The last few weeks has seen the rise of a series of tools that take content recommended by your Twitter network and presents it in a newspaper-style format. Your network takes on the role of an editor.
Twittertim.es is the first instance that I discovered. It assembles content tweeted by your personal network and friends-of-a-friend network to create a crude web page summary. Stories are promoted based on how many times they have been tweeter.
Paper.il uses the metaphor of a print deadline to generate an online newspaper that is emailed to you once a day. Content is organised using semantic analysis into difference sections such as media, business and technology.
Flipboard is an application launched three weeks ago for the iPad. It collates articles, images and videos from URLs and organises them into a beautiful electronic newspaper that squeezes every bit of graphic and navigation functionality out of the iPad.
And to prove the point that my Twitter network has become my personal editor, here’s a story that I received via my network yesterday (via @markpinsent) from Mashable about how news consumption is shifting to personalised news streams.
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.
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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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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I caught up with Antony Mayfield after reading his recently published book: Me and My Web Shadow. He kindly agreed to talk further about some of the issues covered in the book.
Over the next few days I’ll post his comments on dealing with common names in networks, duplication in networks, syncing updates between personal networks and web serendipity.
Antony has created a category on his blog for updates about the book.
How do you manage your web shadow if you’ve got a common name such as John Smith?
The most important question to ask is: can people find me when they want to? What will they do when they are looking for John Smith? Well, most of us would start adding keywords to Google searches like your job, companies you have worked for, where you have lived. John Smith may not appear in the top results for his own name, but he should appear for “John Smith Acme Widgets Ltd”. Making sure a current photo of you is on your LinkedIn, Google and personal websites is also going to help make sure people don’t miss your profile or mistake someone else for you.
When establishing your web presence – personal website, social network profiles – it is important to make sure they include some of these keywords that are part of how people will want to find you. You might also think of adding addresses to your website and key profiles (LinkedIn and Twitter for work) and other places on your emails, both personal and corporate accounts so people can by-pass Google when they want to find out more about you.
The other thing to think about it is making yourself stand out from the crowd a little. Many people use a common name for their Twitter profiles and the like that is specific to them (for instance, Wadds). Keep that consistent (and your avatars/profile pictures) so it will be easier for people to recognise you in different networks.
Should we be concerned that Google is recording our every interaction on the web?
First of all, we should be aware that this is happening, and not just with Google either. Although people who work with the web a lot know this, many people don’t understand how much data is being gathered by them.
Google itself is a benign guardian of our personal data and the pay-off of free services and access to their technology seems to be a deal most of us are happy to make for the moment. The fear some rightly have is about who will have access to that data in the future? What will Google be like in 20 years time and who will own it? This is an important and ongoing debate.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s COO, says that the company would like to make it possible for people to take all of their search data with them – it would be good for Google to make it clear that we can all have access to and the right to delete all of our own data if we wish. As the volume and importance of the personal data held by Google (and others) grows, I would like to see them staying ahead of both governments and citizens in putting in governance structures and safeguards against abuse. They have to keep earning our trust.
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Newspapers have largely ignored social networks as a means to engage with their audience, seeking instead to force readers onto their web sites. But this example bucks the trend.
Remember the sunset shot that I took of the Cheviots in Northumberland a couple of weeks ago? Probably not but stick with me.
I posted the image to the Your Place Northumberland Flickr group that’s curated by the hyperlocal team at the Newcastle Journal. It made the Your Place hyperlocal web site. And now the Northumberland Journal Extra local newspaper.
I think that its an important step because it shows traditional media engaging with its audience and sourcing content via a social network.
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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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Here’s an article that I’ve written for Reputation Online questioning the role of media databases in a future where reputation is governed by the strength of your network. We’ve seen the rise of PR spam, but what’s going to happen when databases extends their reach to the social web and include bloggers or Twitter users?
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As brands pile onto FourSquare baiting users with location based marketing offers the opportunity to discover original and interesting venues is declining. So I laughed out loud when I logged into our local greasy spoon and received a tip from a nearby lamp post put on the map by fellow FourSquare addict Mark Adams.
Here’s the issue. It’s incredibly easy to create a new location on FourSquare. I’ve added a lamp post of my own near our office in Leicester Square.
There’s also lots of duplication. FourSquare users, whether intentionally or not, have added multiple versions of the same venue using different variations of the name such as York Train Station and York Railway Station.
In fact a visit to most railway stations will turn up a venue entry for each platform and several of the trains that travel in and out of the station each day. Are FourSquare users really meeting up with each other via the network on their way back and forth to work?
FourSquare relies on its users and the wisdom of the crowd as an editorial function. But the appearance of random locations and the level of duplication shows that it plainly isn’t working.
The network needs a more traditional editorial function if it is to avoid becoming cluttered.
Spam is also becoming an issue as users build their network of friends beyond people that they actually know. It’s an issue that arises with every generation of social network but in this instance the sharing of personal location information is a stalkers dream.
Here’s another example of user abuse. We’ve developed a healthy level of competition at Speed for the Mayor slot frequently checking-in and out numerous times during the day to outwit each other. It’s not really sport.
FourSquare’s rules need to be tightened. Purists will call me out for spotlighting potential abuses of the network. But social norms as a means of managing a network only work so far – and on FourSquare they’ve been stretched beyond their limit.
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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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PR is the management of reputation. That used to exclusively mean using media relations to build trust between an organisation and its audiences.
But traditional media is in turmoil: ad revenue is at an all time low thanks to the recession and the internet has reduced the cost of publication and distribution to almost zero.
The rise of social networks has led consumers to fundamentally change their media consumption habits. Consumers are becoming contributors.
The impact on the PR profession has been dramatic. Command and control media relations no longer works and increasing brands are building direct relationships with their audiences using compelling content and story telling.
These changes formed the core of a guest lecture I gave on digital communication to the International PR MA course at the University of Cardiff yesterday.
The slidedeck cites five trends in the media and the rise of social media – and five areas where I believe PR professionals need to skill-up as a result.
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Paperchase has published a statement on the contact section of its web site about the alleged copyright theft of work by independent artist Hidden Eloise. The stationery firm said that it purchased the image in good faith from a small London based design company called Gather No Moss.
“[…] In this case, we would like to confirm that Paperchase bought the artwork in question, in good faith, in October 2008, from a well-known central London Design Studio along with a number of other designs. The illustrator who is making the allegation made us aware of her concerns in November 2009 and we duly responded to her in early December, since when we had heard nothing….until today. Back in November 2009, we spoke at length to the Design Studio in question and they categorically denied any plagiarism.”
Gather No Moss also released a statement via Paperchase.
“We have contacted Hidden Eloise by email and are hoping to talk with her soon. We carry the work of designers who like Hidden Eloise are all trying hard to make a living through their art. We would never knowingly sell a design that infringes the copyright of a fellow artist.”
These are robust responses. But Hidden Eloise remains unimpressed either by the tactics or the response from either Paperchase or Gather No Moss – and she has the mob rule of Twitter on her side.
Hidden Eloise’s blog post went viral this afternoon fuelled by the indignation of Twitter users. There is almost certainly a case to answer but the speed with which a story circulates around a network in a case such as this means that basic tenants of journalistic practise are frequently left in its trail.
The Handbook of Journalism published by Thompson Reuters seeks to uphold the highest levels of journalistic integrity set out in its Trust Principals. All major news publishers have similar codes. Reuters has a very clear position on stories sourced via networks.
“It is important to remember that Twitter and similar sites are not sources per se. It is wrong to talk, for example, about picking up Twitter. It makes no more sense to source a story to Twitter than to source it to the internet or an email.”
Reuters is also very clear that a story should have an original source.
“You must source every statement in every story unless it is an established fact or is information clearly in the public domain, such as court documents or in instances when the reporter, photographer or camera operator was on the scene.”
It also a well-defined approach to the principal of fairness when an allegation is made by a third party.
“The act of seeking confirmation of the news before publishing it can lead the organisation to front-run our story and announce the information before we have a chance to put our story out. This does not relieve us of the responsibility to give an organisation a fair chance to comment. […]”
The Paperchase story has followed the first two guidelines but not the third. A story about a third-party propagates through a network until it is directly countered. This is yet another example of how social networks are accelerating the news cycle and don’t necessarily adhere to journalistic standards.
It is telling that Paperchase had not set up a Twitter feed (@FromPaperchase) until today and that its response has been published not on a blog but on the contact page of its web site. Companies must engage in the channels used their customers. And for Paperchase that’s clearly social media.
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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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Google Buzz started to roll out to Gmail users this evening in a move said to challenge Facebook and Twitter.
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