It's Not Just Black and White

Change Is GOOD!

For their sixth birthday Facebook launched a new look to their website. The new look rolled out over a period of a week and Facebook uses slowly were able begin to use the new site. As new users began to use the new site, the status messages started showing frustration and groups such as BRING BACK THE OLD FACEBOOK started forming, again. Deja Vu?

Every time Facebook rolls out a new look, people get upset, frustrated, and form groups. I don’t understand it. Very few websites remain exactly the same over a period of six years. When it comes to websites and design, change is usually good. Think about it. If we kept websites the same for years and years on end, we would still have our sites in tables with the pipe border around each table with each cell being a different color. I bet Facebook would look great with the old table look, circa 1997.

Change is generally good. Most websites such as Facebook are making changes behind our backs every day. They are upgrading server functionality, they’re changing code to make the site run just a little bit faster, and they continue to build upon the pieces of the site that are already in place. People never complain about the site moving faster do they? By creating the new layout, Facebook is actually making it easier to navigate in the long run. It now only takes one click once you’re logged in to see your friends profile updates. Before, it was two. Ideally we’d all become accustomed to the new design over night, but it takes a  little bit of time and eventually we realize that Facebook just made it easier for us!

Facebook has taken a great approach to the design change. Looking over Facebook’s archive of designs, you will see the color scheme has always stayed the same, the homepage has had two major overhauls in terms of layout, and the inside of the website generally matched the header and footer of the outside. They’re staying consistent. It would be a major problem if every time they did the redesign the navigation moved, the colors changed, and the functionality changed. Facebook slowly rolls out new functionality and eases us into the change. They didn’t go from the 2004 look to 2010 look over night.

Think of it as the evolution of the Pepsi Logo. In the 1970’s the Pepsi logo was sharp and fit with the times. Forty years later the logo still has the circle and says their name, it just moved with the times. Like Pepsi, Facebook hasn’t changed its overall brand with the new design, they’ve upgrade it to move with the times. Very few companies can get away without change. It’s a part of life and over time the new Facebook layout will be appreciated. For now, click through it and stop complaining. It’s not that hard to learn!

While most people watch the Super Bowl for the football, I watch it for the commercials. Last year, the commercials were fairly disappointing, nothing really stuck out or caught my eye. This year, the commercials were better and had a lot more stories to tell. Doritos® came through as the funniest commercials of the game, Google aired their first commercial ever on TV, and I only noticed one repeat commercial. Not bad for three and a half hours of football!

Most people pay attention through the main portion of the commercial and move on by the time the commercial is ending and showing their contact information. While I didn’t watch the end of every commercial that was on, I noticed something different in a lot of commercials… their Social Media information. For companies to list just their website, I’m sure they draw traffic in after the game, but how about listing their Twitter name. It is no secret that Twitter was buzzing during the game with comments about the players, the plays, and even the commercials. Using a mobile version of Twitter it’s not hard to do a search for the name and click follow. Simple as that, a company could gain hundreds of new fans.

Social media icons are slowly popping up around websites where people can find a businesses full list of contact information. Yet it has been lacking on TV. Nine times out of ten I won’t visit a website that is mentioned on TV, but I’ve found that I follow a lot of businesses on Twitter simply because I know they post daily updates and it’s all in one place. With the mention of them on TV I can pick up my phone and add them to my account and receive updates immediately.

With the more frequent updates on their social media account, viewers are more likely to turn around and follow them on social media than visit their website everyday. In turn this will continue to force their brand name in the viewers eyes whether they realize it or not. It’s a smart move for all businesses who are running any form of ad on TV or even on YouTube. The more traffic the better; the more people see a brand the more likely they are to buy it. Ignoring the fact that some businesses will pay millions of dollars for a 30 second to 1 minute ad during the super bowl, it’s worth the extra time to turn around and add one extra bit of contact information in.  Adding that one extra bit of text with their Twitter username could turn a whole lot more profit than it took to edit the commercial and add the text.

If businesses are planning to create new commercials in the future I think it is a wise decision to add their Social Media information in there by default. They don’t need to list everything down to their MySpace page, but something as simple as @BusinessTwitterAccount could turn their business traffic around in ways they could only imagine.

Twitter as a Personal Tool and a Resource

A friend and I have an on-going debate… what’s the point of Twitter? He is constantly telling me that there is no reason to use Twitter, it is worthless, and it is a waste of time… I told him I’m going to write a blog entry and prove to him there’s a point to using Twitter.

I joined twitter in May of 2008… I tweeted for one or two weeks and that was it. I used Facebook status updates a whole lot more and didn’t really see too much to Twitter. I came back to Twitter within the last year and realized how much more is out there. Twitter has grown from a personal status update to a whole library of data. If you follow some of the right people you can get more articles and blog entries than you could imagine.

A few examples:

Guy Kawasaki – Guy posts all sorts of content. Most of the articles he posts are ones that he has taken, done a short review of on his blog, and linked to the full article. The articles range from latest tech news to weird things people have done. His tweets aren’t personal by any means, but they give you a whole bunch of news and information in one place.

Lisa Barone – Lisa does a great job of mixing business and personal life on Twitter. Her tweets are hilarious to read, yet most of the time bring up very good points. She often shares interesting links to other articles and her own opinions as she writes for Outspoken Media.

Beebow – Lauren spends her days writing blogs for her company and sharing tons of information on Search Engine Optimization. Her tweets range from other SEO people to follow to articles and blog entries.

A day has not gone by in the last six or seven months where I have not found at least two articles from Twitter worth reading. Instead of having to Google a specific subject to find the information someone else starts up a discussion about it. Different subjects you might not have thought of can come up just by watching what people tweet. The more time I’ve spent on Twitter the more I’ve learned about social media, search engine optimization, and the benefits of using both to market a website.

Yes, Twitter can be used as a personal tool, but don’t turn away just because people are tweeting about what they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Twitter can worth your time if you use it the right way.

It’s a debate I’ve heard way too often lately: “Which is better? Facebook? Twitter? None of the Above?” Facebook has been around longer than Twitter, but does that mean it’s any better or worse than Twitter? For me, at the end of the day, Twitter and Facebook serve two very different purposes.

Facebook came about my freshman year of college. Like most of my school, I spent my spring break basking in the excitement that our school finally had the privileged of being on Facebook. (It was February, in the midwest, and it was snowing… yes I spent it on a computer). I friended people I hardly knew, but that didn’t matter. My classmates and I spent our days seeing who could get more friends, meeting new people, and exchanging homework information. With college in the past, Facebook has been the place for me to keep up with my friends from college, family, and friends from high school. I haven’t used it too much for networking outside of that. For the most part, it’s been about keeping in touch. When I’m frustrated, my Facebook status will show that.

Twitter on the other hand is all about meeting new people and learning new things. With a new found love for social media as a marketing tool over the last five or six months, I wanted to learn everything there was to know about it. Google got me some articles, but never the in-depth conversation I was looking for. Enter Twitter. Twitter gave me exactly what I needed to interact with people who have the same interests as me. I found article after article on social media and search engine optimization. It was the outlet I was looking for to learn from.

I still will use Facebook from time to time for non-personal things and I will use Twitter to post quotes, love songs, etc when I’m in that kind of a mood. But overall the two websites serve two very different purposes for me.

How do you use Twitter and Facebook?

Screen Cap From Twitter - 7:30 PM - October 21, 2009

On October 15th , the US watched as a family feared that one of their own was “floating above Colorado”, as they believed their youngest boy had untied a UFO type balloon and was inside it as it floated away.  The story was more than one trending topic on twitter and was on all of the news stations. There was even a boyintheballoon twitter account was created before the balloon landed. Yet it was still hard to believe that this young boy was floating above Colorado.

People were right not to believe. By that night, the young boy had spilled the beans on Larry King Live that it was all for show. Within four days CNN broke the news that the authorities had reason to believe the incident was a hoax. Yet, a week later, Balloon Boy is still a trending topic on Twitter, is still in the news, and is the background of so many jokes that are out there.

Thanks to social media the Henne family got what they were looking for, attention. As a former reality TV family from Wife Swap, the Henne family was looking for another reality show. Was this the kind of reality show they wanted? In the past week they’ve been on a variety of TV shows, had plenty of national coverage, and have been one of the major topics in social media. You can’t really ask for more attention than that.

The exact details of what happened that day are known only by the members of the Henne family, and we may never know the full truth of what happened. Yet, do we even care? Using the tools that are at our fingertips daily, people around the country were able to come to their own conclusions of what happened and share them with thousands of people. The Henne family definitely got America’s attention.

So why are we continuing to talk about it almost a week later? Why am I writing this blog about it? Because it’s fascinating how a story out of a town in Colorado can spread across the country within minutes. Speculation beginning immediately after the story broke. When Michael Jackson passed away in June, it was a trending topic on Twitter for weeks. In fact a good portion of people found out on Twitter or Facebook. The day before that no one said much about Michael Jackson. Imagine what would have happened if we had Twitter during the OJ Simpson trial.

A few weeks ago, Jay Leno took Twitter to the Senior Citizens Home. They tried to explain to the senior citizens what Twitter is. In the last few weeks I’ve had to explain Twitter to a variety of people; some have understood it, some look at me dumbfounded.

I’ve used everything from “it’s a way to connect with people, to it’s a micro blog, to it’s a whole new form of communication”. For those who don’t get it, I get told to pick up a phone. I have to laugh because my main form of communication with friends is with a phone, but through text messaging. With texting you’re limited to 160 characters per text. Twitter took it one step further and dropped it down to 140 characters.

In all of my ways of trying to explain twitter to friends, family, and others, I have never found the best way to explain it without having to go into lots of detail. Saying it’s a micro blog, sometimes gets into “what is a blog”, saying it’s a form of communication leads into “who are you communicating with”.

I was trying to think of an easy way to explain Twitter to those who just don’t get it without having to go into detail, and still make it worth their time.

In exactly 140 characters, here’s how I would describe it:

A form of interaction with friends, family, etc. used to keep them up to date with inner workings of your daily life, business, or interests

How would you explain Twitter in 140 characters or less? Leave a comment and let me know.

In the last six months Twitter has gone from a small social network to one of the largest social networks out there. I first signed up for Twitter over a year ago. At the time, I didn’t understand the point of it, and walked away for about 10 months.

I soon discovered that the gymnastics community had grown on Twitter and you could follow gymnasts such as Nadia, Dominique, Carly, and Nastia. I was hooked again, it was an instant connection back into the world of gymnastics. One thing lead to another and I discovered a whole world of social media, other sports, photography, and local businesses on Twitter. From that point on, Twitter went from just a way of keeping up with news, to a whole new way of learning new things and meeting new people.

Twitter makes it so easy to find your comfort zone. Adding hash tags to the end of a Tweet, focusing on a single topic, or just looking at those tweeting in your area makes it so easy to find people to talk to. People are on Twitter at all hours of the day, tweeting from all around the world, and talking about so many different topics.

Back in the day when a group of fellow gymnastics webmasters and I would stay up all night waiting for results from events to come in, we’d start up a chat room on AIM and hash out our opinions of the commentary. As the gymnasts are competing in London at the worlds this week, that conversation was missing on AIM… It has now moved to Twitter. Tweets from USA Gymnastics, Inside Gymnastics, and International Gymnast were Re-Tweeted (RT) by fans, other gymnasts, and Olympic committees. When the FIG’s website went down throughout the day, we could rely on someone on Twitter to post the results.

Twitter reminds me of a poem that was written 10 years ago by an anonymous person (back when AIM was THE way to communicate):

We sit and we type, and we stare at our screens
We all have to wonder, what this possibly means.

With our mouse we roam, through the rooms in a maze
Looking for something or someone, as we with in a daze.

We chat with each other, we type all our woes
Small groups we do form, and gang up on our foes.

We wait for somebody, to type out our name.
We want recognition, but it is always the same.

We give kisses and hugs, and sometimes flirt.
In PM’s we chat deeply, and reveal why we hurt.

We do form friendships – but – how, we don’t know
But some of these friendships, will flourish and grow.

Why is it on screen that we can be so bold
Telling our secrets, that have never been told.

Why is it we share the thought in our mind
With those we can’t see, as though we were blind.

The answer is simple, it is as clear as a bell.
We all have our problems, and need someone to tell.

We can’t tell real people, but tell someone we must,
So we turn to the ‘puter, and to those we can trust.

Even though it is crazy, the truth still remains
They are Friends Without Faces, and odd little names.

The ability to have conversations with others through computers has been around for a long time… but Twitter opens up more doors to meet even more people and find information even faster.