In my previous post on Facebook Extended Permissions I focused on the positive aspect of this much-debated (and much-hated) aspect of working with Facebook’s API’s. After all, they are there to make things clear and secure, for both the developer and the user. The road to security in Facebookland is not paved with yellow bricks all the way, though, especially not for the user.

The offline_access extended permission

This permission allows an application offline access to all of the data the user has given the application permission to read. Why is this a problem? When the user clicked on Allow in the connection dialog, they have already allowed the application access to the information, right?

Right.

However, without the offline_access permission, the application is not allowed to store the user’s information, and the user’s information can only be used while the user is using the application (ie while the user is online). Which makes the offline_access permission more of a meta permission.

The offline_access permission gives an application the ability to request information on the user’s behalf, while the user is offline. Allowing this permission sounds serious, Orwellian even.

For developers this might be bad news. It is very likely that fewer users will click Allow when seeing the offline_access permission in the list of permissions than otherwise.

But what is the real world implication of this permission?

Imagine a developer with malicious intent gets the offline_access permission from a user. Most users do not check their installed applications very often, if ever (especially since it’s so well hidden within the Facebook settings).

The user then (for instance) gets spammed to bits by the malicious developer (or clients of the malicious developer). Upset user decides to change their email address. It’s a big hassle, but worth it, if the user stops getting spam. The user also updates their email address on Facebook, to receive Facebook notifications in their new inbox sans spam, and voila, the malicious developer gets their new email address, because the user has granted them offline access. In fact, the malicious developer can, in stead of 1995 style email address lists, sell self-updating email address lists to their clients for ten times the price. Pretty nifty, huh?

The power of Facebook’s Newsfeed to spread information is legendary. The good news for users (a bad news for unscrupulous marketeers) is that while a facebook app with the offline_access permission can query as much information about you as it wants to, whenever it wants to, it can not post to your Profile on your behalf, while you’re offline. Your friends won’t receive any updates in their feeds, unless you were part of the process.

Next week: Facebook Like Button – The real bad one

Facebook might refer more traffic to news websites than Google these days. But any digital marketer ignores Google’s search engine at their peril.

Yet there are still many that are oblivious as to how Google’s Pagerank works. Is this video I explain how PageRank works.

Google themselves defines their ranking system, called PageRank like this:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.’

Note Google does not talk about domain rank. It largely ignores domains – like wewillraakyou.com – but looks at the value of individual pages like wewillraakyou.com/hoes-does-google-page-rank-work/

Every page has a value merely for existing on the world wide web. When a page links to this page it transfers Pagerank to it. If a page has two links it splits the value it can transfer between these two links.

Google's PageRank formula - makes the web a meritocracy

In other words, links are like votes. But not all voters are equal. Voters that have received many links themselves can transfer more voting power.

Therefor the BBC site, which has a lot of amazing content and to which many people link, has pages with tremendous PageRank. If one of these pages link to your webpage, you are guaranteed to get a major Pagerank boost.

This system has meant that web search acts largely in a meritocratic fashion. If somebody does something remarkable, it tends to rise to the top.

It also means that if you have a mediocre website, content, service or product you will have to spend top dollar to get eyeballs. In other words, just as with social sharing the rule applies for search: advertising is a tax on an unremarkable product.

Welcome to the first edition of The RAAKonteur. Every week we will compile all the best bits of news from the ever-changing media world. Which new Social Media tool is worth knowing about? Which campaigns show a great understanding of the media shift?

With a bit of our own analysis thrown in, for free.

You can subscribe here.

Pushing products with Social Media

Old Spice’s new tv advertising campaign won its agency Wieden + Kennedy a Grand Prix in Cannes. Still, the sales of the tainted ‘man freshener’ apparently went down 7% year on year.

This week they launched an amazing earned media version of those commercials. For a few days they scripted and filmed reactions to actual Twitter messages, both from high profile Twitter influencers as well as punters. A perfect implementation of traditional campaigning with what Brian Solis calls connecting to ‘an audience with an audience’. We have a sneaky feeling that if they continue this way, it will re-position them as a younger brand and eventually increase the sales.

Apart from the 40-odd million YouTube views (!), a most exciting by-product of that campaign was the Old Spice Voicemail Generator. Interestingly, this wasn’t part of the agency’s plan. It was devised and developed in a few hours by a few guys on Reddit who got excited about the YouTube videos. Not every brand manages to engage people in such way and Utku Can has a good post about how this is an example of the importance of making awesome stuff.

From Crisis comms in US to Champion comms in UK

If Old Spice does not shake your doubt about the effectiveness of Social Media in raising the bottom line, then how about this.

Last winter Domino’s Pizza in the US had a nightmare when videos appeared on YouTube showing an employee sticking cheese up his nose and then putting it on a sandwich that was to be delivered to a customer. They were slow to react at first, but as this article explains, Domino’s did a whole lot right to fight the crisis that threatened to engulf them.

But Domino’s UK have gone on the offensive. Mashable reported that the company has increased its pre-tax profit by nearly 29%, which equates to £17.5m (roughly $26 million). The pizza retailer attributes social media initiatives and its Foursquare promotion for the gains.

Is PR starting to eat King Advertising’s cake?

While the Old Spice story is an example of the ad industry starting to understand ’sociall’, last week Wolfstar’s Stuart Bruce claimed in a talk at the CIPR that the PR world is best placed to ‘do Social Media’. That’s true from a building relationship point of view, but if anything the PR industry will have to become more creative (or team up with people who are).

And PR moguls Edelman seems to agree. They’ve gone all creative themselves and created an Augmented Reality app for Ben & Jerry’s. From the demo video (terrible voice-over by the way) it looks on the gimmicky side of things. But we can only salute Edelman (and Ben & Jerry’s) for a move like this.

Mine is bigger than yours…

Looking for an audience with an audience? A while ago we mentioned why we thought Klout is a better indicator of Twitter influence than Edelman’s Tweetlevel or Hubspot’s Twittergrader. Because unlike many other services, Klout takes into account the difference between the amount of people you follow and those that follow you. Plus your follower’s Klout scores as well as the amount of actual Retweets and mentions you receive.

Hootsuite – our favourite Social Media deck – this week introduced a way to filter Tweets by Kloutscore. And amazingly Dirk Singer of Rabbit Agency tweeted that a client has worked Klout scores into a contract!

PS: Another influence service we think is on the right track is trst.me.

Rabble rousing crowds and Cameron’s “Big Society”

The Treasury announced they will crowdsource ideas with the Spending Challenge website on to how to cut the massive government deficit. Unfortunately the quality of many of the public suggestions and malicious attacks forced them to take down the public ideas.

One commentator opined on the suitability of crowdsourcing for this type of public endeavor and referred to Churchill’s statement that “the best argument against democracy is to ask the opinion of the average voter”. Others (including us) felt that if you ask the right question to the right crowd using the right tools, crowdsourcing can indeed deliver good results.

Co-write the best book about marketing ever

Another example of Collective Engagement. Earlier this year, smart man Bud Caddell wrote one of the best posts about the changes in the advertising/marketing industry. He’s become even smarter now and used the social funding site Kickstarter to raise cash for a book he wants to put together.

We love Kickstarter as site, but Caddell has smartly taken the project further and has made his backers and integral part of the project. If you pledge $100, you become part of the Editorial Board. So if you want to be involved in his Bucket Brigade project, get out your wallet too. You have until tomorrow morning to join.

Wether you love the Facebook API, or hate it, this week Facebook will welcome its 500 millionth user, making it impossible to ignore it.

Much scrutiny of late was directed at the social media giant’s security policies (or rather, lack thereof), and Facebook responded by stepping up their approach on security, at least as far as extended permissions go.

Lets take a step back. In the past, users, by connecting to an application, allowed Facebook applications access to an implicitly specified amount of their profile information. Now users are confronted with an explicit list of permissions the Application is asking for.

Facebook Extended Permissions (user dialog)

Of course, change is always opposed by proponents of the status quo, and the reception of Facebook’s decision to try and sort out their permissions policy is no exception.

The change has caused waves of dispair in the Facebook developer community, especially amongst members of the DIY mashup community. For instance, click here to see what a search for “extended permissions” on the Facebook Developers Forum typically returns: Click here

While the extended permissions clearly proves to be a stumbling block to many developers, it is actually one of the few well designed aspects of Facebook’s suite of API’s. (no, I’m not generally a fan of the Facebook API, quite the contrary)

Ease of Use

A comma-seperated list of extended permissions is passed as a GET variable to the Facebook login URL, redirected to when getting the user to log in. It couldn’t be more simple. For some bizarre reason, though, Facebook decided to use different variable names for the graph API and the normal API. And, as usual with Facebook, this “feature” is extremely poorly documented. For your own reference, it’s scope in the graph API, en req_perms in the normal API.

examples:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=YOURAPPID&scope=read_stream,publish_stream
http://www.facebook.com/login.php?api_key=YOURAPIKEY&req_perms=read_stream,publish_stream

Clarity of Permission Names

Permission names are simple and self-explanatory; you don’t have to consult the list time and again to remember them. email, for instance, gives you access to the user’s email address. publish_stream allows you to publish to a users stream, and read_stream allows you to (guess what!) read from a user’s stream.

User Friendly Dialog Descriptions

The way each permission is translated to the user in the connection dialog is also simple, complete, and makes perfect sense. It’s amazing how often big software companies fumble with this step. For instance, read_stream is translated to the user as Access posts in my news feed. Pretty self-explanatory, huh?.

Read part two: Some serious security concerns.

Content is reasserting itself as King, the Search Engine Optimisation industry is moving into the ‘content’ business, a domain Public Relations – who specialise in ‘earned’ media – previously saw as theirs. That was the conclusion of a talk / debate I attended at the CIPR yesterday.

But not only that, PR is not countering. The industry has not moved into doing lucrative SEO either. Philip Sheldrake put it eloquently:

Has the PR industry missed the boat on the optimisation of web content to attract the attention of Google, more commonly known as search engine optimisation? The emergence of the multi-million pound search industry during the last decade suggests that may be the case.

Search agencies are increasingly packaging planning, content development and analytics, into a payment-by-results model. It’s a compelling proposition for a marketing director that is seeking guaranteed outcomes.

Now search agencies are starting to use PR tactics such as press releases, bylined content and wire distribution to drive their campaigns prompting the scrutiny of the role of PR versus SEO.

Content: Art or Science

Are PR and the SEO industry in fact playing the same field?

A distinction was made by Kelvin Newman, Creative Director at SiteVisibility (an SEO company), between technical SEO and link building SEO. The former, I have argued on this blog, is actually dying a slow death. When I repeated this assertion yesterday, it was greeted with nods and disagreement in equal measure.

The point was made that SEO is the science and PR the art of using content to build reputation. And as such, said Wilson McInnes, Managing Director of NixonMcInnes, they come from two very different perspectives and even appeal to different kinds of people. PR was strategic, while SEO was merely tactical. PR was concerned with brand, SEO was not.

Good and small agencies are starting to offer an integrated solution. But all this was academic, was a consensus of sorts. Clients, particularly big ones, still have separate budgets for PR, advertising, SEO, digital. And until this changes, agencies will have to pitch specific services, even if there is a lot of overlap.

Still, it was felt that SEO in particular was moving in to eat PR’s lunch.

In that respect social media and PR are much closer related than PR and the SEO industry me thinks. Social media is about brand too. It is strategic, not just tactical. Because good integration of social media into a business is likely to fundamentally change the way the business operates.

Facebook’s recent changes have kicked up a hornet’s nest of privacy concerns.

This post is not about that in particular. It’s about how people with good ideas that read this zeitgeist well can use existing social media to create a ‘buzz’ or even launch a project.

Diaspora on Kickstarter

A group of 4 talented young programmers have read the public mood well and responded with an idea that has captured the imagination – Diaspora.

Their platform of choice: Kickstarter, a well designed new platform that is revolutionising the organisation and funding of projects.

Diaspora is a project that aims to create:

“the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”

Importantly, Diapora used Kickstarter’s crowdfunding system.

Kickstarter works as follows: you post a project and ask for funding from the great and good of the internet, staggering the amounts that people can contribute. The money is only due once the full target amount is reached. If that doesn’t happen, the money doesn’t leave your account.

It’s a strong platform. An art project that we at RAAK helped founding reached its goal of $10,240 and is now going into production.

Originally Diaspora only asked for $10,000. But as of today, with 15 days to go, they already have $170,000 from nearly 5000 backers.

Now that is pretty impressive.

Three thoughts about Kickstarter.

Funding content instead of Advertising

If you’re a business, why not trawl Kickstarter for worthy projects to fund. We are moving back to a world where business does not buy media space for intrusive messaging, but become patrons of ‘content’. Now here is a platform to do that. Choose the right projects and you could get some PR mileage as well.

Curate and support talent

Perhaps creative agencies should bring deserving artists, designers and even events onto Kickstarter and back them with creative, advice, and promotion etc. That way they don’t just curate ‘content’ but can become part of the creative eco-system.

A while back in an article titled: who says the future needs an advertising agency? Bud Caddell wrote bout one possible future for agencies.

But we’ll also begin to see a new species of agency evolve, the platform builders, that reverse the power dynamic between brand and agency by creating remarkable, attention earning, systems for human interaction.

Now here is a platform to help the platform builders!

Crowd-investing?

Thirdly. Why are there no crowd investing platforms of note? That’s because US and UK legislation makes it illegal to offer shares to the public outside of the official stock exchanges.

Tweeting for your business? You have a personal Twitter account and you’re wondering ‘Should I use that?’

People that run Twitter accounts on behalf of brands often use their own usernames. Or a combination of both, like the pioneering RichardatDell, who was one of the first people worldwide to start using Twitter for his job.

Why do people take the personal approach? It is simply easier to engage with others as another person.

Also, there’s a deep psychological need in most of us to unite our different ’selves’ if possible. To present to the world all we are. And if you are happy in your work, if your work is an expression of who you are as a person, you’re likely to be more inclined to combine your work and personal Tweets.

Being yourself on Twitter is easy (you don’t have to think too much) and has the added benefit of showing you as a more rounded, more real person.

Mixing business and pleasure

But what if you move jobs?

Unlike many other online services (email, IM, etc), you can actually change your Twitter username and even your Twitter name. So you can use one account and adjust the name as you move between jobs.

What about the arguments that say you should have more than one Twitter account? One account for your professional and one for your personal life? Perhaps. We all have many different sides to our lives.

At one of our training courses, I met a marketing manager for a cosmetics brand who, in her spare time, ran a Twitter service dispensing sexual advice and tips. For her, having two separate accounts made absolute sense.

Luckily tools like Hootsuite now make it easy to manage many accounts (including Facebook & LinkedIn) at the same time. This is quite handy.

For me, Twitter is a firehose for all I have to say on media, South African politics and everything else. I’m on the wrong end of 30 and rarely do stupidly embarrassing stuff these days, so it’s ok. But still, Hootsuite allows me to direct more personal messages to Facebook, hard core business ones to LinkedIn.

Sorted.

The UK election landscape is in turmoil. The Lib Dem Nick Clegg’s showing in the first ever televised debates in the UK has boosted the third party, and thrown the cat amongst the pigeons (who says there’s no role for old media like TV .)

But the UK has a first past the post election system, which means it is entirely possible that a party can win a seat with a minority of support.

RAAK thinks a lot of Lib Dem and Labour supporters would vote for either party if they knew it would keep the Tories from having a seat.

Tactical voting by RAAK

Over the weekend the Observer published an article on how to vote tactically. And we thought it would be good if the information was easy to access online.

So here it is: Battle vote. See if your vote matters.

PS: Hint – The election debates are much more fun if you watch them while on Twitter. It’s the way forward.

You follow me I follow you back?

Don’t be fooled.

If somebody that’s following you on Twitter follows 10,000 other people, don’t expect to have a meaningful tete-a-tete with them. And if you’re following 1,000 people on Twitter, don’t even pretend that you will notice half the stuff they are saying.

Social media is full of misconceptions, confusion and unexamined clichés. That social media is about conversations is one of these. Yes, conversations are part of social media, but this fixation with conversation misses the one core element that makes it truly different from other media.

In truth, the basic rules of media and messaging have not changed at all.

• It’s still perfectly possible for one media outlet to speak to thousands of people;
• We also know that people have a limited attention span;
• And we know that we can’t have a two way conversation with many people at the same time. When I worked for Lycos for instance, celebrities like Natalie Imbruglia were invited to do chats with fans. These chats never really took off. The stars could only reply to one person at a time, leaving many chatters frustrated.

None of these things have been altered by social media.

What has changed is that technologies have dropped the entry-level for publishing or talking. The barriers have dropped so low, that everybody can potentially be a media outlet of both the conversational and broadcast kind. Often whether they become conversationalists or broadcasters depend on their talent.

As we explained in a previous post social media is not new. In the past we also had forms of so called interactive or two-way media; your phone is a good example of two-way media.
Still, conference calls, with its potential for multi-way communication, only form a minute part of telecommunications. That’s because conversations don’t scale well.

But why then the success of Facebook, who just surpassed Google in the US in terms of usage? Because conversations are only a part of Facebook’s picture.

Technology has allowed companies like Flickr, Facebook and Youtube to provide services where users can share stuff. Facebook has been particularly good in turning even the smallest bit of activity on its platform into content, i.e. its Personal News Feed. I ‘friend’ somebody, you find out about it because you’re my friend.

Jeff Jarvis calls it ‘the wisdom of my crowd’. Sam Leith calls it ‘the Reuters of inanity’. Fact is that the stronger the bonds of friendship, the more likely I am to engage with your ‘content’. And like conversations, friendships don’t scale.

Still, everybody has friends – and the most inane thing a friend has done is often more interesting to them than Gordon Brown’s bullying.
This is one of the key differences between Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is asymmetrical. There is no requirement of mutual friending. And the result is that Twitter allows for broadcasting, on top of ‘conversations’. Facebook is now trying to change its feed to be more Twitter-like, with mixed success.

This difference explains why Twitter is not as big as Facebook. Like with blogs, only a small percentage of the population have the drive to say something ánd make it so interesting that it goes down with a faceless audience. As Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace said, if you have a thousand friends, you’re broadcasting, you’re an entertainer.

The problem for broadcasters, and with I mean all broadcasters, is that, unless we’re talking mass live events, their ‘content’ will rarely match a person’s love to natter with their buddies. AT&T is still a much larger company than Google or Time Warner in terms of revenue. The world’s big telco companies dwarf the media, computer and entertainment companies in terms of revenue. Simply because people spend a huge amount of money on their phones.

Which brings me back to my original point. I rarely follow people on Facebook I don’t know or want to know. I don’t normally expect people I follow on Twitter to follow me back. I rarely follow people on Twitter that follow more people than they have following them (I immediately think they don’t have much of interest to say). I don’t get excited if somebody follows me on Twitter that follows a 1000+ other people? What’s the chance they’ll see what I’m Tweeting? What’s the chance I’ll be retweeted?

That’s why for me, the perfect follower follows 300 people while 10,000 follows them. I.e. they get little input but puts out to a lot of people.

The simple answer is no. Social media is not new.

In 1892 in Budapest, a certain Tividar Puskas launched an exciting new service that used telephones to deliver radio programs to an audience. Initially he had 60 subscribers. Puskas thought telephones would make a great way to distribute information and entertainment, i.e. a great broadcast medium.

A stentor reading the day's news to 6200 subscribers - An image depicting the stentor of Telefon Hirmondó - April 1901

It was not to be. His service did manage to garner 15,000 subscribers by 1907, but died because we found a use for phones that is vastly more lucrative and valuable – namely talking to each other. One-to-one communication.

Since then one-to-one telephony has become one of the biggest industries around. The world’s largest telephone company AT&T is still much larger than Microsoft, Times Warner, or Google in terms of revenue. And there are much more telcos than there are large internet portals or entertainment companies.

But well before the telephone and the telegraph we already had forms of media that were interactive, conversational, one-to-one.

The town square, where people could meet and exchange information, was an old form of social interaction. The town hall speech, its one-to-many equivalent, was ‘broadcast’.

We have had one-to-one letters for hundreds of years, and more recently we had pamphlets (today’s flyers) through which to ‘broadcast’ our messages.

So what is different now? According to Clay Shirky it’s the technological changes of recent that have accelerated social interaction. Things that used to be hard to coordinate because they took time and were expensive to organise have become easier to do.

In other words, social media is not new, but what is new is that social technologies have lowered the cost and the barriers for entry. Now, everybody can be a media outlet.