Ruminating on Open Graph Protocol

Ever wondered how some links on Facebook are shown with an image and a brief paragraph? I dug deeper to understand what Facebook was doing behind the scenes to visualize the link.

To my surprise, there was something called as "Open Graph Protocol" that defined a set of rules for telling Facebook, how your shared contents should be displayed on it.

For e.g. we can add the following meta-tags in any web page and Facebook would parse these tags when you post the link to this page.

<meta property=”og:title” content=” “/>

<meta property=”og:type” content=””/>

<meta property=”og:url” content=””/>

<meta property=”og:image” content=””/>

<meta property=”fb:admins” content=””/>

<meta property=”og:site_name” content=””/>

<meta property=”og:description” content=””/>

More information can be found at this link -  http://www.optimizesmart.com/how-to-use-open-graph-protocol/

Ruminating on the #hashtag economy

The '#' (hash) symbol was originally created for twitter users to categorize their messages. It was used by Twitter users to identify keywords and trending topics. After Twitter, users on other Social channels such as Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest jumped on the bandwagon and started using #hashtags to participate in online conversations on a topic. A good article explaining the origin of hashtag is available here.

Ironically Facebook adopted #hashtags quite late in the game. But today Facebook has full support for hashtags and when we click on a hashtag, we see a feed of all posts (what people are saying) about that event or topic. Hashtags have become so popular that recently Obama encouraged citizens to use the hashtag "#1010Means" to protest against low minimum wages.

Needless to say hashtags are a powerful concept for advertisers to capitalize on. It helps advertises to market their products/services to the right audience; who are interested in a particular subject.

Organizations have also stated using the power of hashtags in Social channels for building innovative services that bring in new sources of revenue or help improve customer satisfaction rates. This whole new paradigm is known as the "#hashtag economy". 

For e.g. Amex has creatively used hashtags to send promotions to their customers. https://sync.americanexpress.com/twitter/Index

Kotak Bank has created a Customer Self-Service platform on Twitter; wherein customers can tweet the right hashtags to perform banking transactions such as checking balance, request for checkboook, etc. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/finance/banking/kotak-mahindra-bank-links-current-accounts-to-twitter/articleshow/32733759.cms

Social Tools in the Enterprise

Microsoft has conducted an interesting survey on the demand for social tools in the enterprise.
The results of the survey are available here: http://goo.gl/zG8atQ

Financial Advisors and Social Media

A lot of financial advisors are using Social Media to interact with their customers and engage them. But as pointed out on this link, there are certain SEC regulatory constraints that financial advisors should be wary about while using social media.

First, all disclosures (earnings, operations, etc.) should be made available to all parties at the same time. We cannot share information only on social media and not through other channels.
The second challenge is around handling negative comments on social media sites. How to officially respond? Can anyone put comments on the Facebook page?
The third important facet is that of the customers privacy. If an advisor responds to a customers question on twitter or facebook and inadvertently discloses some kind of financial information about the customer, then it could be considered as a violation of privacy by SEC.

Also from a regulatory perspective, it could be required to store all communication and retain them for future. There are a number of players in the market that provide services for achieving all social media interactions. E.g.
https://www.backupify.com/products/personal-apps-backup
http://www.socialware.com/products-services/socialware-compliance/
http://www.symantec.com/advisormail/
http://www.smarsh.com/social-media-archiving