Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: social media

  • Inflating titles, inflated apirations

    Inflating titles, inflated apirations

    This story first appeared in Smart Company on 19 April 2012.

    “She listed her job on LinkedIn as my ghostwriter,” reflected the journalist about his publishing business’ Gen-Y staff member.

    The journalist’s lament reflects an unexpected corporate risk in social media; that of employees giving themselves grandiose and sometimes damaging job profiles.

    Over the last 20 years, title inflation has been rife in the business world as corporations and government agencies doled out grandiose titles to soothe the egos of fragile management egos.

    So it isn’t surprising that many of us succumb to the temptation to give ourselves a grand title online.

    In the journo’s case a young graduate working as an editor in his publishing business listed herself as his ghostwriter, risking a huge dent to his credibility among other the lizards at the pub or the Quill Awards.

    That business journalist is not alone, in the connected economy what would have been a quaint title on a business card or nameplate is now being advertised to the world.

    Making matters worse, we now have tools like LinkedIn and other social media sites to check out a business’ background and who are the key contacts in an organisation.

    So what your staff call themselves is now important. It can confuse customers, cause internal staff problems (“how come he’s an Executive Group General Manager?”), damage business reputations and quite often put an unexpected workload on a relatively junior employee.

    In your social media policy – which is now essential in any business that employs staff – you need to clarify what titles your people can bestow upon themselves.

    As well as making this clear to new staff, a regular web search on your business that includes all of the popular social media sites should be a regular task.

    Just as economic inflation can hurt your business, so too can uncontrolled title inflation. Watch it isn’t affecting your operations.

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  • You hold us harmless

    You hold us harmless

    Social media site Pinterest was recently caught in one of the ongoing quandaries of social media – the ownership of content.

    The subject is tricky; social media sites rely on a vibrant community of users posting news and interesting things for their online friends.

    Unfortunately many of things social media users post are someone else’s property, so almost every service has a boilerplate legal indemnity term like Pinterest’s.

    You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cold Brew Labs, its officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable legal and accounting fees, arising out of or in any way connected with (i) your access to or use of the Site, Application, Services or Site Content, (ii) your Member Content, or (iii) your violation of these Terms.

    Facebook have similar terms (clause 15.1) as do LinkedIn (clause 2.E) and Tumblr (clause 15). Interestingly, Google’s master terms of service only holds businesses liable for the company’s legal costs, not individuals.

    Boilerplate terms like these are necessary to provide at least an illusion of legal protections for investors – those venture capital investors, greater fool buyers or punters jumping into the latest hot technology stock offering need a fig leaf that covers the real risk of being sued for copyright infringement by one of their users.

    The risk in these terms shouldn’t be understated; by agreeing to them a user assumes the liability of any costs the service incurs from the user’s posts. Those costs don’t have to be a successful lawsuit against the service, it could be something as minor as responding to a lawyer’s nastygram or DMCA takedown notice.

    Of course, none of the major social media platforms have any intention of using these indemnity terms; they know that the first time they go after a user all trust in the service will evaporate and their business collapse.

    Somewhere among the thousands of social media services though there is going to be one that will pull this stunt. Strapped for cash and slapped with an outrageous claim for copyright damages, the company’s board will settle then send out their own demands to the users responsible.

    Those “responsible” users – probably white, middle class folk sitting in somewhere in the US Midwest, South East England or North Island of New Zealand – will be baffled by the legal demand that requires them to file a defense somewhere obscure in California or Texas and will go to their lawyer friends.

    When the lawyers tell them what it means their next step will be to their local news outlet.

    The moment the story of a middle class person facing losing all their assets hits the wires is the moment the entire social media business model starts to wobble.

    In many ways what the social media sites are trying to do is offset risk.

    Risk though is like toothpaste. Squeeze the tube in one place and the pressure moves elsewhere.

    By laying off a real risk by using legal terms the social media sites create new, even bigger risks elsewhere in their business.

    The dumb thing is these terms really don’t protect the services anyway – it’s unlikely the typical social media user will have anything like the assets to cover the costs of a major copyright action by a rich, determined plaintiff.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how many services still have these indemnity clauses in 12 months.

    For the industry’s sake, the big players will need to have ditched these terms before that first dumb attempt to claim damages from users hits the wires.

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  • Overstuffing the social media goose

    Overstuffing the social media goose

    “Small business has to get on Pinterest” urges the social media advisor.

    “Oh no, not another of these social media thingummies” thinks the business owner or marketing manager.

    Pinterest is just the latest of a dozen online services that businesses have been urged to join in recent years. An incomplete list would include the following;

    • Pinterest
    • Google Plus
    • Facebook
    • Facebook Timeline
    • Quora
    • Color
    • Yelp
    • Tumblr
    • Google Places
    • True Local
    • Blogging
    • LinkedIn
    • LinkedIn Groups
    • Twitter

    The question for the time poor business owner or under resourced manager is “where do I find the hours for all this?”

    It’s not just smaller businesses either – most corporations don’t have the resources to dedicate to all of these services, let alone provide the 24×7 coverage many are beginning to expect.

    When it comes to online services and social media businesses owners and managers are like geese being stuffed for foie gras, they’ve had so much stuffed down their necks they can barely move.

    Like the foie gras ducks, businesses have become glassy eyed – when someone tells them they have to sign up to another online service they just switch off.

    We’ve reached the point where are too many networks for event the most underemployed social media expert to handle.

    For those advocating social networking or other online services for business, it’s time to start acknowledging the time poor reality of most businesses and consider exactly which services are best suited for the organisation.

    In businesss it’s not time to switch off, that could be the worst thing to do as so many new ways of talking with customers are developing.

    Instead of feeling overwhelmed, it’s time to start carefully considering which services will work best with your markets, products and staff and choose carefully.

    The days of just charging into the latest social media sensation are over, these services are growing up and they have to prove its worthwhile for businesses – or individuals – to invest their time.

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  • The allure of free data

    The allure of free data

    It looks like a nice business model, you get users to generate your content for you. Many of the new digital media empires like YouTube, Facebook and Foursquare are built upon it.

    The Register’s Simon Sharwood looked at the downside of this business model – junk data.

    Even the most well intentioned users makes mistakes with thing like addresses and that’s before you get mischief makers or competitors putting in false information.

    There’s another aspect too, what one person thinks is relevant may not be to other users or to the people running the service, Simon cites the dozens of “mom’s kitchens” on Foursquare.

    For those who’ve added their mom’s house, that’s relevant and maybe even funny to them.

    All of this illustrates the downside to the free, User Generated Content (UGC) model; you have to accept what the users give you.

    Which means it isn’t free – it has to be collated, processed and the noise has to be filtered out.

    At worst, somebody has to make the decision what is relevant and what has to go. This isn’t easy and, as Google found with their Name Wars, can upset a lot of users if it isn’t handled well.

    Nothing in life is truly free and with data becoming increasingly important to business it’s worthwhile considering the quality of that free or cheap stuff you get from the net.

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  • When history bites

    When history bites

    In a strange way Peter Watson, the Australian Labor Party election candidate disendorsed and expelled for his homophobic views, is a trend setter for his generation.

    Mr Watson was caught out by the unsavoury views he’d posted on Facebook and other online forums. That he defended what he had written “when I was like 14, 15 years old, so we’re talking about four, five years ago” made matters worse.

    Our digital footprints – material about us on the web or in social media sites – sometimes show we’ve strayed into places we’d rather admit to.

    There’s plenty of others who have posted things that will bite them later when they apply of jobs or seek political office.

    It will be interesting to see how society and the media adapt to our histories and the dumb stuff we did as teenagers being freely available, Mr Watson is an early casualty of that adjustment process.

    One of the more disturbing aspects of the Peter Watson case is his political party’s failure to do the most basic of checks on their candidate’s background. Something that again illustrates just how out of touch the nation’s political structures are with modern society.

    When we talk about disruption, we often focus on the jobs, business and social aspects of that change. One thing we often forget is that social upheaval directly affects political parties.

    Political parties who fail to adapt to the needs of their society become irrelevant and fail.

    So maybe Peter Watson has, through sheer dumb luck, found himself on the right side of history in being expelled from a political party that doesn’t know how to use Google search.

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