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Micro Persuasion

Daily links, insights, photos, videos and more on emerging technology.

Facebook Pulls Lexicon Analytics ToolToday

Facebook has taken its promising Lexicon tool down from the site. Perhaps this happened when they pushed their new redesign. Lexicon, like Google Trends, provided limited yet interesting data on site-wide trends. You can read more about it here.

From the Lexicon site....

"Thank you for your interest in Lexicon. We are removing the Lexicon product from Facebook for the time being. We may bring components of Lexicon back in the future, but we are focusing development on our analytics tools for Page owners, advertisers and Platform developers."

Analytics remains a major focus at Facebook for advertisers and page owners. They recently pushed out a tool that lets page owners see detailed data about their individual items. Still, I would like to see the social network emulate G

Trust in Friends Declines, Trust in Experts Rises - Social Media and PR Still WinYesterday

Last week Edelman, my employer, published our tenth annual Trust Barometer study. You can read the full report here. One of the more juicy statistics that Advertising Age and others noted is that trust in peers surprisingly dropped dramatically from 47% to 27%.

Tom Foremski says this is bad for PR:

"This is bad news for PR agencies because social media has been the ‘point of the spear’ for so many firms. This is what brings in new business."

While he's right that social media has been a big business driver, I respectfully disagree with Tom that this is bad news for the PR agencies. It won't make the PR industry's case for social media budgets any less compelling. In fact, it's awesome news. Here's why...

If you dig into the report, you'll note that the Trust data shows that we're desperately seeking out experts. This is unsurprising given the torrent of information we're all contending with. We're self-curating and in the process seeking out higher authorities.

Facebook Will Centralize the Social WebYesterday

Michael Arrington laments about about the decentralized nature of social content on TechCrunch today...

"The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

You might be sick of hearing this from me, but strongly believe that Facebook is the next Google. It took me a while to "get religion," but now I have it. Just as Google brought a simple way to search the web, my observation is that Facebook is poised to do the same for organizing and - this is key - centralizing social content

Google will continue to dominate "pull." But Facebook will aggregate content, make it social and rule "push." Using our social circle it will surface content that we care about just when we want it - and allow us to comment on it all. As more people use Facebook to connect, share and create, a network effect takes over - and the system get even smarter.

Here's an example. In my newsfeed today I saw an item from CNN about Sarah Palin. Within minutes it had dozens of comments. Some 20 minutes later it had 300 comments. Now that pales in comparison to the 2775 comments (as of this writing) that

Facebook Could Eat the WebFebruary 4

Photo credit: mastermaq

Like almost everyone else on the planet, it seems, I am spending more time on Facebook than any other site. The lone exception is Google. The reason I know this is that Safari, my browser, lists Facebook as my most visited site when I access its top sites feature.

In addition to using Facebook to check in on what my family, friends and colleagues are up to, I have been using it as a newsreader for months. The screenshot below is my reader. This is something that the company suggested everyone do here. Although I suspect that most users haven't taken the steps top create a dedicated news list as Facebook suggests, there's not doubt that the social network is becoming a critical source of information. Yesterday, Hitwise published a fascinating report that illustrates just how large Facebook looms as a source fo

Go Big, Get Your Employees on the Bus or Go HomeFebruary 3

The following is also my column in next week's issue of Advertising Age.

Go Big, Get Your Employees on the Bus or Go Home

Photo credit: Traffic by scottpowerz

The single biggest challenge that marketers face over the next ten years is attention scarcity. Bank on it.

According to Andreas Weigland, Amazon.com's former chief scientist, more data was generated by individuals in 2009 than in the entire history of mankind. Human attention, however, is finite - and arguably, it shrinks as we age. 

The end result is downright ugly. It's like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze through two Lincoln Tunnel tubes during the peak of rush hour. Your marketing programs may be the biggest, baddest bus in the flow, but you're competing with everyone else for the same space and time. Chances are, however, your bus is empty. Park that idea for now. We'll come back to it.

Each individual, whether it's a stay-at-home mom or a twenty-something onlin