In my daily Twitter feed readings, I stumbled upon Brian Solis article, “Whoops I didn’t mean for you to see this.” The article did a nice job summarizing why Facebook users shouldn’t be afraid of the recent changes. I thought the article was timely as I listen to the daily complaints of the new interface. Solis explains how Facebook is moving to this real-time thought process, which happens to tie in nicely with our current readings in social media class. As we’ve been reading and studying the past few weeks about real-time marketing, it seems as if Facebook has embraced the idea and is trying to get it millions of followers on board as well. The biggest problem I see with Facebook leading this real-time motion is that not all are ready. As we have discussed plenty of times in class, some are slower to jump on the bandwagon. Not everyone is an early adopter, and it’s almost as if Facebook is pushing all to become real-time machines now. While I can appreciate the effort, the massive changes made were not well explained in a way that my 50 something mother understands. All she knows is that Facebook changed something and now she is scared to death that everyone is going to be able to read all of her posts and know all of her business.
What this boils down to is Facebook needs to have a better system is place to explain changes and offer tutorials to those that are struggling with the changes. They have the tools. I’ve looked and their located under your arrow button up by your name and home button, scroll to the help center. Why couldn’t they just put a recent changed update button up by our search box for all to see easily at least for the first week? It’s hard enough to get my mom to log on, let alone try to find the help center to read about why her status updates are not going to everyone in the world.
While I’m all forward the new move to real-time integration into one of my favorite social media platforms, it would be nice if Facebook could still hold tight to the basics of keeping your target audience informed. I love social media tools as much as the next guy, but mutually beneficial relationships are still the foundational building block!
1 comments:
I completely agree with you Dr. Agozzino. At first, I was angry that Facebook changed their interface. Everything seemed to happen at once, and not much was done to explain the new changes. While most of us 20 somethings understand a lot about the digital word, it is so hard for older generations to understand what's going on. I think that Facebook could've instituted the changes more slowly too. It's hard to take in a whole set of new technologies at once. However, the "real-time" aspect of facebook can become annoying at times. It makes it 10x more easy to Facebook "stalk" now and I feel like more of my privacy has been taken away. On Google+'s system you only see what's going on in the circles you want to, which I really enjoy. We'll just have to see if these changes make or break Facebook. It was wise for them to try to institue changes for the new "Real-time" world, but they took things a bit too far.
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