November 2010

Round X: Do you or does Facebook own your Facebook data?

By Steve Backman, November 10, 2010

 More and more web sites allow you to sign in with your Facebook ID. Not a good idea if you are just doing it to avoid remembering passwords. Better to sign-up for lastpass.com or something like it. Interesting idea if you truly want to share what you do on the other site with your Facebook circle. 

In the be careful what you ask for department, issues of privacy, openness of data exchange and reciprocity among web services continue to stick to Facebook.  Michael Arrington’s 11/9 post on Techcrunch.com, the major watcher of all things high tech and start-up, takes a fairly strident stand against Facebook’s current policies. /

Facebook has become not just another social network but an institution of our times, complete with a Hollywood version.  As it grows, its economic power grows, a lot by gobbling up ever larger mounds of personal data and web browsing habits.  When you log in to another site using your Facebook ID, a new stream of data flows outward from that site to Facebook. Behind the scenes, your data on Facebook cooks with all your other data to produce ever more complete portraits of your habits and the social cohorts you are assigned to. This gives Facebook more marketing power to advertisers and marketers.
 
Facebook’s lack of reciprocity about data bothers a lot of people. It bothers Google and other large presences on the web. It bothers media and technology critics. It bothers Facebook users even if they don’t quite make the leap from technological limitation to corporate policy. 
 
The latest conflict, between Google and Facebook over user identities is illuminating.  Google announced a policy that it would only allow other web servers to grab user lists if those web services provided the same services back. This effectively blocked Facebook. Facebook retaliated by publishing the manual steps to work around this restriction. And a  war of words on this heightened. 
 
Facebook’s policy hinges on the idea that you should be able to get at your data, but not data about your friends. So if you are a friend on Facebook, you may export that bit of information, but not other stuff—notably not the email addresses of your friends. Reasonable in some ways, but in practice, users become tied to Facebook. This is true for individuals, for organizations and advocacy causes and for businesses.  There are ways around everything, but not on an easy, free or grand scale.
 
Bottom line: While Facebook claims you have control over your own data, control is not ownership. You can only do as much as their tools allow. And their competitive market position governs what they allow more than deep and abiding concern for their users’ long term independence and privacy.  
Arrington argues that Facebook needs to give individuals and organizations greater ability to extract their data. Likewise, he says that other web services greater ability to draw on a user’s Facebook social graph, the sum total of their relationships. 
 
Read the whole post, but his summary makes the basic points: 
1. It’s what users want, and it’s the right thing to do.
2. Facebook is so large now that health-of-ecosystem and user needs must be considered when Facebook makes product and policy decisions.
3. They’re lying to press and users, even today, about their motivations for retaining data. This is not about protecting users.
4. The data export tool they released last month is a red herring.
5. They have a very small window of opportunity to do this, before Attorneys General and class action litigators see too big of an opportunity to pass up.
 
Whatever you think on the substance of the issues,  anyone who works with technology has some social responsibility to break these issues down for those we work with and influence and to speak up on the consumer—as well as potential regulatory issues involved. 
 

Controlling Your Social Media Message

By Laura Quinn, November 1, 2010
There's a lot of people saying that in the age of social media we can't "control the message."  People will say what they want to say about us, and we can't put words in their mouth, so we just need to let go.  We need to get over our need for control.
 
This seems to me to be at odds with most of the tenants of good marketing.  The concept that people are talking about you is an old one, and it's encompassed in marketing strategy in the concept of your "brand."  Your brand is what people in the world think and say about you.  You don't control your brand, you can only try to steer it.
 
This, to me, parallels the social media world exactly.  You can't "control" the message, but you can try to steer it, which is far different than just letting go.  
 
So let's say you're running a campaign.  You're trying to get people to stop shopping at a particular store (we'll call it Store Laura).  You don't just say "Stop Shopping at Store Laura," hope that people will pass it around on social media, and call it a day.  You shape your message and message points, and think through what will be most compelling.  You design an ongoing set of communications so there's a stream of information from you to the world.  You might create a set of logos, images, videos, that help to create your point.  You spread these to your supporters over time with the hope that they'll help pass on the message.
 
At the point that you've put things into the world, you *will* need to let go a little bit.  You can't play the message police if folks are trying to support the campaign and use some non-approved language.  But you can continue to put out good and compelling information with the hopes that people will use that more than stuff you really don't agree with.
 
So what does that mean?  I would posit four principles of Steering Your Message with Social Media (because everyone loves a numbered list, right?):
 
  1. Design your message to be compelling to a social media audience.  If you're hoping people will pass it on, you need to make sure it's interesting to begin with.
  2. Provide lots of things to let people easily pass on the message.  Truthfully, you're likely to have more pretty lazy supporters than ones who will go out of their way to craft new stuff.  If you give them lots of interesting things to share and pass on, even different options to choose between, they're more likely to use your own content (which, presumably, is completely aligned to your goals) than make up their own.
  3.  Frame the message to be bigger than just a set of words.  You don't want to get bogged down in word choices in the middle of an important campaign.  Define the goals and brand attributes so that people can tell their own stories, craft their own clever slogans, or put their own spin on it without "going off message" from your perspective.  If they're putting energy towards (in our example) trying to get people from shopping at Store Laura, then unless they're really over the line in some horrible direction, they should be considered on message.
  4.  Let your community help shape the message.  If you succeed in getting your community to help you out online, make sure you pay attention to what they're saying.  Through words and actions, they're telling you what's compelling and what's likely to stick.  Don't push things that no one seems interested in; instead use what seems to resonate to refine the message.  And don't be afraid to follow the lead of someone in the community, if they have a great idea.  (Of course, ask permission if they've created it themselves).
 
So it's really not about "letting go of your message."  In fact, this set of guidelines depends on crafting your message carefully to begin with, monitoring it over time, and supporting it over time with new content.  You certainly need to let people put their own spin on your information, and perhaps revise it, but the old tenants of trying to shepard your brand hold true.  You can't control the message, but it's important to nuture and steer it.