Has Facebook Just Repackaged Beacon? Does Anyone Care?

Apr 30, 2010 By Mark Evans in Social Media 2 Comments Tags: api, beacon, data, Facebook, privacy

Apologies for beating a dead horse but it has been more than a week since Facebook launched several major changes in which it operates, highlighted by a huge move in making more data public, and how third-party Web sites are able to personalize content based on information they call pull from Facebook.

To be honest, the reaction has been far less muted than I expected. Even though Facebook introduced significant changes in how the data of its 400 million users can be leveraged by Facebook and Web sites taking advantage of the new API, one of the only groups with major concerns is Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

It’s shocking because if you’re a Facebook user that visits another Web site, they’ll already have information about you. Sure, it means a more personalized experience but there’s a price to be paid, which is that your data is being increasingly shared. To be clear, more of your Facebook information is going to be made public.

To me, the benefits of this new data arrangement are skewed in a major way in Facebook’s favour, while wrapped in a nice, tidy package of convenience and personalized for users. For Facebook, the ability to have stronger links with Web sites means more ways to generate revenue.

This is a crucial consideration for a company whose growth and the financial resources to support this growth has out-paced its ability to generate revenue. Despite its success, Facebook finds itself scrambling to generate more money because, let’s face it, its advertising on Facebook is a high-volume, low-margin business.

When you put Facebook’s new data strategy in context, it’s hard to believe that so many people have simply accepted it while Beacon received such a negative reaction that Facebook was forced to retreat. In many ways, Facebook’s new approach is just a re-invention of Beacon packaged as “personalization”.

More check out these articles and blog posts:

- Facebook Applications Raise Privacy Concerns (Toronto Star)
- Marc Meyer’s “We care about our privacy. We just didn’t realize how much social networks didn’t.”
- A Must-Do: Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings (Mark Evans Tech)

A New, Bold Partnership for ME Consulting

Apr 28, 2010 By Mark Evans in Social Media 4 Comments Tags: mark evans, me consulting, media profile, mp thread

Since launching ME Consulting in January 2009, social media has been a key part of the business, particularly over the past six months as more Canadian companies start to embrace it.

It’s been great to be sitting in the eye of the social media hurricane as all the action whirls around you. The part that I’ve enjoyed the most has been providing strategic counsel to companies looking to establish a strong social media presence but need insight, advice and information about the best options and how they align with the marketing and sales strategies. While six years of hands-on experience with social media also lets me provide tactical services, it’s not where I offer the most value.

When Media Profile’s Alison King and John Thibodeau approached me a few months ago about an opportunity to help them with social media, my first reaction was “I’m not looking for a job”. Their response was “We’re not looking to hire you”, which made the rest of the conversation intriguing because after escaping the cubicle farm, there’s no going back.

What transpired is a unique and strategic partnership with Media Profile, one of Canada’s leading public relations agencies. I’m part a new unit called MP Thread that will be offering a full range of social media services. My role will be to provide strategic counsel, while Media Profile will deliver tactical and creative services.

For me, it’s a eat your cake and have it too opportunity.

By being part of MP Thread, I get the opportunity to with some of Media Profile’s major clients – and, hopefully, new clients – while continuing to do my own thing with ME Consulting. This means I will continue to work with my existing clients, which mostly consist of start-ups and fast-growing companies looking for digital marketing and social media services.

When I was a newspaper reporter, I joked that working for a PR agency was going over to the “dark side”. Now that I’m here, I can see the light!

Here’s the official press release announcing MP Thread.

Sorry, but Blippy is a Stupid Idea

Apr 27, 2010 By Mark Evans in Social Media 3 Comments Tags: blippy, consumers, credit cards, Social Media

Confession: I’m a social media junkie – an enthusiastic blogger, active Twitter user, reluctant member of the ever-growing Facebook empire, and YouTube watcher. I like to share my thoughts and interesting content and online services.

The chances, however, of me using Blippy are zero, nil, nadda, nunca.

Why anyone would give a third-party their credit card information so their purchases can be tracked and broadcast is bizarre. Over the past week, I have been beating the drum about the changes that Facebook made to its API that now make more of your information public, and Blippy is just another strange part of the “tell-all” ecosystem that has emerged in recent years.

Really, what are the benefits of telling the world about your purchases? Seriously, what’s really in it for you, your friends or strangers who see this information.

Is it vanity? Is it a way to provide real-world suggestions about the best products and services to purchase? Is it just another creature of consumerism, which seems to have survived the recession relatively unscathed? Or is Blippy just another beast to feed our growing addiction to sharing.

I’m sure there are people who get some value from Blippy by getting a better idea of what people are buying so they can make better purchasing decisions but let’s be real here: Blippy’s in the business of collecting massive amounts of data so it can aggregate and leverage it to make money. In other words, your activity fuels the fire.

To me, the common theme between Facebook and Blippy is how the balance between the benefits offered to users, and what these companies get from all their users’ activity is starting to tilt in the direction of the companies. While users get a few social media crumbs, Facebook and Blippy are gorging at the data buffet.

By the way, here’s Blippy mea culpa in the wake of reports that some of its users credit card information was accidentally disclosed via Google.

Is Social Media Driven by Anxiety?

Apr 25, 2010 By Mark Evans in Social Media 9 Comments Tags: anxiety, Facebook, privacy, Social Media

A friend of mine has a theory about why social media has been embraced so enthusiastically as a “tell-out” medium in which people voluntarily and happily disclose incredible amounts of details about their personal and professional lives.

He believes a lot of social media activity – tweets, updates, check-ins, blog posts, photos, videos, etc. – is driven by anxiety. Many people are simply anxious about not being heard, recognized or acknowledged. As a result, they turn to social media to tell the world what they’re doing, thinking, eating and feeling to ease this anxiousness.

It explains why so much social media activity is “me, me, me”, which, in turn, goes a long way in explaining why people feel the need to disclose so many personal and professional details that are really of interest to so few people. How to explain why people spend so much time on Twitter, Facebook, etc. offering a running commentary of their day-to-day existences.

This “tell-all” phenomena provides some context to Facebook’s decision earlier this week to turn itself and more of the data of its users into a public forum that can be searched and indexed by third-party applications. What was once a private network that provided users a place to share things with friends and family is now a public one, which offers far more benefits to Facebook (more page views, more advertising) than its 400 million users.

While Facebook’s “public-ness” is both fascinating and troubling, it’s far more interesting when you take into account all information that its users disclose. If we weren’t so public, the concerns about Facebook’s public-ness would be far less of an issue.

I should make it clear that increasingly all of us are leading digitally public lives to one degree or another. As a digital creature, there’s certainly a lot of information online about myself. But I have tried to make a concerted effort to maintain a healthy distance between public and private. There are many things in my professional life that don’t need to be public, and there are many things in personal life that should private.

In many ways, however, this isn’t the way that digitally-engaged people are leading their lives. The gap between public and private has dramatically shrunk to the point where it’s difficult to tell between the two.

As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, Facebook’s changes have put the spotlight on the fact we’ve reached a fork in the privacy road – either we go down the path of full disclosure or veer towards a path of public-private balance. My sense is the public-private path won’t be embraced until more people realized the downside of leading tell-all lives.

For more thoughts about Facebook’s changes, check out:
-blog post from Simple Thoughts
-Mathew Ingram’s post on GigaOM about how to block the changes made by Facebook.
- Phil Baumann’s “Facebook’s Hidden Hate Button”.
- The National Post’s Matt Hartley has an article looking at the work done by Canada’s privacy boss, Jennifer Stoddart, in making Facebook address privacy issues.

What do you think? Are you concerned about being overly public?

A Fork in the Road for Online Privacy

Apr 22, 2010 By Mark Evans in Social Media 3 Comments Tags: Facebook, Foursquare, privacy, Twitter

There are times when I feel like an outlier compared with my digital peers.

At a time when many of them are happily sharing all kinds of information about their professional and personal lives, I have been fairly cautious about showing all of my cards to everyone on the Web because I think there should be a healthy divide between our public and private lives.

In many ways, I’m on the outside looking in, particularly compared with younger people who think nothing on sharing everything and anything, particularly on places such as Facebook.

While I’m still trying to digest all the news coming out of Facebook’s F8 developer conference yesterday, it has become apparent that online privacy has come to a serious fork in the road with two distinct paths.

One path that is we surrender our online privacy, and live with the reality that everything we do and disclose online will be available to anyone. The second path – and one that I don’t see happening – is people wake up to the new reality that online privacy could be a thing of the past, and the pendulum swings away from full disclosure.

As much as online services such as Facebook, Blippy, Twitter and Foursquare are interesting, entertaining and valuable, they’re also companies in the business of data and, increasingly, they are sharing and aggregating the information that we happily provide them about our interests, purchases and activity.

All of this activity is happening behind the scenes but few people seemed concerned about our data being used this way. Perhaps I’m overly-concerned or maybe ahead of the pack but sooner or later people should start to realize that the stuff you share online is being used in many different ways by many different companies.

If you can live with having a public and social existence carry on but if you have any concerns about privacy, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

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