January 27th, 2009, 9 Comments »
In the next couple of months, I’m giving three talks to different groups associated with post-secondary education. In preparing these speeches, I was doing research into Facebook’s market penetration among BC’s teens.
As you may know, Facebook’s advertising program lets you thin-slice your target audience in all sorts of interesting ways–gender, age, location even specific interests or workplaces. I created a query that indicated that I could reach 344,860 British Columbians between the age of 15 to 19. I take this to mean that there are 344,860 profiles matching that criteria on Facebook.
Curious to see what percentage of all BC teens this was, I checked the BC government’s stats for the current population of teens aged 15 to 19 in the province. They reported 287,444. I took screenshots of the two sources:
That means that there are 1.2 profiles on Facebook for every BC teen. Is that possible? Probably. After all, I recently read that 99% of the 2012 class at Amherst College had a Facebook profile. I suppose that if 20% of teens created two profiles, they’d generate these results.
And I remember reading some of danah boyd’s (lower case capitalization hers) research that indicates that teens discard unwanted profiles frequently, and often create several on a given social network.
In any case, isn’t this kind of false advertising from Facebook? The most teens an advertiser could possibly reach in BC is all of them: 287,444 in 2008, a few more in 2009.
9 Comments »
August 23rd, 2008, 3 Comments »
I thought the most popular Facebook pages for politicians told the story of the demographic differences between Senator Obama and McCain’s supporters:
3 Comments »
May 27th, 2008, 20 Comments »
Over dinner, Julie and I were musing about setting up a mutual friend. We scanned our brains for other friends and acquaintances who are single.
Recognizing the shortcomings of my brain, I figured Facebook might do a good job of standing in. I poked around a bit, but didn’t immediately find what I was looking for.
I turned to Google, and discovered the Facebook app Most Eligible Singles. It looks pretty silly, but once you add it, there’s an option on the app page to show your single friends. I have shockingly few, particularly of the female variety. Of the 465 Facebook ‘friends’ (take that term with a Dead Sea’s worth of salt) there are only 17 females who are declared as ‘single’. And only six of those are in Vancouver.
After a little more looking, I eventually found the Facebook profile search, where you can filter on any profile variable. However, the results don’t seem to easily discriminate between your immediate friends, and friends of friends. So, it’s sub-optimal.
20 Comments »
April 13th, 2008, 16 Comments »
Since it launched, I’ve been conflicted about Twitter. It’s an ego distillery, and the signal to noise ratio is ridiculously high (or should that be low?).
Yet, I’m feeling increasingly obligated to engage with the tool for professional purposes (not to mention the book we’re writing). I encourage all of our technology clients to use the service, but there would be obviously be applications for an active personal account as well. A friend recently launched a new project, and announced it on Twitter. He called it something like “a fantastic lens for focusing attention”.
But, man, I just can’t get interested.
Thinking about it, I wondered if it had something to do with an obligation to ‘follow’ a few hundred members of the digerati. Or even the social obligation to follow everybody who’s following me? I more or less bowed to that perceived pressure in Facebook, and now I’ve got 455 friends and rising. How many of them are actual friends or colleagues in any kind of meaningful way? Less than half, I’d guess. As such, it’s a useless tool for monitoring actual friends’ activity. And I’m not even sure if I want to do that.
My New Baseline
So here’s my latest Twitter experiment. I’m only going to follow people who I personally know, and with whom I have an ongoing regular relationship. We see each other at least occasionally, or exchange emails or something. If I met somebody two years ago at a conference, and haven’t seen them since, they’re out. If I read their blog and comment regularly, and send them an email every once and a while, they’re in. That’s my new baseline.
I just culled my Twitter following list down to 33. It will increase, as I haven’t actively sought anybody out to add, but I’m going to try to be disciplined about it.
Hopefully this approach will help me get more excited about the tool. Instead of just another fire hose of geeky news, I’ll be watching my friends and colleagues lives. Which, just as mine would, may turn out to be tremendously dull. But I’m giving it the old college try. Again.
I don’t expect to ‘tweet’ (that is, broadcast messages) very much at this stage. I plan to just watch and reply to others if something tweaks my interest.
UPDATE: I’m so conflicted about Twitter that I failed to include a link to my Twitter stream o’ tweets.
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March 19th, 2008, 3 Comments »
Travis recently became an unintentional pitchman on Facebook:
But that behavior, becoming fans of a company, exposed an interesting problem recently. I became a fan of Kinzinâ€â€for no real reason, other than that I liked their design and the way they solved a problem of online communities: namely, privacy controls for family, especially kids.
So imagine my irony-laced surprise when a friend sent me this screenshot, of an ad she said she clicked on because she thought I was explicitly messaging it to her…
I’m going to remove myself as a fan for Kinzin. I don’t dislike their service, but I don’t want to be an inadvertent (and uncompensated) shill for them.
Here’s the screenshot. It’s unrelated, but apparently somebody took Travis’s photo just as he was passing between dimensions:
He makes a good point about the ‘uncompensated’ part. Obviously his ‘endorsement’ has value but (besides free use of Facebook, for which he already looks at ads) nobody’s paying him for it. Robert Scoble has 4923 friends on Facebook–how much is his endorsement worth?
Travis explains that there’s no way to turn off this functionality on an individual company (or ‘page’, in the parlance of Facebook) basis. To do so for your entire profile, click privacy in the menu bar at the top of your profile. Then click News Feed and Mini-Feed and choose the Social Ads tab. Finally, choose “No one” in the dropdown box and click Save Changes.
I don’t want to impugn Kinzin here. I don’t have an opinion of their service (it’s not really targeted at the likes of me), and their only gaffe was in picking a potentially-unpopular advertising strategy.
Michael from Kinzin left a comment on Travis’s blog. He didn’t apologize per se, but he did say that they’d turn off the ‘social actions’ (goofy name, that) for their Facebook ads.
What’s the lesson here? We don’t know very much about social advertising, or how it’s going to be perceived. So, proceed with caution.
UPDATE: Michael from Kinzin has written two relevant posts about Facebook, privacy and advertising.
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February 25th, 2008, 3 Comments »
This is some sad news from my host country:
A Moroccan computer engineer has been sentenced to three years in jail for setting up a Facebook profile in the name of a member of the royal family.
Fouad Mourtada was arrested on 5 February on suspicion of stealing the identity of Prince Moulay Rachid, younger brother of King Mohammed VI.
Yowza. That’s hardcore. It’s a tragedy that all nations can’t offer the freedoms that we enjoy in Canada.
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October 25th, 2007, 6 Comments »
Rob, of Social Signal (among other) fame, emailed me about their first Facebook app. It’s a project for BC Hydro, and has a sunny conservation message:
We’ve created Green Gifts to give Facebook users from B.C. and everywhere else a fun way to keep in touch with each other while spreading the word about energy efficiency and sustainable living.
Green Gifts are free to send and receive. Each one comes with a Green Gift picture and your personalized message. And it also comes with a Power Smart tip: a simple, practical way you can conserve energy and shrink your environmental footprint.
The app enables you to send your friends environmentally-friendly gifts (well, little icons really) such as reusable coffee cups and bus passes. It’s all viral-ready, because the gifts are free (unlike the standard Facebook presents) and it’s easy to pass them on to your friends. Plus they offer an “I’m green” subtext, and green equals cool these days.
Moi, J’ai Facebook Fatigue
While I’m on the subject, can I confess to some Facebook fatigue? I was talking (er, on our Facebook walls…walling?) to Meg about this yesterday, and said that I’d found Facebook good for the following:
- Organizing events
- Starting and joining affinity groups
- Finding old friends (this is time-limited, of course–there are only so many old friends)
- Losing at Scrabble
There are plenty of professional applications (see, for example, the aforementioned Facebook app), but personally, I’m kind of spent. I guess everything else (well, the Scrabble too) feels like a time-waster, and I’ve already optimized by time-wasting elsewhere (swimming, biking, World of Warcraft and so forth)?
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September 11th, 2007, 6 Comments »
I was just over at From the Grey Box, a blog entirely about what a guy finds in his apartment building’s ‘free box’:
Look, I know for a fact at least a few of my friends check out this blog occasionally. I also know for a fact that at least one person I don’t even really know checks out this blog occasionally (that would be my friend Liz’s friend, to whom Liz introduced me as “the guy with the grey box blog” (I’m paraphrasing), which friend said he checked out my blog occasionally, which made him the first person I’ve met who’s read my blog before actually meeting me, which I’m not sure what I think about this.
I left a comment, which I thought bore repeating. I’ve tweaked it a bit:
As a, er, student of all this blogging stuff, I’ve observed a recurring theme: there comes a time in every blogger’s life when they recognize, for the first time, that strangers read their blog. Or they discover that a particular peer group–say, their workmates–know about and read their blog, despite their not having revealed it to them.
The response, especially among personal diarists, is often to immediately shut down their blog and start again, anonymously.
It’s like being on stage, and looking out into the audience expecting only to see friends and family. All of a sudden, there’s a bunch of strangers looking back at you.
Maybe this has been one of the appeals of Facebook (and previous such networks)–that you can have precise control over your audience?
6 Comments »