As many people probably know, Facebook has been hammered recently by concerns over user information and privacy. It’s disconcerting stuff.

I’ve just logged in and changed pretty much all of my privacy settings to make sure my information doesn’t end up in the hands of some distance third party of a third party who accessed it because someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years was my friend on Facebook.

Not that that can happen now, but it seems like a reasonable extension of where Mr Zuckerberg and friends are taking their social behemoth.

I’m not against Facebook, not against using the platform or the services.  But I am against someone using my personal data in the context of my ’social graph’ for their own financial ends and disguising it as a business plan.

Facebook can’t make sufficient money for its user base because it’s fundamentally not a business. WPP’s chairman Martin Sorrell recently made a statement to this effect, that ‘Social Media is more a personal phenomenon than a business one’. Joseph Jaffe criticized Sorrell on his blog for saying this, but I think missed the core intent of the comment - there is no inherent value in being a medium for social connection.

I think Sorrell was making a statement about the viability of Facebook as a business more than he was commenting on the viability of using Facebook to run/market a business. These are two very different things. If I create a network of people using some fancy new technology, the value of those connections is held and realized by the individuals in the network and the savvy individuals/businesses that can utilize the network for their own means.

It’s not realized by the guy sitting on all the fancy technology used to connect the network in the first place.

Facebook is not worth some squared sum of the connections it facilitates. Up to now, it’s basically worth whatever advertisers want to pay to interrupt people writing daily updates on their virtual walls or playing with their virtual farms.

This being not enough, it now has its sights on using personal data to ‘augment the internet experience’. No thanks. I like your platform, like that it connects me to people I care about, but I can’t give you permission to use my personal information to build a business from. It’s not yours. It’s mine. I don’t care necessarily how private it is (it’s on the web after all, right?), but it’s not a way for you to make money.

This is the essence of the debate to me. It’s not about privacy, it’s about permission. The bargain was that you can bombard me with ads, services, third-party offers, it wasn’t that you could take my social data and use it to make money for yourself.

I can’t wait to see what 4 guys working night and day on only pizza and beer in NY can create!

I recently took a readership survey on the Digg site and realized there were some fundamental flaws in the way we are trying to understand online behavior.  And this is by no means solely a problem at Digg, it speaks to a deep seated bias we have when trying to probe media behavior.

Some examples from the Digg survey:

Question: How often would you say you go online?  Many times a day, daily, weekly, etc.

Between my home computer that I never turn off, my work computer I turn off once a week, my cellphone and my Ipod Touch, I don’t think I am never NOT online.

At some point the distinction between online and offline blurred to such a degree that there is now no meaningful demarcation.   I can certainly ‘disconnect’ myself, and do.  But even then, I am conscious that my online presence still ‘exsits’ and perpetuates itself without my direct involvement.

In this sense, the more important measure is how integrated my ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lives are, not how often I switch between the two.

Question:  Which of the following do you visit at least once a month?  <list of websites>

What exactly is a ‘visit’?  I have a iGoogle home page that streams 10 different RSS feeds, am I ‘visiting’ each of those sites every time I read the feed?  Do I have to click through to them for it to count?  What about my RSS reader where I look at the BBC news, is each article a visit?  What about the CNN Breaking News emails I get?  Are those ‘visits’?  If I never turn off Twhirl, how many visits is that a day to Twitter feeds?

Again, ‘visit’ is a remnant of an earlier online experience and one with roots in TV and radio - where the only way to get to the information was to physically change the channel.

We need to think about ‘consumption’ not ‘visitation’ when thinking about online media.

Question: Rank these reasons for spending time online - entertain, research, manage my life, etc.

Why do I go online?  What’s most important?  This question loses all meaning when you think of your online life as an extension of your offline one.  ’Online’ is not a destination with a cause and reason to visit, it’s a fluid extension of real needs/wants/desires.

‘Needs’ is the real issue here - what needs does your online life fulfill?

The survey continued in the same vein with subsequent questions.  Websites were treated as destinations and ‘visits’ and the online experience had reason and purpose.

I think it’s time to rethink a lot of how we measure ‘online behavior’.  Rather than assuming individuals online are ‘destination’ seekers, we need to think about how individuals aggregate and move between the nodes of the network they create.  It doesn’t mean destination seekers don’t exist, it just doesn’t adequately explain the complexity of their online world.

Bottom line, why measure online behavior like we used to measure offline behavior?  A mouse isn’t simply a different way to navigate, it’s a paradigm shift in your relationship to information.

I thought Digg, of all companies, would have understood that.

I think we’re all been in this situation - you are launching a new product, trying to sort out a new tactic, trying to understand a new market.  

You get some research and look at the numbers.  It seems that there is a definite opportunity among females.  They are normally 51% of the population but this idea/product/tactic seems to resonate with females way more - they are 60% of those who liked/love it!

Digging deeper you find that they are also slightly younger, maybe live in the Mid West, and have middle class incomes.  Before long you are writing a strategy document to target single white females in Chicago.  Giving them a name like ‘Mid West Care-Freers’ and basing a brand strategy around them.

But what happens to the 40% of males who like the product/idea/tactic?  Especially the slightly older married guy from Florida?  He’s a young at heart Mid Western girl just trying to break free?

In all seriousness, just how important is an idea/product/tactic that skews slightly anything?  It’s a difference, but is it a difference that matters?

I am prepared to argue ‘no’.  Small differences and ’skews’ (as we like to call them in consumer research) are a carry over from a time when we purchased media with the intent of wasting most of it.  If we knew females liked our idea, it was more efficient to find tons of females and inundate them with messaging than find the 40% of males who wanted to be just like that Mid Western girl.

These days great ideas spread.  They spread faster and connect better than ever in the past.  We’ve moved (are moving) to a world where it’s easier to find like-minded people than people who are ‘like’ each other.

That’s a profound difference.  It’s the essence of group construction and the impetus behind social media.

And it’s a difference that matters.

Thinking about the excessive amount of TV advertising I’ve consumed while watching the Olympics lately, I was beginning to wonder if new Marketing trends were just a bunch of hot-air.

So I pulled the following data from Google Trends.

This is a chart of the search and news volume for three phrases ’social media’, ‘traditional media’ and ‘TV advertising’ - search volume is on the top, news volume is on the bottom.

Sometime around the middle of 2007 you can see ’social media’ take off as a phrase.

Of course, this is old news to Social Media advocates who have been living and breathing this trend for the past year and a half. But what’s interesting is the downward trend for the ‘TV advertising’ line.

Either Jo Public has stopped searching for generic ‘TV Advertising’, or Marketing practitioners have lost interest. I think it’s probably a bit of both.

Watching the Olympics you wouldn’t have guessed.

Gareth over at Brand New posted a short musing on why we need to concentrate on building Social Brands rather than executing Social Media campaigns.

I agree. And I’ve said it before, Social Media is not a call to inundate the web’s social channels with advertising, it’s a call to change the way you do business.

Why? Because the Web has changed/is changing the way people work and play. It’s not simply another media medium.

Your brand/company exists in two places these days - its physical existence (where you work, the employees, the products, the infrastructure) and its digital existence (its website, search engine presence, online conversations about its products/services, customer complaints and compliments, etc.) . The digital presences needs as much care and thought as the physical one.

Imagine if a customer tried to contact you in the ‘real world’ and you had never thought to put in a phone line or build a door to your front office? We take these things for granted in the physical world - it’s laughable to think of a company without a phone system, or indeed a front entrance!

Why do we NOT take them for granted in the digital world? Why do all companies not have blogs? Why won’t some respond to online conversation? Why is it difficult to find the email address of the CEO? Why do they ignore customers trying to have fun with their brand or product?

Why? Because they are not paying enough attention to their digital presence. Not managing it properly. Not investing in it. And not using any of the tools consumers are using to help them navigate this new frontier.

As long as ‘digital media’ is relegated to a subset of Marketing and ‘Social Media’ a subset again, this will remain the norm.

Social Media is not a strategy, it’s a call to manage your digital presence with as much care and thought as your physical one.

Sean over at CrapHammer (got to love that blog name!), posted a link to a short video promoting the new book The Pirates Dilemma, by Matt Mason. Here is the video.

It definitely looks like it would be worth a read. It’s hard to argue that youth culture hasn’t/isn’t changing the media landscape. Whole institutions are crumbling because of it (read traditional media outlets).

What struck me watching the video though was why the attention on pirate culture now - as the video goes into some depth to explain it as a common historical trend? It comes down to music (and potentially movie) piracy. And it’s an economic argument. Never in the history of media has the means to reproduce and share it been so easy and ubiquitous.

So does that make everyone a pirate? Or are some of us sort of free-loading pirates? More akin to looters running through upturned cars than pirates who seek riches and fame plying their trade?

I think there is a distinction there. Subtle, but important. And I know people who fit into both camps.

I think I am off to buy the book… or steal it if possible