Here’s a look at what we’re reading today:

While rumors of Facebook’s penchant for making your private messages public has been greatly exaggerated, there IS a Facebook bug out there that can make posting on your (former) friends’ timelines problematic. Or a whole lot more fun:

A recently found Facebook bug lets you post un-deletable messages to friends’ walls.

Here’s how it works: Once you’ve blocked a person on Facebook, he or she can no longer see content you’ve posted on the social network, including posts you’ve made to their own wall. Since the content is no longer visible, it can’t be deleted. The only way either party can see the post again is if the block is removed.

In a way, Facebook lets you know that’s going to happen when you block someone in the first place: “Blocking means you won’t be able to see or contact each other on Facebook,” reads a message that pops up when you decide to block someone (see screenshot below). However, it’s a one-sided agreement: The person being blocked isn’t notified, and all of the content you’ve previously posted on their wall remains intact but invisible to both of you.

Are you relieved to know that people you have blocked might have written un-deletable comment about you on your wall? We knew you would be.

Speaking of Facebook, is your brand over-posting? Turns out, too much content, no matter how brilliant, is one of the fastest way to lose fans:

More is not always better when it comes to Facebook. Ignoring the fact that most fans never return to a page after they like it, people get frustrated and annoyed by constant posts. Worse than that: now you, the social media professional, has to come up with a large amount of posts. When posting three or more times per day, most of those post are worthless with little value to the fans.

Here are some great stats from an article from the social business:

One-to-two posts a day is more effective than fewer or more posts per day. One or two brand posts receive 32% higher “like” rates and 73% higher comment rates compared to posting 3 or more times a day.

Engagement is highest when brands post four to five posts a week. Posting one to four times a week produces 71% higher user engagement than five or more posts in a given week. Posting less than that, does not maximize your opportunity to target your fans as often as possible.

Meanwhile, over at Google, another algorithm change is on the way, this time to reduce low-quality, exact-match domains from ranking so highly in search results:

The head of Google web spam fighting team Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that Google will be rolling out a “small” algorithm change that will “reduce low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains” from showing up so highly in the search results.

Cutts said this will impact 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. He added it is “unrelated to Panda/Penguin. Panda is a Google algorithm filter aimed at fighting low quality content; Penguin is one aimed at fighting web spam.

This should come as no surprise, as Cutts said a couple years ago that Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank well when they shouldn’t, in some cases.

Likely over the coming days, you will see shifts in the search results where many sites that may rank well based on being an exact match domain may no longer rank as high in Google’s search results.

Finally this morning, take a moment to read this Sikh woman’s response to a mean-spirited photo of her posted on Reddit:

A Sikh woman’s classy, thoughtful response to a mean-spirited photo of her posted on Reddit has not only warmed the hearts of people around the globe, it has even forced the man who posted the photo to look at his actions and repent.

The original poster, a student at Ohio State University who goes by the handle “European_Douchebag,” posted the above photo with the caption “I’m not sure what to make of this.”

Classmates of the woman in the photo, Balpreet Kaur, a neuroscience and psychology student who also attends Ohio State, alerted her to the post on Facebook. Kaur is Sikh, and will not alter her appearance because of those religious beliefs.

In a response to the post, Kaur shared the reasoning behind her appearance, and why what appeared to be a big deal to the man who posted the photo didn’t matter to her at all.

“If the OP wanted a picture,” she wrote, “they could have just asked and I could have smiled.”

According to Kaur, Sikhs believe in the sacredness of the body, because “it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being… Just as a child doesn’t reject the gift of his/her parents, Sikhs do not reject the body that has been given to us.”

Tolerance 1, Internet Trolls 0.

Have a great Monday!

The post What We’re Reading: Facebook Privacy, More Google Algorithms, and Reddit Strikes Back appeared first on 435 Digital.

In a nutshell, here’s how Ohanian says social on the Internet works, what he jokingly calls that “great big secret.”

• The Internet is a level playing field. All links are equal. To rise, you need to catch some attention. Attention is the new currency. Do something fun and cool.
• It costs very little to get  content online. Video, audio, writing, photography, your thought processes, whatever — all it costs is your effort, a little time and the willingness to explore to publish, produce and promote yourself.
• Put yourself out there. Distribution costs are little. What you need to do is win an audience. And when your  audience has  audiences, iteration is  cheap.
• Be genuine. Be honest. Be up front. This is the  hardest principle for some to swallow. We’re used to operating in a command and control mode.  Let it go, take yourself less seriously. Tell the truth. And have some fun!

One founding principle underlies all this: Messaging is not top down anymore. Its grassroots up and coming from all sides. It’s a good thing. It can keep us more on target. As Tech Soup, an NPO consultancy to nonprofits, said:  “We’re often very different people from our supporters. The most successful marketing campaign might not be our favorite.” In this case losing control worked.

As Ohanian says: “Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say, ‘Mister Splashy Pants.’  ”

I know I do.

The post Reddit: Smarty Pants? Meet Mister Splashy Pants! appeared first on 435 Digital.

A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.

The rate at which things spread on the Internet is jaw dropping.  Due to multimedia,  a meme can be a hyperlink, video, photo, drawing, hashtag, word, audio recording or something that hasn’t been invented yet. And because the Internet is primarily social, it spreads quickly via social networks, blogs, email, news sources or other websites.

In the past few weeks, we’ve had a great one — The Pepper Spray Cop. As you undoubtedly know, Lt. John Pike decided to pepper-spray protesters the Friday before Thanksgiving week.  Evident in the original video is his nonchalant sharp-shooting aim and the protestors gentle acquiesence on the University of California at Davis campus.  Other videos take issue with the editing and presentation in the original, offering a different POV. Social sharing network reddit is said to have been  the cradle for the Pepper Spray Cop meme’s genesis, and much conversation is still going on there, as well as formation of some incredible archives of Pepper Spray Cop Memetic Art.

Whether you agree with the Occupy movement or not, a memetic moment like this makes you sit up and take notice.  Here’s a link to a collection of art, videos and parodies curated by Antranik, Anto for short, who says his  “main drive for cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing this blog is for my friends.” It’s a pretty amazing collection. There’s also an interesting collection over at Boingboing.

Mr. Pepper Spray’s popularity is riding the bumper of another powerful meme. This one came in the form of a petition advanced by a 22-year old college grad, Molly Katchpole, who was a force that helped to bring  Bank of America to its knees over debit card fees.

Katchpole started her petition on Change.org, She says in this piece for the Guardian UK that as many as 40,000 people signed her petition in one day and ultimately 300,000 people supported her pledge.  Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s CEO, was forced to answer her charges on national television, Katchpole says.

As to the Occupy movement, there’s much intellectual bantering about what it means, whether it will endure and what it could become.  In a recent piece on the Pepper Spray Meme, Nieman Journalism Lab wondered:  “It will be interesting to see whether the image’s viral life will affect [the] question of “what’s next” for Occupy Wall Street in the world of traditional media.“

We are looking for answers to the wrong question. In my observation, Occupy is unlike anything we’ve seen before because it comes to us during the social blossoming of the Internet.

Occupy is born from the Internet and acts like the Internet. Occupy is the Internet manifest on Main Street.  To say Occupy is predominantly social is not to say that it is not serious or powerful. It is to say that “social” is what it is about. It is about having a conversation about what is  important, what is essential in our joint public lives.

When two people meet at a cocktail party, our conversation is about understanding what we have in common so we can see whether we have ground to continue the conversation in a personal relationship. With Occupy, ground is assumed because that initial conversation has already occurred online and it is time to move onto the next phase of conversation.

Many on the Occupy frontlines come from  a background of  economic privilege under stress [you must borrow large sums have a college degree - but there's no jobs!]  they don’t see a way forward that makes sense. They are saying “Let’s get on with it!”as well as “What can we build together?”

Conversations like this are organic and necessary for moving into the Digital Age and they will put stress on old style organizations — note the initial blindness of leadership at  Bank of America.  Industrial age organizations that resist the evolution to the new social  both online and on Main Street will have much to catch up to later.

So rather than resist, it’s best to mind the memes.

The post What’s my meme? appeared first on 435 Digital.