Jenny Schmitt bio:
Jenny-Rebecca Schmitt is a veteran public relations and marketing professional, trainer and sought-after public speaker. Her 15-year marketing and communications career includes experience in the fields of sports marketing, nonprofit marketing, healthcare communications, and public relations.
Earlier this week, we shared a small social experiment – we were able to discover key details and specific information by browsing the social media profiles of four people we recently met at a local networking event. The results surprised us and got us thinking more about how casual people tend to be in very public places online.
Are you careful about what you say in public places? Do you ever really know who you’re talking to at a party? Do you mind if people eavesdrop your conversations at Starbucks? Do you let people read your laptop screen while you sit on the airplane? You’re probably socially attuned to all of these and careful about information that you’re revealing when you’re interacting this way in the real world, but you think differently about privacy in the online world. People tend to have this inflated presumption of privacy and they’re less careful about what they reveal. If fact, your privacy expectations and behaviors may be altered if you begin to think about a reality analog to the different types of social situations that you’re encountering through social media. You would probably be surprised how much people can learn about you because of the way you’re treating the online world differently than you act in the real one.
Let’s look at real-world analogies of the most common social networking sites and see how it might make you think differently about your privacy expectations. When you interact with people on Facebook, think of it as how you might act at a wedding reception. You either know everyone there or you have met a lot of them or, at the very least, you trust that they’re ok because the bride and groom invited them there. So you can let your guard down a little bit, share pictures, even drink a little too much and say stupid stuff. But you don’t really know everyone there, do you? You can’t be sure that everybody there was invited to the wedding. So you can’t completely trust everyone there, but on Facebook you pour your heart and personal information out on the table for everybody to sort through it.
If Facebook is a wedding reception, then Twitter is neighborhood bar on a Thursday night. You know a couple of people there, maybe even some good friends, but you have to assume everything you do and say in that bar might be heard by anybody. And you have no idea who those people are or if you can trust them. And who is the creepy guy that’s hanging around and listening to everything you have to say? You might reveal some personal things to your friends, but other people are listening.
If Twitter is a neighborhood bar, then social sites like Chatroulette or adults in MySpace are a shady nightclub downtown. You can’t really trust anything you hear or see there, but you might go there to let loose and have fun sometimes. Or maybe you just go there for bands that you like. You’re definitely going to see a different crowd at that nightclub then you might at the wedding reception last weekend, so you probably are going to put your guard up a little bit. You definitely can’t trust much of anything you see or hear there, and there might even be illegal things around. Plus, nightclubs never seem to stay open for very long.
If you don’t go to bars, then LinkedIn is much like your last professional networking meeting. You go to those types of events to meet like-minded people and to make contacts for business development, job searching or to just grow your network. You have casual and professional conversations with people and hand out business cards, but you don’t normally walk around handing out resumes. But that’s what you do on LinkedIn, right? Except on LinkedIn, the whole world can read all of those details, not just the self-selective group at your networking event. And again, these are people that are a step above strangers off the street, but you’re still not going to reveal tons of personal details to them until you get to know them, or when you run into them at a wedding.
If people thought about these real-world situations a bit when they are interacting socially in the online world, perhaps they would reveal a little bit less. Would you walk in a bar and tell everyone all of that?
If you’re on social media, guess what? You reveal more than you know.
The debate on privacy in the social space took another huge leap this past week. The Wall Street Journal’s ran an in-depth, investigative series titled, “What They Know.” The eye-pooping, jaw-dropping insights in the series (here, here and it continues here) left little doubt that your digital footprint is easier to track and identify than you might realize. But The Wall Street Journal has a big staff, time to investigate, and an editorial directive to find the story.
What could a person like me find out about, say, some people they met at recent networking events?
From a recent handful of business cards I gathered at a networking event, I poked around on social networking sites to see just what people reveal about them to the rest of the world – without cookies, spyware, or other data-gathering tricks. This was a simple search to see just how much I could learn about four people. What’s surprising is that I found a lot of details that I’m not certain these four folks know just how much they’ve put out there. Among the details, I learned:
where they went to college
where they went to high school
how old they are
where they live
where they were born
what nationality they are
what religion they are
everywhere they’ve ever worked
how many kids they have (I even got to see photos and videos)
what their spouses do for a living
who they voted for in recent elections
what their primary hobbies are
what movies they had recently seen
what bands/music they like
what books they’ve read in recent months
what restaurants they’ve been to in the last month
and where they’re traveling to right now
Remember, this was just me, looking at public info they’ve posted on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others.
So what are you opening revealing about yourself? Perhaps more than you know.
“In the future everyone will have 15 minutes of privacy.”
For now, Facebook efforts to own the new social web are facing a backlash from its blatant invasion of your privacy (and the privacy of your friends). The company has made it ever-challenging to keep control of personal data on the side of consumers using its services. With changing updates coming in rapid succession, defaults set at opt-in, it’s easy for consumers to not know, or be confused about, what they are agreeing to share and to disclose. For Facebook, their trappling of privacy is another rung in their effots to control data, remember it wasn’t that long ago that Facebook asserted content rights over nearly all data: writing, photos, art, etc. Read the rest of this entry »
Today, I presented at the PRSA/GA Annual Conference in Atlanta, Ga. This presentation to PR professionals focused on providing the basics of social media – definitions, demographics, and details – they would need to enhance/advance a company’s brand. It was also the first time I debuted the new Prezi format, which won rave reviews from the audience.
While we can get lost in the details of social media, its rise as new channels and its growth and accessibility around the world is changing the very fabric of societies. In this outstanding presentation by Clay Shirky at TED, he offers a mesmerizing look at how social media and texting are changing – and have changed – our understanding of world issues and events. This video is certain to inspire you to start a conversation, listen to the news more closely, and most importantly, to step back and look at how our undestanding of news and events is direcly influenced by citizens’ experiences.
On the heels of the recent research released by UberCEO that CEOs are social media slackers, I was making a social media presentation to a large group of CEOs last week… a bunch of folks with the same questions that my clients ask, “Is social media a fad?” and “Why should this matter?” Even though UberCEO’s report provided great insights into the current adoption of social media by Fortune 100 CEOs, I kept coming back to a more basic need to build understanding of how consumers have shifted, from passive to active, to get their attention.
How did I start the social media conversation with this group of CEOs? Well, I started by asking a series of questions:
·how many had smart phones – about 80%
·how many have been on Google in the last 48 hours – nearly 100%
·how many had seen one video on YouTube in the last 3 months – 100%
·how many have read news or a news article online in the last 24 hours – 100%
·how many had used the internet to snoop on a competitor? or make a purchase? or find the latest links schedule? – nearly 100%
·how many had used a ratings review service, like for a car, movie, or restaurant – about 30%
I didn’t ask how many were onLinkedIn, Twitter, Facebookor other social media spheres – my main point to this group was that how they use the internet on a personal basis is similar to how their customers are using it. And while some of these questions are related to search and not social media, it’s the behavior and the channels that I wanted this group of CEOs to focus on.
And with those initial questions and a few comments on my end about the rise of the active consumer as the intro, you could see a few a-ha moments happening. I went on to share an interactive presentation on just what is social media and why its influence is important and growing (including the latest numbers from Neilsen).When I wrapped up, I got a lot of thanks and plenty more questions which reaffirms that these business leaders want to understand this without the pressure of being early adopters or prolific users.But for the first time, for many of these executives, they “got” why social media matters because I started the conversation with them as consumers and not CEOs. And that understanding may be the start of something more.
What do you think?
There's no need for the social media conversation to lead to chaos.
(Part 3) The Darker of Social Media: Malicious Intent
Just how much are you giving away through social media?
One of the easiest ways to compromise your computer's security is through social media applications.
Most of you know by now how beneficial social media can be in reaching your audience or listening to the conversation about your brand. You probably also know how much time it can take to do it right. Or how much time your employees will waste once they get sucked into Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, what most of us don’t realize is that there are critical security and privacy concerns that go along with the open, personal nature of social networking.
Finally, the most serious of consequences of the open nature of social media is when the first two problems (trust and authenticity, see our previous blogs) are combined with actual malicious intent.You can control your own information flow and you can be diligent in your efforts to establish explicit trust with people in your network, but social media applications are vulnerable to malware that security companies do not even fully comprehend yet. For example, Facebook has been hit time and again by malicious Facebook applications that run within the system to spam your friend and spread like viruses. Facebook applications also require you to allow access to private data in your profile, potentially giving away sensitive info to malicious people. Twitter has had it’s own share of worms – usually under the guise of helping you build followers – that hijack an identity and post messages under your identity.
In social media spheres where you are trying to build a brand and control your message, don’t take risks. Don’t install Facebook applications – even for ‘good causes’ or ‘games’ unless you trust the source of the application, not the invitation, 100%, and don’t friend someone you don’t know or a site with which you are unfamiliar. It’s easy for someone to create forged or confusingly similar profiles on Twitter or Friendster or other sites where they have the opportunity to damage your brand or steal your customers.
As with any security issue, you must stay on the social media offensive to ensure that it’s you that is controlling your message and that the trust in your social media is explicit.
