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.

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.

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.

Paying Attention

Hurrah the inaugural London Social Media Week is finally here, chock-full of lots of amazing sounding event, such as Social Media in Enterprises – the Elephant in the Room and Local Social Summit: The Science of Social Media, niether of which I can bloody make. Luckily for me, I did manage to get to the second, or #smwldn event over at the IAB this morning which was on a panel session on Social Graph Optimisation.

Now I love my various social graph as much as the next person and I took the title to mean how to make your graph work harder, particularly for brands. Chatting with others after the session, it seemed we all had different ideas and expectations. Some though it would be more akin to search optimsation and other on how to drive more traffic. To be honest, I’m not sure the panel had a unified idea of what was meant by SGO  either. Fortunately this didn’t stop the discussion being  lively, interesting and, occasionally, contentious.

In particular I wa intrigued by the chat around sharing the value that the social graph, a riff that was started when Vincent Sider, Head of Strategy: Social Media, Gaming & Presence of BT (disclosure BT is a Porter Novelli client) kicked off his initial spiel by asking if we were paying attention. I thought this was a slightly passive aggresive dig at everyone in the audience who was blatently keeping one eye on the panel and the other on their iPhone. It turns out I was being sensitive, rather the point ws should we not be paid for attention when it comes to the web?

This point was expanded on further when questions were owned to the floor and Sam Sethi suggested to Trevor Johnson, Head of Strategy and Planning, FaceBook EMEA, that users could potentially get a share of the revenue generated by the ad displayed neatly in contextin our newsfeeds. Apparently this is not the way forward for Facebook and I can’t see any social platform provder looking to incentivise in this manner. I am already rewarded by my social graph platform providers. I provide them with the bare minimum of personal information, in return it let’s me stalk keep in touch with all sorts of people. I actually feel that the transaction of incidental but insightful information, like my godson is progressing well with potty training, might be cheapened if I then made a percentile of a penny for the ad advertising huggies that now shows on my screen.  I know that the current contextual set-up doesn’t work to that granularity, but it will one day and I’m currently exaggerating to make my point.

As it stands, it’s a quid pro quo, and I’m doing fairly well out of the deal. Fortunately there are lots of other people happy to provide far more about the minutiae of their lives to make it worthwhile for Google and Facebook to monetize from ads.

This leads to two questions. Would I share more in an ad free environment that I paid for? Possibly but only if my friends did too and as most of them have a seemingly cavalier approach to their privacy in return for a free platform, I doubt they would. A social graph is only as good as it’s contents and potential to connect when all is said and done. Privacy was breifly discussed and I think that perhaps this is the one event that SMWLDN is lacking. The Facebook rep pointed out that our approach to it is changing as a society without suggesting that Facebook itself might have the tinciest inciest hand in this change to societal mores. Of course all the panel are interested, to some degree, in monetizing the social graph, our social graph.  The second qustions is, what happens if there is an anti-privacy back lash and we all decide to reclaim our information and revert to the old Internet trick of using a nick and not a real name.

Privacy is dead, apparently

Unfortunately I think it’s already a little  too late for me to add to my 2010 predictions, and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t highlight that privacy is going to be a major focus in 2010.While many  people will point to Twitter as proof that oversharing and for privacy is now rife, it’s FaceBook that is truly leading the charge allowing every aspect of a users life to be easily shared, although founder, Mark Zuckerburg, seems to believe that it is merely reflecting changes in societal norms, not driving them.

ReadWriteWeb has just posted a short interview between TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and the FaceBook Founder at this week’s Crunchies. Facebook took the award for Best Overall Startup Or Product for the third year running.  One of the key questions posed by Arrington was ‘Where is privacy going for the web?’. Zuckerburg pointed out that people are increasingly comfortable in sharing all sorts of information, something that he himself predicted in November 2008,  due to the proliferation of other platforms. FaceBook is merely adapting to reflect this change in social norms. He also mentions that if FaceBook were to start today that everything being public would be the default, despite it’s initial emphasis on protecting your trusted network as a user. However, As ReadWriteWeb points out:

I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over, ReadWriteWeb

I’m not sure I agree that Zuckerberg is being arrogant or condescending but it does seem strange that he doesn’t acknowledge the role  FaceBook must inevitably be playing in changing cultural norms. While FaceBook does not dominate the world entirely, there is still a bit of competition in China and Russia from QQ and V Kontacte respectively, it certainly dominates the US and Western Europe. With 350 million active users, it surely has to admit that it is perhaps having a slight impact on the way that we currently view and treat privacy, particularly  for the generations coming through who have never known anything but easy online sharing.

I suspect that perhaps FaceBook is trying to distance itself from any debates about why our attitudes, and actions, around privacy are changing, due to the furore it encounters every time it changes its T&Cs. Like Google, the more information it can gather on its users, the more accurate and valuable it can make its advertising proposition, pretty much its only income generator. However, how many people would be willing to reveal information on that basis? Sure I’ll tell you all my likes and dislikes so that you can make money off it ad my friends get to know me better as a side-effect? Sweet!. Facebook needs to tread a fine line between seeming to offer its users protection and privacy while encouraging them to be as open as possible.

I’ve already discussed the potential of a social media backlash happening in 2010 and I think with the sentiments expressed by Zuckerberg this week, we’re only going to see more and more discussion over the year on exactly why we need privacy, why we’re so happy to disregard it and what the consequences might be.

Social Media Backlash

If 2009 could be deemed the year that social media hit the mainstream, or at least became accepted by most businesses as something that is not going to be going away anytime soon if ever. Then perhaps this year might be the year we start to see a large consumer backlash against it.

There have always been social media nay sayers, I know it’s hard to believe but not everybody is on FaceBook, I know at least two people who aren’t and have no intent of ever being so, but I think the trend is growing. One indication is the popularity of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a handy one-stop shop for removing your interwebz presence. It doesn’t delete your account, rather it goes in, unfriends all your contacts and removes all of your private content before changing the password. Exactly what it does varies between platforms but FaceBook was rattled enough to block the Suicide Machine’s server from accessing it at the beginning of this week, and then issuing a cease and desist letter three days later, which focuses on the breach of T&Cs commited by soliciting user details and reporting profile pictures. Something which Suicide Machine states that it doesn’t do, in fact it believes that:

We are just offering a service to users who want to drop out of Facebook. According to Facebook’s terms of service, they should actually not threaten us but the people who commit suicide — ‘You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account’ http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf — And again, we are neither ‘hacking’ into their servers, nor scraping their pages. We only store the profile picture and the name of the user! This is actually possible without even logging into Facebook.”

Facebook blocks ‘Web 2.0 Suicide Machine’, NetworkWorld

One of the reasons you might want to drop off the social graph is to protect your future self from anything that your younger or present self might have done. Something which the BBC reports France is also pondering helping it’s citizens do with a Right-to-Forget law. This would enable users to request the deletion of data, or for web and mobile companies to destroy emails and text messages after a set time as:

People and young people need to be protected by the State so that there is fairness in the way this protection is established. A right-to-forget could protect an individual’s privacy and stop them from being permanently held to ransom by unguarded actions from their past.

Divina Frau-Meigs, Professor of American Studies and Media Sociology at the Paris Sorbonne University,

France ponders right-to-forget law

Which might be taking the Nanny state a little too far in my opinion, surely it would be better to teach people, young and old, the dangers of being too liberal with their personal information both on and offline rather than let them have the safety net of a future reset button?

Why do we need privacy

After announcements by Google’s Eric Schmidt around privacy, which I think can basically be summed up as ‘act like your parents/god/all-powerful being of you choice can see what you are to at all times and you’ll be fine’ approach. Followed by Facebook’s tightening up of privacy settings, which could potentially be summed up as a ‘sheesh  you people are too dumb to protect yourselves, let us do it for you’ arse covering manoeuvre. My thoughts have turned to privacy in general, online in particular and the question running around my head right now is, why does privacy matter?

Earlier in the year I had a natter with a psychotherapist of some renown about online privacy, they firmly believe that in 10 to 15 years time that they will be seeing clients present with a whole new set of issues based on our increasing online use. Their fears were based around the importance of non-verbal communication and what will happen when the vast majority doesn’t include it. My concerns were more based on the rather huge likelihood of something stupid that you had done in the past coming to bite you on the arse at a crucial point in the future and what  that would do to your self-image and esteem.

In a handily timed example, the wife of current Common speaker, Sally Bercow,  announced her intention to stand as a labour MP in the upcoming election along with a slew of revelations about her younger self, which was regarded as an unusual step. It is possible that the decision was made to be so transparent after the media accused  her of losing a job after lying about her degree but whatever the impetus, it was a brave and interesting move. Brave in that she has put herself up as the centre of judgemental gossip and voter derision, interesting in its unusualness. It will also be interesting to see what will happen in the run up to the election. Will her move have taken the sting out of any potential attacks by rivals or will her confessions be thrown in her face repeatedly?

Now it is possible that in twenty or so years, when the upcoming bunch of millennials are running the show no-one will care what you did in the past and if there are pictures of you as a teenage goth three sheets to wind hanging around the inernet, then that just adds colourful detail to your general windswept and interesting self and no more. Currently though we have the Boomers and Gen X in charge, and to them thought of (over)sharing every element of your life seems to border on insanity. Now as a society, we excel at accepting behaviour that previous generations held to be beyond the pale*, for example abortion, female suffrage and  homosexuality. Perhaps these are overly weighty examples to support my hypothesis that potentially at some stag in the future we will accept that people do do stupid things in their youth, or indeed at any age, that we are not all beige clones dedicated to a future work self’s protection

Pale is the noun meaning ‘a stake or pointed piece of wood’. It is virtually obsolete now except in this phrase, but is still in use in the associated words paling (as in paling fence) and impale (as in Dracula movies).

The paling fence is significant as the term pale became to mean the area enclosed by such a fence and later just the figurative meaning of ‘the area that is enclosed and safe’. So, to be ‘beyond the pale’ was to be outside the area accepted as ‘home’.  Source: The Phrase FInder

Social networks to set societal standards?

Following on from Chris’ post on the presentation of self in social media which discussed self-censorship when sharing online, the past week has seen a wider discussion about what role the social network providers themselves should play in censorship. In particular Facebook has come under flack for not removing groups that are about Holocaust Denial though it will happily remove more and less controversial content.

The initial request seems to have come from Brian Cuban in an open letter to Facebook chief, Mark Zuckerburg, in which he asks for the removal of such groups and points out that:

By allowing these groups whether they number 1 or 1000, Facebook is not promoting open discussion of  a controversial issue.  It is  promoting and encouraging hatred towards ethnic and religious groups, nothing more.

Facebook has recently banned a group called the Isle of Man KKK as it clearly violated the Facebook Terms of Service, particularly the bit that says:

You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Which you would think would also cover the contents of groups such as ‘Holocaust: A Series of Lies,’ and ‘Holocaust is a Holohoax’, for this is organisation that also well know for banning pictures of breast feeding women, so a blanket approach to enforcement is not beyond them. However according to an interview on CNN with a Facebook representative the groups remain because while the company agrees that the pages are offensive and objectionable, it believes that people have the right to discuss such ideas on its pages.

The question here is should we be looking to the platform providers to dictate what topics we are allowed to talk about on their sites. Perhaps for Facebook it is more of an issue as it seems to be determined to own the content we happily and often haphazardly upload which I suppose might leave it at the risk of potentially being sued as both owner and publisher of any salacious material. Alan Patrick over at Broadstuff has an excellent overview on the implications the decision not to ban the groups as yet on the freedom of speech.

And if you have time I recommend you pop over to Newsweek to read its article post on Facebook’s Porn Cops

Also posted over at Clicking & Screaming

Twitter is for the old folk

Just  picked up on some Nielsen research on Twitter demographics that states Twitter is not being picked up by the kids. The average user is 35 – 49, which is nice because it means I’m dragging down the average (just) and it gives a tiny bit of creedance to my belief that Gen Y and the Millenials are not actually all that when it comes to technology.

Some theories have been put forward as to why this is, old ppl like it cos its simple and/or they band wagon jumping setting up accounts but actually using it and its too dull in comparison to stuff like Facebook.

None of which seem to ring true to me, Facebook is trying to become twitter it seems (though not very popularly or successfull) and for as long as I have used Twitter the majority of users I know on it seem to be my age or older. If anything its the youngsters that have only started joining and not using it to the same degree.

I know much is made of the fact that they are the first generation to grow up with the internet as a de facto part of existence, are incredibly au fait with all stuff digital and are the trailbalzers on the new frontier.   However, knowing, being friends with and having worked with the odd one I don’t see that, they are quicker to adopt something once it has already tipped and more trusting when it comes to putting their life online,  but its the older generation that I see as the ones who are pushing the boundaries of what is achievable with technology.

Or am I wrong and this is the beginning of an age induced meh at the young people?

Privacy – is nothing sacred?

There’s been a lot about privacy in the news this week. First Facebook, which only slightly tweaked its T&Cs so that all your contents are now belong to them, forever. Then the more UK centric debate about reality star Jade Goody, who having lived her life in the spotlight for the past seven years will now be playing out her death on the public stage too it seems. Then to top it all, the very bastion of keeping schtum, the Vatican has used information gathered during confessions for a publicity campaign.

The Facebook saga has been well covered by many other people already and a U-turn has already been swiftly executed. Personally I like the stance that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took in his post. That Facebook wasn’t changing its T&Cs, rather it was just clarifying them, which is a top notch spinmeister bit of spiel if I ever heard one.*

It’s not the first time Facebook has pushed the boundaries when it comes to privacy. In 2007 everyone got upset about its Beacon programme being a tad too invasive. FB duly saw sense and made it opt-in rather than automatic enrolment. However, if as Zuckerberg’s himself has declared, ‘…people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before’, then it will not be too much longer until such moves go unnoted.

Perhaps our need to share everything has been stimulated by the millennium craze for reality shows that make megastars out of the most mundane. Admittedly reality TV existed before Peter Bazalgette** persuaded Channel 4 that nine weeks of watching ten no marks would be their biggest money spinner for the following decade, but I think we can safely say that BB was the thin end of wedge.

The most famous of the mundane is Jade Goody, who appeared in Big Brother 3 in 2002. It was this series in which the contestants became the most media savvy, realising that there was more money to be made by squeezing their 15 minutes outside the house than actually winning the competition itself. Goody, with the help of media svengali, Max Clifford, excelled in this. She has rarely been out of the papers, gossip mags or off the slightly scuzzier satellite channels and the British public happily lapped it up.

There are many reasons why Goody is popular, she provides fodder for those who like to sneer at her malapropisms, her general lack of education and lifestyle. For others she is proof that anyone can become rich and famous and provides inspiration. Most were happy for her to share every detail of her life but now that it comes to her death though we’ve all gone a bit prudish and she is being berated from several sides for continuing to appear in the media. Some are praising her for bringing the plight of cancer sufferers to the fore and doing the only thing she knows how to make as much as possible for her two children.

I think this indicates that it is no longer up to the individual what they wish to remain private, although this very much depends on the individual and what level of ownership the public feels they have on them. Perhaps this is reflected in the way Facebook changed its terms, that it will eventually decide what will be public property and what will should remain underwraps.  Actually it could be argued that it has already appointed itself as the moral guardian, what with its interesting approach to pictures of breastfeeding.

The question is do we need a new moral guardian? Perhaps is the answer following recent coverage on the Vatican. Today’s papers are full of coverage about how  men are more likely to confess to sins of lust and gluttony, and women were more likely to admit to pride and envy.

From a PR perspective, this is a nice piece of work.  A bit of competition between the sexes and it ticks off the various sleaze, sex and inquisitiveness boxes too. For someone who is interested in privacy and also knows a bit about religion it rang a few alarm bells As far as I am aware what is said in confession is meant to stay in confession. I believe (though am happy to be corrected on this) that if I were to confess to a priest that I’d committed a crime that they would be unable to then grass me up to the local constabulary, they would urge me to do give myself up but due to the sanctity of confession they couldn’t snitch themselves.

Now it seems that while they still can’t pass on any juicy gossip they can keep a rough record of who did what and then print it in their equivalent of a trade mag. I’m intrigued as to how the data was gathered, did they ask each person for permission to record the general category of sin or did they not give the penitent in question the heads up?

No matter which method was employed, it certainly raises a few questions as to what our notion of privacy will be like in  five – ten years hence, if the catholic church is not above either A) employing anecdotal information or B) profiting from the sins of its flock for a marketing push of its own.

~~~

*Which I have, I once heard myself mutter in a meeting, ‘it may not be *the* truth, but it’s a believable truth’. But don’t worry dear readers, I took myself outside and had a stern word with myself about being a gnat’s nadger from becoming the kind-of-jumped-up, soulless, marketing spawn that Bill Hick’s had long ago issued clear instructions to and returned to being a general lovely instead.

** Incidentally Peter Bazalgette is the great-great-grandson of Sir Joseph William Bazalgette, whose crowning achievement was the central London sewer network. I include this nugget only in the interests of keeping  the niff, naff n triv quotient up. You may draw any conclusions about how different generations have differing approaches when it comes to pumping effluence for the British society in your own time.