Social networking

I’m definitely hooked on Facebook, and I think that when the company opened up to third-party applications, that was a brilliant move. But the applications thing does get to be annoying.

Today, a Facebook friend sent me some “Good Karma.” Hey, that’s nice. But, in order to “receive” it, I have to add the Good Karma application to my Facebook profile.

Since I already have 47 applications installed (though not all of them are visible on my Facebook profile), I declined my Good Karma. I’m definitely suffering from application overload, since new and cool ones keep coming out — and I keep trying them out. I periodically go through a winnowing process to keep my Facebook page at least someone under control.

Have we already reached a point where it’s nearly impossible for any application to succeed in capturing a large audience because there’s so much competition?

Over at STLToday.com, Kurt Greenbaum’s Twitter project is live: Today on Highway 40.

The idea is to use Twitter to document the driving and commuting experiences of people as a key arterial in St. Louis is closed for a long reconstruction period. Greenbaum, who is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s social media director, recruited 10 people (plus himself) to use Twitter to file short (140 characters) reports about what they encounter in the weeks before the shutdown and the week after. The road closes on January 2.

Here’s the list of traffic Twitter correspondents, who have begun their short reporting assignment. You can read their reports on a special STLToday page, or on Twitter itself.

This will be interesting to watch. But I’m also looking out for a good example of using Twitter for a big fast-breaking story. I’m not sure how this will work for a more drawn-out story that can be planned for. It’ll work fine, of course, but will the content be interesting enough to engage the audience? Let’s see!

Yet another Twitter+journalism item. … Slate political correspondent John Dickerson is reporting from Iowa this week, and he’s filing Twitter bursts as well as blog items — and his musings are going on a Google Maps mashup. Talk about your trendy reporter!

Here’s yet another Twitter+journalism idea, via PBS MediaShift: Twitter posses.

As J.D. Lasica explains, the concept is to have reporters begin using the immediacy and interactivity of Twitter: “A beat reporter could enlist a dozen or two dozen passionate, driven readers to serve as a kind of Twitter posse. Whenever she was about to tackle a big story or difficult interview, the reporter could begin a mobile dialogue with her posse members, who could pose questions, much like the ‘backchannel’ IRC feed at conferences such as AlwaysOn or Supernova.”

This is a faster version of “beat blogging,” the idea of journalists using social networking tools to assemble a group of experts in a topic to assist and advise them and improve the depth of their reporting.

I can’t help but love how journalists are embracing these new online tools as they appear. For lots of people, their first reaction to Twitter was, “That’s frivolous.” (I’ll admit it; I thought that initially, too.) But fairly quickly folks started thinking outside the box.

I’ve said here that I’m a (qualified) fan of the “social ads” concept that Facebook is implementing. But I’m only a fan as far as the concept goes; Facebook’s implementation still has major problems.

Example: In my Facebook News Feed this afternoon was this social ad, which appeared because someone on my friends list allowed it to be published:

Now that sucks. It’s a stupid way to advertise, because it gives the appearance that David Henderson is spamming my Facebook account with an ad from Blockbuster Video — which is not what he intended, I’m sure.

But if this was done right, it could be a great and cool form of advertising. If Dave had just rented the movie Rent — or had just rated it 4 stars on Blockbuster.com — then I’d be fine with receiving that information in my News Feed. If Dave was (because he agreed to) sending all his Facebook friends a $1 off coupon for Blockbuster, that would be fine. But the ad above is stupid and counterproductive on Blockbuster’s part.

The best way to handle this ad would be to 1) have the News Feed ad above be something like “David Henderson gave Rent 4 stars on Blockbuster.com” (relevant personal information about a Facebook friend’s activities, approved for publication by him in an opt-in manner), and 2) use the ad banner space in the left side of the Facebook News Feed page for a more conventional ad (like “One month free trial…”).

The social ad that showed up in my News Feed is dumb. If Facebook pumps that kind of crap onto user News Feed pages, the Beacon and Social Ad programs will fail.

Done right, they will represent a major positive innovation in online advertising.

The deal between MediaNews Corp. and Topix.net, where Topix will host the user comments for web articles on MediaNews’ newspaper websites, is stirring up debate in the blogosphere — especially between Howard Owens and Topix CEO Chris Tolles. (Journalism.co.uk report.)

Owens has gotten heated in his criticism of the deal. I understand where he’s coming from, but my own view isn’t quite as harsh.

First, I’ll point back to an article I wrote for the Poynter Institute several years ago: “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism.” In that, I outlined the various levels of user interaction that media sites can pick and choose from. User comments were at the absolute bottom of the list; it’s the very least that any website can do to let the audience into the game.

I would argue that while user comments are essential, they can take up substantial resources if you’ve got a lot of traffic and you’re monitoring them closely. So if you’re going to outsource anything on the “social” side of web publishing, user comments would be it.

BUT, working with an outside vendor, there must be good communication with the editorial staff. The vendor can alert the publisher to problems or user comments that require personal attention. And just because a news website is working with a vendor on user comments does not mean that editorial staff members are off the hook. The system should work to alert them to comments on their stories that require interaction with the audience.

I’ll go along with this idea only if the rest of the audience-interaction or social strategy of the news organization is taken seriously — the other things I talked about in that 11 Layers article (and more; that was written in 2005, and much has changed since then).

If any news companies are looking at the Topix offering and thinking, “Great. We can outsource our audience interaction and get back to the news business as usual,” well, that’s nuts. User comments are just one small element of interacting and engaging with your audience.

WSJ.com’s Kara Swisher interviews Facebook’s Owen Van Natta about the whole social ads things. Yeah, Facebook’s had some privacy problems and it screwed up at first with the implementation of social ads, but this is so innovative. We’ve come a long way from banner ads!

It’s been an odd week for me. After my business partner and I decided to shut down our small company, the Enthusiast Group, I decided to be open and transparent about what happened. Following the lead of Judy’s Book founder Andy Sacks, I’ve blogged and written a column about what we learned about grassroots and social media from the humbling experience of presiding over a failed company trying to succeed in that space.

The Editor & Publisher Online column got a lot of attention; I’m pretty sure it’s seen more write-ups and blog mentions than any other column I’ve written.

For the most part, I’m glad to be sharing what we learned. I did it because I felt strongly that we learned some lessons that others in the media business needed to hear. Perhaps I’ve caused some business plans involving grassroots and social media to be tweaked to avoid the problems we encountered.

Most of the folks who blogged about my column seemed to get my message, though there were some that I disagreed with. Then there was this oddball one by Tom Abate, comparing me to Dilbert creator Scott Adams…

Abate makes some interesting points, but I didn’t “fail at blogging”; the Enthusiast Group was a niche grassroots content and social networking play. I blog here and occasionally on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Neither of those efforts make me money, but I don’t think I’m a failed blogger.

But that word, “failure,” is what makes the week “odd,” or maybe disconcerting is a better word. Many of the posts about me this week were supportive of our efforts at the Enthusiast Group. Some particularly good write-ups can be found by Robert Niles for Online Journalism Review, Dan Pacheco and Jeremy Wagstaff.

Some of the headlines, I must admit, were a bit hard to take:

• Steve Outing: Learning from Failure
• He failed, so you don’t have to!
• More Lessons from a Citizen Media Failure

Ouch. Well, I suspect in the long run that talking about this publicly will be a good thing.

I really like the concept behind Facebook’s Beacon program, which sends information about your purchases to the people in your Facebook friends network. That is, I like it as long as I as an online shopper am in control.

Having online shoppers opt in to having purchase information broadcast to their friends is, of course, the way this program should have been set up in the first place. Instead, Facebook tried to make the program opt-out — and then was surprised (d’uh!) to face a massive public backlash and even a MoveOn.org campaign aimed at getting them to scrap or change the program.

So yesterday, Facebook relented and made the program opt-in. I’m glad company executives listened to reason. How a company as smart as Facebook could misread privacy concerns so badly is hard to comprehend.

Now that it’s settled, though, Facebook has a great program that pushes the envelope for online advertising.

Dan Pacheco, who’s a newspaper industry expert on grassroots/citizen media and social networking, has done a thoughtful blog entry about the demise of my company (the Enthusiast Group) and Backfence.com. Since his work for the Bakersfield Californian and its various websites involves some of the same models of grassroots content and social networking that we were playing with (indeed, the Bakersfield social media work predates my company), some folks have been asking Pacheco if his social media ventures are next. (The death watch mentality.)

His answer: emphatically, no! Why? Pacheco says — and I agree — that the big difference with his company’s social media and grassroots neighborhood news ventures is that the online sites are tethered to complementary print properties, which provides a workable revenue model. (Local advertisers, he points out, remain stuck on the outdated idea that print is significant while online is still experimental, so their money is easier to get for print.) Both Backfence and my company were building online pure-play sites, and that’s a tough business.

Pacheco asks if a print strategy to complement the websites could have saved my company. Possibly. It’s something we considered seriously — having print products that featured the best of the content submitted by users and our “enthusiasts-in-chief” to our sites. But we would have had to raise much more money than we did to support a print strategy.

We pondered such ideas as partnering with magazines in our sports niches, which might feature an insert of our content. I still think that was a good idea, but we didn’t get anywhere with publishers, who still seem stuck in the past, not recognizing that the audience (especially the younger segment) is clearly transitioning online.

And we learned the hard way that outdoor companies — the Enthusiast Group’s target advertisers — are, like most local advertisers, still stuck in the past and focused mostly on print.

So don’t cry for Bakersfield. Pacheco and company still have a good shot at figuring out this grassroots media thing.