July 28th, 2010 by Wadds

Media is media, defamation is defamation

It didn’t need a High Court judgement to remind us that media law applies in social media as in any other aspect of the media.

But a judgement handed down by Mr Justice Tugendhat yesterday saw a plaintiff awarded £10,000 for being defamed on Facebook.

The case concerns Jeremiah Barber who, posted child porn on the Facebook page of Raymond Bryce, after falling out, along with a defamatory comment.

Inevitably we’ll see more of these types of judgements. Its a booming business for media lawyers.

Here’s a related article that I wrote in March for Reputation Online about copyright and privacy in social networks.

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July 23rd, 2010 by Wadds

Facebook: ‘Get back in touch with your wife’

There’s a flaw it would seem in Facebook’s network algorithms. Yesterday it urged me to get back in touch with my wife.

I know that I spend a lot of time away from home but I am fairly confident that there isn’t much that Facebook could bring to our relationship of 16 or so years.

Its not uncommon it seems for people to be prompted to connect with their nearest and dearest. Here’s comment from my Twitter networks.

Facebook clearly hasn’t realised that the people with whom you interact least online can be those closest to you.

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May 25th, 2010 by Wadds

Evil web app displays personal mobile numbers from Facebook

After writing about Facebook personal privacy issues recently I met a developer at a Thinking Digital dinner tonight that has created a web application that exploits user data from Facebook to dramatic effect.

Tom Scott (@tomscott) has built his Evil app using the Graph API to search public groups about lost phones. The web app randomly displays the private phone numbers of unsuspecting Facebook users.

Scott says that his intention is highlight personal privacy issues on Facebook and has truncated the displayed numbers to make his point.

Evil follows a long line of projects by Scott who describes himself as a geek comedian. Check out and enjoy Breaking the News Salmon in a Dishwasher, The Google Street View Race and other projects on his site.

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May 14th, 2010 by Wadds

Facebook privacy: software tools enable personal content to be interrogated

Facebook, Inc.

Image via Wikipedia

The chances are that I’m not your friend on Facebook. But that doesn’t matter. I can almost certainly access personal content that you’ve posted on the network.

With a very simple web script I could mine the comments that you are making to your Friends on your Facebook page – unless you’ve throttled back your security settings to the maximum level of protection.

Speed’s Dan Howe tracks social media developer sites and forums and has spotted a potential security hole in the Facebook applications designers Graph API. An API is a fancy name for how one software application such as Facebook talks to another. TechCrunch also spotted the conversations about the hole and covered the story this afternoon.

The Facebook Graph API can be used to find out what people are posting behind the network’s closed walls.

Here’s an application call for everyone that is making posts about a job interview. If you click on the link you’ll see the code generated by the API-call. Look closer and you’ll see text strings of each conversation that mention the string “job interview”.

Can you see the privacy issues we can?

Of course we could make the presentation prettier by designing an application to manipulate the search data and present it in a more attractive way, but that’s the not the point. This is a very trivial example that demonstrates how easy it is for developer to integrate user data within what we assume to be a closed social network.

I caught up with Dan this afternoon. He’s been working with the API and reckons that unless you have locked down your privacy settings to a friends only setting it is possible for anyone with a web browser to access content that you post on your personal Facebook page.

Facebook has published a list of the type of search queries supported in the documentation for the Graph API. These include individual users (you and me), pages, events, groups and status messages. It’s a marketing wet dream.

I don’t know about you but it makes me very uncomfortable and I’ve locked down my security settings as a result. Privacy and transparency are the two issues that could halt the phenomenal growth of social media.

Facebook must make users aware of the potential of the tools that it’s making available to harness data and content posted within its network if it’s to avoid a backlash.

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April 22nd, 2010 by Wadds

Reputation Online article on Nielsen’s report on social advertising within Facebook

Here’s an article that I’ve written for Reputation Online about Nielsen’s report published at ad:tech this week on the effectiveness of social advertising versus PR within Facebook.

The report says that earned media, the goal of any PR campaign, is a highly effective way for a brand to generate awareness in a social network such as Facebook – but cannot be guaranteed. Meanwhile, social ads (a form of network endorsement on ads) drive engagement and reach similar to traditional paid-for campaigns.

The Nielsen report is compelling but is flawed by its focus solely on social ad campaigns. It omits an analysis of the impact of standalone earned media campaigns on Facebook, what we’d more commonly recognise as traditional PR or word of mouth campaigns. Its uncountably a vehicle to sell ad campaigns on Facebook but is worth reading nonetheless.

Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression

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April 15th, 2010 by Wadds

Five minutes with Mayfield: syncing personal networks

Here’s Me and My Web Shadow-author Antony Mayfield on how he uses difference networks including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and makes connections between each. Antony has created a category on his blog for updates about the book.

How do you segment personal networks on Facebook versus LinkedIn versus Twitter?
This is different for everyone, and people need to work out what works for them based on what’s useful for them and those in their networks.

What works for me is:

  • Facebook: Is a personal space for me, mainly for friends and family. I restrict what people see about me and things I post there beyond that network of people, partly for privacy, but mostly so that I don’t have to feel too self-conscious about posting endless updates about family life, running, or whatever, which will be boring or even irritating to many people in that volume. Colleagues and acquaintances that I “friend” on Facebook see some content, but not everything – this isn’t a business networking space for me. It feels a little harsh dividing out people into groups or degrees of closeness, but it is necessary to do so in order to make the network useful for you and them.
  • Twitter: Twitter is a very special network for me. It’s mainly for sharing thoughts about what is happening right now and getting those amazing moments of serendipity when someone posts a link or a thought that is precisely relevant to me in that moment. How I manage this network is simple: I follow people who are interesting to me at that time, and unfollow those who seem to be less relevant at the moment. I allow anyone except blatant spammers and bots to follow me (I block them) and try hard not to be offended if they unfollow me – appreciating that I might not be useful to them right at that moment.
  • LinkedIn: As my blog is my public notebook, LinkedIn is my public contact book, biograph  and a functional, business networking space. I don’t cross-post to Twitter as I don’t think most people hang out there like they do in Facebook or Twitter as much and the volume of posts would be irritating. I’ll connect with anyone who seems interesting and relevant, but mostly people who I have met. There’s no real need to segment networks in this space, beyond giving endorsements only to people I have actually worked with and not connecting with people I have reason not to trust.

Should bloggers exercise caution in promoting their content across different networks, based on audience?
It’s a matter of taste and social sensibilities really. “If in doubt, pull don’t push” was a mantra in the social media team at iCrossing for a while, meaning yes, be cautious, because if you don’t understand a network or a space properly a clumsy promotion could do more harm than good for your reputation. Better to earn attention and pull in attention via recommendations, links and most of all by developing good, durable networks of likeminded people.

That’s not to say don’t be pushy – most commentators on a post on Mashable I wrote recently were promoting a site, service or book related to the topic – so I guess that is acceptable in that space. Some of them were certainly useful to me and no one in the Mashable community saw fit to challenge them.

What’s your view of syncing status updates between Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?
For some people this works well. They tend to be people who are happy living very open lives online. Like a lot of people, I choose to divide those networks a little.

I cross-post manually between these three networks when I think there is something. That’s actually not that often. I like to like status updates on LinkedIn for a while, for instance, and it will usually be something about a work related event, or a trip I am making that might be useful to people in that work-focussed context. Also, I think my less social media focussed friends and family in Facebook would get irritated by the frequency and content of my Twitter posts.

Again, though – how you manage this is based on how it works for you and what is useful.

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April 5th, 2010 by Wadds

Book review: Antony Mayfield’s Me and My Web Shadow

Proponents of social media in the UK and US will almost certainly have come across Antony Mayfield’s work. He’s a senior vice president at iCrossing, a digital marketing firm, that works with brands including Coca-Cola, Toyota and Channel 4.

We’ve only ever met once very briefly but Mayfield feels like an old friend. I read his blog and follow his tweets. Therein lies one of the benefits of maintaining a strong web shadow.

Managing your own web shadow is important says Mayfield as our lives increasingly move online. The web is the first place people will look to find out about you and being connected brings opportunities he says.

Mayfield’s personal web shadow extends over his blog, Delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Look him up for yourself.

Me and My Web Shadow is a guide to managing and promoting your personal reputation online. In three sections Mayfield covers the basics of the web, a review of your personal reputation online and a self-styled “Haynes manual” to managing your web shadow.

It’s an incredibly well written book (Mayfield is a former PR) that successfully bridges the gap between self-help manual and text book. The theory is there when you need it, but for the main part, the book is packed with practical advice and links to useful resources and tools.

This is a book that you should share with your family and friends. Mayfield says this is his intended audience. It works equally well for web savvy and the “I don’t get Twitter” brigade alike. My wife, a self-confessed privacy obsessive and social web Luddite has bagged my copy.

Me and My Web Shadow focuses on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as a means of building a personal profile online. Each social network is tackled in a basic guide to getting started, through building a presence, establishing a network and publishing content. The personal benefit of blogging is also covered in a chapter of its own.

But Mayfield doesn’t dodge difficult issues online such as dealing with bullies, trolls and negative comments, identity theft, privacy and dealing with mistakes.

The key theme of the book is that openness online is rewarded. In the conclusion Mayfield introduces us the concept of serendipity engines.

“[…] to be connected is to be lucky, or at least luckier. […] Online connections increase your chance or finding the right person with the right knowledge at the right time,” says Mayfield.

Openness uncovers opportunity through connections.

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March 20th, 2010 by Wadds

Why are we so quick to criticise? (Nestle Facebook page may be fake)

The Twitter mob jumped on Nestle yesterday after it was allegedly heavy-handed in a comment stream on a Facebook fan page.

Week-in-week-out the social media mob passes judgement on brands that cock-up online. The speaker circuit is littered with case studies of #failed companies such as Eurostar, Paperchase, Habitat and Vodafone.

Here’s the issue: the instantaneous nature of communication in a network means that we no longer stop and think and everyone has an audience. Speculation is shared and the mob quickly turns it into fact.  Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Brunix have first hand experience.

The Nestle page may not even be real. It could be a fake set-up as a double bluff by activists.

Mat Morison makes the point that social media practitioners are incredibly quick to criticise and pass judgement.

Kerry Gaffney and I once came up with a rule-of-thumb: “don’t be too quick to jump in because there but for the grace of God go you.” It sounds sententious, but we reckoned that it would pay off in time; people would, we felt, be less likely to jump on us when we inevitably #failed.”

Sound advice.

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March 18th, 2010 by Wadds

BBC web site set to become content hub; iPlayer 3.0 to incorporate social features

BBC Online is set to become the access hub for “every bit of content” from the BBC according to Erik Huggers, director, BBC Future Media & Technology. Viewers will be able to personalise their services and share BBC content on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Huggers was speaking at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit today.

Daily Telegraph tech and digital media correspondent Emma Barnett interviewed Huggers after his presentation and reports that social functions will be incorporated in iPlayer 3.0 which is set to be launched shortly.

“We are close to launching the third version of the iPlayer in beta which will have many more social functions embedded within it,” said Mr Huggers. “People will be able to bring their Facebook friends onto the iPlayer so they can share what they are listening to or watching with each other more easily.”

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March 17th, 2010 by Wadds

Ten threadsy invitations available

threadsy founder Rob Goldman tells a familiar story in the TechCrunch pitch below.

“About a year ago we lost track of what people meant when they said. The average young person has two email accounts, two social networks, one IM account and spends more than two hours a day online,” said Goldman.

“We exist in a fragmented mess of communication systems that are incompatible,” he said.

threadsy is an integrated web based communication client. It pulls together your existing email, Facebook, Twitter, chat, and the broader social web into a single stream. Think of it as an in-box for everything that identifies individuals across different communication platform and enables you to filter or search by platform or message type.

Thanks to gabba-founder Paul Fabretti I’ve got ten invitations. Leave a comment or give me a shout on Twitter if you want to check it out.

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February 11th, 2010 by Wadds

Angry Paperchase customers vent fury on Amazon and Twitter

Paperchase customers are using Twitter and Customer Reviews on Amazon (the product page has since been pulled) to vent their fury at the alleged copyright theft of work by independent artist HiddenEloise.

On Twitter #paperchase is trending and the @paperchaseuk Twitter account has been grabbed by someone offering to help the company respond to its audience. There has been no activity on an official looking Paperchase Facebook page since 2008.

Econsultancy’s Aliya Zaidi has written an excellent summary and analysis of the story making the point that social media has become an incredibly effective tool to expose corporate misdemeanors.

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February 9th, 2010 by Wadds

Ten things you need to know about Google Buzz

Google Buzz started to roll out to Gmail users this evening in a move said to challenge Facebook and Twitter.

  1. It’s available immediately to all Gmail users; unlike Google Wave it isn’t restricted to beta users. According to Google it will appear in your inbox in the next day or so
  2. Google Buzz is a realtime social network like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. You can use it to share links, photos, videos, and status updates with your network
  3. Updates from people in your network will automatically be posted your Gmail inbox
  4. The network will prioritise messages from people in your network that the Google Buzz algorithms determine are most relevant to you
  5. Google Buzz incorporates a function similar to Twitter’s retweet. Users can recommend posts that might be of interest to other people in their network
  6. You don’t need to build another network as you’ve done before with networks such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. Google Buzz will use your email history to build out your network. If Gmail isn’t your primary email client consider importing your address book from other email clients
  7. Using the Google Buzz application on your mobile phone (iPhone and Android) will enable you to include a GPS-generated location with your updates
  8. Updates will be made available to everyone in your network and indexed by Google as a default. Privacy settings and user-defined groups will enable information to be locked down
  9. An enterprise version is in the works for companies that want to use it as a social communication platform
  10. Is a competitive threat to other social networks? Potentially, but it depends on uptake. Gmail has 175 million potential users. Facebook has 400 million users. Twitter has an estimated 25 million users
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January 25th, 2010 by Wadds

Social media 1920s-style: the medium has changed but the message remains the same

I am fascinated by the messages on old postcards. The limited space means that they are often no more than single sentences written in clipped English.

This one was sent sometime after 1912 judging by the George V half-penny stamp.

The message asks its recipient to meet the sender off a train.

“Just a line to let you know I shall come on Friday. I shall reach Meldon with afternoon train and expect you will be able to come to the station.”

It’s succinct and to the point. It’s also social. A postcard can be passed around and shared. Now we’d use email, Facebook, SMS or Twitter of course, but the message would be equally brief.

Almost a hundred years on the content of our messages hasn’t changed, only the way we send and share them.

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January 18th, 2010 by Wadds

PCC rules against digital door stepping

In a move that has implications for newsgathering via social media the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) ruled today that it was inappropriate for a journalist to contact the family of a dead individual via Facebook. It said that such a move breached Clause 5 of the Editors’ Code of Practice by intruding on the grief or shock of a bereaved individual.

The case arose after a Sunday Times journalist contacted a member of the family of a dead student to question a prior PPC complaint that a story contained inaccuracies.

Oliver Luft at the Press Gazette has the full story.

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November 17th, 2009 by Wadds

Don’t sync updates: different networks, different audiences (lessons from a 13-year old)

I got an ear bashing from my 13 year old goddaughter this weekend. Why, she asked, do you keep posting nonsense on your Facebook news feed. It’s because I’ve synced my Twitter feed with my Facebook feed I explained. “Twitter?” she said.

My Twitter network is made up of a different group of people from my Twitter network. Facebook is family, friends, mates from school, university and stalkers. Twitter is mainly people from my professional life.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some crossover between the different networks. Life isn’t perfectly ordered. But inevitably when I push a message automatically from one network to another some folk get confused.

It could be about to get a lot worst. Thanks to a deal between LinkedIn (exclusively professional contacts in my network) and Twitter last week I can sync my LinkedIn feed with my Twitter feed, either automatically, or selectively by adding a hashtag #in to my tweets.

By syncing updates between various networks I’m not sharing a message with a network but have reverted to an aged-old broadcast model. Each network has a different audience and I should tailor my content appropriately.

Stephen Davis has made this case to me on numerous occasions. Have a read of this aptly titled blog post – Tweeters: Stop spamming my Facebook! I’m starting to see his point.

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