MindComet

Facebook privacy directions

I’ve had some requests from friends asking how to prohibit 3rd party applications from accessing your Facebook photos… here they are in screen shot form.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 24, 2009

Facebook, why aren’t you protecting your greatest asset?

Did you know that Facebook, by default, allows 3rd party applications to access your photos? What’s the harm in that you ask? Well, it turns out that some nefarious application developers are using people’s likenesses in some alarming ways.

Blogger, Cheryl Smith reported this originally on her blog. [At the time I wrote this, her blog is down, no doubt to Digg-effect like traffic…think of all the Adsense revenue she’s missing out on!]. Her husband was browsing Facebook, when he was displayed a “hook up” advertisement letting him know that “Hot singles” were waiting for him…pretty common ad on Facebook, except the face in the ad, was his wife’s. DOH!

Yeah. Fortunately for him, Cheryl wasn’t up to any shenanigans. She was the victim of Facebook’s inadequate protection of user data. A 3rd party ad network, had retrieved her photo and displayed it in ads that we’re presented to her friends. Let me be clear, this is against Facebook’s terms of service (TOS), and the ad network was disabled by Facebook. However, it raises the question about what obligation Facebook has to protect your privacy and in this case your reputation?

Having your likeness displayed in a comprising and possibly damaging context, by an irresponsible 3rd party, could have far reaching impacts to you. Imagine if you’re using Facebook for professional networking and your colleagues saw that ad. What impact would that potentially have to your career? As far as her marital relationship, what if this unnecessarily caused friction between her and her husband? Lets that take argument to the extreme and ask, what if Cheryl’s husband was the jealous type, who had a violent temper and Cheryl had been harmed physically as a result of him seeing the ad? Luckily they realized how and why this happened, took it in stride and found humor in it. However, I wouldn’t expect the average Facebook user to be able to “put the pieces together” and walk away with a chuckle. This is a potentially dangerous situation.

This is against their TOS, and the ad network was punished, isn’t that enough? HELL NO! The fact that Facebook’s developer platform allows programmers to explicitly violate the TOS, without any safeguards, is alarming.

Why hasn’t Facebook taken the job of protecting it’s users reputations seriously?

At the end of the day, we’re their greatest asset. Without us, their $10 billion valuation goes right into the toilet.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 21, 2009

Brand Terrorists

Watch out, there are brand terrorists on the loose!

And yes brands, you should be really really scared of them.

Some of you might be wondering, what are they?

Brand terrorists infect online channels with negative information and perceptions about a product. In many cases, that negative chatter is well deserved by the brand. Brand terrorists are often created through poor customer service.

So what can you do?

For one, make top-notch customer service part of your DNA. Look at Zappos, as an organization they are hyper-focused on customer service. EVERY single employee, not matter what your role or expected level of interaction with the customer, must attend customer service training. That’s hard core.

So how many Zappos brand terrorists are there? I don’t know for sure, but a recent search on Twitter assured me it’s probably pretty low and confirmed that they have lots of “brand advocates”. Yes, brand advocates, the people who happily praise your brand in public forums and HELP brands sell products..no commission required.

What else can you do?

Extend your customer service through social media channels. Proactively mine actionable customer service situations, take care of the customer and transform a brand terrorist into a brand advocate. Relative to normal customer service overhead, it’s a scalable, low cost approach.

If you haven’t read my post, Twitter kicks ass…and so does Boingo, click on over and see a real world terrorist to advocate transformation.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 15, 2009

Facebook is dead. And so is Twitter.

An interesting argument was made by Dustin Clingman, a local game designer, at the DMAF’s “State-of-the-Digital Media-Industry” event in Orlando.

He makes the point that Twitter, unlike Facebook, has positioned itself as an extremely efficient method for spreading out information with global context. He makes his point by asking the question, “Who found out about Michael Jackson being dead on Facebook?“

In his comparison of the two platforms, from a mass-communications standpoint, I totally agree with his point that “Facebook is dead”.

However, I think his comparison is short-sighted in a couple of regards and is clearly from the stand point of a non-marketer.

For one, Twitter has lost alot of it’s trust factor. It’s becoming a very noisy platform that’s been infiltrated by unscrupulous marketers, get rich quick schemes, hackers, hoaxsters and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bots (no one, not even Twitter knows the extent of this problem). Following the death of Michael Jackson, who found out that Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Degeneres, and Britney Spears had died on Facebook? These claims were all over Twitter, yet were all completely false.

Secondly, Dustin has failed to factor in the huge marketing potential that Facebook provides—the potential for word of mouth marketing in groups of friends with an implicit level of trust that’s unparalleled on other social platforms. According to a recent study by eMarketer, 34% of US Internet users bought a product based on a recommendation from a friend or relative. Compare this to a mere 5% who were influenced by a blogger (or micro-blogger).

So while were doing comparisons, from a social media trust and WOM standpoint, I believe that “Twitter is dead”.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 02, 2009