Observations about Facebook friends

After spending some time connecting with people over Facebook I have reflected and made a some observations.

First of all I realized that in real life I have three levels of friends.
Level 1: people that I schedule time to be with,
Level 2: people I run into and greet e.g. co-workers, other parents in my child’s class
Level 3: former level one friends who now live someplace else. In the past I only interacted with them when we exchanged holiday cards or if we are in the same town we will get together for a meal.

Moving to Facebook the definition and interaction of friends have changed. I have seen that Facebook democratizes the type of interactions I have with these three levels of friends. I find that my Facebook interactions are minimal and sanitized view of my life. Way to superficial for my level 1 friends, about right for my level 2 friends, and more often then before for my level 3 friends.

What is most interesting about Facebook is that I have gained two new groups of "friends" which I call level 4 and level 5 friends. Level four friends are past level 1 friends that I have not socialized with in years. Level 5 friends are former level 2 friends I have not run into in years. For both level 4 and 5 friends I see the same routine play out. We hook up, then have the same three or four catching up e-mails. Then these people go into my Facebook ether. That is they are my “friend” and I am their “friend”. When I log onto Facebook I get to see their new posts, but I rarely if ever directly converse with them.

On Facebook I see that most adults post only superficial information on their life e.g. a picture of their dog, a photo of a vacation, a child's accomplishment, some mindless test or quiz they have taken. Facebook has given me a strange, superficial insight into the lives of many people I hardly know or have not known in years. They too have a strange, superficial insight into my life. I have not found that I have any more connection to these people then if I ran into them in a store or the airport. What is different is I now continually can find out the most superficial things about their lives.

Another observation about Facebook is that I find that it provides an insight into how people want to be viewed, or maybe what is important to them. My brother, who has two young children, only shows pictures and provides statistics on his cycling races. Other friends fill me in on the latest activity of their dogs or their score on some superficial online quiz they just took. I wonder if this is what is truly important to them or is their way of superficially connecting to a wide net of people while maintaining privacy. I wonder if these connections bring any new benefit into our lives or if they are just the latest distraction.

Do multi-taskers make good employees?

I was very interested in a new study on chronic multi-tasking run by Stanford University professor Clifford Nass. Specifically professor Nass looked at the new bread of media multi-taskers. People who are receiving and using multiple, unrelated streams of information at once, like chatting with a number of different people, while working on a paper, while reading, and listening to TV. They studied chronic multi-taskers and found that multi-tasking impaired a person’s cognitive processes at most of the types of thinking we categorize as deep thought. Surprisingly the study found that chronic multi-taskers are really bad at being able to filter relative information, manage their working memory, and are slower at switching tasks. They concluded that chronic multi-tasking harms a person’s ability to think.

Additionally they found that there were different patterns of chronic multi-tasking in different generations. Teens and twenty’s want to do it, while thirty plus have had it forced upon them. Across the board they find that chronic multi-tasking is a growing trend in all age groups. Not surprisingly chronic multi-taksers believe that they are competent when performing these tasks. They give themselves a lot of credit for getting lots of information from multiple sources.

So how does this relate to business and specifically eLearning. I have attended a number of conferences where the speakers tell us we should be modifying our courses to cater to young people who are use to simultaneously receiving lots of media stimulation. This study clearly demonstrates that people might be chronically multi-tasking but that this behavior is not conducive for thinking and learning. I have always contended that an organization should build internal training that works for the corporation’s culture. Modifying material so that it appeals to a new demographic has always been counter-intuitive to me. Good training should be focused on meeting a companies goals and meeting a course objectives. Typically this is assuring the employee can demonstrate an understanding of the material being presented. The goal of a course creator should be to focus on presenting information in an instructionally sound way.

Apps vs. Browsers for mobile devices

I have been asked a number of times about the pros and cons of Apps (applications) vs. browser access when using mobile devices. The use of Apps is not a conversation when discussing web access on a PC's. When using a PC no one is interested in downloading an App so that they can have access to information. We all just assume that once we get onto a web site we will have access to that web site's applications. This is the exact opposite experience we have with mobile devices. With mobile devices we expect that we will need to download an App to have access to any type of information. So I need to ask, why is this?

What
I believe that Apps for mobile devices came about for two reasons, one is Apple's lead in the market, the other is the combination of old browsers and poorly designed web sites. Specifically Apple figured out with the iPod that you can make more money selling $1 songs then you can by selling the player hardware. To make this business proposition possible Apple needed to create a well designed, hip player so that their player is the player of choice. Once their player was chosen they could lock their user base into purchasing songs from only their store. Apple receives a 70% commission on every song purchased. Apple controls the market, forcing everyone else who wants to play in this market, including recording studies and artists, to write for the Apple player. When Apple, who controls the music player market along with the download music market, looked at the next logical hand held device to expand to, they naturally looked at the cell phone market. Since they were so successful making money with downloads they naturally looked at how they could repeat this success with the phone market. Naturally they chose to create a solution that requires software to be downloaded from their store to their player.

Helping Apple make the App play is the current state of mobile browsers and web sites. Most mobile browsers do not have nearly the same capabilities as the browsers we are use to using on our PC. For example Windows CE is equivalent to IE 4 while Windows Mobile is equivalent to IE 6. So a lot of functionality we are use to receiving when on a PC will not be available when we are on our mobile device. Also pushing this paradigm is the technology and graphics used on most web sites. Most web sites have been developed to be accessed by the latest browser. Graphic artists develop web sites with big fancy graphics and rich media so that they look nice on a PC size screen. Applications like web forms are being developed using the latest technology like java server pages, active server pages, PHP, or Python. Current web sites have not been developed with the small screen and limited functionality of mobile browsers. Because of this, mobile users are limited when surfing the web.

Organizations that are looking at being available on mobile devices need to understand the pros and cons of each approach. Unfortunately I see limitations with each approach. Understanding the pros and cons, provides you with some of the information you will need to make a decision on which direction to go.

Why:
There are pro’s and cons of going with an App solution versus a browser based solution. For the end user and the content developer the easiest solution would be a browser solution. The issue is having a web site that is developed with the limited functionality and download speeds necessary to run effectively on a mobile device.


Pro's and Con's of Apps:
Pro –
• For the app creator – functionality and control – App creators can be assured that all their App’s features work. You can develop your app so that it is optimized to run effectively on a specific mobile devices.
• For the end user – Since the app is downloaded to your device you are not limited by weak or slow WiFi access speeds.

Con –
• For the app creator – you need to develop an application that works on each of the players. Each player uses a different operating system and supports different technology. Porting to different players is not trivial.
• For the end user – you need to purchase and install each application. Many times you do not have the access speeds to download and install on the fly so that you need to think up front what applications you will need. Each App cost money.

Pros and Cons of Browser
Pro-
• For the app creator – one development cycle works on all the different devices.
• For the end user – access when you want it where you want it, typically for free
Con –
• For the app creator – need to test out and make sure the technology you are using to create your mobile web site is supported by the different mobile browsers. Some features that you may want to add my not be available across the board. Need to make sure that when you are developing your mobile accessible web site that it is slim so that it download and runs fast on a mobile device.
• For the end user - Does the web site/web App work on their mobile device? Does the web site have the functionality and bandwidth so that it works well.

Back to the future with mobile devices

The mobile device application market is a lot like the software industry of 20 years ago. Twenty years ago we had a lot of operating systems running on a bunch of different hardware platforms. If you wanted to develop an application you needed to develop it for each operating system and port it to each platform. The only way an end user had access to an application is if they installed it on their computer. We then moved into the modern, web era of computing. Life become so much easier for everyone. Software companies can now develop new applications once, put them on the web, and everyone has access. They no longer are porting to different operating systems and hardware environment. End users love the easy accessibility of using applications when they needed them without having to bother with downloading and installing software. This all worked well until we started moving to the newest computing frontier, mobile devices. Now we are back to the future, operating specific applications that need to be developed and ported to each device, and downloaded and installed by the end user? For mobile devices, why have we moved away from the beauty, elegance, and simplicity of web sites and web applications?

Questions on web marketing

I have been thinking a lot about Social Media Marketing. My thoughts and questions are more long term strategic as in measurement and long term use as a marketing channel, rather then tactical.

I am wondering how social media marketing is going to effect earlier waves of marketing like traditional media and traditional Internet marketing (web optimization, ad words, and e-mail blasts). We hear a lot about how new media is killing revenue for old media - "Craig's List" takes money from news papers without making "Craig's List" rich (issues covered in Anderson's book "Free"). What I am interesting in exploring is the effect of new marketing from the marketers point of view. Is it really effective? How do we know? Will social media companies figure out how to make money? That is from the marketeers point of view will they charge for access? If they charge then they will need to provide marketeers with effective measurements (cost per lead, cost per sale). If we all try using Social Media for marketing how quickly will this media become saturated and no longer have any effectiveness. What's next? Will the lack of effectiveness cause us to go back to more traditional forms of marketing? Will social marketing effect web site, web list, and web ad revenue? What's next?

As a data point:

A friend recently ran a B2C marketing campaign on Face book. They created a YouTube video to go along with their campaign. I thought it was quite clever. They got a lot of visits, a great viral spread, a lot of positive comments, which resulted in access to a lot of people they never would have accessed in a more traditional form (using both traditional media and Internet media). After their initial exhilaration they found that all of this attention did not increase sales - lots of tire kickers, no buyers.

I have started to research if this is normal or an anomaly. I am interested in others experience. If you say it works, how do you measure success? Why do you think your social media campaign was effective? Does it work for some markets like B2C, but works less effectively in a B2B market? Please get back to me with your comments and thoughts. You can post them here are e-mail me at anita@readygo.com.

Marketing in 2009

I talked with Jim Blassingame on his radio show today about marketing this century. We just touched the tip of the iceberg. I have run a few different marking organizations and have been running a software company for the last 10 years. Marketing is a big and important part of my company's budget. When making a marketing decision I am continually figuring out the fully burdened cost of a lead and the cost to close business per lead. To stay in business you really need to understand your customers and product, then look at all avenues for marketing and figure out what really works. It's easy to stay with what is working. With limited time it's hard but necessary to try whats new.

Over the length of my career I have seen three waves of marketing:

Wave 1: Traditional mass marketing or also called "before the internet" marketing. This includes mass mailings, trade shows, cold calling, and media buying (news paper, magazine, ...)

Wave 2: Internet marketing includes web sites, search engine, add words, and e-mail blasts.

We have now moved into:
Wave 3: Social Networking Marketing - an easier and harder form of marketing. It's easy since new technologies have higher access rates (e.g. e-mail blasts in the 90's were much more effective before spam and spam filters cut access.) Social Networking Marketing is harder since success stories seem to be urban legends rather then acceptable practices. I know people who have done "successful" Facebook campaigns that don't bring in a penny of revenue. Still the "free" cost of social networking makes it a worthwhile cost per lead.

As with any marketing campaign, the issue is understanding the media and being able to apply this knowledge to your product and customer base. I don't see that newer waves of marketing have done away with previous waves, even though later waves take money away from previous waves. Traditional media is in a free fall as marketeers like me try out newer (and cheaper) avenues of marketing. It will be really interesting to see how this all shakes out.

If you want to hear more about my thoughts on this you can listen to my discussion with Jim:

Designing mobile eLearning courses

Before embarking on creation of a mobile accessible course you will want to understand how the learner’s experience changes when they view your course through a mobile device. Mobile devices are typically used in a very distraction-filled environment. Learners may be on a bus, on a train, at the store, eating lunch, or at work. The mobile device screen is very small. This limits what the learner can see and can make it difficult to read a large amount of content, view graphics, or see moving graphics.

Course content behaves differently when the display window shrinks. Graphic artists and many course creators like to design eLearning courses so that all aspects of the visual layout are tightly controlled. They like to precisely specify the position of each character. This is called absolute positioning. Absolutely positioned pages work well for printed brochures, but don't work well for environments where the learners have different screen/display sizes. Because the designer has specified positioning for a specific screen size ahead of time, the browser cannot rearrange the content optimally for the end-learner's current screen size. Absolutely positioned content may require horizontal scrolling to read, or may simply be illegible because the font size is too large or too small. Along the same line of thought, many test questions are built with tools that only work on specific browsers. For example, tools assume that the learner uses only Internet Explorer 7 or later or has flash installed. Mobile devices (event those that use Microsoft Windows Mobile) use older, simpler browsers making many web pages and web forms unusable.

Additionally, in a mobile environment your content will be most effective if you only provide a small amount on each page. While learners can scroll horizontally on a mobile device, it may be difficult to follow the content if they have to scroll too much. The rule of thumb, is to provide about twice the amount of content that can be viewed on the screen: If an average mobile screen supports 300 characters, limit your pages to 600 characters. This leads to content that is short, quick, and fast. Mobile devices have different size and capability limitations. Some browsers will resize the fonts, some support zooming, some don’t respect style sheets, some have a portrait layout, etc. Avoid multiple columns, since they will require horizontal scrolling.

There are a few simple rules to follow when creating graphics for mobile devices. Avoid placing important text inside graphics. That is, it is possible to put text inside a graphic to serve as a label. The mobile browser may shrink graphics so that they fit on the small display size. Any text that is in the graphic will also be shrunk, potentially to a size that is illegible. On other devices, if the graphic is too large, the visitor will need to scroll horizontally and vertically to see it. This can become frustrating for your learner since horizontal scrolling is annoying and is not supported on all mobile devices. So, graphics should be designed for low resolution screens.

None of the currently available mobile devices support multimedia that is part of web pages. This means that content requiring plug-ins such as Flash, PDF, Java, and most movie formats do not work across the platforms. The movies that are becoming popular on iPod require a proprietary movie application, separate from the browser. This means that rich/multimedia should be avoided.

The overall layout/look-and-feel of your site can also be a challenge. If you plan to use the same content for the desktop and the mobile learners, one option is to have two different style sheets, with the appropriate one loading at run time. In a properly designed site, the style sheet specifies layout, positioning, font sizes/colors, backgrounds, borders, and many other display attributes. It is important to understand that style sheet support is not uniform across mobile devices. Because of the non-uniform support, you might consider creating two separate eLearning courses: one for PC access and one for mobile access. Some basic considerations when creating a template for mobile devices:
• Most branding can be done through font and background colors
• Use small or unobtrusive graphics and logos
• Avoid navigation bars that may take up a large percentage of the screen. If you want to include complex navigation, place these at the end of the page content so that learners have access first to the primary content.
• Avoid background graphics.
o The end learners ambient light will vary depending on whether they are indoors or outdoors.
o A background that causes low contrast difference between text and decoration may make content impossible to read.
• Pull-down menus don’t necessarily work on mobile devices (because of uneven JavaScript support), so consider using arrows to take learners through a tour of your course.
• Graphic navigation icons should be simple arrows or a descriptive word such as “next” or “back”.
• Navigation frames work well on some devices, but not others. It’s best to place them below or after the main content.

When you build your content using recommended web practices it will work effectively on all platforms. Content that follows W3C recommendations including HTML implementation, style sheets, and relative positioning is the most accessible from the largest number of platforms. If you are already using a tool, confirm that it works on all mobile devices. You may need to do your own testing since most vendors have focused on the desktop market.

Also consider the connection speed for your visitor’s device. Many mobile devices only have access to low bandwidth services. Your visitor might only have access to download speeds comparable to what most people had in the mid 1990's. Since access speeds vary tremendously, make sure your content can be downloaded quickly.

Tests can work over mobile devices, but they need to be implemented using standard HTML. A big caveat is your LMS. Most LMS’s do not work in a mobile environment since they created their environment in tools (AJEX and Rich Media) that do not work on mobile devices