social media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Managing your digital estate

What happens to our social media and cloud accounts when we pass away?

Everyone who goes online leaves “digital footprints“, a trail of the things we’ve done on the web. When you pass away, what happens to those status updates, comments and documents you’ve left on the Internet?

Dealing with the passing of a loved one is always difficult but today we have an added complexity of dealing with the online problems of social media sites suggesting people still “like” the deceased or valuable documents locked into cloud computing services.

With more of us storing information into cloud computing services, having important data locked away becomes a real risk and how online storage or software companies deal with deceased estates becomes important.

Online services don’t have a standard way of dealing with the data of someone who has passed away, here’s a quick sampler of some of the different policies.

Facebook

The social media giant has the easiest way to manage a deceased’s profile, simply fill in a form and swear you’re telling the truth. Facebook will then “memorialize” the account.

“Memorializing” is an interesting way of dealing with user’s passing. Rather than deleting the account, Facebook will lock out everyone but friends who are still able to post to the deceased’s wall. In some aspects, this is quite an elegant solution.

One of the features of LinkedIn is that it gives upfront suggestions of who should be in your network. If you’re a heavy user of the service, you’ve almost certainly encountered a suggested contact that is either inappropriate or distressing so the stakes for LinkedIn in keeping their contacts up to date is high.

LinkedIn’s process of dealing with a deceased’s passing is an email to customerservice@linkedin.com with the word “deceased” in the subject line. You need to give some details on the user’s passing and their account.

Google

With Google offering both social and cloud computing services, they are probably the most important service of all. Google’s requirements for handing over account details are rightly stringent.

Google’s procedure for deceased accounts involves the person first reporting the user’s passing to identify themselves first. Interestingly this has to be done by post.

Twitter

Like Google, Twitter requires anyone reporting a user’s death to mail proof of identity along with a death certificate. Once they are satisfied the user has passed away, they will deactivate the account.

PayPal

“When contacted in regards to a deceased estate we move quickly and with respect to close the customer account. Our policy and process is similar to many large financial institutions including banks When PayPal is notified that an account holder is deceased immediate steps are taken to suspend the account to prevent any unauthorised transfers from the account.

To close the account of someone who has died, PayPal needs to be sent paperwork including; details of the Executor of the Estate and a copy of the death certificate for the account holder. The documentation is reviewed and, once authenticated, the account is closed. If there are funds in the PayPal account, then these will be issued to the Executor of the Estate.

With bankrupt estates we refer this directly to our legal team who deal with them on a case-by-case basis and take action according to the instruction provided by the person or company handling the bankruptcy.”

Apple

No specific policy, the company recommends “customers needing guidance in relation to a deceased estate contact iTunes support at http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/contact/“.

Amazon

No clear policy. The company has been approached for comment.

Digital estate management services

There’s a number of services which help manage digital identities after someone passes away. Mashable reviews a number of these.

Sharing passwords

One simple solution is to share passwords with your next of kin, but that is a horrible security risk which isn’t recommended.

A slightly different solution is to split passwords in two and give half to different people, that still has risks and can get complex.

Probably the biggest problem with passwords is they change. Even if you write the password in your will or share it with trusted loved ones there’s a good chance it may have changed in the meantime.

Central email accounts

Probably the easiest, albeit still risky solution, is to have all online services pointing to one email address. almost every service has a “recover my password” feature which an executor or loved one with access to the central address will be able to recover most account login details.

Should everything else fail there are the courts and every major online service will obey a properly executed legal order although anything involving lawyers invariably ends up messy, difficult and expensive so that course should be the last resort.

As with everything online, balancing security, convenience and privacy is a difficult task for both individuals and companies. It’s not made better by the distress and grief when someone passes away.

Ideally we’d all plan these things and it would be easy on our loved ones although things often don’t turn out that way. It’s as true online as in any other aspect of life.

On being a hater

A cheap slur hides real problems with online communities and anonymous comments.

The phenomenon of the “Internet hater” has been one of the unfortunate developments of the web.

Just as entry barriers for new businesses are low, so too are the restraints on clueless and anonymous idiots posting comments like “drop ded you faggot” or “hope you get canser bitch” onto web forums and social media pages.

English comedian Isabel Fay has a great rebuttal to the haters with a clip that co-opts some of Britain’s top comics with their experiences.

These haters are sad little people as the BBCs Panorama program found when it tracked down one individual who had posted offensive comments.

We knew Darren Burton of Cardiff, aka Nimrod Severen, would be a pathetic individual. Those who post anonymous, hateful comments are rarely anyone who has anything useful to contribute to society.

Online “haters” are a real problem and cause distress to people who encounter the foul comments these creatures post. However the “haters” tag is increasingly being misused to shut down fair comment and criticism.

Legitimate critics or dissenters from the groupthink and shallow advertorials that increasingly dominate parts of the web will quickly earn the tag “hater” as well.

Every multi level marketing spiv or con merchant with a few followers will quickly throw the term out at anyone who dares criticise their behaviour in the hope of rallying their followers to shout down the dissenters. Usually it works.

If you’re prepared to think outside the group and genuinely challenge those selling old rope as new ideas, let alone expose the hypocrisy of those who claim to open and transparent while hiding their real intentions, then be prepared to wear the tag “hater”.

The only reply is to stand on your beliefs and be prepared to use your real name. The real trolls are scared, frightened creatures – just like many of the useful idiots co-opted by the spin merchants and Internet spivs.

At least “hater” is just a cheap insult and they aren’t coming for dissenters with pitchforks. Yet.

Triangulating privacy out of our lives

Social media sites will have to deal with increased government regulation.

Lost among the noise of Facebook’s rumoured plans to launch a kids’ network, there’s quiet pressures developing as consumers start to realise the value of their data – the pressure to regulate social media.

In his Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data, New York Times writer Quentin Hardy raises some of the issues about the data which is being collected about us.

One of the big areas is triangulation – building a picture of somebody based upon seemingly unrelated data. Quentin explains it in the example of somebody who might be looking for a job.

There other ways in which we can lose control of our privacy now. By triangulating different sets of data (you are suddenly asking lots of people on LinkedIn for endorsements on you as a worker, and on Foursquare you seem to be checking in at midday near a competitor’s location), people can now conclude things about you (you’re probably interviewing for a job there) that are radically different from either set of public information.

The key word of course is “conclude” – we base an assumption on what we think we know. It could turn out those LinkedIn endorsements could be part of a performance review and the competitor’s location could right next door to a hot new lunch spot.

We should also keep in mind the value of this data is asymmetric as the value of this data to a third party is low, if anything. But to the individual it could mean losing a job and other major consequences.

A good example of this is the story of how a UK hospital trust lost highly sensitive health records of thousands of patients, including those being treated for HIV.

The trust ended up being fined £325,000 but that fine is trivial compared to the massive individual cost from just one of those records being released.

Fines are a lousy way of enforcing privacy anyway, as the financial penalties are just passed onto shareholders or taxpayers.

The only meaningful sanction for failures like the Brighton General Hospital breach are holding individuals, particularly managers, personally responsible.

As we saw in the successive Sony security breaches last year, most organisations aren’t interested in holding their senior managers responsible for even the most egregious data failures.

This failure of the corporate sector to protect consumer data will almost certainly drive calls for government regulation and sanctions.

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd flags this regulation issue in Quentin Hardy’s New York Times piece, saying “Regulation is coming,” she says. “You may not like it, you may close your eyes and hold your nose, but it is coming.”

Danah also makes an important point that users – particularly kids – have developed tactics to obscure their ‘digital footprints’.

For Danah, and others trying to understand what is happening online, this causes a problem, “When I started doing my fieldwork I could tell you what people were talking about. Now I can’t.”

These tactics of creating dummy social media profiles and using euphemisms are a huge threat to the business plans of social media services and the “identity services” desired by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

As data becomes less reliable, or more difficult to triangulate, the value of it to advertisers falls.

It may well be that regulation of social media and web services ends up not being necessary as users become more net savvy. For medical and other personal data though, it’s clear we have to rethink the way we use and store it.

Facebook’s Childrens Network

Do we need social media networks for children?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is developing a childrens network to overcome the problem of kids under 13 joining the service.

Underage kids getting on the network is a major problem for the social media service with last year’s Pew Social Media and Young Adult survey finding over half of US children logging onto these sites.

The rule of under 13s joining Facebook or other social media services isn’t one born out altruism – it was born out of the US COPPA law which was enacted at the end of the 1990s to protect young children from inappropriate advertising and data mining.

For Facebook and all the other social media data mining operations the inability to gather information on or advert to minors means they haven’t been interested in investing time or money in developing childrens’ networks.

As social networks become more critical to kids’ social lives, it’s not unexpected that younger children are going online just like their older brothers and sisters and this creates risks for services like Facebook.

To mitigate those risks, it was inevitable that Facebook would have to address the problem with setting up a service aimed at younger kids.

Where the challenge lies for Facebook and parents is encouraging kids to use the younger service. It’s going to have to be compelling for the youngsters to use it in preference to the adult network.

The key there is to get the critical mass of kids onto the service – social media platforms only succeed when users know their peers will be there.

So Facebook are probably going to have to offer most of the features of the main platform, without advertising or some of the more intrusive data mining and games.

It also won’t be possible to exclude adults from the kids network as parents and other relatives want to know what their offspring are doing and being friends with the younger ones is essential so they can see posts and other activity.

Age will also be an issue, it may well turn out that a kids network is more appropriate up to say 15 year olds rather than the current thirteen mandated by COPPA.

Overall, a Facebook Kids Network will be sensible move. The worry for Facebook is that kids might just decide there is more compelling place for their friends and interests.

Do you want to be the personal lubricant guy?

A reminder why you need to be careful with your Facebook likes.

Nick Bergas is a multimedia producer in Iowa City, but to Facebook he’s a live advertisement for personal lubricant.

As the New York Times reports, last Valentines Day Nick saw an Amazon listing for a 55 gallon drum of personal lubricant, ticked the product’s Facebook “Like” button and added a witty comment to his friends.

Shortly afterwards, Nick’s face started appearing in Facebook sponsored posts for big drums of personal lubricant.

Last year I wrote The Privacy Processors on how Facebook is using our personal data and Nick’s story is a good example of how every like, relationship or comment is potential fodder for Facebook’s marketing platform.

While Nick seems pretty chilled about his Facebook celebrity, for some it might not be so benign.

As we’ve seen for student teachers and others, an innocent or even funny posting may be a problem to those without perspective or a sense of humour.

For Facebook and other social media services, Nick’s story also illustrates a problem – that of “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.

While one of Facebook’s major assets is its huge user database, there’s no guarantee the data is accurate or useful.

Selling Nick’s details to a bulk medical lubricant wholesaler is pretty pointless, but that sort of intelligence is key to the future value of Facebook.

That much of the data gathered is the flaw at the heart of Facebook’s bid data aspirations and Google’s hopes to become an identity engine with Google+.

For us mere individuals, the lesson is we need to be a little bit careful about pressing those “like” buttons; explaining your affinity with bulk lubricants could be a bit tricky with your mum or partner.

Does Facebook’s float mark social media’s peak?

Is social media about to plunge into the trough of disillusionment?

After its successful float on Friday, social media giant Facebook’s stock is now 18% down on the IPO price and there are claims some investors were aware of revised analyst expectations shortly before shares went on sale.

Facebook’s share price isn’t being helped by large advertisers, most notably General Motors, publicly expressing their dissatisfaction.

In SmartCompany’s survey on business tech use, one statistic that stood out was that less than 30% of businesses were happy with their returns on social media.

Facebook can’t even win in the courts with a Californian magistrate throwing out the social media platform’s trademark case against a Norwegian pornography site.

It’s been clear for some time that the tech industry has been in an investment bubble and social media services have at been the centre of that hype .

The huge expectations of Facebook’s float value has been one of the drivers of Silicon Valley’s investment boom – a dangerous feedback loop in itself.

So now Facebook’s share price is in decline and angry investors are asking “why” and demanding answers from advisors and banks.

The real question though is does Facebook’s float mark the peak of the current tech boom in the same way AOL’s merger with Time Warner in January 2000 marked the peak of the original dot com mania?

One of the great similarities with the original dot com mania is the businesses’ failure to make money from their services – today’s Pintrest and Twitter have that much in common with the great Dot Com boom debacles of Pets.com and Boo.

The biggest problem with the social media services is most of them are advertising dependent. As we see from General Motors’ dissatisfaction and that of the businesses in the Smart Company survey, most businesses aren’t happy with the performance of social media platforms.

Getting the advertising, or other revenue streams, right is key to the survival of these services. Google cracked this after the original dot com boom and are now one of the most successful companies ever.

The companies that figure out the revenue models for social media, or online news, will be the next Google’s and Facebook could well be the business that cracks the code for social media.

For the social media industry overall, it appears the sector is now at what Gartner calls the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” on their hype cycle.

The next stage from the peak is the tumble into the “trough of disillusionment” and that appears to be where Facebook is heading.

As Gartner points out, that trough is also where good, stable businesses are built. While the sector or technology is scorned, those who survived the tumble out of fashion are able to consolidate and learn from the harsh lessons they’ve received.

Eventually the market rediscovers the technology or industry and eventually becomes accepted as a mature part of business or as Gartner put it, they enter the “plateau of productivity.”

This is exactly the process Amazon went through during the dark days of 2002 and 2003 after the tech wreck which today finds them as one of the Internet’s giants.

Whether Facebook can emulate Amazon or Google is for history to judge, but social media’s falling out of favour is not a bad thing, the wreckage of the current tech mania will see much stronger and viable social media businesses that will deliver real value to industry and society.

In the wreck of the dot com boom we saw HTML “coders” reduced from driving Porsches to driving buses, the same thing will probably happen to many of today’s social media experts. That in itself is not a bad thing.

Eroding business silos

Knowledge is power, and the businesses who can share it are those who will define the 21st Century.

During our ABC radio discussion on politics and social media with Jeff Jarvis, we inevitably came around to the issue of sharing information.

We’ve covered the risks of personal sharing extensively and Jeff’s view is that our perceptions of privacy are evolving as we explore what is acceptable or tolerable in an information rich world.

Overlooked in this discussion is just how important sharing is for businesses – particularly in breaking down silos within an organisation.

As organisations grow, silos develop as various groups or departments grow to address specific functions. It’s a natural process.

However silos can damage businesses as valuable business knowledge is kept within the group rather than shared with the entire organisation.

This is the opportunity we see now in the various cloud computing, social media and big data tools that have developed to help people, gather, curate and share information.

Today there is no excuse for critical customer information sitting in the call centre logs not being available to marketing, sales or management teams. That is just one example of thousands.

Over time we’ll see businesses owners and managers develop the skills and tools to use data more effectively. This is already happening as many IT people move from Information Technology to Knowledge Management.

Business silos won’t ever be fully eliminated; in many ways they are necessary as you can’t expect the company accountant to know everything the customer service or sales staff do.

Those businesses who are successful will be those who overcome internal politics and resist the managerial urge to build little empires, information is too important to be hoarded by middle management princelings.

In the 19th Century power came in the form of steam engines, today it comes in knowledge. How well are you harnessing the power in your business?

ABC Nightlife Computers: The politicians on your homepage

How politicians are using the web and social media to push their message

Politicians around the world have discovered social media and the web. Australia’s political parties are gearing up to copy Barak Obama’s 2008 online campaigns.

Paul, Tony Delroy and Jeff Jarvis – Associate Professor and Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York and the author of “Public Parts: How sharing in the digital age improves the way we work and live” discussed how politicians are using social media to get into your inbox.

The program is available from the ABC Nightlife website. If you’d still like to make comments or ask questions, feel free to have your say below.

To show what politicians are doing with online media, here are some examples from the Obama 2008 US Presidential campaign.

The Art of The Possible – An overview of the Obama – Biden 2008 campaign that defined modern digital political campaigns.
One of the most interesting phenomenons in the 2008 Obama campaign was The Great Schlep (language warning). Can you imagine a campaign like this in Australia?
Blue State Digital tools were developed for the campaign. These are now being used in Australia.

Some of the topics we looked at include;

Australian politicians don’t seem to have used the web very well. Why is that?
What are the ways overseas politicians using social media?
How do these integrate with the political parties’ existing databases?
Does this fit into the term Big Data we’re hearing about businesses?
Doesn’t this all create opportunities for false identities and campaigns?
Can you keep the parties off your computer?

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Monetizing the Masses

How do social media services make a profit?

Monetization is a horrible word.

The term is necessary though as many online business models are based upon giving away a service or information for free. For those businesses to survive, they have to find a way to “monetize” their user base.

When Google were floated in 2003, the question was how could a free search engine “monetize” their users. The answer was in advertising and Google today are the world’s biggest advertising platform.

Facebook’s Inital Public Offering (IPO) announcement raises the same question; how does a company valued 99 times earnings find a way to justify the faith of its investors?

Advertising is the obvious answer but that seems to flattening out as the company’s revenue growth is slowing in that space. The AdWords solution tends to favour Google more than publishers as most advertising supported websites have found.

Partnering with application developers like the game publisher Zynga is another solution. Again though this appears to be limited in revenue and Zynga itself seems to be having trouble growing its Facebook user numbers.

So the question for Facebook is “where will the profits come from?”

There’s no doubt the data store Facebook has accumulated is valuable but how the social media service can “monetize” this asset without upsetting their users is open to question.

For Facebook the stakes are high as the comparisons with Friendster and MySpace are already being drawn.

We’ll see more partnerships like the Facebook Anti-virus marketplace, but these seem to be marginal at best.

In the next few months things will get interesting as Facebook’s managers and investors strive to find ways to make a buck out of a billion users who don’t pay for the service.

While “monetization” is an ugly word, it is one that every online company thinks about.

Every web based businesses will be watching how Facebook manage their monetization strategy closely as the entire industry struggles with the faulty economics of providing services for free.

Customer service gods

After years of neglect, customer service now matters again.

“Treat your customer service people like gods,” says online business advisor Todd Alexander.

One of the conceits of the 1980s business model was that customer service, like training and capital investment, is an expense that should be driven down at all costs.

In corporations, government departments and politics those who dealt directly with the customers, taxpayers or voters were seen to be the low level, low status employees who could be outsourced at the first possible opportunity.

That was great when markets were growing and there was an abundance of low hanging fruit to be plucked from the marketplace.

Now that customers are cash strapped and margins are falling, keeping customers happy becomes more important.

A statistic often quoted is that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than keeping an existing one, that difference may be exaggerated but it’s not far from the truth.

Those departing customers can do great damage to the business as well.

In the 1980s customers had little recourse apart from taking their business elsewhere. Often they didn’t have that choice in sectors where duopolies reign.

Now customers can vent their frustrations to the world on the web or through social media and there’s no hiding from the loss of reputation.

What’s more, many of the businesses that relied upon picking the low hanging fruit of a growing economy, high immigration or increasing consumer debt to find more customers through the last thirty years now find the rules of changed.

Customer service now matters.

Any management that considers customer service to be low status is a dinosaur and will soon be following them.

It’s a good time to be disrupting comfortable business models.

The Free Myth

Free services often come at a cost of your time.

One of the biggest dangers to businesses is the belief that something is “free”.

As we all know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. When another business gives you something for free it’s safe to say there is a cost somewhere.

One of the speakers at the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business social media event stated this when talking about social media saying “I can’t believe all businesses aren’t on Facebook – it’s free.”

Social media isn’t free. We all know the value services like Facebook are mining are the tastes, habits and opinions of their users.

For businesses, engaging heavily in Facebook or any other social media service hands over far more information about their customers to a third party than they themselves would be able to collect.

All of that information handed over to a service like Google or Facebook can come back to bite the business, particularly if a well cashed up competitor decides to advertise at the demographic the business caters to.

The core fallacy though is that these service are “free”. They aren’t.

Every single service comes with a time cost. Every social media expert advises the same thing, businesses have to post to their preferred service of choice at least three times a week and those posts should be strategically thought out.

That advice is right, but it costs time.

For a business owner, freelancer or entrepreneur time is their scarcest asset. You can always rebuild your bank account but you can never recover time.

Big businesses face the same problem, but they overcome this with money by hiring people for their time. In smaller businesses, this time comes out of the proprietor’s twenty-four crowded hours each day.

The computer and internet industries are good at giving away stuff for free, in doing so they burn investors’ money and the time of their users. The social media business model hopes to pay a return to investors by trading the data users contribute in their time.

While businesses can benefit from using social media services, they have to be careful they aren’t wasting too much of their valuable time while giving away their customers to a third party.

Often when somebody looks back on their life they say “I wish I had more time.” They’ve learned too late that asset has been wasted.

Wasting that unreplaceable asset on building someone else’s database would be a tragedy.