inapro.posthaven

The Re-Undiscovered Country?

In actuality, I’m sure some social media gurus still use MySpace quite frequently.

I just don’t happen to know any of them.

Some of the companies I work with still have MySpace profiles, but they’ve basically been left for dead.  Someone checks on them once a month to see if they’re still breathing, but otherwise, they get minimal attention compared to Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Why is this, exactly?

I mean, I remember when I personally quit MySpace because it had become a festering cesspool of porn spam and bad design, but I’m an elitist.  The benefit I was getting from MySpace was microscopic compared to the effort required to simply maintain a spam-free presence there.

So I quit.

And I bet a lot of you did the same.

And I bet Scott Ludwig is right: none of us know what MySpace offers these days, or at least not enough of us to convince everyone else that MySpace could possibly be worth adopting again.

And yet, there sit 44 million people, just aching to be marketed to by your crack team of social media experts.

Surely your messaging techniques have advanced well beyond the rudimentary tasks MySpace allowed you to execute in 2007 [which is the last time most people I know admitted they even had a MySpace profile].

So what’s stopping you from carving out that lucrative niche as a MySpace specialist?  Or at least re-incorporating MySpace into your toolbox?

Simple: we’re all waiting for someone else to tell us we can.

Pipe Down; I’m Not Done Shunning You Yet

Nobody has the time to re-master MySpace because we’re all invested in the same tools everyone else is using.

If nobody’s talking about MySpace, there’s no buzz bandwagon to benefit from.  There’s no SEO juice.  There’s no community of peers, and there’s no cool factor that comes with belonging to the same group everyone else is in.

Which, of course, makes it ripe for wildly profitable niche exploiters.

Maybe “MySpace” will become the reheated buzzword of 2010.

Maybe we’ll reclaim that territory and help it matter again.

Or maybe… if you’re really thinking outside the box…

… Friendster.

Marshalls is launching a unique Facebook campaign for the next three weeks where people are asked to sign up as fans, take quizzes and earn keys to unlock a free $5,000 wardrobe.  The concept was designed by Hill Holiday and represents yet another big brand moving into Facebook.

The campaign involves users first signing up as a fan for Marshalls at the Marshalls’ Facebook Page.  The contest starts each Thursday, where fans play a quiz based on the campaign’s online videos.  Completing the quiz gets you the key, and for each key earned, $1 is donated to the Dress for Success charity.

Then, as Wednesday hits, key holders are reminded to come back to the fan page to try their key between noon and midnight Eastern time to see if it unlocks a ‘virtual wardrobe’ worth $1000. 25 keyholders also win $50 gift cards.

According to HH:

The campaign culminates on Wednesday, April 28^th at noon (eastern) with a live, interactive “virtual grand prize event” streamed from NYC and brought to everyone viaUstream.  Fashion-wise shoppers can watch and participate in the event on Marshalls’ Facebook Page, marshallsonline.com, and various fashion influencer blogs where theUstream player and social stream will be embedded.

HH also talks about some of their more interesting features of the campaign:

• TV spots are not only tagged with a “drive to” Marshalls’ Facebook page but include a voiceover mention aimed to increase receptivity to go online and engage.
• For each week’s kickoff, we’ve created a 24 hour media stunt to help grab attention and invite consumers to Marshall’s Facebook page to earn their key. Check out perezhilton.com today as we’ve skinned the site as one big Marshalls shopportunity.
• We’re using Facebook engagement ads in two ways. First, the “become a Fan” video engagement ads will showcase the week’s shopportunity video (a “behind the scenes” extension of the TV spot). And, second, the “become a Fan” event ads will enable Marshalls’ to invite others outside their Facebook page to the April 28^th live event.

Until today, the Achilles heel of Posterous’s super simple blogging service has been its less-than-stellar online post editor. Today, however, the startup is ready to unveil its completely overhauled Post Editor 2.0.

Post Editor 2.0 is designed for supremely easy content management. You can now upload and arrange any combination of photos, music, videos and documents in your posts via copy/paste or drag-and-drop. The interface is intelligent, the experience is smooth and the blogging platform is now incredibly flexible.

The new post editor is available now to all Posterous users, and you can try it out for yourself with the “Post by web” option in your dashboard. You’ll notice that the redesigned editor now includes a dedicated media section on the right where you can batch upload any and all media for your post. If you upload multiple images, they can be grouped in galleries, reordered via drag-and-drop, rotated, deleted and interspersed with text as you choose.

What’s interesting is that Posterous — which we like to call the e-mail-to-blog-to-anywhere platform — has strayed from its original e-mail-centric focus with this update. The service now offers a sophisticated web editor for more advanced blogging needs, and could be seen as competitive to most other blogging platforms. The best part is that the new features don’t sacrifice the service’s trademark simplicity, which means it’s still 100% mom-friendly.

ClickZ News

Facebook Killing 'Become A Fan,' Embracing 'Like'

By Christopher Heine, ClickZ, Mar 29, 2010

Facebook is scaling back on the word "Fan" and ramping up usage of "Like" on brand pages. According to a confidential e-mail sent to ad agencies today, the social media site will change the "Become A Fan" button to read "Like" within the next few weeks.

When asked about the change, Annie Ta, spokesperson for the Palo Alto, CA-based company, confirmed via e-mail that the words on the button would be changed. But she wasn't able to offer other specifics about whether "Like" would replace "Fan" in other places on Facebook. "We're still working on some of the details, but brand Pages can still be referred to as 'Fan' Pages after the change," Ta replied.

Facebook, in the note to ad agencies, said it wanted to give the agencies advance notice about the change that could affect upcoming advertising campaigns or Facebook strategy.

Part of the confidential e-mail read: "Over time, as users adapt to the language change, we recommend that you invite people to connect to your Page by saying 'Find us on Facebook' or 'Like us on Facebook'. You may also choose to put more emphasis on your custom URL than you used to."

The e-mail also explained how the new "Like" button will be differentiated from the "Like" feature already seen in user updates.

How it may affect ads was also addressed in the e-mail to ad agencies. "Users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and aesthetic differences. An Engagement ad unit, capable of making connections, will feature the 'Like' button and show social context above it such as, 'John Doe and 3 of your friends like [Page Name].' Standard ad units, not capable of making connections, will simply feature the word 'Like' by itself, and may show social context above it that says 'John Doe and 3 of your friends like this ad.'"

 

Facebook users have been clicking the current "Like" feature nearly twice as often as the "Become A Fan" button, according to the memo. And the social site appears convinced using "Like" more often will increase engagement between consumers and brands.

The e-mail read: "'Like' offers a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in. These lighter-weight actions mean people will make more connections across the site, including with your branded Facebook Pages. We believe this will result in brands gaining more connections to pages since our research has shown that some users would be more comfortable with the term 'Like'. The goal is to get the most user connections so that you can have ongoing conversations in the news feeds of as many users as possible."

Scott Kleper, CTO for the San Francisco-based social marketing firm Context Optional, suggested that the change could indeed create greater engagement as Facebook intends. "Becoming a fan of a brand is perceived as a large commitment and is an important measurement metric... 'Liking' can be another great driver of awareness and an opportunity for users to show an additional form of affinity," he said.

Scores of brands, such as Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Skittles, have cultivated online communities on Facebook.

You can follow Christopher Heine on Twitter at @ChrisClickZ.

How LinkedIn will fire up your career

By Jessi Hempel, writerMarch 25, 2010: 6:14 PM ET

 

(Fortune) -- If you need a job, or just want a better one, here's a number that will give you hope: 50,000. That's how many people the giant consulting firm Accenture plans to hire this year. Yes, actual jobs, with pay. It's looking for telecom consultants, finance experts, software specialists, and many more. You could be one of them -- but will Accenture find you?

To pick these hires the old-fashioned way, the firm would rely on headhunters, employee referrals, and job boards. But the game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture's head of global recruiting, you'd better be on the web.

 

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner

To put a sharper point on it: If you don't have a profile on LinkedIn, you're nowhere. Partly motivated by the cheaper, faster recruiting he can do online, Campagnino plans to make as many as 40% of his hires in the next few years through social media. Says he: "This is the future of recruiting for our company."

Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. In today's job market an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory -- and more useful -- than swapping business cards and churning out résumés.

Make the most of your LinkedIn profile

More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February. They include your customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on LinkedIn puts you in the company of people with impressive credentials: The average member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000. More than a quarter are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That's why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.

The reason LinkedIn works so well for professional matchmaking is that most of its members already have jobs. A cadre of happily employed people use it to research clients before sales calls, ask their connections for advice, and read up on where former colleagues are landing gigs.

In this environment, job seekers can do their networking without looking as if they're shopping themselves around. This population is more valuable to recruiters as well. While online job boards like Monster.com focus on showcasing active job hunters, very often the most talented and sought-after recruits are those currently employed. Headhunters have a name for people like these: passive candidates. The $8 billion recruiting industry is built on the fact that they are hard to find. LinkedIn changes that. It's the equivalent of a little black book -- highly detailed and exposed for everyone to see.

For a generation of professionals trained to cloak their contacts at all costs, this transparency is counterintuitive. So far most conversations about how to use social networks professionally have focused on what not to do: Don't share drunken photos on Facebook. Don't use Twitter to brag about playing hooky from the office.

 

But as companies turn to the web to mine for prospective job candidates, it's no longer advantageous to refrain from broadcasting personal information. Instead, the new imperative is to present your professional skills as attractively as possible, packing your profile with keywords (marketing manager, global sourcing specialist) that will send your name to the top of recruiters' searches.

At the same time, you can connect your online professional interactions in one place, joining groups on the site (LinkedIn has more than 500,000 of them, based on companies, schools, and affinities), offering advice, and linking your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile.

"You Google other people, so don't you think they're Googling you?" LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman asks. "Part of a networked world is that people will be looking you up, and when they do, you want to control what they find." Helping you present yourself well online is just the start. LinkedIn plans to go far beyond, making itself an active and indispensable tool for your career path. The secrets lie buried in the data: those 60 million profiles, including yours.

The brains behind LinkedIn's tech upgrade

In a business where data wonks are rock stars, Dipchand ("Deep") Nishar is Bono. During his five-year tenure at Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Nishar, 41, was instrumental in developing its ad platform, its mobile strategy, and products for the Asia-Pacific region. Hoffman spent almost a year recruiting him to be vice president of products, until finally, in January 2009, Nishar took a right out of Google's Mountain View, Calif., parking lot and drove two blocks to his new office at LinkedIn's headquarters.

Having so much experience in Asia, where mobile messaging and other social networks were adopted even faster than in the U.S., Nishar understood the value of a system that would help consumers organize all those digital relationships.

But it was one personal interaction that really sold him on LinkedIn's potential. Nishar was trying to decide whether his daughter, who was 12 at the time, should spend her summer at a program offered by Johns Hopkins University. He posted the question to his status update on both Facebook and LinkedIn. While he received more comments on Facebook, they were casual and congratulatory. Only four of his LinkedIn contacts wrote him, but they offered a rich analysis, describing experiences with the Johns Hopkins program that left them better off academically; they persuaded him to enroll his daughter. "People are in a different context and mindset when they're in a professional network," he says.

This was Hoffman's bet when he founded the site in 2003. It was just after eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) paid $1.5 billion to buy PayPal, where Hoffman had been a founding board member and executive vice president, and he was casting about for his next big project. Hoffman, 42, was already one of Silicon Valley's most hyperconnected players, with investments in dozens of other startups (including Facebook), so it was natural for him to think of a way for people to build on their links.

"I realized that everyone will have their professional identity online so they can be discoverable for the things that will be important to them," he remembers, waving his hand as he sits back in his chair. "The obvious one is jobs, but it's not just jobs. It's also clients and services. It's people looking to trade tips on how you do, say, debt financing in the new capital markets." Backed by other angel investors like him, Hoffman and four others put up the initial funding and gathered a tiny staff to launch the site as a bare-bones operation in his Mountain View home.

At first, users were slow to embrace the service. Plenty of Web 2.0 entertainment websites were enjoying meteoric rises and monstrous buyouts by big media companies. (In fact, after helping fund YouTube, Hoffman gave its founders office space for three weeks in their early days.)

By comparison, LinkedIn seemed a little static; it was only for résumés. As Facebook caught on among bona fide adults, it created a population of web users fluent in updating their status, posting links, and microblogging. Hoffman could sense that social networking was finally becoming mainstream, and he needed to give LinkedIn's users a reason to stick around before they moved their résumés and other professional information to platforms like Facebook. So last December he recruited former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner to step into the CEO position. And he won over Nishar.

IPO watch: Is LinkedIn ready for its big moment?

John Klodnicki wasn't looking for a job when he took the call from an IBM recruiter who had found his profile on LinkedIn. As a program director for data-storage company EMC, he spent five days a week on the road consulting with pharmaceutical companies. "I was moderately happy," he said. Sure, all that traveling was a drag.

On that Friday afternoon Klodnicki was scarfing a sandwich while standing in the security line at the airport in Providence, trying to get home to his family in New Jersey. The line was long, so he had the time to chat about opportunities. After going through several rounds of interviews, the initial job fell through, but the relationship had been started. He kept in touch, and last September, Klodnicki started work as an associate partner developing new business with pharmaceutical companies at IBM's Philadelphia office, just half an hour from his home.

Thanks to LinkedIn, people like Klodnicki are increasingly easy to find. "It's a great equalizer for us. It gives the recruiter an opportunity to reach out directly to a candidate," says Annie Shanklin Jones, who heads U.S. recruiting for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500). "In a company the size of IBM, that's significant."

IBM has always been one of the first companies to experiment with new social technologies. Its recruiters use Twitter to broadcast job openings, and the company organizes its own talent communities. But Jones says LinkedIn is the most important social-media site for reaching prospective hires.

Cost saving is a major motivation for companies looking to bypass big headhunting firms. "If I were going to go out to a major recruiting firm, for example, we could potentially pay upwards of $100,000 to $150,000 for one person," says Accenture's Campagnino. "Start multiplying that by a number of senior executives, and you start talking about significant numbers of dollars very quickly."

If anybody should be nervous about that, it's L. Kevin Kelly. As CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, one of the most prominent recruiting firms, he has made a living out of the hiring market's opacity. As he watched the rise of LinkedIn, he knew it was a disruptive force he would have to learn well; last summer he flew to the Bay Area to have dinner with Hoffman.

Their companies have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, LinkedIn is a welcome tool for recruiters, and Heidrick & Struggles is a customer. LinkedIn's software allows recruiters to search its database without access to photographs, thus keeping in compliance with antidiscrimination laws, and to contact anybody in the LinkedIn network. But the recession forced companies to cut back on their budgets for outside firms.

Heidrick & Struggles' revenues fell 36% in 2009, and while business has started to creep back, Kelly is aggressively trying to remake the company as an adviser rather than simply a search company, offering consulting on ways to handle staffing issues and select board members. Now it's just 7% of the business, but he expects it to grow to half of what Heidrick & Struggles does.

There will still be a need for headhunters and traditional methods of hiring, though, because LinkedIn doesn't work for everything. And it has to be used carefully.

"If you're not managing that site, you can erode your brand," says Arlette Guthrie, the vice president of talent management at Home Depot. Guthrie has learned how to use the site through trial and error. Over the past few years she experimented with using LinkedIn for all hires -- including seasonal workers, Home Depot will need 80,000 people in the next year -- but discovered that LinkedIn didn't offer better applicants for the bulk of the company's positions, mostly in their retail stores. Though plenty of cashiers and doctors and teachers join LinkedIn, the site's primary membership is corporate professionals.

Now Guthrie uses LinkedIn mostly for three hard-to-fill areas: supply chain, information technology, and global sourcing. Some of Guthrie's recruiters spend time daily on the site, reading up on potential candidates, chatting with them in groups and on message boards, and responding to inquiries. The approach has worked well. Using services like this on the Internet she has been able to bring down the time it takes to fill the positions, an important metric among recruiters, by nearly half.

At the entry to the "Hope" classroom on the satellite campus of Belhaven University in Houston, Susan Thorpe passes out a small book called 12.5 Ways to Get Ahead on LinkedIn. Up front, her husband, Doug Thorpe, who self-published the guide, has drawn a diagram on the whiteboard that looks like an elaborate football play. A series of circles labeled one, two, and three stretch out from a central bubble labeled you. A dozen job seekers take notes as Thorpe describes how to call upon first-level contacts -- those former colleagues and friends you've befriended on the site -- to reach second-level contacts. It's a process as old as human relations: Hey, could you introduce me to your friend? Thorpe explains the etiquette and technique of doing it digitally. "Write a personal note when you ask someone to connect," he tells his students.

Thorpe, 57, is one of hundreds of consultants who have sprung up to help professionals establish themselves online. After he lost his mortgage company two years ago in the real estate crash, he started Jobs Ministry Southwest, a religious nonprofit that offers free support for job seekers in the greater Houston area. A dozen of the 160 people who attended the previous day's support group have paid $24.95 for a half-day introduction to LinkedIn.

Thorpe's main message to his clients is that it's important to complete your profile. Get recommendations from former co-workers. Use keywords to bring out the skills you want to highlight. Join groups: Recruiters often scour professional groups to round up potential candidates. Answer questions from colleagues that showcase your professional expertise.

One of the students, Heinz Meyer, exhales audibly at the prospect of all that time online. "This could turn into a 24/7 thing real quick," says Meyer, 67, who had just lost his job at Universal Pegasus, a pipeline construction company. Thorpe responds by suggesting the class spend a concentrated amount of time on the site each day, say 30 minutes. Believe it or not, LinkedIn doesn't pay this guy.

There is much debate in the class about Thorpe's suggestion that job seekers should include professional photographs with their profiles. ("Don't use dogs, horses, cats, or cows in the background," he says.) Older job seekers in particular are worried that their gray hair will trigger age discrimination. There are drawbacks to so much transparency, they argue. Doesn't it ensure that employers potentially know more about you than they should?

It's a question Hoffman considered right from the start. For all the benefit that LinkedIn brings to the job hunt, it can't erase fundamental challenges in the job market. One big reality is that plenty of baby boomers are out of work as the industries in which they've developed three decades of expertise move overseas or change irrevocably.

These job hunters will need to reinvent themselves in new careers. The thing about social-networking profiles is that they don't lie, at least not successfully. You can't fudge your experience or hide your age, because your connections know you in real life. So Hoffman is inclined to agree with Thorpe's advice: Post your photo. "A LinkedIn profile lets you represent yourself as strong as you can, so build that to your advantage," he says.

Okay, but how do you finally land a job? It's the last question that Thorpe's students ask as he wraps up his lecture. Thorpe turns back to the elaborate diagram on the board, pointing to the circled numbers. Social networking is just a more efficient way of reaching out to people you know -- and people they know. You work the network. You connect with people like John Campagnino at Accenture if you want a job in consulting. Then you turn off the computer, and you call your connections on the phone. And you invite them to lunch. 

 

 

 

 

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Too shy to job hunt?

After a layoff, become a consultant?

Facebook your way to a new job?

 

First Published: March 25, 2010: 7:47 AM ET

March 25, 2010

Faster than a locomotive, leap over giant buildings - yes, its... SMS! Text messaging has twice the users of email, twice the size of television

Mobile phone based messaging is 2.6 times as big by users, as email. Mobile phone based messaging has twice as many active users as the total worldwide population of television sets. And personal computers of any kind including netbooks? Mobile phone messaging is three times as big as the total global installed base of any kind of personal computer including netbooks. And this is not 'wireless email' no, nor is it 'twittering' or mobile 'instant messaging'. No, the most used mobile messaging system - that is, the most used data application on the planet -  is SMS text messaging.

This blog article is your mobile messaging primer updated for 2010. And I can now tell you for a fact, that nobody is safe. Even the last luddites will take to it. That uncle of yours who says 'never' - even he will be converted. We now have the evidence! Its about time to take a look at mobile phone based messaging for March 2010. This is another 'primer' blog posting, in other words its detailed and fact-filled, so it won't be short. Go get yourself a cup of coffee before we start.

SMS USED BY 53% OF PLANET

We've reported in the book and on this blog for many years already that SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet. Consider email. Email was invented in 1971, so it has had 39 years of life. In those four decades email has spread globally and has 1.4 billion active users today (said Netcraft Feb 2010). Note this is far more than the total number of personal computers in use worldwide, as obviously there are many who share a PC at home, or use one at an internet cafe or at work or the university etc. Still, in 39 years, email has achieved 1.4 Billion users which is 21% of the total population on the planet. Very impressive. In fact, email has more users than fixed landline telephones (at 1.15 Billion and in gradual decline). Did you notice that? More send messages than talk on a fixed landline worldwide. A very impressive achievement indeed.

Email was the first 'killer application' for the internet. It was a vital link in the expansion of the personal computer from the office to the home. It was the first reason why 'normal people' wanted to get an internet connection (and eventually was superceded as a reason to get online by search and browsing, and now social networking like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc)

That is our context. 39 years, 1.4 Billion users. Now take SMS text messaging. Mobile phone based messaging was invented by Matti Makkonen then of Telecom Finland (part of TeliaSonera today) and my former mentor when we both were employed by Nokia later in his career. Matti's invention was first technically used in the UK when machine-originated SMS were used for technical testing purposes in 1991. The first commercial and consumer use of SMS was in Finland on the Radiolinja GSM network (part of Elisa, another of my former employers). The first reported use of SMS to send a text message from one phone to another phone was by Nokia employee Riku Pihkonen, who did this on obviously a Nokia phone and the Radiolinja network in 1993.

So SMS text messaging is less than 17 years old today. Literally less than half as old as email. How has SMS fared? Spreading like wildfire, SMS became the world's most widely used data application. It was used by half of all mobile phone subscribers by 2002. That year SMS user number shot past the total worldwide count of email users. SMS hit one Billion active users by 2004 and two Billion active users by 2006. The juggernaut continued its relentless climb and by 2008 SMS had passed 3 billion active users (Ericsson 2009) and earlier this year we heard from messaging solutions giant Clickatell that SMS is nearing its 4 Billionth user (Clickatell Jan 2010). My consultancy, TomiAhonen Consulting measured the mobile phone messaging active user base at 3.6 Billion mobile phone subscribers at the end of 2009. That was 78% of all mobile phone subscribers on the planet. Towering over email, SMS has 2.6 times more users than email. The SMS user base is 53% of the total population on the planet.

Even the last 'laggards' are getting onboard, with for example over two thirds of Americans now active users of SMS. It was at 65% of US cellphone subscribers two years ago and growing strongly (Wirefly Apr 2008) and American consumers now prefer sending SMS text messages to making phone calls on their cellphones - another universal trend by the way (CTIA 2009). In advanced markets like Britain 87% of all subscribers send SMS (Carphone Warehouse 2009), China 90% of subscribers send SMS (China Mobile Sept 2009) and in Pakistan 90% of subscribers use SMS (Daily Times of Pakistan Feb 2010). In other "mid-markets" where SMS is not quite universal, it still used by the majority of mobile phone subscribers like in Brazil where SMS is already used by 79% of mobile phone subscribers (Acision Dec 2009)

HOW MUCH

Lets put this in numbers we can appreciate. The limit of a standard SMS text message is 160 characters (if you're familiar with Twitter, Twitter's limit is 140 characters). Now, the average user in the Philippines send 26 SMS text messages per day. If we assume the average length of an actual text message sent in the Philippines is 80 characters in length - half the full length - then the Filippino population produce that much new original text - by triple-tapping on their phones - that each average user would create a new book, yes book, in the number of words produced ...every four months. So every average Filippino writes that much on their phones, they're creating the equivalent of 3 new books every year. And thats not the heaviest users of SMS, no not by a long shot. Heavy users, older teenagers and young adults from the UK to South Korea to the USA have been measured sending on average 100 SMS per day.

If you send 100 text messages per day, and then you obviously would typically do that with friends who are also heavily into SMS text messaging, so you'd roughly speaking receive also the same amount - another 100 SMS text messages arriving on your phone daily - that means you're either reading or writing a text message every 5 minutes of all hours you are awake in the day (every single day of the year).

ADDICTIVE

SMS text messaging is a universal trend. It is proven to be addictive in university studies on mobile phone addiction from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium to Queensland University in Australia. Proven not just to be addictive, it is as addictive as cigarette smoking! (so there is absolutely no prospect of going back. Undestand this paragraph - SMS text messaging is proven to be addictive in university studies and as addictive as cigarette smoking - that means, that anyone who ever 'gets the habit' won't be able to stop). By the way, who was it who first told you in a book that SMS was showing signs of being addictive? Its yours truly, in my second book m-Profits in 2002. If you were around to read that book back then, and you bothered to follow up with my writing, you'd be a mobile messaging mogul and millionaire now (as some of my readers of course are).

As of this January the world was sending 12 Billion SMS text messages every day, which is half a billion messages every hour, or 9 million text messages every minute or 150,000 text messages sent globally every second of every day. Each of those is a paid or charged message. 150 thousand paid messages sent every second. To put it another way, this industry earns another million dollars of revenues - every 4.5 minutes

LETS TALK MONEY

So how big is it? SMS text messaging passed 100 Billion dollars in annual revenues two years ago and has now passed 113 Billion dollars in annual revenues for 2009. How big is that? For context, the global music industry is worth about 20 Billion dollars. Hollywood box office revenues are about 25 Billion dollars. Videogaming software income and console sales, combined, are worth about 40 Billion dollars. Internet based content incomes, such as paying for premium content like multiplayer gaming like World of Warcraft or Second Life, and various adult oriented services etc (excluding advertising income, so this is the directly paid revenues), is worth about 27 Billion dollars. Add all of those together, global music spending, global videogame spending, global cinema box office revenue and global internet content revenues and we are at 112 Billion dollars. SMS text messaging alone is worth 113 Billion dollars. And while music industry is in a death-spiral and most media are losing customers and losing a lot of money in 2009 when the global economy suffered, SMS text messaging revenues users by 11%, grew traffic by 27% and grew revenues by 7%.

Or to take another industry, SMS text messaging generates as much revenues as total worldwide radio broadcasting industry. Or closer to home for me, SMS texting alone earns more than the worldwide book publishing industry. That is a lot of money. And if we hark back to email, for comparison, internet based email earns less than 5% of what SMS earns. Yes, SMS text messaging is 20 times larger by revenues than email. The little brother has truly grown past its older sibling.

EVERYONE WILL USE IT

 

But yes, how far can it go? We all have that parent or uncle or boss who hates SMS (probably hates all mobile phones) and totally refuses to use SMS. It seems like there would be a part of society who will 'never get it'. For that, we now have absolute evidence. Research & Markets have just reported in February 2010, that Finland's total user base of SMS has reached... drumroll... 90% of the... drumroll... total... drumroll... ...population !!! Not 90% of the mobile phone "subscriber base", not 90% of mobile phone 'users'. In Finland SMS has now reached an active user base that is 90% of the total population!

Finland is where it all started, and now 17 years later, we are at the point where nine out of ten Finns are active users of SMS text messaging. Why is this such an astonishing number? We need to look at the total age pyramid of Finland to get its significance: 8% of the Finnish population is too young to finish first grade in school. So 8% of the Finnish population can not be expected to use SMS because they have not yet learned to read and write.

Now it truly gets astonishing. Yes, 92% of the total population of Finland have once learned how to read and write (Finland was one of the first countries in the world to reach 100% literacy, even the USA is not at 100% literacy). And now Reserach & Markets measures that 90% of the total Finnish population are active users of SMS. That means, that out of the population which is 'old enough' to know how to read and write, a massive 98% of that population uses SMS! That is truly a massive statistic. It is for all practical purposes 'everybody' because - in that last 2% who do not use SMS but who are old enough to have gone to school at some point, we have people with permanent disabilities that they cannot ever use SMS - they are either totally blind or 'legally' blind, and/or have amputations in arms/hands/fingers and unable to use a phone keypad. That last 2% includes those who have mental disabilities that they cannot learn to read or write. That last 2% includes the old and infirm, including those who are so old their eyesight cannot handle looking at a phone screen even with eyeglasses, or their hands are so hurt by arthritis they can't hold a phone. And that last 2% includes those who have reached those stages of old age like Altzheimer's that they can't remember people anymore and can't thus use a phone.

Yes, Finland is where it started and today, out of all people who know how to read and write, and who have the physical abilities to read, to write (and to remember), we have essentially 100% adoption of SMS text messaging.

I told you its addictive. And if so, it means it is only a matter of time before everybody will be doing it. If Finland is at this point today, you can be 100% sure, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Israel, Singapore, Italy, Austria, etc are only a few steps behind. The rest of the world will follow. Every country it will become true, even in the USA and Canada, that every economically viable person who knows how to read and write, will sooner or later discover the immense power of mobile phone based messaging - and will use it. And then its only a matter of time before they become addicted to it.

GOTTA TAKE A BREAK

So, your young adult friend just excused himself or herself and went to the bathroom. Did you notice that the young adult took their phone with them? If its a public restroom like at a restaurant, and someone happens to be listening - they won't hear your friend talking on the phone, no. We don't take the phone to the toilet to make phone calls. No, we use the phone in the bathroom to read and send messages. We can feed our messaging habit privately without drawing any attention. Nobody gets to eaves-drop on the discussion. And if the phone keypad and other 'beeps' are set to silent, nobody will even know what we're doing in there. As to teenagers, they are brazenly willing to send SMS text messages to someone else while they are talking to you. I am not kidding. 48% of British teenagers admit to doing this, sending text messages simultaneously while carrying on a conversation with someone else like their parents, teachers etc (Carphone Warehouse 2006).

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

 

Then we have those, still many 'luddites' in North America still, and occasional senior management in miscellaneous other laggard countries - where they wonder whether SMS is suited for business communications. This myth was destroyed early in the past decade in the UK, where typically very conservative British business executives discovered SMS and started to use it in business. Early statistics from the MDA (Mobile Data Association) reported that the majority of UK based executives used SMS for work - receiving as many as 40 work related SMS messages daily - and that British executives considered SMS their most valuable time-management tool. Think about it, the only resource a manager cannot replicate, is his own time. And if 'conservative' British executives felt SMS was their most valuable time-management tool, perhaps you should consider if this might be true.

Mobile phone based messaging is so powerful and necessary for modern high-speed management, that Barack Obama insisted he had to get to keep his Blackberry. That was in the Spring of 2009. Now consider Britain - UK former Prime Minister Tony Blair was using SMS in his government meetings back in 2004, five years before Obama brought it to US top government use. And how did Blair use it - he had approved the use of SMS during meetings, between Cabinet members, to allow them to communciate silently across the table - without disturbing the meeting. This is modern management. Not 'forbidding the Blackberries' as we still hear of some US CEO's decreeing - but rather to embrace the modern high-speed communications. Blair also had his Cabinet members use SMS to retrive data in real time from subordinates who were outside the meeting. But did Tony Blair invent this innovation? No. The Slovenian Prime Minister was using SMS back in 2000.

 

Why SMS, why not email? Think about it. How urgently do you respond to emails? 160 Characters measured in 2007 that we respond to email in 24 hours, but we respond to SMS in 5 minutes. How much faster is SMS? It is 288 times faster in response time than email! That is like comparing air travel speeds of a hot air balloon to a jet plane. SMS is the jet age of interpersonal communications. We have similar findings from 2008 that SMS is read and responded to within 15 minutes (Experian 2008).

 

SMS is the most discrete form of communication and it is the fastest form of communication. No wonder kids use SMS to try to cheat in tests. No wonder business executives use SMS in management. What started once as a 'teenager thing' has now reached the total population, every age of those who know how to read and write. And its not a consumer thing anymore, it has a valid place used in business the world over.

PREMIUM SMS

But the most widely used data application is not just a messaging platform for person-to-person communication. The first commercial or 'business' use of SMS was in Business-to-Consumer use, when Merita Bank of Finland offered banking balance alerts via SMS in 1995. We would see total banking solutions via SMS from the Philippines within a few years. Aamulehti the Finnish daily newspaper offered SMS based headlines from 1996. The first SMS-enabled vending machines were installed in Finland in 1998. Today most of Finland's vending machines accept mobile payments, the total count of such vending machines is past 1,000. Globally vending machine vendors are falling in love with the idea from Poland to Hong Kong.

1998 was the year the first paid 'premium' content was delivered via 'premium' SMS, which is also the birth of the 'mobile internet' or the 'mobile VAS industry' (VAS means Value-Add Services). That first paid premium content sold to the phone was the ringing tone, offered by Saunalahti (now part of Elisa) in Finland. A year later NTT DoCoMo would offer the first full 'mobile internet' service in Japan. But the first paid downloaded content to phones started here, in Finland with the ringing tone - delivered via premium SMS, twelve years ago.

In 1999 the first SMS-enabled mobile parking systems went live in Norway. In 2000 Finland offered the first SMS based advertising on MainosTV 3's mobile phone news headline service, totally free but advertising sponsored. 2000 saw the first use of SMS to pay for train tickets in Austria. 2001 brought us the first use of SMS based Check-in by Finnair. In 2002 we saw the first use of city public transportation by SMS when Helsinki Public Transport offered its tram and subway single tickets via SMS.

The list is too long for me to cover every example. Since then we've seen SMS-enabled payments of video rentals, lotteries, movie tickets, gym lockers, etc. SMS has been used to deliver alerts from libraries reminding you that your book is due, to hairdressers and dentists and doctors allowing you to book and reschedule appointments. SMS can be used to pay for the London congestion charge and is now used widely around the world for various charities such as relief after the hurricane that hit Haiti. Finland was the first country to adopt SMS as the nation's primary alert method for disaster communications and SMS has since been used across the globe to deliver national emergency warnings of anything from Tsunamis to the Bird Flu. And SMS 'notification' is legally binding as the required notification of a divorce in some Muslim countries. SMS acknowledgement is now legally binding as an electronic signature in contracts in Spain, and Estonia becomes the first country to accept SMS votes in a national election this year.

Some adoption numbers tell the tale in perhaps a more compelling way. United Airlines just announced that it is adopting mobile phone based check in, in the USA. A half dozen airlines in North America already do so (I believe Air Canada was first on that continent). But where they just are starting on this journey, we've seen mobile check-in in Europe and Asia for most of the decade, on airlines from Lufthansa to Japan Airlines to Norwegian. How about the leader? Finnair reported in 2009 that over half of its passengers, on its busy routes, use its mobile phone based check-in, which now includes multiple ways to access the services not just SMS, but also MMS, WAP and 2D barcodes (QR Codes). What of the public transport? Helsinki public transport reported in 2008 that 55% of passengers who bought single tickets on the trams and subway, used its SMS based tickets.

In Kenya, the SMS based banking services that launched only 3 years ago, have been so successful, that today 49% of all banking accounts in Kenya use mobile phone (SMS based) banking. Still, its not just Kenya. In South Africa you can get your total paycheck paid to you by SMS. In India the utilties like gas, electricity and water, will give you a 5% discount if you pay by SMS rather than by cash. Slovenia became the first European country where essentially every consumer payment could be done by SMS including taxis, restaurants, groceries, public transport etc. Parking was a particularly popular solution and I had ever more impressive numbers, until Estonia nailed the ultimate number - today 100% of parking in Estonia is paid for by SMS. No coins, no credit cards, no other payments, only SMS. They thus became the first country with the first (albeit small) industry - parking payments - that has cannibalized 100% of all other payment methods. SMS is the only way.

SMS AS MASS MEDIUM

What of content? SMS delivers news, entertainment, information and advertising - 74% of mobile phone subscribers in India receive SMS based advertising (Gfk & Limbo 2008). Worldwide in 2008 the total population of mobile phone users who received advertising passed 1.5 Billion recepients (Juniper Apr 2008). That was only 42% of all mobile phone owners at the time, but it meant that from 2008, more 'eyeballs' on the planet received ads on their phones than received ads in newspapers, magazines, the internet or even TV. And by far the vast majority of that mobile phone based advertising today is still SMS text messages globally. My consultancy TomiAhonen Consulting measured the total audience at the end of 2009 to be 1.8 Billion people which is only 39% of all mobile phone owners, yet is 50% more than the total global population of personal computers in use, including desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks.

Its not just media content delivered to the phone. SMS is used as a powerful interactive channel for older legacy mass media like TV, radio, print etc. 21% of UK television viewers vote regularly on reality-TV shows (M:Metrics 2006) which an impressive number until we go to Asia where we find numbers like India, where 44% of the mobile phone subscriber base has voted on a TV show using SMS (Vital Analytics 2009).

And while I have been an advocate, active user and student of SMS for over 15 years now, this messaging system keeps surprising me too.  SMS text messaging is the only mass media channel that will reach us in our sleep. Yes, we may fall asleep to CNN or MTV on the TV set - but that won't wake us up if something happened. It will just play in the background until perhaps we have the type of TV set that turns itself off after an hour or something. And the morning? We can wake up to the clock-radio beside our bed - and thus wake up to radio - but we have to set the alarm ourselves. Radio cannot turn itself on and wake us up. SMS reaches us when we sleep.

The Catholic University of Leuven study reported that 40% of all teenagers wake up to incoming SMS text messages occasionally. But that study was years ago and focused on teenagers. Now we have more astonishing numbers. Lightspeed Research surveyed the UK population and found that 67% of British citizens sleep with the phone in bed or by the bedside table (obviously using the phone as their alarm clock too). That is not an astonishing number (matches similar research from before) but this is - only 14% of the British population will turn their phones to silent for the night! So 53% of the British population sleep with their phone ringing on, and the phone in bed with them (Lightspeed June 2009). Very literally SMS text messaging is the only mass medium that can reach us while we sleep and wake us up in terms of an emergency or any kind of breaking news.

SMS WILL BECOME BIGGER THAN VOICE

 

And then we talk of our 'mobile' (or our 'cell') being a 'phone' ie mobile phone or cell phone. Yes, the 'phone' part of mobile comes from the fixed landline side, where what was originally called the 'voice telegraph' soon earned its own name as 'telephone' from the Greek as tele fon, long distance talk. Its a talking device, a phone. Sure it is. Except what was true of the fixed landline, is NOT true of the mobile. I am trying to learn to call it a 'mobile' and not a 'mobile phone' or 'cellphone' for that very reason. We are seeing an increasing proportion of mobile phone owners, who do not own their device for its voice call purposes. They consider SMS text messaging as the vital feature of the mobile, and voice calls as an optional extra. We have global numbers on this already - Lightspeed Research tells us that globally 87% of the population with a mobile phone do not originate voice calls but do send SMS. They tell us that in the UK 11% of mobile phone users behave like this, and in the USA, 13% of cellphone owners do not originate voice calls while sending SMS text messages (Lightspeed 2009). In India the proportion is now 90% using SMS, and only 66% originating voice calls (Yankee Group 2007).

I am not saying that voice calls are ending. We communicate in different ways when we use voice, and when we use text messages. But there is a growing part of the total phone ownership who do not originate calls. If they don't use calls - we should not call it a mobile 'phone' should we? And of course, this is an economic opportunity. In South Africa Vodacom introduced their 'call me' service. A free SMS text message that can be sent by anyone to anyone. It only says 'call me' and it is sponsored by advertising. But if you are poor or something has happened and you are for example out of credit on your pre-paid mobile account - then send the 'call me' message to your relative or friend, and they will call you. SMS helps bring more voice minutes, isn't it a magical service?

MMS WORTH 29 BILLION DOLLARS

Thats just SMS. What of MMS? What is so often thought of as a 'failure' and a horribly bad end-user proposition of expensive poor quality 'picture messages' sent from one cameraphone to another - is actually a very potent and powerful media platform. In China for example, 70% of all MMS messages are sent by machine, not by person, in various media and advertising uses (ZTE Jan 2009). MMS is so powerful as a media channel because it offers simple standardized messaging-based delivery of video, sounds, pictures, and more text than SMS. And while only 13% of all the mobile phones on the planet are 'smartphones' - a massive 80% of all phones in use - 3.1 Billion of them - can receive MMS messages. Yes, MMS reaches the pockets of 6 times more people than all smartphones put together. If you are a media guy and like your iPhone, then even if we add all iPod Touch's and use the 'total shipped' number of 75 million since 2007 (even though not all iPhones will be used anymore as some have been replaced with newer models) - MMS reach of MMS-capable phones is 41 times larger.

And on MMS we can deliver videos, sounds, pictures and text. And MMS is interactive. Evidence of Chinese use include the Chinese newspapers, all of which now offer the twice-daily service of headlines (with pictures, video and sounds of the news headline items, obviously) that the branded newspapers offer in their MMS news headline versions? How popular? 39% of the total audience of the Chinese newspapers already subscribe to the MMS news headline services (Morgan Stanley 2009).

Yes, as every user of SMS is familiar with the mobile messaging format and how its paid for etc, just like SMS, MMS is also inherently interactive. For many non-technical users, if they receive a news headline on MMS, they often think "oh, this is a cool SMS text message, that has a picture on it, very nice". MMS is a most compelling delivery platform - optimized for small screen mobile interactive media use! Think about it, its everything SMS was, but has the enhancements for media. A kind of super-SMS. No wonder media brands who try it, totally fall in love with MMS. It is also optimal for almost any kind of advertising from coupons to 'engagement marketing.'

MYTH OF MMS FAILURE

MMS would be the biggest mobile success story ever, were it not stuck in the shadow of its phenomenally successful big brother we know as SMS. Consider. MMS is only 8 years old. Yet, it delivers over 5 times more revenues than total email revenues worldwide. And email has been around for 39 years. MMS alone is bigger than global music, global cinema box office reveues, or total worldwide internet content revenues. Yes, MMS was worth 29 Billion dollars in 2009 according to TomiAhonen Almanac 2010, and researchers are in total agreement that MMS is growing faster than mobile messaging overall. Portio Research already says MMS will pass 31 Billion dollars in 2010, while Research & Markets says MMS will pass 32 Billion dollars in annual revenues. But the most telling comparison of MMS is with SMS. It took SMS nine years to reach one billion users. It took MMS only six years to hit that level. For revenues, SMS passed 30 Billion dollars of annual revenues in eleven years, MMS passed 30 Billion dollars in 8 years.

Do not misunderstand MMS. It is not a person-to-person messaging 'substitute' to SMS text messaging. This was the common failure we as an industry made. I am guilty of it, I wrote of this assumption in my early books. We thought that SMS traffic would 'migrate; to MMS. That has been proven to be false and the industry soon learned. I chaired the first three global MMS conferences in Vienna and we learned really fast. Yes, we can send picture messages from one cameraphone to another. But MMS is far more potent in delivering media content.

And what a powerful media platform it is turning out to be. We see it on television where innovative broadcasters augment their revenues with MMS for example sending soap opera previews of tomorrow's episode - 5 minutes of tomorrow's storyline, delivered today after today's soap opera episode has ended. Why not? This is an easy way to monetize TV viewership? Or send cooking recipes or games or coupons or simple puzzles like Sudokus etc. MMS earns five times as much money as ringing tones - the first 'value-add' or premium content 'success story' of the mobile telecoms industry. Note, that ringing tones themselves are 4 times larger than all of Apple's iTunes sales worldwide. Yes, we all wonder with 'ooh and aah' how great the iPod success had been and how much money iTunes has been able to generate to the global music industry in digital music downloads. But ringing tones are 4 times bigger globally - and then MMS is 5 times bigger yet. MMS alone is bigger than all music sales worldwide. Why are we not celebrating MMS as an astonishing global success story?

NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND USES MMS

"But Tomi, I don't use MMS". Yeah, and older people in the Western industrialized countries - who tend to be most of the readers of our blog - are not the first to adopt MMS. That is true. But the numbers do not lie. We have statistics from all major countries and the pattern is the same. The growth in MMS is rapid and global.

How many are using it? In the UK 62% of all mobile phone subscribers already use MMS (Aenas 2009) and in the USA, 40% (Jagtag 2009). The leading European country is Norway where 84% of the subscriber base uses MMS (TNS Gallup 2009). That is not surprising, as Norway is where MMS was first launched. In Asia we have issues with wealth and in the poorer parts of Asia the handset population is not all cameraphones and not all MMS-enabled (yet) but even today in China 28% of the subscriber base uses MMS (China Mobile 2009), even in very poor countries we are seeing solid numbers like in India MMS is used by 24% (Yankee 2007).

How big is the user base? MMS has 1.7 Billion active users worldwide in 2009 or used by 37% of the total global mobile phone subscriber base (TomiAhonen Almanac 2010). This compares with 1.4 Billion email users, and 1.2 Billion total personal computers in use on the planet. Yes, you reach more devices using MMS than any internet-based services including search, social networking and email - combined - on the internet. In fact, as the world has 1.6 Billion television sets, MMS will reach a larger active user base, than the total of all television sets in use on the planet. That is enormous reach indeed. Or if we think back to newspapers, the global total daily circulation of all newspapers, paid and free, is 470 million. MMS has 4 times as many paying users than total global newspaper circulation.

The amount of traffic in MMS is modest, when compared to SMS, obviously, but Informa counted that the world sent 43 Billion MMS in the fourth quarter of 2008, which translates to 3.5 MMS sent per mobile phone subscriber per month on average, or nearly one per week. And that traffic is growing at breakneck speed. Portio tells us that MMS traffic is growing at 48% in traffic and 22% in revenues, this year. This from the second most used data application on the planet. For contrast, email grew a modest 7% in 2009 (Netcraft 2010).

Please do understand this enormous opportunity. The iPod was launched in 2001 and grew sales until about 2007 when it levelled off. The world sells about 40 million iPods per year. The total installed base is about 250 million iPods. The content on the iPod is the iTunes music and video market, which produces annual revenues of all types of iPod content at about 2 billion dollars globally. The iPod was the tech press darling for much of the past decade until Apple launched the iPhone.

The Blackberry is a loved mobile messaging device that is optimized for wireless email, and it has its Blackberry instant messenger service and it is supreme for sending SMS text messages. Blackberry has sold about 75 million Blackberries since its launch in 2001. About 35 million people subscribe to the Blackberry messaging services which generate roughly a billion dollars of annual revenues.

Around the same time MMS was launched in January of 2002, and today MMS has 1.7 Billion users (7 times more than iPod, 20 times more than Blackberry), and generates 29 Billion dollars of revenues (15 times more than iTunes, 30 times more than Blackberry). This is a supreme, sublime technology and messaging platform. MMS is not a 'failure' by any means, and were it not for the unprecedented global success of SMS, we'd know of MMS's gigantic global success and celebrate it more.

WHAT NEXT

A couple of follow ups. First, if you happen to be involved in politics or your business is near to it, like providing communication solutions or advertising etc in politics, this year 2010 we have several major elections happening from the US mid-term elections to British parliamentary elections etc. Please understand the power of mobile messaging in your election campaign and read my Primer on Mobile in Elections.

If you'd like a short 2 page free document to remind you of the main facts, numbers, and stats about SMS and MMS, I have just rewritten my "Thought Piece" on mobile messaging, with 2010 updated stats and numbers. I like to think that everybody, even the busiest manager, has time to read 2 pages. So its yours if you ask for it by sending me an email to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com. Ask for the Thought Piece on Messaging and I will send the pdf file to you by return email. You can freely forward it to all your colleagues who wouldn't have the patience to read this type of long rambling Tomi Ahonen blog articles haha.

And if you want the facts of mobile overall, including obviously all the SMS and MMS related numbers and facts, please consider my TomiAhonen Almanac 2010. I have sample pages and sample stats at the ordering page.

Posted by Tomi T Ahonen at 07:32 AM in 7th Mass Media, Advertising, Books, Convergence, Darwin, Media, Messaging, Mobile, Networks, Newspapers, Statistics, Strategy, Television, Trends | Permalink

One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site.

Sound trivial? It isn’t. This is likely part of Facebook’s Open Graph API project that will incentivize third party sites to interact deeply with Facebook by sharing content and associated metadata.

Today you can “share” content with Facebook via a simple button (you can see our implementation at the top of this post). The new Like feature goes way beyond the Share button, we’ve heard.

Good for publishers? Yes. But it’s also very, very good for Facebook as hundreds of thousands of websites will rush to format their content to exactly Facebook’s preference and send over all their data without a second thought.

One way to think of this, says a source with knowledge of the product, is this. Google spends billions of dollars indexing the web for their search engine. Facebook will get the web to index itself, exclusively for Facebook.

Yes, it’s a big idea. Or, as MG put it, the entire Internet will be turned into a tributary system for Facebook. And it all flows from a simple Like gesture, and a few other features we’ll be writing about shortly.

 

 

While routinely searching for a person on Google, I came across a new feature in Google Search where Google is displaying Facebook friends for a particular user in the search results.

As you can see from the screenshot above, searching for my own name resulted in the following search results, the more interesting thing though is that Google is also displaying names of friends from Facebook (the above account is not mine though and belongs to another Keith D%u2019souza).

The friend list snippet is displayed for public Facebook profiles of users, it is not available for Facebook users who have disabled third party sites from accessing their information. Here is another example for a search I did for Robert Scoble.

Google did not display the Facebook Friends for Amit Agarwal, which might suggest that there are privacy settings restricting it. However, it did display the LinkedIn Profile information for the same search.

Why would Google want to display Facebook Friends in search results? The only reason I can think of right now is to allow users to see find people based on common friends. This could also mean that Google is trying to make it easier for people to find and connect with others through search results.

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to remove this information from the search results at Google. You will have to explicitly change the settings in Facebook and LinkedIn to make the information more private.

What do you think about the new additions to the search results? Do you think it would be helpful in finding the correct person? Or do you think that it is an invasion of your privacy?

 

 

 

a new angel came down from web 2.0 heaven this week. a new social crm plugin for gmail provides a 360 view of people with whom you correspond. but is the full monty treatment appropriate for all your contacts? and what are people seeing about you? never heard of rapportive? well, they've heard of you, and they're sharing that info with all your gmail contacts. 

rapportive, a service that integrates with gmail, got fabulous writeups. the next web was among the first to trumpet the news: "gmail gets a slick social crm tool. you're going to like this."  "stop what you are doing and install this plugin," gushed readwriteweb.com. and so on.

what is social crm? in this case, it's the ability to see what social channels one's correspondents are using, along with information collected from those social channels. rapportive adds a widget to the gmail interface (click on image to see larger):

 

naked to the world

cool beans, yes? well, kind of. let's take a closer look. rapportive found a pretty good picture of me on my linkedin profile. it found my birthdate somewhere or other and did the math. I don't much care if people know how old I am, but the placement is a little prominent. I think the work history comes from linkedin, as well. trouble is, it's not very current. to look at this, one would think I was still fighting the good fight to make a mortgage company look pretty. um, not since 2008.

the twitter handle? not me. the myspace account? not mine. hmm.

how do they know?

I tweeted my curiousity about where rapportive was getting its info and, more importantly, how I could correct it. I was impressed by how quickly rapportive's founders got back to me through twitter and by email. the information, they told me, came primarily from a site called  rapleaf.com. rapleaf appears to be some kind of scraper site on steroids. it searches up and down the lonely corridors of the interwebs looking for email address. my yahoo address was in my google profile, so apparently it looked for that, too. I secured btodd early on (a college nickname), and have been plagued since then by mail intended for every idiot in the universe with last name todd, first name starting with b, and an inability to correctly enter their email address. thus the bogus twitter and myspace. but I digress

there is no way to edit information in one's rapleaf profile. cup half full? it offers a preview of what the private eye will turn up for your divorce trial. but overall, not a good situation. the guys at rapportive tell me they are working to bring editing to profiles. that's good.

don't use gmail or rapportive? you're still in the crosshairs

the profile at right is for a professional contact. I was very surprised to see her age - she looks and acts far younger. I'm not going to visit her bebo profile or myspace page. but I could, and so could anyone who receives correspondence from her. what if the information is erroneous or incomplete, as on my profile? the millions of people who don't use gmail or keep up with social networking stuff are unknowingly providing access to personal information.

what about those who are part of the social media set? skillful personal branders and the like? how will they deal with a social profile outside their control? is this how chris brogan wants to appear? no smoking guns, to be sure, but the new media labs twitter handle is at odds with his formidable personal brand. or jeff cutler? it's no secret jeff drinks a bit, but surely he's more than just a billboard for a brewery?

could be the best rapportive profile is no profile at all - here's my dad's and another friend's (way to fly under the radar!)

especially after the  recent furor over google's buzz service, the absence of any contrary opinion about a service I see as far more intrusive and arbitrary is surprising.

what do you think? are you using rapportive?

note: research for this post was gathered by my amazing girlfriend and sleuth extraordinare  alice hanes. if you want to find out about something (or someone), hire her.