Should We Care about Privacy?

By Mark Evans in Social Media 2 Comments Tags: , ,

For whatever reason, privacy has become an increasingly dominant theme for me recently. And judging by the number of newspaper articles, radio shows, blog posts and presentations about privacy, there are lots of other people thinking about it has well.

It is interesting to get a handle on why privacy is taking more of the spotlight given online privacy is a new or sexy topic. One explanation may be the number of social media services that make it easy to share information publicly, and how comfortable people have become in sharing the details of their personal and professional lives. What was once private information or limited to a few family members is now being broadcast to everyone and anyone. The personal privacy barriers are voluntarily coming down.

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Flickr or Foursquare, the amount of personal information about what you’re doing, buying, seeing, eating and located has become a digital tsunami.

The big question is why is public disclosure has been so enthusiastically embraced? Is it vanity to show how smart we are in the choices we make on a daily basis? Is it personal branding to create a perception of who you are or who you want to be? Or is it anxiety in which people feel unheard and isolated so social media gives them a user-friendly public broadcasting vehicle?

It’s not that I think public disclosure is a bad thing; it’s the level of disclosure that seems out of control. It’s so easy to talk about stuff publicly that many people never self-edit themselves for posting, updating, tweeting or checking in. These days personal routines evolve around eating, breathing and personal updates to the world.

I think the focus on privacy is not going to have much of an impact on what people do online but it’s important to pay more attention to privacy to build awareness of how people are behaving and how they should behave. If anything, the focus on privacy may encourage some people to think twice before telling the world everything they’re doing.

Some Lessons in E-Advocacy

By Mark Evans in Social Media, Uncategorized 1 Comment Tags: , , , ,

As social media has become more popular, it has been enthusiastically embraced by non-profits and community groups looking to make their voices and position heard. In many respects, social media has leveled the playing field by giving people a powerful and popular platform that can thrive even if their issues and causes aren’t embraced by traditional media.

Until recently, I was an interested observer in this social movement. But that changed when Toronto’s Parks and Recreation Department proposed to eliminate community board that operated eight arenas in the city, including one in my neighbourhood that does a great job of serving the needs of the entire community.

The proposal made no sense because community-operated arenas are well run, clean, provide amazing programming and, as important, are profitable. This compares with the 40 city-operated rinks that lose $13-million/year.

Rather than just idly sit by and watch the politicians carry out this flawed plan, several members of my community and I decided to get involved to make it clear there was another point of view out there. So what do you do to promote the cause. These days, you tap into social media.

The first move was creating a Facebook Fan Page that could be used to explain our position and highlight links to interesting content such as newspaper articles, blog posts and documentation from the city of Toronto. Given that Facebook has more than 400 million registered users, it was a user-friendly way to attract support.

Another tool we tapped was an online petition. We ended up using GoPetition, a free service that’s pretty easy to use. In particular, “signing” the petition was quick and did not require providing information beyond a name and e-mail address.

In the end, we got 252 Facebook Fans and 258 GoPetition signatures. It was a respectable number although, in hindsight, we could have probably attracted more support by delivering flyers to peoples’ houses and putting postcards on utility polls.

That said, I think the Facebook Page and petition were successful they did galvanize the community, and allowed us to highlight the issues when approaching newspaper reporters and bloggers. This gave us credibility, and played a key role in generating some much-needed newspaper and blog coverage.

And in the end, we would like to think that our campaign worked. Rather than eliminating the community boards, city council approved a compromise that will hopefully serve the needs of everyone involved.

For me, the process was enlightening and educational process. It provided me with first-hand knowledge of how social media can be an effective communications and lobbying tool, as well as insight into how Facebook Fan Pages work.

The Dark Side of Social Media and Privacy

By Mark Evans in Social Media 23 Comments Tags: , , , ,

At PodCamp Toronto yesterday, one of the intriguing sessions was Brad Buset’s presentation about privacy, and how there needs to be more awareness of how much information we’re disclosing via social networks.

It’s an issue that has been lost in the shuffle amid the excitement about sharing what you’re doing, thinking, eating, going, drinking, buying and where you’re located. Everyone is pounding away on their keyboards to broadcast everything and anything without much thought to whether disclosing this information has a downside. In many ways, we’re drunk on social media.

The reality is there’s a dark side to social media that people need to serious start thinking about now. Every tweet, update, video and blog post is micro-chapter of your public profile that anyone can access. Sure, it’s information that is created for friends, family and colleagues but it’s also out there for other people with less virtuous interests.

The appearance of Please Rob Me is probably the best thing to happen to the idea of social media privacy. PRM is a mash-up that taps Foursquare and Twitter to highlight people who have broadcast that they are not home. For break and enter specialists, it’s a great resource.

Buset made a great point when he said that Please Rob Me is just the tip of the ice berg. Using APIs, someone could create a service that would combine updates of your location (Foursquare) with updates of what you’ve bought (Blippy) with updates of what you’re doing (Twitter or Facebook) to create an even better database for B&E specialists.

While this scenarios may seem farfetched, it’s just an example of how your social media information can be harvested and aggregated to provide accurate snapshots of your life. Unfortunately, most people are not thinking about social media privacy. They’re far too happy with the idea of leading transparent lives that can be shared with friends and family.

The problem is the public-private pendulum has swung too far to public. While sharing experiences and ideas is a key part of what makes social media so powerful, people need to think more about what they’re broadcasting and who can see it.

Buset said part of the problem is that social networks have a vested interest in helping people find each other, which means they want to make more information public so that it’s search-able. This explains, he said, why the default settings for Facebook profiles have swung to public from private.

In many respects, the emergence of Foursquare could be the best thing to happen to social media privacy. The willingness to publicly broadcast your location is a major and serious surrender of personal privacy. It’s one thing to broadcast that you need a coffee, you drank too much or think the Olympics are a waste of time; it’s entirely different to tell people where you’re located on a regular basis.

It’s time for privacy to be pushed into the spotlight rather than forced to exist in the shadows. We need to focus on how much information is being broadcast to the world, and how social networking companies are pushing everyone to be public rather than private.

If we surrender our privacy, the way we live our lives is going to be completely different.

Links: For more on Please Rob Me, check out this ReadWriteWeb post.

How Much Social Media Should Be Monitored?

By Mark Evans in Social Media 4 Comments Tags: , , , , ,

For good reasons, social media monitoring and measurement is all the rage as companies look to get information and intelligence about all the conversations taking place.

To offer comprehensive coverage, companies such as Sysomos (a client) monitoring blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikis and forums, as well as traditional media. It’s all about getting as good a handle as possible on what’s happening and who’s driving the conversations.

One of the realities for anyone doing social media monitoring is how many social media platforms should be monitored – a challenge given the fact there are hundreds, if not thousands, of social media services being used to one degree or another.

For example, should Google Buzz be monitored now given it has nine million users? Some social media monitoring services such as Sysomos are already doing it because each Google Buzz user has an RSS feed that can be indexed.

What about Foursquare, which is the new shiny toy for social media enthusiasts? Does it make sense to monitor Foursquare right now when the only thing users doing is broadcasting their locations. Is that valuable or relevant social media activity that should be taken into account?

What about Ning, the do-it-yourself social networking service that has millions of users? Or Google sidewiki?

In other words, where should you draw the line? How popular or interesting does a social media service need to be before it needs to be indexed and monitored?

What do you think?

Can A Social Media Agency Be Relevant?

By Mark Evans in Social Media 1 Comment Tags: , , , ,

At the meshmarketing conference last October, one of the panels was how social media was tearing down the silos between advertising, public relations and digital agencies. Instead of operating in their own realms with little overlap, these different agencies are increasingly finding themselves in direct competition due to social media.

PR agencies, for example, now need to offer social media service, as well as digital content to create campaigns. Advertising agencies need to offer digital to complement their creative efforts, while digital agencies have to provide social media consulting to complement their development work. As a result, we are starting to seeing acquisitions and internal expansion to deal with the growing demands of clients who want one-stop shopping.

In the wake of this activity, it’s interesting to see the creation of Powered, a new 70-person social media agency that was created by combining three different agencies: Crayon, Drillteam Marketing and StepChange Group.

According to AdAge, Powered was created to “compete with digital agencies, public relations shops and an emerging crop of specialists to occupy the lead role in helping brands deal with social media.”

So, the obvious question is whether a “one-trick” pony agency such as Powered can effectively compete with PR, digital and advertising agencies that are driving towards offering a broader portfolio of services, including social media.

My sense is that for a social media agency to be viable, it obviously needs to offer excellent strategic and tactical services. That said, there will be pressure to expand into other areas such as digital to serve clients who don’t want to deal with one agency for consulting and then another agency to create the digital collateral needed to support their social media campaigns.

If Powered becomes successful and establishes itself as a social media powerhouse, it would not be at all surprising to see it snapped up by a digital, advertising or PR agency looking to quickly expand its capabilities – something that would no doubt please Powered’s investor, Austin Ventures.

Why and How Do Videos Go Viral?

By Mark Evans in Social Media 2 Comments Tags: , , , ,

Earlier this week, I did an interview with the CBC in Thunder Bay about a video by a local rap singer that had gone viral with more than 150,000 views. For a small city such as Thunder Bay, this was a major news story because the video went from being the toast the town to being an online phenomena in a few days.

One of the questions asked by the CBC host was how and why videos go viral. The answer is far from simple because it can be a difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint why a video captures the imagination of people to the point where they enthusiastically share it with other people, who share it with other people, and so on.

So what does a video need to go viral?

Perhaps the most important element is it needs to be entertaining to engage people enough that they want to pass it around to other people. “Entertaining” can be defined as funny, silly, captivating, enjoyable, interesting, different or immersive. It can apply to a song, a dance such the “Evolution of Dance“, a stunt such as putting Mentos in Diet Coke or just be something out of the ordinary such as steps that play music.

A viral video also needs a social media spark. It needs a person with a following or someone seen as an influencer to elevate the video to another level where it can be exposed to a larger audience.

In the “Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell described these people as “mavens” who accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others.

For viral videos, there’s also an element of luck and being at the right place at the right time, which is probably more difficult to define or capture.

So, what are you thoughts about how a video goes viral? How would you explain it?

Note: This post originally appeared on the Sysomos blog

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