Twitter – Savannah Unplugged http://www.billdawers.com Mon, 28 Oct 2013 16:32:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.2 18778551 A few tweets from the Savannah Film Festival – pics of Jeremy Irons, Norman Reedus, Miles Teller http://www.billdawers.com/2013/10/28/a-few-tweets-from-the-savannah-film-festival-pics-of-jeremy-irons-norman-reedus-miles-teller/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 16:30:13 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=6324 Read more →

]]> In my City Talk column coming out tomorrow (Tuesday), I write a little about the increasing role of social media in terms of PR and publicity for the Savannah Film Festival.

Here’s just a very small sampling of tweets from various quarters after less than 48 hours. Most of these appear under a search of the #SavFF hashtag, but there are many more to be found by searching other terms.

]]> 6324 As tragedy unfolds, news media and social media users make some big mistakes http://www.billdawers.com/2012/12/15/as-tragedy-unfolds-news-media-and-social-media-users-make-some-big-mistakes/ Sat, 15 Dec 2012 16:22:58 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=4447 Read more →

]]> Let me begin by saying that I can’t imagine the horror and sadness in Newtown over the last 24 hours or so. My heart goes out to those whose lives have been devastated by yesterday’s mass shooting.

Like so many other Americans, I followed the news online — my minimal cable package doesn’t even include the news channels.

But I wasn’t following very closely, at least not until the name of the alleged murderer began appearing in my Twitter feed and on a variety of newspaper sites. The killer was NOT Ryan Lanza, but that’s what was first reported. The shooter was Adam Lanza, apparently, Ryan’s brother. Adam might have had some of Ryan’s identification on him, or a law enforcement official giving confirmation off the record might have simply transposed the names.

But, armed with my incorrect information, I did what many others did: I looked up Ryan Lanza on Facebook. And there he was — and, surprisingly, still is today. There’s nothing to see there beyond a couple of profile photos, plus his hometown and current city.

In part because of the dearth of information, it was hard to ignore the fact that Lanza “likes” the game Mass Effect.

And then confusion began to set in, as a widely circulated photo (which I’ve decided is OK to post here) suggested that Ryan Lanza was alive and well. He was even posting denials of involvement to his Facebook page. (Imagine his horror, as he realized the scale of the tragedy in both his own family and his hometown.)

Ryan Lanza FacebookThe Atlantic Wire has a pithy summary of how all this went down: How the Internet Got the Wrong Lanza.

But was the internet to blame as much as the official or officials who apparently confirmed the wrong name for members of the media? Or were the media sources themselves to blame for reporting what others were reporting without independent verification or an official statement? They could have held off. NPR’s All Things Considered on Friday afternoon never mentioned the alleged shooter’s name, for example.

Anyway, Ryan Lanza’s Facebook profile pic has been shared almost 10,000 times directly from his page, and no telling how often it was downloaded and reposted. (I think that the number of shares is down by several thousand from its peak, so maybe some realized their error and took down their posts. I’ll try to find out and edit the info right here if I can.)

And then the snowballs started rolling. If Ryan Lanza is on Facebook, surely he’s on Twitter. So my Twitter feed filled up with links to this kid — a BMX fan with a couple of dozen followers. A few of that Ryan Lanza’s tweets are angsty, one welcomes the end of the world, a couple sound lonely — so of course the armchair psychologists (I was one of them but didn’t make a fool out of myself by publicly posting my analysis) saw a deeply troubled young man about to snap. It was obvious.

And then at exactly 3 p.m. that Ryan Lanza realizes that he has picked up a few thousand followers and tweets the following, which has been retweeted over 10,000 times:

So unspeakable tragedy is transformed into rank absurdity. I hope the kid figures out a way to make those 5,000+ followers benefit him somehow.

A few lessons seem pretty obvious. Credible news outlets should wait for official confirmation of names. The internet-sleuthing public should be less trusting and more cynical about the information they are given. While there are sometimes mental health warning signs in some users’ online postings, it’s really easy to give too much weight to many of those.

At the same time, law enforcement needs to understand that public — and media — behavior like this is to be expected. If an incorrect suspect has been named, some sort of official statement should be made as soon as possible.

Ironically, Adam Lanza — the apparent shooter — seems to have had almost no social media footprint.

]]> 4447 No surprise in Facebook stock decline http://www.billdawers.com/2012/05/22/no-surprise-in-facebook-stock-decline/ Tue, 22 May 2012 22:05:42 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=2929 Read more →

]]> Facebook stock fell again today on its 3rd day of being traded on Nasdaq. It fell almost 1% more in after hours trading.

Facebook is now priced at 30.77, off more than 7 points off its IPO price last Friday — and more than 30% off its peak on Friday.

No surprise, as far as I’m concerned.

The IPO valuation was over 100x earnings, far higher than made any sense to me and to lots of analysts a whole lot more savvy than I am.

Even if the stock price continues to fall as I anticipate, Facebook obviously retains great power.

Largely because of my years as a columnist in Savannah, my years of teaching school, and the amount of time I spend out and about, I have an absurd number of Facebook contacts: close to 2500 friends. When I started my blog in January 2011, Facebook was in the back of my mind: I was tired of providing so much free content to Facebook for which I was not compensated, and I knew that I could leverage my Facebook presence into more blog traffic.

And that’s pretty much what has happened.

In the last 30 days, my blog traffic has gotten about 550 referrals from search engines, 183 from Twitter, and 10 from LinkedIn.

But this blog has gotten 4,978 referrals from Facebook in the last 30 days. That’s unusually high because of the large number of hits on my post about Orange Crush at Tybee, but it’s still indicative of Facebook’s incredible reach.

Still, consider what happened over the last week or so. I made a blog post with some pretty nice photos from Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy’s 34th Annual Covered Dish Supper, and I promoted that post as usual through Facebook and Twitter. Amazing organization, great event attended by over 300 people, photos of dozens of people I know — all that translated into a fairly meager 150 page views on this blog.

Once the blog views had run their course, last night I posted the exact same album of photos to my personal Facebook page and tagged some of the pics. I have no way of knowing exactly how many hits that album has gotten in less than 24 hours, but a single photo of Tom Kohler got 15 likes and 5 comments in a matter of hours.

I’ve had similar experience with other posts, and I’ve gotten used to the simple fact that the vast majority of comments I get on blog posts will be made below my link to it on Facebook and not on this site itself.

Facebook really has become the home page for many of us as we use the internet, and we keep coming back to it. That’s true not for the Facebook site in its entirety, but also specifically for the home page. It seems that many users who saw that picture of Tom didn’t even click through to see other pics from the event, just as 19 people liked a photo Cusses’ Angel Bond since I posted it yesterday, but no one has liked other, better, untagged photos of Angel in the same Facebook album. (Original pics in this blog post.)

So Facebook has created an experience that masterfully keeps users on the site, but many seem to stick awfully close to their home pages. In other words, many don’t seem to know how to take full advantage of Facebook. Another example: I routinely get puzzled looks when I talk about using Facebook lists and the “close friends” setting to keep better track of my inner circle.

I’d like to think that Facebook would get more streamlined so that users understand the functions better and find it easier to maximize and personalize its functionality.

But Facebook is just getting more and more cumbersome, with more apps, with more users like me with an inordinate number of friends, and with increasing questions about user privacy. I don’t think these problems will lead to widespread Facebook abandonment — it’s become too crucial as a communication platform.

But what’s the ultimate value of the company? Will it withstand the inevitable onslaughts of competitors? Will it be able to increase ad revenue even as questions about user data proliferate? Will it be able to survive as the technologies change and as more users go mobile?

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