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Posts Tagged ‘social networking sites’

Your Network, Your Reputation

August 3rd, 2009
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With the rapid growth and use of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and many others, there’s a growing interest by service providers, marketers, and hosting companies in mapping this fertile ground. Your network (online and in person) is where your reputation resides. What does your network say about you?

What to Measure?

What to Measure?

IBM (a company with more than 38,000 patents) published a paper called Social Ties and Their Relevance to Churn in Mobile Telecom Networks in which the authors point out that it’s not the individuals that are important. It’s their relationships. From the abstract, “Exploring the nature and strength of these ties can help understand the structure and dynamics of social networks and explain real-world phenomena, ranging from organizational efficiency to the spread of information and disease.”

The bottom line here is that if enough of your friends don’t like something, there’s a tipping point where people start changing to something else. In the case of mobile phones, for instance, lots of people will get a new phone when their provider becomes a problem, and their friends agree about that problem.

There are two parts to this issue. First: whether you are a leader or a follower. Marketers and advertisers really care about leaders because they will influence their friends to do (or not do) something. Second: the mapping process can get rather personal. The IBM paper above looks at the “aggregate” or group behavior of a network. However, tools can be tuned or created to be very specific about your network: whom you see, how often, and who else they’re connected to.

In the case of politics where transparency is informative, you can see nice, detailed visualizations of networks at work around TARP (the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or “bank bailout” money), federal funding earmarks, or health care. But what about when it gets personal?

Coaching moment: Records of your relationships and your network are everywhere: in your social networks, in your email, on your phone, records of bridge tolls, and more. The mapping technology doesn’t yet work in real-time, but it’ll happen. By itself, this isn’t the major concern for me. The really big problem lies in the fact that we don’t have rules for how this information can or should be used.

Our corporations do not have the same concerns, priorities, or moral compass that people do. Corporations are motivated by what the company can do that is profitable and makes their shareholders happy. There are no laws or other forms of guidance about what proper social behavior is, largely because as a society or a culture, we’ve never talked about it.

I suggest now is a good time to start talking. With your friends. What do you want in an Information Policy Platform?

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Working toward Personalized Commerce

December 13th, 2008
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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada made this outstanding video called Privacy and Social Networks. It’s important to understand, as this video shows, that this harvesting of personal data is going on all the time.

Coaching moment: There are two sides to this problem. On one side are the account holders of these social networking sites. They are busy disclosing their interests, connections, and lives. These account holders may not realize that they are being mapped and sold out to the extent that they are. Perhaps they think it’s ok.

On the other side are the businesses that run these sites. They have Terms of Service (TOS) contracts that account holders agree to, whether they read the terms or not. The businesses engage in harvesting and selling practices that benefit their bottom line. (Would you expect anything less? They are businesses, and this is one way that it’s done.) The problem is that the buying and selling of account holder data is not transparent to the account holders.

If this makes you feel uneasy (and I think it should), think about how you’d change this model. An underlying assumption of the whole user data exchange is that companies want to sell you their stuff. The harvesting and data collection is about making sure you’re more likely to be interested in what they want to sell you. Marketers don’t like guessing, and they often get it wrong. (When you don’t buy, it’s a wasted catalog).

But what would it look like if you had a platform for requesting marketing material for something you’re interested in buying, instead of getting angry that you have so much spam and bulk mail (catalogs and the like)?

This is a much longer post about some work being done in this area. Read more…

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A peek at Distributed Social Networking

December 3rd, 2008
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One  of the overview ideas about OpenID is that it gives you a place that you can call your own. It’s a URL (a web address) that gives  information about you to other sites that you decide to share that information with. For instance, you can use your OpenID to sign in and make comments on this and certain other blogs, to sign into other services, and to represent yourself (and if you choose to make it public, what you’re doing).

The idea behind distributed social networking is that, like Facebook and MySpace and other social networking sites, you should be able to connect with your friends; but unlike those sites, you aren’t required to create an account on each one of your friends’ other services.

Here’s a great 15 min. video from pixelsebi that explains it.


Distributed Social Networking – An Introduction from pixelsebi on Vimeo.

Coaching moment: In the past, and still to a large extent, web sites want to “own” us and our data. But think about this: their data is merely a point in time, and unless we choose to update that service, their data about us often gets stale and goes out of date. What if we controlled what companies knew about us? There is certain data that might be required for requested transactions, but what might you want the world to know about you?

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