Spin Valley Post

At Facebook, we’re constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we’ll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our “Connecting with…” series.

Chuck Martin and a team of researchers from the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business & Economics recently found that the amount of time students spend using social media and services like Facebook does not affect their grades. I talked with Martin, a lecturer at the school and the CEO of organizational research firm NFI Research, about those findings as well the use of social media in his classroom and its impact on the workplace. Martin is the author of eight business books, including his soon-to-be released “Work Your Strengths.”

You and a team of researchers recently looked at the correlation between using social media and grades. What would you say is the big finding from your perspective?

The big finding is that there is actually no correlation between the amount of time that students spend using social media and their grades. We found that basically the heavy users and the light users get pretty much the same grades.

In addition to the finding that there isn’t a correlation, what were some of the results about just how much students are using social media?

For the purposes of the study, we considered social media to be Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn…. This study was very wide. It was 1,100-plus students out of the 12,000 at the university, and we surveyed every college at the university.

But of the heavy users of social media, 63 percent got high grades, and of the light users, 65 percent got high grades. So there is no real difference between the two. And of the heavy Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. The light Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. It was identical.

And did that surprise you?

It didn’t. Interestingly, the hypothesis of the students was that there would be no correlation and they were correct. But if you talk to any adults, adults were totally surprised by this. And adults and parents typically have the view that you need to spend more time on your homework and less time on your social media so that your grades stay high. Well, it turns out that it makes no difference.

Why do you think there is this disconnect? Is this just a generational gap, or something about how people use (social media) differently?

It’s not just generational, it’s actually behavioral. If you look at the students today, they have grown up with things like Facebook and YouTube and blogs and so forth, so it’s not a separate thing. In the early days of the web, people would be at work or school and they would start surfing the web and two hours later they would come back and say, “What was I looking for? I forgot.”

They basically got lost in the experience, and today with social media it’s actually become integrated with people’s lives. So it’s not a separate thing where people leave life and go do (social media). It actually has become part of what they do every day….

They have a multitasking ability that’s a little different?

I created a course for the university called “Social Media in Marketing.” (During class) we had my presentation on the screen live, and we were dipping in and out of the web. We had a live Twitter feed projected to a large screen, and we had a third screen with another projection, where we had a back channel so that people could communicate anonymously on the big screen…. There were three big screens in front of the classroom with three live network feeds, and we also had video and we had people patched in by Skype.

Everybody in the room used a computer for the entire three-hour class, and they were encouraged and actually did interact. They were tweeting with people around the country during the class about the content, and people were tweeting from outside the classroom from different parts of the country with questions that we would then tackle as a group.

And it turns out that the engagement level of the students was higher than a traditional classroom. We talked to a neuropsychologist, who is actually one of my co-authors, about this multitasking aspect and his view was that it’s not really multitasking. It’s really using different media simultaneously on the same subject matter.

That’s really fascinating because the conventional wisdom is, “Oh, this is just a distraction from paying attention to the lecture.”

Right, we had people come in and monitor the class. We had trustees or we had the finance people, and they were all astounded by what they were seeing. Every class was longer than it was supposed to be because we couldn’t really get the students to stop.

Do you find that it extends the conversation outside the actual class, and are there other ways of using things like Facebook beyond the lecture?

We actually, for that course, ran the course on Facebook…. Since this was social media, we decided that we needed to use social media and we created the course on a private (Facebook) group. So all of the members of the class were in the group, and then each of the (study) groups created their own Facebook groups for their teams. The difference between that and a traditional course was the course then ran 24/7 because people were having conversations about the content all the time…. We will be teaching this course again in the summer and will be using Facebook for that as well.

Thinking further out, though, do you think that more classrooms will begin to adopt this idea of using social media both in the class and outside?

When we were doing the social media course…we had requests from outside the classroom from other parts of the country that they wanted a live streaming feed. So one time we just streamed it live onto the Net, and that’s because of the demand. It’s not necessarily because the teacher said he wished to do this. It’s because the market said, “Hey, we should do this.” Once you use the back channel in a classroom, for example, and it’s highly interactive, it’s difficult not to have it.

Where do you see Facebook and social media fitting into the workplace moving forward? What would be your advice to business leaders?

Let (employees) do it and encourage it. It’s just like in the classroom: The great fear of adults for our class was that (we would have) all these people behind computer screens and that they weren’t going to be paying attention to the class (but) going to be shopping and doing all these other things online.

Nobody did that, nobody. It just didn’t happen, and if that happened it would mean that I was failing as a teacher.

It’s the same thing in business. If you let your employees do their work more effectively, they will work more effectively.

Matt, a manager on Facebook’s communications team, passed paper notes as a back channel when he was in school.

Discovering and making connections to friends, applications and other voices is an important part of your experience on Facebook. That’s why today we are rolling out an improvement to Search to help you quickly find and connect with the people, Pages, groups, events and applications you care about.

Now as you’re typing in a query in the search bar, you will instantaneously see results not only of the people, events, groups and Pages you’re connected with but also the connections of your friends and globally relevant results. You’ll see a wider variety of relevant results and be able to discover new connections you might want to make on Facebook right as you’re entering your search.

For example, if you start typing in “MGM” to find the Facebook Page for the band MGMT, you may see it as the first result in the drop-down menu because you or one of your friends is a fan of MGMT on Facebook. You can simply hit enter on that result and you will be taken directly to the MGMT Page.

If you are searching for something else, like the MGM Grand Las Vegas hotel or the movie studio MGM, you can select one of those instead from the drop-down menu.

If you don’t see what you are looking for in the drop-down menu, you can go to the search results page by selecting “See More Results” from the bottom of the drop-down menu. You’ll be taken to the full results, where you can sort by different categories and refine your search further.

We’re rolling these changes out gradually over the next few days, so you may not see the new results just yet.

Wayne, a Facebook engineer, is searching for friends who play Pet Society.

Twenty-five years ago on this date, the first company registered a Web address with the now prolific .com extension. In recognition of that milestone, we’ve asked Internet industry leaders to take a look back at the impact of .com and share perspectives on the future direction of the Internet.

We’re also honored to have Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg nominated as one of the the “.com 25″—a recognition of the 25 companies and people whose contributions were fundamental to shaping the Internet as we know it today. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates are among the 75 nominees. The final “.com 25″ will be honored May 26 at a gala in San Francisco.

Mark McLaughlin
CEO, VeriSign Inc.

Looking back at the first .com 25 years ago is a little like discovering what was the original document to come out of the first printing press. It’s interesting but what came after is the real story. And what came after symbolics.com, the first .com registered, has defined a generation.

Twenty-five years ago when the first .com name was registered, I was a freshman at West Point, with no concept of a connected world. Our idea of communications was our weekly lineup at the pay phone waiting to call our parents. Not long ago, I was back at West Point and I saw cadets carrying their world in their pocket with smart phones. Emailing, texting, and calling. They’ve never known life without the power of the Internet.

That’s what the Internet has done for all of us. It has reshaped our perspective—about how we interact with each other and our relationship with the entire world. The social impact alone is staggering. With over 400 million users, Facebook would be the third-largest country in the world. Every day over 200 eHarmony members get married. And Apple just celebrated it 10 billionth iTunes download.

At VeriSign, all that Internet activity translates into 18 trillion website and email lookups a year that we handle. So, just as Johannes Gutenberg must have looked at the printing press and asked, “what’s next?” we all wait to see where the Internet will take us. And, as the operator of .com we know that we won’t dream up its uses, we just need to stand ready to support it.

Alec Ross
Senior Advisor for Innovation, Office of the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

To me, the rise of .com has meant the near end of isolation. Growing up in West Virginia, I saw firsthand how life opportunities are limited by the information people are able to access. Grow up in an information-rich environment, and you are well-positioned to compete and succeed in knowledge-based sectors of the global economy. Grow up with a deficit of information, and you are positioned for the service industry, folding bed sheets and busing tables.

Dot-com has brought people and marketplaces more closely together. It has both created and strengthened communities by allowing them to take root in virtual spaces. In the coming years, I see the tectonic shift made possible by .com increasingly being about education. The innovations that have taken place connecting people to marketplaces and to each other will now connect people to educational resources in a way never previously imaginable. And because of it, kids will have an unbounded opportunity to learn.

Susan Crawford
Founder, OneWebDay

I remember the first email address I ever saw, and I distinctly remember thinking that it was ridiculous. What was that loony “@” sign doing there? Why was everything in lower case? The exuberance and the essential humanity of the Internet took everyone by surprise, and all of those fireworks started with .com. We’ve adapted since then, and we’re used to lower-case billions. But the story that changed the way the world learns, trades and communicates began with .com addresses and their decentralized, flexible nature.

What’s coming next? Things are changing quickly, and .com is receding in importance as other namespaces and places become central. Internationalized domain names, in other scripts, are long overdue. There’s a fight for gate-keeping control, and many of the players in that fight would prefer not to be relying on domain names. Nothing goes away, though, and we’ll be seeing .com in lights for generations to come.

David Gross
Former Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, U.S. Department of State

During the past 25 years, .com—also known to its friends as “Dot Com”—has done more to change the world than any person or event. It has opened the world to potentially unlimited access to information and has encouraged people and governments to recognize—as they did at the UN’s “heads of state” World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)—that “freedom of expression and the free flow of information, ideas and knowledge are essential” and that we are universally committed “to the freedom to seek, receive, impart and use information … for the creation, accumulation and dissemination of knowledge.”

From virtually every corner of the world, people are able to use .com to connect with friends and family, learn about economic opportunities, interact with governments (including the opportunity to tell “truth to power”—sometimes at great personal risk), save lives, help others and to make the world a better place for future generations. It doesn’t get better or more powerful than that. Thank you .com and happy anniversary/birthday!

Andrew, manager of policy communications at Facebook, is looking forward to tomorrow’s policy forum in Washington, D.C., to discuss the impact of 25 years of .com on our lives and our world.

As more and more people share and connect on Facebook, we are growing our operations and teams to support them around the world. Just last week, we announced plans to invest in a new Austin, Texas, office, and today in India we unveiled our intentions to open an office in Hyderabad.

Both of these offices will allow us to better serve the more than 400 million of you now using Facebook worldwide, as well as our growing number of advertisers and developers. We are now hiring people to join the online sales and operations teams that we’re forming in these new locations.

By having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones, we can provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support.

The new offices come at a significant time in our international growth. Seventy percent of the people using Facebook are outside the U.S. and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages. In India alone, we’ve seen rapid growth and now have more than 8 million people there actively connecting on Facebook with their friends, family, and other people they know, both within India and around the globe.

The new operations centers in Austin and Hyderabad will supplement our support teams in our Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and office in Dublin, Ireland. We’re proud to now call America’s Lone Star State and India’s City of Pearls home.

For job opportunities in either location, visit www.facebook.com/careers.

Don Faul, a director of global online operations at Facebook, is looking forward to brushing up on his cricket skills during his next trip to India.

We’re introducing a new series today called “Faces of Facebook,” which features excerpts from interviews with our employees that originally appeared on our internal blog. Their words offer a glimpse of life inside of Facebook and the work they do around the world.

Adam Conner was the first member of our Washington, D.C., office when he joined Facebook in November 2007. He works on the public policy team as one of Facebook’s official D.C. lobbyists. He is originally from Los Alamos, N.M., and is a little broken up over Conan O’Brien right now.

You send a lot of social emails and show up at all our company parties. (Social is an internal email list where employees discuss social topics such as finding concert tickets, a new apartment or teammates for a pickup game of basketball). What do you do in your spare time?

Sigh, the party thing used to be the case but not any longer, I’ve missed the last two holiday parties. But I did manage to be around for Game Day last year, which was awesome (Game Day is an annual Facebook tradition where employees spend a day competing in teams in a series of outdoor games).

I’m a pretty social person and have always worked around a lot of people; but when I first started working for Facebook I worked by myself from my apartment. If I had worked for any other company I think I probably would’ve gone insane. But being constantly on Facebook (the product) with all of Facebook (the company) let me feel like a part of the company in a real way. Social (email) was kind of the same way and I’ve never seen anything like social anywhere else I’ve worked.

Describe a moment where you felt that your work was making a difference in the world.

The week of January 11-17 was pretty cool, helping to pull together the Global Disaster Relief Page in just few hours. I went on vacation that weekend and was on the phone in Mexico convincing President Clinton to plug our Facebook page as part of the relief efforts.

Election Day in 2008 was pretty cool, too. We’d registered 60,000 voters in just 10 days with ads on the site, got 5.5 million U.S. users to click the “I Voted” button on Election Day, and had something like a million users look up their polling location on the Google Map. That was when I realized the high point of my professional career in politics was going to be getting 5.5 million people to click a button.

When you applied to work here, what crazy rumor about Facebook culture did you initially dismiss, only to discover that it’s completely true?

I knew almost nothing about Facebook when I joined. I was like a lot of people who don’t seem to conceive of the idea that people work at Facebook and not magical computer fairies.

Why do you work for Facebook, over any other options open to you right now?

I really love my job. I get to sit in meetings with vaguely important and occasionally actually important people and explain why Facebook is like the wheel or fire and how not using it really isn’t an option anymore. Government and politics both operate with pretty limited resources, but technologies like Facebook really are an answer for helping them overcome those constraints.

I came to DC to be a character in the (American TV show) West Wing (like Sam or Josh) and there are times when it was hard to look at all my friends working on the Obama campaign or in the White House and not feel like I’m missing out. But Congress, the White House, the government—those have all been around for a while and will be around for a while longer.

Facebook is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s like my favorite Facebook philosopher, (engineer) Soleio, once said (in this video): “This is Everest. Like there’s nothing else, you get this thing done, you do this thing well, and then you can go home. You can say ‘Hey I changed the world.’ “

Charlotte works on Facebook’s international user operations team.