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.

My wife and I went along to a local San Franciso screening of Fresh a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a documentary film by Ana Sofia Joanes about the Fresh food movement - locally grown and harvested food (pic is my abysmal attempt to document the occasion with a cell phone camera).

My wife has become very involved with the Fresh, locally grown food movement out here on the West coast.  So naturally, by osmosis, so have I.  Well, to the extent that I eat everything she buys.  If truth be told though, I generally enjoy fresh, locally grown food a lot more than supermarket fare nowadays.

The screening of this movie was the first time I’d really seen a collection of Fresh ‘foodies’ all in one location.  A real eclectic bunch - everyone from your ‘farmer Joe” types to hip urban chic.

The screening was MC’d by a local food entrepreneur who is opening a ‘locally grown’ community restaurant in Berkeley.  He introduced the movie and filmmaker and also chaired the post screening panel.

The panel was an impressive mix of ‘fooderati’ with the main attraction being Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defence of Food.   The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great read and I would recommend it to anyone.  It was also, loosely, the basis for Fresh, the movie.

The whole ‘locally grown’ movement is a complicated one with many different strands.  At its heart though is the notion that you can’t build a sustainable food system based on the principles of the industrial revolution.  Economies of scale work for widgets, but not for tomatoes, or chickens, or beef, or fish.  As soon as you try to ‘manufacture’ these, you have to homogenize inputs and processes to such an extent that any components of the natural system Mother Nature perfected over millennia disappear.

That natural system is based on carefully calibrated feedback loops and symbiotic relationships.  Not the sort of things you find in chicken farms - where thousands of birds are kept alive through a combination of cruel mutilation and drugs.

The result, as Michael Pollan likes to say, is ‘there is no cheap food’.  To industrialize the food process means to introduce foreign agents (like antibiotics) to keep costs down and output high.  This results in lower and lower supermarket prices, but higher health costs as we all cope with diseases that were largely non-existent 100 years ago (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.).

I never really gave much thought to this until my wife (bless her) told me to look closely at the ingredients of the peanut butter I was eating.  As I was reading out the 20 different chemicals listed on the back, she told me that peanut butter is made from crushing peanuts and adding a bit of salt - why would you need anything else?  She was right.  The added ingredients are to make it taste a certain way and to keep you coming back for more.  Also to make it last longer on the shelf.

If you look at the vast majority of other processed foods, it’s the same story.  We’ve sacrificed natural form for convenience and taste.  And in the process, made huge sacrifices in our health.  Fixable, of course, by the benevolent pharmaceutical companies who have a pill for every condition (ok, that’s stretching the conspiracy side of the argument a bit, but it’s hard to ignore the modern trend of food that makes you sick and pills to fix the problem).

As I was sitting in the theatre and taking all of this in, it struck me what exactly this locally grown food movement is up against.  The combined might of industrial agriculture, big retail, and the drug companies.  That’s a pretty formidable set of opponents.

And the battle isn’t only over facts and figures, it’s to capture hearts and minds.  There is a long legacy of industrial food consumption in the US.  Long and treasured.  With some of the most cherished brands selling promises of homely goodness and holiday fun packaged in dangerous foods - Oreo Cookies, hotdogs, McDonald’s hamburgers, etc.

To destroy 50 to 70 years of brand equity is hard to do.  I don’t envy the their task.  But to win this battle, destroy it they must.

I’ve personally discovered that you can’t get half pregnant in this debate.  As you move your diet away from processed foods and wean yourself off junk, you can’t easily go back.  You body ends up rejecting the chemical tastes.  Your taste’s change entirely.  The thought of McDOnald’s, once the staple of my Friday nights, now makes me physically ill.

The locally grown food movement is drawing the battle lines for the next big conflict in corporate America - and this time it’s not just one industry in the firing line (as was the case with Tobacco), it’s multiple industries.  All supporting and sustaining the unsustainable industrial food chain.

So grab a chair, a bucket of locally grown organic popcorn, and watch the ride.  It will be an interesting one.

I just read a post over on False Precision that has a link to this video of Sun Microsystem’s CEO Johnathan Schwartz talking about a whole new product venture that is based on, can you believe this, nefarious Marketing tactics.

Apparently, Java, that ubiquitous little runtime that is installed on nearly every PC and is constantly updated, is now a distribution platform for Sun.  

This boggles the mind.  Firstly, as everyone who has tried to install Java knows, you have to be very careful and read the fine print as the default install settings will put all manner of crap onto your computer.  Secondly, when are companies going to realize that my intention to install their product DOES NOT make me a distribution channel they can profit from?

Have they never heard of Permission Marketing?

I was struck by this over the weekend when I opened a Sunday newspaper (yes a newspaper) and out fell about 30 brochures.  As they cascaded to the floor and formed a sea of glossy and not-so-glossy waves at my feet, it hit me - I’m not a treasured customer, one of the last few willing to pay for information on paper, I am a distribution channel.  A single, anonymous node in a network of other anonymous nodes designed to be sold and traded to the highest bidder peddling their useless wares.

This is how being treated as a distribution channel makes people feel Sun!  Please learn from this.  I may have to use your products because they are simply everywhere, but I will never forget how you made me feel.  And that will hurt you at some point.  

PS: The 10th search on Google for ‘java install toolbar’ is a post on MaximumPC about a year ago that talks about the Java install process and the toolbars that get installed by ‘default’.  The comments are not pretty.  I am linking to it in the hope of getting it bumped up.

I am still struggling to find time to blog at the moment as life and work have taken up pretty much all of my spare time.  But keen to keep things ticking over here as I am still running into lots of things that make interesting blog posts.

My latest is Transparency - I think in today’s day and age, the “T” deserves to be capitalized.  Transparency is the new Marketing code.  I am going to hold every company I use accountable to that code.

So with great reverence to Stephen Colbert, I have the Wag-of-My-Finger and Tip-of-My-Hat to the following companies.

Wag-of-My-Finger to… The San Francisco Chronicle.

I actually got an old-school, old-media subscription to the SF Chronicle a few weeks back.  It was from a cold-call as well!  Talk about harking back to the 80s.  I never usually answer cold calls on my phone, and rarely listen to the first two sentences if I do.  But there was something about this call that kept me listening.  Maybe it was the hum of the office environment in the background that made me think of a bustling newspaper office, super-heroes in mild-mannered disguise and slightly-too-gorgeous looking women with sexy horned-rimmed glasses and upward glancing eyes.  

Whatever it was, it got me hooked.  I subscribed on the spot to a Friday/Saturday/Sunday delivery for a special price of $36 for eight weeks - with no payment due until the end of that period.  And in ADDITION, to sweeten the pot, they threw in a $10 Safeway card for free!  We shop at Safeway so I couldn’t go wrong.

My first feeling of dread (as I knew a newspaper making a straightforward pitch in this day and age was never going to happen) was when I received a call that literally started out like this…

“Hello, did you order a SF Chronicle subscription recently? Yes.  We don’t have your details on file but you can pay by credit card now, please read your credit card number to me now and I will enter it into our system.”

Hold on.  And I gave her a spiel about what I had ordered.  She listened politely then said thank you and hung up.  Way too easy to get her off the phone.  An obvious ‘hit and run’ credit card number pressure call.  Way to go SFC.

And today, in the mail, I got a bill for the subscription and what I thought would be a nice shiny $10 Safeway card!  But alas, I need to sign up to EZ-PAY first.  So I can ‘auto-pay’ my subscription.  Not likely.

The moral of the story is just be honest and Transparent about the offer.  $36 for 8 weeks and if you sign up to EZ-PAY you get a $10 gift card.  Don’t bait me with a gift card offer, it just makes me feel worse about you.  

Which is a shame, as I like the paper. 

Tip of the Hat to… Pacific Gas & Electric.

For simple the easiest to read, most transparent electricity bill I have ever received.  And for having the easiest to use, most Transparent online bill pay system.  Well done.

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.

I stumbled across a post the other day by Scott Brinker, the President and CTO of ioninteractive.

Scott writes a really interesting blog call Chief Marketing Technologist - words that don’t typically, or haven’t typically, shared the same sentence.

He talks about ‘the most important choice’ in online marketing - between the unity of your brand and the individuality of your audience.  He means you have to choose how granular your marketing efforts are.  Do you slice your audience up into tiny segments, each with some unique characteristic, and serve them a tailored message?  Or do you stick to one or two segments and deliver a far less fragmented communication?

The first comment I would make, and with all due respect to Scott, is that I don’t think you need to trade off the unity of your brand.  Brands are multidimensional to begin with.  Whether you like to use Brand Onions, Layers, Pillars, etc.  to conceptualize it, your brand is made up of a core belief and around that (or under it or above it) different manifestations of that belief (values, feelings, attributes).  

I think Scott is talking more about the effort you need to go to as an online Marketer to segment your communication efforts by targeting a few groups or a few hundred!  You don’t necessarily need to trade off your brand unity for this, nor should you, you just need to find manifestations of your brand’s core idea that work for these segments.

But before you even go down this road, I think there is another very important strategic choice - whether or not an individual in your market is made up of multiple segments themselves!

I was recently doing some work for a major national restaurant chain.  They had a traditional segmentation that divided the entire market into five or six groups.  Typical groups you would think of - the family oriented crowd, the sports bar crowd, etc.  The problem was that while these groups represented a dominant attitude for an individual, it was only one of many.  We discovered the ’sports bar’ enthusiast was eating out with his family on the weekend in a quiet and relaxed setting.  His ’sportiness’ was still there, it had just been overshadowed by a different set of needs - relaxing, quiet, family time.  Talking to the ’sports guy’ only about bar food and alcohol missed an entire other opportunity - family get-togethers.  One that happend to represent a GREATER proportion of his wallet.

I think there are lessons here for online marketers.  Especially because online tools are easily deployed for different needs.

Take Gmail for instance.  I use it both for work and personal email, but I use it slightly more for work.  If Google segmented me into a ‘work’ group it would miss an opportunity to sell me on personal tools.

it sounds simple when you put it like that. But most marketers shy away from defining their audience along overlapping need lines.  You are typically either in one segment or another, not both!

I’m not too sure how this idea changes Scott’s original representation of the trade-off.  In some ways it might make it easier.  Instead of focusing on the quirkiness of individuals, who all have traits that make them different, you just need to find out all the ways your product/service is being used/deployed. Consolidate your communications efforts around these different needs and allow individuals to float in and out.

The strategic question then becomes static segments versus dynamic need states?  

Who ever said marketing wasn’t complicated?

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.