At Media Socialist, we want to discover and understand everything in the social media realm. Think of it as an experiment where we’ll try out more social media than is healthy, and we’ll report our findings to you.
Scroll down to read articles about social media, including these popular topics:
Learn about social media, and share your knowledge in our new Social Media Catalog. It’s like Wikipedia, but exclusively for social media.
If you think we’ve missed something awesome in social media, or you’d like us to test it out before you waste your time, suggest it!
Yesterday, Facebook blogged about the difference between Pages and Groups, two different ways beyond a personal profile to establish a presence and connect with people on Facebook. Profiles, Pages and Groups are visually almost identical (for now), but Facebook explains the distinction:
Only the official representatives of a public figure, business or organization should create a Facebook Page.
Unlike your profile, Facebook Pages are visible to everyone on the internet by default. You, and every person on Facebook, can connect with these Pages by becoming a fan and then receive their updates in your News Feed and interact with them.
Facebook Groups are the place for small group communication and for people to share their common interests and express their opinion.
Facebook’s explains the distinction as one of philosophy, but users often gravitate to one or the other based on the technical differences between each:
Facebook Group
Facebook Page
News Feeds
Group members’ posts/activities show
up on the Group wall, and in members’
News Feeds, but a Group can’t author
an update.
A Page can post an update, which
will appear in fans’ News Feeds.
Messaging
A Group admin can mass message all
members, up to 5,000.
Pages can’t send messages, only
“updates,” which appear in an
overlooked subfolder within the inbox.
Privacy
Groups can be set to Open (any
Facebook user can join), Closed
(members must be approved),
or Secret (hidden).
Pages are public, and any Facebook
user can become a fan.
Usernames
Groups can not be assigned a
username (vanity URL).
After reaching 25 fans, Pages, like
profiles, can choose a username.
Metrics
Groups do not offer any
measurement tools.
Facebook Insights is free with
every Page, allowing admins to
track post quality, fan interactions
and demographics.
Admins
The creator/admins are displayed
prominently on the Group.
Officers can also be assigned.
Admins are secret for Pages, and
cannot post content as themselves,
only under the Page’s name.
Applications
Facebook applications can’t be installed
on a Group.
Scroll down and you’ll see this post contains several screenshots. You can see the value of capturing an image from a computer screen. It’s easy to do with available software or keyboard shortcuts; simply choose a screen, activate, and save the image file. It’s not too time-consuming to create one or two.
But why would anyone have a need to create tens or hundreds of screenshots at once?
You’re preparing a libel suit against your former business partner who defamed you on Twitter. You need to document all 48 false and malicious tweets she wrote about you, in case she deletes them.
Your grandmother, who doesn’t have the internet, wants you to print out all 47 of Rachael Ray’s online pizza recipes.
You’re moving to a remote island, and want to bring ALL the LOLcat photos with you.
It’s not a common need, but after I learned how to automate this process, rather than painstakingly seeking out every webpage, and repetitively activating a screen capture, I started using it regularly. Most recently, I entered a video contest, and wanted to periodically document video views received by 14 of my competitors, so I could track them over time. This technique let me click a few buttons, and voila! Images I could reference later.
Your votes in this video contest could win me $2,000, which would help me pay for my wedding to the lovely Amy! (And did I mention you might win $100?)
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly half of Americans use search engines, like Google, daily. According to my browser history, I visit Google 19 times a day, on average! So it’s with that search obsession that in July, I completed my Masters thesis, titled “Media search literacy: The role of access as media technologies converge online.” (Full, 103-page PDF here, or for the gist of it, the Wordle word cloud above sums up all 21,580 words!)
You’re reading a blog, though, so let me condense what I discovered:
A Study of Search Literacy
To be search literate1 is to possess the skills necessary to effectively find information online via search engines like Google. Media search literacy (MSL) is the ability to find media (like videos and music) online through search engines. The purpose of this study was to gauge college students’ level of MSL and figure out what separates the good searchers from the not-so-good.
Research Procedure
All 102 Illinois State University students (average age: 21) who participated in the study own a computer, have internet access, and say they regularly access media content online. I invited the students to a computer lab where they each completed a short survey. Then they were asked to complete three web-searching tasks, with limited clues, to mimic real-life media searches: (The bold text and hyperlinks below were not provided to the students - only the quoted text.)
Find the “Grape Lady” video: “A popular online video features a local newswoman at a winery, crushing grapes with her feet, who falls off a raised platform on live television. You would like to watch this short internet video clip.”
Find the Yes song “And You And I”: “You would like to listen to the classic rock song ‘And You And I’ from an album called ‘Close to the Edge.’”
Find the first episode of “Angel”: “In 1999, the television drama ‘Angel’ premiered. You would like to watch the first full episode.”2
I recorded video of the students’ computer monitors, so I was able to measure the time they took to complete each task (and if they were successful in under five minutes), the number of pages loaded in their browser (and where they ended up), and search engines they used, the text of their queries, and any “advanced techniques” used.
Highlights from the Results
Natural language is the number-one predictor of poor search effectiveness.
(Natural language is the human mistake of submitting search queries that only other humans could interpret correctly. Most search engines are not sophisticated enough to interpret grammar, questions, or full sentences.)
See table below for other best predictors.
Students use search engines to find media 3 times for every 2 times they use search engines for academic research.
Men were more than twice as likely as women to visit Hulu first to find the TV show, and completed the task more than 2 minutes faster than women on average.
53% of students said they’d received prior search training, mostly in high school, but that experience didn’t improve their search effectiveness.
Most students have a relatively accurate perception of their search abilities and believe they could benefit from search training. Two-thirds said they would attend training.
Students prefer YouTube search over Google for finding media online.
Students from urban high schools spent about 1 minute longer completing each task than students from rural high schools.
The following table shows the behaviors and characteristics of students that correlate to the greatest amount of pageloads and time saved - thus, the best predictors of search effectiveness. For instance, students who submitted natural language search queries spent over a minute longer on each search task, and those who relied on search engines’ suggestions also spent significantly more time.
Best predictors of media search effectiveness
Predictor (% of participants)
Task
Pageloads Saved
Time Saved
Avoid writing natural language queries (46%)
Every task
4.75 (per task)
74 seconds
Rural over urban high school education (8%)
Every task
4.32
59 seconds
Unwilling to attend search training (33%)
Every task
3.26
51 seconds
Avoid relying on search engine suggestions* (34%)
Every task
2.48
48 seconds
Avoid using phrase searching or Boolean incorrectly (61%)
Benchmarking is the only way to measure the efficacy of a social media campaign. Don’t think social media is an entirely different animal just because you aren’t familiar with it. Because of the ad hoc nature of social, there is no universal way to approach it, but here’s what I’ve done for social campaigns:
1) Research the situation, organization and publics as you would normally. This will prescribe whether social media is the best approach. For example, if you’re trying to reach a demographic that reads newspapers more than news Web sites, reconsider social media as a key strategy. Save it for tactics. If the target publics and stakeholders align with the focus of the program, campaign or project, go to the next step.
2) Strategy. Establish goals and objectives for the campaign. If you want to increase social media impressions 50 percent by 1st quarter 2010, for example, you need to establish where the program is currently. For existing programs, it’s easy to use an online measurement tool like Compete to gather approximate unique visitor figures for any given Web site mentioning your program. The free version of the service gives you figures back one year. If a current search for the site does not exist, you’ll have to create one. It takes a month to aggregate new data. If this is the case, begin anyway. Relationship building cannot start soon enough. As for finding mentions of your program, set up a search term (“Matt’s widget emporium” NOT “toys” NOT “stuff”) on high-traffic platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr) and click search. Refine the search term to make it more efficient if it’s not pulling the mentions you want. Click the RSS feed button on the page and it will give you the code for an RSS aggregator (I recommend Google Reader). Or, you can copy the URL in the search bar and paste into the Google Reader subscription. You can also set up an RSS feed using Google Alerts. This is another free service from Google that allows you to pull mentions from blogs, news and other Web sites.
If you want to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN your efforts garnered the coverage, use a unique URL service, such as HootSuite, tr.im, budurl, bit.ly, etc. This allows you to enter any URL (like the one for your news release), shorten it into a unique URL and track how many people click it. It also serves as proof that you earned impressions — not the vendor — at evaluation time.
3) Choose your tactics and implement the plan. This often relies heavily on blogger relations – not simply e-mail, but several channels. The best relations often come from a pull model—allowing the influencer to use content that fits his or her theme. Give the blogger/social media thought leader a place to pull information and rich media from. This comes in the form of a social media release , or SMR, (not just a news release with hyperlinks). Measurement tip: House it on your Web site if you can. This makes it easy for your IT people to run analytics (5 Ws and H of your microsite’s traffic). Or, if you lack resources, make your own site to house the SMR. You can run your own analytics with Google Analytics for free. Search Mashable to find all the tools you need.
4) Evaluate the efficacy of your plan. Keep in mind, social media is fickle. If it revolves around human interaction, it’s impossible to determine causation. We aren’t saying a commercial caused customers to convert in rafts; those old advertising and marketing tactics are over.
However, keep this in mind when measuring: Don’t think in terms of activity and results. Think of outputs and outcomes. You can quantify how many e-mails you send social influencers, how many impressions you get from your unique URLs, and all the other outputs it takes to sustain meaningful relationships among various social media. Take screen caps. Count unique visitors. Put it in Excel.
Keep communicating, even when the program is over. You’re creating more than a transactional relationship.
As a social media proponent, online contact forms and 800 numbers don’t provide the personal touch and transparent answers I crave in interactions with companies, so this blog post is a test, to see who’s out there listening (and who’s responsive).
I have a rental car need that shouldn’t be too difficult to satisfy. I’m flying to San Francisco to visit my sister before Thanksgiving, and would like to drive with her down to San Diego to see the rest of my family. I’m flying out of San Diego, so it would be a one-way drive, and I want to do it in one day to avoid paying for multiple days of renting (especially because the price goes way up for one-way rentals).
I initiated online quotes with Alamo, Enterprise, Hertz, and National – all companies I have a discount with – but the online systems leave so many questions:
The pick-up and drop-off times vary by location. How can I figure out which location(s) will make it possible to make the drive in one day?
I’m not familiar with these companies’ policies, so I don’t know if they do after-hours drop offs, or if a one-day rental constitutes a business day, or 24 full hours.
I’d like an economy or hybrid vehicle, but I can’t tell which cars will be available.
I really need a human to guide me through this unfamiliar territory, so I’m curious which of the rental car companies monitor social media, and which are willing to offer personal customer service to make this trip work.
So basically the question I’m posing is: Can I make this roughly 500-mile California drive in one day, and with whom and how can I do it?
As I won’t have a car in San Fran, any rental location near public transportation would be helpful.
I’m not driving all the way to downtown San Diego (unless I have to), and I’ll probably be on I-15 to avoid Los Angeles, so any drop-off point in Escondido or Poway, CA would work too.
Extra search keywords to help companies find this: Budget Dollar Thrifty Rent A Car
Before you use Twitter to store your ATM PIN numbers, remember, it can’t be trusted. The micro-blogging platform, which is dominated by a culture of open, public communication, also provides some privacy: direct messages and protected profiles.
Many of those protected messages can be found through Google’s search engine. The results page shows an index of the tweets it has logged…
For example, a search for Bill Clinton’s [private] profile spits out the first few words of tweets.
While the full text of @billclinton’s tweets remains hidden, and the links dead-end, these snippets (on the right) appear (for now) on a Google results page, simply by using the site-specific Google search syntax: site:
In April, a different security screw-up afflicted Twitter’s other “private” function: direct messages. For a few hours, direct messages (DMs), which are intended to be private communications, like e-mail, were delivered to the wrong people.
Here’s what showed up in my inbox (left). (Mind you, I know none of these people, and none of the messages were intended for me, especially the last one.)
Moral of the story: Twitter’s great for public dialogue, but think twice before sharing anything else. You never know where it might end up.
The companies of the Fortune 500 generate the greatest revenues worldwide, and undoubtedly require a lot of manpower to sustain their day-to-day operations. Due to their size and complexity, these big companies are often slow to enter social media spaces like Twitter. Who should be the voice of the company? What about legal? Don’t we have bigger fish to fry?
By the time some of these giants decide to join the conversation, they may find their trademarked, and extremely recognizable names have been taken, name squatted out from under them, and Twitter, constantly bogged down by its growing infrastructure, is often unable or slow to respond to trademark issues.
In searching for Twitter accounts for the top 50 Fortune companies (via Google), some interesting facts are discovered:
33 of the Fortune 50 companies appear to have an official Twitter presence. Those that don’t are mostly oil companies (Exxon Mobil, Valero Energy, Marathon Oil, Sunoco) and health care companies (Cardinal Health, CVS Caremark, UnitedHealth, AmerisourceBergen, WellPoint).
The majority of the Fortune 50 companies (37), whether on Twitter or not, appear to have at least one of their trademarked/ideal names squatted as a username. Some of these names may be squatted by the company itself, but considering most of these companies are on Twitter and not using these usernames, it’s more likely that a third, unauthorized party has taken hold of the powerful username.
The Fortune 50 companies on Twitter average relatively low numbers of followers. Their primary accounts combined (about 1.3 million followers) garner as much interest as @ICHCheezburger, or about a third as much as @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher). Their popularity is skewed though, by @DellOutlet, which accounts for about 1.2 million of those followers. Removing Dell, the remaining 32 companies average about 4,000 followers each (at the time of this writing).
After the jump is a full list of the Fortune 50 companies with squatted usernames.
Marta Kagan, US Managing Director at Espresso gave a keynote last year titled “What the F**k is Social Media.” This keynote is comprised of a nice overview of the space along with nice statistics that the last year has afforded.
Some key takeaway points:
Visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity-ahead of personal email (Nielsen, Global Faces and Networked Places, 2009)
Social media is like word of mouth, on steroids
Because, dear friend, social media is a f**king force to be reckoned with (insert yoda image)
1,000,000,000 web links, news stories, blog posts, and notes are shared on Facebook every week
If nothing else, take note of the slide design. A nice departure from the text-heavy presentations that all-too-often make the journey from projector to screen.
At Media Socialist, we want to discover and understand everything in the social media realm. Think of it as an experiment where we’ll try out more social media than is healthy, and we’ll report our findings to you.
