Me and My Webshadow

So posting has been a bit slow recently. I blame this on not being at Uni for four weeks*, combined with going on holiday which led to being a bit less busy and hectic than usual, which meant somehow it was more difficult to find time for all the stuff I was fitting in previously, like training for that rather scary race and keeping the Tough Gaffs blog updated too.. Summer term has now started so expect blogging and training to resume.

One thing I have managed to do with more success of late is go to a few events, in fact over the past week, all of which were interesting for various reasons and will be covered in another post shortly. The first was the launch of Antony Mayfield’s book, Me and My Web Shadow: How to manage your reputation online. Mayfield described the launch event as a cross between a christening and a job interview, as the assorted crow sat on sofas, or the floor, to listen to the rationale behind the book and ask questions, it felt a little more like story time with teacher. I regret not taking notes as many of themes that Mayfield touched upon as he described the content have been explored a little here over the past two years. Things such as privacy and why we need it,  what Google knows about us and a slightly prescient post questioning of social networks will set the social norms. There was also a discussion about people protecting their reputations for the sake of their future selves.

I finally flicked through the book last night, mainly as its due to be handed over the person I bought it for this weekend and I’d not already done so. Mayfield said he wrote the book with Hotmail users in mind, and wanted to provide a Haynes Manual for online self-protection and he’s answered his own brief perfectly. The person who I bought it for is concerned about what their shadow is, would firmly describe themselves as a digital immigrant and will, I hope, relish, this useful guide that they can dip in and out of. As Gmail user and if not a digital native, then at least a visa holder with full residency rights, I picked up an awful lot of useful tips  and reminders about tools and techniques I’ve not used in a while.

If I had to offer one criticism, then it would be that I’m not sure the term anomie offers an accurate reflection of the confusion people feel about the fluidity of online etiquette as new technologies and communication methods evolve. Aside from that, I’d heartily recommend it as a useful refresher for the gmailer and an essential part of the book collection to lend out to worried hotmailers.

 

 

 

 

*If this is true, expect Niff, Naff to be mothballed from July to October.

Sixth Sense Spam

Homework spam

If only my lecturers were so easily impressed

Truth, Privacy, Veracity & #BeMyGuest

BeMyGuest, the month of mutual blogging seems to be going swimmingly and my first guest spot has just gone up on Paul Sutton’s Tribal Boogie blog.

As the regular reader will be aware, I’ve got a hang up about privacy this year and therefore it’s not surprise that it’s the topic of my post, which questions what is more important, truth, privacy or veracity. Got read the whole thing over on Paul’s blog and then go read his stuff, it’s rather good.

Searching Questions: III

This time from the rarest of creatures, a shy person on Twitter, who doesn’t seek the fleeting fame of creating a tweet worth of repetition far and wide.

Fortunately for them the answer, if they truly don’t want anyone to retweet their 140 characters, or less, of wisdom, the answer is simple(s).

Don’t tweet.

Rentokil, Ben Goldacre and Twitter

No doubt some of the UK PR community had a wry grin on their faces when they heard that Brands2Life had been called out by popular pointer-out of media medical mistruths and general caller of shens, Dr. Ben Goldacre. On Friday Goldacre picked up on a story that had appeared in the Mail, Telegraph and Standard about just how many creepy crawlies we share our daily commute with. The company behind this obviously PR driven piece was RentoKil, and it had apparently found, after spraying the inside of a tube carriage and bus with insectide and counting the dead ‘uns, many many iccky things that we’d rather didn’t share our travel space – nice.

Goldacre, like some of the initial reports, questioned how Rentokill came up those figures, and being a savvy sort followed up his unanswered media request via Twitter, where it appears to have been duly ignored until late in the day.  A clarification of how the figures were arrived and apology was eventually posted on the Rentokil blog on Friday night, well over a week since the initial press release was distributed.

This post is not an autopsy into who did what wrong, rather the reading the various tweets and associated blogs posts raised a question with wider implications. While he waited for his questions to be answered, Goldacre flagged that Rentokil’s twitter strategy seemed to be a bit askance, and pointed his readers to a Rentokil post reassuring people that it had recently started to follow in Twitter as to why it had started to follow them on Twitter. Some of the commenter’s on the post seem to feel quite strongly that they don’t like the idea of being followed by a company and consider it to be spam. One even said that if @rentokil were to follow them it would block it and report it for spanning.

Now spam to most people means receiving messages or information that you haven’t requested. If a company follows you on Twitter, then that’s not necessarily going to happen unless you follow them back, and then it’s not spam, it’s bacon.Of course they could @  you with all sorts of spammy-badness but they don’t need to follow you to do so.

To be honest I am a little confused about the overreaction but perhaps it’s an indication of Twitter users becoming more savvy and protective about their Twittering space.  What is interesting is that this reaction came about after RentoKil decided to:

move outside of the field of pest control and find experts in other fields including social media, websites, PR, facilities management, I.T., etc. and others who are not experts but who just seem to enjoy using Twitter (there are still quite a few of us that do – despite the 109 million hits on Google which state Twitter is dead!)

A strategy to which only one, one-word, question can be asked – why? Twitter is great for building audiences and engaging with interested parties, (NB. emphasis on the interested there). Following people, no matter what their expertise is, who are outside of your field of interest is always going to a look a bit, well a bit like you’re hoping that they will follow you back and increase your own popularity and influence. Which while not technically spam is very off behaviour in this more personalised world of social media. It is entirely possible that it’s not the case, but you have to wonder what the overarching objective is to be supported by a tactic of following lots of random people, or if RentoKil, like many companies are mixing up the success of a tactic with the success of the strategy.

Also posted on Clicking & Screaming

Society and the Web: Is Social Media Killing our Kids?

In only the second ever guest post on Niff, Naff n Triv, and the first ever as part of the inaugural #BeMyGuest month of mutual blogging we proudly present Paul Sutton and his thoughts on Social Media’s impact on society.

Paul Sutton is a Social & Digital Media Consultant with over 14 years’ experience in PR and marketing communications. Fascinated by the psychological and cultural impact of digital media and the web, he has a passion for online communications, social media, inbound marketing and the ongoing convergence between PR and the web.

Social media, mobile internet and the pervasion of the web in general is getting a bad name in some quarters. There’s a sense of unease among some parties that web 3.0, or the semantic web, far from being the progressive enabler of future generations, could actually lead to a society that is wholly dependent on internet technology not only for economic and sociological reasons, but also for its psychological health.

As technology converges ever-increasingly on the web and we spend more and more time online, some social commentators have voiced very real fears that the web will make our children, our grandchildren and every generation that follows both less intelligent and incapable of forming lasting social bonds. The issue was addressed recently in the excellent BBC mini-series, The Virtual Revolution, with presenter Dr Aleks Krotoski presenting the case of South Korea, the most wired nation on Earth, where there are big concerns over so-called ‘internet addiction’.

Generation Y, generation web, whatever you want to call it, is under threat. At least, if you listen to Generation X it is. Gen Xers fear that as we become more used to tools like RSS and 140 character status updates, we will lose the power of concentration, swapping in-depth reading, knowledge and conversation for skim-reading, surface-level understanding and brief interactions. The outcome will be a society that knows little about lots, but lots about little. It will be a culture where individual intelligence is sacrificed for the all-powerful global brain. And this will only be reinforced as the real-time web becomes reality.

So where has this web aversion come from? Perhaps from the fact that our children “don’t go out and play anymore”, instead choosing to spend their free time plugged into the internet, whether that be gaming, surfing or chatting to friends. It’s estimated that the current generation of digital natives will have spent around 10,000 hours online by the time they reach adulthood, with a large part of that taken up by social media – Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and multiple other networking channels. And so it stands to reason that social media gets the blame.

But can society truly be altered by social media and the web, and even if it can, is this necessarily a bad thing? The answer to the first of those questions, would seem (to me at least) to be yes. Taking South Korea, where 62% of 3-5 year olds regularly use the web, as an example, the country’s children regularly top the world’s education league tables and are reported to display a great willingness to work together to solve problems and help each other out. Whether their individual IQ is effected is unclear, but importantly they demonstrate a community intelligence where they are more informed and make better choices as a result. The way they communicate and interact as human beings is evolving, facilitated by the social web.

So is this social media-influenced evolution a bad thing? I’d argue not. There’s little doubt that my daughter will grow up very differently to the way I did, but unlike many other Gen Xers, this doesn’t scare me whatsoever. If anything, I’m going to try and embrace it as she gets older. The way I see it, she could have greater problem solving abilities than I ever had due to the way children now are willing to share information and ideas, and the way in which they find information via the web in the first instance. Whether her grasp of the English language will suffer as a result of the txt generation and the limitations of communicating via status updates is an unknown, but maybe it’s my responsibility as a Gen X parent to ensure that she reads books and not just skims web articles?

Stephen Fry made the point in The Virtual Revolution that when the motor car was first introduced people thought it was evil due to deaths on the roads. Did that stop us? Of course not. We adapted the technology to make it safer and, as a culture, we adapted to embrace it. And should this not be the case with web 3.0 and social media? It’s technologically-facilitated evolution and is such a great enabler that, rather than fearing what changes its impact might have on society, shouldn’t we be addressing our concerns, understanding what’s happening and channeling it?

For more on Paul, visit his blog at www.tribalboogie.blogspot.com or contact him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/thepaulsutton

Social Media Marketing Opt Out

I attended the inaugural meeting of the Social Media Group for the Direct Marketing Association yesterday. It was generally a gathering of the great and the good from various social media and digital agencies, along with some software houses and a few other (useful) odds and sods. It’s early days but initial discussions around what we might achieve as a group were good and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can build.

As ever when you get more than two people involved in social media together, there was a brief discussion about what we meant and what the key issues were, one of the many that cropped up was privacy. In particular, what right do we have to approach the person via their online homes? The note I scribbled to myself to explore later said ‘is it up to companies to seek the individual or the to be there when the individual comes looking?’. Obviously the answer is both, the tricky part is getting the right balance.

Some individuals will be happy to be sought out. Though we shouldn’t assume that just because a consumer makes their data publicly available that they actually think, want or desire that a business, of any size, will use it to market to them. Of course some individuals will make it difficult to find that information, they are the ones who value their privacy. We also shouldn’t assume that just because a online user is sharing data that it is actually the truth. For example, do you really think I’m actually going to do the Tough Guy?.Seeking out the individual via online channels cannot be done lightly. One fleeting thought I had was that perhaps, in a few years, we will see a Social Network  preference service which people can use to opt out of being pro-actively targeted.

The other side of the coin, is making sure that you are there ready to answer the questions that a consumer may have that you can reasonably answer. Knowledge of search is going to be vital for PROs in the future, you’re already missing a trick if you’re not considering it as an integral part of what you do right now. And by search I don’t just mean optimising press releases and distributing them over the wire to help build link love.

Post modern spam

Do you ever get the feeling that some of the spammers are getting a little bored of their job?

#BeMyGuest

Social media is often praised for opening people’s boundaries and introducing them to ideas and content that they might previously missed. In reality, we tend to use social media to build a series of finely layered filters to ensure that we only see the information we’re interested in. From RSS, which allows you to ignore all the content on a website you don’t think you fancy. all the way through to Twitter which enables  you to follow just the people you find interesting and ignore the rest. It’s similar in the blogging world, it’s easy to get into a blog reading rut, and not to seek out anything new and exciting once in a while.  Which is why Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle’s idea for a mutual blogging month in March is such a stormer.

The idea is simple(s).

It’s pretty simple. During March 2010, anyone taking part will aim to:
1. Write at least one post for someone else’s blog, and
2. Feature at least one guest post on their own blog.

The launch of #BeMyGuest in March. the Comms Corner

Anyone interested in taking part just needs to tweet their intentions using the #bemyguest tag or using the tag to search Twitter for people to swap with . You can also keep up with who is swapping with who at the #BeMyGuest Posterous blog.

I’m quite excited as I’ll be swapping with one of the BeMyGuest originators, Adam Vincenzini at The Comms Corner and also Paul Sutton over at Tribal Boogie. They in turn will be posting here, which is nice, obviously. I reckon I can handle one or two more guest spots so if you fancy strutting your stuff on Niff, Naff then leave a comment, drop me a line or catch me on twitter, not forgetting to use the #BeMyGuest tag.