Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg’s first selection for his book club, Moises Naím’s The End of Power was an apt one. The book, as the Facebook CEO put it, “explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations.”

I’m intrigued by the reaction that has unfolded around the Facebook “emotion contagion” study. (If you aren’t familiar with this, read this primer.) As others have pointed out, the practice of A/B testing content is quite common. And Facebook has a long history of experimenting on how it can influence people’s attitudes and practices, even in the realm of research. An earlier study showed that Facebook decisions could shape voters’ practices. But why is it that *this* study has sparked a firestorm?

The author of a New York Times article titled Facebook’s Existential Crisis reports:

As data increasingly spews from everything — buildings, vehicles, transit systems, cash registers and potentially every light fixture, switch, plug and machine — there’s a growing opportunity to capture it and make it useful for consumers and professionals. Some of it is making its way into apps.

Facebook yesterday launched a significant refresh of its News Feed – the main way most people interact with content on the social network. The changes give images a more central role in the user experience (which makes sense as almost 50% of the content shared on Facebook is now visual). And there are now more options to tailor your feed – including the option to get updates just from your friends.

Sitting with a group of graduating high school seniors last summer, the conversation turned to college roommates. Although headed off to different schools, they had a similar experience of learning their roommate assignment and immediately turning to Facebook to investigate that person.

With Tuesday’s announcement of Graph Search, Facebook has confirmed what we’ve known all along: we users aren’t there to enjoy content as much as we are the content. That means we’re the products it intends to monetize.

December is often a time for predictions, and the most consistent predictions for social media in 2013 concern data. Whether it’s called big data or social media data, brands are expected to make more use of the opportunities this data holds in the coming year.

Written by Jason Miller.

To the folks out there who say that Facebook is not an effective lead generation tool for B2B, I will tell them that they need a new strategy.

Facebook boasts the largest user base of any social network and it’s essential that you have a presence here or your business will simply be missing opportunities.

The more we contribute, communicate share and talk online the more we leave a trail of personal data in our tracks. This may be data about what we say to whom on Twitter, when we are most active or the photos we take. Or it may be data that we have captured from a specific activity – data on every run I have done in the last two years is stored by Runkeeper, for example.