Anti-Social Media

So, another rant about social media?

Yup.

But not really ‘social’ media.

Business is desperate.

Or ‘businesses are desperate’.

Since the invention of advertising many, many, many years ago, businesses have been looking for new ways to force their name in front of your face. As print media has declined, so they have themselves become more innovative, blatant or omnipotent.

Gone are the days when the occasional advert did something unusual and stood-out over the general smegma of mundane copy. These days everything has to be different, unique, individual. It’s almost like the Life of Brian sketch.

But there are data, statistics and analytics these days which can give you a report – instantly and broken down by the second – which tells you exactly how far your advert has reached, or which particular demographic it is proving the most popular with.

And it isn’t just about getting the name into your face, it isn’t just about getting you to buy their product. They need you to do their advertising for them. They need you to share their video, to get your friends on board creating your own advert for their company, sharing their advert as widely as possible for them.

Take the latest “viral”. I use the work in inverted commas because it actually feels more like a force vaccination than a naturally circulated virus. Three. Yes, it’s the dancing pony. Of itself, the idea was nice – a novelty. It was a retro, funky tune that people of my age could reminisce about, with a pony that started moonwalking. Cute. But it wasn’t enough. Obviously Three had to have their own Youtube channel to spread this. And their Facebook page, which people were encouraged to ‘like’ and ‘share’. And a hashtag #danceponydance. I always hate it when people give themselves a hashtag. Hashtags should be organic, ascribed by others like nicknames. Calling yourself ‘Rocky’ at school is like giving people a stone to throw at you. But then they threw down the challenge: create your own video.

And some did.

Some.

It’s not the Harlem Shake or Gagnam style. It’s not a natural novelty, a meme which people spread because they actually want to. I think the blatant commerciality of it actually offended people. It didn’t do badly though – at time of writing the original video has had 6m views on Youtube. The most popular user-submitted video has had just over 120k hits. On the Three channel, despite giving users their own ‘mixing deck’, there have been just nine user-generated videos.

Tellingly though, more popular than any of the user-submitted videos is the‘Findus’ mash-up meme. This combined the trite of the dancing pony with the tripe of the horse meat news story and saw the pony dancing into a Findus abattoir. That has had over ½ million hits.

But as a campaign it hasn’t done too badly. Not quite as well as some of the adverts that people naturally want to share, rather than being urged almost desperately to share, like, interact with. But at least it is showing innovation. And it demonstrates the necessity to have a multi-channel approach to advertising: you can’t just have an advert, you have to have a series of adverts, a billboard collection, unique website, twitter feed, Facebook page, hashtag, merchandise – it’s not longer about the product you are trying to sell, but trying to convince people that they want to pay you money to wear a t-shirt with your logo on so that they can go out and willingly advertise that product for you.

And that’s where social becomes even more … well, anti-social.

You’ll have seen your Facebook feed becoming swamped by adverts recently. Facebook has not been meeting investors estimates for revenues and profits, and its share price has taken a tumble as a result. If it hadn’t been so desperately overinflated by overzealous trophy investors in the first place, if people had ignored the bubbling overhype and took a realistic analysis of the business plan and prospects, they would have seen the struggle into mobile that Facebook was facing.

But the result of this beating was that Facebook has had to find more ways to get adverts into your face. Back when the world wasn’t mobile it was easy – it had a side-bar almost entirely dedicated to adverts. When mobile became dominant, suddenly that revenue stream was not effective. More people were accessing advert-free content. So they had to find a way to get the adverts into your newsfeed. And they have done this incrementally. Previously there were simple banners which you could swipe past quickly. Now the advert takes up the same space as any other photo or status.

And the value of these adverts have changed too. Once upon a time it was simply a case of whoever paid the most got the most adverts. Now, whoever pays the most gets the most effective advert – adverts targeted at people who might actually buy th e product or service. People started to realise that Facebook held a lot of demographic detail; and that the adverts could be targeted to fewer but more suitable individuals with a simple bit of code. It’s like placing a billboard for your fast-food restaurant next to a nightclub or fat fighters club. You may pay ever so slightly more for that one board than you would normally, but it is more cost effective than scattering them all over town.

And it’s taken the heat off the advertisers too. Whereas once they concentrated their energies on engaging you, grabbing your attention with something pertinent or witty or shocking; now they didn’t need to because they were targeting the demographic most likely to be susceptible to the message anyway - they simply identified the demographic and told Facebook to target it, rather than using other data to identify themselves where that demographic was more likely to be.

And so we became a commodity. Our personal data became an asset. No bad thing – it’s been the way for millennia. Ask any prostitute with 36-32-36.

But the corporations changed too. Just as once upon a time they could get you to buy and wear a Pepsi t-shirt and get you to do the advertising free because it was 'cool'; so, if you liked a post by the corporation, this would appear on your timeline to all of your friends without the corporation having to pay Facebook to appear in the dedicated advert section. It’s product-lacement-by-proxy for the social media world.

Facebook caught up with this. Sponsored posts and adverts now cost more to place in the newsfeed where people will see these if one of their friends like it. In fact, so much of the advertising is going to appear in your newsfeed, that they have been able to remove the sidebar where other adverts appeared. The most recent development takes it a step further: you don’t even need to ‘like’ the corporation on Facebook any more – they can track your website visits when you leave.

It certainly seems more targeted than Twitter, where you get one suggested post which may be entirely irrelevant to you. But that targeting - the intrusiveness of the advert on Facebook - seems to be sweetening things for Twitter who have been able to take a hands-off, hands-open approach: we’ll interrupt you as little as possible, and not sneak around interfering with your vital statistics – you can be yourself, we don’t care.

All of this has lead to the rise of the corporate page, or 'corpage'. It is as essential as a website, an email address and a mailing list these days. Facebook likes to think of itself (though it isn’t) as an alternative universe to the internet. You should be able to shop, browse, watch, listen all through Facebook, without having to Google, Youtube, BBC, or Soundcloud yourself. The address (they think) should not be www. But Facebook.com/ Ideas above their station – the good old God delusion.

I’ve already discussed whether and how a corporation should handle theirTwitter handle; and the postings onto a corporate Facebook page are similar.

Whereas subscribers to the page can be treated as subscribers to a mailing list – and you can post statuses with important announcements to people you know are interested; so they are also a free, targeted advertising audience. They like you already, you just have to remind them why they need you.

And so commenced the corporate post - or 'corpost'.

Corporations treated them as 'revolutionary', but they weren’t they were an incremental progression. Those that did treat them as revolutionary probably got it wrong. They forgot that it is even more easy to unlike a page than it is to unsubscribe from a mailing list. At least with an unsubscribe you can direct them to a weblink, take feedback as to why – are the mailings too frequent, irrelevant, irritating? And with mailings, a lot of time and attention went into getting the message correct, the timings appropriate, ensuring they were not too frequent but were properly on key. Of course it took time to get there (some companies, most notably local pizza takeaways, still haven’t gotten this right) but there seems to be a broadly acceptable use of mailing lists. The same cannot yet be said for corposts.

Take KFC.

I don’t ‘like’ many corporations – most of my ‘likes’ are for local bands so I can find out when they are playing and support the people who actually need it. I liked KFC though. The reasoning is somewhat irrelevant (it was an in-joke with friends at the time) but the experience was interesting. On a daily basis I would see a corpost along the lines of “If there are twelve pieces of chicken in your bucket, who would you share them with?” I wonder the sanity of people who bother to comment on these corposts, let alone like or share them. But this was a minor, albeit frequent, irritation. Anyhow, it stopped. It stopped with one click: They updated their status once too often and now I don’t like KFC.

Some corposts very much misjudge the situation. The darlings over at Buzzfeed (who use their corposts essentially as an RSS feed to let you know when new articles have been published, which – for a publishing company – is rather sensible, and is another SM development away from your normal homepage) delight in corpost fails. They regularly produce lists (they like lists. I like lists. I LOVE LISTS) of the worst corporate abuses of your newsfeed. Those posts which miss the mark, not by a little but by so much they clearly didn’t even know there was a mark, let alone what direction it was in. The Facebook or Twitter posts that were misproduced, mistargetted, misunderstood or mistimed. They are many, and they show exactly why the feed should be handled in the same way as any other PR material and not simply by the intern. A badly worded, rushed out corpost can be more damaging than benefit.

And where the mailing or advertising was the preserve of a professional – or at least someone with a vague idea of what they were doing within the advertising industry – now any Tom, Dick or Harry is operating within advertising without realising they are an advertiser.

My local pub, for example. The locals haven’t really worked out how they should be using it. Some set themselves up with an account and actually wanted to friend me. I don’t want to be friends with inanimate object. But as Facebook changed, so did they and they realised that their status would still reach my world-weary eyes if I simply liked them rather than friended them.

I have previously ranted about a different pub that managed to commit the KFC offence of corposting – too much, too often. They were also badly worded, amateurish irritations. This is a different pub.

The reason I like certain pubs is the same as certain bands – that I can find out what is going on. They can use their Facebook page as a quick, easy to update website, rather than paying a developer lots of money for a bespoke site which they can’t update without paying the developer a retainer. I can quickly and easily touch in and find out if it is quiz night at the pub, or if there is a local band playing. The new pub started off down the KFC-offence route too: posting a photo of the fish and chips from that I could order from the menu for lunch etc. Aside from the fact the fish and chips did not look enticing, I did not like the pub purely so they could drip-feed the standard menu to me.

But then things got worse. The competitions started. The most recent was up to Easter.

To participate, you had to ‘like’ the pub. No problem. Then you had to visit the pub – no problem – and take a chicken that they had left around the place. Not real chickens, obviously. Then you had to take a photo of the chicken in an unusual place, upload the photo and tag the pub in the photo. The best five photos would win an Easter egg.

Now, aside from this being an awful lot of effort for the chance of an Easter egg, it meant that my newsfeed became clogged with photos of chickens because the pub was tagged in it. Actually it didn’t. Participation wasn’t high – there were only four participants so they had to give the fifth egg away. However those four participants did take quite a lot of photos, all of which appeared in my timeline.

The problem occurs when they do it themselves or get their staff to personally do their dirty work. I know of a few people who have been told by their boss to post a particular status update or image; and a friend of mine is currently trying to start his own business. Despite his business having a corpage, he still personally goes on about it in his own timeline. That annoys me – the information is there on the corpage; if I don’t like the corpage, presumably I don’t care. Worse still, he’s now started targeting and posting on other people’s pages, asking when they are next coming along to his event. Technically this is a breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Act, but if he targets me he will be a friend no more.

But these are the latest fad to garner likes. And likes-of-likes. I saw a number of them in the run up to Easter – mostly local businesses taking photos of a number of Easter eggs and if you like the local business and share the photo then you stand a chance of winning. Again – you’re doing the hard work for them. They aren’t defining their demographic, targeting the market, you are doing their advertising for them by sharing the photo with your friends, getting it into their faces when perhaps they wouldn’t otherwise have seen it. It works particularly well for local businesses because if someone likes you, they probably know about you; and if they share it, their friends are probably also local, or at least the type that would come into your shop and photograph (maybe even buy) things!

But this has bred the new drug: the desperation for likes and shares. And – competitions aside – businesses are not above begging for these. They know that a single like could be up to 300 personalised adverts.

And this is where the beautiful Buzzfeed lists come in, highlighting the blatant desperation. “Like this if you hate Mondays” and other such mundane stupidity irks me. I actually wonder who likes these posts. Why? Most of the worst are entirely detached or irrelevant to the product they are promoting. The worst, though, are where a brand tries to piggyback on a zeitgeist or topical moment – Valentine’s day being one. Obviously I’m not going to take my date for a meal at KFC, so why would I like a KFC Valentine’s day related post?

And in the wake of the corposts come the spammers. One of my friends has been repeatedly liking and sharing photos from Apple’s ;  Apples’ ; AppleUK ; IPadApple and various other organisations who claim to have a number of ipads or iphones which they have to give away. They are usually unable to sell them – though they never give a reason why – and all you need to do is like, share, comment.

What surprises me is the lack of ‘due diligence’ that people do about this. They fail to see that the page administrator has only a few thousand likes. Surely if this was legitimately Apple it would have millions? Why has the page only been active for a month or so? Why are they unable to sell them? Why is the picture of hundreds of boxes in a warehouse, and not a professionally produced image? But then I fully acknowledge I am much more sceptical than most.

I’m a little uncertain what is to be gained by these sham pages, but then I’ve never clicked one. It isn’t as though they get to harvest your information or abuse your newsfeed. Afterall, there is no forced interaction, and unliking is just as easy as liking. But spam is as does and always hides itself alongside legitimate businesses in order to scam the stupid.

So we’ve seen the effect of a good or bad social media campaign on companies, and – to a degree – individuals. What about the platform?

These corpost help the site to make money. The corporations readily pay the platform to promote their posts and the platform is happy with that. For now.

But it takes striking a happy medium, and I’m not sure that has been met, yet alone set up to be sustained. The problem is that the more corposts there are, the fewer posts from friends: the more dilute and less ‘social’ your social media site becomes. It turns it into just another advertising platform. And this is occurring at the critical moment for these Facebook. I’ve already analysed how it istrying to not just push the boundaries of privacy, but to whollyredefine how ‘social’ your data is. It turns out it isn’t your data that it wants to be more social, it wants to redefine social to be much more … well, corporate. Suddenly social involves you giving a lot more of yourself away, to a lot of organisations that you don’t necessarily know.

This could be the perfect storm for Facebook.

As people are leaving because of their privacy concerns; so those that stay are sticking around less because they are interested in less of the content. At the moment the droves disconnecting have not reached critical mass - such a position being kept at bay possibly only by mobile interaction. However for how long will this be true? Does Facebook realise that by both action (actively promoting; actively diminishing user controls) and inaction (failing to curb excessive or invasive corposting) it could be damaging its own position? Where it wants to be a sticky site – a site people stay on or readily come back to – with one hand it is wiping off the sticky, with the other it is actively shining the surface. Only it is doing it with gloves on so that the advertisers can't see and are still listening to assertions that it is sticky. It wouldn’t take much for a competitor to capitalise on this.

But then that is the lifecycle of advertising. Swamp until it’s bland; innovate until it’s expected; astound until you bore; and then reinvent the medium on a whole new platform. It’s like feeding the obese: it is an absolute necessity, but too much and cumulatively you kill it. Only there are no guidelines as to what is a healthy daily amount of advertising.

Less-than-social media?

The death of another social media?

Another day, another highly motivational or inspirational or otherwise well-intentioned post or picture on Facebook.

You know the ones

“Share this if your mom is the best mom in the world”

“Like this if you hate cancer”

“A best friend doesn't tell you to stop crying, but cries with you”

or some other such nonsense.

Why are they proliferating?

Fortunately they seem to be subsiding in favour of more classic memes and funny videos - Facebook has recently changed not only the ability to share, but also the embedding of shared videos to make this easier.

And it wasn't that long ago that the 'pay it forward' type videos were going around. You know, where the chap seemed to be asking for some change; whereas in fact he was asking us to change; the good deed carried on and repaid and that sort of thing.

Most of them are highly unoriginal, which kind of defeats the object of the message behind them. Is your mom really the best mom in the world if you are actually sharing someone else's image that has already been shared by half a million people around the globe? But usually they have a very simple, feel-good message behind them. They take no less than a second to like or share, and you can look as though you are doing some good, spreading the message, loving your mom in a slightly visible way.

Or at least until you start sharing so many of these things that people start hiding your statuses, blocking your account, unfriending you. That happened to a friend of mine; but maybe he didn't listen to my previous post on social media use. It certainly turned his timeline from a personal timeline into more of a community pin-board of hopes and wishes. He lost a lot of friends.

But why are they so common at the moment? Perhaps it is just that I am more sensitive to them - that there are many other categories of share which I don't mind so much, either because they are less intrusive, less irritating, or because I engage with them.

However, they are more common than they used to be though. A mere scan through my newsfeed last night confirmed that there are now more “share” posts than original statuses. Maybe there is a reaction - the media is filled pretty substantially with bad-news-stories, doom and gloom and cancer. People want an escape, they want to spread the love, they want stories which aren't doom and gloom. Maybe they think people actually care?

The posts generally fall into one of four categories - the motivational posts about how you should live your life, love your friends etc. (often with the old chain-letter threat that if you didn't share or like then the opposite of the intended motivation would occur); meme posts with a joke (or a satirical lampooning of motivational posts); 'cause' posts - ban animal cruelty, help find this van which was stolen, find these people that stole a van or were cruel to animals, support this charity, question whether the benefit/immigration policy is up to scratch etc.; and commercial posts - 'like' and 'share' this to enter our competition (including the fake ones claiming to be Apple giving away a random number of Macbooks which for some ungiven reason cannot be sold; and yet only having a few score 'likes'). We'll not consider the latter though.

But it seems as though people are reverting to motivational posts, memes and 'causes' as a reaction to how 'social' social media has become.

The fact is: People are getting wary of Facebook.

It has tried to be too social, too public. It has tweeked its policies to allow it to share more of your things, tweeked its settings to automatically share some of your things, developed functions that don't allow you to disable the ability to share some things. And people are responding to this. They are concerned with updating their status or their check-in; they are more reluctant to upload photos: the data might accidentally be public, might disclose where they are when they are somewhere they are not supposed to be; show them having fun when they weren't supposed to.

The fault for this isn't just Facebook, but the users. As more users are being publicly challenged, either trial by criminal court, defamation proceedings, by media or by professional colleagues; so they become more cautious. Suddenly that drive to have over 200 friends, 300 friends, 500 friends has left people questioning whether they want to post anything at all. Looking through my feed last night I hid posts from someone. All of her posts were 'cause' posts about vegetarianism, anti-animal cruelty etc. I had to delve right back into the recesses of my mind to work out why it was that I was friends with her in the first place: we had met once, at a dinner party four years ago.

I have recently been recruiting for a vacancy at work. One of the things that I did was check through Facebook to see if the posts of any of the candidates were visible, controversial or has some other potential to bring them or the company into disrepute. The next thing I checked was whether we had any mutual friends who could tag me in their photos, thereby exposing me (or the candidate) to risk. And in the days where some of your 500 friends are people who you only met once at a party four years ago, there is increasingly this risk. In a world of 500 friends there are a lot fewer degrees of separation than six - the http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15844230"target="_blank">latest statistics suggest it is closer to 3.74. I enjoy being reasonably 'free' on my Facebook, hence why I don't have work colleagues as friends on there, so I don't want an incoming colleague to already be a friend, or a friend one removed. This also presents itself as a problem for my colleague who is leaving to travel the world - I would actually like him as a friend, however he will also be friends with a number of other colleagues. That simply can't be done.

As an example of the problems that can be caused, take this weekend.

This weekend a very good friend of mine is getting married. Unfortunately I will be unable to attend. This is perfectly legitimate and entirely down to various logistical problems, not least the wedding taking place on a Sunday night, quite a distance from my home city on a day where train engineering works mean that in order to get home at a sensible time for work on Monday I would have to leave the wedding just before 10pm, which (as the party doesn't start until 7:30pm) ends up being a practical impossible situation. I have offered my apologies.

In an entirely separate development, I am off down to London this weekend. This has been eased by my non-attendance at the wedding; but was not conditional upon it. I would still have been able to go to both London and the wedding had other logistics not got in the way. In fact my return train was timed on the basis that I was going to try to attend both.

However, there is a risk that a conclusion could be drawn that I could not attend the wedding as a direct result of my trip to London. This therefore means that I am going to have to ask my friends not to tag me into places or in photos for the weekend, until the conclusional risk has dissipated. Fortunately my London friends seem to have started drifting away from Facebook anyway, so the risk is minimal.

But is this caution a signal of the death of social media - or at least social media in the current form? From the memes, causes and motivational posts, social media seems to be about being more social with other public media, rather than publishing more about your own social life. It doesn't take long for the bubble to burst. I know I keep going by to the Myspace example, but in 2008 it was overtaken by Facebook as the most popular SM site. Now it doesn't feature in the stats, so quick was the demise. Yes, people are fickle; but they are also now getting educated about this new form of communication. And whilst Facebook tries to push the boundaries of 'public' and 'social', it takes more than a company to redefine these terms for all of society. If the changes are imposed upon us, we react in a manner that the company cannot control: we withdraw. The only thing currently working in Facebook's favour is that there is no challenger to the crown, no-one operating for the benefit of the users, no-one to capitalise on Facebook's faults and failings. Diaspora was supposed to, but never really took off.

So, is this the death of Facebook? Really?

Well, I can't help but think that - whilst not the end - it may be the beginning of the end. Whether because of people actually getting stung, either by a scam or an ill-considered post which has repercussions at work; or because of the increasing wariness of witnessing others get so stung; or because of a frustration that the site is no longer what it was - that whilst it has tried to change “social media” to be inherently more “social”, it has in fact changed the meaning of “media” from “personal” to “meme”.

[Since I started writing this back in December and finished it on 21st March, there has been the resignation of the Youth Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent after her social media history came back to haunt her. We await to see if this has a further chilling (or normalising) effect on social media]