Articles about Social Media

What's the measure of Facebook's IPO? MBAOnline sent us a couple of infographics explaining just that (see them below the fold). But I must qualify that they don't take into account downward trends and some nasty behind-the-scenes backstabbing. Late yesterday, writing for Reuters, Alistair Barr reports that ahead of Facebook's Friday IPO, lead underwriter Morgan Stanley reduced revenue forecasts during the roadshow promoting the public offering. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs did similarly.

Fallen dot-com stock analyst and risen tech news publisher Henry Blodget adds perspective. "This by itself is highly unusual (I've never seen it during 20 years in and around the tech IPO business)", he observes. "But, just as important, news of the estimate cut was passed on only to a handful of big investor clients, not everyone else who was considering an investment in Facebook". Uh-oh, selective disclosure violates SEC rules.

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With Facebook now public and sitting on a huge pile of cash, let’s turn the conversation to the social network’s most pressing competitor, Google. Google and Google+ don’t appear to present much of a threat to Facebook, but the game board was reset on Friday and tactics at both companies will change accordingly. Now Facebook has to find a way to grow revenue and users and will increasingly bump up against Google’s huge advantages in search and apps. For Facebook to achieve its goals, the company will have to enter both spaces with gusto.

Google has learned how to leverage its strengths and suddenly one of those strengths is Facebook’s success. Now that Facebook is a $100 billion company, it doesn’t hurt Google to be number two in that space. Who else is? Pinterest? Instagram? Twitter? None of those services offer a full-fledged social network for those who do want a Facebook alternative, and some people will.

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So Facebook is now a public company but with the shares only one business day old the news is already bad: Facebook shares didn’t pull a Google or a Yahoo or a Microsoft or even a TheGlobe.com and soar out of sight on IPO day. They ended right where they started pretty much after the day traders took their easy profits. And while Wall Street sees this performance as a dud, Facebook itself sees it as a masterful piece of financial engineering.

If you are an investment banker -- and let me re-emphasize that, if you are an investment banker -- you want IPO shares to go up on their first day, rising in price by at least 10 percent though no more than 20 percent. This shows the IPO is hot, the company is booming, yet the offering wasn’t so underpriced that the founders feel cheated. Such IPOs make investors feel happy and happy investors buy and sell more shares and participate in future IPOs.

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Microsoft on Monday opened its experimental social search service called So.cl, which lets users socially broadcast their search queries and attached results. Socl is the product of Microsoft's Fuse labs, and has been open to limited user groups at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University, for the last five months.

Unlike the recent revamp of Bing, which integrates a user's social graph into their search base, Socl is something entirely different. The new service combines the "social broadcasting" aspect of Twitter and applies it to search queries and research.

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Ahead of Facebook's Friday IPO, NPD released usage data for Android smartphones. Unsurprisingly, user reach is quite high. In looking over the data, I honed in on Google+, which makes a surprising showing for a social network not even a year old. But behind early adoption is a lesson for Google and Android developers about the app vs browser.

First, the data NPD highlights: Nearly 75 percent of Android users accessed Facebook, via app or browser, in March. But, separately for both, reach declined from February to March. However, the overall trend for the app is up. By comparison, Twitter: 23 percent web, 16 percent app. Google+ reach is 16 percent web, with the app swinging between 10 percent and 15 percent. For all three social networks, web reach exceeds the app.

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Stated differently: Will you invest in Facebook? The third-largest IPO in history begins today. Facebook set a price of $38 share, which values the social network at about $104 billion. Twenty-eight year-old cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be super wealthy, if Facebook gets its price (and likely much more) as I post ahead of the market's open.

Facebook makes available 421.2 million shares. Zuckerberg maintains voting majority, 503.6 million, which at $38 is $19.1 billion, making him the 29th richest person -- wealthier than Google's cofounders.

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It’s a strange day when some of the biggest news about the latest release of an application is a feature's removal, but this is the case with the latest version of FeedDemon. Some months ago, Google announced plans to make changes to its Reader service and this has ultimately led to FeedDemon removing the sharing features that relied on this particular service, but Google+ mostly been picks up the slack. The most recent version of FeedDemon also has a number of other changes and additions that are worth mentioning.

The program has long featured a recommendation engine that can point you in the direction of stories, articles and feed that you might well find interesting, and this has been improved to ensure greater relevance.  When you use the built in browser to view web pages, a new Ctrl+0 keyboard shortcut is available that can be used to revert to a 100 percent zoom level. If you have the Pro version of the program – as opposed to the free Lite version – you also have a new newspaper style Photo Strip view to make use of.

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Apple execs all follow the same party line: They don't talk about forthcoming products. But somebody often does, perhaps coordinated with public relations folks or even careful disclosure from someone on Apple's board. Whom isn't so much important as someone does. As I've observed for years, leaks' timings are fairly consistent -- either to lift the share price or steal some other company's thunderous announcement. I can't help but see both in several seemingly strategic leaks, starting with today's disclosure about iOS 6 features.

The Wall Street Journal reports that iCloud will get new photo- and video-sharing capabilities, which include comments and availability outside Photo Stream -- meaning people don't have to own a fruit-logo product to view them. Apple reportedly is extending photo capabilities, while adding video-sharing as feature set. Today's leak follows another -- this one from 9to5 Mac, claiming Apple will dump Google Maps for its own service in iOS 6. Both leaks communicate that Apple is serious about social cloud services and search, and I don't believe they're coincidentally timed, given Facebook's imminent IPO.

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Does reputation matter to you? Are you concerned what people say about you when you're not around? Perhaps you want to know what crap anonymous commenters post about you across the InterWebs? If the answer is "Yes" to any of these, you might be vulnerable to this tweet: "Hey some person is saying horrible things about you". Resist the temptation.

I got this one Monday and again yesterday. I started to ignore the tweet, but it came as direct message. So I clicked the shortened link, which brought me to the Twitter home page with message log-in failed. Immediately, I panicked, intuiting this likely was a phishing scam. Sure enough, Chrome revealed the fake URL and I backed off. But some other people haven't been so lucky, as Gartner analyst Mark McDonald confesses today. In reading his post, I realized it would be public service to share a bit about his experience and to warn others.

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May 9 is, in a way, a watershed day for Android -- and that's not necessarily a good thing. Many developers I communicate with repeatedly say they confront the same quandary: Android or iOS first? Maybe they choose to develop for iOS, only to ask: Android or iPad next? Google is a software developer, too, and this day put its priorities in order with a stunning iOS-first update. The new iPhone app for social network Google+ is stunning, breathtaking, immersive and makes the already great experience on Ice Cream Sandwich seem outdated -- although some of the best visuals migrate to iOS.

In a way, Google sets the wrong example for its development partners by putting iOS ahead of Android. But why not? The iOS install base is larger than Android (365 million to 300 million at last reveal); countless analyst surveys show that iOS device users are more connected and engaged; and fragmentation isn't a problem since the majority of the iOS install base is on the newest version (versus about 5 percent of Androids). Google wants Plus to succeed in a big way, so improving the experience everywhere should be a priority. But iOS first, for the next big thing, is the priority.

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What do you get when Google+ and YouTube reproduce? Hangouts on Air, which today is available globally -- well, if that's how you view 20 countries (or so it looks from the list I see). My question: What does this mean for the future of services like USTREAM? Given Google's reach with search and video services, and the growing social network, coupled with Google Plus Your World, my answer is "uh-oh".

Google+ debuted nearly 11 months ago in beta, with the Hangouts video-sharing service being one of its stand-out, and stand-apart-from-Facebook, features. Hangouts lets Google+ users video chat with up to 10 people. In September 2011, Google+ opened to the public, with big upgrades to Hangouts: "On Air", which allows watching beyond the 10 participants; mobile broadcasting for Android 2.3 and above; and collaboration, which reached beyond YouTube to shared screens, sketchpads and Docs. Today's broadened availability is all about enabling millions of self-broadcasters to reach wide audiences at low cost.

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Is your business getting good value from customer relationship initiatives, or are you even able to quantity it? Gartner says unlikely. Only half of all Fortune 1000 companies are expected to see a positive return on investments in social CRM through the end of the year. The findings call into question the effectiveness of using the social web to further business objectives, or whether companies even have the capability to measure success.

Of those failing to achieve positive ROI, only one-fifth can actually measure these failings. That means an overwhelming majority of enterprises are losing revenue through failed social initiatives and don't even know it, the analyst firm argues.

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About 13 million Facebook users in the United States either do not use or do not know about the social network's privacy controls, sharing private information they would not have otherwise. This amounts to one out of every 10 users in the country.

Consumer Reports' study of what we are posting on Facebook should give pause to chronic oversharers. For example, 4.8 million posted publicly where they were going for a day, possibly tipping off a burglar to an empty house; 4.7 million liked a page on a specific health condition or treatment for a disease, which may pique the interest of a prying health insurer.

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So um, yeah, I have a confession to make. Even though I've written dozens of stories about the dangers of cell phone use while driving or hell, even criticized Google's Project Glass on international television because it is a distraction, writing this post makes me face the music and my hypocritical ways.

British insurance company Ingenie released the results of a survey of 1,000 young drivers age 17-25 on Friday. It shows that smartphone apps are becoming an increasing distraction, and one of the biggest culprits is OMGPOP's Draw Something.

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Social networking news is not limited to the latest acquisitions by the likes of Facebook; LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, still generates headlines. The big news for iOS users: the app has moved to version 5.0 and heralds, amongst other things, the arrival of the universal version of the app; so with LinkedIn 5.0, iPad users finally get an app that enables them to tae advantage of their Retina display.

The iPhone version of the app had already come in for some praise, and the move to welcoming iPad owners to the folder looks set to head down the same path thanks to the great design that is prevalent through the interface. With tablet devices becoming increasingly common in the business world as tools of the trade, it’s good to see that apps are evolving to take this into account.

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