Category: social media

Chasing away the astroturfers

Recent court and industry regulator rulings are good news for honest businesses using social media.

Yesterday we heard the collective gnashing of teeth as social media experts, lawyers and business owners complained about the Australian Advertising Standards Board’s ruling that companies are responsible for comments on their Facebook pages.

The ASB ruling (PDF file) was a response to complaints that comments on Diageo’s Smirnoff Vodka page breached various industry codes of conducts and encouraged under age drinking.

While the board found the complaints weren’t justified – something that most of the hysterical commentators overlooked – the ruling contained one paragraph that upset the social media experts and delighted the lawyers.

The Board considered that the Facebook site of an advertiser is a marketing communication tool over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control and could be considered to draw the attention of a segment of the public to a product in a manner calculated to promote or oppose directly or indirectly that product. The Board determined that the provisions of the Code apply to an advertiser’s Facebook page. As a Facebook page can be used to engage with customers, the Board further considered that the Code applies to the content generated by the advertisers as well as material or comments posted by users or friends.

The key phrase in that paragraph is “over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control”. Obviously someone posting on Twitter, their blog or someone else’s website is beyond the control of the advertiser.

With Facebook comments, the onus is on businesses to make sure there is nothing illegal appearing on their streams and any misconceptions or false statements are answered.

In many ways, this is common sense. Do you, as a manager or business owner, want your brands tarnished by idiots posting offensive or illegal content? Sensible businesses have already been dealing with this by deleting the really obnoxious stuff and politely replying to the more outrageous claims by Facebook friends.

What’s more important with both the ASB ruling and the Allergy Pathways case the ruling relies upon make it clear that ‘astroturfing’ on social media sites won’t be tolerated.

Astroturfing is the PR practice of creating fake groups that appear to support a cause or product. A group paid for by an interested party appears to grow naturally out of community interest or concern – a fake grassroots group so to speak and hence the word ‘Astroturf’ which is a brand of artificial grass.

Organisations like property developers and mining companies have been setting up Facebook pages and websites that appear to be community groups supporting their projects and many smaller business have been inducing friends, relatives or contractors to post false testimonials. In the run up to major elections in 2012 and 13 we’re seeing many of these fake groups setup to push various political agendas.

For a few consulting groups, astroturfing has become a nice line of business and those of us on the fringe of the social media community have been watching the development of ‘online advocacy services’ with interest.

While no-one has claimed Allergy Pathways or Diageo were posting fake testimonials on their own Facebook pages, the rulings in both cases are a warning that the courts and regulators are prepared to deal with those getting clever with social media.

For honest businesses this ruling is a non-issue, it’s timely reminder though that web and social media site are not ‘set and forget’ but need to be regularly checked, valid customer comments replied to and inappropriate content removed.

The ASB ruling reaffirms what sensible social media experts have been advising all along, and that’s good news for them and their clients.

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Verified Jerks

Anonymity is the problem on the Internet, accountability is.

When you work in customer service you quickly learn that some people are just rude jerks. Depending on how bad a day you have it could be 2, 5 or 10% of the population.

For these people the Internet has been a paradise with almost anonymous forums and newsgroups allowing them to be rude and obnoxious with little risk of being held accountable for their spiteful behaviour.

One of the hopes of social media services was that forcing people into using accounts tied to their real identities would impose some self discipline among these trolls and haters,

Sadly The argument that verified identities would stop people being irresponsible is wrong.

The sad story of seemingly mature people insulting and wanting to beat up a five year old participant on a reality TV show illustrates how manners, good taste and style are beyond some people.

It’s depressing, but unsurprising that this demographic can’t figure out that ‘reality’ TV shows are anything but real. The programs are carefully edited to suit the dramatic narrative of the producers with some of the participants being portrayed as villains and others as heroes.

The little girl in question could be in a spoilt little brat, but you’d want to be careful making that judgement from what you see on TV.

Many would put the spiteful behaviour of the Facebook commentors down to being another example of social media destroying our society, but this behaviour pre-dates the web.

In the 1990s we saw a similar wave of insults aimed at President Clinton’s then teenage daughter Chelsea. In many ways it was far worse in what we are seeing today in that those encouraging that behavior were the leaders of political parties and their ideological fellow travellers in the media.

The abuse of Chelsea Clinton marked the rapid decline of standards in politics that leaves many of us now sickened by the behaviour of all parties – and that of the media that treats their shenanigans seriously.

Notable about the raucous political partisanship is that most participant are happy, even proud, to be named as they debase the institutions they’ve been elected to represent.

The reason is they aren’t accountable, they know most of us are rusted on voters and the few that aren’t can be conned long enough by expensive advertising campaigns to get them elected.

Should they not get elected, they’ll be welcomed into the arms of their corporatist friends who will find them a nice sinecure on a board, committee or think tank.

The real reason people act like jerks is because they think they aren’t accountable – the politicians know they aren’t and most Facebook users figure the odds are in their favour that they’ll never be held to account for their boorish behaviour.

Anonymity is the reason for bad manners on the net, accountability is. While our society doesn’t make people accountable for cruel, rude or corrupt behaviour then these people will thrive. With or without the internet.

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ABC Nightlife Computers: The state of tech

July’s ABC Nightlife tech looks at viruses, online frauds, security and social media

Join Paul and Tony Delroy to look at some of the trends and events that are affecting how you use phones, computers and internet in your home or business.

A lot’s happened in the tech world over the last few weeks – Facebook has gone from the web’s golden business to being shunned, new tablet computers have been launched and we’ve had a virus threaten to knock people off the Internet.

If you missed the show, you can listen to it online through the Nightlife website. Some of the topics we looked at included;

  • So what was the DNS Changer Trojan? Did the FBI really take over a criminal computer network?
  • Could a virus really damage computers and bring the Internet to a halt?
  • Is it true the US, Israel and North Korea are using viruses to attack other countries’ computers?
  • Should we worry about viruses on smartphones and tablet computers?
  • What about virus hoaxes? There’s a good one going around about Facebook at the moment?
  • Both Microsoft and Google have launched new tablet computers, will they knock off the iPad?
  • Microsoft’s tablet is going to run the new Windows 8 operating system, how does that look?
  • Facebook seems to have gone from hero to zero since they launched on the stock market. What happened?
  • There’s been some pretty serious Facebook privacy changes recently, what should people watch out for?
  • Microsoft have had some big security updates this week, what are they.

For the Microsoft updates we mentioned, the major security updates can be downloaded from the Windows Update page or the Automatic Updates in Windows Vista and 7.

Windows 7 and Vista users should also disable the desktop widget feature, Microsoft have two fix it tools available for download and users should run both.

Listeners questions included the following problems;

Alternatives to Outlook Express

George was looking at upgrading to a new version of Windows that doesn’t have Outlook Express included but still wants a computer based email client rather than trusting a cloud service.

Some of the alternatives include;

Antivirus programs

Margaret asked about antivirus options for Macs, there’s a couple of free antivirus programs designed for the Apple Mac

For Windows users, the easiest free anti-virus to use is Microsoft Security Essentials.

Microsoft Silverlight on Android

Accessing Microsoft Silverlight based services like NineMSN on Google Android devices can be a problem as Jason found.

Unfortunately at this stage there’s no clear solution for playing Silverlight sites on Android devices as Moonlight, the open source Silverlight player has been abandoned.

Next Nightlife spot

Our next Nightlife tech spot will be on August 6 and we’ll decide the topics closer to the dates. Watch the website for details over the next few weeks.

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Facebook’s final fail

Has Facebook gone to far with its address changes

We’ve come to expect Facebook storing and manipulating our personal data, but is changing our contacts’ email addresses the final straw for the social media service?

Last week Facebook started changing users’ default email addresses to their inbuilt @facebook accounts.

This was irritating for many users, but now it appears the social media service has gone too far with changing the address books of their users.

If you have connected your iPhone, Android or Windows smartphone address books to the Facebook App, there is a chance that your contacts’ email addresses are now set to send to the user’s Facebook address rather than their “normal” email account.

When you synch your phone with your PC or laptop these changes will also be made in your main address book.

Given most people don’t use their Facebook supplied email this means many people won’t see messages sent to that address. This is a serious problem

You can check if your address book has been changed by simply looking at your contacts’ email addresses.

If it has, let your contacts know their addresses may have been changed as they can change the settings on their accounts. Read Write Web has instructions on fixing the address book problem.

Facebook’s behaviour on this is seriously worrying, it’s bad enough they store all of our data but altering our personal information is for me a bridge too far.

Given most mobile phone users would rather have their wallet stolen than lose their handset, Facebook’s messing with phones address book is going to shake their confidence in the service far more than the myriad privacy issues.

If the IPO was Facebook’s peak, it could well be this poorly thought out tactic that marks the beginning of the company’s decline.

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Deep mining business data

Big data means big opportunities for businesses prepared to look at what their customers are doing

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

The age of big data means big opportunities

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

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.

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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