Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

Mysteries of Facebook Optimization: EdgeRank

Posted on | May 1, 2011 | No Comments

Probably the most important part of the Facebook experience is the News Feed, the list of items (called objects) from your friends, fans and groups on the main page. But what you may not realize is that not all the news that is fit to print shows up directly in the ‘Top News’ because of an algorithm called EdgeRank that determines what makes the cut and what doesn’t.

EdgeRank operates a bit like time, it keeps everything from happening at once and overwhelming you with content. Still, Facebook wants you to get the objects it thinks you are most interested in and wants to reduce the clutter from objects it deems less important. A simple rule is that you can increase the likelihood of a friend’s objects showing up by interacting with them. This is what is called an edge. Likewise, you can “optimize” the chances of your own objects showing up in the Top News feed portion of others by following the rules of “engagement”.

Whether you are an individual or represent an organization of some kind, the visibility of your posts are important. The EdgeRank algorithm is based on three factors: affinity, weight and time decay. Affinity is a lot like it sounds like – commenting on or liking an object, visiting a friend’s profile, viewing pictures, sending messages, etc. Weight is a score given to each type of edge with some actions more important than others. This is determined exclusively by Facebook so it’s a good idea to follow some of the discussions about EdgeRank on the web. Time decay is largely a factor of staying current by logging in and regularly interacting with the friends and likes you, well, like. All these factors are calculated to give an object an EdgeRank score that will determine whether the object shows up in someone’s Top News.

If you are a marketing or social media manager for a brand, it gets complex as you are looking to more aggressively push your objects. Until recently your major concern has probably been the acquisition of new fans with the “Like” button. Now, “brand managers” are using a variety of techniques to engage their fans. These include call to action (CTA) techniques that urge a response, such has asking questions or sending invitations.

Buddy Media has recently developed a White Paper on EdgeRank that presents ideas on how to push your content to the top of the News Feed’s ‘Top News’. Download it for more details on the following:

  1. Ask questions
  2. Post games and trivia
  3. Interact with fan engagement
  4. Incorporate wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
  5. Incorporate relevant photos
  6. Relate to current events
  7. Incorporate videos
  8. Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
  9. Include links within posts
  10. Be explicit in your posts

Unfortunately, you will also see more movement on Facebook’s part to get brands to advertise in order to reach their fans as they look to increase their revenues.

Here is a tool to help you calculate your EdgeRank:

Anthony

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Category: characteristics of digital media, multimedia, social media
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Florida’s Creative Class Thesis and the Global Economy

Posted on | April 30, 2011 | No Comments

I had a chance to live in Wellington, New Zealand for a few years teaching television production and a graduate class on the geopolitics of Directing student productionscommunication at Victoria University. Besides being the capital of the country, it’s a great little city that has used its English heritage to effectively draw from the British Commonwealth as well as America to create rich art, design and theater cultures. The city is mentioned in Richard Florida’s Flight of the Creative Class as an example of one of the enterprising nodes around the world that now compete in the global “creative economy.” After an interview with New Zealand native Peter Jackson, the Academy Award winning auteur of such films as King Kong and the Lord of the Rings series that was shot in New Zealand, Florida reflected on the role New Zealand’s capital city. Jackson was able to use the incredible profits generated by the Rings trilogy to build his Weta Digital studio and help catapult the kiwi capital into the global circuits of creative production and attract significant talent to “the land of the long white cloud“. [1]

The World is Spiky

Florida critiques the central theme of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, arguing instead that the world is “spiky“. With this he means that economic activity tends to concentrate around economic regions and particularly cities such as Wellington that attract creative people and projects.

Richard Florida’s works on the importance of creativity in the global economy has received mixed reviews but stand as an impressive body of work. Among his books addressing the creative class thesis are:

He contends that the creative class is a key driver of economic growth in our modern economy, particularly when they use the new technologies. This group consists primarily of scientists, engineers, designers, professors, architects and even poets but also includes legal, business, and policy strategists. To compete effectively in the spiky world, countries need to be talent magnets.

9/11 and the Closing of America

Florida is an urban economist and theorist who began his query into the creative class in the wake of 9/11, when the Patriot Act and other security measures began to put pressure on immigration of creative talent into America. He has a high regard for the scientific and entrepreneurial talent coming in from other parts of the world. This led to his triple T list of crucial factors for the creative economy: technology, talent, and tolerance. He places a particular emphasis on the latter, stressing that economic regions and nations need to be open to different ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations.

To develop economically, Florida encourages nations and regions to support their universities, particularly faculties that do science and technology; cultivate new industries that capitalize on creativity; prepare people for a creative global economy, and foster openness and tolerance to attract the creative class.

It’s an intriguing thesis, not one that is central to my own research agenda, but it does inform some of my interests, such as the fate of New York’s “Silicon Alley.” Primarily I use it to to remind my digital media students we live in a globalized political economy and they need to organize their education around that fact.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2011, April 30). Florida’s Creative Class Thesis and the Global Economy. apennings.com https://apennings.com/meaningful_play/floridas-creative-class-thesis-and-the-global-economy/

Notes

[1] Richard Florida’s website is creativeclass.com

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


AnthonybwAnthony J. Pennings, PhD is a professor at the State University of New York, Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012 where he taught Digital Economics and Media Management. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in the 1990s.

Category: creative cities, digital geography, global e-commerce, meaningful play, political economy of media
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Global E-Commerce Report Focuses on Logistics

Posted on | April 27, 2011 | No Comments

It’s one thing to have your customer peruse your site, pick a product, and pay for it; it’s another to have it delivered quickly and safely.

The recent Global E-Commerce Delivery Report 2011 focuses on the latter, getting your physical product to the customer. The report was produced by the Hamburg, Germany market research firm yStats.com and shows that the efficiency and speed of logistics have become important e-commerce factors in the competition for customers and sales. It presents facts, figures and trends about e-commerce deliveries within 22 countries with the recognition that online delivery performance can serve as a source of competitive advantage.

Some of the topics include an evaluation of free shipping days, delivery options in different countries, the ecological footprint of various delivery options, and the role of store-pickup programs. It also has a number of case studies of both e-commerce sites and deliverers in different countries. For example, American Apparel, Borders and French’s 3 Suisses e-commerce site as well as German logistics companies supporting e-commerce such as Deutsche Post / DHL, DPD, GLS, Hermes and UPS.

Anthony

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Category: global communications, global e-commerce

United Nations Looks to Transform with Integrated ICT and ERP

Posted on | April 10, 2011 | No Comments

When I visited the Situation Room at the United Nations (UN) a few years ago, I was underwhelmed with its technological whiz-bang. For a number of reasons, it was difficult for the UN to computerize adequately. However, it is currently moving forward with an ambitious strategy to use ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) to reform its organizational DNA with unumojoa program it calls “Umoja.” The word means “unity” in Swahili, and the UN will strive for it by re-engineering administrative and business practices in a wide range of activities including finance, human resources, procurement, program management, travel, reports to management and stakeholders, as well as supply chain services. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put it:

    Umoja is the cornerstone of UN administrative reform, and presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move the UN away from administrative practices on which it was built in the 1940s, and equip it with 21st century techniques, tools, training and technology. A fundamental tenet of the initiative is that lasting reform is built, firstly, on changes of attitudes and skills of staff members; secondly, on modification of processes and organizational structure; and, thirdly, on deployment of a global information management platform. Umoja is fundamentally a people- and process-driven initiative enabled by modern technology.

The UN is facing a number of challenges in addition to continual budget concerns. Peacekeeping operations have continued to grow in complexity, scope, and size, and often operate in remote regions with underdeveloped infrastructure. The current IMIS system is outdated and fragmented, making it difficult to achieve adequate returns on investments in maintenance and training. It also lacks much-needed capabilities for management information, decision-making, and planning. One of the recent additions Umoja is offering is the Programme and Project Management (PPM) workstream. It is designed to provide the UN staff with more tools for planning, monitoring, and evaluating UN programs and projects. It also provides the Secretariat and Member States with extensive information about program results and project expenditures.

The UN is also adopting the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) as mandated by the UN General Assembly, which passed a resolution in 2006 urging its adoption by all United Nations organizations. IPSAS is an accrual-based accounting system that is being implemented by public sector bodies around the world due to its best practices for clarity and transparency. This list includes the EC (European Communities), ESA (European Space Agency), INTERPOL (International Criminal Police Organization), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), among many others, including over 80 countries.

Among the biggest challenges to implementing the Omoja changes is internal acceptance of the new procedures and requirements. Its success will be measured by how well it is used by all the different UN organizational bodies and staff. This will not be an easy transition and will require the mobilization of support for Umoja by all the different stakeholders, including vendors and people working in the field.

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

AnthonybwAnthony J. Pennings, PhD is the Professor of Global Media at Hannam University in South Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in the 1990s.

Category: enterprise systems
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Top Social Media and Forum Sites in the US

Posted on | April 8, 2011 | No Comments

Here is a list of the top social media websites and forums as compiled by Experian‘s Hitwise ranked by the number of visits during the week ending on April 2, 2011. I have added links in case you are not familiar with the individual sites. It shows the dominance of Facebook, particularly over its former rival MySpace, which has recently repositioned itself as a music-related site. Notice also that Classmates.com is now Memory Lane, an interesting take on their former target market.

1. Facebook 64.08%
2. YouTube 19.80%
3. MySpace1.32%
4. Yahoo! Answers 1.14%
5. Twitter1.10%
6. Tagged 0.84%
7. myYearbook 0.45%
8. Linkedin 0.37%
9. Club Penguin 0.31%
10. Mylife 0.31%
11. CafeMom 0.31%
12. Yelp 0.25%
13. MocoSpace 0.24%
14. IMVU 0.20%
15. Classmates, now Memory Lane 0.18%
16. Tumblr 0.16%
17. Badoo 0.14%
18. Yahoo! Groups 0.13%
19. myYearbook Chatter 0.13%
20. CaringBridge 0.12%

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Anthony


Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Category: social media
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Viral Marketing and Network Effects

Posted on | April 4, 2011 | No Comments

Hotmail was one of the first companies to capitalize on network effects when founders Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith began to offer web-based free email hotmails accounts in the summer of 1996. Previously, people would access their email accounts by logging into their email accounts through a PC or mainframe terminal at a university, corporation, or ISP. Using Hypertext Markup Language or HTML (“HoTMaiL”), a web-based service was created where a person could access their email account from any web browser connected to the Internet. What was also extraordinary about Hotmail was the growth strategy they adopted to get new users to sign up.

The idea came from Tim Draper, a venture capitalist who first wanted “P.S. I love you. Get your free Web-based email at Hotmail” at the bottom of every email message. After a rigorous debate, the company dropped the “P.S. I love you”, but they added Hotmail’s URL so the email message’s recipient could click on the link and go directly to the website where they could sign up for a free account with 2 MB of storage. In six months, they had a million registered users. When it was sold to Microsoft for $400 million in December of 1997, it boasted 8.5 million subscribers and as part of the MSN grew to 30 million by mid-1999. Something extraordinary had happened.

It was about the time of the Hotmail sale, when Steve Jurvetson began to write about some of the unique characteristics of Internet companies. Netscape asked him to write about some companies for their corporate newsletter called “The M-Files.” Draper had a particular interest in companies that were using their browser in unique ways. Brainstorming with Draper, they came up with the term “viral marketing” after rejecting terms like “geometric marketing,” and “tornado marketing.” As Eric Ransdell wrote, Jurvetson began to peruse his psychiatrist wife Karla’s medical books. He was drawn to the idea of the sneeze as a way to examine the dynamics of viral activity. A sneeze can spew out millions of items, and infectious particles like viruses can spread to many people if it is done in a crowd. The Internet provides the crowd and the right viral message can “infect” millions of people. Ransdell writes:

    Suddenly, the principle behind viral marketing seemed so easy to understand. In this new world, companies don’t sell to their customers. Current customers sell to future customers. In exchange for a free service, customers agree to proselytize the service. Because recipients of Hotmail messages are almost always friends, relatives, or business acquaintances of the sender, the marketing message is that much more powerful. Each email carries an implied endorsement by someone who the recipient knows.

Google drew on the Hotmail experience for Gmail but took a somewhat different tack. Starting in 2004, it began beta-testing its advertising-supported web-based free browser. Their strategy also drew on network Gmail logoeffects although they added an aura of exclusivity, partly because of the beta-nature of their product. Instead of just getting a Gmail account, new subscribers had to be invited.

Statistics on email are hard to find and somewhat unreliable but starting with the 1,000 or so initial invitees in March of 2004 Gmail has become one of the top four web-based email clients with Windows Live Hotmail and AOL Mail following leader Yahoo! Mail which has over 270 million subscribers. Microsoft’s Outlook (renamed Windows Mail) was the most used email client until the popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPad email capabilities. While Windows Live Hotmail probably still has more subscribers, Gmail has proved its value in the US based on Internet usage.

While the viral phenomenon is about rapid diffusion, network effects is about value. Network effects has been another main driver of web-based services and businesses. The ubiquity of the Internet has made it extremely valuable for all involved. With that type of connectivity, new viral strategies are being implemented to capture the value of the network effects on the web and other digital devices. I’m looking forward to Igor Shoifot’s new book on viral marketing. He promises us at least 101 reasons to buy it.


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AnthonybwAnthony J. Pennings, PhD is the Professor at the Department of Technology and Society at SUNY Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii during the 1990s.

Category: media strategies, mobile technologies, social media, strategic communications, technologies of meaning
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Developing Apps for Apple’s Mobile Devices

Posted on | March 25, 2011 | No Comments

While Android mobile devices like my Droid X are certainly gaining in popularity, Apple products still lead the pack in terms of popularity, if not user satisfaction, for mobile products. The key to Apple’s new mobility devices is the iOS operating system originally developed for the iPhone, but now the standard for an array of Apple products including Apple TV, the iPhone, iPad, and the iPod Touch. You can see a wide variety of applications developed for these Apple devices at the Apple App Store.

From idea to application

The iOS is notable for its user interface. Apple made history by commercializing the graphical user interface developed by Xerox Parc for the Apple Macintosh and continues to push development in this area with the haptic or touch user interface. Apple likes to call this the ‘Human User Interface” and they outline several Human Interface Principles that potential developers should take to heart.

  • Aesthetic Integrity

    • Does the design integrate well with the desired functionality?

  • Consistency

    • Does a design follow the iOS guidelines so that it fits the user’s expectations based on other Apple applications?

  • Direct Manipulation

    • Do users operate directly on onscreen objects and get immediate visual or haptic feedback?

  • Feedback

    • Do users get immediate acknowledgment of their actions and assurances that a process is occurring or has occurred?

  • Metaphors

    • Does the interface communicate directly and assuredly with the user through metaphoric symbols?

  • User Control

    • Does decision-making stay with the user as much as possible? Can they terminate an operation effectively and quickly?

Here Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak talks about the importance of the human in the user interface.

The iOS Human Interface Guidelines are a useful way to evaluate user interfaces and can give you ideas about ways to shape your ideas into a well-designed application. The next step is to start reading the iOS Application Programming Guide to help you prepare for coding and actually building the application.

Anthony
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Category: mobile technologies, multimedia
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Social Media: Some Thoughts on Curriculum

Posted on | March 22, 2011 | No Comments

Social media are sets of Internet and mobile platforms and tools that facilitate meaningful exchanges and value creation between individuals and with groups and organizations in both the commercial and public spheres. While the earliest tools included blogs, bookmark sharing, forums, podcasts, tagging, and wikis; new applications available through platforms like Facebook, Hulu, Second Life, Twine, and Xbox Live suggest that the creative capacities of social media are only beginning to be explored.

Social media has been embraced by users and organizations, both commercial and non-commercial. It is used around the world to connect with friends and families, share information about concerns and interests, and mobilize others in activities. Enterprises are increasingly using social media techniques to engage people in their discussion forums about services and products and to get customers to be active agents in promoting their brand and offerings. Non-profits and grassroots campaigns have embraced social networking to influence election results, interest people in public policy discussions, and facilitate social change through democratic involvement.

Social media has been part of our curriculum for the last several years. I redesigned the foundation courses for the BS in Digital Communications and Media degree in 2005. I included two courses that cover social media, the Digital Media Management I and II series taught by Igor Shoifot of Fotki.com (now living near Silicon Valley and teaching for UC Berkeley) and Collaboration Technologies that has been taught online by Kristen Sosulski. Last year I developed some ideas for an MS in Social Media and more recently a 2 credit course that would provide an introduction to the promises and perils of social media. The MS didn’t quite fit into the mix here yet but the small course, which seemed almost more difficult to conceptualize, will be taught in the summer of 2012. In any case, I thought I would share some ideas I had for developing a curriculum framework for teaching about social media.

These are the general areas that I think should be considered in a program on social media.

  1. New developments in social media technologies and techniques;
  2. Key communication and economic attributes that power this medium, including important metrics;
  3. How social media can be used as part of an organization’s communications strategy;
  4. Key skill sets and knowledge students can acquire for entrepreneurial innovation and employment in this area;
  5. Legal, privacy, and other unfolding social concerns that accompany this dynamic new medium;
  6. Issues of social change, citizen engagement and democratic prospects;
  7. Research implications of social media and the theorization and methodological skills needed to conceptualize research projects.

Anthony

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Category: social media
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  • About Me

    Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.

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