Ian M Rountree's Blog | Online Marketing and Communications

Facebook Timelines – First Look

September 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

From the site that brought you eight different news feeds in six months, comes a wonderful new toy. A profile dedicated not to what you are, but everything you have ever been. Timelines, introduced last week through developer beta, have been getting a lot of press – but what might they actually mean for your profile?

Here’s what my Timeline looks like at the moment:

It’s fairly spartan for now – I’ve put in some extra information, but largely, the moment you activate your Timeline, the magic… Doesn’t exist. I’ll admit, for the first few minutes, I didn’t see what the big deal was.

What do Timelines do that Profiles didn’t?

One of the biggest features the new profile system enables is called Milestones – you can set one for just about anything. A birth, a marriage, a death – the new system allows you to go back through your life and mark out the things you want to communicate as important to you.

First thing I did? Marked the birth of my son, Liam. Pretty important event in my world.

I’m sure I’ll get around to finding a picture for my own birth in 1982 eventually – but there’s no rush. Milestones aren’t time-sensitive the way status updates are. I can wait until I’ve got access to all the slide shows from the year my family spent in Australia before adding the marker in my profile that says I went there. Next time I travel, I can build a Milestone out of the trip as it happens – and use one of the photos from the trip’s album to do so.

But that’s not all – with the Timelines system, Facebook’s changed how their entire update methodology works.

It’s not listed specifically as a feature, and it’s certainly not obvious, but Facebook seems to be moving away from the pure “timely updates” theory of social networking, toward creating a full life record within their system.

The box you’ll see on your Timeline (and it’s not clear whether this will look similar on your Home screen) does the common Status/Photo/Place combination as usual – but the kinds of milestones you can add seem to suggest a much broader scope to the site.

Sure, we can mention we had a child or got married… But adding a pet? Losing a loved one? Achievements, awards, and health and wellness goals? This isn’t the usual profile-hygiene fare here – it’s a pretty big deal. When combined with the marked difference in how Facebook is now displaying news on your home feed – thanks to this month’s News Feed revamp – it’s clear the network is putting some thought into the kinds of news people want to read.

The same people who religiously review the Obituaries in their local paper might, for example, might be the kind to mark only Milestones in their family’s Timelines as top news, and train the system only to promote big events.

The people who are most interested in music culture may de-prioritize their friends’ news in favor of a particular set of band and artist pages.

Relentless business people? We know what they’ll mark as important, don’t we?

How Timelines might affect your personal brand.

Facebook has never really been good for a personal brand directly from the profile side of the site. Pages, sure – we can optimize them to work with a marketing strategy… But now? Imagine tailoring your milestones and life events to only highlight your professional life. Conferences, speaking engagements, promotions, job changes – the list is endless. You can build your Timeline to reflect a single aspect of your life, and go for as much completionism as you can stomach.

Again, it’s a case of choose your own level of involvement. I’m sure we’ll see a whack of personal branding guides over the coming weeks from some very opinionated voices.

Has privacy on Facebook changed?

Naturally, the changeover to Timelines – and associated App-level permission changes – is causing some concern over privacy. But, then, every change the social network makes to its system and capabilities seems to have that effect. This time, particularly, there’s some concern over apps gaining permission to automatically share what you’re doing. For example, if you authorize the New York Times as an app, you may find mentions of every page you view on that site in your timeline.

This persistent auto-sharing may not be a big deal for some people, but imagine seeing 75 to 100 updates in your stream, from one avid news reader.

Yeah. Not a privacy concern. But I imagine a lot of people will either get annoyed, or immediately shunt these kinds of updates off their feeds – thus destroying any value for the app-makers. Once again, it’s an opportunity for thoughtless publicity (not a bad thing) to turn into obsessive annoyance (a very bad thing). And only your friends list can determine which you’ll end up receiving.

I’m not concerned about privacy on social networks…

Because that’s not what they’re for. By their very nature, social networks are sharing platforms – you don’t share privacy. That’s not the point. Any assumption going against this grain is fundamentally flawed – so why worry about it?

We’re still not very good at dividing our personal and professional lives, or our online and offline lives, or our family lives and public lives. So rather than being concerned that Facebook and other social networks are “stealing our privacy” we need to get better at self-censoring. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing something with the world – it may not be a good idea to put it online. While privacy and restricting options do exist, assuming they’re solid is not a good idea.

In the end, it’s all a game of “Choose Your Poison” anyway.

How you present yourself online is closer to your choice of haircut, than it is your choice of friends. There will be bad hair days on your social networks, and times when it’s so fantastic you worry about being narcissistic. Learn to live with that, and you’ll be fine.

We used to think of Facebook as another photo sharing service. Then it was a microblog alongside. Then it became ten thousand other little parts of our lives.

But now…

What do we call Facebook now, I wonder?

The Mechanics of Ambition

August 4, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Some time during the mid-nineties, we decided culturally that ambition was a bad sign in a person. That the seeking of wealth or achievement for its own sake was an indicator of selfishness, or greed, or a lack of awareness of one’s fellow humans. While one hundred per cent of these statements may be true, I think more broadly that we’ve lost sight of something very specific related to the idea of personal achievement.

Ambition isn’t just a feeling of need to achieve or acquire on its own.

It’s a process. Knowing your limits, setting the boundaries – and then trying to expand them. Ambition isn’t achieving a goal; it’s consistently setting newer, higher goals, every time you strike a milestone in your life or work.

Get a promotion? Start working toward the next one.
Trade up on homes? Look for things that make the new home better than it was when you got it.
Finish writing a book? Pick your adventure – write a second one, or make the first one a real killer for sales.

There are all kinds of choice to be had for personal development, but it all comes down to a simple process:

Deliberate over a goal.
Decide on achieving the goal.
Make a plan of action
Enact your plan until your goal is achieved.
Deliberate over an advanced goal.

Now, I know this is fairly reductive, but it’s the very motor of personal success. We work hard, we achieve (on our own behalf or on behalf of others), and we move on.

When did this become a bad ideal? Sounds like kaizen to me.

Proximity

August 3, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We want to think outside the box – but then end up being too far from the box to be recognizable.

Being too close to the work gets us in trouble for different reasons; it means we limit ourselves and don’t take advantage of opportunities others see for innovation.
Measuring your proximity takes a particular skill, not only with your awareness of the needs of others, but your awareness of self.
Proximity doesn’t end with physical control, such as managing a task, etc. It ends much like personal space does – people have differing amounts of necessary personal space they must maintain for their own sanity. But how do we adjust for this? How can we ensure we’re the right distance from the box without being too close to the work?

We can’t. And perhaps we shouldn’t.

There are benefits to working closely with a subject – domain knowledge, an understanding of purpose, shared belief and the idea of why.

Similarly, there are benefits to being detached. Clinical examination, the agility that comes with sitting out the siege of new ideas. Awareness of a broader landscape.

It may be impossible to navigate between the two for every job – but this is yet another awareness trap we can avoid if we school our process, and think about our work differently.

After all, before knowing what the right proximity is comes knowing how close – or far – from an ideal you are. That, actually, may be far more important.

After This, Therefore From This

August 2, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We’ve all heard the classic form of this problem – correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But, even knowing this, how often do we fall for it?

The internet followed where ARPANET began.

The internet became a craze in the late nineties.

LiveJournal followed on the text-file blogging craze of the mid-nineties.

Facebook followed on the heels of LiveJournal, and other networking platforms.

Twitter followed Facebook.

These are some really appealing matches to make, because they appeal to our immediate, emotional logic. Of course Twitter followed Facebook – it was a stripped down version of the same thing, for basically the same purpose. But was it? Similarly, did Facebook follow any other social network before it, or was it something new, bred from similar stock?

Take it a step further – if you tweet this post, share it to your Facebook stream, or give it a +1 or a share on Google+ – does it immediately follow that my traffic will increase? Further still – if I hadn’t posted this entry, would my site be getting any traffic today at all? Not necessarily – while I’ve been on an unintentional blogging hiatus for most of July, my traffic has only dipped a small amount, and my posts have been getting shared without my involvement. I’m not the only one to see this kind of behavior – Justin Kownacki did some forensics on his blog traffic when he got back into the blogging game, finding that traffic still happened.

So why do we post new articles? Why write on blogs at all if traffic does not necessarily follow?

Because there’s no black or white; new blog articles might mean immediate explosions of traffic.

They might get shared immediately, strike a nerve, and go viral. They might also take some time to gain uptake, and become search placement assets instead of social communications assets. We might also remix them eventually, with enough input from eventual comments, and build books or education pieces or seminars out of them. There’s no end to the usefulness of a large library of media assets sitting behind your domain. This applies whether you’re a well-meaning private person, or a multinational corporation. There is always potential, when information exists, that would not have existed if the information had remained unpublished or unused.

It’s so easy to trap ourselves into thinking either post hoc ergo propter hoc never applies, or always does; never anywhere in between.

After all, if I hadn’t a very large bank of past posts – nearly 400 at the moment – the natural search traffic and subscribers I have been gaining in absentia of new writing would not have existed. The ongoing interest in the history on my site wouldn’t have spurred me into thinking it was worth taking up the torch again – and I’m betting you might be in the same situation.

It’s about taking a long view, and in some cases ignoring the immediacy of natural steps to find the roots of current situations.

Post ARPANET, ergo propter Twitter.