SOPA and PIPA Update: Congress has delayed consideration of the PIPA and SOPA bills, which – if enacted – would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Congratulations to all who took a stand and to all who signed the petitions that had been going around, including Google’s petition, in which we supported.
Google’s inbox message this morning to us for supporting the #AntiSOPA and #AntiPIPA stand.
On the SOPA/PIPA blackout day, January 18th, 2012, Oneupweb participated by representing via their homepage.
I first started using social media management dashboards (sometimes called ‘clients’ – somewhat confusing terminology in the digital marketing industry) several years ago, when I began managing multiple business accounts. Like many others, I’ve tried a number of different dashboards: CoTweet, TweetDeck (both pre and post-Twitter acquisition), Seesmic, UberSocial and, my favorite, HootSuite. Social media dashboards are great tools, offering customizable options for monitoring, engagement and analytics. But they’re not perfect.
Here are a few quick tips for using these tools more effectively:
1) Separate Business and Personal Accounts – Even if you’re allowed to use personal social media accounts at work, don’t manage them with the same dashboard you use for business accounts. It’s all too easy to post the wrong message to the wrong account, as Chrysler found out the hard way in 2009. Ouch.
A tweet intended for a personal account forced Chrysler to issue this apology in 2009.
2) Don’t Over-Schedule – Many social media dashboards offer a convenient scheduling feature for planning future updates. This is a great feature for companies interested in maximizing efficiency, but it also makes it easy to forget the real purpose your brand is using social media: to engage directly with your target market. Scheduling updates is no substitute for listening.
3) Don’t Insulate Yourself - By their very nature, social media dashboards have a tendency to detach the manger from the product itself – a Facebook Page, Twitter or LinkedIn profile, for example. Even though you’re posting from a third-party client, it’s important to make routine “site visits” on your social media channels themselves. This will help keep you ahead of the curve on design and user experience. Plus, networks often offer powerful analytics tools themselves – such as Facebook’s Insights.
Don't let your social media dashboard keep you from "the field." It's important to spend time visiting your various social media properties.
Are you using a social media dashboard? What other tips would you add?
Facebook’s Timeline has been one hell of a topic since F8 in 2011. The topic has been more about the word WHEN. When will it move from Beta? When can a user go live? When will everyone be switching to it? And now the question in my search today was when will everyone be forced over to it as the new design – no going back? That is the rumor this week. Rumor is that sometime this month Facebook users will be forced over to Timeline. It’s been all over Facebook and off. A good chunk are happy about it, yet a good chunk are ranting against it.
In doing a search today I wanted to see if I could verify if this rumor about the Timeline being forced was true – and if so, when? I haven’t been able to verify it as of yet today.
Do I think it will be the norm and the old style will be killed? Yes.
Why? Because Facebook is the Wild West character of our modern day cyber experience. They are the ultimate renegade to their own structure. In their land, there is no marshal though the FTC is indeed attempting to be their Wyatt Earp.
Even as we speak on the topic of the FTC and Timeline, there are talks that Timeline may already be breaking its FTC settlement. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has requested the FTC look into the new feature:
“Facebook is changing the privacy settings of its users in a way that gives the company far greater ability to disclose their personal information than in the past,” the group wrote. “With Timeline, Facebook has once again taken control over the user’s data from the user, and now made information that was essentially archived and inaccessible widely available without the consent of the user.” [Freeman: Mashable]
Facebook’s Timeline – not so timely. Possibly not so much in wearing its full face of trust, and masked instead with mystery.
What do you think? Share with us your thoughts on the Timeline.
Lately, I have been noticing some trends in social media usage of graphics. From Facebook to Twitter, or from Mashable to Social Media News blogs there is a definite trend. In this blog I’ll lay out what I have observed.
1. Cool Blue:
The dominate hue utilized in these graphics is the primary color blue. Whether its Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, blue is the definite dominate color across the color palette.
2. White Space:
A majority of the images used for blogs and articles across the web about social media have one common theme, and that is the use of white space. Notice the image I pulled from doing a Google image search on the word social media -
3. Iconic Buttons:
Most every social media platform has incorporated the ever-so-easy and recognizable button style icon to represent their brand. When we see the famous lower case “t” in robin-egg blue most instantly think Twitter. When we see the famous lower cased “f” in a deeper blue most instantly think Facebook.
4. People Paper Cut-Outs :
In a lot of articles and blogs about social media that show the human in the masses the graphics usually show the little human in what I call the paper cut-out style. It seems to be synonymous with the social media topic.
5. The Social Circle:
The last thing I noted was the use of the circle within social media graphics.
If you compare 28,439 likes vs. 853 dislikes, what result do you think would be the reporting YouTube view count? Common sense would predict that the view count would more than likely have it at least over 28,439 views, right? Wrong. Not even close. Try 303.
Notice it says 303 views but notice the Likes
Yes, you read that correctly. Three hundred and three views reported. Doesn’t sound like something possible from an online video giant like YouTube, but this is a common occurrence for videos that hit the 300 view threshold too fast.
Regardless of the frozen view count at 303 for DJ Earworm’s mashup for the top pop hits of 2011 the true count as of December 27th, 2011, was well over 28,439 views yet for several days it stayed reporting at 303 views. It wasn’t until today that YouTube finally joined real time and it is now reporting to be at 2,550,406 views. But the buzz it created in being frozen was most entertaining.
One viewer of the video commented that one possibility could be”… view count gets stuck when too many people are watching simultaneously.” (@getbanned123)
A few other viewers had some interesting comments to share on the view count as well:
What exactly is the algorithm for the YouTube view count?
YouTube View Count Algorithm: as explained by YouTube.
“YouTube employs proprietary technology to prevent the artificial inflation of a video’s viewcount by spam bots, malware and other means. We validate views to ensure the accuracy of the viewcount of all videos beginning with the first view. This validation process becomes publicly visible when the viewcount reaches 300. At this point, the viewcount may slow or temporarily freeze until we have time to verify that all further views are legitimate. Rest assured that the views system is working as intended, and that the viewcount will update as soon as the system has verified the legitimacy of the views.”
For such a video giant and popular website you would think they would have come up with an algorithm to report view counts in real time though.
"Scooby Doo - you know we have a mystery to solve!" -- FROZEN
Sometimes these frozen counts can last from 24 hours to, in some reported cases, a year. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate their validation process. It is great to know they take their site that serious in preventing abusive activities. But in the same token with the way some of these platforms these days are employing real time algorithm’s YouTube should solve this one a little more in real time as well.
Watching the reaction to the view count mishap yesterday with DJ Earworm’s mashup video was most entertaining, but at least now they are caught up and the world can enjoy the 2011 mashup while knowing the world really is watching in real time. Or at least we think?
But now, with no further ado, we end this social share with none other than DJ Earworm’s Mashup video “United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom)”. Happy New Year and here comes 2012!
How about you? What is your take on the YouTube view count algorithm?
