Facebook gives average users an incredible opportunity to reach a mass audience, according to the latest study by the Pew Internet in American Life Project. It says the average user can reach up to 150,000, and a median user can connect to 31,000 others.

It also found that most Facebook users receive more from their Facebook friends than they give, according to a new study that for the first time combines server logs of Facebook activity with survey data to explore the structure of Facebook friendship networks and measures of social well-being.

These data were then matched with survey responses. And the new findings show that over a one-month period:

• 40% of Facebook users in our sample made a friend request, but 63% received at least one request
• Users in our sample pressed the like button next to friends’ content an average of 14 times, but had their content “liked” an average of 20 times
• Users sent 9 personal messages, but received 12
• 12% of users tagged a friend in a photo, but 35% were themselves tagged in a photo

“The explanation for this pattern is fascinating for a couple of reasons,” noted Prof. Keith Hampton, the lead author of the Pew Internet report, Why most Facebook users get more than they give.

“First, it turns out there are segments of Facebook power users who contribute much more content than the typical user. Most Facebook users are moderately active over a one-month time period, so highly active power users skew the average.

Second, these power users constitute about 20%-30% of Facebook users, but the striking thing is that there are different power users depending on the activity in question.

One group of power users dominates friending activity. Another dominates ‘liking’ activity. And yet another dominates photo tagging.”

Other findings:

• Women do more status updates than men.
• Users average 7 new friends a month
• Few people unfriend from feeds
• There is little evidence of Facebook fatigue
• Facebook users can reach an average of more than 150,000 Facebook users through their Facebook friends; the median user can reach about 31,000 others.
• Tagging Facebook friends in photos is associated with knowing more people from diverse backgrounds and having more close relationships – off of Facebook.
• A wide range of activities on Facebook are associated with attending political meetings.
• Those who participate in Facebook groups are more likely to try to persuade someone to vote for a specific candidate

The full study offers details.

© 2012, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.

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While 30% of users between ages 18 and 24 like Timeline, only 10% of those over 65 were happy with the new design.  When broken down by gender, men and women had exactly the same opinion – 77% dislike Timeline, while 23% like it.

In its recent filing for an initial public offering of stock, Facebook admitted part of its strategy is to “break things” as part of the development process. The Timeline feature may do the job when it becomes mandatory. Now that Facebook has serious competitors such as Google+ just waiting to harvest disgruntled users, it may want to reconsider that tactic.

Here’s an infographic detailing the study results:

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One tool they use are fake accounts which can then be used in a variety of ways to distribute spam or mount attacks on legitimate users, says security firm Barracuda Networks, which has done a study that can help you spot a fake trying to friend you on the site.

Facebook  consistently fights to keep attackers out of its network, most recently announcing its lawsuit against a marketing firm accused of “spreading spam through misleading and deceptive tactics.” The Barracuda Labs study provides yet another example of this “arms race” as an increasing number of attackers move to social networks to carry out their wares.

Highlighted findings from the Barracuda Labs study include:

• Almost 60 percent of fake accounts claim to be bisexual, 10 times more than real users
• Fake accounts have six times more friends than real users, 726 versus 130
• Fake accounts use photo tags over 100 times more than real users, 136 tags per four photos versus one tag per four photos
• Fake accounts almost always (97 percent) claim to be female, as opposed to 40 percent for real users

“Likes, News Feeds and Apps have helped lead Facebook to its social network dominance and now attackers are harnessing those same features to efficiently scale their efforts,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer at Barracuda Networks.

“These fake profiles and apps give attackers a long-lived path to continuously present malicious links to innocent users.”

“Also, researchers have shown how friending malicious accounts can lead to account takeover using Facebook’s trusted friend account recovery,” Judge continued. “We have analyzed thousands of fake accounts to determine features and patterns that distinguish them from real users, and created a feature-based heuristic engine to distinguish real users from fake profiles.”

The study analyzes data collected from Barracuda Profile Protector, a free tool that analyzes and blocks malicious activity on Facebook and Twitter, along with public data collected from streams and network crawling to demonstrate how users typically operate.

Barracuda created this inforgraphic to illustrate the study results:

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Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager for news and journalism, indicated in comments from her visit to Columbia University’s social media weekend on 28^th January that Twitter is set to unveil a number of new tools for brand pages in the next few months, which will allow brands to more accurately monitor the reach and effect of each tweet published.

Whilst this sounds similar to current tools already available, Punch has indicated that the data will have added weight given that it is coming from a primary source, rather than a third party application.

Pete Goold, managing director of online PR agency Punch, said: “The data that seems set to become available in the coming months will add immense value to the Twitter platform, which already facilitates one to one interactions between brands and their audiences on an awareness and customer services level. Being able to track the exact reach and impact of each individual tweet will enable brands to fine-tune their Twitter strategies moving forward.

“Whilst there are numerous analytics tools available which can look into Twitter in depth, having an analytics platform embedded within the network itself is likely to improve the quality of future campaigns as a whole, meaning that brands must make the most of analytics data and employ the expertise of individuals and agencies who understand what it all means.

“This development may also be part of Twitter’s strategy to try and persuade more brands to invest in the platform from a marketing perspective, since the pool of information and insights which could be available through Twitter is astronomical. With this added revenue, we’d certainly hope that Twitter will continue to invest in providing deeper analytical data in the future.”

Punch Communications is a leading integrated PR, social media and SEO agency, with a wide range of global clients, spanning the retail, gaming and tech sectors.

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NIST is soliciting proposals to pilot on-line identity solutions that allow individuals and organizations to utilize secure, efficient, easy-to-use, and interoperable identity credentials to access online services in a manner that promotesconfidence, privacy, choice, and innovation.

This “Federal Funding Opportunity” follows upon the Obama Administrations release of the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” last year.

It’s Executive Summary says:

“A secure cyberspace is critical to our prosperity. We use the Internet and other online environments to increase our productivity, as a platform for innovation, and as a venue in which to create new businesses. Our digital infrastructure, therefore, is a strategic national asset, and protecting it—while safeguarding privacy and civil liberties—is a national security priority” and an economic necessity.  By addressing threats in this environment, we will help individuals protect themselves in cyberspace and enable both the private sector and government to offer more services online.”

NIST hopes to fund five to eight projects up to two years each.

Preliminary proposals are due from eligible contractors by March 1.

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President Obama says there is a shortage of engineers, yet many remain unemployed

During a recent video chat session, President Obama told a woman that he could not understand why her engineer husband was unemployed because “industry tells me that they don’t have enough highly skilled engineers.”

However, in an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies of the data from the American Community Survey collected by the Census Bureau show that there are a total of 1.8 million U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who are either unemployed, out of the labor market, or not working as engineers.

This is true for those with many different types of engineering degrees.

For a complete review of the American Community Survey, including a table containing detailed employment figures for specific engineering degrees, visit the Center for Immigration Studies website at: http://cis.org/obama-and-engineers

The 2010 American Community Survey shows:

• There are 101,000 U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who are unemployed.
• There are an additional 244,000 U.S.-born individuals under age 65 who have a degree in engineering but who are not in the labor market. This means they are not working nor are they looking for work, and are therefore not counted as unemployed.
• In addition to those unemployed and out of the labor force, there are an additional 1.47 million U.S.-born individuals who report they have an engineering degree and have a job, but do not work as engineers.
• President Obama specifically used the words “highly skilled.” In 2010, there were 25,000 unemployed U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who have a Master’s or Ph.D. and another 68,000 with advanced degrees not in the labor force. There were also 489,000 U.S.-born individuals with graduate degrees who were working, but not as engineers.
• Relatively low pay and perhaps a strong bias on the part of some employers to hire foreign workers seems to have pushed many American engineers out their profession.
• There are many different types of engineering degrees. But unemployment, non-work, or working outside of your field is common for Americans with many different types of engineering degrees.
• The key policy question for the United States is how many foreign engineers should be admitted in the future. Contrary to President Obama’s statement, the latest data from the Census Bureau indicate there is a very large supply of American-born engineers in the country. It would be better for the president to seek more diverse sources of information than simply relying on “industry” to determine what is going on in the U.S. labor market.

Data Source: Figures for the above analysis come from a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the public-use file of the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Figures on degrees and employment are based on self-reporting in the survey and have been rounded to their nearest thousand.

The survey asks about undergraduate degrees, so some of the individuals who have a Master’s or Ph.D. may not have their graduate degree in engineering. Also, those who indicated that they have a “professional degree” are not included in the discussion of those with Masters’ and Ph.D.s because a large share have law degrees. The 2010 data is the most recent ACS available.

© 2012, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.

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The study finds that crowdsourcing is not the misguided fad that some critics have suggested but that the process of crowdsourcing actually — under the right conditions — creates more knowledgeable consumers and, in time, leads to more efficient, lower-cost generation of high potential ideas.

The study, “Crowdsourcing New Product Ideas Under Consumer Learning,” was conducted by Kannan Srinivasan, the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professor of International Business and the H.J. Heinz II Professor of Management, Marketing and Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business; Assistant Professor of Information Systems Param Vir Singh, also of the Tepper School; and Yan Huang, a Ph.D. student at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon.

The team set out to investigate the three most common criticisms of crowdsourcing: that individuals’ limited view about firms’ products leads to the contribution of mainly niche ideas; that consumers’ limited knowledge about firms’ cost structure leads to too many infeasible ideas; and that firms’ lack of response to customers’ ideas leads to customer dissatisfaction.

“Although crowdsourcing initiatives are being widely adopted in many different industries, the number of ideas generated often declines over time, and implementation rates are quite low,” Srinivasan said.

Understand the dynamics to find valuable ideas

“Our findings, however, suggest that a better understanding of the dynamics at work in the crowdsourcing process can help us to address the common criticisms and propose policies that draw out the most consistently valuable ideas with the highest potential for implementation from crowdsourcing efforts in virtually any industry.”

The policies suggested by the study for effective crowdsourcing rely on the implementation of a system for peer evaluation, rapid company response to ideas that receive significant positive endorsement from the community of idea contributors, provision of precise cost signals that enable contributors to assess the feasibility of their ideas, and a system to reward contributors whose ideas are implemented rather than one that rewards individuals when they post ideas.

“Using a peer voting system, consumers are empowered to both contribute their own ideas and vote on the ideas submitted by others, enabling firms to infer the true potential of ideas as they begin to screen for ideas that are truly worthy of implementation,” Singh said.

Singh added that the initial field of ideas generated in a crowdsourcing effort tends to be overcrowded with ideas that are unlikely to be implemented as consumers overestimate the potential of their ideas and underestimate the cost of implementation.

“However, individuals learn about their abilities to come up with high-potential ideas as well as the cost structure of a firm through peer voting and the firm’s response to contributed ideas, and individuals whose ideas do not earn the favor of their peers or the backing of the firm drop out of the process while contributors of high-potential ideas remain active,” he said.

“Over time, the quality of generated ideas — in terms of their actual potential for implementation — improves while the total number of ideas contributed through crowdsourcing decreases,” Huang said.

“So, the cost to screen contributed ideas is reduced, the efficiency of the process is increased and the crowdsourcing initiative yields high-value ideas with the greatest potential for implementation.”

Although crowdsourcing initiatives have become rapidly popular, the usefulness of this relatively new approach to idea generation has been heavily debated. There have been few academic studies of crowdsourcing despite the enormous business and media attention the topic has attracted, and this study by the team at Carnegie Mellon proposes answers to some of the most hotly contested concerns regarding the value of these initiatives.

Findings of the study in detail

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In telephone interviews conducted immediately following a customer service call during the three months ending December 31, 2011, 69% of AT&T customers surveyed were “Very Satisfied” with the experience, up from 65% a year ago.

Fifty-nine percent of Sprint customers gave the experience their top rating, down 12 points from the end of 2010; while T-Mobile posted a 17-point drop to end 2011 at 48% “Very Satisfied.” Verizon was effectively unchanged at 60% satisfaction.

“When companies get distracted, or focus on only one part of their customer experience or product portfolio, the overall customer experience can suffer. We will be watching Sprint and T-Mobile in 2012 to see if they can recover the ground lost in 2011.”

“Providing a consistently high-quality customer service experience requires ongoing commitment and focus throughout an organization,” said Peter Leppik, CEO of Vocalabs.

“When companies get distracted, or focus on only one part of their customer experience or product portfolio, the overall customer experience can suffer. We will be watching Sprint and T-Mobile in 2012 to see if they can recover the ground lost in 2011.”

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In a national scientific telephone survey, Poll Position asked, “Do you think that the reputation of Facebook will be helped or harmed by its plan to sell shares in the company in an IPO?”

Thirty-two percent of respondents said Facebook’s reputation will be helped by the decision to go public, 22% said the company’s image will be harmed and 47% did not have an opinion on the issue.

The 18-29 age group were among the most supportive of Facebook’s public offering with 37% saying it will help the company’s reputation, 17% said it will hurt the company’s reputation and 46% did not have an opinion.

In the 30-44 age group, 30% said the decision to go public will harm the reputation of Facebook, 29% said it would help the reputation of Facebook and 41% did not have an opinion.

See a breakdown of survey participants by age, race, gender, and political affiliation in crosstabs for this poll athttp://media.pollposition.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/Poll-Position-Crosstabs-Facebook-reputation.pdf.

Poll Position’s scientific telephone survey of 1,145 registered voters nationwide was conducted January 31, 2012 and has a margin of error of ±3%. Poll results are weighted to be a representative sampling of all American adults.

© 2012, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.

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Ian Jones, founder of Meet.com

By Allan Maurer

In the ten years Ian Jones, founder of mobile app company meet.com, marketed online dating sites from Friendfinder to Match.com, he tried most of them out – without success.

“I didn’t have one successful meeting,” Jones says.

His complaints about the online dating sites echo those of many others – he would discover that the photos the women he contacted had posted were a decade old. Or they sounded great online but didn’t come across so well in subsequent phone conversations.

So, in 2010, Jones decided to do something about that and created meet.com, a mobile app set to launch in March that already has 700,000 pre-joins acquired through affiliates and marketing.

Presenting at SEVC

The company, which has about 20 employees and currently has a single angel investor, will present its business plan at the upcoming Southeast Venture Conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Feb. 29-March 1. The 6h annual SEVC highlights both early and later stage investment opportunities from: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington DC.

What makes it different?

Jones tells us that one of the biggest surprises in setting up his startup firm was the “overwhelming support for the meet.com brand and the growth in the smartphone and mobile app markets.”

The brand name is one of the things that differentiates meet.com from its competitors, says Jones. “It has a much higher response rate than ‘Scout,’ or ‘Blender,’ or ‘Grinder,’ based on our research, he notes.

Another differentiating feature is the way the app will work with Facebook. It allows users to connect via Facebook and even communicate with Facebook friends for free after downloading and installing it.

Jones assures us that the app will have strong privacy and security settings and users will be in control of who they connect with.

Once users communicate with people outside their network, however, a $4.99 a month charge begins via the iTunes or Android market stores.

Jones says the app is initially going to work with the iPhone and Android operating systems with Blackberry coming along a bit later.

There are other mobile apps out there that connect people on the go, but Jones says “Our matching technology is superior, our look and feel is superior, and our privacy settings are superior.”

Jones says he thinks we’ll all be experience a “mobile bubble” that will be much more significant that the dot com boom was in the next few years.

Mobile advantages

Mobile has advantages. People are more willing to pay for mobile apps than they ever seemed to be for online services, for instance. “There is much more acceptance from consumers,” Jones says. “It’s much more common for people to push a button and buy a 99 cent or $5.00 app than it is for them to pull out a credit card and charge $19.95.”

Part of the reason for the increased acceptance on the part of consumers is that it’s more secure than online purchases, he suggests.

“People have their credit cards on file with the iTunes store or Android and there are no charge back issues.”

In terms of dating itself, the immediacy of the way the meet.com app works when people are actually on the go and out and about is a major difference from the stale photos and descriptions on online services.

The U.S. dating services market is a now a $2.1 billion business, with online dating services soaring in popularity since 2001 and representing 53% of the market’s value, according to a recent report from Market Research.  But, dating website revenues are expected to grow only 7.5% this year as the U.S. market becomes saturated with 1,500+ sites and free dating sites and competition from popular social networking sites attracts cost-conscious singles, the report says.

In the not too distant future he thinks the prices on smartphones will fall even further, greatly reducing or eliminating any price barriers to consumer adoption.

Meet.com is seeking under $500,000 in an angel round and will present the details of its business plan to investors representing literally billions in capital at the SEVC.

Here’s the company’s video description of its product:

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