New Search Functionality on Facebook
August 12, 2009
Facebook announced on their blog yesterday that they have rolled out an upgraded version of their search feature, one that now includes search capabilities of wall posts and newsfeeds of friends and those who have selected to have their content available to everyone. Here’s an excerpt of the announcement:
You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.
As I see it, the two primary benefits to this addition regard reputation management and conversational marketing. For example, let’s say that the owner of The Fort Restaurant in Denver wants to see what people have been saying about the restaurant in Facebook. Before yesterday, this was not possible. Today, however, once logged in to Facebook, one could enter the term “The Fort Restaurant” in the search box and see the posting below from the Denver Food & Wine Classic page:
Nice, right? Definitely; however there is a downside. Facebook search doesn’t support any type of phrase matching options so, in our example above, in addition to the post we also have a list that includes all mentions of the words Fort and Restaurant, in any order and placement. This means that the search results also include posts about restaurants in Fort Wayne, Fort Collins and Fort Worth. In this scenario, you’d want to further define your search, perhaps by entering “Fort Restaurant Denver,” in order to see more focused results. This drawback aside, the new search does allow restaurateurs to monitor their restaurant’s reputation and to respond to mentions of their establishment (both positive and negative) in an appropriate and timely fashion.
The second benefit to the new search is perhaps a bit more clunky, however it could prove useful to some dedicated marketers. It is possible to search public Facebook posts for mentions of the type of service your business offers. In our example above, if someone had posted to their wall asking for recommendations for restaurants in denver, a search for “restaurants in denver” would show the post and allow the marketer to respond to the potential client with a special offer, directions to the restaurant or links to their online menu.
TwoTables’ take on the changes? It’s definitely a step in the right direction but there is room for improvement from Facebook. We’d love to see features already available in Twitter, such as saving search queries and using RSS feeds within feed readers to monitor the results. Read the full announcement on the Facebook blog.
Twitter a Victim of Denial of Service Attack
August 6, 2009
I started my workday with the news that Twitter had fallen victim to a malicious attack, called a Denial of Service (DOS), against its website. The popular social networking site reported the service disruption in their official company blog at 8:00 AM Pacific Time.
What is a DOS and how are hackers able to take down a behemoth such as Twitter?
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), an agency of the Federal Government charged with providing response support and defense against cyber attacks for the Federal Civil Executive Branch, describes DOS attacks as:
…attempts to prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services. By targeting your computer and its network connection, or the computers and network of the sites you are trying to use, an attacker may be able to prevent you from accessing email, web sites, online accounts (banking, etc.), or other services that rely on the affected computer.
How is this accomplished? Most commonly, the attacker will overload the website’s server with an inundation of requests for the website. Another method employed in DOS situations, called Distributed Denial of Service, occurs when the attacker is able to take control of another’s computer, using this innocent ally to take down the target website or service.
I hadn’t realized until today that Twitter had become an integrated part of my daily routine. I tried for several minutes to access the site this morning in order to send out a notice to our followers about a PR opportunity for restaurants in New York and Miami and only upon being denied did I understand how much I relied on Twitter to send immediate communications throughout the day.
Did the Twitter outage affect you or your business? Leave a comment with the details!
Thick or Thin? More Than Merely a Question of Pizza
August 4, 2009
Last Friday, Umair Haque presented a thought-provoking discourse on his Harvard Business Blog in which he defines the difference between thick and thin value in business and his belief that those companies who choose the latter will meet their demise in the 21st century. In my opinion, Haque offers up some of today’s most compelling theories on corporate culture and leadership, and this post doesn’t disappoint.
Haque assigns thin value to profit that “…leaves others worse off, or, at best, no one better off,” using the example of cell phone companies needlessly and purposefully eating up customers’ minutes with 30 seconds worth of useless instructions each and every time they check their voicemail. In contrast, he defines thick value as profits that are a by-product of providing “…sustainable, meaningful value” and quotes the Generation M Manifesto that he posted in early July as a litmus test for this concept. There’s a lot of food for thought in that proclamation, however there are two items in particular that stand out to me:
….You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.
….You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.
Haque concludes his article by asking the reader “… how thick is the value that you are creating?” At TwoTables Internet Marketing, we are committed to providing exceptional service, unparalleled quality and “sustainable, meaningful value” in everything that we do, in business and otherwise. It’s as much a commitment to ourselves as it is to our families, our clients and the communities in which we live and work.
Give Haque’s article a read and post your thoughts here. We’d love to see how others are putting this notion of “thick value” into practice.