Who has the data on the social media wars? uh, search engines

Social Media is the big battlefield.  News.com has an article on Twitter's strength of hashtags vs. Facebook.

#Hashtags: Facebook's missing link to pop culture

The # symbol has become the key to connecting to people and events you care about on social media. It's also an obvious hole for Facebook.

Is this insight really meaningful?  And can you make a business decision on this?  Are adding #hashtags the answer?

Who knows better what to do in social media?  A bunch of analysts and media reporters? Or?

Who has the data?  Ohhhhhh, Google does.  One thing I have noticed running this blog site is seeing the amount of robots, search engines that hit my site.

Google and other search engines - Baidu, Bing, Yandex all have the RAW data to understand the social media wars - what works and what doesn't.

The battle for Mobile and Social are like wars where data is key to define strategies.  But, in any battle the winners are not those who have the most amount of information.  If that was true then the CIA with all its analysts and computer systems should have been able to win every war.  Too much data can create a problem of analysis.

The problem with data is it shows the past, not necessarily the future.  Yet, some people will stand on the piles of data and use it to justify their position of analysis.

Sometimes the winner in the war is the one who takes a different strategy that the data doesn't support.

Ender's game is finally coming to the screen at the end of year and is a science fiction classic.  Did Ender win because he had more data, or he saw things from a different perspective than others.

Hiding your intent in the public, cloaking technique used by teens documented

Danah Boyd post on Pew's report on report on Social, Media, and Privacy and she closes with this paragraph.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched as teens have given up on controlling access to content. It’s too hard, too frustrating, and technology simply can’t fix the power issues. Instead, what they’ve been doing is focusing on controlling access to meaning. A comment might look like it means one thing, when in fact it means something quite different. By cloaking their accessible content, teens reclaim power over those who they know who are surveilling them. This practice is still only really emerging en masse, so I was delighted that Pew could put numbers to it. I should note that, as Instagram grows, I’m seeing more and more of this. A picture of a donut may not be about a donut. While adults worry about how teens’ demographic data might be used, teens are becoming much more savvy at finding ways to encode their content and achieve privacy in public.

This technique of cloaking is not anything new.  The Chinese micro bloggers have learned to use this method to say things that don't trip censorship filters.

Pew report says

Other privacy protecting and obscuring behaviors

Many teen social media users will make the content they share more private by obscuring some of their updates and posts, sharing inside jokes and other coded messages that only certain friends will understand; 58% of teen social media users say they share inside jokes or cloak their messages in some way.45 Older teens are considerably more likely than younger teens to say that they share inside jokes and coded messages that only some of their friends understand (62% vs. 46%). Girls and boys are equally likely to post inside jokes and coded messages, as are teens across all socioeconomic groups 

In the data center world this is no different than inside jokes.

An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or in joke, is a joke whose humour is clear only to people who are in a particular social group, occupation, or other community of common understanding. It is an esoteric joke which is humorous only to those who know the situation behind it.

In-jokes may exist within a small social clique, such as a group of friends, or extend to an entire profession such as the film or professional wrestling industries, or a particular sporting endeavour. Even an ethnic or religious group may have its own in-jokes.[1]

 I often use this same cloaking technique as I can say things to a specific set of readers that to others just looks like a regular blog post. :-)

Data Center Marketing Hype vs. Social Networks

One person recently asked me what is going on in the data center industry.  I said the big are getting bigger, the small are disappearing and the middle is trying to make it seem like things are great.  Those who make the most amount of noise aren't necessarily doing the best.  When a company is quiet with few press releases and presence at trade shows doesn't mean they are not growing. I found it interesting when you would give a small presentation at a conference like Uptime Symposium and half the room is full of your competitors. If you have something really good that sells, you don't want to tell your competitors how you market your product and how it addresses customer needs.

What got me to write this post is reading Chris Crosby's post on Pardon My Hyperbole.

Pardon My Hyperbole

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareMore Sharing Services2
 

Pardon My HyperboleEveryone exaggerates. The big one that got away gets bigger with every telling. That one yard plunge you made for a touchdown in high school now stands at 50 yards, and getting longer, and of course you really did use to have a 30 inch waist. Hyperbole is not a bad thing. The advertising business is built upon it and so are most of our egos. Al Gore has made a career of it ($200 million at last count). In our everyday lives, we accept a certain amount of puffery surrounding most any assertion that we hear—let’s call it our personal plus or minus 10%—but sometimes we just have to jump in tell someone that “it’s time to pull in the reigns there cowboy”. I ran across just such a case the other day when I read someone describe data centers as “today’s steel mills”. While I agree that everyone has a right to use hyperbole to make a point, I think this guy’s abusing the privilege.

 

 

 

When I first read this I thought of the marketing over promises of what a product or service will deliver.  Most vendors know their customers will under utilize the product/service so its performance will be fine.  But the bigger players are working at a scale that challenges the limits of products and services.  What do you mean the product has issues at 80% load.  Well no one runs the product at 80% load most are aren't even at 50% load.  You mean your specifications aren't accurate.  Well no one has actually run our product in production at 80% load.  One of my friends was a the nightmare tenant in his colocation facility.  He would consistently push circuits to their 80% of rated capacity.  His landlord would constantly talk to him about the dangers of running the facility at 80%.  My friend knew he was paying for the capability so why not use it.

Here is a crazy idea for the vendors spend some of that marketing budget on listening to the experienced influentials.  Learn what issues they have with existing products/services and what they need in future products/services.  Oops, just shared what some of the smart people have figured out.  Hanging with the influentials to listen is worth more than trying to sell them something.  

One of the funniest stories is when a salesman cornered a data center executive and lectured him how he is making big mistakes not working with his company, one of the top companies in the industries.  You aren't buy into my over promise and under deliver market dominance strategy. :-)

Life changes when you hang around the really smart people to listen, learn, and socialize.  You start to see the reality of what works and what doesn't.

The big are getting smarter as well as bigger.  The small have no idea what is going on.  The middle is well, stuck in the middle.

Blogging tips from the Best

GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher has a post on how some of the best bloggers got to the top.  

A lesson from the blogging elite: there are many ways to the top

by 

 

21 HOURS AGO

1 Comment

paidContent Live 2013 Andrew Sullivan The Dish Andrew Ross Sorkin NYT Maria Popova Brain Pickings Tim Ferriss The 4-Hour Workweek
photo: Albert Chau
SUMMARY:

There’s more than one way to the top of the elite blogging ladder. Here’s lessons from four bloggerati that made it there.

The really surprising thing about a conversation with some of the blogging world’s most celebrated names is how little they actually have in common — in terms of their motivations, strategies and business models. At paidContent Live on Wednesday, Brain Picking’s Maria Popova, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, The Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, and web marketing guru Tim Ferriss, discussed the various reasons why they blog, and how (if at all) they monetize their web work.

Have you hired a person based on their tweets? Some people are

AOL Jobs has post that will get you thinking.

Is Twitter Killing The Resume?

 

The death of paper resumes has been predicted ever since the advent of email. And now some tech-savvy employers are even refusing to look at traditional resumes or conduct in-person interviews, instead relying on applicants' postings on Twitter in the pursuit of top talent.

It may not be the death of the resume, but your tweets may be more important than a reference.

The larger lesson, she says, is that social media is becoming more pervasive in hiring. Though you may not be screened based on your ability to tweet for a job, she says, "it is becoming more and more important for any professional to maintain a digital profile," which appears on social-media sites such as Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and LinkedIn.