Category: communication

Student protests, the Facebook way

Or, All we are saying is give feeds a chance…

Facebook‘s recent changes that allow online buddies keep closer tabs on each other has half a million Facebook users — many of them college students — up in arms. The Facebookers fear the tweaks create a “creepy” and “stalker-esque” atmosphere on the social networking site.

The changes come in the form of news feeds that notify users when their friends have uploaded new photos or changed their profiles in some other fashion.

A disgruntled user has created a petition urging Facebook to go back to its old-school ways. As it currently stands, “We all know who has dumped who, who is doing what, and who doesn’t like something anymore. This is invasive, and while it is displayed for others to see, it is not meant to bombard their homepage.” (Source: Digital Micro Markets, which tongue-in-cheekedly likens the protest to the civil rights protests of the 1960s and suggests that “the thousands of unhappy, non-paying users of Facebook can … use their allowance pools to hack an online social networking cool app more to their liking!”)

Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is urging calm. “We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it’s brand new and still evolving.”

I don’t get why the subscribers are so upset. When you join a social network on the web, you’re forfeiting quite a bit of privacy and are tacitly agreeing to live a fishbowl sort of life, at least to your closest online friends. But perhaps this will be a wake-up call for millennials to think about issues of privacy and use a bit more caution in who they let into their social networks.

Five, seven or 17 rules for social media optimization (SMO)

Just getting caught up on the rules for social media optimization discussion that’s been bouncing around the blogosphere the past few weeks. (Social media encompasses “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other” via blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, vlogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc.)

The SMO discussion began with Rohit Bhargava‘s August 10 post of the five rules of social media optimization (hat’s off to PR Squared for the find).

Here are Bhargava’s original five rules, and snippets of his explanations:

  1. Increase linkability. “Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.”
  2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy. “Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags…”
  3. Reward inbound links. “[L]isting recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.”
  4. Help your content travel. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further…
  5. Encourage the mashup. In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.

Easy peasy, no? Then why aren’t more of us (including yours truly) making a conscious effort to optimize our sites for social media?

Anyway, over the past three weeks, the SMO list has grown to 16 (or maybe 17, I’m not certain), and now there are rules for adding a rule to the list. I haven’t scratched beyond the surface of these rules yet, but I’ll delve in shortly and will be looking for ways to make my site more social media optimizationally acceptable.

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