It’s well known that communicating online is not as rich as communicating face to face.  You lack the audio visual clues that come with talking physically to someone, and this can often lead to misunderstandings.  In the corporate world where clarity is important, that’s not good.

For most of the last 10-15 years, emoticons have attempted to help provide greater context to our written words online.  A smiley face or a wink can defer the tone we intend for a particular message.  By and large this works reasonably well, but of course it’s hard to escape the idea that the humble emoticon is a bit too childish to have a place in the serious world of commerce.

An interesting collaboration between Facebook and Berkeley university may help to shift your opinion a little.  Facebook teamed up with psychology professor Dacher Keltner to attempt to make emoticons better and more reflective of the actual emotions we experience.

“This all began we were looking at the kind of issues people were reporting to Facebook,” Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar said in a recent interview. “The reports had to do with things Facebook didn’t need to act on, but things people should address–what should happen when you say something that’s upsetting to me or put up a photo I didn’t like?”

They wanted to make people just a little bit kinder to each other, both for altruistic reasons but also to cut down on support requests for things outside of their control.

The result has been seen within the recent Facebook Stickers update.  The new emoticons were designed by Matt Jones, a Pixar illustrator who worked with Keltner to come up with his creations.  The aim was to make the emoticons more accurate representations of our faces when experiencing different emotions.

They wanted also to capture some of the emotions that have historically been difficult to capture in emoticon form, such as sympathy or embarrassment.

To help achieve this they wanted to make the emoticons dynamic images rather than static ones.  The movement before and after the actual expression helps to create context and understanding.

With the realms of data available on the web, the number of uses for that data continues to rise.  Last week we saw researchers claim that they could predict stock movements based upon the keywords entered into Google.

This week researchers believe they have unlocked the key to understanding the obesity of an area.  The team, from Boston Children’s Hospital, believe that the kind of things people like on Facebook can provide telling insight into the overall health levels of that area.

For instance if a high percentage of Facebook users cite exercise amongst their list of interests, they believe that will be replicated in a lower obesity rate for the entire town.  The flip side is that if people cite things like watching television amongst their interests, it will see higher obesity rates.

“Online social networks like Facebook represent a new high-value, low-cost data stream for looking at health at a population level,” according to researcher John Brownstein, who runs the Computational Epidemiology Group within CHIP. “The tight correlation between Facebook users’ interests and obesity data suggest that this kind of social network analysis could help generate real-time estimates of obesity levels in an area, help target public health campaigns that would promote healthy behavior change, and assess the success of those campaigns.”

The researchers obtained aggregated data containing users interests, their timeline posts and what they liked on the social network.  The sample consisted of people from across America, and also from purely within New York.

Analysing this data allowed them to compare the percentage of people with healthy and sedentary Facebook content with data from two surveys that recorded geotagged data on body mass index.

The analysis revealed that the closest correlation was between the interests people declared on Facebook and the obesity rates in their town.  For instance, obesity rates were 12% lower in the area that had the highest percentage of Facebook users having exercise related activities.

What’s more, the correlation also worked on a more local level, with specific areas of New York showing lower obesity rates when residents revealed active interests on Facebook.

 ”The data show that in places where Facebook users have more activity-related interests, there is a lower prevalence of obesity and overweight,” said Chunara, an instructor in Brownstein’s group. “They reveal how social media data can augment public health surveillance by giving public health researchers access to population-level information that they can’t otherwise get.”

The study also bolsters the case for using social media as a means of delivering targeted interventions aimed at reducing rates of obesity and other chronic diseases, as applicable.

Whilst social data from the likes of Twitter and Google have been put to worthwhile use, predicting things such as the spread of disease, Facebook has not really enjoyed any similar success stories.  That may be down to the closed nature of the network as much as the lighter nature of discussions on the site.

Some new research might be about to change all of that however.  A new study recently published in the American Journal of Medical Quality proposes that the number of likes a hospital receives on Facebook is a good barometer of the likely quality of that hospital when it comes to the healthcare they provide.

The researchers analysed 82 hospitals in the New York area, measuring in particular the number of likes each hospital had on Facebook.  They then matched this data with the mortality rate of heart attack patients at each hospital, which was determined by the percentage of patients that died within 30 days of admission.

The results are intriguing.  They found that every 93 extra likes correlated with a 1% fall in the mortality rate.  The researchers draw the conclusion that lower mortality rates equal higher patient satisfaction, which manifests itself in a higher number of likes on Facebook.

It’s a simple and you might say obvious conclusion to draw.  It does raise a couple of interesting points though.  Firstly, there is not neccesarily a direct link between mortality rates and patient satisfaction.  The very sickest patients may still die, but their relatives were nonetheless very happy with the care they received.

It also provides a nice insight into the feedback loop involved in such circumstances.  Rating hospitals is not new, and the NHS provides people with the facility to rate their GP, their dentist and their hospital.  Such facilities can be invaluable in deciding which provider to go with.  In that context you might think that a simple like does not compare favourably with a more detailed review, but this research suggests that it does nonetheless provide a good indication of the quality of the hospital.

So how do the big London hospitals do?  Interestingly King’s come out on top with 4,216 likes, followed by Guys and Tommy’s with 1,495 and St Mary’s languishes behind with 525.

How does that compare with the NHS ratings?  Well King’s score 5 stars (from 31 reviews), Tommy’s has 4.5 stars from 51 reviews and St Mary’s has 4 stars (from 31 reviews).  All of which represents an almost direct correlation with their Facebook rankings.  Interesting indeed.

It’s probably fare to say that Facebook gets accused of many things, and indeed various studies have shown that the site tends to cater for our more vacuous desires.  A University of Arizona study has however shown that it might have some benefits to our grey matter after all. The researchers wanted to test whether asking older adults to use Facebook...

Lego are well known for their excellent use of social media, utilising it to engage their core customers in the creation of new products.  Such intensive usage demands that managers throughout the company are comfortable operating in a social business.

It was a view echoed by Lars Silberbauer, Lego director of social media, at a conference recently.  He revealed the importance of everyone within Lego understanding what it is to be a social business.

He revealed that managers have to go on a day-long course into social media, at the end of which is both a theoretical and practical exam.

The practical part was relatively simple, yet nevertheless one that statistics reveal would be beyond many executives.  It required executives to post a status update to the companies Facebook page.

“You see the nervousness around the room when they see they need to communicate with customers,” said Silberbauer. “But when they get 500 likes, that’s when they realise what social media’s all about.”

The course goes to great lengths to stress that social media usage at Lego is not done for vanity purposes, such as securing likes.

“We have four ways of creating value out of creating engagement,” Silberbauer said. “Increasing sales, becoming more efficient in our marketing, building brand affinity and protecting our brand via social media.”

Silberbauer cited a trial Lego ran on Facebook to see if a promotion on the social media platform could drive sales. Rather than use a pack-shot, Lego asked a fan to create an image, which was used in the promotion.

“Within six hours we’d reached about 1m people and around 8,000 visited our ecommerce site and drove $10,000 of sales – 15 minutes of work without any adspend.

“My boss asked: ‘Can we do this four times an hour then?’ Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.”

He went on to explain how at Lego, the important part of their social media work is to create the connection with customers.  That is their ultimate aim, and it’s an aim that many organisations would do well to replicate.