Mediaboss Marketing

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

30-Apr-2014

Contact: Matthew Swayne mls29@psu.edu 814-865-9481 Penn State

Social media companies that give users a greater sense of control can ease them into interface changes, as well as curb defections to competitors, according to researchers.

"Several studies have looked into how social media companies have failed," said Pamela Wisniewski, a post-doctoral scholar in information sciences and technology, Penn State. "What we need to think about is how social media companies can be more adaptive and how they can improve the longevity of their sites.

In a study of the reaction to the introduction of Facebook's Timeline interface between 2011 and 2012, researchers found that users considered the mandatory transition to the new interface highly stressful. They also found evidence that suggests that giving users a voice can give them a sense of control to better adapt to new online environments.

Facebook's Timeline interface allowed users to access posts by date, highlighted certain events and set privacy controls to remove, modify visibility or hide posts on their page. The company initially provided a blog to release information to users, but then closed the blog, said Wisniewski, who worked with Heng Xu, associate professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State, and Yunan

Chen, assistant professor of informatics, University of California, Irvine. Denying users the ability to use the blog as a place to voice their concerns and give feedback may have thwarted one of the positive strategies people use to cope with changes in their environment, the researchers said. People who feel more in control become focused on solving problems and adjusting to the change, while those who do not feel they have control tend to focus on their emotions and resort to more negative coping strategies.

The researchers, who presented their findings today (April 30) at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, said that 67 percent of users' coping strategies in the Timeline transition were negative. The users complained, threatened to switch to another social network and urged others to drop Facebook.

"Without giving people a way of offering feedback, you make them feel less empowered and they have more of a feeling of hopelessness," said Wisniewski.

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Social media users need help to adjust to interface changes

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TTA14 - FGLN - Social Networking
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Cisco has put out to pasture its WebEx Social enterprise social networking (ESN) suite, opting instead to partner with Jive Software.

Cisco and Jive are marketing a bundle that includes Ciscos WebEx Meetings and Jabber for online meetings, Web conferencing, IM and audio/video communications and Jives ESN software, which provides Facebook like capabilities for workplace collaboration, like employee profiles, activity streams, microblogging, document sharing and group workspaces.

The bundle is already live with some customers, like Thomson Reuters, where 60,000 users can invite colleagues to and launch WebEx meetings from the Jive interface, as well as fire up a Jabber IM session from within Jive. Details on pricing were not immediately available.

Cisco and Jive plan to progressively link these products at a technology level so they work in a more integrated fashion. The companies will also offer consulting and services for customers that need customized implementations.

For Cisco, this partnership represents a shift in strategy. For years, the company pushed WebEx Socialformerly called Quadas an integral part of its overall enterprise collaboration and unified communications (UC) product stack.

Clearly the ESN suite never gained as much traction in the market as Cisco expected it to, so the company is pulling its horse from this race, where competition is broad and intense among vendors like Microsoft with Yammer and Sharepoint; IBM with Connections; Tibco with Tibbr; and Zimbra with Telligent.

Instead, Cisco wants to double-down on WebEx Meetings and Jabber, and also on its UC products, with a particular emphasis on video conferencing, a segment of the market where it sees a ripe opportunity to outfit meeting rooms of all sizes with video collaboration systems.

Were not going to rest until every single room in every single business all over the world has extraordinary video conferencing and collaboration equipment. Thats our mission, Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of Ciscos Collaboration Technology Group, said in March when the company announced an array of new and improved video conferencing products.

The way Cisco sees it, most conference rooms either dont have conferencing equipment or, if they do, the systems dont work properly, so its zeroing in on that underserved market. Developing WebEx Social further doesnt fit in with this strategy.

Cisco also faces stiff competition in this UC marketespecially from Microsoft and its Lync UC server, IBM, Avaya, Siemens Unify, Alcatel-Lucent, Mitel and ShoreTelso it has its hands full battling these and other rivals.

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Cisco retires WebEx Social, partners with Jive instead