Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: social media

  • Deep mining business data

    Deep mining business data

    This post originally appeared as Mining Business Data: Get ready to drill and excavate, the June 28, 2012 post on Smartcompany.

    The IT industry loves buzzwords and the phrase coming into fashion is “big data”. Forget “social media” or “cloud computing”, much of what you’ll be reading about in columns like this over the next few years will be about mining the information piling into our businesses.

    Big data’s power is illustrated in yesterday’s report that Mac users will pay more for hotels than those on Windows systems. So travel site Orbitz now plans to headline more expensive options to visitors using Apple computers.

    While social media and cloud computing are falling out of favour, we shouldn’t discount those old-fashioned terms as they are two of the main drivers of big data. Cloud computing makes it possible to crunch data cheaply, while social media is generating even more data for people to play with.

    Sydney business Roamz is a good illustration of how social media, cloud computing and big data come together. Born out of founder Jonathan Barouch’s desire to find local activities for his young child, Roamz pulls together data from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to build a picture of what’s interesting in your neighbourhood.

    It’s no coincidence direct marketing giant Salmat has invested in Roamz, as the data being gathered allows companies to paint a comprehensive picture of what their customers like.

    Another business making sense of big data is Kaggle, set up by former Reserve Bank economist Anthony Goldbloom. Kaggle is a crowdsourcing service which runs data analysis competitions on business problems through to things like HIV research, chess ratings and dark matter exploration.

    Like most things in the computing industry, these services were only available to those who could afford supercomputers a few years ago, today they’re available to anyone with a credit card and internet connection.

    The era of big data might help us overcome Pareto’s Principle – otherwise known as the 80/20 rule – that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. We can also be sure that 80% of our problems come from a different 20% of clients.

    Having the ability to crunch numbers quickly means we can identify the good payers and problem customers before we do work for them. It might also mean we beat another business truism by finally being able to identify the 50% of our advertising budget that is being wasted.

    Even if you don’t think your business is ready to dive into the world of big data, it’s worthwhile at least having a look at your website analytics to see what your customers are looking at.

    Who knows? Like Orbitz, you might identify those cashed up Mac users who love spending money.

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  • Connecting the data dots

    Connecting the data dots

    One of the connected world’s weaknesses is its fragmented as various silos of data appear in the different social and cloud services.

    Bringing those sources together in a way that’s useful and relevant is one big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

    Sydney company Roamz is one of the businesses looking at this opportunity by bringing together a user’s Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare feeds to figure what interesting stuff is happening locally.

    Roamz’s CEO and founder Jonathan Barouch has a vision to “cut out the noise” from social media services by “curating and cleaning the data”.

    The idea of curation isn’t new in the online world, this is probably one of the biggest challenges for everyone on the web as we find ourselves swamped with data. To date, much of the idea of ‘curation’ has been around news sources where services like Google News try to deliver relevant current affairs to the user’s desktop.

    Social media sites are particularly in need of curation, particularly given your friends in Nevada are much help when you’re looking for a good coffee shop in Melbourne.

    This is the problem Roamz seeks to solve and we’re seeing this with various other services, not least the social media platforms themselves as Facebook tries to extend its reach and Google attempts to integrate their local services with the Zagat restaurant review system and Google+.

    Some would dismiss these services as “first world problems”, after all who cares about twittering hipsters trying to find a single origin, fair trade soy latte in Broadmeadows?

    There’s a point in that view, although there is a much bigger problem for businesses in this fragmented data world in harnessing and validating various sources of market intelligence.

    For businesses that get this right, they’ll be able to target advertising and marketing much more effectively while being able being able to tap into what their customers think and want.

    It’s no accident therefore that one of Roamz’s major investors is consumer communications giant Salmat, who can deliver great value to their corporate customers through supplying this data and market intelligence.

    The next IT buzzphrase is “Big Data” where businesses deal with this flood of information that is swamping all of us, by being able to understand customers and their behaviour things become far more efficient and cost effective.

    Bringing data together and making sense of the results is the big challenge of our times, those who can solve the problem will be among the next generation of business leaders.

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  • Managing your digital estate

    Managing your digital estate

    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.

    LinkedIn

    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.

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  • On being a hater

    On being a hater

    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.

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  • Triangulating privacy out of our lives

    Triangulating privacy out of our lives

    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.

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