Privacy in the Age of Social Media and Radical Transparency

Bruce Schenier at Wired wrote an excellent piece ("It's Time to Drop the 'Expectation of Privacy' Test") about the need to drop the "Expectation of Privacy" test currently used as the primary case law that determines the constitutionality of government action. He cites some of the analysis and proposed alternatives from Daniel Solove, Orin Kerr, and Jed Rubenfeld.

It is crucial that the US take concrete efforts to address this issue; more information is being created (in 2008, 4 exabites of unique information was generated - more than all of the data created in the preceeding 5,000 years), digitized and held (potentially indefinitely), this will only become an increasingly dire concern. This is especially true when one considers the spectre of a privatized federal intelligence-gathering infrastructure.

The problem becomes apparent, too, when one thinks of how defamation law works given the "public figure doctrine." Under the current model, private citizens are affored more protection than public figures. But what constitutes a "public figure" in the age of social media? Does simply creating a MySpace profile qualify? What about publishing a Twitter feed?

In the book Born Digital (which I'm reading), the authors (John Palfrey and Urs Gasser) run through the lifecycle of a child born today to illustrate how vastly more data is created and available about them than in any generation in history - and how decisions that will affect the rest of their lives are made without their consent by unwitting parents.

In the area of government and civil rights, there have already been abuses of the warrantless wiretapping power that the Bush Administration claimed for itself as the administration illegally wiretapped journalists and aid workers. Perhaps the solution to this lack of privacy is more transparency: what if we requried the federal government to publish online a list of all of its active surveillance investigations? The argument that such information should be protected because it would alert criminals/terrorists to the investigation is moot because they already assume this is the case, and this might dissuade the government from abusing its power.

In the area of social norms, we're running up on some terrible uses of existing criminal law with respect to privacy - like those protecting sensitive populations like minors as teenagers are being prosecuted for sending or holding nude photos of themselves. (These prosecutions pervert the spirit of these laws becuase they're in place to protect the victimized population; they're not meant to be applied when the victim is the perpetrator).

I'm increasingly convinced that the future lies not in restricting access to information, but in protecting society after the fact in a world where everything is transparent. We should be asking ourselves what we can do to render harmless private information about us that might be disclosed (because we must assume that it will be). What will this look like? It will change everything from how we validate identity, to how we educate/prepare children, and it will likely fundamentally alter our societal/cultural mores.

"Fool us Onc...": Why Social Media Renders Most Marketing/Advertising Worthless

When it comes down to it, most marketing/advertising (and a lot of public relations) in the modern era is about fooling people. Fooling them to infiltrate their social sphere to influence them, fooling them to thinking they need things that they don't, fooling them into thinking that one product is better than another.

So the model goes, you think of a new way to fool a bunch of people into paying for your product/service, they get wise, they stop paying, you think of a new way to fool them into paying for your product/service (and lather, rinse, repeat as needed). It's a dance.

That model is only economically-viable when you're able to fool a large number of people at once for a relatively low cost. In an environment saturated by ubiquitous technology and social media - that model fails because the costs and barriers change. Even if you figure out a way to game the system, the lifespan of that new tactic is extraordinarily short because people are now always networked and communicate with each other. The lifespan is so short that it's a fraction of the length of many advertising / promotion campaigns, so before you can even get the word out - the verdict from the audience is already in.

Here's how it works:

First, it's increasingly difficult to even find the people you need to fool. People are opting out of the traditional mass media in droves, so one must spend vastly more resources piecing together an audience of any considerable size. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Second, once you do find a way to reach your audience, they've become highly tribal and have set up discourse communities with increasingly-esoteric communication codes to police their membership. The time you'd invest learning the communication codes of a discourse community in order to infiltrate it isn't worth the comparatively small payoff of the tiny "Long Tail" audience you reach. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Third, even if you find the audience and learn their language - if you disappoint them (either with a product/service that doesn't meet their needs or that is inferior), you stand to lose them forever. Worse, if you disappoint them enough, they may tell their other tribes about you. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's a world of opportunity for good products/services (as Jonathan Coulton will tell you) provided by organizations that are responsive and accountable to their stakeholders, and the barriers are lower than they've ever been. There are even opportunities for big companies, provided they're willing to stop trying to fool themselves (and customers) into thinking that they can be all things to all people and they're willing to shrink down to the size that best serves their stakeholders. (Seth Godin just expounded on this point in his blog).

Social Media Case Study: the Shooting of Derek Copp

There's an interesting regional case study in the power of social media going on right now. Last week (Mar. 12), Grand Valley State University student Derek Copp was shot by police as they entered his off-campus apartment to arrest him on suspicion of drug possession. As details have dribbled out about the case, it's come out that he was not armed and did not resist arrest when he was shot.

Social media has played two central roles in the unfolding case:

First, the media began mining the public data on his Facebook profile for information to fill out their stories with (and have thus far used photos and videos in addition to quotes). I've been wondering how long it would take the media to figure out what a goldmine MySpace and Facebook are for gathering student data (I can usually get in contact with students faster through either of those platforms than I can requesting their contact information from the Student Records office).

Second, his friends quickly organized other students and have been engaging in a series of protests (primarily organized through Facebook). The first protest happened the day after the shooting (Mar. 13) and involved some 3o students. I checked the Facebook group students have been using to organize "Protest for Peace" over the weekend (Mar. 17) and it had 1,030 members.

It currently (Mar. 19) has 1,212 members and the shooting has morphed into a protest of US drug policy in general and has spread to Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. The GVSU group has 300 people signed up for a march, and the U of M group has 81 people signed up for a protest.

This will be an interesting case to follow.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) at the 2009 NCMPR National Conference

I recently made a presentation about Online Reputation Management (ORM) at the 2009 national conference of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations (NCMPR) in Kansas City. It's an organization for advertising, marketing, pr, and foundation professionals at two-year colleges, and the people involved with are really good at sharing insights and best practices (especially compared to other professional organizations) so it tends to be a good place to benchmark against similar institutions.

My notes, bibliography, a short take-away document and a page of links to search and analytical tools to do a brief online reputation audit are all available at grcc.edu/ncmprorm

One of the best things about making presentations (and similarly, teaching) is that it forces you to re-examine your own practices and make sure that you're toeing the line. It also makes one formally think about strategies and tactics which leads to a bit clearer of an understanding of them. As a result, I was reminded that the title tags on our site are pretty shoddily done so I'm in the process of revising them.

Ragan Communications: OMG. Epic. Fail.

My co-worker (not me) has apparently been receiving solicitations like this from Ragan Communications:

>>> On 3/5/2009 at 4:46 PM, wrote: Dear Derek‚ Are you on Twitter by any chance? I am writing to ask if you'd follow me. I know: It sounds a bit cultish. But hey‚ I gotta walk the talk‚ don't I? I promise not to pester you with boring tweets. This link (http://twitter.com/mark347) will take you to my page. Just hit "follow" under my picture. I hope all is well with you‚ Mark P.S. Are you coming to our Corporate Communicators Conference in Chicago this May? Is anyone else from Grand Rapids Community College? P.P.S. As always‚ I'm looking for story ideas for Ragan.com. Let me know if you guys have made any breakthroughs in your comms department‚ OK? Just hit "reply" to this message to get by the usual gatekeepers. Remove yourself from this mailing list. ( http://www.ragan.com/savicom_unsub ) This has been sent to you by: Ragan Communications 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 500 Chicago, Il 60601 Contact us at 800.878.5331 or employeecomm@ragan.com.

There are a number of problems with this email aside from the fact that it's addressed to the wrong person; (1) The author wrongly assumes that I know who he is (and further, that I actually believe him when he says he hopes things are well with me). (2) "Grand Rapids Community College" is clearly not a corporation - so why would its employees be attending a "Corporate Communicators Conference?" (3) Somehow I just don't buy that they're interested in any "breakthroughs" from my "comms department," or that I'm going to get special access to them by replying to the email. (4) I checked out the Twitter feed and it's full of boring promotional tweets (and even more boring sub-tweets from followers).

This is an unfortunate example of how profoundly misunderstood social media is by the traditional mass media communications machine. The 'establishment' (for lack of a better word) continues to think that social media is just another channel to pump the same messages through. It's not, and as the faux pas above illustrate - not only is the message rendered ineffective - it actually stands to do damage to the organization by revealing it as disingenuous. It's like watching a pocket calculator try to pass the Turing test.

I'm no rocket surgeon, but I think that rather than wasting time with bulk email Mark should be working on his craft and producing a Twitter feed, podcast or blog worth reading to influence opinion leaders and early adopters. If he's good, I'll hear about it and subscribe on my own. That new paradigm is what frustrates organizations stuck in the past (the GOP is a primary example of this right now): they actually have to produce a worthwhile product that meets the needs of a segment of the public that has money to spend on it. They can't count on slick marketing campaigns anymore because it's no longer affordable to patch together large enough audience with enough repetition for that approach to work on.

PRSA just published a piece in PR Tactics which gets some things right, but still reinforces some of the mistaken perceptions about "using" social media (mostly as a result of trying to explain it to those who still don't grasp it and can only think about in outmoded terms).

The bottom line is that one doesn't "incorporate" social media - one must live it. Any level of sincerity and transparency less than that is doomed to fail because those using social media are so adept at sniffing out inauthenticity.

If an organization is not willing to fundamentally re-think every aspect of its operations in response to social media - it shouldn't participate. But that's okay; not every brand is congruent with approach demanded by social media and for the forseeable future there's still place for those organizations to continue operating. If they want to have a future though, they should at least be closely watching discussions about themselves in social media and evolving the capacity to transform themselves.

Balance Isn't Enough: How PR Makes Everything a Wash

As the traditional media continues to radically cut back on the quality of its reporting during the fiscal collapse of the industry, it opens a lot of opportunities for unethical manipulation (chiefly by public relations practitioners; especially in the context of the declining power of advertising).

This problem is not new, because the decline in the quality of for-profit journalism is not new. Slowly (and with the help of heavy lobbying from the media corporations) the wall of separation between the ad sales office and the newsroom has eroded. One of the consequences has been that we've come to accept news coverage that gives equal time to "both sides" as being "balanced," when nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that nice guys finish last in the concision-minded medium of the traditional broadcast media.

So in the debate over environmental policy, scientists and academics who are honest about the limitations of research and who do their best to do the most comprehensive analysis (which can make such analysis difficult to understand) end up losing out in the arena of the news media which provides a false equivalency between academic research and the sort of partisan, pay-for-play research used by interest groups in disinformation campaigns.

That was the conclusion reached by Eric Pooley, Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy (and former editor of Fortune magazine) from a case study he did on how a "Cap and Trade" bill was defeated with assistance from a grotesque public relations campaign from the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Council for Capital Formation. He recently appeared on an episode of On the Media.

The study of a research model of the NAM and the ACCF was pitted against a meta-study of five different models by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Pooley explains:

"These models, as I say in my paper, are not crystal balls. EDF said that right up front. You can't believe any one model - that's why they took the five best and put them together to see if there was some sort of rough consensus emerging - and there was. However, what their opponents have been doing is taking one very skewed report and pretending that they do have a crystal ball. [...]

We took a sample of 40 stories that explored the cost of it [cap and
trade]. We found that seven of them were one-sided - on one side or the other, 24 were balanced in a sort of stenographer sort of sense, it was the 'he said,' 'she said' opposition and then nine stories attempted to play what I call a 'referee' - calling one side or another if they were playing fast and loose with the facts. And that's my model for how you have to work a very contentious policy debate like this.

Reporters aren't getting the time on the beat that they need to master this material, and if you don't master the material you can't hold the combatants to any sort of standard because they will game you."

Given the current climate in the newsmedia, this situation may likely get worse before it gets better (especially at the local level where coverage has already been deficient for years). There is no clear solution to this problem. Certainly the medium of the Internet will continue to help individuals quickly brush up on complex concepts, but thus far it's not proven to be a cure-all.

[Read Eric Pooley's Case Study "How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change"]