Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten published nude pictures of the national hero Fridtjof Nansen. That was too much for Facebook – and references to the photos were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Facsimile of Aftenposten October 15th, 2011

No nudity, please!, asks Facebook. And photos from 1929 of the Norwegian national hero Fridtjof Nansen were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page, which has almost 70.000 fans. In addition the newspaper received a warning that its Facebook page might be removed if new violations of Facebook’s policy were discovered.

Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, which is the company owning Aftenposten.

The clash between Facebook and Aftenposten raises some interesting principal questions, especially to what extent it is fair that Facebook restricts what a media company (or any other company or person for that matter) publishes on its Facebook page.

Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) was a Norwegian national hero, well known both for his Arctic expeditions as well as his work to help refugees after the first world war.

Aftenposten tells the story of how Nansen at the age of 67 fell in love with the 30 year younger journalist Brenda Ueland, an American feminist and journalist.

In a new book letters Nansen wrote to Ueland are published, including nude photos Nansen took of himself and sent to his love hoping that whe would returns photos of herself without clothes.

Aftenposten published two of the photos in its article about the book – and also shared the link to the article to the 70.000 friends on its Facebook page. The article received a number of reactions from readers.

The link to the controversial article was shared on Aftenposten's Facebook page

And then Facebook stepped in.

Within a few hours the link had been removed by Facebook from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Aftenposten also received a message warning that this photo was violating Facebook’s regulations, and that Aftenposten would risk being thrown out of Facebook if more violations were discovered.

“This message is a warning. Further violations may lead to your account being closed. Please read carefully through the declaration of duties and rights, and refrain from publishing offensive content in the future”, Facebook wrote.

Aftenposten’s editor-in-chief, Hilde Haugsgjerd, argues that Nansen is one of Norway’s biggest national heroes, and that it is known that he had relationships to many women. “Now there is a book on the market with this as the main topic, and we found it in order to cover this editorially”, she says to her own news site.

The photos in question are all from 1929.

So what do you think? Is it OK that Facebook censors this type of content? Or should the social network give media organizations some flexibility to decide for themselves what is proper content to be published under its bran?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

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In 2011 it is no longer possible to be a top professional journalist without  mastering social media. Here are five reasons why news organizations need to care about the new trends.

Social media is starting to become an integrated part of the work of many news organizations.  Yet many editors and journalists still struggle to see why they should put a lot of effort into understanding the dynamics of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

• Read also: Social networking tips for mainstream media

I gave a speech this week for the annual conference of the European Alliance of News Agencies in Geneva, Switzerland. In preparation for the presentation I compiled this list of five key reasons why social media should matter to news companies:

1. Distribute the content

Social media is all about sharing – and sharing drives traffic. As such Facebook and Twitter can be powerful channels for distributing content.

There are two main reasons for that:

• People tend to trust tips from their friends more than others. Stories shared on Facebook and Twitter therefore have a higher chance of being clicked on.
• People spend much more time on social network sites than on other sites. According to Facebook, the site’s 800 million users spend on average 15 hours per month on the site. By making their content available on these sites, media organizations make it easy for people to share their stories.

Source: Comscore

2. Create engagement

Content without engagement has no – or at least low – value.

Good content creates engagement, emotions and reactions. And social media provides excellent tools to create such engagement.

Most news sites will find that content that creates engagement will have a longer average length of the user sessions. People spend more time on the content and they will move on to more of the other content of the site as well.

The big social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube, provide efficient tools to create engagement and they also provide lots of information about who actually engages with your content. And THAT is valuable information most news organizations would struggle to find on their own.

Journalism used to be a one-way process. Editors selected the news and presented the same stories to a large audience, confident that no other could reach the same audience.

This premise has changed. Today everyone can create a mass communication channel. Journalists do no longer have a monopoly of distributing information.

This fact changes journalism. And it changes people’s expecations of the journalists. It also mean that journalism hasbeen redefined. It is no longe a one-way street. Instead modern journalism is a continueous stream of two-way communication.

3. Pick up news fast

When big news events occur there are no better place to keep track during the first hours than in social media.

In fact social media is a great tool for professional journalists to pick up news. And this seems to be done in at least three different ways:

• Big and live news events. In these situations journalists should immediately start monitoring Twitter to pick up any news from eyewitnesses or other sources. News will typically be distributed in social media first – and then in the traditional media.
• When social media becomes part of the news event itself. We see this happen more and more often, for instance in the uprising in Libya or in the terror attack in Norway. How people use social media during the events – and what role this plays – becomes an important element of the story to be told.
• Monitoring social media for particular areas of interest. This is the everyday use of social media in an editorial organization. Most journalists have an area of expertise. They should systematically monitor what is being said about that area – including the messages from important sources – in social media.

The Twitter photo of the airplane that landed in Hudson River in New York became an iconic symbol of news reporting in the age of Twitter

4. Dialogue with readers

Social media forces us to change our way of thinking – from journalism being a “one-way-communication” to looking at our profession as a two-way dialogue.

Social media is all about sharing – and dialogue. Unfortunately many editors don’t seem to realize this. They look at social media primarily as a  place to distribute content – and don’t reflect on the fact that people want them to share and communicate as well.

In fact sharing is the core of social media. And there is no way we can succeed with a social media strategy if we do not start to share

For editors there are many benefits in starting to talk to readers through social media.

Take the Facebook page of Aftenposten – Norway’s largest newspaper - as an example.  It now has 67.000 followers. Aftenposten has been quite skilled in using the Facebook page not only to distribute content, but to ask for the advice from readers in covering specific stories. For the editorial staff this has turned out to be extremely useful.  (Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, the owner company of Aftenposten)

5. Build brand value

This is the more overriding reason: How a news company uses social media influences the brand value of the company.

During the meeting of European news agencies I was asked which business opportunities I saw in social media.

I am not sure that is the right focus. At least business models are not the first we should look for. But doing things right in social media is an efficient tool to build brand value over time.

And high brand value always creates business opportunities.

How you dialogue with your readers in social media can strongly influence the perception of your brand – for better or worse. Your task therefore should be to establish brand missionaries,  people who will do anything to promote your brand among their friends and acquaintances.

Summing up

It is in fact becoming more or less impossible to be a professional journalist today without an active attitude towards social media. Yes, Facebook and media brands are to some extent competitors, at least when it comes to catching people’s attention. Yet, social media and traditional media organizations are in position to collaborate much more than before – to the benefit of both parties.

Here are five don’ts and five dos for how media companies should use social media, as suggested by Media Helping Media.

This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run by David Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

Traditional media’s attitude to social networking is evolving with varying results. Some harness the opportunities offered, while others refer to ‘social media’ with a condescending ‘and finally’ tone that suggests they are out of touch with their audience.

The five don’ts

1: Don’t appear out of touch

Never refer to social networking as a new phenomenon in your copy, bulletins, studio discussions or in a piece-to-camera and live radio spots. A large part of your audience is using Twitter and Facebook and increasingly turning to them and other sites as their primary sources of information. Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility.

• Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility

2: Don’t call it new media or new technology

It’s not new. Using terms such as ‘new media’ makes it sound as though you are ‘old media’ and lagging behind. The term was okay towards the end of the last century, but you should be part of a converged news operation delivering content to whatever platform/device the user turns to in order to access information. If you are, then it is part and parcel of that. If you are not, then you should be.

• If you keep calling it new you will come across as old

3: Don’t leave it to your online team

Or worse still a junior member of staff to manage and monitor. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination strategy. All your journalists should be using tools such as TweetDeck to monitor what people are saying and to discover stories. Take it seriously or you may soon find you are no longer taken seriously.

• Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination

4: Don’t snigger

Never let presenters refer to stories that involve social networking with that ‘and finally’ tone or that condescending, knowing nod and smile, as if it is all a bit of a joke. It could come across as patronising or (even worse) disconnected, distant and judgemental. Get some of your more connected correspondents (and there are loads around) to educate the studio presenters and some of the less connected producers. Those in the field often get it because they are rubbing shoulders with the audience on a daily basis and understand the significance of the changing audience behaviour; they also know, first hand, how your news organisation is being perceived.

• Don’t take pride in adopting a patronising, disconnected, distant and judgemental tone

5: Don’t miss the story

Remember that the number and speed of tweets on an issue is a story in itself, and you can run that story even before you have been able to verify what is being said with the usual two independent sources. Simply reflecting the activity and taking the time to follow a few tweets in order to sample the diversity of perspectives and opinions will enrich your news coverage. If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news.

• If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news

The five dos

1: Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

Remember you can tweet facts, you don’t need long, complex concepts. Tweet about things that your news organisation can confirm have happened as soon as the confirmation is in. You just need the facts in a short sentence. Subject, verb, object – send. The social network audience feeds off facts (and other stuff), and it is taking those facts to another place (their preferred social networks) where they add their own context and analysis by interacting with their friends (rather than sitting in front of a TV or radio or clicking through your webpages or thumbing through your newspaper/magazine pages). Always add a short URL if the story is supported by an article or audio & video online.

• Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

2: Take a gift with you

If you are going to gatecrash the social network party offer something that those who tweet will value. Your best offering is facts from stories where you are ‘digging where others don’t’ or in the category of ‘had it not been for you the world would never have known’. They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites, broadcast networks or newspapers. Originality is the key. Tweet facts that they can’t get elsewhere. Automate your feeds through to Facebook and Twitter to provide a steady stream of content for social networks to feed off.

• They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites

3: Change your tools

Think differently about the way you set up the desktop for your journalists. If they can only surf the net and browse the wires some may limit themselves to that window on the world – and your news offering will reflect that limitation. You need to observer, evaluate and, where appropriate, integrate the social network chatter and make sense of it in a way that informs the public debate and broadens perspectives. Also encourage your journalists to engage in conversations when they find a story, rather than just feed off what is already there.

• You need to integrate the social network chatter into the tools your journalists use

4: Widen your contacts

Start to build up a new contacts file of those hundreds of thousands of (free) stringers who are filing copy (that’s the stuff of headlines) free of charge 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year. (Imagine organising a rota for that — the work flow implications are mind blowing, let alone the staff costs). So enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known voices who may no longer have the connection with changing audience behaviour.

• Enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known and overused experts

5: Embrace, hug and welcome back

Find ways of bringing the social network experience back into your news production process, and not just as a token nod and wink, but as a serious reflection of how both you and the audience are changing. Those tweeting may have taken your facts away with them to their preferred social networking space to discuss with their friends, but in doing so, they and their contacts will add their own value to the growing story. Be sure to invite them back, and find ways of sharing that enhanced understanding and feeding it back into the system so the richness of knowledge and experience and the diversity of perspectives is available for all.

• Social networking is a reflection of how the audience is changing – ignore it at your peril

See how others are doing it

Check out the Facebook sites for CNN, BBC News, the Wall Street Journal and other leading news organisations.
Look at how many followers they have. Check the number of times stories are commented on and discussed in the Facebook environment.

And look at all the automated links offering a direct route back to the media organisation. Next, check their presence on Twitter.

Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic; it’s a no brainer.

• Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic.

The ‘broadcast/publish at’ model died years ago. The ‘engage with on our terms’ model is in its death throes. Now it’s about ‘participate in’ and empowerment. Those traditional media organisations that move to this model qucikly may have more chance of surviving.

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Check also out the following resources from Media Helping Media:

• Social media kitbag for journalists
• Top sites for journalists

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This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run byDavid Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

So you got stuck, working for the printed newspaper all these years? And now you realize your future is with digital media? Here is your digital makeover plan!

Many of my journalist colleagues these days find themselves in the same trap: They realize that the future holds limited demand for print journalist experience alone and that the brightest career potential in the business is within digital media.

The only problem is: They have no experience with digital media whatsoever!

What should you do? Is there a digital makeover plan you can follow?

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One thing is for sure: It will require hard work on your part. But if you want to stay in the media business, you better get on with it! And please don’t wait for your employer to fix it for you. Your competence is your own responsibility.

Also I think you can be sure of the following: Career opportunities in the media business will be fewer and fewer every year for people with only print experience. Especially that applies to any kind of management position.

Why is that?

Because most media companies will realize they have a digital competence deficit in their staff. As digital media takes a stronger position in the media houses, top managers realize it will be foolish to hire editors and managers with only print experience. Rather they should look for people who know how digital platforms work.

To put it even more clearly: Your print experience will be in less and less demand over the next years! If you look at it in a perspective of 5 – 10 years, changes will be dramatic. As a print journalist you are indeed naive if you don’t believe that this will affect you professionally in a big way.

• Read also: How print journalists can fall into the typographers’ trap

So you got to do something, don’t you?

Yes, you do! And you better get on with it!

Here is my suggestion for a one-year first-step digital makeover plan for journalists:

Step 1: Get yourself on social networks

If you are not on Facebook yet, you better register now. Understanding social media is essential for digital journalists and there is really no other way to do this than to participate yourself. Therefore your first step will be to get active on some of the most common social networks. As a minimum I suggest  you start using actively Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Also familiarize yourself with YouTube and at least one location based social network, like Foursquare or Gowalla. And if you are really dedicated to the task, you might consider starting your own blog. Really, there is no better way of learning digital media than maintaining an active blog.

Let us not forget an important aspect of this step: Start interacting with your readers! Respond to their comments, ask for tips to stories, use readers’ expertise in your articles, follow all discussions about your own content.

Step 2: Get experience in online journalism

If you work in a media company, start talking to the web people in your organization. The best alternative is to ask if you can work for the web site for a while, gaining useful experience. If that is not possible, show active interest in writing exclusive stories for the web site, including special versions of the print stories that you write. Your main purpose at this point is to gain as much experience as possible and to learn from your online colleagues. Study their writing style and what makes stories work on the web as opposed in the newspaper. Experiment with different headlines and see which ones make readers click. And especially: Take good note of which print stories that do not work on the web site! There will be more of them than you probably thought ahead.

Too many technical terms the online people expect you to know? Check out this digital survival guide for journalists!

Step 3: Learn basic photo editing

In big print organizations specialists often take care of the photo editing. So far, at least.  Hardly any web site editorial organization can afford that luxury. Instead it is expected that all journalists know how to crop and photo shop an image. And I tell you: There are hardly any journalists under the age of 30 that do not know photo shopping today at some level.

The most used software is Photo Shop. You may decide to start with Photo Shop Elements, which is a simpler version.

How to learn it? There are numerous online courses!  A great place to learn is Lynda.com, which has easy-to-follow videos for self-study of any type of software.

Step 4: Start making short video clips

Video is an essential and growing part of the web. As digital journalist you might as well start to learn using video at once. The best starting point is making small video clips, for instance with your iPhone. This can be short clips from the interview you are writing about, like what I have done in this story about the social media strategy of 20minutos.es in Spain.

Using video can be incredibly sophisticated or amazingly simple. At this stage you should start with the simple solutions. You will realize they can still create great value for the reader.

Digital journalists should of course learn more sophisticated video recording and editing as well, but I suggest you start with the shorter and unedited clips and then move on as your confidence grows.

Step 5: Start experimenting with interactive elements, like maps and time lines

Digital journalism opens up for many new story telling techniques, such as sound slides and time lines. Until recently many of these techniques required a lot of technical knowledge to use. Not any more. Today there are lots of sites offering to help you make your story telling more interactive.

Here are three tools you can start playing with:

Time lines:  http://www.dipity.com/ Create exciting time lines to illustrate how the topic of your story has developed over time

Maps: http://www.umapper.com Make maps that users can click on for more information.

Live log: http://www.coveritlive.com A great tool for live events, allowing you to live log and communicate with readers as the events pass.

After finishing your work, all services provide you with a code that you embed into the story. You will probably need some help from an experienced web journalist for this part. But I tell you: Learning how to embed external elements like maps, time lines and Youtube videos gives you unlimited creative possibilities in digital journalism.

A great blog for getting tips on interactive multimedia journalism is 10.0oo Words.

Step 6: Start analyzing traffic data for your site

Almost all news sites will have some analytics system installed. Many use more than one system, depending on the purpose of the analysis. Live logging of traffic is for instance often a separate system.

Ask for access to the analytics of your news site and try to learn the basics of the service, whether it be Google Analytics, Xiti or another system. Try to understand the traffic pattern. Where do users come from? What stories are most popular?

The easiest and most fun software to learn using will typically be the live log, where you can see which stories people click on right now. By following the live log regurlarly you will learn a lot about what actually works and what does not in driving traffic to a web site.

Step 7: Get yourself a smart phone – and use it to its full potential

A significant shift in platforms is taking place – and it will have major influence over the media industry over the next years. It is driven by the growth in smart phones, but also tablets like iPad is pushing the development.

If you don’t have it already, hurry up to get a smart phone. Whether it is an iPhone or an Android-run phone is not that important. What matters is that you get a smart phone with lots of apps, GPS and all other features that are part of a modern phone.

Try to use it to its full potential. It will revolutionize your media consumption, and give you a new perspective of where journalism might be headed.

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My suggestion is that you make this list of 7 steps your plan for this first year of a digital makeover – although not necessarily in the same order.

If you spend time on all these steps – and try to learn as much as possible – you will be much better positioned in a year from now than you are today.

However, let me tell you: It is not enough! There are many more things you need to learn. But it is a starting step, putting you in the right direction.

But do not be fooled: It requires hard work! And you have to do it yourself. Don’t sit around and wait for your employer to come around with a course or two. Only you can be the manager of your own professional future.

And please, please, dear print colleagues: Do not fall into the typographers’ trap!

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Bonus:

After this article was written I was made aware of an excellent guide to become a good multimedia journalist:

Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency

It is written by journalism professor Mindy McAdams at University of Florida.  I really recommend that you read it! It is highly useful and very instructional.  (thanks to Blue Lady Blog for giving me the link)

I gave a speech for 70 managers in Media Norway. But the audience turned out to be more than 4500. Here is how!

This is a simple and personal story of the power of social media. It explains how a presentation for a small group may reach many more people than the ones who actually attended the original presentation.

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On January 25th I gave a presentation for the managers conference of Media Norway (a Schibsted-controlled company owning four major media houses in Norway).  About 70 people listened to my speech of digital media trends in 2011. To be honest I was quite nervous about this presentation, as the audience was composed of top managers in all the Norwegian media companies I work closely with in my work as editor and senior manager at Media Norway Digital.

But in fact this group of highly competent managers within my own media corporation turned out to be only a small proportion of the total audience for my speech.

Here is why!

My audience was 70 people. They were all top media managers in one of the most technologically advanced markets in the world.

After giving the speech a few people asked me for the slides. To make it easy for them, I decided to upload the presentation slides to Slideshare.

That started the viral distribution! The Slideshare team liked it so much that they decided to feature my presentation the front page of their site. Suddenly a lot of people decided it was worth their time to flip through the presentation.

And then people started spreading my presentation in social media. As for myself, I wrote a blog post elaborating the somewhat scetchy details in the presentation. Even that blog post was shared quite a bit.

The conclusion after 10 days?

• 70 managers attended the presentation
• 270 people – almost four times as many people as those who listened to the speech – downloaded the presentation from Slideshare to their own computer
• More than 120 people spread the ideas in social media, primarily on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. About 20 of them commented on the presentation, mostly on LinkedIn.
• 3900 people have viewed the presentation on Slideshare.net
• 37 web sites have embedded the presentation
• More than 1000 people have read the blog posting on BetaTales.com
• About 20 people I did not know before have asked to connect with me on LinkedIn. I have also received many new followers on Twitter.

The conclusion?

The speech I gave for about 70 of my colleagues ended up with an audience of almost 5000 people.

So far, that is. The viral distribution will probably continue.

I have had similar experiences before. Two years ago I taught seven online journalists at Aftenposten about how they could use Twitter as a tool for journalism. The now out-dated presentation – uploaded both in Norwegian and English – since has been viewed by more than 7000 people.

The physical audience was multiplied by 1000 times!

In April last year I was going to give a presentation at the annual conference of Society of News Design Scandinavia. Unfortunately the conference was cancelled at the last minute due to the vulcano ashes from Iceland which interrupted a lot of air traffic in Europe at the time.

I never had the chance to give the presentation, with an expected audience of 50-60 people, but the slides that I had prepared have been viewed by more than 1000 people on Slideshare.

We are talking about a presentation I never gave!

It is quite amazing, isn’t it?

Of course I realize this is not the most stunning example of the power of viral distribution. However, this is my personal experience, which is what inspire me to continue sharing my content. And that is what matters to me. It is also these types of experiences that make me continue blogging on BetaTales.

For me blogging has been a tremendous learning experience. It has taught me a lot about what what works and what doesn’t work in the digital world. In fact BetaTales has become my private lab, where I can try out a number of things without the risks of doing it on a large commercial site.

And I have learned so much about the power of sharing!

What are my conclusions so far?

Here is the essential one:

The most important driver for creating value in content is engagement!

Really, if your content is not able to inspire engagement, it has no or very low value.

That’s my experience at least!

What do your think?

By the way: Here is the presentation that was embedded on Slideshare:

It was time to cut the crap: The Spanish news site 20minutos.es decided to make a sincere effort to increase the quality of readers’ contributions. Here is how.

The Schibsted-owned free newspaper 20 Minutos in Spain also has the third largest news site in the country, 20minutos.es.  Now it has launched a major program to increase readers’ contribution on the site. The program is called Eco and is an innovative self-developed framework for integrating readers’ commments and social media into the news stories.

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I recently visited Madrid and met with deputy editor-in-chief for 20minutos.es, Virginia Perez Alonso. She explained to me the philosophy behind Eco, that was launched on November 26th.

- 20minutos.es has a long tradition collaborating with our readers, especially when you compare us to the biggest news sites in Spain, like El Pais and El Mundo, she said.

Watch a short interview with Virginia Perez Alonso in the video above!

- In fact this is an area where we really wish to make a huge difference. We want to show that we understand our readers.

But as many news sites have experienced, building quality in readers’ participation takes a lot of work. Too much of comments are just crap that create noise rather than making real contributions.

20minutos.es set out to change this. They wanted to increase both the amount and quality of readers’ contributions, thinking this would differentiate the site in a positive way for its bigger competitors.

The answer was called Eco.

What is Eco, then?

It is a platform aggregating all readers’ contributions to a story, whether it is on 20minutos.es itself or in social media like Twitter and Facebook.

The total activity around a story is calculated into a Eco measurement. Stories with the most reader activity will then be given visible symbols on the front page of the news site.

Here is how it works:

On the front page

The number of comments each story has received is clearly marked in connection with the subtitle.

Then, if a story reaches a sufficient “ecco”, a measurement for readers’ activity, a special symbol is placed on the story image, indicating that this is a “hot story”.

It looks like what you see on the left. The eco symbol will take on a stronger color the more reader activity is associated with the story. Over time, the editors hope, readers will get used to the meaning of this symbol and look for the stories creating the most readers’ activity.

What happens, then, when readers click on the story?

In the actual article page a set of symbols appear after the lead paragraph.

It looks like this:

The bar both gives the proprietory “eco value” as well as number of comments, Tweets and Facebook likes.

Below the story are the comments and other contributions from readers:

Notice the tab for corrections. Readers are encouraged to report any factual error they might find in the story – and there even is a tab for the responses from the editorial staff.

An essential part of the eco system is that the most liked comments are displayed on the top. That is one of several measures to encourage readers to provide quality contributions.

- For sure this will not be used by every reader. These functions are for the most important of our readers, explains Virginia Perez Alonso.

They currently receive about 300.000 comments each month and expect this number to increase as readers get used to the new eco system.

A major challenge is to get all the journalists to participate. Each journalists gets his/her own user page in the eco system, but to succeed it is also necessary that they in fact participate actively. Convincing all journalists that this is worthwhile will still takes some time, admits Virginia Perez Alonso.

It is still too early to say how the eco system will work out. Yet I was impressed by the massive effort in making readers’ engagement the differentiator from competing sites. 20minutos.es has spent most of its limited development resources for several months on this project and is betting on this making a significant impact on its success.

I hope they will succeed.

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How location and positioning will become game changers in the local media market as Google and Facebook proceed with their offensive plans.

As they watch the wave of change hitting the media business, chief executives of local media brands usually have been able to cling to one last resort: At least their strong position in the local market is fairly safe.

No more.

There is a global digital revolution entering local media markets.

It is called location. And positioning. It is the tool of global players like Google and Facebook as they try to attract local small advertisers.

Let us start with formulating two basic postulates:

1. What can become digital, will become digital
2. “Global equals local” in the digital world

Why do I mean by this?

The first postulate should be pretty obvious. We are in the middle of a major digital transformation. The changes are inevitable, the only point left arguing about is the speed. Everything that can become digital, will eventually become digital.

That includes all types of local ads.

The second postulate probably needs a little bit more explanation.  In the analog world local market places and services in most cases were controlled by players with a strong local presence. The reason for this was obvious: Physical restraints, like distribution or storage needs, gave huge advantages to companies geographically based in the local area.  In this type of market many areas of business, like running a newspaper, required a huge initial investment, primarily in buildings and production equipment.

In the digital world there are no longer physical restraints to entering a local business. In fact local needs can be served as well by a global player as by local businesses. No longer do you need local expertise in every area where you do business. More important is the platform you have built for your business.

In short: Global equals local.

What does this mean for local media sites?

The major competitors are no longer necessarily other local players. Instead you are competing with global giants in your own small and local market.

And here comes the most important point: Global players are now preparing a major offensive to grab the lion’s share of local ad markets around the world.

The reason for this development is obvious: The rise of the smart phone. People no longer want a phone just to call with. They also like to surf, search, look for additional offers, etc. This includes services that register your physical location at any time. And basically all smart phones today offer geographic positioning as a major feature.

Both Google and Facebook now seem to go after the local markets around the world – although from different perspectives.

Let us start with Google

Google’s ingenious idea in ads was to automatically connect the content of a web page with the message of an advertisement. In addition the pricing and display of ads would be dynamic, depending on the efficiency in collecting users for the advertiser.

Google Adwords has been the major revenue stream for Google with its smart way of combining commercial ads with whatever content is on any specific web page.

Now Google obviously is refocusing its resources from Adwords to location based coupons.

“The Holy Grail for local advertising is location-targeted coupons, and we’re building Google Offers to enable that, as well as click-to-call functionality for nearby businesses,” said Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms at Google in a recent interview.

Google has announced that one third of all mobile searches are based on where people are at any given moment.

And Mike Steib notices how that is an enormous opportunity for a company like Google:

“When we see that a third of the search queries on a mobile device are local in nature, but a smaller percentage of ads that are local in nature, that’s a recipe for an opportunity for advertisers and agencies.”

We should also mention Google Places, which essentially is a free global catalogue service enabling any small business to get correctly tagged on Google Maps. In many countries Google has purchased data from catalogue companies to make sure all businesses – large and small – are placed on the map.

There is no more telling example of Google’s refocus than the fact that the well-know search boss Marissa Mayer has been given the new role of managing the geo/local business.  That means she is moving away from the area that has represented 90 % of Google’s income to a new area said to be “crucial to our users and to the future of Google”.

Geo/local is crucial to the future of Google? Think about that! If it is crucial to the world’s largest search gigant, what about the many thousands of local media sites?

So tell me, executives of local media sites around the world: What have you done in the area of geolocated ads recently? Not so much? You better pay attention!

What will Google do?

Fast Company in a recent blog post exemplified how Google already is already betting on geo location being an essential of the future. Look for instance at this example of changes in Google’s search result:

You may also try to search for the word “restaurant” on an Android powered mobile phone – and you will get a glimpse of how Google hopes to include location based search results whenever possible.

The direction Google is moving is quite obvious: From being the best in the class to connect ads with content on web pages, Google now hopes to have a similar position in serving ads based on where you are at any given time.

That is bad news for local media sites!

What about Facebook?

Fecebook seems determined to compete in the same area as Google, namely in utilizing where people are at any given moment.

The last effort is Facebook Places. This encourages people to report where they are at any given time. Facebook wants to connect people to friends who happens to be nearby – and the company wants to offer lucrative deals.

Several services, like Foursquare and Gowalla, are already based on people “checking in” at where they are. Both have become quite popular, and have inspired a number of creative uses, like how you can check which bars in New York and San Francisco have the highest female to male ratio right now.

Still, Facebook, with its 500 million users, have a much bigger potential of becoming the de facto location service of people around the world.

I suggest you read this article from ReadWriteWeb that explains the Facebook strategy in this regard. Most important is how Facebook has decided to open up it Places API.

“In other words, Facebook Places has positioned itself as the central hub for all check-in apps”, concludes ReadWriteWeb.

Not only has Facebook Places been introduced. The huge social network at the same time has launched Facebook Deals. The service gives businesses a chance to offer users special deals as soon as they check in to their business on Facebook Places.

So far this is only available in USA – and it is still in an early phase. But imagine just for a moment that Facebook indeed succeeds in making its many users check wherever they are and also builds a successful location-based ad business on top of this.

Who stands to loose from this?

You are right! Local media sites. Suddenly a global giant offers a whole new opportunity for your local advertisers to pinpoint just the people who are close to their physical store.

To conclude so far:

Two global giants are moving into the local ad scene – attacking from different directions. Google’s approach is through search. Using your mobile phone to find information, you are better served with links that are relevant to your physical position. Facebook’s approach is through your social network. It has the potential of making huges masses of people voluntarily tell others where they are at any time – and then monetize this information.

While being strong in offering local content and keeping a close relationship to the population, many local media sites will still find themselves at disadvantage in this area compared to both Google and Facebook.

And that is not enough: There are other players as well!

Please write down the words “social shopping”! It is a whole new group of sites utilizing people’s need to make shopping a social experience.

Maybe the best known example is Groupon.com, a site offering daily deals to its users and rewarding members who invite friends to take part in the deals.

In my own small country (Norway), Groupon has in a very short time been able to offer deals in no less than 20 different cities.   It is not a huge success yet, but still indicates strongly how foreign services move into what has been considered very local markets.

To conclude: My advice to local media sites

Please, please: Pay attention to what is happening to location-based commercial offerings in your market! Your competitors are no longer local players. They are global!

As a first step: Make sure all your content – be it editorial or ads – has the correct meta data so that it can be utilized in a location-based service. For a starter: All ads and local stories should have geo coordinates associated with it.

In my experience most local media sites unfortunately will fail already at this step. While they have plenty of local content, it is not structured.

Secondly: Think carefully through how you can utilize your unique relationship with the local population to offer unique services to people. What can you do that is not possible for Google and Facebook?

Thirdly: Look for ways you can use the location-based services of global giants like Google and Facebook to make money in your own market. If Facebook becomes the de facto “check in” service for location: Use their API to offer local services on top of it. If Google proves to have success in location based search: Make sure your content and commercial partners are right in the middle of the search results!

And most important: Do not assume that because you have controlled your local market for decades you cannot be put out of business by competition from global players.

Stay alert! You are in for a tough fight!

(Thanks to Espen Grimmert, founder of social media consultancy Klokere.no for contributing suggestions for this article)

Related articles

• Is Google Prepping a Local Mobile Coupon Offering? (marketingvox.com)
• Adwords Is Dying and Google Knows It (and they are doing something about it) (fastcompany.com)
• Local Search Engine Optimization An Investment In Your Company (webmanmarketing.com)
• Google taps Marissa Mayer for location, local services (intomobile.com)
• Localization, Unique Data Sets & the Future of Search (seobook.com)

Newspaper-owned Nettby used to be Norway’s largest online social community. Then came Facebook. Gone were the media companies’ hopes of being the centers of gravity for people’s social activities.

This blog is about digital media trends. That includes trying to look into the future, for instance by identifying 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010.

Yet the digital media landscape is changing so fast that only one thing can  be stated with certainty: The future will be different from what we are able to predict.

At the peak Nettby had more page views alone than the 10 next web sites in Norway together. But then came Facebook ...

This week brought the news that the once hugely popular social community Nettby in Norway will cease to exist in the beginning of next year. Probably very few of our readers internationally have ever heard of Nettby. Still, stay with me as the story is an interesting example of how the digital landscape has changed within just a couple of years. Certainly it illustrates how what we thought about the future just a short time ago completely failed to materialize.

Let us go back around three years – to 2007. At the time a lot of media companies were starting to discover the power of social media. We were thrilled by how media tycoon Rupert Murdoch two years earlier had bought MySpace.com for no less than 580 million USD. By 2007 Myspace was considered the leading social community site in the world.

In many newspaper companies, especially in small markets like Norway, we were dreaming of creating a big local social network of our own. We hoped that we could be a center of gravity for our readers, helping them connect to each other.  To achieve this we were studying MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and other global social communities that were growing.

I worked for Aftenposten at the time, which is now Norway’s largest newspaper. In our digital development department we strongly believed that we could build a leading social community for Norwegian users.

800.000 Norwegians had a profile on Nettby at the peak

The thinking was similar in other media houses in Norway. And it certainly was not without merit.  In Norway the newspaper Dagbladet already had some success with its social community Blink, which was followed by an even more successful community by the tabloid newspaper VG, namely Nettby.no (launched in September 2006).

In the Norwegian web market media houses have maintained a very strong position. Several newspapers are on the top 10 list of popular web sites among Norwegians. The most popular site is VG.no, which last week had 3,7 million unique visitors – in a market of 4,5 million people. With the possible exception of Aftonbladet.se in Sweden, I doubt that you will find any other newspaper company in the world with such a dominant position in its local market.

VG’s social community Nettby had a broad appeal – and tried to be the social meeting point of all Norwegians online. At the most – in 2008 – it saw 400.000 active users per week and more than 300 million page views. Again: Remember the small size of the Norwegian market!

In 2008 the Schibsted Media Group, which owns VG, valued Nettby at around USD 31 million. Others valued it at up to three times as much.

But then came Facebook.

Slowly Nettby, which had become so popular in Norway, started to loose ground. Norwegians discovered Facebook. They concluded Facebook gave them more benefits in terms of functionality and opportunities of connecting with old friends.

Even though Nettby was supported by the biggest traffic-generating web site in Norway, it was not sufficient. People just decided that they were better served by Facebook – despite all efforts by VG to convince them otherwise.

Social communities are often ruled by the principles of network economics. People tend to gravitate towards the biggest service, as all users are better served by being where everybody else is. When Facebook grew in popularity, people would experience that was the site they would indeed meet all their old friends from school. Today 58 % of Norwegians use Facebook on a regular basis.

Young people were the biggest user groups at Nettby in the end. Source: b2b.vg.no

The last bastion of Nettby were the teenagers. Nettby had its strength among the younger users. However, a social network cannot survive without volume. As Nettby had been loosing users steadily for 20 consecutive months, the board decided the lower limit had been reached. Nettby had to cease to exist – and the users needed to be given time to deinstall all their content.

Currently Nettby sees only 60.000 unique visitors per week, a small portion of what it had at the haydays.

Page views per week in 2010 for some of Norway's largest news sites. Nettby is included in the numbers for VG and the main reason for the dramatic drop.

VG’s decision to close down Nettby was certainly not surprising. In fact, those of us who are working for competitors have betted with each other when VG would make the inevitable outcome public.

Still, the demise of this social community illustrates how hard it is for local players to compete with the global giants, like Facebook. Today very few media houses, however strong their position might be, think that they can build a large general social community in their market. The thinking is very different compared to only 2-3 years back.

Instead we are now discussing how we can connect our services to Facebook by using its social plugins. We want our content to be distributed wherever people are and we fight to have the Facebook pages with the most followers. It is important for us that people engage with our content and discuss it. But no longer do we try to have readers do all the discussions on our sites. Rather we tell them: Please tweet about our content! Blog about it! Share it! Like it on Facebook! Engage! Engage! Engage! Wherever you are!

And having noticed how much our thinking has changed, I have asked myself:

What of all our assumptions today will be proven wrong over the next 2-3 years?

I would love to hear your answer to that question!

Google’s Eric Schmidt suggests we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook has launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life?

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This article titled “Does technology pose a threat to our private life?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Friday 20th August 2010 23.06 UTC

Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? And where did you go for breakfast this morning? What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.

From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to CCTV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically. But nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.

Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, reading, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our “social graph”, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it. Having executed the social networking business idea better than its rivals – MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5 have been left for dust – Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by July this year. That’s already one in 13 people on Earth, and Zuckerberg recently predicted it was “almost a guarantee” that his site would reach 1 billion users, with growth in relatively untapped markets such as Russia, Japan and Korea “doubling every six months”.

On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest gambit in the battle to remain top of the social networking heap with a move into geolocation services, which harness the GPS functionality of increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. Facebook Places will launch first in the US and later in the UK, allowing users, if they choose, to share their location with friends on the site by checking into public venues. Sensitive to intense public scrutiny of its privacy controls, Facebook was careful to make the service opt-in but every geolocation service – including Google’s Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare – has prompted renewed debate about the protection of personal details online.

“This is a seminal moment where we’re seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy,” says Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and member of Facebook’s safety advisory board. “The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn’t hit 30 yet, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognise that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset.”

Facebook has come under significant pressure to make its site safer for users. Incidents of serious crimes facilitated by the internet such as the murder of British teenager Ashleigh Hall by Peter Chapman earlier this year, are tragic but rare. More common is the embarrassment from a compromising tagged photo of a drunken night out.

The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google’s Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the web are worth the sacrifice of the individual’s right to privacy. Facebook users first raised their pitchforks in 2006 when the site introduced a news feed for each user, summarising their friends’ activity. More recently it came under pressure to simplify its privacy controls with some high-profile commentators and groups – organised on Facebook pages, naturally – encouraging others to remove their profiles. It responded in May with simplified privacy settings.

Richard, now Lord, Allan is a former Liberal Democrat MP and Facebook’s European policy director. “The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information. The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that’s where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook.”

Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterise privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other’s lives. The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities. “Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true. To say you’re ‘living in Facebook rather than the real world’ is a complete misreading of what’s happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology we need to get used to it.”

Our personal information can broadly be categorised as trivial data such as music preferences, behavioural information about our activity and connections, and confidential information including credit card numbers. But even seemingly innocuous information can be used against us, says security expert Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro. “In isolation, much of this data may be trivial but from a hacker’s perspective, any information is good information,” he says. “Use search engines to discover the extent of your online footprint and tailor it. Keep tabs on yourself before anyone else does.”

Balkam describes the internet’s two biggest privacy problems as reputational damage – inadvertently posting drunken photos that your boss might see, for example – and physical safety, the latter being the issue for women particularly wary of location tools. Burglary is another concern, when users of location services announce they are out of the house; in February three developers built PleaseRobMe.com to raise awareness about the implications of broadcasting location to a public audience.

Currently location games such as Foursquare, where users check in at public venues to earn points and prizes, tend to have a small, enthusiastic and largely trustworthy group of dedicated users comprised of so-called “early adopters”. For them, this period of intensive invention and opportunity is a golden age. Christian Payne – who describes himself as a “social technologist” – abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a “car crash epiphany”. Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from BT asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he’d crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialised, and its users more sceptical.

“We’ll never see it like we do now – more nefarious people will come later,” he says. “But it would be more risky for me not to take the chance of building meaningful connections with acquaintances who then become friends when one of you needs some help.”

Payne seems to put a lot of intimate information into the world, but still skillfully manages to keep his personal life, and that of his partner and son, almost completely private. It’s up to the user to decide what they want to keep private, he says, though he’s uncomfortable with the idea that he is unknowingly creating a public persona for himself. “I’d hope I’m doing this naturally and not thinking about it. But then asking me that is like taking me out of the play I’m acting in as myself – and asking me to direct it.”

Online privacy is intrinsically linked to identity. Author Peggy Orenstein wrote in the New York Times recently that her reflexive compulsion to tweet a pleasant moment with her daughter had also spoilt the moment, and mused that our online personas are elaborate constructs that we, knowingly or unknowingly, craft into an identity we want the world to see. The internet has provided a platform that seems to challenge us to present a single identity to the world, yet we struggle to balance the profiles we share with family, friends and work colleagues.

Stories of employers sacking staff for drunken Facebook photos will be replaced by an acceptance that drunken university pictures are the norm, says Dr Joss Wright, Fresnel research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He hopes sites will develop more intuitive ways to share information with the appropriate people; when his grandmother joined Facebook it “severely curtailed” what he could share with his friends.

“I’d like to believe people will learn how to guard their privacy, but we’re more likely to see societal shifts in what is seen as acceptable for privacy,” Wright adds. “Privacy has tended to be something quite intrinsic, and there hasn’t been a mechanism for privacy violation in general society until the arrival of the internet. The rise of Facebook and Foursquare show we don’t really understand privacy or what it means to preserve it, and don’t have an ability to understand the consequences of violating it either.”

Regulators struggle to keep up with the pace of technology and enforcement of what rules there are is weak, meaning the onus for education should be on the services themselves, says Wright, who doesn’t think they are closely scrutinised enough. Though sites like Facebook have a duty of care, “the economics are against that, because their entire business model is built around getting us to share as much information as possible”.

But there are upsides, too. Sharing personal information is beneficial in giving insights into different aspects of society. “If you can see the details of people’s lives, when you can see someone’s actual persona, it’s harder to be biased and bigoted,” said Wright. “But a balance has to be struck between the amount we share for the positive and negative.”

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerberg takes a different tack. “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect.

Part of Facebook’s success has been to demand people’s real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the internet where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of “trolling”, where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other. The improvement in the quality of communication and debate online is in no small part down to the trend towards using real identities. However, anonymity still has its role in whistleblowing sites such as Wikileaks, or in debates where a contributor to a discussion on rape, for example, deserves protection.

If you think the current internet landscape is frightening, don’t think too much about what’s coming next. Already served with targeted ads based on keywords in our Google email, or picked out by our age and interests on Facebook, the future is more personalised still. “Sites will get much better at filtering information and predicting our behaviour, serving us what we want to buy and finding new ways to share information, like location. Three years ago, people wouldn’t even have dreamed of sharing their location,” says Wright. While the sensitivities and sensibilities of managing our online data still need to be clarified, there will be benefits in personalisation, which promises more meaningful, relevant advertising for consumers and consequently, for advertisers, far more effective bang for their buck.

So what next? Three years ago, rival social networking site MySpace seemed invincible. Could Facebook still lose its edge? Anything is possible.

Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.

“No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users, and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behaviour. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that – and the average age at Facebook is 28.”

Where the Twitterati draw the line

Zoe Margolis, blogger

While I’m very active on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I have so far avoided all the location-based tools on my phone. Primarily, this is because I do not want to publicly announce where I am – I wish to protect my privacy and safety – but also because I don’t want to bombard people with incessant, dull, information; I’ve unfollowed people on Twitter and Facebook due to their too-frequent (and, might I say, very annoying) Foursquare updates being fed through to their timelines.I can see the point of location tools – they’re an easy way to connect people who might otherwise be unaware of their proximity to their friends – but given the amount of information we already share using social networking sites, it almost seems like overload to add yet another method of input, and it’s pretty much redundant if not all of your friends/social circle are using the same tool.

I have some major concerns with Facebook Places though and believe it is a huge threat to people’s privacy. It is already live in users’ settings(though the feature has not yet been rolled out in the UK) and while there is the option of limiting the location info to friends only, they have to de-select the automatically enabled “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” box in order to opt out of their location being included on a public list for all to see.

In addition to this, people’s friends can “check’ ” them into locations, so even if someone has limited the information about themselves that they are sharing, there might still be a breach of their privacy from others.

Most of my friends on Facebook have never heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, let alone used a location-based tool on their mobile phones; I assume the majority of people who use Facebook are similar. Given this, it concerns me that Facebook Places appears to be lacking transparency about privacy. The ability to change the settings to ensure personal information is protected seems more geared to the tech-savvy, than the lay-person; I fear many people will discover their privacy has been breached only after the event.

Privacy on any social networking site or location-sharing tool should start off being intact: 100% protection, with the chance to opt-in to less privacy, should you wish to share information with others. Facebook seems to take the opposite view, making the default position little/no privacy with the need to opt-out; I won’t be using Facebook Places any time soon.

David Nobbs

I don’t believe total privacy is possible so I never telling anybody anything on line that I wouldn’t be happy for the nation to know (if it was interested!).

I think some people are so hungry for celebrity they’re happy not to have a private life at all. I’m very careful with my tweets. People can never be quite sure whether they’re true or false, and I never reveal when I’m going to be away.

Sorry this is so short but I’m off to Portugal now for five months. Only joking.

Max Tundra, musician

I probably spend too much time online, sharing details about my life with anyone who has the remotest interest in my music. I don’t like the idea of letting people know exactly where I am right this second, but as my fans tend to be fairly sane and unstalkerish, I feel comfortable letting them know what I’m up to in a general sense.

I don’t use Foursquare or any applications which might reveal my geographical co-ordinates, although I am often easily locatable, as I play advertised concerts. I did, however, recently delete my personal Facebook profile, as that seemed to be a cluster of unnecessarily pertinent information about my life and the people I share it with, as well as being a colossal waste of time which could be better spent telling people on Twitter that I prefer the Henry vacuum cleaner to the Dyson.

Graham Linehan, comedy writer:

I always hated Facebook because it made me very uncertain about what I was and wasn’t sharing with the world. The privacy settings were, famously, a bit of a maze, and seemed subject to sudden changes that you hadn’t agreed to. I felt like one day I might open up the site to see a picture of myself in bed asleep with my wife, like in Hidden’.

Twitter is different because it forces you to be very selective with what you choose to share, and so forces social media back to a more private place. I personally don’t tweet much stuff about my home life, because I don’t want to accidentally tweet something stupid like “Holiday starts tomorrow!” along with a geotag to my home address. So my tweets are generally links to things I find funny or interesting, and my home life only gets a look-in when something truly interesting or funny happens.

Once I made a mistake and posted my home number while trying to send a direct (private) message to someone and we had to change it, but that was a valuable lesson to learn early on, because now I’m a lot more careful with what I put out there. It wasn’t too much of a problem, though. We only got two or three callers who hung up as soon as my wife said “Hello, Dreambeds”. I asked her who Dreambeds were and she said “Dunno. I suppose they sell beds.”

I think people should start to claw back as much privacy as they can. Services such as Twitter show that it’s possible to share selectively. Sharing selectively should be the default setting on every social network service. Which, again, is why you won’t see me on Facebook any time soon.

John Prescott, politician

Twitter has been a revelation. In the past if I needed to get message out I’d have to convince a paper to publish it. Now I can tweet my thoughts and, if interesting, it’ll get pick up. My Milburn tweet was running on rolling news within 10 minutes.

I share a lot of content like my blogs and vlogs along with links to stories and virals from others I like. Twitter is also great to run campaigns and organise tweetups.

We did the first pastiche of the Cameron airbrushed posters, which then inspired mMyDavidCameron.com. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were doing their own versions. It destroyed Ashcroft’s poster campaign and cost nothing.

And when the founder of the National Bullying Helpline said people were bullied in No10, someone tweeted me a link to the industrial tribunal which proved she was accused of bullying herself! It killed the story within 24 hours.

I’ve found Twitter to be a fantastic way to communicate, learn from others and show the real me, not the distorted view peddled by the media.

But I’m not convinced about geolocation applications. You have to have some privacy.

Suzanne Moore, journalist

Don’t mistake personal information for honesty. Personas are created and people play as well as tweet their hearts out. If you don’t want to bare your soul you don’t have to, but the dividing line between public and private is now generational, one that neither mainstream culture nor government appears to understand.

I don’t much care what people think of me and was wondering who some guy on MasterChef was the other day on Twitter and wondering if I had slept with him. Turns out I hadn’t which was a relief. And a joke!

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

More than 1,6 million people live in Norway’s capital Oslo, claims Facebook. But the real number is only about 500.000. Advertisers be warned: You cannot trust the demographic numbers of Facebook.

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The very core of Facebook’s advertisement model is the promise that you can pick exactly the target group you want for your ad. Do you want to reach only women between 40 and 50 years old? No problem! Facebook will show your ad only to that group. Teenage boys in Sweden? Sure. Facebook can do what no other advertising platform can help you with.

But start comparing Facebook’s estimated reach for different groups with the actual demographics and it may all look quite different.

Espen Grimmert

My former colleague Espen Grimmert did just that. Grimmert, who is one of the smartest people I have ever worked with,  recently resigned from his position as digital marketing director at Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten to start his own company Klokere.no. In his start-up he offers consulting and courses in how companies can use social media in an efficient way.

Among Grimmert’s courses is how companies should use Facebook. One message: Don’t automatically trust the demographics of Facebook!

In an article in the Norwegian business newspaper Dagens Næringsliv Grimmert gives several examples of how Facebook’s demographic figures can go all wrong. He compares Facebook’s numbers with the official numbers of Statistics Norway. (You can read a Norwegian version of Grimmert’s thoughts here)

Here are some of them:

• According to Facebook 1.665.000 Norwegians live in the capital city of Oslo. The real number is only about one third of this.
• Facebook claims Norway’s second largest city Bergen has 72.440 inhabitants above the age of 13. The official number is 216.033.
• Another city is Stavanger. According to Facebook it has 193.200 inhabitants. The official statistics, however, only shows 102.951.
• A smaller city in Norway, Drammen, has 5.460 inhabitants according to Facebook. Official numbers are 52.643.
• According to official statistics there are 613.000 Norwegians between 20 and 29 years old. Facebook, however, has found another 200.000 and claims the total number is 853.480 people.

Espen Grimmert says to BetaTales:

- Advertisers are mislead to believe that they might reach more users than they actually do, and they might pay for an audience they don’t want. Especially regarding age it seems to be a long way from reality to Facebook’s numbers.

But why are the numbers so wrong?

Grimmert claims many users are misleading Facebook. He mentions a teenage boy he knows who on Facebook claims to be 27 years old and married.  The discussion about privacy and Facebook has encouraged many users to alternate their profile info on the social network, he says.

In the paper edition of Dagens Næringsliv Facebook’s spokesman Jan Fredriksson says the social network uses IP adresses in a specific area to estimate the number of users in a geographic area. In that way a web user can be considered as living in Oslo if he gets his internet connection through company headquarters in that city.

I must admit that I found Grimmert’s thoughts very interesting. I would really love to hear your reflections on this. Can we trust the demographic numbers of Facebook? I don’t think so.

But what do you think? Do you have any examples from your geographic area? Let us know!