Social Media's Bad Rap as a Time Waster

"The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years." That's Erik Qualman's position in his book, Socialnomics. I encountered the ideas in a YouTube video and they resonated because they were in line with a message that the late marketing guru Ray Jutkins was delivering twenty years ago, although not about social media.

I mentioned this back in February. Since then I've bought and read Qualman's book. Qualman is an MBA Professor at the Hult International Business School. He has 16 years of experience as an adviser to companies such as Cadillac, EarthLink, EF Education, Yahoo, Travelzoo, and AT&T.

In the 1990s, Ray Jutkins was talking about the importance of the Internet, and specifically the Web, for businesses. He cited some figures about the importance of various media. The comparison involved how long it took for 50 million people to use the technology. Jutkins had the first 3:

The Internet existed as ARPANET starting in the 1960s and didn't become an open network until 1998, so 1998 is the starting year because that was when the general public first had access to it. Likewise, Facebook technically began in 2003 at Harvard but didn't become generally available until the summer of 2004.

Popularity versus Success

It's clear that Facebook and the other social media sites are popular, but does your business need to participate?

I remember when many business owners thought it unimportant for their companies to have a website or for their employees to have e-mail addresses. In the 1980s, a business owner who was having a fax machine installed said that he had no idea what he would do with it. The telephone was once considered to be a fad. So were radio and television. And the guy who had no idea what he would do with a fax machine became, within a month, the company's most prolific user of the device.

What's important about social media is that today's high school students, college students, and young professionals are comfortable with using the tools. These are the people who are working for you today and will be your company's managers in the future.

To put the sheer number of Facebook users in perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would rank third in population behind China and India—with the United States in position 4. As Qualman says, "We don't have a choice on whether we do social media; the question is how well we do it."

Click for a larger view.Senior managers are catching on. Qualman reports that 80% of businesses use social media for recruiting new employees with LinkedIn being the most popular by far. Another indicator that social media demographics are changing is the fact that the fastest-growing Facebook segment is that for users between 55 and 65 years old. Women are adopting Facebook usage faster than men.

Change Is Accelerating

How many people do you know who have only a cell phone? Many of these same people have all but abandoned e-mail because it's too slow! Twitter and Facebook are the new e-mail.

People use Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, and other social media postings to report excellent products and services. Think of this as word-of-mouth advertising with a million-Watt amplifier. And if people are displeased with your product or service, they'll use that same high-power amplifier to condemn you.

More than one third of bloggers post opinions about products, services, and brands. Services such as Angie's List make it easy for consumers to rate businesses. The entire communications landscape is in the midst of a gigantic, quiet revolution. Do you know what people are saying about your company or brand online? What are you doing to position yourself, your product, your service, your brand, and your company more positively?

Trust in advertising is at an all-time low even if people see your ads. Do you know any TiVo or DVR users who actually watch the ads when they play back recorded programs? Newspaper subscription rates are declining faster than ever and even if people see your ads, fewer than 1 in 5 will believe them. At the same time, word-of-mouth advertising continues to be the most believable kind of advertising that you cannot buy.

Social media are about word-of-mouth advertising. Successful companies in social media, says Qualman, act more like Dale Carnegie and less like the characters on Mad Men, "listening first and selling second."

We Will Miss You, Karen Kenworthy

Karen Kenworthy wasn't a professional big-name programmer but she wrote a column for Windows Magazine during the 1990s and had a knack for explaining complicated subjects in a way that anyone could understand. This week we note her untimely death.

Those who subscribed to Karen's newsletter received a message this week from her brother: "I suspect that many of you have noticed that the last issue of Karen's Power Tools Newsletter was dated March 17, 2010, and you may have been anxiously awaiting another. It is with great sadness that I write to tell you of Karen's death on April 12, 2011, after a long struggle with several debilitations, including diabetes."

Mike Elgan remembered Karen's time with Windows Magazine: "If you read Windows Magazine in the 1990s, you probably remember Karen Kenworthy. She was a brilliant programmer and columnist, and wrote the 'Karenware' series of Windows apps. Many people still use her utilities every day because they were so well-made and useful."

How could a no-name programmer score a column in one of the most popular magazines of the day? Elgan explains: "We WinMag editors 'discovered' Karen on the Windows Information Exchange, or WIX, message board (pre-Web). She was able to answer any question, and seemed to know everything—plus, she had the rare gift of explaining the complex simply. So we gave this amateur columnist her own space in the magazine called "Power Windows." She turned out to be one of the best and most professional writers we had ever worked with, and won a huge and loyal fan base."

Returning to the message from Karen's brother, Bill, "I know that Karen touched many of you with her kindness, wit, creativity and encouragement. She was a loving daughter, sister, aunt and friend. And she was a pretty darned good programmer, too. We are deeply grieving her loss. For now, Karen's server is still running, the programs she has written can still be downloaded, and donations can still be made through the website."

And Fred Langa said "Karen Kenworthy wrote a very popular column for Windows Magazine, when I was there. She was as good a programmer (I still use some of her "Karenware" software today) as she was a wordsmith (her readers loved her stuff). I have none but positive memories of working with Karen."

Bill Kenworthy says that his sister was a long-time supporter of The Dohnavur Fellowship, a special children's ministry in southern India. You can learn more about them at www.DohnavurFellowship.org. "All we ask," says Bill Kenworthy, "is that you remember her whenever you take the case off of your computer, contemplate removing entries from your Windows Registry, listen to Bob Wills or Riders in the Sky, or wave and say 'Hi!' to anyone on the 'net."

You'll find her obituary here and, if you wish, you may leave a message there.

Short Circuits

Is a Narwhal in Your Future?

Ubuntu 11.04 has been released as the successor to version 10.10. Ubuntu's numbering uses the year (11) and the month (04) and this tends to inflate the version numbering. And every time I look at a new version of Ubuntu I wonder why more people aren't using it.

Canonical both names and numbers its releases. Natty Narwhal is the latest. The narwhal (monodon monoceros) is a medium-sized toothed whale that lives in the Arctic. Males are distinguished by a long, straight, helical tusk extending from their upper left jaw. While populations appear stable, the narwhal has been deemed particularly vulnerable to climate change due to a narrow geographical range and specialized diet. [Source: Wikipedia]

Click for a larger view.Version 11.04 was released on Thursday and by Thursday evening I had updated my dual-boot notebook computer and I'd used WUBI to add Natty Narwhal to a netbook computer. The full installation didn't want to work on the netbook. WUBI is the Windows Ubuntu Installer and it places Ubuntu inside the Windows file system. There's a small speed disadvantage to WUBI, but it creates an easy and foolproof installation.

If you've been thinking about trying Linux this would probably be a good time to try it. If you're already an Ubuntu user, prepare for some big changes. Starting with this week's release, Ubuntu is no longer be based entirely on the desktop manager Gnome. Instead, it will use Unity and that means the look and feel will change.

In addition to the Unity desktop interface, Ubuntu 11.04 will include LibreOffice and the Compiz window manager. Firefox is, of course, the default browser. There will no longer be a separate netbook version and, instead of booting a CD, those who want to give it a try can do so "in the cloud", without explicitly downloading or installing anything.

This version of Linux looks even more like the Mac but I haven't worked with it long enough to offer any firm conclusions. I always caution that it you depend heavily on Microsoft or Adobe products, as I do, Ubuntu cannot be your only operating system.

Canonical provides a free Ubuntu One membership to all uses of the operating system so you automatically have 2GB of online storage that you can use to sync files, contacts, bookmarks, and notes between computers.

Interested? Visit the Ubuntu website.

Loving Google Calendar Sync When It's 64

I had complained, rather loudly, that Google's calendar sync application didn't work with the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office and Google's PR folks tried to spin the lack of support by saying that it worked on 64-bit systems if you were using a 32-bit version of Outlook.

That was then. This is now. And this week Google's Jessica Kositz said "A few months ago, you had a conversation with my colleague, Victoria Katsarou, about Google Calendar Sync for 64-bit versions of Outlook. Happy to tell you that this is live - and available for download - as of today!"

If you've been waiting with as much anticipation as I have you'll be delighted with what you find. Google Calendar Sync does now work with 64-bit Outlook!

You'll find it on the Google website.

Big Doings at Adobe

For the first time I'm aware of, Adobe is releasing a .5 mid-cycle release that contains a lot of new features. The Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 became available this week so it'll be a while until I'm able to download, install, digest, and review what's new. There is a charge for upgrading from CS5 to CS5.5 and I'll let you know if I think the upgrade is worth the fee.

In the meantime, Adobe has some free upgrades you'll want for Lightroom and Camera Raw: Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 are available for immediate download on Adobe.com. The updates add support for 13 popular camera models including Canon EOS Rebel T3i, Nikon D5100, and Fuji FinePix X100. They also add more than 25 lens profiles to help photographers automatically correct distortion and chromatic aberration.

These updates also correct several bugs reported by customers.

Because Adobe encourages users to provide feedback on its applications, the company now has a Get Satisfaction customer community at Photoshop.com where users can provide real-time feedback and requests for the entire Adobe Digital Imaging family of products. There's also a direct link and a Facebook presence.

Whether you're a pro or an amateur, you'll find something to like in Lightroom, which Adobe calls "the essential digital photography workflow solution." The Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in is essential if you have one of the newest cameras.

Both of these update are available without cost from the Adobe updates site.

Sony Playstation Users Could Lose More than a Game

This week Sony announced that a cracker may have accessed the account records of about 77 million customers. About half of the victims are US residents. The break-in occurred between April 17 and 19, and the crook could have users' names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, passwords, logon IDs, and maybe even their credit card numbers, expiration dates, billing addresses, and transaction records. Oops!

Sony says there is "no evidence that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility." The company is at least being prompt and forthright about the problem which also affects the Qriocity online music service. Sony quickly took PlayStation Network and Qriocity offline April 19 and expects them to be operational again soon.

These kinds of reports, unfortunately, aren't unusual even though companies have instituted stronger protections. Sony's online service (now offline) provides movies, TV shows, games, and access to a 3-D virtual world called PlayStation Home.

Although Sony announced the problem on Wednesday, it wasn't until the following Tuesday that they admitted customer data had been compromised.

Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal has demanded that Sony provide users with more complete information about the incident.

Sony plans to send e-mail messages to all 77 million potential victims, but Sony says the number of messages required means that it will take some time to get them all out. Really? The average spammer is able to send that many messages in a single day.

Sony is still trying to determine what it can do to compensate affected customers.