Retailers Seek Partners in Social Networks

Just a few years ago, the retail industry was deeply shaken by a growing trend in store browsing — shoppers wandering around the aisles with their cellphones, surveying the merchandise while looking online for somewhere else to buy it for less.

Some retailers explored blocking Internet service in stores. Others swapped out bar codes to make them incompatible with their competitors’. But ultimately, most major retailers decided that many customers would be on their phones regardless of what stores did — so they decided to get on their customers’ screens.

With online retail competition increasing, nowhere is that frantic embrace more evident this year than in the parade of partnerships and projects traditional retailers have formed with digital companies, many of them for the holidays.

“We want to be where the consumer is,” said Gregg W. Steinhafel, chief executive of Target, in an interview.

“I think it’s like anything that hits you with a ton of bricks, it requires you to step back and say, ‘O.K., it’s very sobering, now what does this mean for us?’ ” he said. “We ultimately concluded that if that’s the way the guest is going to live and shop, then we want to be a showroom. And we love showrooming — provided we can capture that sale.”

For Target and many other retailers, among this season’s favorites is Pinterest, which Casey Carl, president of multichannel at Target, described as “one of the social platforms where it’s actually not only about sharing.”

“It’s not just about, ‘Hey, look what I had for dinner!’ It’s about products,” he said.

There are holiday-party-planning boards for Target Red Card holders. Nordstrom, which already released its holiday catalog on Pinterest, says it will station signs in its 117 full-line stores that highlight some of its popularly pinned wares.

Pinterest itself is starting a new feature on Wednesday, a “Holiday Gift” category that will not only offer shoppers gift ideas but will give retailers yet another display window — this one online — for their items.

“Pinterest is a service about connecting with things, things you have, things you like, things you want,” said Steve Patrizi, head of partner marketing for the nearly four-year-old company. “So for retailers, it’s a no-brainer. Go where people are already looking for things.”

But as the title “multichannel” or “omni-channel” coordinator might suggest, most major retailers are not linking themselves to just one social media site.

Walmart is leveraging Facebook and Google. Toys “R” Us is pushing hard on YouTube. Sears is on Instagram and hosting holiday parties on Twitter.

According to comScore, a company that collects and analyzes online data, Pinterest has plenty of competition. Compared to its more than 43 million unique visitors in October, Twitter had 64 million, and Facebook towered over its neighbors with more than 178 million unique visitors.

And while shoppers referred from Pinterest to retailers spent more, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, those referred from Facebook were buying more frequently. During a four-week period in October and November, customers referred from Facebook spent an average of $54.64 per order, compared to an average of $123.50 per order from Pinterest, IBM found. Referrals from Facebook converted to sales at nearly four times the rate of Pinterest referrals.

“Last year we would’ve used three or four social platforms,” said Jeffrey J. Jones II, chief marketing officer at Target. “This year we’ll use seven or eight.”

Nicolas Franchet, head of retail and e-commerce for Facebook, said that while the company did not disclose what portion of their advertisements came from retailers, it was an important area for Facebook, which worked with retailers big and small.

“If you find somebody” we aren’t working with, Mr. Franchet said, “let me know.”

Walmart, for example, will use Facebook to announce its local store manager’s special on Black Friday. Those deals will vary by location, and will be posted on each store’s individual Facebook page, like Walmart South Boston, Va.

Social Networks in a Battle for the Second Screen

The companies were seeking more than just bragging rights.

Facebook and Twitter both see the social conversation around television as a way to increase use of their sites and win a bigger piece of advertisers’ spending, which eMarketer estimates will be $171 billion across all types of media this year in the United States. In recent months, they have engaged in an escalating battle — publicly and behind the scenes — to claim the title of the nation’s digital water cooler as they woo networks and advertisers.

Sorting out which site deserves the crown, however, is tricky. Each company uses its own standard for determining social TV conversation, and unlike other types of Internet traffic, there is no neutral arbiter.

Twitter, citing data calculated by Nielsen’s SocialGuide service under a confidential formula, said about 600,000 people had posted more than 1.2 million messages, or tweets, about the “Breaking Bad” finale over about a 10-hour period surrounding the East and West Coast broadcasts. But that included retweets, which are messages that simply pass along what others have posted.

Facebook said three million people had chimed in on its service. But that counted original posts, comments on those posts and even “likes,” the quick thumbs-up that people can give to a friend’s Facebook item. And the service looked at everything in a 24-hour period that included the broadcasts.

The public relations blitz shows how important old-fashioned television has become to the Internet-era social networks, particularly Twitter. The company, based in San Francisco, has signed TV-related deals with dozens of advertisers and content distributors over the last year, like Verizon Wireless and ESPN, to burnish its growth prospects as it prepares to sell stock to the public for the first time. That initial public offering is likely to take place next month.

Neither Facebook nor Twitter has disclosed how much revenue it makes from advertising related to TV, and some industry experts doubt they are earning much.

Still, there is little question that television is a favorite topic for users. About half of Americans visit social networks while watching TV, and one in six Americans posts comments about shows during their broadcasts, according to a coming report by eMarketer, which found that people in some countries like China and India are even more active in their chatter.

Live events like sports attract the highest engagement. “Sports events comprise somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of TV programming in any given month but generate close to 50 percent of the Twitter activity” around TV, said Sean Casey, senior vice president for product at Nielsen’s SocialGuide unit.

Nielsen has found that the average audience for Twitter messages about a TV show is 50 times the number of people posting messages about the show. If 2,000 people are posting messages about a show, for example, an average of 100,000 people are seeing those messages. The research firm also found that heavy Twitter activity around a popular broadcast can drive more people to both the show and Twitter.

That kind of potential impact intrigues networks and advertisers, and this week, Nielsen began reporting detailed Twitter activity along with conventional TV audience ratings to its clients.

For viewers, the line between what they see on TV and what they see on their smartphones and tablets is quickly blurring.

During this year’s United States Open, for example, the beer maker Heineken sponsored the tennis tournament in New York, the television broadcast and video highlights posted on Twitter, including a remarkable 54-shot rally between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. Potential viewers could catch up on the matches from anywhere.

“We were trying to bring people to the event who weren’t there,” said Ron Amram, senior media director at Heineken USA. “All of us have realized how powerful Twitter can be to get the conversation going.”

Twitter, considered by many to be the leader in social conversation around live TV, has spent much of 2013 courting networks like Fox and MTV and consumer brands like Heineken. Last week, for example, it signed a deal with the National Football League to distribute football clips sponsored by Verizon Wireless and other companies.

Such partnerships have created a significant new revenue stream for Twitter.

“We’ve built a business around working collaboratively with TV,” said Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue. “We really see our role as a force multiplier.”

Although Mr. Bain declined to provide financial details about the initiative, the public may learn more when the company files information for prospective investors, which could occur as soon as this week.

Facebook, whose social platform is built more around each individual’s web of relationships than rapid-fire conversation, has a more complicated relationship with TV.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated, because of erroneous information provided by Nielsen, the average audience for Twitter messages about a TV show. The number of viewers of such messages was found to be 50 times the number of people posting the messages (some posters send multiple messages); it is not the case that an average of 50 people see each tweet. 

Iran Bars Social Media Again After a Day

The Web sites had been blocked since huge antigovernment protests exploded after the disputed presidential election in 2009. But for almost a full day on Monday, jubilant Iranians were able to call them up without resorting to VPN software, which is illegal.

The Internet has long been a battleground in Iran between those pushing for more personal freedoms and hard-liners who feel they must protect society from dangerous influences — a struggle that may have played out on Monday.

Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, has repeatedly promised an easing of Internet restrictions. He has a Twitter account, which is managed by people close to him. His foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has Facebook and Twitter accounts where he actively engages in debates.

Political insiders say Monday’s mysterious unblocking of Facebook and Twitter was an attempt by certain groups within the Iranian political establishment — it was not clear exactly who — to measure the reactions of Internet users.

“Monday’s move was a test conducted to see what people would do if Facebook and Twitter were opened,” said one source close to the new government who asked to remain anonymous because of the secrecy surrounding the matter. “Apparently the test results have been unfavorable, because the sites have been closed again.”

That was echoed by Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political analyst close to the government. “It seems to me the authorities wanted to see what would happen if the Web sites were opened,” he said. “This is not uncommon in Iran.”

It was unclear exactly what the authorities would have been seeking to find out with such a test.

Conservatives tended to favor a technical glitch as the explanation for the unblocking of the Web sites. “God willing this has been a mistake,” Judge Abdolsamad Khoramabadi, a prominent hard-liner, told the semiofficial Mehr news agency. “But if this was done on purpose, we will confront those behind it.”

Judge Khoramabadi warned on Sunday that Facebook is destroying families, saying that it is the cause of one-fifth of all divorces in the United States. “Some officials seem to be unaware of the dangers of this Web site when they speak of unblocking it,” he told the Khabaronline Web news site.

On Tuesday, the semiofficial Fars news agency published a long article pointing out the dangers of social media, saying that Facebook was blurring the lines between private and public.

“Many women choose profile pictures without their Islamic scarves,” Fars wrote in an editorial. “Facebook is aiming to blur our cultural lines between private and public. There are no borders on Facebook. This is extremely dangerous.”

But in another sign that Monday’s unblocking was a test, a well-known TV anchor, Reza Rashidpour, who campaigned for Mr. Rouhani, congratulated Iranians on Monday for gaining unrestricted social media access but also cautioned them. “We hope our people will restrain themselves and our officials will be patient,” he said.

If indeed a test was conducted, it seemed to reveal a pent-up hunger for less restriction and more interaction. One Twitter message by this reporter — “Hello world, we are tweeting without restrictions from Iran” — was retweeted nearly 900 times, with many Twitter users welcoming Iran to Twitter and Iranians saying they could not believe what was happening.

But the window quickly closed. Rayaneh, a poet, said she tried to get online on Monday to post a message to the world. “1, 2, 3 ... 1, 2, 3 ... Can you hear us? We are testing if Facebook is running without VPN here,” she said. “But by that time, the filters were back on.”

Bits Blog: Facebook Offers New Windows Into Social Conversation

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Bits Blog: A Summer of Data Hacking Social Problems

Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online

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As Social Media Swirl Around It, Supreme Court Sticks to Its Analog Ways

They will be joined, if Twitter is any guide, by thousands of anxious, curious people across the country eagerly waiting for the court to rule on a remarkable number of major cases with huge implications. With just days remaining in its 2013 schedule, the court has left dangling its considered opinions on same-sex marriage, affirmative action and the nation’s voting rights laws.

“We all crave information instantaneously,” said Ms. Blatt, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter who has argued 33 cases before the court, including one that is still pending this year. Last Monday, and again last Thursday, she found herself scouring legal blogs, looking for whatever clues might exist.

“I always thought those people were strange, and there I was, doing it,” she said. “People are dying to know something that they can’t.”

In a city beset by leaks — a young programmer recently gave a hoard of top-secret documents to newspapers — the high court’s annual rulings remain stubbornly opaque until they are handed out (on paper, first) by the court’s public relations staff. Meanwhile, the nine justices have the luxury of appearing publicly oblivious to the swirl of social media, the angst of Washington’s legal community and the voracious appetite of America’s 24-hour news cycle.

Many Washington institutions are making the high-tech transition; even the chairman of the Federal Reserve holds regular news conferences now. But like the Kremlinologists of the cold war, who deduced Communist power struggles by a leader’s presence on the Red Square reviewing stand, modern-day court watchers can do little more than speculate about when and how the court might rule.

“You never know when it’s going to come down,” said Mr. Olson, a former solicitor general who would know, if anyone would. A court observer for decades, he has shown up on each of the last three decision days at the court. “I just try to prepare for anything.”

Mr. Griffin is a founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the organization that filed the legal challenge to Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California. Four times in the last two weeks, the court has issued decisions in other cases but not about that law’s constitutionality. Each time, Mr. Griffin has returned home and unpacked, lest his suits become wrinkled.

On Monday, Mr. Griffin will return once again, joined by the four plaintiffs in the case, who plan to stay in Washington until the high court rules, before they return home to California. If the court overturns the ballot initiative, the couples hope to have a wedding ceremony as soon as possible.

Across California, gay rights organizations have started many early mornings refreshing their Web pages for news and then going back to bed. Staff members at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center have elaborate plans for action after any outcome, and they are preparing to head into the office in the early morning as they anticipate widespread celebration or protest in West Hollywood.

And lawyers at the office of California’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, have been preparing for weeks with legal memos anticipating a wide range of possible outcomes.

The Web is ready, too. On Thursday, after the justices once again did not issue rulings in any of the biggest cases, news organizations blared the “news” to their followers. “BREAKING NEWS: No major decisions from Supreme Court today,” the Yahoo News site announced on its Twitter feed. Another Twitter user wryly observed: “Clearly all Supreme Court judges were unpopular kids in high school and, excited by all the attention now, are gonna drag this out.”

A year ago, in the minutes before the court announced its decision on President Obama’s health care law, Twitter users posted more than 13,000 messages a minute about the court. (By comparison, there were 160,000 a minute at the height of the presidential debate in Denver last year.)

The court’s term is dwindling fast. The schedule calls for a round of rulings on Monday, and court observers believe the justices may issue decisions on Wednesday and Thursday as well. There has been speculation of a July 1 session, though Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is scheduled to teach a class on the history of the Supreme Court in Prague on July 2.

There will be other issues in Washington this week. The Senate is set to take a final vote on an immigration overhaul, perhaps on Thursday. (If the court overturns the federal Defense of Marriage Act first, lawmakers may not need to seek immigration protections for same-sex partners of immigrants, advocates said.)

But most of the intellectual guesswork will be about the justices and their rulings.

There are ways, if you know them, to offer educated guesses about the timing and authorship (if not the substance) of the court’s coming decisions. The tricks have become de rigueur among the Washington social set, whose members swap Supreme Court theories at cocktail parties the way Angelenos swap movie industry gossip.

“Everybody around this time starts to try to predict who has the decision and what it’s going to say,” said Irving L. Gornstein, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University. Mr. Gornstein calls himself a “participant” in the court-guessing parlor games. This year, he said, is the worst he can remember.

“Here you have four huge cases, which is really extraordinary for a Supreme Court term,” Mr. Gornstein said. “I can’t remember when you’ve had this many cases at the end of a term.”

Among the tricks of the court-watching trade is knowing that each of the justices is assigned to write the majority opinion in at least one case during each two-week “sitting,” when cases are heard for oral arguments. On Monday, if there are rulings yet to be announced from a particular sitting, and a justice who has not yet written an opinion from that set of cases, that justice might be a good bet.

Knowledgeable observers also keep close watch on the number of boxes of rulings set out by the public information officers at the court. The more boxes, the more rulings.

“It is a game that everybody’s playing because it’s so important,” Mr. Olson said. “These decisions are really important to the people involved, and they have consequences for a long time.”

Adam Liptak contributed reporting from Washington, and Jennifer Medina from Los Angeles.

Disruptions: Social Media Product Plugs Draw Scrutiny

Texas Instruments

In 1982, Bill Cosby appeared on television showing off a snazzy new computer. “Looking for a powerful home computer?” he said as he waved his hands over a Texas Instruments PC that looks archaic now. “This is the one! With 16K memory, it can take you a long way.”

The commercial made it obvious that Mr. Cosby, a prominent comedian and television star, was being paid to promote the boxy device.

Computers have changed significantly in the decades since. And, to the confusion of consumers, celebrity endorsements have, too.

Today, when celebrities and people with large followings on social networks promote a product or service, it’s often impossible to know if it’s an authentic plug or if they were paid to say nice things about it.

Take Miley Cyrus, the 20-year-old pop star who was traveling around America last week promoting her new album. One morning she posted on Twitter: “Thanks @blackjet for the flight to Silicon Valley!” The details of the arrangement between BlackJet, a Silicon Valley start-up that arranges for private jet travel, and Ms. Cyrus are unclear. But Dean Rotchin, chief executive of BlackJet, said “she was given some consideration for her tweet.” Ms. Cyrus did not respond to a request for comment.

Thanks @blackjet for the flight to Silicon Valley! #wecantstop

— Miley Ray Cyrus (@MileyCyrus) June 3, 2013

Did her 12 million Twitter followers know about the arrangement? It’s unlikely, and that lack of clarity, increasingly common in the social media postings of celebrities, is starting to draw the attention of federal officials.

“In a traditional ad with a celebrity, everyone assumes that they are being paid,” said Mary K. Engle, associate director of the advertising practices division at the Federal Trade Commission. “When it’s not obvious that it is an ad, people should disclose that they are being paid.”

Under F.T.C. guidelines, companies and the celebrities they are sponsoring risk being deceptive by not noting that these endorsements are advertisements, Ms. Engle said. Sometimes, they are breaking federal rules called “Dot Com Disclosures” that require clarity about sponsorships, even on Twitter. People who violate the law can be given warnings or be fined, though the size of the financial penalty isn’t clearly defined.

Some celebrities are unapologetic about promoting their investments anywhere they can. In 2011, Ashton Kutcher was guest editor of an online-only version of Details magazine, where he profiled a dozen companies in which he was an investor or adviser, but did not disclose the investments. At the time, Dan Peres, the editor in chief of Details, said the magazine stood “by how we communicated Ashton’s involvement with some of the companies.” Mr. Kutcher declined to comment.

Mr. Kutcher has also tried to sneak companies in which he invests onto “Two and a Half Men,” the CBS show for which he is a lead actor, by placing stickers for the tech outfits Foursquare, Chegg and Flipboard on his character’s laptop. He boasted in an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he “pulled it off,” until the network found out and started blurring the back of his laptop during the show.

Mr. Kutcher regularly posts about companies he invests in on Twitter, too. He also uses his Twitter and Facebook heft (he has about 14 million followers on both services) when negotiating with companies he wants to invest in, by noting that he will share the product on these social networks. The F.T.C. declined to comment on any particular instances where celebrities have posted about companies with which they have financial relationships. The agency did say there are “open investigations” into companies that have broken federal rules.

“Like advertorials and infomercials, with Twitter, our view would be that the consumers have a right to know. It gives them that additional information, just like a celebrity endorsing something on TV,” said Andrea C. Levine, director the National Advertising Division, part of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which reviews advertising claims for accuracy.

“It’s a new day, with a new way, but an old issue,” Ms. Levine said.

According to talent agency employees, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to divulge private dealings with clients, some A-list celebrities can be paid as much as $20,000 for a Twitter post or Facebook update.

In May, Kim Kardashian posted on Twitter: “Pregnancy lips…. @EOS to the rescue! LOL” with a picture attached of her using EOS lip balm. Ms. Kardashian did not respond to a request for comment.

Last month, the actor Michael Ian Black was more forthcoming and told his two million Twitter followers that Dos Equis had paid him thousands of dollars to share an ad for the beer company.

@planetoffinks No, they wrote it and paid me thousands of dollars to run it.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) May 11, 2013

Linda A. Goldstein, a partner and chairwoman of the advertising, marketing and media division at the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, said that in all of these contexts the advertisers, investors and celebrities had a responsibility to disclose that they have something to gain.

“The message to brands is that you are responsible for the action of your spokespeople, so when you engage them, they should be aware of their obligations,” Ms. Goldstein said. In some cases individuals are breaking the law, she said, and she believes the F.T.C., or another government agency, will eventually bring fines against a celebrity for not disclosing his or her financial relationship.

Although there are no specific rules about the language people must use in an endorsement, Ms. Engle of the F.T.C. suggested using the word “ad” to preface a tweet. “It only takes up two extra characters.”

There is a risk, of course, that today’s celebrities could anger fans by not disclosing their financial ties. In an interview with InfoWorld magazine in 1982, William Turner, the marketing manager for Texas Instruments’ consumer products group, was asked why he had chosen Mr. Cosby to represent the company.

“He represents comfort,” Mr. Turner said, “and people trust him.”

Pregnancy lips…. @eos to the rescue! LOL twitpic.com/ctpyjj

— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) May 28, 2013

Rachel Sklar Tries to Become a Social Media Entrepreneur

It was happy hour at the Thompson hotel on the Lower East Side, and Rachel Sklar — entrepreneur, networker, relentless promoter of women — was hoisting herself onto the bar. In one hand, she held a silver ice bucket; in the other, a glass of Champagne and an iPhone.

About 40 women had gathered on a cool April evening to celebrate TheLi.st, an e-mail listserv and Web community that Ms. Sklar founded three years ago to help women in tech help one another. Thanks to an infusion of cash from the Knight Foundation and some angel investors, TheLi.st was about to become an actual for-profit business, a would-be cross between LinkedIn and Facebook for women who will pay for the chance to connect with others like them. Think binders not just full of women, but assembled and read by them.

Throughout the evening, Ms. Sklar, 40, had asked the women to submit written notes on how TheLi.st had helped their careers, for a chance to win prizes (like bags full of cosmetics or T-shirts).

“TheLi.st helped me realize the significance of my company’s progress at an important time,” Ms. Sklar read from a torn bit of paper. “Claire! Oh, Claire went for dinner. But she won a beauty bag.”

In the world of Ms. Sklar, all women working in tech (or media, or politics) are winners, even if they have a problem with her. As long as they are succeeding, she can use them as evidence — data points, she might say — that women deserve to be more frequently hired, funded and featured on the supposedly meritocratic tech scene.

“All I need is for you to be awesome,” she said in a telephone interview. “Then I can wave you around as an example of women who are amazing, who get stuff done when I come up against the people who say, ‘Oh, we tried really hard but we couldn’t find any qualified women.’ ”

Fast-talking, witty and irrepressibly enthusiastic, Ms. Sklar inspires a strident loyalty among many in her orbit. At the party, nearly every woman had a story about Ms. Sklar brokering introductions that proved crucial to her career.

“I first met Rachel at a happy hour drinks, and it ended up leading me into this group of women that has literally changed my career and my life,” said Callie Schweitzer, director of marketing and communications at Vox Media and a recurring presence on “30 Under 30” lists.

“I had nothing to offer her,” said Jocelyn Leavitt, a founder of Hopscotch, an iPad app that helps teach children to write code, “and she was just like, ‘Come with me, let me introduce you to these people.’ I didn’t know anything about anything about tech.”

Stacy London, a host of TLC’s “What Not to Wear” and a founder of StyleforHire.com, said she had started “stalking” Ms. Sklar because she found her Twitter feed (39,000 followers, nearly 50,000 tweets) so informative.

“When I launched my tech company and was looking for like-minded women,” Ms. London said, “she hooked me up with everyone.”

And on and on and on.

But how did Ms. Sklar, who has spent far more time writing musical theater lyrics than source code, become the unofficial yenta for New York women in technology?

It is a long, zigzagging tale, full of ambition, happenstance, heartbreak and summer camp.

Born and raised in Toronto, Ms. Sklar dreamed of a life in the theater. (In 1994, as a drama instructor at her childhood summer camp, she became, as far as she knows, the first person to stage a theatrical version of “Grease 2.”) After college, she applied to the New York University Tisch School of the Arts musical theater writing program, but abandoned her application when the University of Toronto law school accepted her. “I didn’t actually want to be a lawyer,” she said, but “this was something my parents thought would be a prudent move for me.”

Still, the experience would prove formative. “Law school and summer camp are the two experiences that inform pretty much all I do,” she said.

A corporate-lawyer gig eventually brought her to New York, where she decided to indulge a lingering interest in journalism. Through a combination of Mediabistro classes and persistence, not to mention a tireless capacity for socializing, Ms. Sklar rose from FishbowlNY blogger to a founding editor at The Huffington Post and Mediaite.

Her crowded calendar and outsize personality made her a microcelebrity in certain circles, featured frequently (if not always flatteringly) in Gawker and The New York Observer.

She is, by her own admission, a relentless starter of projects. In 2006, HarperCollins contracted her to write a book tentatively titled “Jew-Ish: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and All the Ish in Between.” On her 36th birthday, she formed Charitini.com, which encouraged people to donate money to charity in lieu of buying birthday drinks for friends.

Yahoo’s Tumblr Deal Is a Bet on a Shift in Social Media

It also heralds a larger shift in social media. Facebook arguably invented modern social networking, and is still the king. But increasingly its approach is seen as passive and outdated as people flock to sites like Tumblr where they can be more actively engaged in creating personal, expressive content to share — and which could potentially translate to advertising dollars.

“People love a stage or a pulpit from which they can broadcast,” S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, explained. “The genie is out of the bottle. Everyone loves it and it’s very seductive for users to get online and be a source of content, rather than just consuming passively.”

This is behind the appeal of sites like Tumblr, where millions have created signature blogs; or Reddit, the news aggregator, which is encouraging users to make and upload video content to share; or video sites like YouTube. Also, Vine, a Twitter app that allows people to easily make and post six-second videos has been wildly popular since its debut in January. One of Vine’s creators, Dom Hofmann, said its initial success was “rooted in the simplicity of the tool.”

Snapchat, the messaging application, which lets people add text or draw cartoons on top of photos and videos, is processing upward of 150 million images each day. And Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year, has attracted more than 100 million users in its short life span — letting people add vintage effects and other filters to their photos.

The more services like Vine and Tumblr can “come up with ways to let people control and generate content and project identity,” Mr. Sundar predicted, the more successful they will be.

Still, these newer sites have not yet proved they are moneymakers, which makes Yahoo’s move a big bet. And as much as Tumblr’s sale can be seen as a success story for the small company, it also hints at the darker struggles of a social media service that is rich in users and nothing else.

Plus, Facebook is still a force to be reckoned with. The company has a billion-plus users and generated $5 billion in revenue last year. But except for the Instagram acquisition, Facebook has been slow to introduce tools to let members make and create interesting content beyond uploading photos and videos.

The result is that it has evolved more into a social directory, a kind of yellow pages of the Internet, where people spend time tending to their public image and endlessly tweaking security settings to keep their party pictures private. And signs have begun to emerge that users are becoming bored and disenchanted with the site.

A recent report by Piper Jaffray that surveyed 5,200 American teenagers on their online use found that while Facebook was still the most important media destination for teenagers, its popularity slipped by 9 percent from spring of 2012.

Gene Munster, one of the lead analysts on the survey, said that if anything, the results showed that the taste and interest of Web users, particularly younger ones, was fickle and fleeting.

“It’s not a question of whether or not Facebook will stay relevant,” Mr. Munster said. “On the margin, they will still be relevant. It’s about the potential for declining engagement and what that impact is over the longer-term for making money.”

People have so many news feeds, sites, apps and in-boxes competing for their time, said Kim Celestre, an analyst with Forrester Research, that the sites and services where they are active participants are more likely to hold their attention for longer, attracting advertising dollars. Tumblr says its members spend 24 billion minutes on the site each month.

“Big marketing campaigns are looking to bring people into their brand and immerse them,” she said.

Bits Blog: The New Flickr Is Pretty, but Is It Social?

screenshot via Flickr Flickr’s new site design creates a clean look and feel, but it is still missing a true social layer.

On Monday, just a few hours after Yahoo officially announced it had purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the company unveiled a new version of Flickr, a photo-sharing Web site.

It sure is pretty, with lots of high-resolution, rectangular photos and a clean, grid design. The company is also offering everyone on the site a free terabyte of space to store their photos. That’s potentially enough to stores hundreds of thousands of photos.

But the new Flickr still feels like it’s missing one thing: social. Like its counterparts, including Facebook, Instagram and Google Plus, the new Flickr site has a familiar design: There is a banner across the top, which is a place to showcase a person’s favorite image. There is the classic square profile picture for each user off to the left.  To the right, a counter shows the number of photos someone has uploaded to the site and when they joined the service.

Where Flickr deviates from the rest of the social pack, however, is with the company’s choice not to show how many friends or followers a user has.

Yes, this might sound like a much-needed departure from the norm of ego-driven social Web sites, but how many people follow someone on a social site can do a lot for the users of the service.

First, for people browsing a social Web site like Flickr, a follower count can be a quick signal to help someone understand if a person is worth following. It’s almost a quantified look at the so-called wisdom of crowds.

There is, of course, the ego aspect of displaying such a number. A simple search on Twitter for ““more followers than”” shows tens of thousands of friends publicly prodding each other as they race to gain a larger following on the site.

On Instagram, there are more than 370,000 images tagged with hashtag #moreFollowers. There are also over three million pictures tagged with #100likes, where people desperately hope to pass 100 “hearts” on a photo they have taken. Although Flickr offers a “star” button to say someone likes a photo, its almost impossible to find on the site, especially for newcomers.

These numeric signals are more than just ego, they help create both a game dynamic and a reward system on these social sites — one that still seems to be missing from Flickr.

Last year, Yahoo unveiled a new Phone application, which begged the question: could Flickr, once the best photo-centric Web site on the Internet, regain that crown?

Its latest design seems to push it closer to that point. Now it just needs to show people how many new friends the site has made.

Bits Blog: Photos Take the Spotlight in Updates to Google’s Social Network

Users of Google’s photo service will get a one-click option to enhance photos.

Google may dominate Web search, but when it comes to social networks, the company’s Google Plus service is an underdog against Facebook and Twitter. As of December, Google Plus users were spending about 12 minutes a month on the service, according to the company, a smidgen of time compared with the hours that Facebook users spend on that site every month.

But Google has one unique weapon in its quest to build traffic for Google Plus: it is increasingly tying all of its services, from search and maps to video chats and photo sharing, to the social network. Google doesn’t consider Plus a social network in the Facebook sense, but views it more as a connective layer personalizing and connecting Google’s myriad of services together for each user.

The company said on Wednesday at its developer conference in San Francisco that about 390 million people a month used the network of services, with slightly less than half using the core service, called the stream, which features updates and posts from a user’s social network.

To increase the time spent on the service and make it more useful, the company unveiled a redesign of the stream and related apps at the conference.

The most striking improvements are to Google’s photo sharing service. When users upload a batch of photos to Google’s online photo album via Picasa or mobile devices, Google’s algorithms will sort through them and attempt to choose the best of the bunch — eliminating blurry shots, duplicates and bad exposures and favoring photos of smiling people, landmarks and those that are aesthetically pleasing

“Photography is very labor-intensive,” with all the editing and uploading that comes along with shooting photos, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of engineering. “At Google, we think we can give you some of your time back.”

Users will also get a one-click option to automatically enhance photos to fix red eye, adjust exposure, soften the look of human skin and correct other flaws.

The quirkiest new photo feature, which Google calls “auto awesome,” can stitch together a series of snapshots — a child blowing out birthday candles and cutting a cake, for example — into a short animation, or merge multiple photos shot at different exposures into a single image with high dynamic range.

To encourage users to make Google their principal place for photo storage, the company will allow users to set up their mobile devices to automatically upload all photos to Google, with unlimited free storage at standard resolution and 15 GB of storage at full resolution for high-quality prints.

All of the new photo features are scheduled to be rolled out later on Wednesday and will be available on existing Google Photo albums as well as new ones.

The Google Plus stream of updates has been given a new multi-column format.

The more familiar part of Google Plus, the page showing the stream of updates from your social networks, has been given a new multicolumn format. It creates a busier look, but also offers a view of more updates, including photos, at one glance.

Google’s Hangouts service is getting easier access from mobile devices.

Leveraging Google’s strength in search, the stream will also feature automatic hash-tagging of topics mentioned in a post and use those to provide links to more information from a user’s social network or the broader Web. For example, a friend’s comment about an event like the Boston Marathon bombing could pull up other comments and related news articles.

Hangouts, Google’s text and video chatroom service, will also receive some new features, including easier access from mobile devices and other Google services like Gmail and archiving features that can keep a permanent history of a conversation within a group, whether it’s a business discussion about the merits of various strategic plans, the evolution of a romance or family debates about where to go on vacation.

Coverage of the annual Google I/O conference for developers, May 15-16, 2013.

China’s Social Media Fuel Citizen Quake Response

Never mind that the government had declared that the narrow mountain roads to Lushan were open only to authorized rescue vehicles. Two days after the April 20 earthquake, Mr. Wang was hitchhiking with 19 gear-laden strangers to this rubble-strewn town. While the military cleared roads and repaired electrical lines, the volunteers carried food, water and tents to ruined villages and comforted survivors of the temblor, which killed nearly 200 people and injured more than 13,000.

“The government is in charge of the big picture stuff, but we’re doing the work they can’t do,” Mr. Wang, 24, a former soldier, said recently, standing outside the group’s tent, which was cluttered with sleeping bags, work gloves and smartphones.

The rapid grass-roots response to the disaster reveals just how far China’s nascent civil society movement has come since 2008, when a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Wenchuan, not far from Lushan, prompted a wave of volunteerism and philanthropy. That quake, which claimed about 90,000 lives, provoked criticism of the government for its ham-handed relief efforts. Outrage mounted in the months that followed over allegations of corruption and reports that the parents of dead children had been detained after protesting what many saw as a cover-up of shoddy school construction. Thousands of students died in school collapses during the quake.

Like the government, which honed its rescue and relief efforts after the Wenchuan earthquake, the volunteers and civil society groups that first appeared in 2008 gained valuable skills for working in disaster zones. Their ability to coordinate — and, in some instances, outsmart a government intent on keeping them away — were enhanced by Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblog that did not exist in 2008 but now has more than 500 million users.

“Civil society is much more capable today compared to 2008,” said Ran Yunfei, a prominent democracy activist and blogger, who describes Weibo as a revolutionary tool for social change. “It’s far easier now for volunteers to share information on what kind of help is needed.”

One of those transformed by the Wenchuan earthquake was Li Chengpeng, a sports commentator from Sichuan turned civic activist. When the Lushan earthquake hit, Mr. Li turned to his seven million Weibo followers and quickly organized a team of volunteers. They traveled to the disaster zone on motorcycles, by pedicab and on foot so as not to clog roads, soliciting donations via microblog along the way. What he found was a government-directed relief effort sometimes hampered by bureaucracy and geographic isolation.

Two days after the quake, Mr. Li’s team delivered 498 tents, 1,250 blankets and 100 tarps — all donated — to Wuxing, where government supplies had yet to arrive. The next day, they hiked to four other villages, handing out water, cooking oil and tents.

Although he acknowledges the government’s importance during such disasters, Mr. Li contends that grass-roots activism is just as vital. “You can’t ask an NGO to blow up half a mountain to clear roads and you can’t ask an army platoon to ask a middle-aged woman whether she needs sanitary napkins,” he wrote in a recent post.

The government, however, prefers to rely on state-backed aid groups to deliver supplies and raise money, largely through the Red Cross Society of China. But that organization is still reeling from a corruption scandal in 2011 that severely damaged its reputation and spurred greater support for nongovernmental charities, which are generally thought to be more transparent.

Faced with a groundswell of social activism it feared could turn into government opposition, the Communist Party has sought to turn the Lushan disaster into a rallying cry for political solidarity. “The more difficult the circumstance, the more we should unite under the banner of the party,” the state-run newspaper People’s Daily declared last month, praising the leadership’s response to the earthquake.

Still, the rise in online activism has forced the government to adapt. Recently, People’s Daily announced that three volunteers had been picked to supervise the Red Cross spending in the earthquake zone and to publish their findings on Weibo.

You're the Boss Blog: One Social Media Start-Up Rises From the Ashes of Another

The adventure of new ventures.

One of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to do is to admit defeat. But in the case of Apu Gupta and Nick Shiftan, failure was likely the best thing that could have happened to them.

In 2011, Mr. Gupta, 37, and Mr. Shiftan, 31, founded Storably, a company they billed as Airbnb for storage space. Anyone with spare space — in their basement, driveway, garage, closet — could rent it out to those in need. Storably facilitated the transaction, provided insurance and allowed users to post reviews.

Mr. Gupta and Mr. Shiftan raised $750,000 from the venture capital firms NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures and introduced Storably in September 2011. Two months later, the founders knew it wasn’t working. The site was getting barely 3,000 visitors a month. “That’s the equivalent of opening a retail store and having crickets show up,” Mr. Gupta said. “It’s abysmal. By the time we shut down, only 23 people had used the site for a transaction.”

At that point, Mr. Gupta and Mr. Shiftan had burned through 25 percent of their money and felt they had two options, which they presented to their investors. “We said we can give 75 percent of your investment back and liquidate the company, or we can figure something else out,” Mr. Gupta said. “And they told us, ‘We didn’t invest in the idea, we invested in you guys. We don’t want our money back, so go figure something else out.’ It was an amazing thing to hear.”

Courtesy of Curalator After two months, Apu Gupta (left) and Nick Shiftan knew Storability was not working.

The pair — along with their first employee, Brendan Lowry — brainstormed for about a month, coming up with three or four ideas apiece each day. At the end of the month, they had about 70 ideas, seven of which they deemed promising. They tested a few, including DrinkedIn, an application for LinkedIn that would match users and send them to a bar to have a drink and network.

But the idea that rose to the top was a platform that allows companies to measure the impact of Pinterest and other visual social media. They called the company Curalate, and they introduced it in beta in March 2012 and for real two months later. Mr. Gupta said the rise of Pinterest last year looked similar to Twitter’s early days with brands “falling over themselves to get on board but reluctant to commit until they had some way to measure their presence on the platform.”

Enter Curalate, which created a way to listen and measure visual conversations. The company’s algorithm recognizes images using pixels and then matches it to a brand. “The platform tells companies the conversations people are having about their product,” Mr. Gupta said.

He told the story of a shoe offered by the department store H&M. The company’s Web site displayed the shoe in a bright neon color, but the shoe customers were “pinning” and describing in loving terms was a combination of beige and pink. “So there was a big discrepancy between what the brand thought people wanted versus what people actually wanted,” Mr. Gupta said. “And that’s the whole point behind what we’re doing. We reveal, by looking at their imagery, what consumers really care about.”

Here’s where the company stands now, roughly a year after its introduction.

Employees: 15

Location: Philadelphia

Pitch: “We are trying to help brands form meaningful relationships with their customers,” Mr. Gupta said. “You have to be able to understand your customers and if they speak to you visually, you need a platform for that. It’s not just about Pinterest, but a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. Consumers increasingly talk about brands using pictures rather than words. Even Facebook has become a more visual medium. We pin and reblog and Instagram our lives.”

Challenges: Finding the right talent — salespeople, developers and designers — has been an ongoing challenge. A more perplexing challenge, Mr. Gupta said, is staying focused. Curalate’s space is so wide open that the company can try just about anything, and that freedom has caused them to sometimes lose direction. “When a space is new, it’s easy to feel pulled in different directions by clients,” he said. “It’s easy to lose your own point of view. So we really have to figure out a road map. And sometimes that means we need to say, ‘this is what we build and it’s not right for everyone’ and we may have to turn some clients away.”

Traction: Mr. Gupta said Curalate was now used by 350 brands that paid a monthly fee for its software as a service, which included a suite of marketing tools in addition to analytics. The company recently added the ability to analyze Instagram images to its platform. “Pinterest is about the things people aspire to buy, the things they want,” Mr. Gupta said. “Instagram is people celebrating what they bought.”

Revenue: The company declined to discuss its revenue, but the typical brand spends about $1,500 a month for Curalate’s services.

Financing: After going through what was left of the original $750,000, the company raised another $3 million late last year from the same investors.

Competition: Repinly, Piquor and PinReach are a few companies operating in the space, but none of them “is doing anything across platforms or using image recognition,” Mr. Gupta said.

What’s Next? “We want to broaden the number of platforms we get insights from,” Mr. Gupta said. “Companies also want us to build things that encourage consumers to communicate visually more often.”

What do you think? Have Mr. Gupta and Mr. Shiftan hit upon the right idea this time?

You can follow Eilene Zimmerman on Twitter.

Social Media’s Effects On Markets Concern Regulators

That is the question the financial industry and government regulators are trying to answer after a Twitter hoax on Tuesday that claimed President Obama was injured in an explosion at the White House. That report caused the Dow Jones industrial average to drop temporarily by 150 points, erasing $136 billion in market value.

The markets recovered in minutes, but the episode has heightened concern among regulators about the combination of social media and high-frequency trading.

The vulnerability, in part, stems from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision this month to let companies and executives use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to broadcast market-moving news.

High-frequency trading systems are designed to make trades based on keywords within milliseconds. The hoax message also went out on a new feature on Bloomberg’s financial data terminals that delivers select Twitter posts to hedge funds, investment banks and other users.

On Tuesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to hold a public meeting in Washington with a couple of dozen high-frequency traders to discuss whether there should be additional safeguards to protect against the effects of social media on markets.

Even as markets rebounded on Tuesday, some investors lost money on the quick decline while others made money if they bet on a sharp drop.

“In 2010, we passed Dodd-Frank, the big financial reform bill, but nowhere in there do they mention high-speed trading or technology,” said Bart Chilton, a member of the trading commission. “That’s how quickly markets are morphing. Now, here we are three years later, woefully unprepared.”

The false report (“Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured”) was posted on Tuesday after Syrian hackers broke into The Associated Press’s Twitter feed.

Immediately, the mood shifted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

“It was nine, 10, 11 seconds and it was fast and then the question was ‘Why’?” said Andrew Frankel, co-president of the brokerage firm Stuart Frankel & Company.

He said traders realized shortly after that the post was a hoax since the television screens showing Bloomberg and CNBC had nothing about an explosion at the White House. Still, the episode recalled the 2010 “flash crash,” when an automated trading program caused the Dow to sink more than 600 points, and it left a deep skepticism of social media on the trading floor.

“You look at how quickly that happened and now everyone wants to release corporate earnings on Twitter,” Mr. Frankel said, in between calling out, “Sell!” to his team. He added: “The concern is ‘How do you know what’s right and what’s not? How do you know what’s hacked and what isn’t?’ ”

Spokesmen for Twitter and The A.P. declined to comment.

Even though Syrian hackers remain the prime suspects, the trading commission is now investigating 28 different futures contracts and specifically examining the five-minute period before and after The A.P.’s Twitter account was hacked. It is looking to see if there were anomalous trades, and investors who benefited from them.

“To think it was all lost because of this hack attack is very disconcerting,” Mr. Chilton of the commission said. “We would be irresponsible if we turned a blind eye to these debacles.”

The decision to allow market information on social media came after Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, had posted on Facebook that the service had exceeded one billion hours of streamed video a month, sending its stock price up.

“We appreciate the value and prevalence of social media channels in contemporary market communications, and the commission supports companies seeking new ways to communicate,” the S.E.C. said on April 2.

Two days later, Bloomberg introduced a feature on its financial data terminals that incorporates a stream of relevant Twitter posts delivered to investors. All of Bloomberg’s more than 310,000 subscribers, who pay at least $20,000 a year for access to the terminals, now have access to those posts, which the company says are clearly identified as Twitter messages.

“The S.E.C.’s decision reflects the reality that we were dealing with in that this information is being distributed by companies and investors are consuming it and we needed to get it on the terminal,” said Brian Rooney, the company’s core product manager for news, adding, “We’re not in a world where people live in a vacuum.”

At the same time, the use of algorithms designed to peruse millions of sources of information like blogs and social media to analyze and execute trades is only becoming more widespread.

Bits Blog: Boston Start-Up Buzzient Offers Social Data to Police on Explosives Chatter

Jodi Hilton for The New York Times Tim Jones, the chief executive of Buzzient, is both an explosives expert and head of a social media management company.

When two bombs exploded at Monday’s Boston Marathon, good Samaritans of all sorts rushed in, from off-duty medical personnel to residents who opened their homes to evacuees. Tim Jones, the chief executive of Buzzient, a Boston-area social media management start-up, felt a similar urge to help, using his company’s ability to search Web history on forums, comments and social media, to focus on specific topics —  like explosives.

Mr. Jones also happens to be the former head of an explosives-detection company. Given his background, he jumped in when this week’s news broke — as a kind of virtual bystander. Nearly two years ago, he had offered his company’s social media monitoring tools to the Boston Police Department, pro bono. This week, his first thought was to tweak his company’s search algorithms to target online chatter about explosives, in case the police department would seek that kind of data as their investigation continued. The following is condensed and edited from an interview with Mr. Jones about his company’s volunteer efforts to assist with the investigation.

Your company, Buzzient, has been working pro bono with the Boston Police Department since 2011, shortly after the London riots. How did that relationship begin?

We were big proponents of Boston’s “innovation district” about two years ago, and with that started to work more closely with the mayor’s office. I received an inquiry from the mayor’s chief of staff, and this was right after the London riots.

The London police weren’t paying attention to social networks, they had no idea that groups of people were communicating on social networks saying: “Hey, five guys, take tube and start something here. Another five guys take the tube and start something there.” The Boston Police Department saw that, thought, “Hmm, this is something we should pay attention to.”

Police Commissioner Ed Davis reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re interested in what you guys are doing, we’d like to know a little bit more.” He came over to our office, sat down with us, and saw that there was kind of a shared vision of how we could use emerging technology to at least give them a little bit of an early warning system. So what we offered to do was make this available to them pro bono. To be clear, there’s no financial relationship between Buzzient and the City of Boston, we’ve never been formally requested by the City of Boston or the F.B.I. to use Buzzient. It’s something we just did because it was the right thing to do.

How did you first hear the news on Monday about the explosions at the Boston Marathon?

I saw a couple of alerts on the phone. The first thing I did was I sat down and just logged into the system myself and started making changes, based upon my knowledge of explosives. (In a prior life I ran an explosives detection company that I spun out of Georgia Tech.) There is a timeliness to this around gathering data and the best thing to do was to sit down and up the tempo of the system that we had running. So we began to focus on social media conversations and content around explosives.

With your background in explosives detection technologies, what kinds of things did you think would be helpful to look for on the social Web?

As it has turned out, I believe these explosives are going to turn out to be either black powder or TNT-based. But a lot of what I worked on before was on the detection of plastic explosives and plastic explosive variants — C4, RDX, HMX, PETN and TATP. The analysis we conducted here was really around: were people around online talking about these much more destructive explosives? That’s to figure out if there were any telltale signs of someone asking about these complex explosives becoming frustrated, deciding they would go for less destructive explosives, like TNT. It was also to determine whether there is any ongoing threat of people trying to use these more complex explosives.

How did you get involved in the field of explosives detection?

At the time I was a venture capitalist with a particular focus on spinning technology out of our national labs and major universities. 9/11 comes along and I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m making good money as a venture capitalist, but is there more to life?”

I had previously seen technology coming out of Georgia Tech that enabled you to take the equivalent of a chip, a semiconductor, and identify either explosives or biological elements to detect them based on the vapor trail they create. Every time an explosive comes into contact with air it creates a unique vapor trail, a unique signature. So the signature for TNT is different than the signature for C4. By deploying this low-cost chip technology, the thesis was, one could build a very, very low cost, very ubiquitous detector grid that you could then deploy in things like mailboxes, lamp posts, airports, etc.

The frustration we ultimately found was at that time I think the attention of the venture capital community had already shifted away from homeland and global security back to the Internet, particularly the consumer Internet. When everything happened on Monday, I kind of tilted my head and said, “I told you so.” This is the stuff we knew we needed to do and, quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of appetite for doing so.

What would be the holy grail for mining social analytics in the Boston Marathon case?

The holy grail would be something similar to what happened with the ricin letters that were sent to the White House: someone who has logged onto a forum, and has logged in with some identifying piece of information —  a user name, an e-mail address —  has asked particular questions, commented, maybe, on other posts. Someone who has, in effect, self-identified, where someone basically puts out enough information you could say, “Oh, this person is kind of asking pretty much the same sorts of questions that correspond to what we found in the physical forensics.”

Kelly Issues Rules for New York Police Officers’ Use of Social Media

As word of the order spread, police officers across the city checked their accounts to see if anything they had posted might run afoul of the new rules. Some edited their personal accounts to remove references to the department.

One officer, who had served in the military, replaced a Twitter profile photo of himself in his blue patrol hat with a portrait of himself in an Army uniform. Another wondered if his profile should include the word “detective.”

For years, officers faced relatively few official restrictions on social media, where many proudly posted photos of themselves in uniform and listed their job as “N.Y.P.D.” Indeed, the Police Department has lagged behind other jurisdictions in formalizing rules for personal online behavior.

“Such an order is not unexpected,” said Roy T. Richter, president of the Captains Endowment Association, the union that represents high-ranking officers. “The only surprise is that the order was not put out before now.”

The order followed recent embarrassing online activity at the Fire Department in which two of its members, including the fire commissioner’s son, wrote racially inflammatory Twitter posts. Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, however, said on Thursday that his order had been in the works long before.

The Fire Department is drafting its own social media policy, a spokesman said.

In issuing the new rules, Mr. Kelly sought to motivate officers to scrutinize their postings in what appeared to be an effort to defuse any lurking social media land mines.

The three-page order dated Monday details online behavior that could land officers in trouble, including posting photos of other officers, tagging them in photos or putting photos of themselves in uniform — except at police ceremonies — on any social media site.

Members of the department are also “urged not to disclose or allude to their status” with it. Doing so could make that person ineligible for certain sensitive roles.

Other regulations were more straightforward: Do not post images of crime scenes, witness statements or other nonpublic information gained through work as a police officer; do not engage with witnesses, victims or defense lawyers; do not “friend” or “follow” minors encountered on the job.

Violations of the order can result in disciplinary action, including dismissal. Officers with existing social media accounts are ordered to “immediately ensure that their personal social media site is reviewed and in compliance with this order.”

The order, which builds on the city’s general social media policy and was reported on Thursday in The Daily News, comes a year and a half after officers posted insulting Facebook comments about the West Indian American Day Parade. In that case, more than a dozen members of the department were disciplined.

It also barred local commanders from sending out posts without approval from the department. Last year, one Brooklyn precinct commander was criticized for posting photographs of men about to be released from custody to a Twitter account maintained by the precinct.

“I think the captain’s actions were actually another example of the innovative thinking of our precinct commanders,” Mr. Richter said on Thursday. “He was thinking outside the box and he should be commended.”

Mr. Kelly said the order was intended partly to avoid confusion between the department’s official statements on social media, and personal statements by officers. He likened the rules to those put in place by many other agencies and private businesses.

“One of the issues in a complex business like this is that people say they’re part of an organization, this organization, and make a statement that the public can interpret as policy,” he said. “You can’t run an organization like that.”

But, he said, the department had not assigned anyone to comb through social media sites looking for violations; the new rules would be enforced when the department learned of potentially troublesome postings.

The guidelines appeared to broadly match those adopted by other big city departments around the country.

The Detroit Police Department issued its guidelines in 2011 after an officer posted photos of a suspect wielding a machete on his Facebook page. That same year, the Albuquerque police also barred department members from identifying themselves on social media. That order came shortly after an officer, involved in a fatal police shooting, was seen on Facebook describing his job as “human waste disposal.”

Findings: Good News Spreads Faster on Social Media

Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, sick children, murdered spouses — the more suffering and mayhem, the more coverage.

But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”

Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication — e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations — found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things?

To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’s Web site. He and Katherine Milkman, a Penn colleague, analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months, controlling for factors like how much display an article received in different parts of the home page.

One of his first findings to be reported — which I still consider the most important social-science discovery of the past century — was that articles and columns in the Science section were much more likely to make the list than nonscience articles. He found that science aroused feelings of awe and made Times readers want to share this positive emotion with others.

Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative emotions like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”

“Stories about newcomers falling in love with New York City,” he writes, were more likely to be e-mailed than “pieces that detailed things like the death of a popular zookeeper.” Debbie Downer is apparently no match for Polly Positive, at least among Times readers.

In another attempt to understand what’s buzzworthy, neuroscientists have scanned the brains of people while they hear about new ideas. Then, as these people told others about what they had heard, the scientists observed which ideas spread and which didn’t.

You might predict that people would pass along the most memorable ideas — the ones that lighted up the brain regions associated with encoding and retrieving memories. But that’s not what happened in the experiments, which were conducted by Emily Falk along with colleagues at the University of Michigan and researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The best predictors of buzz were elsewhere, in the brain regions associated with social cognition — thoughts about other people. If those regions lighted up when something was heard, people were more likely to talk about the idea enthusiastically, and the idea would keep spreading.

“You’d expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated and successful in spreading ideas that they themselves are excited about,” says Dr. Falk. “But our research suggests that’s not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important.”

This social consciousness comes into play when people are sharing information about their favorite subject of all: themselves. This is intrinsically pleasurable and activates the brain regions associated with rewards like food, as demonstrated in a study by Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell of Harvard. In fact, the study showed, it’s so pleasurable that people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about themselves.

Past research into everyday conversation showed that a third of it is devoted to oneself, but today that topic has become an obsession thanks to social media. Rutgers researchers classify 80 percent of Twitter users as "meformers" who tweet mainly about themselves.

The result is even more Polly Positivity, and not just because people are so adept at what psychologists call self-presentation: pointing out one’s own wonderfulness. While people have always said nice things about themselves in traditional conversations and saved the nastier comments for others, today they’re more diligent in spreading the word through written media like e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

“In most oral conversations, we don’t have time to think about exactly the right thing to say,” Dr. Berger explains. “We fill conversational spaces by saying what’s top of mind. But when you write something, you have the time to construct and refine what you say, so it involves more self-presentation.”

Dr. Berger’s experiments have shown that people say more positive things when they’re talking to a bigger audience, rather than just one person — a result that helps explain the relentlessly perfect vacations that keep showing up on Facebook.

But does all this positivity actually make the audience feel any better? Not necessarily. A study in Utah showed that the longer people spend on Facebook, the more they think that life is unfair and that they’re less happy than their “friends.”

Similar results were observed in Germany by a team led by Hanna Krasnova, which recently reported a “rampant nature of envy” and other “invidious emotions” among heavy users of Facebook.

“The spread and ubiquitous presence of envy on social networking sites is shown to undermine users’ life satisfaction,” the German researchers conclude, describing this phenomenon as “the self-promotion-envy spiral.”

That spiral hardly sounds like a positive trend, but there’s probably a quick way to reverse it: turn on the television. Mass-media producers and editors have always known a reliable way to assuage envy. Once they’ve scoured the globe to bring calamity and chaos into the living room, even the most miserably unhappy couch potato knows that there is someone, somewhere, doing worse.

Twitter Hacks Force Companies to Confront Security on Social Media

Burger King’s Twitter account had just been hacked. The company’s logo had been replaced by a McDonald’s logo, and rogue announcements began to appear. One was that Burger King had been sold to a competitor; other posts were unprintable.

“Every time this happens, our sales phone lines light up,” said Ryan Holmes, the chief executive of HootSuite, which provides management and security tools for Twitter accounts, including the ability to prevent someone from gaining access to an account. “For big brands, this is a huge liability,” he said, referring to the potential for being hacked.

What happened to Burger King — and, a day later, to Jeep — is every brand manager’s nightmare. While many social media platforms began as a way for ordinary users to share vacation photos and status updates, they have now evolved into major advertising vehicles for brands, which can set up accounts free but have to pay for more sophisticated advertising products.

Burger King and Jeep, owned by Chrysler, are not alone. Other prominent accounts have fallen victim to hacking, including those for NBC News, USA Today, Donald J. Trump, the Westboro Baptist Church and even the “hacktivist” group Anonymous.

Those episodes raised questions about the security of social media passwords and the ease of gaining access to brand-name accounts. Logging on to Twitter is the same process for a company as for a consumer, requiring just a user name and one password.

Twitter, like Facebook, has steadily introduced a number of paid advertising options, raising the stakes for advertisers. Brands that pay to advertise on Twitter are assigned a sales representative to help them manage their accounts, but they are not given any more layers of security than those for a typical user.

Ian Schafer, the founder and chief executive of Deep Focus, a digital advertising company that also fielded a few phone calls from clients concerned about the Burger King attack, argued that Twitter bore some responsibility.

“I think Twitter needs to step up its game in providing better security,” Mr. Schafer said. In a memo to his staff about such attacks, he called on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest “and anyone else serious about having brands on their platform” to “invest time in better understanding how brands operate day to day.”

“It’s also time for these platforms to use their influence to shape security standards on the Web,” he wrote.

The risk for Twitter is in offending potential business partners as the company tries to build its advertising dollars, which make up the bulk of its revenue. In 2012, the company grew more than 100 percent, earning $288.3 million in global advertising revenue, according to eMarketer.

On Wednesday, it introduced a product that would allow advertisers to create and manage ads through third parties like HootSuite, Adobe and Salesforce.com. Advertising is estimated to account for more than 90 percent of the company’s revenue.

“This is not something we take lightly,” said Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, in an interview last month. (The company declined to comment on the Burger King hacking, saying it did not discuss specific accounts.) Mr. Prosser said Twitter had manual and automatic controls in place to identify malicious content and fake accounts, but acknowledged that the practice was more art than science.

Mr. Prosser said Twitter had taken an active role in combating the biggest sources of malicious content.

Last year, the company sued those responsible for five of the most-used spamming tools on the site. “With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,” it said in a statement. “We hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

But security experts say, and the recent hacks of Burger King, Jeep and other brands have demonstrated, that Twitter could do more.

Opinion: Can Social Media Sell Soap?

Growing legions of marketing consultants are pushing social media as the can’t-miss future. They argue that pitches are more likely to hit home if they come from friends on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Google+. That’s the new word of mouth, long the gold standard in marketing. And the rivers of data that pour into these networks fuel the vision of precision targeting, in which ads are so timely and relevant that you welcome them. The hopes for such a revolution have fueled a market frenzy around social networks — and have also primed them for a fall.

The drama swirls around data. In the “Mad Men” depiction of an advertising firm in the ’60s, the big stars don’t sweat the numbers. They’re gut followers. Don Draper pours himself a finger or two of rye and flops on a couch in his corner office. He thinks. His job is to anticipate the needs and desires of fellow human beings, and to answer them with ideas. What slogan would light up the eyes of the dour airline executive, or the dog food people? Fellow humanists dominate Don Draper’s rarefied world, while the numbers people, two or three of them crammed into dingier offices, pore over Nielsen reports and audience profiles.

In the last decade however, those numbers people have rocketed to the top. They build and operate the search engines. They’re flexing their quantitative muscles at agencies and starting new ones. And the rise of social networks, which stream a global gabfest into their servers, catapults these quants ever higher. Their most powerful pitches aren’t ideas but rather algorithms. This sends many of today’s Don Drapers into early retirement. Others, paradoxically, hunt down new work on social networks like LinkedIn.

Yet this year has brought renewed hope for the humanists — or at least a satisfying burst of schadenfreude. Facebook made its public offering in May at a valuation of $104 billion, only to see the share price tumble as many began to doubt the network’s potential as a medium for paid ads. Corporate advertisers are devoting only a modest 14 percent of their online budgets to social networks. According to comScore, a firm that tracks online activity, e-commerce soared 16 percent from last year, to nearly $39 billion this holiday season. But advertising from social networks appeared to play only a supporting role. I.B.M. researchers found that on the pivotal opening day of the season, Black Friday, a scant 0.68 percent of online purchases came directly from Facebook. The number from Twitter was undetectable. Could it be that folks aren’t in a buying mood when hanging out digitally with their friends?

A more likely answer is this: When big new phenomena arrive on the scene, it’s hard to know what to count. We’ve seen this before. During the dot-com bubble in the late ’90s, investors threw billions at Internet start-ups that promised to deliver targeted ads to millions of viewers, or “eyeballs.” But eyeballs didn’t produce dollars, and the high-flying market crashed. Many naysayers gleefully concluded that the Internet itself had failed.

Yet as these cyberskeptics crowed, a company called Overture Services was pioneering an innovative advertising application for the new medium. When Web surfers carried out searches, it turned out, they welcomed related ads. And if they clicked on one, the advertiser paid the search engine. Google soon implemented this system on a mammoth scale and turned clicks into dollars. Advertisers could calculate their return on investment down to the penny. In this domain, the insights of a Mad Man counted for nothing. Search ran on numbers. The quants rushed in.

While the rise of search battered the humanists, it also laid a trap that the quants are falling into now. It led to the belief that with enough data, all of advertising could turn into quantifiable science. This came with a punishing downside. It banished faith from the advertising equation. For generations, Mad Men had thrived on widespread trust that their jingles and slogans altered consumers’ behavior. Thankfully for them, there was little data to prove them wrong. But in an industry run remorselessly by numbers, the expectations have flipped. Advertising companies now face pressure to deliver statistical evidence of their success. When they come up short, offering anecdotes in place of numbers, the markets punish them. Faith has given way to doubt.

This leads to exasperation, because in a server farm packed with social data, it’s hard to know what to count. What’s the value of a Facebook “like” or a Twitter follower? What do you measure to find out? In this way, marketing resembles other hot spots of data research, including brain science and genomics. In each one, scientists are combing through petabytes of data, trying to discern whether certain genes or groups of neurons cause something or simply correlate with it. It’s not clear, because these are immensely complex systems with millions of variables — much like our social networks. Even as researchers swim in data that previous generations would have swooned over, they struggle to answer crucial questions regarding cause and effect. What action can I take to get the response I want?

Debates rage as quants accuse one another of counting the wrong things. Take I.B.M.’s Black Friday study. While the numbers indicate that few shoppers clicked directly from a social network to buy a laptop or a fridge, some may have seen ads that later led to a purchase. If so, valuable influence went unmeasured. “I.B.M. is looking at a single point in time,” says Dan Neely, the chief executive of Networked Insights, a marketing analytics company. Neely’s team followed Macy’s Black Friday campaign on Twitter, which started weeks before the big day; it generated a viral flurry on the network, he says. Clearly, many big advertisers are still believers: last week, Facebook shares got a boost from reports that Walmart, Samsung and other boldfaced names have recently stepped up social-media advertising.

But gauging the effectiveness of these ads is still a challenge. “It’s hard to measure influence,” says Steve Canepa, I.B.M.’s general manager for media and entertainment.

That, in fact, may be the ultimate lesson to draw from the social media marketing miracle that wasn’t. The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past.

Dave Morgan, a pioneer in Internet advertising and the founder of Simulmedia, an ad network for TV, points to the early years of electricity. In the late 19th century, most people associated the new industry with one extremely valuable service: light. That was what the marketplace understood. Electricity would displace kerosene and candles and become a giant of illumination. What these people missed was that electricity, far beyond light, was a platform for a host of new industries. Over the following years, entrepreneurs would come up with appliances — today we might call them “apps” — for vacuuming, laundry and eventually radio and television. Huge industries grew on the electricity platform. If you think of Apple in this context, it’s a $496 billion company that builds the latest generation of electricity apps.

Social networks, like them or not, are fast laying out a new grid of personal connections. Even if this matrix of humanity sputters in advertising and marketing, it’s bound to spawn new industries in consulting, education, collaborative design, market research, media and loads of products and services yet to be imagined. Maybe, just maybe, it will even be able to sell soap.

Stephen Baker is a technology journalist who blogs at thenumerati.net, and the author of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything.”