YOUR Social Media Platform Persona?

Researchers at King's College London, working in collaboration with Penn State University, have found that social media users adapt their behavior to individual social media platforms in a way that is clearly identifiable and learn-able when tested on a model..

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Using the webpages of 116,998 About.me users, the research team extracted matched user profiles on several major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram and found that different genders and age groups adapt their behavior differently from each other. Such behavior includes the language they use in profile descriptions and the type of images they choose for their profile pictures.

Women were found to smile more than men in the profile pictures across all five of the social networks, while those under 25 were less likely to smile and this was suggested to be a result of the popularity of selfies among young people.

On LinkedIn, 90% of profile pictures were of a single person, while less than 60% of profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram were of only one person. Interestingly, on Facebook and Instagram, up to 40% of users used a picture that didn't include their face.

In contrast to statistics which show that women have a slightly higher myopia rate than men, more men were found to wear glasses in their profile pictures, suggesting that the two genders choose to fit in with gender-specific norms or social pressures; men may want to appear more intelligent while women appear to give in to social pressure to not wear glasses.

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The first author, Dr Changtao Zhong, now working for Twitter, says that the model developed by the researchers is able to automatically identify the network when given a profile picture or self-description.

The differences in behaviour were generally consistent across different platforms and these behavior differences correspond to how informal or formal the network is. Networks that are more formal such as LinkedIn are easier to tell apart from networks that are less formal such as Facebook.

Guest Authored By King's College London. King's College London was established in 1829 and is a co-founded constituent college of the University of London. Today, King's College London has more than 19,700 undergraduate and postgraduate students. It is home to five research councils, trains physicians, dentists and conducts complex medical and health related research. King's College London is also known for its academic and research in Physical Science and Engineering, Institute of Psychiatry and Social Services. Follow King's College London on Twitter.

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"Dr Nishanth Sastry, Informatics, said: "The results of our research have shown that different social networks do have different conventions, and users adapt their profiles to suit these conventions.

Our findings have implications for advertising strategies.

For example, brands that find a large audience on one particular social media platform may not be popular on another, because the expected norms and core demographic could be different.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Listening Power?

When you think about social media do you think about what your next post is going to do for your brand?  

How many new followers, likes, and shares you can garner?

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It seems social media these days is all about saying something. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if what you are saying is important or not, as long as it gets you noticed.

But if that is all you are doing, you are missing the point.

Recently Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed the mission of the platform from making the world more open and connected, to giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.  To do that you not only have to be present, but you have to communicate. Half of all communication is listening; some among us might say listening is even more important than talking.

What if we looked at a credit union’s social media presence from that perspective? How many of you fear a negative comment, dread a sub-par review, have anxiety that someone will go rogue in the wee hours of the night? Don’t pretend these things can’t or won’t happen… listen for them and be prepared to address them.

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Listen Everywhere

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If someone complains about your credit union on Twitter but your credit union decided not to establish a Twitter profile, does that Tweet still exist? Just because you didn’t see the Tweet doesn’t mean the rest of the Twitterverse didn’t see it. The riskiest thing you can do is to choose to ignore a particular platform or social media all together. Be present and at least listen.

Have a Plan

You can’t please all the people all the time. And when that time comes, your gut instinct may be to delete that post. Don’t necessarily go with your gut. Sometimes deleting something negative can create even more negative posts. Unless the post contains information or content that would cause more harm, such as exposing nonpublic personal information or language that might open you up for regulatory review, take your time, work with your team–and within your strategic plan–to address the concern.

In a study done by Bazaarvoice, 7 in 10 respondents indicated that when and how a business responds to posts impacts their perception of the level of care, support and the overall trustworthiness of the brand. In fact, studies show that consumers are more skeptical of businesses that have only positive reviews.

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Avoid Being Self-Centered

Your credit union’s Vendor Management Program covers many issues, but are you able to continually listen across social media, news sites, blogs, complaint sites, etc. for mentions of your vendors or partners? Due to the nature of vendor relationships in the financial industry, what happens with vendors and partners can heavily impact your business. Don’t be the last to find out.

Technology can help you manage all your social listening. You don’t have to rely solely on Google alerts archived in your inbox. Today’s tools can scan social networks and the web for a wide variety of content and allow you to customize how you receive, manage and store your search results.

We live in a world of information overload, but don’t let that information overwhelm you. Listen for everything – good and bad – and deal with each result strategically. If you do that, you will start to notice that you have more followers, likes and shares after all. Build that community instead of creating a one-sided platform where you are talking, but not listening.

Guest Authored By Jeffrey Harper. Jeffrey is the President of BSG Financial Group. He brings more than 25 years of industry experience. ​He heads up the Sales and Marketing divisions of the company. Jeff plays a pivotal role in growing the company through innovation, marketing, compliance and customer support. Follow Jeff on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Platform Persona?

We live in a world of information overload, but don’t let that information overwhelm you.

Listen for everything – good and bad – and deal with each result strategically..

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Social Media Grieving Guidelines?

Last month, I lost a dear friend: suddenly and unexpectedly..

You can never be fully prepared for death, but when it's sudden and unexpected, you become dazed and disoriented while your brain tries to process the information.

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That Friday Morning Was A Mess

Too stunned to even attempt a normal working day, I went about informing our circle of friends.

It's what you do when someone dies.

One knee-jerk reaction was to post something on social media -- Facebook in particular -- but I resisted. 

A month before, I had read a powerful article by Taya Dunn Johnson titled: Please read this before you post another RIP on social media -- there is a hierarchy of grief.

In the article, Dunn Johnson describes the horror of losing her 36-year-old husband suddenly and unexpectedly and how, as she was trying to deal with the immediate admin that comes with death, people were calling her after seeing RIP posts on Facebook, even though she had not logged into the platform. 

She describes her panic as she had yet to inform her husband's best friend or their relatives. 

She did not want them to hear the news via social media, but word had spread.

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Digitized

We're living in a digital era and even death, and the grieving process, has become digitized.

Dunn Johnson describes social media as a new layer to the grieving process. Before social media, the bereaved would be visited by a close circle of family and friends, to dispense hugs and food and to swap tears and condolences. 

This still happens, but social media, while well meaning, speeds up and amplifies the process, and can add stress to the immediate family who are reeling with shock.

She acknowledges that people should be allowed to "express their love, care, concern, support and prayers for the soul of their recently deceased and family", and a platform like Facebook is perfect to express these feelings. However, she pleads:

"We are shocked. We are heartbroken. Give the immediate family a little time to handle the immediate and time-sensitive business related to death."

She observes that we don't have established rules for digitized grieving, but adds: "This isn't breaking news and you're not trying to scoop TMZ.

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"Listen, I know you're hurt. 

"Guess what? Me too. 

"I know you're shocked. Guess what? Me too. 

"Your social media is an extension of who you are. I get it. You "need" to express your pain, acknowledge your relationship with the deceased and pray for the family."

And for me, therein lies the problem, and dichotomy, of grieving via social media.

We want to share. 

We want to amplify. But we sidestep the uncomfortable truth that there lies a nub of narcissism at the root of it all.

I don't deny that our feelings of hurt and devastation are not sincere, but a group hug in cyberspace almost becomes an obligation of sorts.

If you don't post, will it be seen as uncaring? Is there insensitivity in not expressing your grief in cyberspace? And do you post simply to draw comfort from your social-media circle?

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Support

Rachel Moss also weighed up the pros and cons of digitized grieving in her blog titled: Why I Changed My Mind About "Attention-Seeking" RIP Facebook Statuses.

She sees social media as a means of support in the aftermath of death. 

"Writing RIP on Facebook is attention seeking, but in the most literal sense," she says. "It's a way of saying "someone I knew and cared about died and I'm not coping very well, so please can you help me?"

She adds that talking about death makes bereavement easier, including by posting statuses on Facebook about loved ones who have died.

I agree with both writers, but feel that we miss the point of differentiation, and that is the impulse to share instantaneously -- in essence a warped sense of instant gratification. 

Posting a tribute or memory of the departed does help process the grief, for all concerned, but wait until the shock waves have subsided.

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Dunn Johnson concludes her article with some sobering suggestions.

"I caution you to wait and then wait a little longer before posting anything. 

"The person is no less dead and your sympathy no less heartfelt. The first couple of hours are shocking. 

"Most bereaved people will only be able to truly appreciate your love, concern, prayers and gestures after the first 24 hours."These are her guidelines:

"If the person is married, let the spouse post first. If the person is young and single, let the partner, parents or siblings post first. If the person is old and single, let the children post first.

"If you can't identify the family/inner circle of the person, you probably shouldn't be posting at all."

Guest Authored By Dion Chang. Dion is an Observer, Trend Analyst and the Founder of Flux Trends. Follow Dion on Twitter.

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“Sage advice, and quite possibly the first guidelines for digitized grieving. 

We should heed them.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

The Blockchain Small Business Revolution?

Our world is experiencing a social media zenith. Three billion people are currently active on social channels, and countless new apps and innovations are being developed every day to meet the demand.

Undoubtedly, humanity now lives in an age of unprecedented knowledge, communication and connectivity.

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However, the current digital landscape we call social media has become fundamentally broken for the "small folks".

We might even go so far as to say that our entire digital infrastructure has reached the point of corruption. But because we’ve been absorbed in it for so long, and have accepted the many small, incremental changes the social-media platforms implement year over year, many of us are blind to its brokenness.

What’s so flawed about the current online environment? The centralization (or top-down control) of social media has gone to its head. In other words, the big, centralized social-media outlets now call all the shots.

They control what you see on their platforms. They own all rights to your photos and content. They make big profits off you and your information. And they even monitor your online behavior, no matter how discreet you think you’re being.

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Blockchain Is The Answer

Thankfully, there’s a better way. It’s called blockchain. Although its name is unassuming, it’s capable of utterly decentralizing social media as we know it, much to small business's favor.

Blockchain is a new kind of online networking technology that no single person owns. What’s so groundbreaking about it? A few primary reasons include:

• It’s decentralized. No entity can control it.
• It is secure and incorruptible.
• It’s completely transparent, while also allowing you to be as private as you want to be.
• It allows transactions and communications to take place without middlemen or brokers

Blockchain came to life with the existence of Bitcoin -- a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency (cryptocurrency). But blockchain technology is now starting to be applied to the entire online universe. Here’s how the blockchain will revolutionize social media.

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Free Flowing, Censorship-Free Content

In this current centralized online environment, a few giant social-media outlets control the global conversation. Sophisticated algorithms silence the voices that don’t fit the whims of the big social platforms.

What’s worse, social media accounts are sometimes deleted without warning. Imagine discovering that the Facebook page you’ve spent several years maintaining, along with its thousands of followers, has ceased to exist. It was here 15 minutes ago, and now – erased. Not only is this blatant censorship, but it’s also years of time, effort and money down the drain.

Clearly, as long as big, centralized platforms are pulling the strings online, there can’t be free expression. But the issue of censorship and suppression is a problem that blockchain-based social media will eliminate.

In blockchain-based platforms, there’s no “head” or decision maker to create algorithms that keep your audience from seeing your content. Everything is decentralized. So if you publish it, your audience will have exposure to it.

Also, your content is safe, secure, and censorship free on the blockchain. That’s because your files and digital property aren’t stored in centralized servers, but rather in “nodes” (or connected computers.)

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Every node that makes up the blockchain has a copy of your digital property. There’s no chief administrator of these nodes. No one can say, “Remove XYZ Company’s data and content from every node in this blockchain!” No person has such authority. (And even if someone tried to make themselves “king of the blockchain,” good luck trying to delete someone’s content from every node in the blockchain.)

New Revenue Streams for High-Quality Content

Blockchain-based social media platform onG.social is leading the charge against today’s bloated publishing model. Currently, online advertising and publishing are wildly profitable industries. And while the big advertisers and centralized social media networks enjoy multi-billion-dollar revenues, the masses who create and share the content receive nothing.

According to platforms like onG.social, we are ushering into a bold new age of content – an age where big, inflated publishing will shrink while the voice of the masses will rise. On this new platform, your content will live in a trustworthy setting that’s free of spam. If they are succesfull, what’s even more exciting is that you’ll now be able to generate new revenue streams that were once only available to corporate giants. How?

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onG.social is issuing a new, blockchain-based digital cryptocurrency -- onG Coin -- that can be exchanged into USD.

Through this currency, the platform rewards people and businesses for creating high-quality ads and content. They even reward users for interacting with high-quality ads.

One more benefit of onG.social is that it also serves as a single hub that can publish all your content to the centralized platforms – including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. This way, you can benefit from the blockchain while still maintaining all your other online presences.

Other Blockchain Applications for Small Businesses

Besides improving the state of social media, the blockchain is also transforming business processes. In fact, it will soon make an undeniable, worldwide impact on transactions that take place between individuals, businesses and governments. Here are a few examples of blockchain applications:

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A Better Way to Crowdfund

Many small businesses are dependent on crowdfunding for raising funds. Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms serve as third parties that connect startups with investors. These third parties hold all funds in escrow accounts until they’re ready to be released.

As helpful as crowdfunding has been, it’s still centralized and flawed. The crowdfunding platforms are standing in the middle of everything, overseeing the transactions and charging fees for themselves. But as you may expect, blockchain crowdfunding decentralizes this model.

With the blockchain, startups can post their crowdfunding projects and seek funding directly from a community of people who are interested. Founders create their own cryptocurrency tokens, complete with initial coin offerings (ICO) to be purchased by backers.

These digital tokens are very much like traditional shares in a stock market. And they can go up or down in value. Investors in blockchain crowdfunding can, therefore, make money if their “crypto-equity” goes up in value.

Rather than using intermediaries like Kickstarter, the middleman is wiped out. The cryptocurrency tokens are safely and securely accounted for in the blockchain where they can’t be lost, hacked or forged.

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Smart Contracts

In the current centralized model, transactions of money, shares, property, etc. always go through a central system or middleman of some kind. Every party involved in the transaction places their full trust on the central system. Such trust is dangerous, of course, because these systems frequently fail.

A smart contract, as you’ve probably guessed, does away with the middleman. The smart contract is basically a computer code that’s programmed into the blockchain. The computers in the blockchain execute this code automatically when a transaction takes place.

A smart contract can be thought of in similar terms to marketing automation. A certain task is automatically executed as soon as something else is triggered first. For example, one process could be “when payment is confirmed, ship product.”

Smart contracts can be used in many complex processes and by many industries – such as healthcare, insurance, legal, automobile, real estate, government and more.

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While their uses run too deep to cover here, a few groundbreaking benefits of smart contracts are that they’re:

• Decentralized – With smart contracts, many transactions that would normally require lawyers, brokers and intermediaries can be made without these third parties.
• Fast – By cutting out the drudgery of time-consuming paperwork, many business processes can be handled much faster.
• Secure – Cryptography keeps information safe.
• Accurate – The computerized automation of smart contracts can greatly reduce human error.
• Trustworthy – Although your information and documents are safely encrypted, they are nonetheless witnessed in the highly-public blockchain. No one can claim they lost a document or that they never received information you gave them.
• Less Costly – Autonomy from intermediaries saves time and money.

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Ecommerce Benefits

Two revolutionary changes the blockchain is bringing to e-commerce are expanded trust and cryptocurrency.

First, the trust aspect. Although there are countless millions of online stores in the world, most people limit themselves to a select few e-commerce businesses that they trust. A consumer’s trust usually extends only as far as the reviews made by people in particular circles or by friends and family.

But what kinds of e-commerce opportunities would be created if consumers could know that a businesses’ reviews came from people who actually made purchases from the business? And how would it change buying behaviors if consumers could release their payments only after their products arrived in good condition?

Certainly, this expanded level of trust will mean new worldwide markets for e-commerce businesses. It’s all made possible by the incorruptible, verifiable transaction data that’s stored securely within the nodes of the blockchain.

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As for the advantages that cryptocurrency brings to the e-commerce table:

• Elimination of chargebacks – Because payments made via cryptocurrency are always initiated by the buyer, a buyer can’t claim he or she “wasn’t supposed to be charged.”
• Elimination of sensitive information – Because you don’t need to store credit card numbers or other private data, there’s no need to worry about being liable for hackers stealing such data.
• Improved cash flow – Cryptocurrency transactions are processed immediately.
• No processing fees – This one speaks for itself!
• Customer satisfaction – Customers love payment alternatives like cryptocurrency. Offering this option is sure to win loyalty and a competitive edge.

Guest Authored by Itai Elizur. Itai is is the COO at Inbound Junction, a content marketing agency specializing in helping startups and business increase their online visibility. Prior to joining the Inbound Junction team, Itai worked as a Creative Manager at Wix.com, and as the Director of Marketing at Infolinks, the 3rd largest website network in the world. He also spent several years on the publishers’ side, managing the audience development and monetization for The Forward and as a political correspondent covering the 2012 US election for several large Israeli publications. Itai holds an M.A in Media Management from The New School University in NYC and a B.A in communications from the IDC Herzliya. He has presented in several national academic conferences and has published two papers about the effect of user comments in journalism. Itai specializes in helping business develop and optimize large-scale user acquisition strategies through content, brand messaging and marketing automation. Follow Itai on Twitter.

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“Are You Ready?

Like the internet age that happened just a couple short decades ago, we’re headed for another revolution.

The fuse is lit, and the explosion of positive change is fast approaching.

Will the blockchain revolution take you off guard? Or will you be prepared, watching as all your competitors try to frantically catch up?

If you sense the change and want to be a key part of it, you can – and should – start preparing now. Keep up with blockchain and cryprocurrency trends in the news. Start participating in blockchain-based social platforms.

Consider offering cryptocurrency options to your customers.

And above all, smile. You’re about to witness the unfolding of a better way of engagement, business and life.." -Itai Elizur

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)