Five Questions With Facebook’s Chris Cox

Facebook often sends product managers and marketing team members to do WebEx briefings with journalists about new features. So it’s somewhat noteworthy that the social networking giant trotted out its resident forest-through-the-trees seeker, VP of Product Chris Cox, to pitch the press on what’s essentially a set of responses to user complaints that Facebook is launching this week.

In an interview with AllThingsD on Monday, Cox tried to paint Facebook’s latest round of tweaks to user profiles and sharing settings into a bigger picture. He also fought off questions about the sensitive topic of competition with Google+.

“I see this as a big advance,” Cox said of the new features, which will roll out to users starting this week. “One component of what you’re sharing is the content, but the other component is the audience. I just think that’s an exciting, high-level idea.”

Here’s a lightly edited write-up of our conversation.

AllThingsD: It seems to me that Facebook has had a mentality of asking users to opt out rather than opt in to being tagged by other users, starting with photo tagging and including recent launches like Facebook Places. And the idea seemed to be a philosophy about encouraging social sharing and spreading, which sometimes freaks people out because they didn’t necessarily give someone else permission to use their name. But now you’re changing how photo tagging works so users can keep themselves from being tagged. Is that a change of philosophy?

Chris Cox: We’re still really focused on tagging being easy to understand. We do think it’s important that people can tag anyone and anything, but on the flip side, your profile is yours, so this is an attempt to get the balance right.

You’re fixing a lot of the most common complaints about Facebook. But that’s also what Google+ just did.

These changes have been in the works for six months. Part of the process for making changes like these is to [run them by] regulatory and legal and special interest privacy groups. It’s not the kind of thing where we can respond to what Google’s doing in a month. This really is not at all about Google in any way, it’s about trying to iterate.

You’re also yet again changing a lot of the Facebook interface, moving things around that people have been accustomed to using every day — though I know you said you’ll be making special efforts to explain the new stuff to users. But just about a year ago you guys had done a major privacy revamp and said people could rest easy that those settings would remain consistent for a while.

We continue to read user feedback, and clearer controls was still at the top of the list. As long as it was at the top of the list we couldn’t stop working on it. And we’re incorporating a lot of the stuff we did last May into this. We’re not reverting; I see this as a big advance.

People are figuring out how they want to use this stuff at the same time as you’re building it. But I think there’s a growing cultural awareness, or skepticism, that anything you put online could get into the hands of someone who could use it against you, regardless of the privacy settings.

As long as email has been around, you can cut and paste anything. Nobody can guarantee that something you write in email won’t get anywhere. And it’s not just the digital world; if you throw something in your trashcan, it could get out. Replicating and distributing information is getting easier, not just on Facebook and not just on the Internet.

That kind of advice on balance is good in terms of getting people to think about what they’re sharing. On Facebook we can show you: this is who’s going to see it on your profile. That we can guarantee. We can’t guarantee that someone won’t copy and paste and mail it to your boss because we don’t have control over the desktop and we don’t have control of snail mail.

If you had to pick, what would you say is the most important part of this week’s release?

In each post, now, is communicated the audience. And that’s what the Facebook product is, it’s a sharing tool. One component of what you’re sharing is the content, but the other component is the audience. I just think that’s an exciting, high-level idea.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

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Blind Social Sharing & Its Effect On Personal Credibility

Social media may seem like ‘information overload’ for some, especially since there are now thousands of tweets sent per second and millions of people with a Facebook account. But how is this information created and sent? What is the ratio of actual unique information compared to the amount of re-tweets and Facebook posts about it?

These types of questions lead to the question of how much content is actually consumed versus how much of it is being shared. Sharing content to share it is a legitimate strategy for some — just look at Guy Kawasaki. As a co-founder of news aggregation website Alltop, he has become an Internet marketing legend, with over 364,000 followers on Twitter as of June 2011.

However, the line between becoming a credible news resource and one that simply spews links is sometimes a fine one. Guy Kawasaki does a great job of promoting appealing content that is interesting to most online users, but for social media users in a niche industry, it becomes harder and hard to attract a bigger, loyal following on links alone.

Blind Links

Blind Links are social media posts that are simply an article title and a URL:

 

While this seems like a relatively harmless way to share information (and the majority of Twitter users are likely guilty of it), blind link overload can lead to devalued credibility and social influence. This is because most tweets with shared links should include the opinion of the person tweeting it.

Of course, many article titles speak for themselves, but otherwise commentary (not always for businesses, more so when it’s on a user’s personal Twitter page) by the user provides their opinion and personal insight on the subject.

When it comes down to it, not all links need to include commentary, and blind links shouldn’t necessarily be avoided. It is too much of one thing that can generally cause users to ignore all tweets.

Personal tweets about experiences and events thrown in with tweets that share links and information is a good mixture of credibility and humanization—allowing readers to benefit from a user’s knowledge and what they’ve seen, while also allowing them to see the user’s personal life.

Perils Of Blind Re-Tweets

Another type of blind sharing, called blind re-tweets, occur when a user re-tweets a link/tweet without actually reading the article that the link goes to.

A Mashable article from April 2011 by David Spark discusses this phenomenon and even provides a graph of data showing the discrepancy between actual visits to a blog or webpage versus the number of times the URL was shared via Facebook/Twitter/Etc.

But how can a blind re-tweet affect a user’s online credibility? Actually, in a number of ways. For starters, if a user shares a link that they hadn’t checked, it may turn out to be a spammy link that doesn’t go to the information the title alluded to.

Questionable Sources

Besides sharing spammy links, the users that are being re-tweeted (and in turn @ mentioned) themselves may also pose a credibility risk to the user who is re-tweeting. If a user is flagged for spam or has posted a lot of spammy links in the past, a person who is reading a re-tweet may click on the @ mentioned user’s name and see their profile and recent tweets.

If some are questionable, this may cause them to unfollow the person who was re-tweeting the information. In these instances, sources are just as important as the links and information they are claiming to provide.

Is A Good Balance Possible?

What seems like information overload to some may seem like just the right amount to others. Many blogs and articles have discussed under-posting on Twitter and Facebook (as well as over-posting), but for those that want to have an active social media presence without spending all day searching for content share, sometimes scheduled tweets and blind links are a must.

A steady stream of information is sometimes the most consistent approach rather than 10 tweets between 8-8:30 am with nothing else said throughout the day. A few tweets each day, varying between personal commentary, links with insight, and blind links may be the best approach to produce a well-rounded Twitter account.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Let’s Get Social

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