Life Events and Social Networking

Originally published 8/18/2010

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has some interesting ideas on privacy and social networking.  Noting that people (especially young people) have a habit of posting private or potentially embarrassing information on public social networking sites, he predicted that “coming of age” in the future might have to include the creation of a new online persona to distance oneself from youthful online indiscretions. If that’s true, I wonder why would we limit reinventions of one’s online self to just a single coming of age life event.  What about getting married: should the bride and the groom be able to change their names to disavow social networking posts made when they were single?  Should divorcing couples be allowed to change their names to distance their online personas from when they were married?  Should parents be allowed to change their names after they have children? What about switching political parties? Moving to a new city? And so on and so on.

How would such a trend apply to our professional personas?  Increasingly, employees are asked to join social networks as online representatives for their company. If I post positive reviews of my current employer’s products and services, for instance, won’t I need a new persona if I change careers and go to work for a former competitor?  Or if I post a competitive analysis casting another company’s product offerings in a negative light, won’t I need a new name if my company and that company merge?  As it stands today, you certainly don’t have to look far to find lots of examples of statements made by corporate executives that they’ve come to regret after their business environment changes.

I doubt seriously if creating new online personas for each different life event becomes formalized anytime soon (informally, of course, people do it all the time with email and user name aliases).  Instead, I expect governments to get involved soon (some already have) to legislate that when a person leaves a social network, the owner of the network must irrevocably delete all content that person created while a member.  It remains to be seen how those privacy laws will effect 3^rd party content aggregators and search engines.

As online privacy laws stand now, it should give people pause when participating in social networks. It should also be a big consideration for organizations thinking about getting into social networking. How much involvement can you expect of members on public social networking sites when it finally sinks in that anything they say “can and will be used against them” in the future? 

The Flip Side of Social Networking Success

Originally published 8/11/2010

An interesting story came to light a few days ago. Presumably you are aware of the social news site Digg.  Well, it seems that a group of conservative members of the site conspired (apparently for months if not years) to drive its member-voted top content towards the right end of the political spectrum. By utilizing multiple accounts (against Digg’s terms of use) and by communicating with each other outside the community (through an invitation-only Yahoo group called the Digg Patriots), this group was massively successful in voting up news items that furthered their conservative agenda, and burying content that conflicted with it. They were also successful in provoking more liberal members of the site to the point where those members became belligerent and insulting enough to be banned from the site.

Now shills and plants were around for a long time before social networking, and some would argue that this group did nothing wrong. After all, Digg is all about crowdsourcing the top news stories (ok, not just news, but whatever bright and shiny web content that attracts the attention of the community). But this is an interesting phenomenon: These (apparently) weren’t paid actors intent on driving people to do more business with a company (or do less with a competitor); this was a group that basically took it upon themselves to hijack a community to further their political agenda. Why did they pick Digg? One would assume because of Digg’s popularity: according to a 2009 study by Social Computing Journal, it’s the #9 top social networking site.  After all, why hijack a site hardly anyone looks at? For social networking it seems, success is a two edged sword: A large group of sufficiently motivated users might make your social networking site an incredible success, but such a group might also choose to bend or break it to suit their agenda. And sadly, the more successful your social networking site the more likely it is that it will attract this type of activity.

Would You Pay For Social Network Content?

Originally published 7/30/2010

We may be about to find out.  Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue and Vanity Faire among other titles, announced that they were going to change their on-line business model from an ad-supported one to one where the bulk of revenue will come from directly charging users for access to content.  Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally) the social networking news site Reddit.com (owned by Conde Nast) announced a new “Reddit Gold” premium service this month.  Despite the indignant outcries from longtime users, Reddit had managed to collect a few thousand subscriptions ($3.99/month or $29.99/year) in the first few days after the program was announced.  Curiously enough, the justification for the fee wasn’t for access to the content, but a promise to use the funds collected to improve the Reddit.com infrastructure.

Apparently charging directly for social networking content is problematic. Consider the following: In a survey published in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism's 2010 Digital Future Study, a whopping 0% of those polled would pay to use Twitter. Nobody. No one. Nada. Now granted, there’s a margin of error in any survey, but statistically predicting that no one would pay to use Twitter is an incredible measure of the worth users perceive for the pleasure of accessing other people’s online content 140 characters at a time.  Other efforts to charge for formerly free content haven’t fared so well either. In the UK, less than 3 weeks after The Times announced a members-only strategy and erected a paywall around their site, online traffic had dropped by 90%.

Steward Brand is famously quoted for saying “information wants to be free” (although that’s not entirely what he said).  It certainly appears that way for social networking at least. Charging people to participate is a monetization model with some serious challenges.

Social Media: Nation Building for the 21st Century

Originally published 7/22/2010

There were a couple of interesting social networking milestones that were just passed (as of this writing).  Facebook and Twitter just accumulated their 500 millionth and 100 millionth accounts, respectively.  To put that into perspective, if they were nations instead of online communities, Facebook would be the third largest country on the planet, behind China and India but ahead of every other country. If each account on Facebook is one person, that means nearly one out of every eleven people on the planet are on Facebook (which is remarkable considering that more than a fifth of the planet – China -- can’t even get to Facebook). Twitter, in comparison, would be the 12th largest country (not counting Facebook) with a population just larger than the Philippines and just smaller than Mexico.  Granted neither Facebook nor Twitter accounts map one-to-one with people, and not all of those accounts are active,  but numbers that large are still remarkable.

Which begs the question in my mind: what is that size “community” good for besides marketing?  Marketing opportunities can be lucrative to be sure, and are certainly responsible for keeping the lights on.  But increasingly social media is about doing something other than accumulating a large and colorful variety of cute farm animals:  getting a political candidate elected (or booted out of office); raising funds for a good cause (Haitian earthquake victims, for instance); righting social wrongs (exposing corrupt police or politicians).

Nations (when properly motivated) can accomplish great things that individuals and even communities cannot. What great things will Twitternation and Facebooknation do?  Time will tell.