Category Archives: Social Media

Chick-fil-A Finds Politics Can Be Bad For Its Business | News – Advertising Age:

Fast-growing chicken chain Chick-fil-A has long been known for sticking to its conservative roots. In a 2010 interview with Ad Age, an exec said the restaurant would sell hamburgers before it would consider opening on a Sunday. But what was once seen as an almost charming quirk of a Southern restaurant is increasingly coming under fire as the franchise funnels money into political causes that are seen as retrograde by large numbers of consumers once willing to give it a pass.

Things came to a head last week when an interview that Chick-fil-A President-Chief Operating Officer Dan Cathy did with the Baptist Press hit the internet. In short, Mr. Cathy, son of founder S. Truett Cathy, affirmed the company’s support of what he considers traditional marriage. “Guilty as charged,” Mr. Cathy told the magazine. “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives.”

Unlike a lot of people, I’m going to congratulate the Chick-fil-A company for standing up for its values here, and defend their right to do so. If that’s an important core value to the company, they should.

Don’t mistake defending their decision with supporting it. I don’t. Nor do I plan on visiting one of their establishments any time soon. But at least they took an position. How many big companies do that? 

But if you want the casebook reason why so many big companies and professional athletes master the skill of “cliche 101″ and never utter anything remotely non-generic, just look at the outfall from this. Chick-fil-A is a company that’s been in expansion mode, moving into new markets, working to take the company and brand nationwide with some success. And this is the sort of hard lesson you learn when you go from “what works in my home town” to “what works everywhere”.

The reason big companies go bland is because bland is what’s palatable everywhere. It’s a difficult thing to try to speak to a nationwide or global audience and not get tripped up here. Remember back in 2003 when Apple introduced iTunes for Windows and proclaimed that Hell had Frozen over with Apple shipping windows software? No, you probably don’t, actually. But it was a big deal — and the state of Virginia threatened to cancel all of its Apple educational contracts because, well, Steve Jobs used a cuss word. Apple changed the ad campaign, and it all mellowed out again. 

I use that example because there’s been some complaining by the conservative groups the we shouldn’t be picking on Chick-fil-A for their beliefs. Well, heck, why not? This is a common pressure tactic, and effective. It’s just this time it’s being aimed in the other direction. 

The fact is, if you want to influence others with your position, you have my blessing. Please do. But realize that the flip side of that is that people will react to you and your position, and not all of them will be positive. And what may work in your home town or with your core group may not work so well in other regions, or in groups you’re hoping to attract to your brand. 

THAT is why big companies go bland and cliche-ridden. And that’s a lesson Chick-fil-A is now learning. And they’re going to have to make a decision, do they want to hold to their values and promote them, and be willing to take the hit in lost customers or sales it might create? Or are you really interested in becoming a national brand and grow in the market? 

Most companies choose growth. Honestly, there’s rarely a lot of upside to pushing your agenda. A better strategy is to shut up, take the money you make, and quietly funnel it to support the causes you believe in. That tends to be a lot less controversial; take a look at Curves as an example the Chick-fil-A management can emulate. Don’t think choosing to isolate yourself from the company management will completely protect you, though. Just ask the GoDaddy folks. 

This would have likely been a quick and soon forgotten kerfluffle, if it weren’t for the Muppet toy crisis, and here’s where I think Chick-fil-A screwed up. One side effect of this was that the Muppets cancelled their relationship with the company, and that ended a promotion of a toy giveaway. Chick-fil-A announced this as a safety recall, which only gave fresh ammunition to those looking for reasons to criticize them. 

For all I know, the claim is true, too. Whether it is or not is irrelevant. The perception here is that they’re covering this up, and no matter how Chick-fil-A tries, the critics will jump on them for this. And it frankly looks bad because they seem to be trying to blame the Muppets for this. If they had simply put up signs saying “because of circumstances beyond our control, we’ve had to cancel this promotion”, nobody would be posting photos of the signs to Facebook and beating them up for this.

To me, it looks like a sour grapes reaction, no matter what the truth is. And by doing it, they give their critics fresh ammunition to sustain the criticism. If they’d used a simpler response that avoided naming the Muppets, they wouldn’t have rebooted this controversy. Unfortunately, they did, and gave it a second wind. Someone in their marketing or PR group should have caught this and short-circuited those signs to something safer.

In the grand scheme of things, this is minor — assuming they don’t pour more gasoline on the fire. It’s a good time to be quiet and let things fade. It’s a good opportunity for a learning opportunity on when to keep your mouth shut, too, especially you’re a small company learning a lesson about what happens when you become a big one…

Pinterest allows impersonators free rein—but for how long?:

Each new social media service that crosses the threshold of public awareness sees two things: brands and celebrities rushing in to find out if they can use the service to their advantage and, right before that, squatters and jokers who got to the brand name first. The latest to experience this Wild West phenomenon is the visual bulletin board service, Pinterest, which recently announced a brief policy statement on usernames that hardly clears things up for companies, celebrities, and satirists alike.

 

We have something like 35 years of history and experience here on the internet now. Along the way, we’ve made pretty much every mistake we can make, usually multiple times.

But I really don’t know why startups ignore this history and keep getting hit from behind by things they should know are coming.

A basic reality: when you’re small and nobody knows about you, “be nice and act like mature adults” works. As soon as you get some visibility and growth, every service should know that there are common problems that are going to show up that need to be dealt with:

• Porn
• Spam
• trolls and griefers, abusive jerks in general
• Name grabbers and impersonators

The list goes on. The reality is, every site that succeeds at some level has to deal with them. And most of them, it seems, waits until they actually show up and create problems to sit down and go “we need to do something. What?”

I don’t understand why, either. They’re coming — unless you fail up front. So why not plan for these up front in your policies and your systems and controls? Maybe you won’t get it right the first time, but you’ll have a leg up over “now what?”

Pinterest seems to have missed the implications of copyright issues on their site. They’ve had their first wave of porn and spam, the impersonators are moving in. They seem to be reacting well, but some of these things (like the impersonators) they shouldn’t have to adapt their T&Cs to; it should have been there at launch.

Even worse is google; I swear 40-50% or more of the people circling me these days aren’t really people, they’re empty spam hubs waiting to activate. And a good 20% of the names are clearly failures of the real name policies they claim are so important. Taht’s the problem with making a priority of policies that don’t scale in enforcement, I guess.

To sites looking to launch into these social worlds: study what’s happened to sites that came before, and learn from them. It’s a lot less painful than learning on the fly.

Or ask advice of someone who’s been through the wars; at least they can tell you where the troll lairs are likely to be found…

I’m not a “curator” – Marco.org:

First of all, readers aren’t going to learn what those symbols mean. The distinction between them is also unnecessary and will lead to more confusion: I’ve been running a hybrid articles-and-links blog here (↬DF) for a while, I wrote the function that added “via” links to billions of reblogged posts on Tumblr, and I didn’t even know the difference between “via” and “hat tip” until today.

But the inscrutability of these little symbols is irrelevant, because most writers aren’t going to use them.

The problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing.

 

Marco brings up problems with Curator’s Code, an attempt to define a way to standardize and encourage the “hat tip” attributions that go on from site to site (or should).

Now, I always try to give proper attribution. I’m not perfect, but I think it’s an important aspect of the ecosystem of the web. I thought about the proposal in Curator’s Code, and honestly, I’m not that impressed, for the reasons Marco states. But at least someone is starting this conversation, and it’s a conversation we should encourage (and link to).

I think there are a couple of problems with Marco’s argument, though.

First, while the codes may seem inscrutable, if they are adopted and evangelized, we can get past that inscrutability. This same argument could be waged against Creative Commons, and yet, it seems to have become fairly well understood (but with far from 100% awareness; this is the internet, of course). That’s one reason why I’ve tried with my Creative Commons licensing to not just use it, but to pro-actively explain what it is and what my philosophy for using it is. These codes would need similar treatment over time to become really useful, but I think it can be done.

Another aspect that Marco seems to miss is that even if the reader misses these completely — the search engines won’t (unless a site is doing their via/hat-tip links with “nofollow”, which seems like it’d be a wanker action and seriously disingenuous). So even if the person misses the attribution, the Google wouldn’t, and that in itself helps.

But for a situation like that, tying this into some kind of micro format would seem even more useful; and if we were going to push to adopt something like this, we should do it in a way that works both for the human and the machine ready. That seems to be missing here completely, and that’s a big reason why I’ve decided to not adopt this.

Consider a typical post on The Verge, a widely respected tech blog:

while I like the Verge, Marco is dead right here. Their attribution is a nasty example of design over usability. It’s basically impossible to find, even when looking for it. Which seems to be the point of what they did — it’s hidden in plain sight, which is too bad.

So, let’s take this another step or two. Let’s tie it into a microformat, make sure that it’s done in a way that works for sane web designs for both readers and spiders. This was a nice start to the discussion, but this proposal isn’t going far enough, or what’s really needed.

While I wasn’t looking, it looks like the “Comments: good idea, or tool of Satan?” fight has broken out again. Matt Gemmell fired it off:

Comments Still Off – Matt Gemmell:

Just over a month ago, I switched comments off for this blog. I wanted to post a very brief follow-up on that decision.

 

In a nutshell, it was definitely the right move.

but a number of people with a clue have chimed in, including:

• MG Siegler
• Matthew Ingram @ GigaOM
• Fred Wilson
• Siegler (again), with a cameo appearance from Daniel Ha, a founder of Disqus
• Brent Simmons (with a reference into the emacs vs. vi religious war, now in it’s 55th year. hint: I’m a VI guy [see note 1])
• Macstories (via MG, who seems to like this argument)
• Josh Constine @ TechCrunch

That’s some heavy talent with a lot of experience in dealing with the practical realities of this issue. Who’s right?

They all are. It comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish and what you want for your own blog or publication.

I will note for the record that this discussion happened across the various blogs for the most part, and also note for the record that if it had happened in the comment section of any of the blogs except for Fred Wilson’s, it would have gotten buried and almost nobody would have seen it because comments are notorious for not ending up in RSS feeds, search engines and the like, and most rational people get to about the third troll in a busy comment area and bail out, because they have better things to do than wade into the mosh pit.

Which is my way of noting that while comment sections definitely can work (and do, if you work at them), most comment sections fail the “why am I looking at this?” test pretty quickly, Fred Wilson’s blog being a notable exception. And Youtube being a site that proves the rule beyond any need to argue, because, as usual, absent landlords end up breeding slums.

Now, I use Disqus on my blog, and Akismet, and I have almost no spam problem, because my blog is small and generally ignored by the spammers and trolls. I’m also pretty careful to vet comments and back links and don’t encourage trolls and don’t post trackback links that point to spammy sites, which I think discourages them from trying a bit. And mostly, because I’m small I don’t get lots of comments in the first place. If I got popular (hah! not likely) and started seeing high numbers of comments (I wish!) I might change my mind and go commentless without feeling guilty. I think right now, they’re a net positive to my site, but I long ago stopped seeing them as necessary, required or some kind of freaking inalienable right like some people (mostly trolls, I think) do. Heck, if I were a troll, I’d demand free places to do my trolling and insist on no adult supervision, too. I’d love to spend other people’s nickels to spread my opinions…

So my bottom line is that comments are useful, but are mostly broken. You need to put too much work into them to keep them useful — even disqus, which I think does a better job than the others I’ve looked at. But I’m not sure “nuclear” is the ultimate answer here, either.

Some suggestions:

I’d like a way to configure Disqus to turn off commenting after a period of time (like 30 days, or after 3-4 days of no comments); there is little reason to carry on a conversation after it dies down the first time, and so open comments (and trackbacks on blogs) after a couple of weeks is useful only to spammers; reduce the places they have a chance to lay their stuff by turning comments off on older material.

I’d like a way to feature good comments, give them a visibility that doesn’t exist right now. Great example: The Online Photographer, which as far as I can tell, is manually editing them into the body of the article. It’d be awesome if Disqus supported a way in the admin interface to click a checkbox “feature this” and have them appear “above the fold”, so that we can start curating the good comments into the conversation stream as a way of giving them visibility, instead of only trying to keep the noise down by moderating out the worst stuff.

But really, this is a job for a reputation engine. Disqus is well suited to implement this, and spread a reputation across all sites that use Disqus. Allow a site to define what minimum reputation is needed to display them on a site, and track the +1 and abuse flagging back to the Disqus user to generate their reputation. the trolls will sink, and a site owner can choose just where to draw a line and say “below this, you don’t get on my site”, either by not accepting comments or not displaying them. And then let a disqus user override that on an individual basis if they want. even a decent reputation setup with some minimal metrics would make it a lot easier for a site to choose whether to display or dump the trolls, and if someone does post a troll note, let the other users vote it into oblivion if they want.

I think there’s still a lot of life in comments. Fred’s blog shows the possibility, just as this discussion about comments shows how well the alternate possibility (distributing across many blogs) shows how well it can work as well. But to make the kind of environment Fred’s fostered work without the kind of fostering that someone like Fred (or Teresa Nielsen Hayden does at Making Light) we need better technology underpinnings. Most site owners/admins/moderators don’t have the “touch” to guide a community into becoming what Fred and Teresa have. Or maybe they do, but not the time or will to make it happen.

But isn’t that what all this technology is about? finding ways to enable these things and free humans from having to drudge through the grunt work? And moderating comments is drudge work. serious drudge work. With some thought and some code, we can enable the community to self police itself here. So why not do it?

(and just because I can, here are some previous rants on this topic from previous rounds of this discussion: 2008, 2003, 2011 (think comments as critiques here)

Note 1: my infamous emacs vs. VI joke: What’s the difference between an emacs user and a VI user? Give the Vi user a file and set of changes and they will sit down and edit the changes into the file and then go to lunch. Give it to an Emacs user, they’ll sit down and code a macro that they’ll use to make the changes automatically while they’re at lunch. Afterward, both of them have the changed file, but the Emacs user has a macro that he’ll file in his library of macros and never touch again in his life.

I have been experimenting with (and when I say that, I mean “avoiding work with”) Google+ the last couple of weeks, and I have to admit, I did not expect to be impressed, but I am.

The engagement factor is very high, and the friction issue is minimal. It’s very easy to put content into it and point it at your social group — or a subset of that social group — via circles, which are sort of like Facebook lists, but not broken. That’s because facebook lists were grafted onto facebook and fairly awkward to use, while circles were the core element Google+ was designed around, and so everything uses them almost seamlessly and circles make organically slicing and dicing your social graph easy and (almost) painless.

As a result, I’ve found I’m spending a lot more of the time I budget for wading into the social data streams on Google+; this means that I’m spending less time on other services, and the big loser so far is Facebook, where between closing off my time on Zynga games and Google+ means I’ve cut my time on facebook by about 85%. My primary use of facebook today seems to be interacting with and talking to people who are on facebook but not on Google+. Pretty much any situation where someone is on Google+ I’ve shifted my interaction with them there.

The system is pretty good for a 1.0, but not perfect. If find the lack of any way to share items from Google Reader ont Google+ curious (but trust me, I know how in a company the size of Google this happens, and I expect it’s in the plans).

More troublesome is the kerfluffle going on over pseudonyms. it’s hard to spend any time on the system without running into one of the many threads going on about this. For those just getting started, check out this thread for some background; it also shows one of the strengths of Google+’s messaging in its ability for a thread to both get into a meaty, intense discussion without spiraling out of control, and be able to survive ratholes and side points successful. Those are both things many services fail at miserably, and it’s clear some thought has gone into figuring this problem out.

I think Google is well-intentioned but didn’t properly think this one through. Given that it seems some pseudonyms are okay (look at, for instance, 50 cent), google has set up a system I feel can’t be properly policed and is open to use as a spite attack vehicle (spite attack: I piss you off, you report me and try to get my account shut down), and given celebrities seem to be able to use their ‘stage names’ okay, have created a perception of a double standard where you are being required to use your real name, unless you have money and fame.

I made the following comment in the thread above, and it sums up my views on why this policing is a bad idea:

Okay, pop quiz. pick the real and fake names in this list:

1) Barnabus Arnasungaaq
2) Kanimozhi Karunanidhi
3) James Tiptree, Jr.
4) Parasayip Ole Koyati

5) Dean Wesley Smith
6) Chuq Von Rospach
You can look all of these up in google, if you want (I did). Stop and think about it for a second.

1) inuit soapstone sculptor
2) indian politician involved in a sex tape scandal
3) famous pseudonym of a science fiction author (or choose John LeCarre Jr, if you prefer)
4) Person of the Masai tribe in Africa
5) real name of an author who publishes under many pseudonyms
6) are you sure?

My point? first, let’s get past thinking everyone here is an American, using an American name, and that we really have any practical ability to look at a name and determine real or not. When you start looking at a global culture of the scale of the internet and G+, it’s all over.

So policing this on a scale the size of G+ is practically impossible except on the “report/challenge” system. And that means the most likely result of a policy like this is that it’ll become a tool of the griefers. There’s no way Google or anyone can police naming on the scale of a service like this, period, except on a case by case situation involving abuse. So they shouldn’t try.

And my other point is that this is policing the wrong thing. Police bad behavior, not names. Some subset of naming is an aspect of bad or abusive behavior and should be dealt with, but deal with it as behavior. Trying to put naming restrictions in place is well-intentioned but won’t scale and will open the system to abuse by those with axes to grind. Focus on what matters, which isn’t the name, but how whatever is behind that name acts.

By the way, there are still real people in the universe named Adolf Hitler. If one of them joins G+, how would you police that? Because pretty much everyone in the universe will presume it to be a fake name, right? What if this person wants to avoid the issues involved with that name so chooses to use a pseudonym? you going to force them into a situation that opens them to abuse?

And a second big issue: where does “nickname” end, and “pseudonym” start? And how would you write a set of objective rules you could police as administrators?

What is my name, anyway? Is it my real name? Is it my nickname? Or is it a pseudonym? and why?

From reading the various threads on this, it seems clear Google is grappling with this and trying to figure it out; I expect they will. I think this is a case of naivete towards the complexity and implications of the policy, not anything “evil”, and as this has come to light as Google+ rolled out, they seem to be trying to figure out what the right balance is and how to implement it. I’ll cut them some slack while they try.

An even bigger problem for me, though, is harder to ignore: users have found when they get shut down on Google+ that it impacts their entire Google universe. For some folks, that’s devastating. The tight integration of “everything google” is nice, until it bites you; when it bites, it can bite hard. I’m frankly very uncomfortable with the idea of having my gmail account locked or deleted because someone picks a fight with me on Google+; enough so I considered setting up a second gmail account JUST for Google+ usage. Instead, I’m considering shifing my public email presence back to my me.com email address, so that if something bad happens, I’m not completely screwed over here. That’s a challenge as all of these systems integrate more tightly, and something we all need to be aware of. I’ve been careful about not having too many things depend too heavily on Google (no domain registry, no running my business via google docs or google apps, etc) just to minimize the damage this might cause, but now Google+ and Gmail linked is a bit too close for comfort.

This is more serious because Google can (and has; I hear of a few cases of this a year) shut everything down on you without warning, and their appeal process is, well, weak. you can’t pick up a phone and fix things, and they don’t make it easy to get things fixed; not something you are happy about if you’re on the wrong end of it and key business or personal things are locked away from you.

My recommendations for Google to improve all of this are:

• Commit to service specific lockouts. If someone gets blocked out of google+, then lock them out of Google+, not everything. Ditto if their email gets hacked and someone uses their gmail account to send spam, it shouldn’t cause them to lose their google docs or any of their other services. Free or not, people are building businesses and lives around these products, and depend on them, and it’s good customer support to treat them fairly and give them a way  to reconnect, appeal and pull their content out of their accounts even if those accounts are closed down.
• Improve your account lockout/closure appeal process. nothing should ever be shut down without warnings; google needs to improve and make more visible the ways to connect in and explain/appeal these decisions. (note for the record, google’s  no worse than most online social sites out there, everything sucks at the mediation/appeal process; it ain’t just Google, but Google can take a leadership role here in defining best practices for social sites if it chooses – and make it a competitive advantage of its services).
• Resolve the naming issue; as I note above, I think the naming issue is a red herring. Police abuse, not names; if nobody has a problem with the actions and content — don’t worry about it. I think any other path will lead to continuing conflict with the user base, and that’s not good for the service or its users.
• and please, hurry up and implement nested circles and “mute this person”.
• oh, and posting links/notes from google reader onto my public stream.

but overall, I think it’s a great launch. If things continue, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I dump my facebook account down the road. And I’m already posting fewer things onto twitter, and posting them onto google+ instead.

Those are the two services i think are at biggest risk at losing people’s time and interest from Google+, plus all of the smaller specialty sites (like Quora) can’t be happy with a new elephant in the room drawing attention. The biggest risk for Google+ is the naming issue; if they don’t resolve it in a reasonable manner fairly soon, I think there’s a risk it’ll turn into one of those running firefights you see on some services, with the controversy being continually replayed well out of proportion to it’s real impact, but having a high public visibility and impacting the reputation of the services overall.

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, and Google+ grows into its potential. It looks to me like it can be a game changer. I didn’t expect Google could do that.

In any event, if you use Google+, you can find me here. Feel free to wander by and say hi.

The Social Graph: Revolution or Evolution?:

Arguably, the first serious discussion into implementing archival and retrieval of public online information was via Usenet; in early 1985 Chuq Von Rospach posted an RFC for a “usenet article archive program with keyword lookup”.

Social discussion online in itself is obviously not new. Usenet used to be a particularly social platform, distinguished from walled off forums by being decentralised and entirely public. The same metrics used to grade the value of Tweets and Tweeters could be used in any other public arena of social discussion where links or their equivalent are shared, presuming that individual contributors can be identified (which would admittedly be less clear on Usenet than Facebook and Twitter).

I’d actually forgotten about this stuff. In reality, Brad Templeton did a lot more work looking into keywording (reinvented these days as tagging) on USENET; I did some research into how the keywording that was added to USENET was used and found out that user-added keywords were mostly junk and experimented with auto-generating keywords and just didn’t find it useful in that context. Brad pushed it further, but it never took off.

Another thing in the dark annals of time to mention in this context — Erik Fair wrote an article on a concept called an “Accolade” for :login — which today has been invented as the like button. It’s fascinating to see those ideas in the context of today, now that technology has created the opportunity to actually do these things; remember, at that time, USENET and most of the net was actually driving by low speed modems and not only hadn’t been HTML been implemented (not for another decade), but there were no significant database back ends to store all this data in, much less shared data sets or web services (since HTTP is also close to a decade away); all this data needed to get slogged out to every server to keep a local copy of — USENET ultimately may have been the most wonderfully inefficient use of network capacity ever…

Links for your amusement: link, link, link, link.

Has it really been 25 years? How time flies when you’re having fun.

And I’ll close with a quote from that final link, which is just as true about the net today:

USENET is like Gene Wolfe’s Soldier in the Mists. Every day, it wakes up and sees everything as new.