ImpactWatch Blog

John D. Sutter of CNN seems to think Twitter is going to cause a riot.  In this article he explains how new media is helping create a “hotbed of unnecessary hype and misinformation about the outbreak.”  Others like Sean M. Wood of Communi-K believe that mainstream media is more likely to spread panic in an attempt to scrap up new readers in their dying industry.

Interestingly, a lot of Internet attention has shifted from factual information about the epidemic to stories about how news of the epidemic is being spread.  I have a working theory that Ashton Kutcher created Swine Flu.  After all, how else would you explain his recent battle (again, coincidentally with CNN) for top Twitter-god?

Thanks to celebrities like him, Twitter has finally surpassed being only for those ‘in the know’ to being ‘for anyone with a pulse and computer’.  People who once ignored the social media tool are now taking notice thanks to the Ashton-CNN-gate and the Swine Flu controversy.  And let’s not forgot the supposed ‘Oprah Effect’ that some speculate to have increased user numbers by over one million.

So with all these new users, is there cause for worry that social media will begat panic (as this comic so hilariously illustrates)?  Below is a recently made graph showing the number of tweets concerning the topic:

The tweets are mostly offhand comments about the disease.  Some contain links to recent news while lots re-ask the common questions about eating pork.  While many are discussing it, no one is saying anything new.  The tweets don’t seem to be causing panic any more than in-person chat would do.  If anything, I notice a lot of informative replies and Direct Messages to some of the sillier questions.  This could actually ease panic by calming the masses.  Isn’t that the point of social media (and heck, the Internet) in the first place?  To be as informed as possible.

UPDATE: Luckily, thousands of tweets are pouring in this morning about Adam Lambert’s bottom two appearances on American Idol, nearly just as many as about swine flu.  Twitterers are getting back to normal.

CrossFit is an excellent example of using smart Web 2.0 tactics to gain popularity among the online world.  The ideology began in the 1980s with creator Greg Glassman (who sounds suspiciously like he dated Jan Brady).  The first CrossFit gym opened in the mid-90s, but the topic of this post–the website–began in 2001.  The exercise giant has been heralded for its virtual community that bolsters its visibility and supposedly encourages others to stick with the program.

 The beauty behind the program is that it succeeds by infiltrating every ‘big boy’ of Web 2.0.  The program has made an effort to incorporate new Web 2.0 technologies as they became available.  Now the program’s so wide-spread that users start the process on behalf of CrossFit.  Pretty impressive.

Blogs

The blog/site of CrossFit has a simple idea.  It posts the next WOD (Workout of the Day) around 11PM each night, thus making it available for review by all participants for the coming day.  The forums are utilized to post variations on the workouts and exercises s well as elicit discussions among the posters.  Most blog entries contain the following: the WOD, a picture of successful CrossFit people, links to similar previous blog posts, and any additional information about the day.  Users are encouraged to post to the forums and blog comment sections on their times/weights/successes of the day.

Each day is additionally dummy-proofed thanks to a HUGE library of videos of the exercises listed in the workouts. 

Photo-sharing Sites

People love to post pictures of their progress and routines when they enter an exercise routine, and CrossFit is no exception.  A simple keyword search on Flickr for “crossfit” resulted in 72,416 related photos, while an astonishing 64,434 photos were tagged with “crossfit”.  Basically all of the photos were positive, showing progress, CrossFit gyms, or before/after results.

Video-sharing Sites

The concept of CrossFit on video sites is practically the same as photo sites.  Users upload clips of them performing exercises and showing progressive results.  These same users friends and subscribe to other CrossFit participants to keep motivated by seeing likewise progress.  13,100 videos results from a keyword search for “crossfit” on YouTube.

Twitter

The micro-blogging platform is incredibly easy to use for CrossFit, almost as if they’d planned it that way back in 2001.  The website contains explanations and definitions of numerous acronyms, many of which are used in tweets.   Twitterers tend to use the platform to remind others of their impending workouts and post their results.  Some examples follow below.

A search for tweets containing “crossfit” in the 140 characters for just April 22^nd resulted in 448 tweets.  The hashtag #crossfit resulted in 229 tweets.  Of course, some affiliates of CrossFit have official usernames as well.

CrossFit has revolutionized exercising for the Internet age.  The gigantic network of users provides an excellent way to hold exercisers and would-be exercisers accountable to the program, which grows the concept every day.  Personal trainers agree that working out with a friend helps keep people motivated.  CrossFit’s Web 2.0 presence lets you work out with thousands.

Last week, we took a look at creating a home URL and covered good starting practices for a bit of internet marketing. This would have been adequate as recently as 2006, but the internet has become more modular and intricate since then. Social media portals have become mini networks themselves — this guide was written to help readers use these mini networks to drive traffic to their home URL, thereby increasing revenue and message spread. Let’s get started.

A good starting place for any organization is Check Usernames. At this website, you will be able to check for user name availability at a plethora of social media websites. This will aid us in choosing an appropriate username for professional use. Your username should be the name of your organization or a recognizable variation. I find Check Usernames to be a very convenient tool, because I prefer usernames to be more or less consistent from site to site in attempts to create a consistent online presence. Make sure to use your top level domain e-mail contact (the e-mail service provided by your home page URL) or create one in Gmail.

First, let’s create a shortlist of social media sites that are appropriate for your organization. Twitter is currently universal, and a Facebook page is easy to make. Unless you’re a twenty year old DJ or in a local alt rock band, it would be advisable to steer clear of MySpace, which lacks proper quality control suitable for a professional organization. Social news sharing sites like Digg and del.icio.us (now just delicious.com) can be used to promote home URL blog posts. These four websites will be a good starting point for our purposes:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Digg
• Delicious

With just registering for these four networks, we’ve already begun our process of using social media traffic to increase our exposure. Make sure to use strong passwords, as company or organizational social media accounts are valuable to hackers. After you’ve registered, take a moment to read through the website FAQ to get an idea about how each functions.

We’ll begin our strategic use of these social media profiles next week, but it could be useful to blog about your newly registered accounts. For a complete newcomer to the social media scene, take a while (more than a day) to peruse the various networks to see how other individuals and organizations are using them. Take notice of any differences you see between professional organizations and individual internet users, especially on Twitter and Facebook.

In the next round of our guide, the raw content will commence. I will take you through Twitter and Facebook etiquette, strategies, and optimization tips. Part four will focus on blog and website promotion through social news sharing websites (mainly Digg and Delicious, though much of the information will apply to others as well). In the last installment of the series, we’ll bring it all full circle and tie our social media accounts back into our home URL using plug-ins and blogging strategies.

Whether you’re a new organization or an established one looking to benefit from social media traffic, I’ve written this guide to make sure you’ve got some basics covered, as well as optimization tips and resources for further reading. Over the coming weeks, this five-installment guide will allow people with only basic internet knowledge to create and manage a social media presence. The pace might frustrate more advanced users, so feel free to skim.

Home URL: You need a website. Period.

These days, the professional standard is a website hosted at a top level domain (such as yourcompanyname.com or .net). There are many ways to go about this, and your needs will dictate what direction I would recommend you pursue. For inexperienced users seeking the best results, paying for a professional web design firm is the way to go. Do research, and shop around. Some things to consider would be how long they’ve been in business, your impressions of their portfolio, pricing, etc. This can be a costly route, but often times you get what you pay for.

Ideally, you’ll opt for a website powered by a content management system (CMS) – this is a system that will make your life a whole lot easier, allowing you to quickly post things to your website, change its settings, etc. without having much coding knowledge. Some examples of content management systems would include Drupal, WordPress, Xoomla, and Typo. There are lots. I’d recommend going with a popular CMS with a historical following – Drupal and WordPress are my favorites.

If you’re on a very limited budget, some web hosting companies offer automatic installs of content management systems; but there are several disadvantages to this. Many times, the installed CMS will not be the current version, and is vulnerable to security holes or other exploits fixed in a more recent release. This approach is also not beginner-friendly; fleshing out a bare content management system into a budding web portal takes time, skill, and knowledge. If you’re completely unfamiliar with these skill sets, I urge you to support your local web design firm.

Use your website to provide your contact information, mission statements, etc. Release company news and announcements on your web portal, and make sure it is up-to-date. Nobody likes getting to websites that haven’t been touched since 2004, and in 2013 they won’t like yours last updated in 2009. If appropriate, blog on your website, but do so cautiously and strategically. Take time to draft and revise posts, and familiarize yourself with good blog authorship practices by reading through tips from seasoned veterans. A Google search is a good place to start.

The quality of your posts will largely determine the return on investment your website shows you. In my experience, the most direct way to increase revenue is to optimize for specific keyword searches, and then post quality, original content that relates to those keywords. Nothing increases consistent, high-quality traffic more than ranking high on search engines and giving people what they are searching for. Depending on your market, this may be relatively easy or extremely expensive. A web firm that offers search optimization services should be able to determine the competition for your strategic keywords.

Next week we’ll take a look at our first round of social media, and begin working with these websites as well as integrating them back into a CMS-based web portal.

Image courtesy of Guoquan.

In his latest blog entry, Chris Brogan gave great advice passed along to him via Conn Fishburn (Yahoo):  bring wine to the picnic.

Specially, Brogan is referencing the ‘social media picnic’ most of us attend on a daily basis.  Fishburn wants us to bring something of value to our online peers instead of only self-marketing.  It’s a simple principal, but definitely one that bears repeating.  Many Twitter, Facebook, and other platform users neglect this important aspect of the Internet game.

As a personal example, I have an aspiring DJ friend that wants nothing more than to have his musical creations reach a wide audience.  Any time I have the chance to mention him, I try to provide a little linkage to his music, as I just did.  It’s a small act that can mean a lot to the friend, when done appropriately.    Below, I’ve reprinted Brogan’s 10 Ways to Build Relationships Before You Ask for Anything from his post.  I can confidently say that I agree with all of these.

• Comment on and reply to other people’s observations, posts, and ideas. (Sometimes, just retweeting someone’s status message in Twitter is a gesture that matters to people.)
• Share good information freely, such as pointing to great blog posts or articles.
• Make virtual introductions when you see obvious like-minded people who could do to know each other.
• Create useful media like blog posts or ebooks or videos that help people.
• Find mutual interest points and talk about them. (Bonus points to you if they’re off-topic from your business needs, like talking about the Red Sox or Barbecue.)
• Remember things about the other person, such as whether they have a big meeting on Thursday, and ask them about it on Friday.
• Help when someone is promoting their thing. Spread information for other people liberally.
• Find causes and nonprofit experiences to help out. Showing that you’re not just a capitalist pig goes a long way.
• Reply to people and build conversations.
• Thank people when they’re helpful.

Interestingly, most of these suggestions are things that would be equally helpful for ‘real life’ friendships.  I wouldn’t mind if more of my convos in real life contained valuable information.

I thought that my love for Wikipedia couldn’t get any stronger, but my romance with it has taken a drastic new turn with the introduction of WikiRank.  This new app allows users to search for Wikipedia articles and then view a 30, 60, or 90 day line graph of their popularity.  The line represents the number of views for a particular article in a day’s time.

On the front page of WikiRank, the creators have chosen what they believe is a particularly interesting comparison.  From that page, users can do their own comparisons easily.  Once the topics are selected, users can view a sample from the Wikipedia article on the topic as well as see links to various outlets such as Google, The New York Times, and Twitter.  This is a great way to figure out why articles have peaks in viewership on certain days.

The creators want users to be well aware that the numbers are for “entertainment and enlightenment” purposes only.  The log program counts all single page loads, including those from Web spiders.  The creators claim that the overall shape of the increasing and decreasing line graph is more important than the exact calculations.

The user-created charts can be embedded into anything that accepts widgets, and the charts themselves are bright and colorful.  For something that only took the creators six weeks to make, I’m happy that the first version of this seems very complete.

There are two glaring issues with the application: there’s no API (yet) and the auto-completing search functionality sometimes caused me to choose the wrong article, ending in inaccurate comparisons.  The API issue is being worked on, and maybe I’m the only one having the problem with my searches.  Check it out and let me know if you have any tips or tricks for it.

After this post, I pledge not to speak of Facebook at least until May.

With that out of the way, Facebook conducted a poll over the last week or so in an attempt to gauge user feedback to the new design changes.

Predictably so, the response has been overwhelmingly negative. 94% of about 800,000 respondents disliked the changes, leaving fans of the revisions (such as myself) outnumbered.

It leaves me wondering whether or not they should have even conducted a poll to begin with. They are well aware of historic negative feedback following redesign deployments; would it be easier to just let things settle? Or am I in the wrong, and is the new Facebook actually worse than it was before?

Facebook Poll, Screen capture courtesy of TechCrunch

New applications and iterations of Twitter arrive daily, but I think I’ve finally found one that I want to champion:  Present.ly.  Despite my hatred of Web 2.0-y names for products, I feel like there are a lot of positive things to be said about it.

In the company’s own words: “Present.ly gives your employees the ability to instantly communicate their current status, ask and answer questions, share media, and more with the revolutionary communications method pioneered by Twitter.”

Pros

• Text attachments give users the ability to forgo the 140 character limit and attach longer accessible text
• The company offers an Enterprise Edition that provides more behind-the-firewall security than their open cloud-hosted version
• Plenty of interfaces are compatible, including smart phones like iPhones
• The website offers user feedback options as well as video tours
• Users can send video, images, audio, and more through attachments within the tweets
• Group creation helps users to only see the messages that are relevant to them

Present.ly had been around for less than a year, but in that time they’ve made some great progress.  I’m interested to see what else they have in store.

My only query concerns the types of businesses that need this sort of communication.  Assuming most of today’s companies use email for their interoffice communication, I can’t see there being a huge market for Present.ly.  For giant companies it seems like a lot of ‘noise’ would be present on such a platform, and small boutiques could just as easily email or chat with their five-person team.  Twitter is becoming more widespread, however, and this application is an example of just how big the idea has grown.

Can Twitter apps like this one help businesses flourish?  We’ll have to wait and see.

Since its creation in 2003, Facebook has since become a household name, a verb, and a social medium by which millions are people are connected.  With unique visitors of upwards of 70M, it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.  In those years, several updates have been made: some good, some great, some…questionable.  Below is my opinion on what succeeded and what should have been avoided.

August 2006 – Notes (Never really that popular to begin with)

One of the first major additions was Facebook’s attempt to mirror blogging.  Using Notes, users could write their inner-most thoughts and feelings that a standard user profile couldn’t hold.  However, Notes have one major flaw: they mirror blogging, the most popular and widely competitive Web 2.0 nonsense.  Most users just stick to their own blogs and share the links in their profile.

September 2006 – News Feed (rose in popularity)

Ah, yes!  The controversial News Feed!  This baby started a riot when it was first introduced over two years ago.  People couldn’t stand that select private information from their profile was plastered for all to see.  The cries didn’t go unnoticed, and customizable privacy features were added.  Today the News Feed stands as a portal to the rest of Facebook; it’s the best page to look at when you’re just bored.

February 2007 – Gifts (Nosedived in popularity)

These cute little buggers above are called Facebook ‘gifts’ and when originally introduced, purchases of them automatically donated a portion to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.  Initially, these proved very popular, but in time the donation aspect ended and Facebook Platform (which I’ll cover in a bit) dominated virtual gift-giving with free options.  Most gifts rest stagnant in profiles as remnants of the once popular gimmick.

May 2007 – Platform and Applications (Declined slowly in popularity)

One of the biggest changes to Facebook was its attempt to give more creativity to the users.  With the new Platform system, any user could create an application for near-immediate use.  (For more on applications, feel free to check out my study on them located here)

These haven’t lost as much popularity as gifts, but they have certainly declined in interest.  What was once fascinating to users soon became irritating as invitations to new ‘snow ball fights’ bombarded inboxes.  Jesse Farmer of 20Bits writes about the decline of the Platform and how the developing forums are falling into disuse.

May 2007 – Marketplace (Stagnant)

There’s not much to say about the Marketplace other than it was overwhelmed by the same-month introduction of the Platform.  It’s simply Craigslist with one major difference: only users in your networks can see the listings.  Whether that’s an advantage or a disadvantage is up to you.

July 2007 – Attachments on Wall (Smart move, high popularity)

Facebook got it right this time!  Allowing users to add video, links, and more to friends’ walls was a brilliant and timely move.  I have no complaints about this, and I’ve discovered some great videos thanks to it.

April 2008 – Chat Features (Low popularity)

It was an interesting move for Facebook to add SMS-ish features to the system, which are now implementable in popular freeware programs like Pidgin.  Did Facebook users really need the ability to chat while they were checking in?  Not really, but Facebook hadn’t made a big update in a while, and nothing’s ever stopped this social network giant from updating just for the sake of updating in the past.

July 2008 – ‘New’ Facebook (Mixed popularity)

Eric wrote an extensive review of the new Facebook format when it was new.  It pretty much sums up what everyone thinks: meh.  It’s got a lot of good, but some bad.  Overall, users have adjusted to the new format well, and I personally like the less cluttered look.

December 2008 – New Signup Process (New!)

Facebook is currently testing a simpler signup process.  They’re hoping to close the gap between Facebook and MySpace by making it even easier to get a profile.  After the riot that resulted from the new terms of service agreement, it’s a wise move to offer something new/good.

As you can see in the graph below, Facebook is definitely closing the gap.

A few days ago 2009 – News Feed Facelift (Too soon to tell)

It’s a pretty controversial move to change the News Feed’s layout, especially since (as I stated above) it was one of most disliked changes when it first debuted.  The new feed layout is similar, except way more “Twittery” with real time updates and changes.  Also, in order to cram more information onto the feed, updates that used to say “Noah wrote on Anne’s wall” now simply say “Noah -> Anne”.

It’s also much easier to update your status with an obvious content box fitted snuggly at the top of the feed.  Yep: it’s Twitter-tastic.

I don’t care for the hyper-abbreviated notices for things like wall posts, but I do like the new organization of the fan pages, events, and birthdays.  Also, now all the thumbnails have rounded edges.  Now that’s just safer!

If you haven’t logged into Facebook recently, go ahead and take a nice gander. Things have changed quite a bit with their most recent design. Drawing quite a bit off of Twitter, the site is now truly up-to-the-second with updates, wall posts, messages — all of it merging into your homepage in a glob of real time conversation.

There are a lot of non-Twitter users on Facebook — and redesigns of Zuckerberg’s web portal are often met with passive aggressive resistance, such as the formation of anti-Facebook Design Team groups and status updates ridden with complaints against the change. Alas, once the masses use the new format for long enough, they accept that it won’t change back and even the late adopters hop on board.

This set of changes will challenge some users to think outside of their user experience comfort zone, in a way that is more drastic than previous redesigns. It changes the dynamic a lot.

That said, the changes are pretty logical and in the opinion of this daily user, a long time coming. This is the kind of change that will inform millions and millions off people on the ways of socially driven media, forcing them to become part of the real-time conversation.

Facebook's Original Homepage