Writing the last post made me think, when was the last time you heard a modem?
Amazing how quickly technology changes and leaves a museum of sensory experiences in our memories, no longer being updated. What will be next to go? Will we look back fondly at that death-rattle noise you get when you’re standing next to a speaker just before your phone gets a text message?
Maybe not fondly, actually…
haptic: of or relating to touch.
The last few years have seen a shift towards the haptic in personal computer interface design. For several decades now the main paradigm has been visual-spatial, based on the metaphor of seeing things in space and being able to control their movement and arrangement. Of course, the mouse involved using touch to direct movement, but was not really fully haptic because of the difference in location between the hand performing the action (below your eyeline) and the action performed (on the screen, in your eyeline). The new paradigm is visual-spatial-haptic, to coin a really awkward term. Touch-screen devices create the illusion of direct manipulation. Maybe it isn’t even an illusion: you touch the screen, and changes take place beneath your fingers. This is not a new conversation.
Another day, another Facebook privacy story. Well, sort of. BBC News reports on the publication of a data file containing the publicly-available details of 100 million Facebook users by security consultant Ron Bowles.
Predictably, there’s anger and concern, much of it directed at Facebook. But I’m not sure the company itself is entirely to blame. I’m starting to think it’s a generational thing among internet users.
This is, after all, publicly available information. Yes, Facebook’s privacy settings are convoluted and offputting, but it is possible to lock down virtually everything with some determination and a small amount of time. Or – and I know nobody wants to hear this – you can simply not use Facebook if you’re more deeply concerned about putting personal data online. In much the same way that, back in the olden days when I learned to use the interwebs, you might consider not having a web page.
Altimeter’s paper on The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing makes for an interesting read.
Here are Altimeter’s eight criteria:
And here’s their heuristic analysis of how different categories are performing.
The BBC News website’s Tech Brief pointed me towards this post on Religion Dispatches, which revisits the argument for the similarity between hypertext and the literary practices of medieval monks:
The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet pages.
Of all the social media statistics, this one is most loved. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. With 500 million members, only China and India are bigger. But what kind of a country would it be?
A country governed by a small unelected elite.
A country which conducts routine intelligence on its populace.
A country in which the main sectors of industry are farming and organised crime.
PSFK (along with others) reports on the adoption by two British police forces of IBM’s CRUSH system. CRUSH (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) ‘analyzes parameters like crime records, offender profiles and intelligence briefings to look for patterns and identify potential areas where a crime may occur’. It’s interesting stuff.
This kind of predictive analytic cartography isn’t new, though. Charles Booth showed a similar range of interests when making his London Poverty Map in the late 1890s. Booth was part of a generation of analytically-minded social reformers who gave Britain an insight into the geography of deprivation. His colour-coded classification of London streets shows that his interest extended beyond mapping poverty to understanding its effects. He describes the black-shaded areas as ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’.
Are location-enabled social networks a golden opportunity for marketers? Brian Solis says yes, by virtue of engagement potential; Forrester says no, by virtue of demography. So I’ll say not yet, by virtue of network effects.
In a nutshell, I argue this. For now, I’m not sure anyone’s found the extra benefit that comes from marketing in an environment that combines geolocation and social network effects (as opposed to one or the other). In the future, they may, but I suspect they’ll concentrate their efforts on already-massive social networks (e.g. Facebook) and sharing platforms (e.g. Twitter) as they add geolocation functions.
This is a presentation on Starbucks’ digital strategy by Alexandra Wheeler, their digital strategy director. As you’d expect, it’s pretty much the last word on how Starbucks does digital.
Here’s a thought.
I’ll go mad if I hear another marketer claim that online social media has empowered consumers to talk about marketing. The implication is that they didn’t do this before. This is a little like claiming that the birds didn’t sing until someone recorded them singing.
Social media channels have done more than improve the general audibility of people’s conversations (about everything). They have shifted the balance of power away from those people and organisations who traditionally had access to mass broadcast media, including marketers. This is pretty obvious.
In South Africa they use the term ‘historically disadvantaged’, which seems ripe to be applied to those of us who can now be heard through social media.