Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude

Facebook: A Ship Lost in the Dark of Night

Facebook went public a week and a half ago. The IPO, thought by many to be the grandaddy of them all instead was a dud, as the stock barely rose on the first day of trading and actually fell an additional ten percent on the second day. After that, came allegations that investors had hung the company out to dry by selling the stock off prior to open because they felt like the social network did not have a viable monetization plan. The money, while made by those who were in the company early, is for the most part gone. Everyone who has gone in since is now in the red. 

I’ve been rather harsh on the company since its opening. Even though I’m in social media and work on community management for a living, I have always found it necessary never to fall in love with one particular social network unless there is a true and tried business purpose. For me, Facebook has been that revolutionary tool that has changed the way that we communicate, but the more and more you view the site with its ads (and if you use the mobile app, more is on its way), newfangled features, the more you realize the social network that we have come to love is lost. In other words, they too understand that the Internet is finally bored.

Don’t get me wrong however: Facebook has come a very long way in the past 8 years from the dormitory of Mark Zuckerberg post-female rejection to a site that has as many people as 16 percent of the planet. From the point of a view of a product, there has been great success, but from the point of business even though the company has had the luxury of being on top, there have been many cracks. The $1 billion purchase of Instagram and subsequent releasing of its own app, for example, shows that Facebook is scared of what might be. The bringing back of college roots to its communities after it left the very concept 5 years ago is yet another example of a company that isn’t sure what to do, but codes for the sake of coding, with the anticipation that something fun and useful might come out of it - like Facebook chat.  

The other aspect of the company that is particularly frustrating for users is the usability in general. Recently as I have typed to people, I’ve gotten the notification that I might be typing spam. In fact, after congratulating Zuckerberg on becoming married to his wife Priscilla Chan, I was banned from posting a comment on pages I subscribe to for a week. It is however, not as bad as many individuals I know who hit networking caps and cannot go over 5,000 friends despite literally knowing everyone they meet and adding value to their lives. With engineers running a company who don’t socialize (and hey, what is the point when you make hundreds of thousands anyway?) creating a company whose sole point is to socialize, this creates a conundrum, and one that I find is very troubling. 

The next few months are going to be interesting. For the industry, the end of Q3 should be a rather poignant look at where Facebook is in regards to advertising and its revenues. Will people pay $2 to get their status updates featured? Will more people click on advertising? Will the company try to change up the interface again to make things look more streamlined? 

Time will tell. Come back soon and we’ll analyze it! 

The Loss of Competitive Intellectual Advantage

There used to be a time in human society when intellectuality and knowledge were commodities. Back in those ages, knowledge was held by the teachers in society who entertained those who wanted to learn more. For the most part, the rest of society didn’t really need to know much anyway out of the day-to-day tasks of managing their lives and building up a civilization. 

With those who had the knowledge, came the building of Universities. Universities became the center of learning and the center of discussion of contemporary issues, and were also the beginning of sweeping intellectual change. Many Enlightenment era Philosophers were also professors of the time, and their thoughts contributed to eventual revolutions such as that of the French, American as well as social-political upheaval in the 19th century. 

The rise of the Middle Class in the 20th century was the beginning of where overall intellectuality and knowledge were spread further out. Families and individuals now without the need to cover their daily needs on such an explicit level now found it in their daily life to be able to go attend school, acquire knowledge and apply that knowledge into their occupations. Access to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs now became more widely available to everyone, and those who could complete those courses were held in the highest regard. You no longer needed that connection or family blood in order to be someone above the rest. 

Digital technology advanced the whole of society further as the Internet went live in the 1990s, followed by Wikipedia and social media becoming venues of discussion. No longer was intellectual conversation confined to a University lecture hall but now found in blog comment sections, Facebook walls, emails, live chat rooms as well as Skype and Google+ chat rooms. Elite institutions such as MIT and Stanford now even offer courses at no charge on both iTunes as well as their own websites, further lowering the need to have to go to a physical college. Some, such as entrepreneur and ventur capitalist Peter Thiel, have encouraged others to forgo college for $100,000 and instead consider starting their own businesses. 

Is the ivory tower crumbling at the expense of social media and digital technology? 

I had this discussion with my manager at Cisco the other week, and we both came to the agreement that this was true. You can become educated anywhere now, whether it is reading articles on Wikipedia, going to your local library, taking courses off iTunes U or going straight to the source of some college institutions and checking out electronic courses that they may have for free, such as at MIT and Stanford. The only place that still has the barrier to the rest of the public lies in journal archives and journal websites such as JSTOR and Lexis-Nexis, where fees (not cheap) must be paid in order for people to read peer-reviewed journal articles and theses. 

In other words, this means that there is now a loss of competitive intellectual advantage. If you have access to a device that allows you to access the Internet, one could almost argue that there is no excuse to not be ignorant. You can do everything from learn how to cook and tie a tie on YouTube to learning the details of nuclear fission and fusion on Wikipedia, and crack the basics of how to code an app on Codeacademy and the genetic structure of humans through lessons on Khan Academy. You might not be as smart as the PhD student down the street at school, but there is no doubt that if you wanted to understand what he was doing, you could go many places to read up on what he knows and have a stimulating discussion. 

So what does this mean for you? The answer is relatively simple: We live in a society where knowing people matters just as much as acquiring knowledge. If you have a lot of knowledge, but don’t know anyone to share with it, that potential is just as small as knowing a lot of people but not knowing anything to share with them. As competitive intellectual advantage falls and continues to fall, the cost of knowing things falls as well, and therefore the value of people rises. Therefore, it is only in your interests in the long term to get to know as many people of quality as possible, so you can advance your thoughts and capabilities. 

The ivory tower is crumbling. What are you doing to take advantage of that for you and your society? 

Albert Qian is a writer for Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude. Join him in his social media ivory tower today and send him a Tweet to @albertqian.

The Yellow Pages are Done: It’s All in Social Media

A couple of months ago I walked into a shopping center and saw a pay phone. It seemed awkwardly out of place, like a relic in the wrong era. In a day where our mobile phones can play games, pay for items and buy coupons on Yelp, this pay phone could only push numbers and call people. 

Attached to this pay phone was a copy of the yellow pages. The yellow pages hung off the phone booth, lonely as ever and the pages fluttered in the wind. 

Truly obsolete. 

In this day and age of social media, Yelp and Google search, searching through the Yellow Pages is a dirty process, right down to the ink on your fingers at the end. In the time it takes for anyone who can type on a keyboard to find a business, Yellow Page users are still flipping through the alphabet to see if their business is under a letter or a particular category. 

In just a few short years, social media has:

• Made the Yellow Pages search an inefficient one, compared to social media
   
• Consumed excessive amounts of paper, even recycled - Millions of pages are printed each year to be put on the steps of households that never even look at them, but turn them into high chairs for little kids instead. 
   
• Given businesses and consumers a chance to engage in real time on social channels. On the Yellow Pages, you cannot Tweet or share the business you found unless you physically clip out the ad. Do you have time for that?
   
• Lowered the barrier of entry for advertising. If you advertise in the Yellow Pages, the costs are crazy. A one inch spaced listing can range from $252 to $2,500 depending on location, and there is no guarantee that someone could see that small text when glossing for businesses. A larger page listing can run you anywhere from $10,000 to $90,000 depending on your location, and you don’t even get the chance to change the content displayed. A Facebook page is free and you have the opportunity to add content of your own from photos to videos as well as partner with other businesses over social media. Can your Yellow Pages do that? Imagine what an investment of $10,000 could do for your social media presence and bring in more business. The gains would be substantial.
   
• Created viral brand campaigns that really, really allow for more reach. Neither you nor I may ever visit Chuck Testa in Ojai Valley to have anything taxidermized, but we know about his services through the viral video he created with the help of Rhett and Link and the help of Reddit. Yellow Pages are static. Social media moves mountains. 

Don’t be that business that advertises in the Yellow Pages. Join the future of marketing and customer engagement. Let me know how I can help you transition into the future of marketing, content management, video production and social media. 

Albert Qian writes for Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude and has not used the Yellow Pages seriously in 10 years or more. Join him and move your business forward today. 

Thoughts on the Facebook IPO (Take Two)

It was quite a week for Mark Zuckerberg. He had a birthday, got married, and oh - his company went public at a valuation of $104 billion dollars. 

The debut of Facebook was rather interesting. Depending on how you think about it, the introduction of Facebook on the NASDAQ was either a dud or perfectly timed. Closing up 23 cents can be viewed either as a perfect valuation or signaling that social media is a bubble or that there were external factors affecting the stock price, such as the debt crisis in the European Union that currently has the overall stock market on a tumble. I think in nicer times, Facebook might have seen the 10% uptick that most were expecting. 

I reviewed my thoughts on the Facebook IPO earlier in February of this year when they first announced that they would go public. I did not purchase any stock Friday, but I do have some new thoughts since that have come off the IPO.

• Social media has arrived - Not that it hadn’t before, but Facebook’s day one trading volume certainly shows that its here. Whether to stay is another thing.
• Social media is already on our minds - Of the 19 Social Media IPOs in 2011, 82.4% of those stocks (16 stocks) are trading below their opening day value. And because of that, investors are wary. 
• A Maturation of Time Past, But Still Lots to be Done - I would argue that the IPO was a maturation of what Facebook has done for itself over the past 8 years. There are some wonderfully rich folks out in Menlo Park now, and the effort is certainly deserved with the money made. Facebook Pre-IPO has served as a great place for information, news and political gathering, but post-IPO sees a different world in the need to monetize through advertising. 44% already don’t click on Sponsored Stories, General Motors just dropped a $10 million dollar ad campaign and 46% think its a passing fad. We also thought video games were a passing fad too, in the 1980s, by the way - and look where that went. 
• Monetization - A Question of How - It’s going to be argued how Facebook will monetize off the rest of us. As much as Zuckerberg and his team of engineers can tell us, the end users, that they will focus on shipping good code and making a good user experience, shareholders are going to ask for more. And when a product is based upon the efforts of its users, Facebook is going to ask for more clicks on advertising, the buying of $2 status update features and possibly even ads on its mobile platform. Will users click? Will the user experience suffer? Will we see a defiant CEO push back and as a result, see stock price drop in favor of what the engineering crowd sees as optimal? A curious quandary indeed, and it should be interesting to see play out. 

These are some of the initial thoughts that I have on the IPO. Going forward towards the end of Q2, Q3 and Q4 we’ll see more numbers on Facebook earnings calls that will tell us if users truly respond positively or if its the beginning of something else. I’ll share my thoughts then. 

In the mean time, tell me what you think. Did you buy stock? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter @albertqian.

Albert Qian is the writer for Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude.

Social ROI: The Beast in the Room

If there were a business buzzword hall of fame, I have no doubt that the phrase “Return on Investment” (ROI) would be one of the initial inductees. 

Social Media ROI was a topic of great discussion last week at the Ragan Conference. As has been the case with social media, ROI has been a huge topic for the past three to five years. The question at the end of the day is always what ROI denotes in social media, whether it might be tweets, fans, followers, pageviews, page hits or Klout score. 

This question has never had a definitive answer, at least in the discussions I’ve had with people over the past several years. In executing social media after all, unlike every other process, the problem lies within the fact that ROI is not direct. That is, that social media can help in garnering a sale, click through, view, or a conversation, but directly speaking, the ROI is pretty much zero. Suffice to say, just starting a Twitter account or having a Facebook page is not ROI. Using the account and posting to the page might. 

For me, the answer is not simple either, but at the end of the day comes down to relationships. As fluffy as a word as that may be, that’s what business is all about. In the example of a brick and mortar store, a lack of relationships means that sales are depressed. Obviously as customers none of us would ever go to a store that treats us badly. Comparatively speaking, none of us would engage with a Twitter account that spews back hateful trash. 

But how do you measure relationships? Relationships are of course a perspective widely held by the parties involved. A “friend” on Facebook or a “follower” on Twitter after all is not the real-life equivalent. The digital method is not really any clearer. Just because someone spends 5 minutes on your site and clicks through to various pages doesn’t signify true ROI either, even if you sent them from a social channel. Marketing funnels too, can tell some of the story, if you can do a deep enough dive, but not all companies have that technology. 

In the end of the day however, the basic point is that relationships are what take the cake. Building them up to a point of sale is the tough part because of the involvement in emotions and other issues. Treat social media like a party, where you are constantly introducing people to each other and making friends. It works like this in basic business, and it will surely work on the social graph. 

How do you build relationships on social media? How do you answer the ROI question? Share with me on Twitter @albertqian. 

Cisco-Ragan: A Reminder That Social Media is Social

I had the pleasure of sitting down this week at the Cisco/Ragan Social Media Summit in San Jose. The opportunity afforded me the luxury of sitting in front of luminaries like Mark Ragan and Brian Solis as well as social media strategists from Scottrade, Lawyers.com, IBM, Southern California Edison and Neiman Marcus. 

As someone who has geeked out and engaged in the space for three years now, a lot of the topics found here weren’t new, but served as an update and a refresher to what social media is. If you observe the industry from a top-down view, you’re exposed daily to varying viewpoints from those who believe that social media is a fad, a bubble or something that simply isn’t to be dabbled in. Doubters will always exist, but with social media the going notion is that something some day will lead to its demise and that it’s just here as a hobby for most.

The Cisco/Ragan social media summit to me was a good friendly reminder that social media is still about being social and about creating meaning for customers through social channels. Namely: 

• Communicating and being responsive to customer needs in times of great crisis 
• Leveraging technology and gamifying the customer engagement process
• Empowering those internal and external to your company over social media
• Having fun in the entire social media process
• The main audience for anything can be found over social media

As we move forward through 2012, it will be more and more important to understand and apply these processes on both a personal, enterprise and small business level. The conference to me is a good reminder that there is a lot of work to be done, but already there are a lot of great examples and samples of how taking advantage of a platform can already work wonders. 

With that in mind, how will you use social media this year?

Give me a shoutout on Twitter @albertqian. Look forward to hearing from you. 

Who You Know, What You Know

Yahoo, the technology-content-search company everyone has come to enjoy piling on these recent weeks careened further into illegitimacy this week as recently installed CEO Scott Thompson was exposed for not having the computer science degree he claims to have, but only having a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration with Accounting from his Alma Mater. In the process, this has uncovered 12 years of lies, as Thompson was formerly also the CEO of PayPal as well. 

Business is a trust based, people-oriented center of activity. Thompson’s exposure sends us all a reminder that when we network and speak to people, the need for honesty is paramount. Granted, while some get away with a little extra fibbing, there is a fine line between that and outright lying, which is what Thompson is to have appeared to have done. When we lie about who we are however, we not only hurt the people who are looking at us as talent acquisition, but also hurt those who help us get to where we are.

In social media, it works the same way. Trust is a fragile commodity because you can blatantly lie about your age, your looks, your family and every aspect of your identity. People take you for who you are, and much like in business, if you lie, you hurt those around you as well. As a business on social media, fostering that trust is important. Breaking it can create social media backlash that can go for days and weeks, and really tarnish a well built reputation. As is the case both with people and business, you can spend 30 years building something up, and destroy it in a matter of seconds.

Consider the consequences in both social media and in person next time when you think of what to say and how to characterize yourself. 

Albert Qian is the writer of Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude. Connect with him on Twitter @albertqian. 

Dear [Social Media] Graduate,

Congratulations. You’ve reached graduation. 

As you tweet your way into your cap and gown, snap photos on your smartphone and capture each moment from the commencement speaker to the tossing of the caps, you inch closer and closer to the real world. When the gowns finally land on the ground, you will have been welcomed in. 

You’ve been told all your life that this degree wrapped in a bow and on special paper means something. Life is your oyster, they say. Your future is before you, others repeat. Still others keep saying that now that you are a graduate, it is your turn to go out and change the world, and leave it better than your forefathers found it. That as you walk out of the stadium, building, park and auditorium, you have all the power, might in the world to change what you are about to enter into. 

Times have changed many fold since you entered into college, just a short four years ago. In that time, you’ve witnessed a recession that in some sense, continues on with sky high unemployment that still doesn’t seem to end. Among all the hope that commencement speakers around the country will tell you, what they won’t do is sprinkle it with the realities that life will bring. That despite the fact that you have the power to change the world, your prospects of finding that job are low. That despite the fact that the world is your oyster, that monster tuition loan bill you took out four years ago still needs to be paid off, and is collecting interest. 

This world you enter into: It’s not pretty.

Yet as you enter into it, there is much opportunity. As a social media graduate, you’ll get to work in one of the fastest growing fields working with technology that changes by the day. You’ll encounter some pretty tough managers along the way - some who have never learned social media and spend all day on Tweetdeck, without a clue as to what a Sponsored Tweet is, and you’ll encounter some pretty awesome ones too, who while being twenty years your senior can reply to a re-tweet faster than you can, know how HootSuite works and engage with you on “Follow Friday”. 

The greatest lesson you’ll learn however, is the investment of people. That no matter how much you work, how many hours you sit at your desk and how many spreadsheets you finish, the end of the day will always be about the people you work with and those you meet on the journey to your destination. There will inevitably, always be work to be done. People on the other hand, will not always be there. Invest in people, for they add value to the work that you will be doing, day in and day out. Get to know your manager, the people you meet on social media and the people you meet at networking events. Though its never mentioned in any place in the classes you take in school, this will be the single post determining factor of your success. 

So go out there, tweet it up and have fun. It’s been a tough four years (or two), and within that, you’ve conquered the midterms, homework, projects and quizzes. Go out there and make a difference, and remember what you do, always remember to pay it forward. 

Happy Graduation, from The Social Media Dude

PS: Connect with me on LinkedIn. Let me know who I should introduce you to, and I’d be glad to help you out. 

Social Media: Accelerating The Referral

I’m often asked by non-social media professional friends about social media. With social media news taking over the world on a daily basis, it seems like a reasonable thing to ask. The question I get the most is how social media is particularly useful, especially since there seems to be so much noise about who is acquiring who and what the bubble seems to be, the point of the industry. 

For me, the power of social media lies in the referral. Whether its a tweet, a LinkedIn introduction, or a Facebook message introducing two people, social media puts relationships front and center. Nowhere else on earth can you connect two people and get things done, personal or social. 

Have you used social media to connect and make an impression today?

Connect with Albert on social media. Twitter @albertqian, LinkedIn, and Facebook today. He writes for the Social Media Dude blog.