Seems Obvious To Me: Big Media Still Doesn't Get Social Media

Seems Obvious To Me: Big Media Still Doesn't Get Social Media: Total Fail on connecting the dots: I see this on my twitter feed and this is what I see all over tumblr and facebook and twitter ...

Is Fanrank really Spamrank?

This week I was recognized as a #1 Fan by a celebrity based on my participation with Fanrank.
Woo Hoo !?!




Fanrank is a Facebook application that tracks participant activity on Facebook and Twitter with participants earning points by posting and tweeting the keywords and phrases assigned by the Fan Page.  Some of participating artist/celebrities offer rewards to their top ranking fans.


Social media can be fun.  It offers opportunity for fans to share their appreciation of an artist to a much broader audience than ever before. We all come to the appreciation of an artist in a personal and unique way because of the connection between our life experiences. And those of us who enjoy social media have a lot to lose as social media becomes social marketing. At the heart of social media is a desire to engage with friends and family as a community. As a fan, I want to share my appreciation of an artist and build a community around mutual regard.


Fanrank sounds like a good idea - track your fans and reward the ones with the most effective broadcasting - a virtual street team, no streets required.  For an artist or celebrity it appears to be low-cost grass-roots marketing campaign.  It doesn’t really work that way, though, because the Fanrank application has holes big enough to drive a tour bus through.


Fanrank’s flaws are easily exploited by the newest of the newbies.  On Facebook, the application cannot determine actual distribution because it doesn’t know if you are broadcasting publicly or to a limited list. Fanrank doesn’t evaluate content, it recognizes keywords but it doesn’t distinguish between nonsense, inane banter or actual conversations.  Fanrank is not context sensitive and doesn’t know if a published post is bashing or praising the artist.


Fanrank is superficial, automated, mechanical and promotes spammy posts and tweets.  It turns artist appreciation into a popularity contest, encourages competition and one-upmanship, pits fans against one another all in pursuit of recognition and, in some Fanranks, actual prize rewards.


Fanrank is a beta application with serious structural flaws that are exploitable with little effort. Fanrank fails in both of its goals, stated and unstated: it cannot measure or identify the true meaningful emotional investment of a fan and it does not succeed in measuring the market penetration of the fans who use the application.



#FAIL

Facebook's New Smart Lists

The new Smart Lists is another example of "seems like a good idea".

This puppy showed up on my Wall earlier this evening:

So I thought I would check it out. My +/- 3,900 friends are made up of disparate interest groups from RL friends, dog show cohorts and acquaintances, Zynga gamers, fellow Gleeks and various people, animals, fictional characters and inanimate objects.

I have been using what I recall to be "groups" for more than a year now as a way of tailoring my posts for these different categories of friends and acquaintances in a passing-interest way of not annoying some people with posts they have absolutely no interest in having scrolled down their wall.

I was interested in how this new FB classification would or could be worked into that scenario.

Bottom line...waste of time.  Am I just a crabby old fart resistant to change, is Facebook still tinkering with the interface or is it just a pain in the ass?

Instead of just looking at how I actually used these friend groups FB has given me a bunch of generic categories and included my previous lists.  But there is no obvious way to organize the ones you want to see - the only thing you can do is hide the ones you don't want.  This lack of functionality makes the new FB Lists virtually useless to me.

For "Close Friends" FB gives you some suggestions, based on I suppose, recent interactions - and it got most of those right. Except that I don't really need another notification system for people I actively seek out or who are already showing up on my Top News.

So, I tried the Create a List option and this is where FB totally fails. Create a List gives me one option..Search by name - it doesn't give me the option to chose from the groups I have already created or the previous option that I found useful in the past, the "friends on no list" List.

So if I am going to create a new list this is my option now:

Yeah, right - I am going to scroll through all my 3,900 friends to pick out the ones I want.

Okay, so maybe this is a personal problem.
Maybe using the previous Friends Groups was not a high priority for most FB users.
But, really, for those of us who did, how much extra coding would it have taken to add those Groups to the drop down menu?
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Facebook, still fixing things that aren't broken and ignoring the things people clamor for.