Techization

A research report from eMarketer proves 2009 to be the year that Baby Boomers jumped on the social media train.  2009 saw an explosion of growth with the older folks and consistent and steady growth for us young guns.   Check out the graphs below.

You can read a bit more on this newly release report  at Mahable.

I know it has been awhile everyone!  I have been super busy here at UW-Stout with classes and work.  Here is a nice in-depth entry I prepared for UW-Stout administrators on the use of Facebook in their crisis management plan.  Enjoy!

Facebook Overview

Facebook is the Internet’s phone book.  It is way to connect with friends, find old classmates and stay in touch with loved ones who live far away.  Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg at the age of 19 while attending Harvard University.  It was originally founded to be used at Harvard by students only. Facebook spread like wildfire on-campus and soon Zuckerberg and his co-founders distributed the service to forty-five schools and had hundreds of thousands of users within 6 months.   They were onto something.  It was at this point Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to pursue Facebook as a full-time venture in the summer of 2004.  Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Facebook to this day and has a net worth of over 2 billion.  Facebook has been estimated at a staggering $15 billion dollars by Microsoft Corp.  (Wikipedia, 2009)  In 2008, more than 93% of UW-Stout students had an active Facebook account.  (Kaskavitch, 2009)

Facebook User Count:  Over 310 million active users

Facebook Behavior during Crises

Virginia Tech, I35 bridge collapse, US Airways 1549 all have one thing in common.  Each event spurred dozens if not hundreds of Facebook groups often within an hour of the actual even occurring.  These groups on the network provided an open platform to share information at a very fast pace.  Facebook groups were setup during the Virginia Tech tragedy within 15 minutes of the news breaking on what was occurring.  News and information spreads faster than ever before.  So fast sometimes it can cause information overload.  A study published in New Scientist magazine in 2008 found that social network sites like Facebook, instant messengers, blogs and micro-blogging sites like Twitter spread warnings and information more efficiently than traditional communication channels.  (Catone, 2008)

How to utilize Facebook for crisis management

The big question:  How does UW-Stout utilize this tool in its campus crisis management planning?

The answer to this question is by creating “dark groups” on Facebook.  Dark groups are groups that are only visible to the creator and those whom the creator selects to invite, these are known as “secret” on Facebook.  These dark groups can then be pre-loaded with crisis plans and content that students, faculty and staff will need to know in the event of a campus crisis.

These groups will need to be altered and information about the actual incident will need to be added to the group description because of the fluidity of emergencies, but that should only be a paragraph or two.

Once a crisis occurs, you simply make the group public and invite the first ten or fifteen students.  With that small starting cluster of users, the group should grow exponentially will little administration effort.  It would also be worthwhile to put it on the UW-Stout home page to align it with other official channels of communication like news releases, blogs and messages from Chancellor Sorensen.  The power of viral spread via Facebook was demonstrated when students organized the Westboro Baptist Church counter-protest in under 36 hours.  All this organization and information exchange was done with a simple Facebook event.

You will need to consider a few things before considering yourself prepared to use Facebook as a platform in crisis management

• Will you include photos and videos in the group?  If so, will only administrators be allowed to upload media or will everyone be allowed to contribute?
• Do you want to enable the ‘wall’ to allow open conversation?
• Do you want the discussion board enabled?
• Who will manage it in the event of a crisis?

Organizations want very tight control on the messages being delivered and content being passed between users, especially during something as serious as a campus emergency.  Locking down the group and making it a billboard inside a walled-garden is not effective.  You have to be willing to open up and let information flow across the channel in an unfiltered manner.  The speed at which is can go back and forth across this medium could be incredibly useful during an emergency.  You want your message to get out, and you should want feedback from your receiving audience as well.

Creating dark groups on Facebook will not stop other groups from forming.  Having the official group will bolster much more credibility than groups created by students.  You will not be able to censor these groups and the information exchanged on them.  Having the official group and positioning/advertising it as an official channel of communication will make it more relevant and more likely ‘the place to be’ for your target audience to gather and exchange information.  You will be able to:

• Censor information (only if absolutely necessary)
• Direct message all members of your group instantly.
• Control the message and information presented within the group.

All these become possible only if you have administrator privileges in the group.  You would not be able to do the above points if you simply joined a student’s group and tried to calm the flames or correct information as a regular member.

There is one ‘issue’ with pre-creating these groups ahead of time.  You will need to name them right away and you cannot change them later on.  Therefore, you won’t be able to put actual situation specific information in the group name.  Some advocate practice setting up these groups, know the setting’s you want and have the information ready to paste into the group.  You would actually create the group once the emergency or crisis occurs allowing for a detailed group name.

New technologies and communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook connect large clusters of students like never before.  Information is exchanged at light speed and exchanged more efficiently than more traditional channels of communication.

I was browsing my Facebook photo albums yesterday and was stunned!  I had over 30 photo albums and nearly all the photos in them I had not saved the original digital photos.  This blog is a bridge to a another recent blog of mine entitled ‘Is Media Becoming Too Disposable?’.  I knew I needed to act to back-up all these memories from the last four years.  You could go one-by-one and save each photo individually.  That would take forever!  I found a great Firefox plug-in that saves entire Facebook photo albums to your hard drive in one easy click.

The plug-in is called FacePad.  FacePad is a simple Firefox plug-in that allows you to right-click a Facebook photo album and download all photos inside very quickly.  An album of 60 photos takes about five seconds to download on a 10 meg connection and places the photos where you specify within Firefox preferences.

What could be a ‘Facebook creeper’ use of this plug-in?  You could begin archiving Facebook photo albums from friends and random people on Facebook, then place them into software that is now available with face recognition technology.  Tag people for the software to recognize then cross-check to see if their face appears in any photos you have archived.  Your talking about cross-referencing possibly thousands and thousands of photographs.  There’s a new way to keep tabs on someone!

Get It now!  Click below!

Tragic news broke Thursday afternoon as Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.  Jackson left many fans heart broken across the globe as he took a great deal of talent and mystery to the grave.  He almost took something else with him as well, the Internet.

Twitter had to temporarily shut down their search results, saved searches and trending topics to mitigate a full-blown site failure.  This isn’t uncommon for the micro-blogging site.  Twitter has been known to be very unstable during breaking news like the Hudson River plane crash and the Iranian conflict.  “We saw over twice the normal tweets per second the moment the story broke as people shared their grief and memories,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The Associated Press via e-mail.

AT&T said they set a new record for most text messages being sent over their network.  In the minutes following Jackson’s death AT&T subscribers were sending 4,000,000 text messages per minute at its peak, they also said call volume was up 10% during that same time.  AT&T went on to say that the spike in volume from Jackson’s death was even greater than during the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.  This is an unfair comparison by AT&T because their customer base significantly increased thanks to the Apple iPhone in the past three years and mergers.  In 2001 AT&T wireless had about 20 million subscribers, in the first quarter of 2009 they had just under 80 million.

Internet giant Google was also crippled by the breaking news.  The security software that protects Google from hackers thought it was under attack with so many queries coming in.   Those on Google News had to enter a ‘CAPTCHA’ code to prove they were real users and not bot.  Google also began displaying ‘malware’ alerts for users trying to search for breaking news on Jackson.  Search queries spiked around 2pm Pacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and finally leveled off by 8pm. The majority of Thursday’s hot trends related to Jackson’s death, Google said.  Google provided this chart showing queries about Michael Jackson on Thursday.

Facebook unsurprisingly dominated the social media spread of Michael Jackson’s death with its 300+ million user base.  The saturation of networks is best shown on this chart. (Look at that spike for Facebook!!!!)

Yahoo.com had a record setting day as well.  Yahoo News had 16.4 million unique visitors, breaking the 15.1 million record set on Election Day 2008.

This event will likely continue to be studied for months to come.  I’m waiting to see information released on the stress placed on Google’s server farms and Internet hubs worldwide that funnel traffic in places like Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Dallas.   Sure trend analysis like the graph’s above are nice, but I would like to see some technical break down of the event.

Analysis showing number of hourly tweets using #IranElection hashtag 

Tweets per hour including the word ‘Iran’

Note the trend dips and peaks between the mention of ‘Iran’ on Twitter and the use of the #IranElection hashtag to consolidate the onversation over the last two days.

The use of the word ‘Iran’ per-day is radpily falling, will it finally be knocked down off the #1 trending position soon?

These numbers are simply mind numbing and showcase the power of social media and the Internet.  (01:02 p.m. CDT  6/18/09: UPDATED)

With all the violence and government censorship taking place in Iran, international journalists from the United States and elsewhere are having lots of trouble.  Iran doesn’t want any information getting to the outside world about the extent of the revolution and violence taking place. 

“Following a massive opposition rally Monday, authorities restricted journalists — including Iranians working for foreign media — from reporting on the streets. They could effectively only work from their offices, conducting telephone interviews and monitoring official sources such as state TV.” – Associated Free Press

Some journalists having been forced to leave because the Iranian government would not renew their Visa which they received to cover the election. 

Iran has also begun censoring communication online as well.  They are throttling bandwidth within their country and blocking popular communication platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to name a few.   All of these efforts by Iran to censor information have been rather futile.  Social media and tech savvy geeks in Iran and around the world have shown that trying to completely shut down communication is tough to do.  The only way to really crush communication would be to pull the plug on critical network infrastructure and backbones, however that would leave government entities out of luck as well.  Corporate media who cannot have large six-figure cameras on the street have turned to citizen journalist tools to tell the story from the front lines. 

I watched a reporter on CNN who was walking near a rally in which Iranians were being beaten record his story on a cell phone while walking down the street, he nervously looked around while talking knowing at any time they could become a target of Iranian police.  Truthfully, this could have been anyone using a simple cell phone to record a video describing what they were witnessing.  The only difference being this reporter had the backing of a major news network.  The Iranian election has shown that you don’t need that support to get your message out to thousands.

Pictures (like this) spread on TwitPic(a website for sharing photos on Twitter) of a rally with an estimated 100,000 protesters collected over 60,000 views in less than 24 hours.  This YouTube video shows unarmed Iranian’s being shot at by Basiji forces in the streets of Tehran. These are the kind of images Iran wants to keep under wraps as they try and down play the size of protests.   Iran has now stated as of Wednesday evening that those who engage in ‘incitement’ by using Twitter and other blocked websites to communicate to other countries could face execution.  Yes, I said execution.

Iran will continue to try and keep things up wraps, but tech geeks world wide who are aiding and embedding Iranian protesters in online ‘bunkers’ by offering proxies and encrypted VPN’s will continue to prevail.  The real question is where is all this heading?  #IranElection continues to stay atop Twitter trends though trends showing it may be leveling off with 27,000 tweets using the #IranElection hashtag on June 15th, 2009 and just 19,000 tweets on June 17th.

Micro-bloggers and Tweeters worldwide began criticizing CNN for not covering the Tehran Protests.  CNN even had the story in the middle of their ‘Top Stories’ section, no where near the virtual headline like BBC News did.  This situation leaves many questions, including why CNN felt this massive story was unimportant.  I’m not about to start any conspiracy theories but I’ll be interested reading blogs in the coming days about the speculation.  But this debacle shows a very interesting digital perspective.  See this graphic of top news sites designed by Michael Pinto.

The #cnnfail hashtag started and really gained some steam as it was trending for hours over the weekend.  However, that momentum has fallen over the last 24 hours as CNN has responded to their viewers anger by devoting day-long coverage to the ‘breaking news’.

Hashtag decline as CNN responds to viewer anger

Viewers have grown to have expectations for CNN when it comes to breaking news.  I feel if this would have happened with Fox News or any other news outlet,  no one really would have cared all that much.  This bodes well for CNN and their campaign to brand themselves as a leader in breaking news and being an early adopter with new technologies.  However, this backfired on them this weekend.  When CNN didn’t deliver on expectations as they drowned the Iran protest story with Letterman vs. Palin, their loyal viewers got their news from different unfiltered sources online like Twitter itself and lashed out at the media giant for their lack of coverage.   Iran has blocked access to social networking sites, text messaging and even jamming satellite signals for T.V. reporters.  Tech savvy students have found ways around the block Internet sites and have managed to leak out information from the front lines.  This website shows graphic photos of students who were under attack at Tehran University.  Exactly the kind of information the Iranian government wants censored from the global community.

Twitter can not only serve as a platform to inform the entire world about the Tehran University attacks, it can also swing corporate media giants to pay attention.

I hear so much debate from people about Twitter.  Is it a fad?  Will it be gone in two years?  Will it explode with ‘facebook type’ exponential growth?  I think it safe to say that Twitter is perched atop or just nanometers shy of the peak of Gartners famous hype cycle.  Those who ask these questions need to look at what Twitter does on a more macro level.  Use from the likes of The Weather Channel, CNN  and small T.V. markets nationwide Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and his staff probably felt that gaining visibility and users was the hard part.  The reality is the hard part has just started.

Twitter has taken the mainstream by storm from Oprah, The Colbert Show, CNN and even Barack Obama.  Twitter will now suffer the plunge into what is known as the trough of disillusionment.  This occurs when a technology fails to meet expectations and it quickly becomes unfashionable, therefore leading to less media attention and public visibility.  The product itself, Twitter, is starting to slide down into this trough.  Will its benefits become widely demonstrated?  Will it stabilize?  You can make your predictions as you will, but Twitter has offered up something more to the world.  Real-time communication that is customizable, social and search-able.  Leo LaPorte of TWiT.tv has stated that Twitter is not real-time because you need to ‘refresh’ the page to see updates comments.  I would say this is a small technicality.  Aggregater services like FriendFeed are ‘truly’ real-time where updates come in as they are pushed to FriendFeed’s servers and appear with no action required from the user.

Twitter has pushed this social real-time connectivity to the mainstream like no other platform, even leading monsters like Facebook to follow suit by re-designing their users homepage.  Even Google has been working on what many call a possible revolutionary platform known as Wave.  Wave provides real-time communications and may very well re-invent how we communicate online in the long haul.

Twitter as a company may have been the catalyst to mainstream the idea, but it won’t be the last as other tech giants and new start-ups take aim on real-time communications.  This is only the beginning as we embark on another shift on the Internet.  Another question to ponder is; are these new ‘real-time communications’ tools considered web 3.0?  Ahh, let’s not even go there!

Brad J. Ward joins the discussion for Pt. II.  Brad is the Chief Explosion Officer at BlueFuego.com,  BlueFuego helps universities effectively utilize web-based tools for admissions, marketing, yielding and more!

In Pt. I we discussed identifying new media platforms that you should invest in.  When you begin to build your presence on a platform, you need to identify your goal.  What is your purpose for being on XYZ network?  Build relationships?  Build awareness of your brand?  Maybe a bit of both?  You must identify the purpose and goals before you dive in.  This will help later when trying to examine your progress and success which sometimes can be difficult.  Traditional marketing and advertising analysis often don’t apply to measuring social media.

When diving into the social media pool, what do you want to accomplish?

• Create brand awareness?
• Build relationships?
• Both?

Once you have you goals identified you must then assign resources to manage your new web presence.  Part of assigning your resources is trying to figure out where they will be spending their time.  But where is your audience!?  If your trying to reach students the likely choice will be Facebook or MySpace, if your trying to reach out and connect with Alumni, LinkedIn might be a better choice.  Brad J. Ward of BlueFuego.com often speaks to universities about ‘Big 6′: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr.  “Typically, not all 6 fit within the strategy of the school’s presence due to limited resources (staff hours).   If you had to go with one, I would choose a Facebook Fan Page.  That’s where it’s at right now. ” says Ward.

Universities often ask who should manage this presence?  One or two people?  Each department separate and ‘doing its own thing’?  Brad Ward and I agree that there needs to be a champion leading the social media effort.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be a communications specialist, but someone from a department who feels comfortable with the task and is knowledgeable in these new media technologies.  The most ideal situation when using social media on a campus is when each department can dedicate someone to manage their social presence.  However, communication is crucial between the departments as they try to gain synergy and push in a common direction while accomplishing their goals.

You have now identified your platforms and have begun invading them.  You begin uploading pictures to Flickr, start tweeting on Twitter and managing your Facebook Fan Page.  Easy right?  Well yes, but no!  Wait, What?  Social media is often thought of as self-sustaining. You sign-up and your presence alone will draw traffic and conversation.  This might be one of the biggest misconceptions with new media.  Your presence alone is not enough.  Would you design a static webpage, never update it and feel content with it?  I don’t think so.  You need to engage on the platform your utilizing, this is ’social’ media after all, right?  Your Twitter should not simply be a one-way broadcast platform for your news.  Your Facebook fan page shouldn’t lay dormant with no new photos or notes.  When you enter the realm of social media, your trying to build a community of followers around your brand.  To build that affinity you need to engage your audience in a interactive manner, not just broadcast content like a normal website would. 

“The schools who are really investing resources and staff hours into the social web are the ones having success.” says Ward. 

Now that you have started to invade your selected platforms and understand that you must dedicate resources, how do you go about engaging your audience?  This and more in the next installment of this multi-part blog!

Thanks to Brad J. Ward of BlueFuego.com for providing his commentary and insight.  Brad is a leader in higher education recruitment and is the Chief Explosion Officer at BlueFuego, a company he co-founded for consulting universtiies on how to recruit students using social media.