Office Archive for
We’ve asked our team to comment on the changes to Facebook announced at the F8 summit from the perspective of different disciplines. In this second installment, our community moderators, Lauren Lindsay, Steve Mannino and Amy Gosalia look at user reactions and community management challenges.
Lauren: Changes in User Behaviour
Facebook’s move to the Timeline is going to make users focus first on altering and updating their own profiles. The yearbook-like format means a lot of work for people who’ve had Facebook since college and are now going to have to downplay years of partying photos. During this transitionary period, we may see a slight drop in brand interactions, as users pull their attention away from the Newsfeed to focus on making sure those old pictures won’t cost them their jobs.
I’m interested to see how users can take advantage of the organization factor of Timelines without many personal photos. Some people just don’t use Facebook as a place to display photos of themselves – how will they keep their timelines interesting? Will book apps and updates have covers attached to them? Can you put in movie clips attached to the movies you’ve seen?
1. What is your role at CM?
I am a Front End Developer on the Infiniti account in our Toronto office. On a day-to-day basis we are either expanding the current system to accommodate all the nifty things the clients want or fixing bugs (doh).
2. What drives you? What are you inspired by?
I love programming. It’s as simple as that. Being able to tweak a tiny little line of code and instantaneously see the results that it brings to the screen is inebriating. Programming is a delicate mix of science and art, requiring perseverance and creative thinking to be successful. Being a programmer is a constant strive to optimize, refactor and make the solution perfect. The thirst for perfection drives me.
3. What are your passions/interests outside the workplace?
My interests outside of work all mostly have something to do with music. I play in bands, play solo, produce music, whatever I have time for. Other than that, I just love spending time with my cats, my family, my girlfriend and my friends. You know.. the usual!
4. What is the greatest thing about CM culture?
People talk to each other. At a lot of other places people will bang their heads against the wall trying to find a solution to a problem, instead of simply walking over to their coworkers and asking their opinion. At CM, no one is afraid to ask a question and everyone is willing to lend a hand.
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CM loves SxSW Interactive!
We always have a crowd attending, but in 2012, we want to find our place on stage. Help us get there by checking out our FIVE topic submissions in the SXSW PanelPicker systems and voting for your favorite (or all 5).
Why you should vote for us?
SxSW may be a mash-up of digital trends, but in these five ideas, we think we’ve got a little something for everyone. You can check ‘em out now, or let us prove it to you. This week, to show you how smart and fun our ideas are, we’re devoting our blog and our twitter stream to our submissions–5 topics, 5 days. Each day we’ll give you the chance to learn more about our POV on one of our submitted topics with a blog post AND get involved by sharing your own thoughts via a twitter chat.
MONDAY
Consumer Goods: The Next Social Channels
Panel, prototyping contest & demo led by CM’s Executive Technology Director, Scott Ross.
>Vote Here
Join our @CriticalMass Twitter chat Mon @ 2pm to discuss #socialgoods
Plus, enter our prototyping contest by emailing your own ‘socially-integrated consumer good’ idea to sxswcontest@criticalmass.com
TUESDAY
Confessions of a Community Moderator
Workshop and interactive “confessional booth” including moderators for Converse, Peanuts, Humana and Aveda.
>Vote Here
Join our @CriticalMass Twitter chat Tues @ 2pm to discuss #communityconfessions
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Let me begin with a confession. Last year, when I first discovered that I would be working on a Business-to-Business account, I wasn’t thrilled. I think many of us in the fast-paced digital agency world would react the same way.
You can understand my predicament, though. I was harboring the number one misconception about B2B marketing: IT’S BORING.
After a year in the field, I am here to tell you that it’s just not true. To prove it, here are just a few of the top reasons why I’m more than happy to work in B2B.
The Relationships are Varied and Exciting
Corporate-agency relations are every bit as relationship-driven as with consumer-facing clients. When you’re dealing with multinationals, you can be interacting on a daily basis with people from all over the world, developing strategies that map global brand values to local business conditions. If you’re a social person who thrives on collaboration, diversity and complexity, B2B can be addictive.
Google’s highly anticipated foray into social media networking, Google+, debuted to the broader public last week as invitations began leaking out to those participating in its limited trial. Given the high-profile failure of Google Wave, and last year’s rumors of declining innovation after of a rash of executive defections to Facebook, we felt justified in greeting Google’s entry into game with some misgivings. After a week of exploring the network’s landmark features and mercifully simple interface design, we are pleased to report that there is quite a lot Google has done right. That said, it may not be enough to kill the elephant network in the room. It may be most interesting to watch them continue to compete toe-to-toe and find a way to co-exist.
With the web full of hyperbole like “Facebook-killer!” and “game-changer!” we thought there might be room for a reasoned look at the network’s features, benefits and the opportunities they present for private users and brands.
*Because we’ll be referencing Google+ features throughout the post, feel free to reference our friendly Glossary of Features at the end.
In the Beginning…
It’s still in the invite-only beta phase of rollout, and users are coming online in a steady stream. Google hasn’t released usage stats yet, but a list has already surfaced of the top 100 Google+ users by followers, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg topping the chart at nearly 45,000 followers at the time of this writing. If we make the thoroughly unscientific assumption that half the population of Google+ has Mark in their “Following” Circle, then Facebook can probably rest easy for the time being.
Me too. And I didn’t realize just how much I’d fallen off the Twitter wagon until this subject line appeared in my inbox this week: “We’ve missed you on Twitter!” Gasp! Had it really been three months since I tweeted. Indeed it had. The reality is, I’d run out of steam, and had been for a while.
Before my Twitter derailment
I started out on Twitter much like many other people, tweeting about ordinary things like which patio I was having lunch on or venting about some unfortunate incident I’d experienced in the day 
– likely some guy spitting on the sidewalk in close proximity to my feet. As more people joined with more interesting content to offer I got a mild case of Twitter stage fright. Could I really be brilliant all the time? In all honesty, sometimes. Still, I plodded along, upping my game when I could with wittier tweets and better content as more and more people began to follow me.
Signs of boredom appear
Over time I noticed a few patterns emerging. If life was a bit status quo, so were my tweets. If life was awesome and random and exciting, so were my tweets. I found there was a direct correlation to the activity in my life and the activity on my Twitter feed. When I traveled, I couldn’t tweet fast enough about where I was and what I saw. When I was super excited about something, I shared it immediately. But on a day when I wasn’t particularly inspired and had little to say, my Twitter posts would stall and my anxiety would start to grow. And I couldn’t always bring myself to scour the blogosphere and then fake spontaneous brilliance.
My first break from Twitter
Soon enough, Twitter lethargy set in. I didn’t post or sign in for a while. Didn’t even stalk my friends to keep up with their lives. Of course that backfired a bit when I started to feel out of the loop and friends started to say “Didn’t you see it? I posted it on Twitter.” Read More
