Tag Archives: Facebook

Lost Remote: Media brands stand to benefit from new Facebook features

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Media brands stand to benefit from some of the new features being rolled out by Facebook, according to Lost Remote.

One of the most important new features is the ability for page administrators to post comments as the corresponding page brand (in our case, “Lost Remote”), not just as themselves. This certainly comes in handy when moderating a comment string and sharing the admin duties across several people. You’re communicating as a brand, not as a bunch of unrelated people. To avoid dehumanizing pages entirely, admins are displayed in the upper right of the page, which is a nice touch.

Full post on Lost Remote at this link.

Facebook fans – quantity or quality?

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Should newsrooms and web journalists be cultivating as many Facebook fans as possible or concentrating on building the right kind of connections?

There are pros and cons to both, according to Journalistics. More fans equal more visitors to your site and more conversations. However, quality fans mean better conversations – potentially leading to better stories.

Full post on Journalistics at this link.

Channel 4 News: Benjamin Cohen’s life torn open by Wired

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Benjamin Cohen, technology editor at Channel 4 News, has blogged about the experience of being sent the latest, personalised edition of Wired magazine.

Well, personalised for some. “Opinion formers” around the UK have been sent a copy of Wired, titled “Your life torn open”, with personal information about them splashed over the front cover. Cohen was shocked by the information that they printed – and it is shocking at first. But then it is all publically available through Facebook, Twitter, Companies House and the Land Registry.

What’s shocking though is seeing all of this printed in black and white (or yellow in this case). Everything was available from Facebook, Twitter, Company House and the Land Registry but it shows the information is so readily available. It also shows how powerful these resources can be for private detectives or government agents.

Read his post in full here…

The Wall: Independent.co.uk boosts Facebook referrals by 680%

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Independent.co.uk has been doing its social media homework by the looks of things, with a report from the Wall suggesting that Facebook referrals to the site are up by 680%.

According to the post, Twitter referrals are up by 250%. The site’s digital media editor Jack Riley puts the growth in part down to being one of the first big sites to integrate the Facebook Recommend and Like buttons.

Another nice touch is the paper has started to allow readers to get their news through social networks in categories that reflect their interests and the Independent’s breadth of output. For examples this means you can like individual writers in your news feed or if you’re a footie fan you can like its coverage of your particular team.

Full post on the Wall at this link.

OJB: UGC, the Giffords shooting and how ‘inaction can be newsworthy’

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Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog has an interesting look at user-generated content and comment moderation, and the stories they can produce.

Bradshaw looks specifically at Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, which has been subject to strict moderation in the wake of the assassination attempt on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He points out that the decisions to remove certain comments and let others stand can be seen as representative of the page owner’s stance and could potentially give rise to a story.

Bradshaw also warns that trawling through comment threads on political pages is not the same as treading the streets. What you see there is not unadulterated content, it is closer to carefully edited campaign material.

Worth reading in full.

Full post on the Online Journalism Blog at this link.

Lost Remote has a post on another media issue to emerge from the Giffords shooting: the spreading of inaccurate claims on Twitter that Giffords had died, and subsequent removal of tweets by news organisations.

Full post on Lost Remote at this link.

After Twitter revelation, WikiLeaks suspects US of pressuring Google and Facebook

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WikiLeaks suspects that Google and Facebook may be under pressure from the US Government to reveal information relating to the whistleblower’s site or its members.

The claim follows a court order issued by the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in December and published by Salon.com [PDF], which ordered micro-blogging site Twitter to hand over information about five accounts associated with WikiLeaks, including one belonging to Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks tweeted on Saturday:

Note that we can assume Google & Facebook also have secret US government subpeonas. They make no comment. Did they fold?

The subpeona issed to Twitter claims that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the site had information “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation”. This information included IP addresses, contact information, private messages and the addresses used to access the accounts, allowing investigators to establish potential connections between users.

Despite being ordered to the contrary, Twitter notified those targeted by the subpoena, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, Bradley Manning and Icelandic collaborator and MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir. It is over the request for Jónsdóttir’s information in particular that Iceland has requested an explanation from US authorities.

Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, said in an interview with Channel 4 News that the U.S Department of Justice is seeking to target not just WikiLeaks’ main collaborators but also the organisation’s 634,000 followers on Twitter in an “intimidatory” act.

Yesterday, The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond commented that the news of this subpoena may change the way people react to social networking sites:

There’s also a risk that cases like this one will deter people from using social networks to express controversial opinions.

What has come out of this weekend’s events is the contrast in the types of information and their availability and use. As both Richmond and Stephens note, WikiLeaks’ publishing of classified government information reflects the reporting journalists have done “for years”. The American DOJ’s demand of personal details, however, may impact upon how individuals share information in future. Richmond highlights the warning Columbia students were given regarding public online discussion of WikiLeaks, but could similar discussion soon hold risks for journalists?

The Bivings Report: Comparing the success of US newspaper Facebook pages

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The Bivings Report has ranked US newspapers according to the success of their Facebook fan pages – using the number of fans and their level of interactivity with the content posted by each title on Facebook as factors.

Interesting to compare those titles with smaller circulation figures that maintain very active social network profiles with the bigger names.

Full post on the Bivings Report at this link…

Paper.li adds Facebook to social newspaper function

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Paper.li, a personalised social newspaper project launched in March this year that turns a Twitter stream into a newspaper format, has today launched similar functionality with public Facebook posts.

In an announcement on the site’s blog, it explains how this will work:

Facebook currently supports only very basic keyword searches on public posts – so a paper based on the search ‘climate energy’ will find all posts containing both words – paper.li then extracts all links, videos and photos, analyzes them, ranks them and creates the paper in a similar fashion to Twitter papers.

Paper.li is also looking into other possibilities with Facebook, such as creating papers for individual users.

Hatip: Techcrunch.com

jBlog: How Facebook credits could save newspapers

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Dave Lee offers some interesting ideas on how a virtual gifts or credit model implemented via Facebook could help newspaper publishers rethink their revenue models.

Am I telling everyone that newspapers need to start deploying farm-based games across their sites? No, don’t be silly. What I am saying is that people’s desire to have Facebook Credits in order to play online games is, for editors, a gift from the gods. Suddenly, we’ve got millions of people – young people, don’t forget – who have credits. Credits which they didn’t buy to read news but, now they’ve got them won’t give much thought to spending a couple on content.

The newspaper would, on current rates (dictated by Facebook), take 70 per cent of each credit’s monetary value.

I believe, ladies and gents, that’s what we call a business model.

Full post on Dave Lee’s blog at this link…

The Daily Beast: How Facebook’s news feed works

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Missed this story from last week – the Daily Beast’s attempt to crack Facebook’s algorithm for who and what it puts in users’ news feeds. Interesting reading for any news organisation or brand attempting to use Facebook as a promotional tool.

The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook’s personalised news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you’re shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you “stalk” your way into a friend’s news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

Full story on the Daily Beast at this link…