Facebook ban during business hours for employees, is it right?

This argument has been going on ever since Facebook started growing like wildfire. Facebook was originally built for people to connect and share with friends and their networks. It currently has whopping 500million users and businesses are beginning to use it to promote their business.

Here in Nigeria, it has more than 1.6million users; an average young person on the street has a Facebook account while employees now use the site in the office. While working in a corporate setting, with branches across Nigeria, we have access to it like every other technology facilities. For us to know who were at work in a particular day (in the head office and our branches), we simply log on to Facebook, right there would see all staffs live on Facebook!

Facebook and Productivity

For every employed personnel, they are expected to add value to the organization so while Facebook is good for socializing it could also tells on staffs’ productivity. But the big question is; should companies now ban Facebook out rightly?

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9ice rules Facebook as Mr. President catches on!

While diving into data of Nigerians on Facebook and other social media, it’s noteworthy to see 9ice(a popular music icon) maintaining a growing fan base for the past 6months. He has been leading the pack of Nigerian artiste on Facebook since January. As at January he had slightly over 40,000 fans but that number as multiplied by almost time 3 in less than 6months.

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While Mr. President on the other hand, as been growing at an extremely high rate less than a month the Fan page was created. On the launch date, he had at 3,000 fans and that number has grown to a whopping 117,243 Fans. Just last week, it hit 100,000 and barely a week after it has added over 17,000 fans.

Mr. President remains the hottest celebrity online, as his facebook sensation continues.

One of the funny things on this is that, the top artiste(9ice & Dbanj specifically) with most fans on Facebook are not very active on twitter.

Other Artiste

9ice 119,789
Goodluck Jonathan 117,321
D’banj 66,260
Banky W. 42,648
Asa 25,019

Expect more stats in our half-year of the Nigerian Internet market. If you know more Fan pages, please drop below.

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President Goodluck Jonathan hits 100,000 fans on Facebook [updates]

We recently wrote about our President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan joining Facebook to engage Nigerian youth. He has consistently used the platform to communicate with fans on the page and it went from 2,ooo fans at our last writing to a whopping 100,000 today.

With just about 11 comments posted by the president, he got the following comments and likes;

That is an average of 1,946 comments and 2,117 likes on each comments. The post is driven mostly of praise singers but more aggressive people are joining the page and asking the president serious questions like the proposed 10billion for the Nigeria at 50 Anniversary and electoral reform.

Any impact so far?

On monday the president announced to  rescind his decision to suspend super eagles from international competition qouting some of the comments on the facebook page as the reason for taking the decision. Should we say the president is connecting perfectly with the people? Only time will tell!

During the time of writing this article… another 156 has joined the president’s page making it 100,156!

What is you view so far about the presidents Facebook presence?

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President Goodluck Jonathan officially joins Facebook !!! Reaches 2,028 fans under 9 hrs…

Today, 28th of June, 2010, President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan joined facebook by creating an official fan page. This is in response to his promise at the last convocation of the University of Port Harcourt, Last Month.
So far he has just one update, and a lot of comments from Nigerians…sadly most are praise singers…but who cares, the president has joined the likes of Obama on Facebook, we pray he gets addicted!

Want to be a fan? Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/9vdr5a

What do you think of this development?

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Interview with Facebook founder, inspiration for startups

Facebook is a phenomenon no doubt, if it were a country it would be more than three times the size of Nigeria. It has grown in leaps and bounds, it has changed the way we communicate on the internet and most especially it as changed the world!

Mark went through how Facebook growth surpassed his expectation and competition from Twitter and the emerging “location technology”.

Mark, expressed that he was a bit afraid of twitter but so far, he has learnt to watch competitor closely and be able to take right direction.

“I looked at their rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they’re going to be bigger than us,” Zuckerberg says. But he says he was wrong in thinking Twitter’s growth rate would continue in the same way that Facebook’s had. “It just turned out that that their growth rate was kind of unnatural. They got a lot of media attention, and it grew very quickly for a little period of time,”
Read more

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7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook

Using a Weak Password

Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word “houses”: hO27usEs!

Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile

It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls

For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

Posting Your Child’s Name in a Caption

Don’t use a child’s name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn’t on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.

Mentioning That You’ll Be Away From Home

That’s like putting a “no one’s home” sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.

Letting Search Engines Find You

To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn’t checked.

Permitting Youngsters to Use Facebook Unsupervised

Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. “What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious,” says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment “Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes” every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings.

Courtesy Consumerreport.org

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VTN, Nigerian e-payment site set to raise N1.5 Billion ($10M) for expansion

We interviewed VTN CEO, Peter Ojo recently about their innovative e-payment system. Today comes a very big news, Virtual Terminal Network (VTN) is set to raise N1.5 billion ($10Million) in private placement. I got the scoop in my mail just this morning.

The fund is said “… will be used for the expansion of the company’s network, enhance its working capital and increase its operational capacity.”

The placement comprises of 1,520,000,000 ordinary shares of N1.00 each at N1.05 per share. This means that with about N55,000 you can participate.

Remember, this is a private place and not IPO. It’s usually opened to institutional investors and not the general public. If you are one, why not request for info here.

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As Facebook takes over the web; Analyst Review

If you have been taking note of the happenings around the web, you would have seen this coming but you know, most people are concern about privacy that they failed to realize that true privacy is only practicable offline. At the last Facebook F8 summit, an annual event where Facebook discusses its future and development platform with developers. This year’s was held on the 21^st of this month, and Mark Zuckerberg made the bold statement in a blog post Building the Social Web Together it was indeed an expose on how to build the web together from Facebook’s empire. As the saying goes; He who pays the piper dictates the tune, such is the case of Facebook with over 400million users, it has gone beyond the hands of early adopters to the mainstream who have glued their lives with Facebook, spending billions of minute daily on Facebook.

Facebook stats

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events)
• Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

The Moves

The major products announced are Social plug-ins which includes; Like Button, Activity feeds and Graph API.

The like button allows you to recommend any content around the web, sharing them on your profile page and automatically keep you update of the changes on the web pertaining to that website. This also gets you connected to the page of the “Liked” site. With this, you also will be able to see which of your friends liked same content, creating a massive network effect. This allows your friends become editor for the contents as such, it limit editorial control of the sites.

Activity feed: it’s part of the social plugin integrated to a site and allows you to see what your friends are reading on the site, automatically creating a most read column on the site that are targeted to your friends interest. With the psychological believe that your friends are the best pattern to know what your interests are.

Graph API is the suite which allows developers access a Facebook user social graph. So largely the permission is tied to your explicit access you grant the application.

The Battle against Google

The new normal is; people are the one giving authority, it’s no more link exchange of the old model of web 1.0 from which Google thrived massively. As Mark said on Social graph pattern of Facebook “…social graph, which is the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together. Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships.”

Google Adsense is a perfect match for what the web needed in early 2000s but things are changing which Google also can testify to. The web is becoming more social; people are highly engaged on the web these days, sharing likes, posting content and video. Google Orkut which is popular in Brazil and also acquire Youtube back in 2006. Upon the solution brought to the market by Google (contextual search ads, contextual content ads, geotargeting), comes demographic targeting which Facebook now introduce. Google has data people are looking for, but it’s yet to gain has much user data as does Facebook.

While we cannot count Google out yet, because of the fact that the site still have more content than any other search engines and social networking are still growing. Remember also that Google has more than $23billion cash at hand which they can use to buy up any social networking site which could be twitter but twitter is facing a big challenge now with its third party app developers.
A strategic move that will save Microsoft

Not long ago, Microsoft bought 1.5% stake in Facebook which allowed it to expand its ads deals with Facebook and preference on its product integration with Facebook. Though most people saw Microsoft move as overvalued but I saw it more than just an investment but as a strategic move to get hold on the future possibilities which is just unfolding.

Facebook recent launch now integrate Microsoft docs. This allows you to work on your document in collaboration with your friends on Facebook  and also allows you to edit on or offline. Microsoft office is the big cash cow in the Microsoft economy, as the cow is getting thinner everyday with the internet disruption; this is a big life support to savage the dying empire. Though a big challenge to Google docs!

Argument still on about whether your friends are truly the ones you want to share your document with, well you will be glad to know that quite a number of employee of some companies are on Facebook. In my formal company (finance industry for that matter) we had more than 50% of our staffs on Facebook. With branches across the country, information within the company flows faster on Facebook than the normal medium. Also, the age groups on Facebook are gen Ys, this group are hyper connected and as they mature and join the workforce, they will bring in their pattern of communication which will disrupt already exist platforms.
Ushering in of web 3.0

I have said a time and again that web 3.0 will be an intelligent web, a web where information about you is known by websites you visit and they are able to give you what you like based on your past actions, friends preference and other geographic and demographic information about you. In web 3.0, the data created in the web 2.0 era will now start making sense and mining and analysis social data would have been solved.
Make the money, do no evil

Google’s mantra, do no evil has helped Google public perception and has been the basis of judging other companies. Facebook has faced public outburst several times and this step will definitely raise some highbrows. Facebook beacon that was introduced in 2007 was something more like too early and drastic for the user but gradually they are moving towards it.

As to making money, Facebook is coming under pressure to deliver on multimillion dollars invested in the company. With the continuous data Facebook is aggregating, they are working extensively to monetize it. They recently took over 100% ad inventory of their site off Microsoft; this points to the fact that they seem to have realized the importance of social driven advertising model they have and are ready to maximizing to the fullest.

To the question whether Facebook is unshakable, I will say time will tell! New things keep coming up, new companies shaking the big ones. Google overtook Yahoo and now Facebook is threatening Google we should not be surprised if another site comes along to threaten Facebook then we will see how they can work it out.

For any local site willing to attain the level of success of Facebook, why not leverage on its platform? Take advantage of the data they have to build something for your startup and move on from there.

What do you think about the raise of Facebook and the new products announced?

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Facebook adoption and spending on the rise in Africa

Facebook adoption continues to see growth every month. Let’s take a look at how it has feared this quarter. The countries under review have a combined 85% of total African population on Facebook.

Growth in South Africa has saturation point while Egypt, Tunisia and morocco are all fast rising.  Egypt added the highest number of users (392680) between February and now followed by Morocco (345, 380), Tunisia 309,920 and Nigeria, 155,480. Egypt added almost as much users the total number of Ghana, Facebook users.

Egypt is very far ahead of the pack, leading South Africa with more than 500,000 users and penetration still at 23.5%, it sure can increase the gap in months to come. South Africa’s increments in just 2% as oppose 21% or Morocco and Tunisia and 13% of both Egypt and Nigeria.

Chart

Demography

Spending on Facebook

As Facebook continues its search for profitability, it has to selectively choose which African country to focus on. Apparently, South Africa is a country of choice given the technology advancement in the country. Though Egypt and other African countries have considerable user base, but if they are unable to affect Facebook bottom-line, I think will be a huge liability to the company.

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GTBank Intelligent use of Social Media

GTBank is Nigeria’s most dynamic bank with technology driven products and services, they have transformed banking in Nigeria. The stock is currently the highest priced in the banking sub-sector. With impressive performance before and after the banking crisis. GTBank have presence in 5 African countries and the UK.

For now, GTBank remains the case study for successful social media strategy implementation in Africa! I’m amazed at how well planned and executed their social media strategies are… big up. Let’s look at it one after the other.

Facebook Fan Page

Interesting stats (as at 28 March 2010);

• Fan page Launch: 25^th September 2009
• Comments on launch date: 6
• Comments on the second day of launch: 64
• Fans after 38 days: 20, 000
• Total comment since launch: 12,876
• Average comment on a post: 198

Looking at the stats, you will discover that GTB is rightly fishing where the fishes are! The essence of social media is to connect with customers and GTB is effectively doing so! GTB recently launched a Facebook application that it embedded within the Facebook page. The application links users to key services provided by GTB.

Twitter Page

Twitter is also a very powerful and well adopted social media platform in Nigeria, with hundreds of thousand Nigerians on Twitter. Currently twitter is among top-twenty most visited sites by Nigerians. GTB’s twitter page is well branded and operated. With the way the page is being used, it’s can be concluded that’s there is dedicated staff running the platform.

URL: twitter.com/gtbankonline

YouTube

GTB also have presence on YouTube with their creative adverts uploaded to the page. Well branded and structure, GTB is connecting with customers on the emotional level has the videos are well package to make the customers imaging and feel about the brand with ecstatic passion.

URL: GTBank on YouTube

Flickr

This platform showcases GTB photo gallery; displaying some of their CSR efforts.

URL: GTBank on Flickr

Wikipedia

Visibility really is the main driver of online presence; if you are not visible then you are not online. Wikipedia is one of the most trafficked and well index by Google. GTB is present on Wikipedia with information about the company up-to-date.

URL: GTBank on Wikipedia

Ndani Magazine

A quarterly e-magazine packaged by GTB to give insider look into GTB to the customers. The magazine is well packaged, available online for view and download. Another edition is scheduled for release next month.

URL: NDANI

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business social networking site; GTB is also present on the site. With current and past employees linked with it.

URL: GTBank LinkedIn

Are you a GTB staff how has their service touched you via social media? Or you are a social media strategist, what do you think about their strategies?

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