Social Media Users Want to Be Heard

A look at user attitudes While social media users may not find social sites quite as trustworthy as traditional sources of news, according to research from Crowd Science they do see it as an important communications medium—for better and for worse. Users want to be heard. Overall, 45% reported liking when others notice them—leading some to stretch the truth or reveal too much personal information. Young people were especially vulnerable to activities that might haunt them later. But 36% believed others are simply interested in what they have to say. That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to marketers, who know many users will tell all their contacts about good (and bad) experiences with products and services. Females lived up to their reputation as prime targets of marketers seeking the benefits of earned media. Among users over age 30, women were significantly more likely than men to think others wanted to hear what they thought. In addition, women overall were more than three times as likely as men to say online social media was their favorite leisure activity. Though not everything appearing on social media is trustworthy, nearly one-half of users responding to the survey claimed they could "easily" tell whether information they got from social media was true. Less than one-quarter disagreed. These savvy users believe they can spot the difference between the real deal and insincere efforts. While face-to-face contact with friends was generally preferred, about one-third of users said they would rather communicate by social media than by telephone. Source emarketer.com Social Media Consulting, Web Presence, Call Center Technology Book A FREE 1/2 Hr. Phone Consultation

Social Media Predictions for 2010

Social Media Predictions for 2010   With 2010 fast approaching, there's lots of talk about the social media predictions for the coming year. Although we don't have a crystal ball here at SocialMediaExaminer.com, we do have recent social media studies to support some very likely trends. David Armano recently published his social media predictions for 2010 on the Harvard Business Blog.  Here's [...] Read more... Social Media Consulting, Web Presence, Call Center Technology Book A FREE 1/2 Hr. Phone Consultation

Integrating E-Mail and Social Media

E-mail and social media are the top areas marketers expect to increase next year, and putting the two together is a growing trend. Full Article Social Media Consulting, Web Presence, Call Center Technology Book A FREE 1/2 Hr. Phone Consultation Social Media Consulting, Web Presence, Call Center Technology Book A FREE 1/2 Hr. Phone Consultation

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

Image by deneyterrio via Flickr

by Mark Zuckerberg

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.


Mark Zuckerberg