Valentine S Day

There’s a plethora of slogan t-shirt and witty e-greeting card companies on the Web, though only a few publishers like Someecards get to the heart of the human condition about our social media addictions, especially to Facebook. Someecards’ collection of e-greetings covers several topics, but we took special notice of their Facebook-related selection. The cards combine words that get to the nut of our Facebook behavior, along with some past-century advertising images. Here are the 20 most popular Facebook-related e-greeting cards at someecards.com. We hope you find these as amusing as we did.

1. Birthday

[That's just a perk of being one of my real-life friends.]

2. Birthday

[Didn't you get my last dozen Facebook invites?]

3. Birthday

[I know, I'll build a Facebook app to automatically write birthday wishes on Friends' Walls, then let others use it and make more money than Zynga makes with FarmVille!]

4. Confession

[Dad, please stop friending all my girlfriends!]

5. Congratulations

[Okay, not everyone with a lot of Facebook friends is needy, but we're just sayin'...]

6. Somewhat ..

[Maybe you should start with Black History Month, ease in real slow?]

7. Flirting

[So I have, like, 300 unread messages, 500 Group/ Fan Page updates, 35 Alerts, and 1 Poke. How about you? What else can we talk about?]

8. Friendship

[You're on my Facebook Friend List marked "Special," and I promise never to "Hide" your updates.]

9. Workplace

[And can I have an extra 24" monitor? You know to research, um, photo album privacy issues?]

10. Valentine’s Day

[We can even create an exclusive "Hidden" Facebook Group that only you and I are members of.]

11. Sympathy

[Hey don't feel bad if you didn't know about the new privacy settings. Even Mark Zuckerberg forgot to protect his own party pictures, and he only cofounded Facebook.]

12. Valentine’s Day

[If you're lucky, I might even Super Poke you.]

13. Friendship

[Ok, I admit I did Poke her once after IMing her.]

14. Breakup

[And do you mind if I tag a photo or two of you, once in a while?]

15. TGIF

[So can you recommend me to them as a friend already so that I can create a Facebook event and invite them?]

16. Thanks

[Thank goodness Facebook is soon going to let us first approve when someone tags horrible or compromising pics of us.]

17. Workplace

[And don't forget all the social features. This could be bigger than Mafia Wars!]

18. Encouragement

[For now, you can just view my status updates in your Feed.]

19. Confession
[Well at least I didn't waste my day tweeting on Twitter.]

20. Friendship
[You can find my Facebook vanity URL on my Twitter profile.]

Do you have beefs and pet peeves about your Facebook friends and their IMing, poking, inviting, liking, and sharing behaviors? Let us know in the comments, or go make your own someecards.

Last night Facebook expanded their Gross National Happiness product to include three new countries: Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In contrast to the United States which is happy most of the time, Australia is regularly unhappy when it isn’t holidays. In 2007 it appears as though Australia was “unhappy” most of the time. This only leads me to wonder if Australians speak a different form of English than Americans.

Other interesting findings posted by Adam Kramer of Facebook:

• Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day are still among the happiest days for all of these nations, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday are happiest days of the week.
• Canadians are happier the day before Canadian Thanksgiving (a Sunday) than on the actual Canadian Thanksgiving Day (a Monday).
• Australia’s index was lowest on Feb. 13, 2008—the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized in Parliament to indigenous Australians—reflecting the 4 percent of Aussie status updates containing the word “sorry.”
• Happiness levels in the UK seem to have the least variation, with the fewest large peaks among all the graphs due to holidays.

You can view the full Gross National Happiness product here. While there aren’t too many interesting findings of this latest version of the product, it’s interesting to see how the overall sentiment of status updates trends from one country to the next. One thing I should say is that Australians appear to be increasingly happy since first experiencing a “positivity drought” back in 2007.

Analyze the data for yourself here.

Corporate blog expert Debbie Weil has asked the question, “Should blogging be the hub of your social media efforts?” Tomorrow afternoon, Jay Baer and Chris Baggott will take a stab at answering that in a Compendium Blogware webinar of the same name. Sign up now. Seats are limited.

While Debbie has a fantastic discussion going on in the comments section of the post mentioned above, I thought it appropriate to talk a bit about the hub theory of blogging and ensure the notion is looked upon in the proper perspective.

First, we need to assume that we’re talking about blogging for business or corporations. This differs from personal/hobby or media blogs because with each you have slightly different purposes, goals and outcomes of success.

Image by base10 via Flickr

Personal blogs are ego driven. They are either personal opinion platforms for the author or the content is almost solely what the author chooses to write. Hobby blogs are much the same. Media blogs are focused on driving content around an audience’s needs or interests to draw eyeballs and increase exposure to the site’s advertising. The best corporate blogs are focused on driving business success while serving the audience’s needs.

As an example, look at Fairytale Brownies. They have a corporate blog which has a prescribed goal of winning search results around specific keywords. Their Facebook, Twitter and YouTube presences clearly drive people back to the blog for more information (along with other site-specific content that serves its respective community there). The blog is clearly their hub for connecting with customers.

If you visited their blog in February, you found specific calls to action for Valentine’s Day themed promotions. When you clicked through, you were taken to custom landing pages to buy Valentine’s Day brownies for your loved one. With similar approaches around the year (see St. Patrick’s Day ideas there now), Fairytale Brownies have driven thousands of visitors to their e-commerce site and report an impressive 13 percent conversion rate among those visitors to qualified leads. While they do not disclose specific financials, they have shared a 170 percent return on their investment in business blogging.

The reason (though I’m sure Baggott wants me to tell you it’s because they use Compendium) is because their blog is a hub for their social media efforts. They do participate genuinely on Facebook and Twitter, answering specific questions, thanking fans and the like, but continually bring the focus of the company’s social media efforts back to the blog and e-commerce opportunities. The clear focus to drive customers to the blog, thus giving them the options to click through and purchase is what drives their online success.

Can social outposts be your hubs? Sure. Are they as effective? I don’t think so. You can control you blog completely. Focusing that content on winning search results is easier to execute than on Facebook or Twitter. The more search traffic you can drive, coupled with the social media traffic you move from your outposts, the more your efforts are optimized.

For more, check out the webinar with Jay and Chris tomorrow. It’s free and will certainly be full of great information.

In the meantime, what do you think? Is a blog best used as the hub of your social media efforts? What about focusing your activities on Facebook or Twitter? The comments, as always, are yours.

Related articles by Jason Falls and Zemanta

• Corporate Blog Success Begins And Ends With Business Metrics (Social Media Explorer)
• Should a Blog or Twitter be Your Social Media Hub? (socialmediatoday.com)
• Companies Should Organize For Social Media In A Hub-And-Spoke Model (Forrester Research)

Facebook has taken data from status updates to report post what our grandmothers have been saying all along: people who are in a relationship or marriage are seemingly happier than the rest of us.

Lisa Zhang, a University of Waterloo student interning on Facebook’s data team, posted the Valentine’s Day note in which she said happiness of Facebook users was measured by analyzing positive and negative words in status updates as defined by it Gross National Happiness Index during one week in January. This was done by computers with personally identifiable information removed, she noted, claiming it didn’t invade users’ privacy.

The hierarchy goes like this: married people are happiest, followed by people in a relationship, although married people tend to be older and, Zhang notes, older people tend to be happier. The corresponding gender breakdown: men are more positive then women when in a relationship or married, but more negative when married or engaged.

People in open relationships seem to be the most miserable, according to Zhang’s post, with men being the saddest in these pairings. Women reported being in open relationships 40% more than men, she wrote.

Those in open relationships had even less positive status updates than widows, than those with “it’s complicated” as their status, and than singles (who comprise 30% of women and 40% of men on Facebook). Widowed people showed less emotion, positive or negative, overall, she wrote.

Facebook users who do not disclose their relationship status are 50% more negative than everyone else, Zhang wrote.

It’s always insightful when Facebook releases analysis of user data, but it’s important to keep in mind that this information in and of itself is skewed. A Facebook status update can be seen by friends, family and the family of one’s spouse — people may be posting positive status updates to be seen by others even if they are not happy on the inside. Judging “happiness” in its absolute sense is something that is arguably outside of Facebook’s scope.

While there may be some correlation between offline/online and personal/private lives, Facebook has fast become another kink in the social fabric of our culture — one more way for people to express joy, save face, or make a mistake. What happens to a husband doesn’t post something positive about his wife leading up to Valentine’s Day? Probably nothing good.

You might already know that the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, but now you can confirm that number by playing kitchen scientist and melting chocolate. And then you eating the results.

The folks at Wired think that this physics experiment is ideal for all the leftover Valentine's Day candy, but I think it's great all year round.

This is what you'll be doing:

• Make sure the candy is in a microwave-proof box. Better yet, take the chocolate out and put in a microwave safe dish.
• Remove the turntable in your oven. (You want the candy to stay still while you heat it.) Put an upside-down plate over the turning-thingy, and place your dish of candy on top.
• Heat on high about 20 seconds.
• Take the chocolate out and look for hot spots. Depending on the candy you use, you may have to feel the candy to see where it has softened. With the cherry cordials we used, we saw several shiny spots and one place where the chocolate shell melted through, releasing the sweet syrup inside.
• Measure the distance between two adjacent spots. This should be the distance between the peak and the valley (crest and trough) of the wave. Since the wavelength is the distance between two crests, multiply by 2. Finally, multiply that result by the frequency expressed in hertz or 2,450,000,000 (2.45 X 109)

Ta da. In this example, the final number was a bit lower than the actual speed of light, but it's still pretty darn close considering the difficulty of finding the exact "hot spots" to measure from. And the difficulty of sacrificing chocolate to science. [Wired]

Target’s Super Love Sending Facebook campaign has now come to an end and $1 million was donated to the winning charities. Target launched the marketing campaign with a philanthropic twist at the start of this month. The company decided to theme the campaign around Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl. Participants had the option to vote for their favorite charity, if they send a customized video card to their friends – thereby making the campaign grow virally.

The campaign lasted for two weeks and enabled Target to reach more than 900,000 facebook fans, who together sent out 26,000 Valentine’s Day and Super Bowl themed cards to friends and family.

Target’s Charity Giveaway is different from the Chase Community Giveaway in a sense that Target will be splitting the donation between the five selected charities on the basis of the votes that they received during the campaign. The Chase Community Giveaway on the other hand allowed users to vote for the charity of their choice, and donated $1 million to the charity that received the most votes. Further more, unlike Target’s campaign, the Chase Community Giveaway had a list of 1,000 charities to vote for.

Target will distribute the $1 million to the five charities as follows:

• Kids In Need Foundation – 12 percent of votes = $120,000
• St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital^® – 49 percent of votes = $490,000
• The Salvation Army – 8 percent of votes = $80,000
• United Through Reading^® Military Program – 22 percent of votes = $220,000
• United Way – 9 percent of votes = $90,000

Target selected all the 5 charities, due to their work in the area of education. St. Jude, the charity that received the most funds, will be using the money to support the hospital’s groundbreaking research and lifesaving care, including The St. Jude School Program – that is specially granted by Target. Target’s campaign is yet another example of brands using Facebook to launch marketing and brand building campaigns, that also aim to support charitable causes.

Reader Bang's says his wife wanted to surprise him (on Valentine's Day) with a game. She didn't know what console he had so she asked Best Buy for some help. They said he "probably" had an XBOX and sold her not only a game, but a non-refundable XBOX Live subscription. When the couple tried to exchange the purchase (he actually has a PS3), they say they were told the game could be swapped but they were stuck with the unopened, unused XBOX Live card.

Please help! My wife, over the Valentine's, surprised me with Modern Warfare 2 for the Xbox and a 12 month subscription to Xbox Live that she bought at our local Best Buys. I own a PS3 and already own Modern Warfare 2 for the PS3. So you would think it would be simple to just return it?

Wrong!!!!

So we went to Best Buys and tried to return it. The CS rep told us he would take back the game but we are stuck with the Xbox game card. He flipped over the receipt and circled a statement in a big red marker that says “Best Buys does not take back consumable like phone cards. I explained it to him, that it was a gift and I have the original receipt, the game unopened and the game card was unscratched as well. My wife was getting livid as I explained the we don’t even own a xbox and she was told by the sales rep when she bought it that most likely I owned a Xbox and upsold her the 12 month subscription to Xbox Live with the game.

After arguing with him for 5 minutes and holding up a very long line of returns, he told me that I could speak to a manager. We waited 20 minutes for a manager and none came, we left with game and subscription card in hand. My wife and I were so embarrassed at that point and with the receipt being circled with a big red marker, I don’t even want to try to take it back to another store.

What makes me so mad is that over the past 10 years spending thousands at Best Buys and this probably being first return in years, Best Buys gives steady customers like me, the shaft. What’s even more sad, is that I have defended Best Buys to my family members over the past years when they had bad experiences at Best Buys.

Give your wife a big hug for us and then try Best Buy's executive customer service. Perhaps they will be more flexible than the people you dealt with at the store.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and it apparently had the data team at Facebook thinking: Does being in a relationship (as defined by Facebook relationship status) really make individuals more happy? The results, which are detailed on Facebook’s blog aren’t quite as black and white as you might expect.

Methodology

Facebook already has a methodology for measuring the overall “happiness” of its users. It basically looks at how many positive words people use in their status updates (for English speaking users). This results in the USA Gross National Happiness Index.

For this particular study, Facebook looked at the use of positive and negative words in status messages over the course of one week in January. The data team was then able to filter the results based on sex and relationship status (as defined by Facebook).

The Results

The results aren’t entirely unsurprising: People who are in relationships do seem happier than those who are not in relationships. However, there are some important areas of distinction. For instance, the people that seem the most unhappy are those that either don’t disclose their relationship status or those that are in an open relationship.

An open relationship dwarfs widowers and “it’s complicated” by a pretty significant margin for both men and women. However, those that don’t disclose their relationship at all are about 50% more negative than everyone else.

In the end, while this data is certainly interesting, it’s only scientific insofar as it is a reflection of what people choose to share in their status updates. Obviously, that’s not going to be a strong — or even defining — indicator of how people really feel, regardless of relationship status.

What do you think of this data? Do you find yourself more or less happy when in a relationship as opposed to being single? Let us know!

Tags: facebook, happiness, valentine's day

Facebook this weekend published a special Valentine's day study about romantic relationships and happiness. The company's Data Team sliced and diced the language used in millions of peoples' status messages, then looked at how they varied depending on the relationship status the people listed themselves with.

Conclusions? Married people are the happiest, people in Open Relationships are the least happy. Men are less happy than women in an open relationship (believe it or not) and more happy in marriage. These findings are interesting, but what they really indicate is that there may be a modern-day Farmers' Almanac for understanding our lives hidden behind the company's doors. Facebook needs to set that data free or at least do more with it.

Sponsor

The Data Team's conclusions were written up by intern Lisa Zhang, who's relationship status isn't public on the site. Zhang explained the methodology like this:

We already have methodology for measuring the happiness of Facebook users: by considering how many positive words people use in their status updates (see the USA Gross National Happiness Index). This method allows us to see whether a person's Facebook relationship status affects how positive and negative they are. We examined the use of positive and negative words in the status updates of all English speakers over the course of one week in January. To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

One of the most significant findings reported is about people who listed themselves as in an Open Relationship, meaning typically that they are committed to one person but have sex with multiple people. Those people tend to be less positive than anyone else, less positive even than widowed people!

This is truly remarkable, if you think about it. For what tiny percentage of human history has it been a common practice to publicly declare your relationship Open in such a way? It's a pretty new thing! How's it working out for people? Apparently not so well!

That could be good information to know before making certain decisions ("if I knew then what I know now..."). Of course, how does having children affect happiness in married people? How happy do people in heterosexual vs same-sex Open Relationships tend to be? Are women who are engaged to men with feminist or liberal-sympathetic interests (Fan pages) express less negativity than other engaged women or is that just a facade that in reality means nothing?

There are lots of questions raised by this data, and it's just one of an infinite combination of data points that Facebook could analyze.

It's probable that some of this data includes important observations about the human condition. Information that could help people make better-informed decisions than ever before in human history; informed not only by our own experience, and the experiences of the people we observe in our immediate lives, but by the experiences of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Other Examples of Important Advice

Remember the Farmers' Almanac? It's a book that's been published annually since 1818, filled with advice about cooking, gardening, humor and weather predictions. The mysterious Farmers' Almanac team (there's only been 7 editors in the publication's history) refuses to disclose its methods for weather prediction, but claims to have a 80 to 85% accuracy rate over its history.

Similarly, Facebook data might not be able to tell us with 100% accuracy whether people who move from Michigan to California, or who marry young, or who stop playing football and start playing basketball tend to be more happy or less happy than before - but that data could come a whole lot closer to telling us than anything we've had before has.

Of course we're all special snowflakes, with infinite complications, and free will is important - but doesn't it seem that there's an incredible opportunity for world-wide self awareness hiding inside this social network where we're typing our relationship status, our location and our interests into fields in a form?

Of course Facebook uses that data to target advertising. Why will the company tell an advertiser that I'm part of a group of college educated, white, married men, over 30 years old and living in the state of Oregon but it won't tell me that among people in those circumstances I have a particularly geographically limited set of friends and should probably get out more if I want to really understand the world? Now that would be valuable information!

Hunch, the startup lead by Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, makes that kind of data a big part of its social decision making service. The site provides a way for you to walk through various things you should consider in making decisions like what kind of car you should buy next or where you might like to go on vacation. It also asks you questions about yourself along the way.

Among 10k people Hunch asked "do you like Cilantro?" the ones that said they did were far more likely to prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate. People who said they didn't like cilantro are much more likely to prefer milk chocolate. (Probably because people who don't like cilantro don't know what's good in life.) A Hunch study last week of people who own different breeds of dogs found that German Shepherd fans tend to rely more on intuition than common sense and Pug fans particularly enjoyed the movie The Shawshank Redemption.

How about Facebook coughs up the goods on the far greater supply of user data than any other site in the world has?

Unfortunately, Facebook is going in just the opposite direction. The company's Data Team puts out some lightweight analysis like these Valentine's Day conclusions about once a month. When software engineer Pete Warden tried last week to offer up user data he'd collected from 250 million Facebook users to the Academic community for study (see The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul) the company contacted him and told him to put a hold on the release while privacy concerns were evaluated. Last week the company took down Lexicon, its public tool for comparing how often different words were being used across the streams of Facebook users.

Come on, Facebook! Set the data free. It's not about cilantro and chocolate, that's just the fun stuff. There are important observations about humanity hiding in that data. Check out, for example, Hunch's observations of hundreds of people who said they don't believe Barack Obama was born in the US and what else they have in common.

If you don't feel like you can set it free, then at least do something more serious with it. The Farmers' Almanac is a mysterious organization, maybe some more mystery would be ok if it came along with a whole lot of Facebook data.

This is a historically unique opportunity and one that I hope Facebook will take ahold of soon. Think of all the heartbreak the company could help prevent if only people knew their odds of being happy in an Open Relationship, among the countless other decisions we make that would be well informed by analysis of aggregate user data.