It’s Digital Week time again, as the PN Digimites tell us what they’ve been reading about online in the last seven days (originally posted at Clicking & Screaming).
(Giant bra with people on it from Funny Potato)
“White.”
As Facebook status updates go, that’s pretty lame. A whole bunch of my female Facebook friends updated their statuses with one colour or another last week, and it quickly became apparent that for some reason they were telling us what colour bra they were wearing.
But why? Well, this was a rather impressive and simple viral campaign designed to raise awareness of breast cancer. It seems some chain letters went around a couple of weeks ago (I’m a little uneasy about that bit) and then messages/chat messages were sent to female Facebookers explaining what was happening and encouraging them to get involved. As far as I know, nobody has yet claimed responsibility.
So if it’s anonymous, what’s the point? Caroline McCarthy’s The Social notes that this campaign has a compelling ‘curiosity’ factor: “with no explanation for an individual status message, onlookers who saw a handful of them would wonder what kind of in-joke they weren’t understanding and might start investigating simply out of curiosity.”
That’s certainly true, but so is Caroline’s pointing out that online charity campaigns don’t necessarily convert popularity into cashmoney. In terms of a awareness, though, this one might just be mission accomplished.
The end of privacy?
So says Mark Zuckerberg, the irritatingly wealthy founder of Facebook. Having started the site as a relatively private space (not searchable, one had to be friends with someone else to see all their stuff, the idea of complete openness was anathema, etc.) Zuckerberg recently told TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington that “if he were to create Facebook today, user information would be public by default”.
It’s an interesting change of heart from Facebook, and Zuckerberg’s justification that the social web has changed so fundamentally that we’re now not bothered by privacy presumably has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that being able to share all of our tasty, tasty data and content might just be pretty useful for his company.
Fellow PN digi-person Kerry has spent some time picking apart aspects of Zuckerberg’s interview with Arrington and also the ReadWriteWeb reaction linked above. I recommend it.
Mashable for sale (?), gets criticised and engages
Leading social media blog Mashable is at the centre of takeover rumours at the moment, with AOL potentially leading the list of possible suitors. The rumoured sale prompted Adam Singer at The Future Buzz to comment on the downside of Mashable: its perceived focus on quantity over quality.
I’m a daily reader of the site (indeed, it regularly makes an appearance in this very column) and I do so because it is quick off the mark with news and provides a starting point from which to further research its stories. But I too have noticed that it sometimes makes for painful reading despite its almost immeasurable usefulness for folk like me.
The words “traffic” and “linkbait” are crucial when it comes to any discussion of Mashable‘s worth, and this is reflected in the sheer volume of posts on the site, many of which could be deemed off-topic or even not newsworthy. It does seem as if the slightest flinch in the world of social media ends up on the site, sometimes repeatedly.
However, Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore definitely “gets” social media and understood the importance of engaging with Adam, and he did so well. In his comment on Adam’s post, Pete politely welcomed the commentary on his site and offered an invitation to discuss matters further. As Adam noted in his follow-up post, the very fact that he’d made a follow-up post speaks volumes for Pete’s response and can only work to Mashable‘s advantage. Now, about this AOL sale…
Meltwater stands up to NLA
Stephen Waddington and Steve Earl over at Speed Communications have been keeping tabs on the developing situation involving the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) and the distribution of web-based news clippings. As a previous edition of this column covered last month, NewsNow has already made its move by scrapping links to a group of mainstream media news sites.
And now, Steve has posted to tell us all about the forthcoming copyright tribunal and the statement submitted by Meltwater, a news monitoring company whose very raison d’etre could become very costly if it suddenly has to fork out cashmoney to the NLA every time they service a client.
Steve explains: “Meltwater’s approach in bringing the tribunal hinges on its insistence that end-users who receive its lists of breaking online news stories are not breaking copyright law in any way, so the NLA cannot legally compel them to pay licence fees that assure their copyright compliance.”
So, if copyright law looks at the relationship between the newspapers and Meltwater’s clients, and those clients are not breaking copyright law just by visiting a website, why exactly should Meltwater pay licensing fees to the NLA just for forwarding a link? I think it’s a compelling case, not to mention the fact that the newspapers should be grateful for any form of traffic generation given their current state.
Facilitating superfandom
One of my favourite blogs, Hypebot, has been thinking about the pros and cons of engaging extreme fans over “normal” fans in the world of music. According to a study, just four percent of those surveyed would be classed as extreme fans, so why is it that so much of a band or artist’s attention is dedicated to such a small percentage of its target market. It’s a natural leaning, of course, but it’s one which neglects the normal fans (those who might hear and like a song on the radio but not follow the band on Twitter, for example) somewhat.
Despite the supposed ratio of normal to extreme being 25 to 1, I actually think engaging the superfans online is crucial to a band’s success. They are trendsetters and can develop into a passionate core support group which can act as the ‘kicker’ for a band’s development. The rest can be mopped up with radio campaigns and traditional music marketing methods. Social media has made it easier to treat the extreme fans to better engagement (which they want and normal fans don’t), so why not just go with the flow?
Meanwhile, RWW has news of a web app which helps the superfans stay on top of their game: Roadie. “Roadie creates an RSS feed or iCal based on a user’s Last.fm favorite acts or a custom list of manually entered bands. Essentially, it allows users to keep up with album releases quickly and painlessly.”
That’s more like it.
