Healthy Blog Reviews

Facebook is certainly knee deep in the whole privacy thing now and the evidence can be seen in what they are busy trying to accomplish in Washington, DC. Of course, the best way to manage this kind of delicate issue is to do things a way that does not draw attention to yourself from the nation’s capitol but that shipped sailed long ago for Facebook. As a result they are busy trying to show the folks in DC who can make live rather miserable for them that they are not all that bad as a company. Even though the founder and CEO went and wrote a ‘letter’ in the Washington Post apologizing for their actions this is starting to look worse and worse for Facebook. Honestly, it’s simply their own fault so I guess they will get what they paid for. Mashable reports Most Facebook users have no idea that the social network giant has a D.C. office full of lobbyists and policy wonks. But that office will be staging a Congress staffers-only briefing this week to address issues of — you guessed it — user privacy. Like any major corporation that plays footsie with public and private data, large amounts of money, mergers and acquisitions, and other hallmarks of big business, Facebook must stay abreast of policy changes and try to influence legislators in its favor. To help with the launch of its “new suite of simpler and easier-to-use privacy tools,” Facebook is inviting House and Senate staff to the Capitol Visitors Center to “learn about what these tools mean for your constituents and the future of sharing online.” The briefing will take place on Thursday, May 27 at 4 p.m. ET and will include a Q&A. This is not exactly coming from a position of power since it is obvious that Facebook is going into ‘save’ mode and trying to calm the storm that they have allowed to spin out of control. It is awful nice of the folks at Facebook to include a live Q & A for the DC crowd and not do it through a newspaper like they did for the people who are most impacted by their actions. I know there are plenty of social media industry people in high places that want to protect their relationship with a rich guy like Mark Zuckerberg but since I am not one of them I can speak freely. Here’s my take. Facebook is run by an arrogant group of people that don’t really care much about the privacy or anything of their users. They want and need to make money from this huge user base they have amassed and they figure that the very group they depend upon is just a herd of dumb sheep that will do whatever their shepherd (that being Facebook) tells them and they won’t complain. From a business standpoint Facebook’s underestimation of its users’ ability to think for itself has exposed what the company was founded on: we need to get ours no matter what the cost to others. That’s not much different than many other companies, really, but most of those companies have not built a huge user base on a lie and then turned their back on it and then act as if they should ‘just play along’. As far as I can tell, the people who may be the most ignorant are those running Facebook. Otherwise, how do you explain the ‘palms up with a shrug of the shoulders’ approach to being what amounts to playing social media’s three card monty game with their users’ privacy? I may be out of line or over the top but this is my opinion and I am sticking with it. What’s your take?

Tags: companies, congress, constituents, folks, house, opinion, relationship, Social, Social Media, users
Posted May 26, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Facebook is now against Girl Scout cookies. That’s right, from this point forward Facebook is banning all discussion promotion and dialogue regarding all of our favorite treats ( Thin Mints included)! Okay, so that’s not true. As far as I can tell, Facebook doesn’t care one way or the other about Girl Scout cookies. However, if the recent surge of dialogue revolving Facebook’s changes to privacy is anything close to reality, one could assume that Facebook has signed a deal with the devil. To put it simply people are angry with Facebook. Many of Facebook’s new critics sound like a heartbroken teenager who has been cheated on. The talk of betrayal runs rampant through most of the criticizing blog post and comments. Most are asking why would Facebook betray us? To all those that feel betrayed by Facebook it’s important that you understand one thing: It’s your own damn fault. Since when did we think it was okay to trust any one company with all of the personal details and information about our life? Since when did people start to develop real relationships with corporations based on trust and respect? Social media has fooled us into believing that companies can participate with their users in a transparent and authentic way. But in reality every company has an agenda that it must pursue. Every company’s chief motive is its own survival and if that means exploiting their customers contributions then they will do it. The magic of social media marketing is that for the first time it gives corporations the ability to be more authentic than any other time in history. For example Facebook could have avoided most of the media backlash by simply being transparent about their intentions from the beginning. The tag line could have read, “ Join Facebook, where we will collect information about your life and share with the world. ” Sure they wouldn’t have as many users with that tag line but in the end they would be executing real authenticity. The lesson for users: Don’t assume that corporations engaging in social media have the best intentions just because they’re utilizing a trendy feel-good medium to engage you. You should exercise the same amount of caution engaging them that you would when you engage companies off the Internet. In other words Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter and all of the other companies online are not your friends. Their primary objective is to make money not to build trust. Trust, authenticity, and all of the other feel good marketing buzzwords are tools to open your wallet and your guarded privacy. The lesson for marketers: State your intentions in crystal-clear language at the beginning. And, throughout the company’s development reiterate those intentions on a regular basis. Make sure that your users are well aware that your primary objective is your own survival. Make sure they understand that if needed you will use their contributions for your own profit. In doing so you will only attract users that truly believe in what you’re doing and will be more likely to contribute to your success. Now, that we have gotten that out of the way, everyone needs to relax and have a Samoas !

Tags: Company, deal with the devil, Don, facebook, forward-it-may, friends, Girl, girl scout cookies, intentions, Joe, media, Read, Scout Cookies, thin mints, users
Posted May 15, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

In what can viewed as either an act of corporate bravery or stupidity all at once, Facebook offered up their vice president of public policy, Eliot Schrage (right), to the readers of the New York Times to answer their questions about, gulp, Facebook and privacy. While this was not a live event (questions were taken from readers and then given to Facebook to prepare answers) it is an interesting exercise. Of course, Facebook must have “cut a deal” to make sure they put their spin on the current privacy dust-up before answering any questions. Here are a few choice pieces from the “statement” made in the post at the NYT Bits blog . Reading the questions was a painful but productive exercise. Part of that pain comes from empathy. Nobody at Facebook wants to make our users’ lives more difficult. We want to make our users’ lives better. Our mission is for Facebook to be the best place in the world to connect and share with friends and family. Another painful element comes from professional frustration. It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making. Even worse, our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million users. That’s not acceptable or sustainable. But it’s certainly fixable. You’re pointing out things we need to fix. Personally, when I hit the word empathy and realized it came from a Facebook exec I had a little laughing fit. Once I got past that though, well, I just smiled a lot. Here’s some more to take in. Keep in mind this is Facebook’s ‘monologue’ leading up to the actual questions from readers. My biggest concern reading these comments has been the incorrect perception that we don’t care about user privacy or that we’ll sacrifice user privacy in exchange for advertising. That’s just not true. We want to be trusted partners with our users in helping manage those tensions. You’ll see below answers that show just how serious we are about doing that. Strong words which are just words. As they say, that and $1.75 gets you a ride on the subway. Here is the first question and answer from the post. Real simple one: Why can’t you leave well enough alone? Why do I have to do a weekly ritual of checking to see what new holes you’ve slashed into the Facebook Security Blanket, so that I have to go and hide or delete yet more stuff? Are Facebook customers really pounding on your door screaming that they want more categories of their personal data to be available to marketers every few months? –David, Urbana, Ill. We know that changing Facebook — something people have demonstrated is important to them — can be unsettling. But we’re always trying to be better and do more for our users. Clearly, we need to rethink the tempo of change and how we communicate it. Trust me. We’ll do better. The second part of your question reflects what is probably the most common misconception about Facebook. We don’t share your information with advertisers. Our targeting is anonymous. We don’t identify or share names. Period. Think of a magazine selling ads based on the demographics and perceived interests of its readers. We don’t sell the subscriber list. We protect the names. I think the sentiment around how the rest of Q & A went can be summed up by the following comment from Bill in NY (read those comments for the real response as well as the comments on Facebook’s own Facebook page ). The last sentence of this interview, “I’m sorry we didn’t do a better job”, is such a hackneyed phrase coming from the Facebook guys. I do not exaggerate when I say, when was the last time they unveiled something and did NOT have to apologize for it in some form or another? I suggest you go and read the entire piece to get the full picture of what was said and then you can draw your own conclusions about where Facebook stands with regard to privacy. After that let us know your thoughts and concerns here at MP. Has Facebook actually done real damage to itself with its privacy issues or will this all be “much ado about nothing” in a few months? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Tags: demographics, eliot-schrage, facebook, interview, personal, questions, read-the-entire, really-pounding, Social, subway, thoughts, users
Posted May 12, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

We all know that it is virtually impossible for Google to keep a low profile on anything. When you are that big and influential everyone is paying attention and it seems like every time someone breaks wind at the Googleplex it’s news. It’s the price of fame I suppose. Of course, if you create the kind of stir that Google recently did around its Buzz service and the apparent “mistake” of making way too much information public without asking the users, then people pay close attention. One of those is the soon to be ex-Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, Pamela Jones Harbour. During an FTC roundtable discussion in which she noted that her remarks were her own and not those of the FTC (since she is the acting commissioner until April 6 I call BS on that statement but that’s another issue) and the Wall Street Journal reports “Protecting consumer privacy is of utmost importance,” Ms. Harbour said during a Federal Trade Commission roundtable discussion about privacy Wednesday, speaking via videoconference from Barcelona, Spain. “Unfortunately, many of the companies that consumers look to as leaders — and that we expect to be leaders — still have not taken this message entirely to heart.” She went on to rip Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt as well. Privacy is a fundamental right that consumers still care about and have expectations for, Ms. Harbour said. Those norms do not change as technology evolves, and the stakes are growing as more information, such as genomic and public-health records, is made available, she said. Ms. Harbour cited recent comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said during an interview with CNBC, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Ms. Harbour said she could not disagree more with that assertion. “The Commission will continue to evaluate consumers’ preferences, and armed with these insights, I hope and expect that the Commission will continue to shape the conversation about the intrinsic value of privacy,” she said. “But make no mistake: The Commission will unfailingly step in to protect consumers where we believe the law has been violated, and that includes violations relating to privacy promises.” Google’s arrogance, whether perceived or real, doesn’t appear to be serving it well in Washington. If this is the attitude of the exiting Commissioner then they better hope that the next one is a little more Google-friendly. Google’s response to this is what one would expect. A Google spokesman said in a statement that user transparency and control are “top of mind” for the company. “When we realized that we’d unintentionally made many of our users unhappy, we moved quickly to make significant product improvements to address their concerns,” he said. “Our door is open to additional feedback and we’re continuing to make more improvements based on that feedback.” While I am not a big fan of government being too involved in anything I am beginning to wonder about privacy more and more. Ms. Harbour’s following statement made sense and made me think a bit. “Deeds speak louder than words, and this is turning into a dangerous game of ‘copycat’ behavior,” she said. “Unlike a lot of tech products, consumer privacy cannot be run in beta.” Hmmm. Maybe this is why she is leaving the FTC. She makes some sense here and there appears to be little room for that kind of behavior in Washington these days.

Tags: Barcelona, believe-the-law, commissioner, companies, conversation, federal, federal-trade, harbour-during, price, serving-it-well, street, street-journal, such-as-genomic, users
Posted March 18, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld talked to sharing-widget producer Gigya recently to find out what site people tended to share content on the most. Gigya’s widget power social sharing from sites such as ABC.com, Reuters and Answers.com (and 5000 more). When people shared content, where did they tend to post it? Facebook was the #1 choice for 44% of content sharing . (Sub-lesson of this article: lying with statistics. Can you guess what share the other three got from the chart?) Gigya also looked at sign-in data for these sites—for example, whether users signed in via Gmail/Google, Yahoo or Facebook Connect to interact with or share content. For some types of sites, they were nearly equal—but not others. News sites saw 31% Facebook sign ins, 30% Google/Gmail sign ins and 25% Yahoo sign ins (Twitter saw 11% and AOL 3%). But for entertainment sites, Facebook was the far more popular choice at 52%, with Google (17%), Yahoo (12%) and Twitter (11%) trailing far behind. (MySpace, 7%, and AOL, 1%, fared even worse.) Facebook chat is also popular—more than half (56%) of all live chat events Gigya monitors were hosted on Facebook. Twitter was second with 28%, and Yahoo (9%) and MySpace (7%) eked in there. So what were the overall share numbers for Facebook’s competitors in overall sharing? Twitter had 29%, Yahoo 18% and MySpace 9%. If you really study the tilted 3D graph, you can approximate it pretty well—but it looks a little more proportional even at a glance in the 2D graph, doesn’t it? Upon seeing the data from Gigya, another sharing widget company volunteered its data. AddThis, used in 600,000 (smaller than Gigya’s, for the most part, since AddThis’s clients include Blogger users), shared the top ten services their users choose to share with. While Facebook was still tops, their lead wasn’t quite as decisive as in Gigya’s data. Facebook: 33% Email: 13% Print:9% Twitter: 9% Favorites: 8% Google: 6% MySpace: 6% Digg: 3% Live: 3% Delicious: 3% What do you think? Is Facebook the way you prefer to share things online?

Tags: aol, article, data, delicious, Erick Schonfeld, facebook, facebook-social, Gigya, Research, Social, top-ten, users
Posted February 17, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media