The Great Wall of Facebook
Not being on Facebook gives me a new perspective on companies using Facebook for marketing. (And no, my perspective is not that I miss the marketing.) The thing is that marketing doesn’t reach people who are not on Facebook. Now, most social-media users are on Facebook, so if I were a marketer I wouldn’t care about not reaching the few people in my target market who don’t use it. But as a marketer, I might start finding that a slowly increasing number of the people I reach out to directly (bloggers, influencers, etc.), are not on Facebook. After all, isn’t it the...
Read MoreFacebook Shakedown
When I went to sleep on Friday night I had 535 Facebook friends. Today I have 416. I know each of those 416 people. Some are close friends, some old classmates, some relatives, some acquaintances, many are crafters and colleagues. I do not know the 119 people I unceremoniously unfriended yesterday. I may have met a few of them briefly, but most I never met and likely never will. Why had I accepted their friend requests, then? It’s not because I had the goal of having as many Facebook friends as there are members of the United States Congress. Mostly it’s because, though I was very...
Read MoreRemembering When I Felt Differently
Something occurred to me out of the blue today: during my last few months as editor of Interweave Crochet, as the company was beginning to focus more on the possibilities presented by online tools and social media, I wanted nothing to do with any of it in my work as editor. Crazy, hey? As you might have noticed, the whole print publishing industry is struggling to make sense of online media in much the same way the yarn industry is struggling. In my final months at IC, there was a lot more talk around the office about online stuff: blogs, forums, Twitter. And even though I had my own blog and...
Read MoreKicking the Collective Ass of an Industry
In the couple of weeks since the Twitter fail I wrote about, I’ve had some very interesting conversations with people in the yarn industry about business use of social media, and specifically about the role TNNA could and/or should play in educating yarn-related businesses about it. Yesterday I tweeted this: And then I figured I should just blog what I’d already dumped into an email exchange with a colleague. I’ve edited it a little. Anyway, a few people replied to my tweet (I’m looking at you, Clara, and at you, Beth), and I hope they’ll comment or blog about...
Read MoreFacebook: The Beginning of the End
This is not another post about the Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) debacle. Well it is, sort of, but the TOS is not my focus. This is about my prediction that we’ve now entered the era of Facebook’s slow decline. In case you’ve been too busy worrying about your taxes two months early, I’ll recap what happened this week. At the beginning of February, Facebook updated their Terms of Service (TOS). Websites do this all the time. They wrote a blog post about some of the changes, but they failed to mention a major one. This week The Consumerist, a consumer-rights focused...
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