Democracy can be difficult, especially for a multibillion dollar public company.
In 2009, Facebook decided it was a good idea for its users to vote on certain policy changes. This week, the company announced it was no longer a good idea.
Under the old rules, a vote was triggered if a policy change received more than 7,000 comments. If 30 percent of all active users voted on a policy, their views had to be considered. Now that its number of users is close to the population of China, which has more than a billion people, Facebook said it plans to end that process.
In a letter posted on Facebook on Wednesday, the vice president for communications, public policy and marketing, Elliot Schrage, said the company “found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality.”
“Therefore, we’re proposing to end the voting component of the process in favor of a system that leads to more meaningful feedback and engagement,” he continued.
That, he offered, would include the opportunity to submit questions to the company’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan.
Facebook sent an e-mail to its users apprising them of the change. They have until Wednesday to submit comments. If at least 7,000 pour in, it will trigger a vote.
The announcement was made along with several other notable proposed changes, including a plan for Facebook to share data with Instagram, the photo sharing site it acquired this year. That means the company can use data accumulated by Instagram to build broader, unified profiles of Facebook users.
Google, Facebook’s biggest Web rival, already gathers data on its users from its various products, including e-mail and search.
The changes come as Facebook seeks to shore up its share price, which closed at $24.32 on Wednesday, far below the $38 initial public offering in May.
Under the proposed changes, Facebook would also no longer let users control who can send them e-mails, using the e-mail address issued by Facebook.com; it would instead offer “new filters for managing incoming messages,” according to Mr. Schrage’s blog post.
That post prompted thousands of comments in a matter of hours on Facebook’s site governance page. Users complained about a raft of things. A few seemed to endorse the change, but there were many naysayers.
“I understand the issues of quantity vs. quality,” wrote one user, named Paul Tousignant, “but the proposed new system is much more opaque than the existing one. This is, after all, a social platform, if it people feel too much like what happens here is out of their hands and managed in a back office, their loyalty will be fragile. You guys have the best critical mass of users, but there *are* alternatives.”
David Clemens wrote: “I am a grandparent and all my friends are grandparents. All of us have kids on facebook, who post things mostly to us. It seems to me like there are lots of us. We are OLD and we do not like or tolerate constant change.”
It is unclear whether the proposed changes will incur scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook last year settled charges of having deceived its users with making personal information more widely available than intended. The company faces audits of its privacy policies for the next 20 years.
Join this field trial to preview upcoming features we’ve been working on, such as:
Improvements to search in Gmail
As you type a search in Gmail you’ll instantly see relevant emails as well as results from Google Drive, Google Calendar and more.
Results from Gmail and Google Drive when you search on Google.com
Your searches on Google.com may bring up relevant emails, files and more from Gmail and Google Drive
Email relevant to your search Find relevant Gmail messages and shared links in your search results.
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Enhanced flight tracking feature Get information and statuses for your upcoming flights.
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Files from Google Drive Search documents, spreadsheets, presentations, files and more from Google Drive.
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This trial is currently only accessible on https://www.google.com in English and for @gmail.com addresses (not available on Google Apps accounts). Due to limited capacity and initial setup, you will receive an email confirmation from Google when your account is ready (and possibly other update emails during the trial) but note that we may not be able to activate the experiment for everyone.
You can come back to this page at any point to leave the trial.
Twitter plays a vital communication role in many communities throughout the world. The social media platform is connecting communities of individuals passionate about certain topics, creating a place for coordinating collective action and information sharing with a broad segment of the society.
Twitter allows information to travel around the world at an almost instantaneous speed.
A racist and abusive comment was accidentally posted on British Ariways’ official Twitter page, highlighting the risks involved in using the social networking site.
The upset started when a user called “JaeLadd” messaged British Airways to complain about his flight being cancelled.
His tweet was then responded to by another user called “Asian Ronaldo”, who used racially abusive language and told the original poster to “f*** off back to your own country”.
The exchange took a turn for the worse when someone at the airline inadvertently retweeted the racist remarks to the airline’s 210 000 followers. The offensive post was quickly deleted off the airline’s official Twitter page, but not before being retweeted by other users and circulating worldwide.
Within minutes, hundreds of Twitters users resent the retweet and later more than 160 followers had retweeted the apology.
Staff at the airline then tweeted an apology. It said: “Apologies for the last RT. We are sorry for an offence caused and are investigating how this may have happened,” the Daily Mail reported today.
BA spokesman Helena Flynn said the team was thoroughly investigating how the incident had occurred. She said it had not been ruled out that the account may have been hacked.
Flynn said: ‘We don’t know yet how this has evolved. “We’d just like to apologise to all of the poor people who have been involved in this and apologise for any offence caused.”
She said that police had not been in touch over the post and as yet there had been no official complaints.BA said the Twitter account was managed by its large marketing team.
Despite the 140-character limit, the tweeting of a dumb joke, a thoughtless observation or an impulsive can have a big impact. People then have to apologise publicly and repair the damage done.
At 9 on the night of the Grammys this year, oprah winfrey, the first lady of talk show television tried to drum up some views for her show “Oprah’s Next Chapter” by tweeting “Every 1 who can please turn to OWN especially if u have a Neilsen box.” Her fans didn’t seem to mind, but Nielsen did — and not just because she spelled the company’s name wrong. The next day Winfrey deleted the tweet and sent this statement to the New York Times: “I removed the tweet at the request of Nielsen. I intended no harm and apologize for the reference.”
CNN commentator Roland Martin made the wrong kind of headlines after tweeting what was construed as a homophobic response to an H&M commercial featuring David Beckham that aired during the Super Bowl. Martin wrote, “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the fish out of him!” In a lengthy apology posted on his blog, Martin insists the remark was meant to be anti-soccer, not anti-gay, but GLAAD disagreed, and now Martin is suspended from CNN.
Such controversies make such companies and public figures learn a quick and painful lesson in the immediacy and reach of social media.
IndiGo launches new pilot uniform : i really love the way they weave the engagement and create the curiosity with their email campaign 
The Asia-Pacific Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard was based on an online quantitative survey of 295 senior marketers across the region. In addition, the CMO Council interviewed 23 brand leaders from companies including Toyota, 20th Century Fox, Tupperware, Citi Group, Cigna, Nokia, and Yahoo!, among many others. The surveys and interviews were conducted through the second and third quarters of 2012.
“In terms of mindset, Asian marketers are very positive about digital marketing,” said Mark Phibbs, senior director marketing Asia-Pacific at Adobe Systems. “They believe it better engages audiences and that consumers want to interact with brands online. They’re just not doing it.”
For example, Hong Kong, which is the highest in the region in terms of a positive mindset towards digital marketing, with 100 per cent believing that digital marketing will drive competitive advantage. Yet, in terms of “marketing readiness”, Hong Kong rated a 3.9 (out of 10) on the dashboard, one of the lowest in the region, pointed out Liz Miller, vice-president, global programs and operations for the CMO Council.
Hong Kong also rated a 0.8 in terms of marketing skills and a 3.2 in organisational alignment compared with relatively low regional averages of 1.4 and 3.3, respectively.
The three main factors holding back the region, added Miller are a lack of skills, organisational alignment and budget.
“In terms of skills, the region sorely lacks talent with the ability to glean insights and intelligence from customer data,” she said. “Data is not being used to create competitive advantage. It’s mostly used to justify campaign investment and KPIs.” Miller added that only 13 per cent of marketers felt they had the right team in place.
While many companies are collecting data, with markets like Australia and New Zealand complaining they have more data than they can deal with, it’s very fragmented, said Phibbs. “One of the things most companies [39 per cent] do is aggregate their marketing responsibilities across multiple agencies. So it’s very fragmented, and brands can’t control and analyse it effectively.”
The talent issue stretches across from clients to agencies. Three out of four marketers surveyed rated agency effectiveness as moderate at best, and only 13 per cent gave their agency partners rave reviews.
For the most part, marketers believe that the skill set of their current marketing organization is improving (33 per cent) but many feel constrained by the lack of budget to bring on the right level of senior talent to lead these digital teams.
In terms or organisational alignment to carry out strategic digital marketing, Asian companies are blessed with the full support from C-suite and senior management, said Miller. “But we’re seeing less support from sales, channel and IT—and when you’re talking about the aggregation of customer data, these are the three resources most needed.”
Overall, China has the highest rate of organisational alignment in the region at 3.9, compared with 3.2 in Hong Kong, 3.0 in Singapore and 2.9 in Korea.
China’s lead, said Phibbs was likely driven by a large, demanding and very digital consumer population that expects brands to be present online.
Judging by marketing budgets allocated to digital across the region, Asia-Pacific’s marketers have been testing and piloting digital thus far. According to the study, 37 per cent of marketers invest less than 10 per cent of their overall marketing budget in some form of digital marketing.
Unsurprisingly therefore, more than half of marketers cited budget constraints as a key limitation to their digital success and 21 per cent are either struggling to convince leadership of the value and opportunity in digital or dealing with senior leaders who were still wedded to traditional marketing practices.
“CMOs in Asia are not used to convincing the group CEO to take risks in marketing spend,” observed Phibbs.
But, he adds, the region may be about to undergo a seismic shift as, based on the study, less than 14 per cent plan to continue spending less than 10 per cent on digital marketing next year. Furthermore, Australian, Chinese and Hong Kong marketers said that they will be investing 50 to 70 per cent of their budgets in digital.
To gear up for a more competitive space, marketers should look into not only hiring new talent, but also upskilling existing teams, said Phibbs. “It’s not about trying to buy resources, you have people in marketing who already understand the business and the industry,” he said. “By training them you will get powerful results. Hiring new graduates and dumping them in over their heads is not the answer.”
Marketers should also focus on measuring the right elements to prove ROI. According to Miller, CMOs have to fight to define their roles and gain respect in the eyes of the C-suite. “The reality is the CEO will look at the strategies the CMO brings to them and say, ‘This isn’t going to drive the business’. But shame on them [CEOs] for not defining where the business is heading and to centre it on the consumer,” she said, addressing the study by Fournaise on the CEO-CMO divide.
“CEOs need to support their their marketers by mandating encouragement to explore, pilot and test, and to define a strategy that aligns around the customer, without these two things CMOs will not be able to advance digital marketing,” said Miller.
With the eyes of the world on Asia, and international competition moving in, local organisations need to move quickly or be left behind, she concluded.
Bangalore: We are heading into a world where the moment you update your status on Facebook or tweet about it, algorithms will track your mood and your location and serve you text or video ads relevant to you at that point.
The technologies already exist, but concerns about privacy, spam and the absence so far of a good revenue model have prevented such location-specific ads from exploding. But many believe it’s only a matter of time before it does.
A study by research firm Gartner says ads will increasingly become location-centric and will be designed specially for the target, “after mining the mind, mood and money power of each customer”.
As of now, revenue for social media is direct, which is through website advertisements.
This will continue, but Gartner says that by 2016, social media companies will see strong emergence of additional revenue streams, of which location-based mobile advertisements will be a prominent stream.
Neha Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner India, says, “Social analytics, including real-time web monitoring, is going to be a critical marketing and sales weapon for global brands to reach out to their customer targets more effectively and successfully.”
Pankaj Dugar, founder of Treetle.com, a location-based internet portal, says the location-based mobile ad market has the potential to grow exponentially in the near future, but no stakeholder has clarity yet on how to get to customers on their mobiles in a way that benefits both parties.
The challenge is that the ad should be relevant enough for the customer to feel he’s not being spammed or that his privacy is not being assaulted. A lot of conversations are currently happening among app developers, digital ad firms, consumer product companies, telecom service providers and internet/social media companies to understand the space and arrive at an agreeable business model.
Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital brand management firm that assists brands to reach out to customers on their mobile phones, notes that Facebook is now accessed more on mobile phones than on desktops. “The mobile phone offers an unmatchable reach, though size of the screen could be an issue,” he says. The mobile phone’s small form factor means there’s less space to push an ad into an app. And even if you manage to squeeze an ad in, customers may be less inclined to click on that ad.
However, an army of app developers is working to find solutions to the small screen and visibility issues. Some are developing apps for full screen ticker flashes and iconfree screen displays. Mumbaibased mobile ad network Vserv has recently developed a full-screen in-application for mobile advertising. Vserv’s ad platform gets over 6 billion ad requests every month and serves ads in over 200 countries.
“A lot of intelligence is being built to gauge the mood and to make ads less intrusive. Some are talking about introducing an opt-in mechanism for users. This will prevent people getting unsolicited offers,” says Treetle’s Dugar.
Atul Satija, MD of the Apac operations of Bangalore-based InMobi, whose mobile advertising network serves 94 billion ads a month, says the only way the market will scale up is through stronger mobile app product offerings that users like to engage with.
SELECTIVE TARGETS
• Algorithms will track your mood and location to serve you text or video ads relevant to you at that point
• The technologies already exist, but concerns about privacy, spam and the absence so far of a good revenue model have prevented such locationspecific ads from exploding
• Many believe it’s only a matter of time before this happen
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