massive figures has obfuscated the true value of social. This move is an iterative step towards encouraging a more balanced presentation of a brand’s social performance – one that considers breadth and depth in more equal measure.
Can I hear a speculative ‘Hallelujah’?
Check out Clickz for a more latitudinal exploration of the changes to Facebook’s insights and premium ad products.
Special thanks to Ken Murphy for the glorious Meh.
This morning, Mashable is reporting the launch of Ticketmaster‘s latest layer of Facebook integration, a move that allows users to see exactly where their Facebook friends will be sitting at various different events and gigs across the globe.
Live on over 9000 events across the Ticketmaster website, the new interactive map enables seat tagging, which will post to your Facebook wall requesting (or nudging) your friends to do the same.
Got that? No? Try watching this 80 second explanation -
Social ticketing is something we’ve talked about before here at the ‘heads, but that was more around using social media to reward regular attendees with loyalty points and bonuses. What Ticketmaster have done here – really quite well – is taken the Facebook social graph API and applied it to their own site.
In a similar way that Trip Advisor change the structure of what you’re looking at depending on your friends’ purchasing decisions after their experiences, Ticketmaster has taken a step forward by showing the purchasing decision before the experience. Enabling friends to buy tickets whenever they want instead of waiting and waiting until they’re able to get their tickets at the same time.
“How much are we seeing of social brought into commerce rather commerce being brought into social?”
Setting up shop in a Facebook tab is [relatively] easy by comparison, so why not consider changing your customers’ web experience based upon their Facebook preferences as they travel around your website?
To top it off, Ticketmaster’s research suggests that every time a ticket purchase is shared through social, that converts to an extra five dollars in additional ticket sales. Social media integration moving the sales needle? Perfection. Definitely something to keep an eye on in the future.
Irrespective of your feelings around the Ticketmaster brand, this new feature is smart, useful and ultimately beneficial to the end customer. Well done.
My girlfriend and I spent the weekend in Dorset a couple of weeks ago, relaxing with friends. It was lovely. Beaches, barbecues and beer. Bliss. On the Friday evening, we were having a drink in the garden when my friend’s phone buzzed from inside the house.
“Oh”, he said returning with the device, “I’ve got three texts and two missed calls.”
“So do I!” said his girlfriend who had fished her phone from her bag.
All the texts, (six of them) and calls (four) were from the same person. One person who, we would later learn, was sat all alone in a hotel in the Scottish borders.
At this point, my girlfriend and I were a little bemused, so the other couple explained. The mutual friend (let’s call him Bob) had, it emerged, been in contact with our friends for the past few weeks about a wedding they were all attending.
Bob had asked them where they were staying, how they were getting there (they’re all London based) and what they were doing the night before. They, of course, assumed that he was talking about the weekend of the wedding, which was a month away. Bob, they now realised, was talking about this weekend, because that’s when he thought the wedding was.
Ah.
And now, of course, Bob was calling and texting to find out where they were. He thought they were meeting for dinner. And since it was now 9pm, his tummy was rumbling.
Bob had, through various events that included the mislaying of the invitation, an ambiguous diary entry and a series of conversations that had seemed clear – but had evidently been murk – got the date seriously wrong.
So why is any of this relevant to making brands social?
Well, it demonstrates how things can so easily go wrong when a simple piece of information isn’t readily available (the invite) or communication is based on a false assumption (the texts).
In this case, it led to time, money and a lovely cummerbund being wasted; but for your product launch, news about downtime on your service, a change in terms and conditions, or a great offer you have on this weekend, it becomes a much bigger deal.
Who’s missing out because they think they know what your brand stands for?
Who’s getting annoyed because they didn’t know your service wouldn’t be available?
Who would love to purchase your product at 25% off but doesn’t know they have the option?
If that wedding invite had been on Facebook this wouldn’t have happened (so maybe stick your sale details on there?)
If our friend’s monthly planner had been shared via email this wouldn’t have happened (so maybe share updates there?)
Next time you think you’ve been clear about your brand or activities, think about that bloke, sitting alone in a dank hotel. That happens to consumers on a daily basis.
The news is out this morning that literally overnight, Facebook has switched on facial recognition for tagging by default. Typically of the gargantuan social network, the onus is on the user to opt-out of this ‘upgrade’.
A few things on this - first, for the super-private, here’s how to do just that -
Step 1.
From the Facebook ‘Home‘ page, go to ‘Account‘ and then ‘Privacy Settings‘
Step 2.
From there, scroll down to ‘Customise Settings‘
Step 3.
Scroll down again until you find a section entitled ‘Things others share‘
You’ll find the setting you need to adjust (it’ll be the one automatically switched to ‘enabled’) right next to the above section. Done that? Right. Good.
To my second, and leading point/question – do you actually care?
Yes it’s easy to get annoyed about Facebook not asking permission to switch this on, as well as automatically assigning you the default setting of ‘Yes, I want this’. However, surely if you’re not an idiot when it comes to privacy, you’ve already got a certain amount of barriers and settings in place that prevent unwanted friends and tags taking place, right?
Surely, if you’re smart with your photo tagging (and with your friend requests for that matter), this new feature (whisper it) actually makes life easier.
Yes, tagging your friends in photos is fun, but it can take ages. Having Facebook SUGGEST [yes - 'suggest' - not 'automatically tag'] to YOUR FRIENDS that you might be in one of their photos really isn’t such a big deal.
