Open The Dialogue

Yesterday, Facebook announced in a blog post that starting 12:01 EDT, Saturday, June 13^th, vanity URLs will be available for all Facebook profiles and Fan Pages.  This is an important step for Facebook. They are perhaps the last of the major social media platforms to offer them, as both  MySpace and Twitter already do.

A vanity URL is key for your personal brand because it allows us to find others online, by name and without a lot of work. Sure, Facebook has a search bar, but right now the problem is that once you search for someone and it pulls up results and then you still have to dig through those all of those to find the “right” person.  Once Saturday hits, you can easily just type in a friend’s specific URL and you’re DONE. Much easier.

This also means that Facebook can now play a more pivotal role in a person’s online brand.  Across all social media platforms, most of us try to keep consistent whether we use our real name or a pseudonym, people learn about us and look for us based off of the personal brand we have built.

Why else does this matter? It’s good for SEO and it allows us to find exactly what we’re looking for and know what we’re looking at. Something with a bunch of random numbers and symbols at the end doesn’t really tell us if we’ve found the right person or page. It also makes me dig even more when searching.

A few questions I have about the change though: will we find that Facebook users will begin to utilize the platform differently? Will search be as popular and will we still browse through the hundreds of random “John Smiths” of the world until we find the right one?  It will be interesting to see if this alters behavior in any significant way.

 What are your thoughts on the new vanity URLs? Will you be staying home this Friday to get one?

Also, to stake your customized claim on Facebook this weekend, you can visit http://facebook.com/username.

What is it with social networking tools deciding to make changes without the consent or opinion of their user base? Facebook has done it a number of times, once when they introduced the news feed and then again with the most recent redesign.

Now, Twitter is the latest of the social media tools to fall prey to its users.

Earlier this week, #fixreplies became a top trending topic on Twitter, thanks to the latest “update” to the service where Twitter has stopped automatically displaying “@ replies “directed to people you don’t follow. Previously, Twitter users had the ability to choose one of two settings:

1) Turn on “@ replies” from members the user follows directed to members whom the user doesn’t follow

2) To turn those “tweets” off (since they may not be of relevance to them personally)

To Twitter, this was merely an update to its “settings,” but to its users it was removing a capability that some viewed as a way to find other “Twitterers” that they might be interested in following. By doing this, it stopped a method of communication between its users. This is something you never want to do as a communication tool so of course, there was a bit of backlash from users.

So, what did Twitter do? It listened to its users and took the feedback to heart. While at first its communication may have been a bit unclear, it has since made up for it.

Here’s the latest on the whole thing – a post from Twitter’s company blog apologizing and explaining it all from start to finish and how they reacted along the way. Twitter was transparent with their communication, stating where they may have made a mistake and what issues were resolved. A necessary and excellent move, in my opinion – and likely also the rest of the community’s.

And for those of you that don’t have time to read through the entire post, here’s a key take away from the post:

“We’re still listening, reading tweets, gathering feedback, and working on more efficient ways of doing so. Thanks to everyone for the feedback and for using Twitter.”

How can companies prevent this moving forward? Is it always going to be trial and error? Is this type of strategy to be expected? Mashable.com writes about preventative measures that can be taken to avoid user backlash here.

Companies need to be proactive BEFORE the changes occur. They should also be proactive about getting feedback ahead of time by utilizing testers or something like a focus group. Odds are, the responses you get ahead of time will give you insight into what you will be in store for once the changes take place. This also gives you the opportunity to stop a problem before it has a chance to bubble up into something much bigger.

Overall, there seems to be no permanent repercussion from the trial, error and apologize method, but will it stay that way forever? It’s likely. I know that if these companies continue to be transparent and let me know they are listening – I’ll keep coming back for more.

Let us know what you think.

Also, here are some additional thoughts on the issue from the community:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10239517-36.html?tag=mncol;txt
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10240163-36.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheSocial
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/twitter-screwed-up/

A few days ago, a student and researcher at The Ohio State University announced a pilot study indicating that there is a link to Facebook users in college and lower GPAs. 

This topic has sparked some interesting conversation, not only about Facebook, but our habit of multitasking in general.

Frankly, I don’t buy it and here’s why:

1. The study surveyed 219 students – this is hardly enough to call an accurate and representative sample especially when there are more than 200 million active users on Facebook. While I realize that this may just be a start to their research or a pilot, they should really take a look at a larger sample to come to a conclusion rather than the .0001095 percent that was included in the study.
2. No one I knew in college spent ALL day on Facebook. The study states that those using Facebook are studying an average of 1-5 hours a week versus those non-users studying 11-15 hours a week. Now, is it just me or would those students be studying the same amount of time even without a Facebook account? There are a number of other activities including sports, socializing, video games, etc. that could be impacting a student’s “study time” besides their Facebook account.
3. Another element ignored by this study is timing. How long do you have to use Facebook until your GPA becomes “affected?” Are you safe if you’ve only been using it for a month and then cease all use or will you as well be doomed into the categorization having a poor GPA due to your Facebook account? Now that would be an interesting study.
4. I don’t buy that Facebook is the only social network to “harm a student’s GPA.” Have we looked at twitter? Friendfeed? Or LinkedIn? Are those affecting the college student’s ability to have a high GPA?

The foundation of this study and the argument it makes overall is weak.  People use social networks in their daily lives, not just in college and this trend continues to grow. This makes the idea of social networking as a whole more relevant than ever before – regardless of your age.  Of course, it takes time to build your social network online – just as it does to hold an in-person meeting with those in your “offline” network. 

Overall, I think it comes down to the fact that students are yes, spending time on Facebook, but I don’t think you can accurately make the argument that it is contributing to poor grades. If a student has the will to succeed, they will and Facebook isn’t going to stop them.

Here are a few other great posts that offer thoughts on the recent Ohio State University findings:

• Blisstree.com
• Wired’s Epicenter
• College-StartUp.com