Facebook's Struggle With User Rights

Written by Rob Hudson | 25 July 2009
Posted in Social Media

One of the cornerstone principles of Web 2.0 is empowering the customer/user to become truly a part of your online experience, not just a spectator. This is a powerful engagement tool and can build strong, sustainable value for your company while making users feel as though they are important to your business. This enhanced value can also deliver stickiness. However, as with most relationships, there is an honesty, courtesy and trust that you are hoping to build and leverage. Users are hoping for it too at varying levels.

Facebook is struggling with this very issue. They want desperately to leverage the content that users are posting on their service while still giving users control over what is shared. They also want to lean into some of the behavior models that Twitter has fostered such as "following" other's messages. Confusing privacy settings are, in their thinking, preventing users from sharing openly more of their content to larger audiences. The dilemna is that Facebook is not adept at rolling these changes out to users and earning their buy-in. They tend to make changes to their policies somewhat quietly and then the blogosphere tips their hand for them.

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The Words That Matter Change

Written by Rob Hudson | 21 July 2009
Posted in Relevance

By now, you probably know that being found online has something to do with keywords and search engines and the interactions of these. Since I was close to the Google hive when I worked at AOL in Dulles, VA, I learned that this complex interaction is centered around one word for Google - "RELEVANCE". Sure, there are lots of tricks that "SEO" firms can play to simulate top relevance, but they will be fleetingly useful if you don't have sustainable relevance. If you are truly the most relevant listing for a certain set of keywords, then by all means Google wants you to be the ichiban (top one, number one, top dog, big honcho) listing. What set of keywords are right for your company and how you get them to work for you is unique to your business and a longer conversation, but the most important thought for today is that it is a never ending quest to keep up with evolving relevance. I came across the following diagram that shows how search dynamics have changed over the last few years for the blogging space. How might your keywords be changing?