Social Networking

Social Media and the Human Return on Investment, because contrary to popular belief we use social networks to socialise, not to shop. As we grow older and more mature our close network of friends changes and evolves. We go from school friends to university friends and then to professional friends. In the process we move from a village to another village, from a town to another town and eventually from one city to another. In the process the links we have with some friends strengthen and others degrade over time. This is modern life. I find it hard to discern whether the return on time invested on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others is decreasing because people’s understanding of these social networks is shifting or whether it is related to growing up. As the people I know get married and have children their priorities change and privacy becomes more important. We have to keep the children safe. Facebook, as a social network is less engaging than it used to be. The people I have as friends post less frequently, the events we can participate in together is shifting and the content shown in timelines is evolving. To compensate for the decline in friends engaging in social networks like twitter and Facebook people are following publications, brands and news sources. This flow of information is tailored to the lowest common denominator. The sensationalist writing style discourages me from following these sources of information. I have a concern that what were social networks until two or three years ago have become advertising networks on which people occasionally socialise and interact with other individuals. I feel that a bigger and bigger portion of the time that people spend on advertising networks is looking at mainstream content and comments. On Facebook as I scroll down the timeline I notice an increasing number of adverts. Personal posts are less and less frequent. Has the community left this “social” network? I have spent years thinking about online communities and how they interact. During this time I have seen the ebb and flow from one type of community to another across multiple platforms and applications. Within the next two to five years social networks will be virtual reality environments such as we saw with World of Warcraft, Everquest and Second Life. The question is whether people will want to socialise in virtual reality or whether it will be populated by gamers. Every online social network is stigmatised. This stigmatisation prevents people from fully exploiting the potential of social networks. We see this stigma through the use of dating apps rather than Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks. Dating apps are stigmatised but at least you swipe left or right and you’re done. ;-). You’re only “active” for a few seconds at a time. On Facebook and twitter you need to be active for hours, days, weeks or even months… You have to be careful. You may be stigmatised. ;-) Now that most people see social networks as a waste of time it gives us more time to do other things. It gives us time to read, to do research, to watch television and even to go two or three hours without looking at a mobile or computer screen. Imagine that. ;-) I believe that on the one hand the stigmatisation of Social networks as a waste of time has discouraged people from using them to their full potential. As a result of this people feel comfortable spending ten to fifteen minutes a day on these networks. On the other hand I see marketers, public relations specialists and advertisers push for their campaign to be seen. As peer to peer communication goes down and human return on investment (ROI) decreases, and as marketing campaigns take over the timelines they are effectively closing the door on people’s motivation to spend time reading through their timeline.

I have been active on the World Wide Web for two decades, two thirds of my life. Half of that time has been spent as a twitter  user. I was among the first to use the service and I saw it go from being a curiousity to being the most popular conversation tool around. When twitter was young the iPhone was in it’s infancy and data plans did not exist. As a result it was SMS based. The SMS idea was short lived as it ended up costing the twitter founders too much. Twitter owes an immense debt of gratitude to Apple, the iPhone and the shift towards mobile data plans somewhere other than Finland. When we were Twitter infants, when we were discovering the network and thinking of how to use it we were stuck at a computer and dependent on wifi and power sockets. If we left the house we missed on the conversation. Twitter at the time was a compelling network, especially since I was lucky enough to live in London during the golden age of Twitter. Twitter is a fantastic and compelling social network that has the wrong people affecting its feature. Marketers, public relations professionals, investors and other groups are too busy trying to push content to people rather than attract people. Yesterday afternoon I came across the term “Organic Social media” in relation to Instagram’s shift from a reverse chronological timeline to an algorithm driven timeline. A shift in the definition of social media has taken place. A decade ago social media implied that people were sharing content and commenting on it. They were making statements and friends and colleagues would comment conversationally. Marketers et al have destroyed the conversation and shifted everything towards an “I am the best so look at me” fed by likes, comments, shares and other tricks. As Twitter turns ten years old I grow curious about the future of friendships and online conversations. I question whether social media landscapes will become as unfriendly to introverts as bars in the physical world. Will social media become the place where the most conventionally appealing individuals thrive?

Instagram is a photo based social network that allows two types of users, ego-maniacs on one side, and explorers on the other, to share images of interesting things they see and do. Some people share beautiful mountain images and others share images of their trips to Paris, Rome and more. I share images of Via Ferrata, climbing and a number of fun sports. The ego-maniacs share images of themselves in as many places as possible. Instagram is a “last active, first seen” kind of social network. We see the most recent images first. We see active users frequently. Less engaged viewers are less visible. This is a participation reward model. The more engaged you are with the community and the more people will see your content. There is no favouritism. The algorithmic timeline will penalise the most active users and encourage the cult of personality. The Cult of Personality social media model is great for marketers and public relations accounts because it makes those with the most likes and comments more visible. When you’re conversing with two hundred or more people this is enviable. As people interact connections are created and communities form. Conversations are a two direction affair. According to Statista Instagram now has 400 million users. Selena Gomez is the most followed person on Instagram at the time this post was written. 69 million people follow the account. Images from the account are suitable for a glossy magazine rather than a social network. They lack in warmth and familiarity. The account is cold as a result.  These cold and impersonal images can easily get a million likes and algorithms will push this content to the detriment of images by friends and family. [gallery ids=“2784,2785,2786”] Chronological timelines are great because activity and personal engagement reward account holders. When you switch to an algorithm based timeline you will unfollow celebrities to avoid having their posts flood your timeline. Facebook demonstrates what happens when you shift from a chronological timeline to an algorithm timeline. User engagement and interest declines and what were once vibrant conversations lose in appeal and the return on invested time, for users declines. This decline results in the network’s tab being closed in our browsers and the app becomes dormant. Dormant networks resort to sending e-mails to re-engage their users. Both Twitter and facebook do this. Imagine if you received a tweet to let you know that you got an e-mail or that e-mails appeared in your Facebook timeline. It demonstrates that networks like Facebook and twitter, by focusing on making money, forgot to make their products essential. By making this mistake both Facebook and Twitter need to nag us to come back via e-mail. If algorithms are used in timelines then the algorithm should keep posts by our friends chronological and apply the algorithm to celebrity accounts. We already have an algorithmic option on Instagram via the explore tab. Instagram must resist the urge to break personal timelines as this will disengage users. [gallery columns=“2” ids=“2787,2788”]

According to a New York Times writer, Narcissism and the World Wide Web are increasing. “Narcissism is increasing…”

If our egos are obese with amour-propre, social media can indeed serve up the empty emotional carbs we crave. Instagram and the like doesn’t create a narcissist, but studies suggest it acts as an accelerant — a near ideal platform to facilitate what psychologists call “grandiose exhibitionism.” No doubt you have seen this in others, and maybe even a little of it in yourself as you posted a flattering selfie — and then checked back 20 times for “likes.”

  Myshake is an android app developed by UC Berkeley to use mobile phone sensors as earthquake detection and measurement devices.

When the shaking fits the vibrational profile of an earthquake, the app sends the anonymous information to our central system that confirms the location and magnitude of the quake.

There are more than a billion smartphones currently in use. If everyone with an android mobile phone downloads the app and has it running then hundreds of extra data points can be collected. It will provide seismologists with a much larger and far broader data set. Seismologists will be able to collect such a breadth of data that they will be able to understand what is happening in more detail. They can compare data from a diversity of points, whether on one side of a bridge or the other, from the inside of one building or the other and more. It should help with computer models and provide more insight in how materials are affected by earthquakes.

I wanted to write about Social Media and the Lizard brain. My experience of information technology and Social Media is that it is a great tool for people from different backgrounds to come together and have a calm and logical conversation. Some people believe that “we need a social media with heart that gives us time to think.” I strongly believe that the culprit is not social media but rather the way people are taught to think in general and how the stigmatisation of online interactions has led people to feel negative when using social media.

Ben Thomspon wrote, “How Facebook Squashed Twitter”.  The article looks at social networks from a marketing point of view. I like conversational social networks. Social networks by their very name are for conversations. They are about connections and they are about friendship, collaboration and more. 

In its Golden age twitter was a social network to establish new friendships with people we had yet to meet. It was a great tool, especially in places like London where the community of users was big enough to be interesting. Facebook, on the other hand, was a network of school friends, university friends and eventually colleagues. Facebook was more of an interactive yearbook.

I have been using sports tracker for years. I first used it on the Nokia N95 8GB several years ago. This was an excellent app that allowed you to track your moves using the mobile phone as a GPS. The limitation of such an app was battery life on mobile phones. The battery usually did not last more than an hour at first and eventually progressed to two hours or more. The first Suunto Device I used was for diving. I used the Suunto D9 dive computer for many months before upgrading. As I satisfied with this device I bought the Suunto Ambit 2 and eventually the Suunto Ambit 3. The reason for buying these watches is battery life. As normal watches they can last for 100 days, losing about one percent a day. If you use them as fitness watches then they easily last for a day or more. When you’re doing via Ferrata, hiking, cycling or doing other sports you want the device you use to track your fitness efforts for as long as you’re going. That’s where Sports trackers and other mobile phones had their weakness. Mobile phone apps sometimes crash. If you’re pushing yourself hard during a workout you do not want to reach the end of a workout with no data. Another frustration I often encountered was with Movescount, Suunto’s social sports app. At the end of quite a few workouts, I was unable to sync my workout data and analyse my progress. At the time, I wanted to see Suunto and Sports tracker combined. They’re both Finnish companies and they both excel at specific tasks. Suunto for the hardware and Sports tracker for the analytics. By combining the two we have the best of both worlds. Communications between Movescount and Sports tracker has been available for several weeks at this point and it works flawlessly. I have hiked, cycled, walked, sailed and climbed and each activity has synced without problems. [gallery ids=“2690,2689,2688”]

Every day I am reminded of the Idiocy of the Hashtag. Twitter is a conversational medium where the more we converse the more addictive the social network becomes. Every single @ reply was a reaction to what we said or shared. Connections between users were strong and so the network effect took twitter from being a strange experiment in 2006 to being a social network from 2007-2009. In those days we engaged with people directly. Social media marketers, people with families and other priorities came to twitter and decided that they would indoctrinate people in to seeing twitter as a broadcast rather than conversation tool. Broadcasting did away with the conversation. It replaced the conversation with buzz words like ROI (return on investment) and other buzz terms. From a conversational medium where everyone talked directly to everyone else these “experts” hijacked the conversation and encouraged the use of the hashtag. The hashtag took person to person communication, encapsulated it in a hashtag and neutralised the individual to individual communication channels. Individual to individual communications are what makes all social networks addictive. If I believe that someone wants to listen to me, to talk, to exchange ideas then I am likely to make time for them, to read what they have to say, to create a personal connection. That personal connection had me travel to Paris, London, Geneva, Lausanne, Lille and other destinations. Imagine that twitter was still a conversational medium. Imagine that we established personal connections with the event organisers. Imagine that instead of a hashtag we were talking with the twitter account of event organisers. Imagine for a moment that twitter was seen as networking, that socialising on this network was not seen as a waste of time. Imagine that it was seen as a wise investment of time. I was at two international events last month in Geneva and I had my laptop and a data connection (or two if we count event wifi). I could have listened and live tweeted the events and I could have engaged people socially. I could have engaged with the panel and the speakers. They want me to use a hashtag. I refuse to use hashtags because a hashtag is not a conversation. A hashtag is metadata. Metadata should be used to help with threading but should not be the conversation. The conversation, comments and thoughts should go directly to the organisation. The impact of a conversation is far stronger than a hashtag. A hashtag is solitary, is lonely, is disjointed, fails to engage. We see it’s weakness every time an event takes place. I was at one event where I saw that the hashtag only appeared in tweets by the event organiser. The only other place it appeared was in retweets. If you work as a social media marketer you need to engage with people. You need to get people to reply to your tweets, not tweet a hashtag. Event twitter accounts should serve as a conversation hub. They should trigger groups of people at the event and following the event remotely to converse, to share what they think, what they do, who they need to help them. There are two strengths to twitter that very few people use. These are the ability to connect with like minded people before an event, so that by the time you meet them in person you can proceed with a collaboration rather than small talk and secondly to connect with other people after an event, to establish more personal connections. Remember that twitter is a 140 character medium. Twitter is great for short conversations and quick updates. It lacks in substance when it comes to sharing content. Facebook, Google Plus are better when what you have to share takes more than 140 characters. Facebook and Google Plus allow you to build connected communities in a way that is impossible on twitter. Both Facebook and Google Plus have threading, have topic separation and more. They are modern web forums. Twitter is a chat room. Use the web forums to have threaded conversations around specific events and panels and use twitter to establish personal connections with event attendees and others. Yesterday Twitter decided to allow people to follow 5000 twitter accounts. “While it’s entirely possible to see a lot of activity when you’re following 2,000 accounts, the 5,000-user limit increases the chances that you’ll see something interesting.“ Social network stickiness relies on familiarity and a personal connection. If you follow 5000 accounts there is an excellent chance that you will fail to personally engage with any of these accounts. As a result twitter will be the place you visit because of hype rather than personal interest. Twitter is a conversation medium that has identified itself as a broadcast medium which is why there are so many spammers present today. It has encouraged people to have millions of followers, it has encouraged people to follow other people whom there is no chance of personal engagement. They have encouraged their user base to listen rather than interact. Look at the million follower accounts and how they idealise this, rather than the more manageable 300 person limit. Three or four years ago there was some discussion on the number of people that individuals could know well and that number was low. They said that we could get to know about three hundred people well. This means that if we’re on twitter we should not follow more than three hundred people. We should follow those whom engage with us. We should make time available to those who make time available for us. We should make sure that we have personal connections with as high a percentage of those we engage with in social media as possible. When twitter was still a social network and twitter celebrities were still normal people we could converse with iJustine, Sarah Austin, Chris Brogan and many others. With Seesmic we could connect with Scoble and Le Meur. In the early days we could create warmer connections because there were fewer of us and attention was not as costly as it is today. Essena O’Neill is one of the people who came to social media too late. She managed to have more than half a million followers which is fantastic for the ego. Half a million followers would make most people happy.

People on linkedin were discussing whether social media campaigns are worth organising and keeping. When it comes to extreme sports such as Via Ferrata, rock climbing and other extreme sports then I believe that the audience is ready and enthusiastic enough for a social media presence to be desirable. Via Ferrata is an outdoor sport that can be practiced in France, Italy, Spain, Switezrland, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Peru. As a result of the diverse place where this sport can be carried out so social media became an excellent avenue through which to share information about the sport.   I have loved the sport of via ferrata for five years now, half a decade. What I loved about it was the simplicity of the sport. After just two or three climbing lessons and going with a guide once I saw that I could handle via ferrata comfortably without a guide. I always insisted that I would take people with rock climbing experience, not absolute beginners. Via Ferrata is a specific sport requiring specific equipment and specific experience. It requires a head for heights and an ability to hike for an hour or two before a climb and another hour or two after the climb. As the locations are usually remote it also requires someone with a car and whom can navigate. Social networks such as Glocals for Geneva and Lausanne, Xdreams, for Geneva specifically and the Via Ferrata Suisse group for the French speaking part of Switzerland are good places to find participants. The first two examples are to connect with the international/english speaking community and the latter is to connect with the French speaking community. Glocals is a local social network helping the international community in Geneva, Lausanne and other cities to meet up and be active. Through this site you can meet people to work on hangover, meet people to scuba dive and meet people to do outdoor sports such as hiking, climbing, via ferrata, swimming, canyoning and much more. Due to the nature of the social network are spread around Switzerland and the meeting point is usually the event, with car sharing from strategic points.   Via Ferrata Suisse is a nice online community for French speaking via ferrata practitioners on Facebook. As they are spread across the French speaking parts of Switzerland they can provide information and tips on via ferrata that are local. Aside from connecting people social networks and social media are great for the sharing of pictures, personal accounts and textual information about via ferrata. Some people want beautiful landscapes and so pictures will help them select which via ferrata to do. Others are afraid of heights so they will avoid being too far from the ground. A third group will look at how exertional via ferratas will be. I have seen two people run out of energy at Plan Praz and I have seen everyone feel weak by the time they finish the Leukerbad Via Ferrata. Tourism professionals and equipment manufacturers can benefit from a social media presence. I see that Iloveclimbing, Suunto, PETZL, Mammut and other brands actively share the adventures that either their athletes or enthusiasts of their equipment are enjoying. It’s a great way to make me dream of going to some locations, getting that piece of kit or trying an activity at that time of day. To give a specific example I have wanted to do the Moléson by night Via Ferrata for years now and have never got around to it. For two or three years it was because of work and this year it was because of the weather and because I had already booked Leukerbad for the weekend it was moved to. Next year I will make it. I love suunto, Mammut and PETZL. Rather than advertise to the city dweller like Apple, Fitbit and withings do they organise social media campaigns around the great outdoors and around extreme sports. As a result of their social media policy I identify very strongly with their products. In the case of suunto I have dive computers and fitness watches. I understand the passion that their athletes represent in their social media campaigns. Social media is about socialisation and passion. Via Ferrata is a sport that people feel passionate about but because it requires physical fitness and a head for heights your pre-existing group of friends may not be the best suited for your passion to take off. That’s where social networks and social media can help find new via ferrata, see what to be wary of and meet new people. According to these three parameters Via Ferrata and social media are perfect for each other. Sports companies, tourism offices and transport infrastructure would result from a social media presence.