On the heels of its recent privacy misstep, Facebook yesterday announced a new approach to site governance. It has published a set of proposed Facebook Principles intended to guide the future development of the service, and a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that will define Facebook’s and user’s commitments to the site.

Perhaps more significantly, Facebook is asking for users to comment and vote on the documents, signaling a new openness to member participation in future policies. This may offer an opportunity to get other issues, such as group size limits, on the table.

More: Facebook news release

The Publishing Trends Blog posts five interesting takeaways from “Youth and Creativity: Emerging Trends in Self-expression and Publishing,” a session of the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference. This session focused on usage habits among teens who were using digital media as a means of self-expression but who weren’t considering design or art as possible careers or fields of study.

The takeaways:

• Teens don’t see buying a software program (like Adobe Photoshop) as a major “life event.” Whereas people in their twenties and thirties may sign up for classes and buy instruction manuals after purchasing a program, teens churn through many different technologies quickly, using programs only for what they need and then moving on.
• At the same time, teens feel as if they have mastered these programs. Westerman [one of the session presenters] pointed out that when he asks an adult, professional Photoshop user if she knows everything there is to know about Photoshop, that adult will usually answer, “No, I haven’t even scratched the surface.” Teens, on the other hand, will answer, “Yeah, I know Photoshop.” Nor are they concerned that they haven’t learned all the “right” ways of doing things with a program–they’re concentrated on the outcome, not the tool. They don’t ask, “How do I use the masking tool?” They ask, “How can I create a cool rain effect?”
• That’s not to say that teens aren’t asking for help. They are! But they’re going to their peers online or typing queries into Google. There’s a return of the “apprenticeship”–teens learning skills from their more knowledgable peers, actively seeking critiques of their work, and really adopting a craft mentality. Learning is a process of watching and doing on the fly. “There’s no more learning curve,” Westerman said.
• Any niche site can become a social hub–teens aren’t just using Facebook for social networking. One subject in the study, “David,” spent most of his time on the “Silverfish Longboarding” discussion boards. (A longboard is a type of skateboard.) These microcommunities give teens, who tend to define themselves through 2 or 3 major interests when creating online personas, a sense of belonging.
• Teens aren’t using the fanciest, newest technology. Most of those surveyed had fairly old computers and older versions of software. They were making do with what they had. And they were not pirating software. One teen, “Gina,” bought a copy of Adobe Photoshop with her friend at Costco, and the girls took turns using it at home, since they only had one license.

Laurent Haug recalls Clay Shirky’s interview with CJR back in December where he gave a cogent response to the criticisms of the Web’s effects on culture and attention span.  Haug cites one passage that didn’t jump out at me at the time but that is worth keeping in mind:

[I]t’s not just when a tool comes along that change happens. It’s really when it becomes ubiquitous and even boring. And what’s happened now is that the Web has gotten boring for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings. And so, because they can take it for granted, they’re using this platform to add interactivity around regular media consumption.

Haug has himself raised the issue of the boringness of the Web previously.  Both are useful reminders that digital technology and interactivity are just part of the furniture for prospective students.

And since Haug sent me back to reread Shirky’s interview, I’ll share Shirky’s take on why information overload is a generational phenomenon:

[Y]ou know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

…

I mean, the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.

It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it. But it’s also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don’t stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is.

By now everyone in higher ed with an internet connection has posted about the misrepresentation in Facebook groups. (Inside Higher Ed’s summary here.)  At the Stein HQ we’ve been commenting that this is a great opportunity to explore the benefits of an institution building their own social network for admitted students.

Exclusive access to the community. If you can invite your admitted student pool with a unique identifier required to register, there’s no chance of any College Prowler interns posing and getting in. At the same time, the students know all their peers have been invited in, vs. facebook where only the over eager beaver types search out groups and join on their own initiative.

Insights and oversights.  Look for a product where you can see the discussions and address them appropriately. I’m not advocating that admission officers lead the discussions and that every staff member should have their own profile. But in a worst case scenario, you have the contact information on every member to handle any situation confidentially.

You might be wondering if the “official” presence would hinder the freeflowing conversation we have all seen on institution’s facebook groups and other online forums.  Stein has a social networking tool that has been on the market for five years (which actually predates facebook) and in that time, we have seen students discussing everything from their scholarship offers at other schools to what dorm they said they wouldn’t want to live in. Clearly it has not been our experience to see any reluctance from students to talk about whatever they wish.

Boosts yield. We have all seen that the extra excitement built around the school in online forums does help students along in their enrollment decision process. For one of our clients, 75% of the students who used the site ended up enrolling.

Now, this is not to say there isn’t tangible value to participating actively on existing sites like facebook. But to do so effectively, it is important to dedicate resources to maintaining your school’s presence. (See mStoner’s recommendations.)

Brad Ward at Squared Peg has discovered what appears to be an effort by College Prowler to co-opt Facebook groups for stealth marketing campaigns. This is all still sketchy, but the evidence is pointing to interns for College Prowler joining Class of XXXX Facebook groups and gaining admin rights.

What the implications of this are isn’t clear, but if you have an unauthorized Class of XXXX group on Facebook (and, of course, you do), it’s worth checking out Ward’s list of suspicious names and paying attention to this.

UPDATE: The president of College Prowler has taken responsibility (this comment was posted to Squared Peg):

Yes, College Prowler has been directly or indirectly involved with the creation of multiple Class of 2013 groups. The original purpose was to use these groups as a way to inform students that they can access a free guide about their new college on our site. No employee or anyone else associated with College Prowler has used these groups to send out messages or wall posts.

Until about an hour ago, I was unaware that College Prowler was working with another company that may have been using fake aliases to create to these groups. The groups that College Prowler was responsible for creating were set up with real accounts. Here are the names that are associated with College Prowler, and they will all be removed immediately from the Class of 2013 groups(all other names are not controlled by College Prowler):
• Mark Tressler
• Ron Tressler
• Brenna Young
• Lisa Young
• Lauren Plavchek
• Jessica Lash

From a big picture perspective, having a marketing strategy using social networking sites (like Facebook) is something that is necessary to be effective in our business. We do pride ourselves on being forward thinking and aggressive. In this instance, in its current form, we have crossed the line and to reiterate, we will be removing our administrator privileges from all of these 2013 groups immediately.

One to One Interactive has released a study conducted by OTOInsights, its research/neuromarketing arm, that examines why some Internet videos go viral.

General Findings

[D]ata from the study does not suggest any correlation between engagement, emotion, and the length of a video. Long videos (three minutes or greater) and short videos (two minutes or less) are equally likely to have high or low engagement scores. This finding suggests that Internet videos do not need to be limited to sound bite productions or even standard television commercial length. Internet video viewers are willing to view longer productions so long as they’re engaging.

…

Insight 1: Viewer Responses to Internet Videos are Emotionally Complex
… Marketers need to be aware of the range and complexity of emotional responses to quickly consumed and produced digital creatives like Internet video. Similarly, marketers need to guard against allowing their research and analysis methods to become overly reductive about emotional response. Emotional states are seldom monolithic. Even if the videos seem self-evident in their meanings, viewers’ reactions to them are quietly sophisticated.

…

Insight 2:  Engagement Scores Substantially Enhance Interpretability of User Ratings
Marketers designing and evaluating digital media creative assets are not well served by the lack of feedback provided by common ratings systems. Given the importance of ratings systems in video popularity…, it is critical that marketers develop a better understanding of why users might give a video an undesirable rating.

…

Insight 3: Viewer Engagement and Video Success are Positively Linked
This data suggests that a certain level of emotional engagement is a necessary, though not sufficient, predictor of a viral video’s success. In other words, it is unlikely that a video lacking a certain amount of emotional engageability will spread virally, regardless of other factors. At the same time, just because a video has this emotional engageability by no means guarantees that it will go viral; other factors (e.g., word of mouth, computer-based recommendation systems, and trendy cultural topics and memes) will influence a given video’s viral ability.

Some of the methods and findings rely too heavily on OTOInsights proprietary methodology to be immediately applicable to most people.  But if you’re considering employing video in your marketing efforts,  the general points are helpful reminders and challenges to the often simplistic ideas we have about what makes for successful videos.

(Hat tip to Roger Dooley of Neuromarketing.)