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 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.

So after my last post on the Forrester Research survey on Trust and Corporate Blogging, I got contacted by a Corporate Blogger!

I mentioned Joel Spolsky’s blog Joel on Software in the post and got an email from Dan of Fog Creek Software - Joel’s Company. He said thanks for mentioning Joel’s blog in such a nice way, and offered me a free copy of Joel’s book - “Smart and Get Things Done”.

So not only is the Joel on Software blog one of the best corporate blogs around, it is also actively listening to and following up with the blogging community. A nice touch. And a good example of corporate blogging done right.

To top it all off, Joel actually signed the book on the inside cover:

“To Paul,
Be smart!
Get things done!
Eat Fruit!”

I am way ahead of you on that third one!

And to all those Marketers out there that might scratch their head and wonder how a CEO of a software development company can add anything to the Marketing world, Seth Godin called the guy a “genius”. I don’t think Seth throws that term around a lot.

So Joel’s book is squarely on the top of my reading list. From a brief mention in a blog post, to a follow -up email, to a free book, to a review of the book I will post down the track. That’s how it all works.

That’s how you build trust.

There has been a bit of a flutter lately about the whole issue of Corporate Blogging.  A recent post from Forrester Research on their Groundswell blog highlighted some data that showed only 16% of people trust Corporate Blogs.  

“Company Blog” is way down the bottom there.

I am only going to make two comments about this.

Firstly, I think it’s right.  Not that all Corporate Blogs are disingenuous, consumers simply have no way to sort out truth from fiction.  We find it hard to trust things that have no transparency mechanism built in.  We trust online reviews because of the power of consensus - not because we trust an anonymous individual’s single experience.  We trust email from people we know because they probably have a track record with us.  Just like we trust individual bloggers we know are experts in a field.

We don’t trust social networking profiles because just how sure are you that that cute girl who is a friend of your best friend’s best man really does LOOK that cute in her picture?  We all try to add a little pizzaz to our profiles, right?

My point being that it is very tough for a corporate blog to reach a high level of trust with no transparency mechanism.  With no way for readers to easily sort fact from ‘fact’ (the corp comm. version of ‘fact’).  

I think the only way for a blog to do this is to be genuine.  One of the best corporate blogs I read is from Joel Spolsky - the CEO of Fog Creek Software.  He writes in a genuine way that invites trust.  He also writes more about ‘how’ his company does things rather than ‘what’ they do.  About human things rather than corporate things.  

The second point (ok, so maybe it’s the third) is that this is an awful survey question.  Context matters in surveys.  If you include items such as ‘personal email’ along with items such as ‘company blog’ on a scale of trust, you are dooming the company blog in the results.  Why don’t we just add ‘the person who bought you into the world and taught you all you know - usually your, Mother’ to the list?  Then we would really see ‘company blog’ sucking the pavement!

We have spheres of trust that don’t overlap.  How I think about a company blog in the world of communications from brands is vastly different to how I think about and use personal email.

There is no way you can interpret this result as only 16% of people trust Corporate Blogs.  There is actually no valid interpretation of what that 16% represents given the vastly different items in that list.  But alas, I can feel it making its way around the web as I write…

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.

I am about half way through Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody. I had read some initial critical reviews (which I can’t find the link to anymore), but I think they were misguided. It’s a fascinating book about the way we organize ourselves and how the Internet has changed ‘organizing’.

I’ll look to write a review after I have finished it (hopefully soon), but I thought I would make a quick post about The Point.

The Point is a website for organizing group action. It’s the purest form of ‘Internet Organization’ I have come across and is a shining example of the central tenet of Shirky’s argument - it’s not so much that the Internet ‘brings us all closer’, it’s that it removes the inherent ‘cost’ of organizing.

There is an important lesson for Social Media in there. It’s not about interrupting people’s conversations or even being a part of them (brands have no purpose or right to inject themselves into private conversations), it is about using Social Media tools to mobilize (organize) customers who share your brand as a common interest.

What you organize them around is up to you - but the options are limitless and the cost negligible.

That is the real power of Social Media.

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.