Yes there have been many bloggers already ranting about Mark Zuckerberg and his comments this week but I promise this is the most scathing and sardonic of them all.

Millions of e-mails and other personal information were recently hacked by “someone” in China. It could have been you. How would you have felt if it was? Do you like to feel that you can trust these large corporate institutions to respect and protect your individual right to privacy and confidentiality? The CEO of one of those entities, Mark Zuckerberg, apparently wouldn’t have minded at all.

Privacy is a thing of the past according to the young child who runs Facebook, and he’s become a troubadour of this new no-privacy era. Of course the more things you share about yourself on Facebook the more marketing data that can be collected on you. It seems a culture lacking privacy benefits our pubescent wunderkind and the social media platform he rules. What’s more frightening is that a recent interview with an anonymous Facebook employee in The Rumpus reveals that every click and post and profile you view is also recorded and tracked and Facebook employees are given a master code to gain access to any and all personal accounts.What they use this information for? Nobody knows…

Like a modern day Emile Durkheim, Zuckerberg claimed that privacy was no longer a societal norm.  I can see Zuckerberg waxing intellectual about the ethical and moral sea change that has gripped the modern world, a harem of sycophantic devotees breathlessly waiting on his every idea, peanut butter and jelly smacking behind his peach fuzzed lips between sentences. Now I can see Zuckerberg peeing with the door open at the Facebook office, clipping his nails next to the water cooler,  I can hear him talking really loudly about his visit to the doctor while mixing grape Kool Aid and putting up a drawing of his secret office crush right next to the photocopier. A guy who doesn’t care about privacy probably shares every detail of the company’s cash flow, financing and debts with every single employee and person he meets too. Because privacy is simply a thing of the past, it went out the window with jousting and pistol duels. And yet many people who finished their post secondary education seem to differ with this milky skinned juvenile.

Take Professor Ryan Calo for instance, a fellow the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University’s Law School. He suggests that:

“The picture is clearly more nuanced than Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments would suggest…I’ve seen several recent studies out of Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, for instance, suggesting that people continue to value their privacy and are even willing to pay a premium for better privacy.”

Zuckerberg in his defense however did counter his critics by saying “A core part of Facebook’s mission has always been to deliver the tools that empower people with control over their information.” This of course coming from a company that operated in direct violation of Canadian privacy law.

Control over information doesn’t amount to privacy and protection of your information though, or maybe that’s what Zuckerberg meant to say. Maybe Facebook wants to deliver the tools that empower people with privacy and protection of their information, but that’s the thing with the internet. I have no idea who’s going to read this post when it goes live. I have to watch some of the things I say or write because I’m mindful of my reputation and the reputations of those connected to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m older (30) or  perhaps it’s because I’ve built up a network of friends, acquaintances and connections who I feel could be negatively affected by my actions and words if they were irresponsible and thoughtless ones? But when you’re 18 to 25 you don’t think like that. And so I think it’s dangerous that a company amassing such power over people’s identities and information should have a 25 year old college drop out at the helm.

Zuckerberg at the very least should realize the danger that comments like his pose. The president says he doesn’t like broccoli and suddenly a generation of girls grows up anemic. Zuckerberg says nobody cares about privacy anymore and a generation of high school kids grows up with a radically different notion of privacy. And I don’t care about what they themselves choose to post about their raging kegger or whatever else they feel is so important to share, it’s my privacy and yours that’s now compromised by “the new privacy” that Zuckerberg is helping to usher in. Think before you speak boy.  Would you like it if the Chinese hacked into your servers and poked around for a day? Or if the paparazzi harassed you for a week? Privacy is very serious and incredibly valuable.

It’s time Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg grew up and realized this.

So it’s that time of year again. Many of us have spent the last week eating too much turkey and shortbread, racking up credit card debt and testing our liver’s limits with delicious nog-based holiday libations. And so with the looming dawn of 2010, we may be thinking about a New Year’s Resolution to mitigate some of that damage.

Unfortunately, studies show that New Year’s Resolutions don’t really work for most of us. Though we start with the best of intentions, 25% of our resolutions are history within a week of making them. And only 12-22% of us actually stick with them for the year.

However, it seems that one way to help keep your resolve is to share your resolution with the world, say by tweeting about it, or putting it up on Facebook. Sure, if you send out constant Twitter updates about your big resolution you might annoy your friends and make them feel bad about themselves… but you might just actually stop smoking, reduce your Whopper intake, or quit your online porn habit.

According to Wikipedia, 12% of New Year’s resolvers meet their goals. But, that number increases to up to 22% among those who shared their goal with friends and family. Public shame, it seems, is a powerful motivator. So, given that statistic, it only makes sense that broadcasting your resolution to the world, via your favorite social media tool, will give you a much better shot at keeping on the straight and narrow path.

Of course, there’s one big problem with all this. Since social media has recently been declared, by some, unhealthily addictive, it’s probably not a bad idea to make a resolution to stop spending so much time heeding the siren’s call of Twitter and Facebook. And therein lies the Catch-22. My recommendation: forget big changes and just stick to small resolutions like, say, avoiding trans fats, or cutting down to one pack of cigarettes a day.

If any of your FBBFs (Facebook Best Friends) from the New York area recently disappeared from the social networking site, you can stop wondering why. They were a sex offender. Well, it’s also possible they just decided they have better things to do than spend all their time on Facebook. Either way, you’re better off without them.

Thousands of registered sex offenders from New York state were just given the boot from Facebook and MySpace. It’s the result of a new law that recently came into being. The Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (aka e-STOP), requires the state’s 30,000 or so registered sex offenders to inform the state of their home, email and social networking addresses.

Those who set up new social network accounts, or continue to use existing ones, without disclosing their info to the government face new felony charges if caught. Despite that threat, only 27% of those 30,000 provided authorities with an email address. And only 10% revealed a Facebook or MySpace account. According to a government spokesman, those 22,000ish sex offenders who didn’t divulge that information are either in jail, homeless, don’t have internet access or “chose not to respond”. It’s that last possibility that raises a few alarm bells.

But the e-STOP law did succeed in rounding up the accounts of 3,533 registered sex offenders, and having Facebook and MySpace terminate them. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, sex offenders prefer Facebook over MySpace by almost a two to one margin. There was no immediate indication how many were using Friendster.

One can’t argue with Oxford, and the proclamation from those hallowed halls is that the word of the year for 2009 is… unfriend.  Yes ladies and gentlemen, Facebook has contributed the word of the year.  Unfriend is defined by Oxford as a verb meaning to “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” Well, no kidding.  As usual, the establishment is a bit behind the times, but it’s certainly very interesting to look back on past words of the year to gain insight into the social climate of that time. Shall we?

2009’s word of the year hints heavily at the influence and infiltration of social networking into modern day life.  Myself, I have been part of some sort of social network for most of my teenage and adult life (anyone remember Friendster? Asia Avenue?) and it’s hard to think of what life was like before there was such a thing.  In social networking etiquette, to unfriend someone is tantamount to betrayal.  It requires so little effort to add someone, but actual effort to seek out and unfriend them, implying that the deleter must really hate the deleted’s guts.  Who hasn’t felt the well-placed sting of trying to access a friend’s/frenemy’s/enemy’s profile only to discover you have been locked out? Nowadays, people even race to block or delete formal significant other’s and BFFs to claim the “I got over you first” prize, so no wonder the word unfriend has become so entrenched into our vernacular.

The more diplomatic way to go about removing someone without removing them is to keep them on your list and to subtly screen them out of your network sphere.  Facebook allows this with its list functionality, whereby users can create lists with custom privacy settings for various levels of friends.  Now Jane can instantly discover that she’s not such a BFF with Jill by looking at her profile via Chuck’s account and seeing how much more Chuck can see versus her!  Talk about scandalous!  Isn’t that so much more of a slap in the face than being upfront and just deleting that person?  I think so.

My proclamation for the end of 2009 is to take this unfriend business one step further: I say everyone should go through their friend list and just remove those they don’t like, remember, and/or are unlikely to run into for at least the next 12 months.  What’s the point of all this social clutter?  The majority you delete won’t care, and for those people who do get offended, well, they probably should get a life and you don’t want losers on your list anyways, right?  There are various very legitimate reasons to unfriend someone, which you can read here if you need help filtering; so this season, don’t be a wimp – just unfriend.  Ironically, it just may make you feel more connected.

Marketers have had a lot of fun using social media but it’s been difficult to quantify the results of many activities past. Depending on who you talk to the profit generated by social media is either hidden because the consumer doesn’t generally make a purchase through the platform itself, or because the effects are often strongest concerning brand loyalty or brand recognition but not necessarily translated into purchases right away. Today is the busiest shopping day of the year in those United States of America (Black Friday) and a big social media experiment of sorts is going on. Traditional media has been swept aside in favor of tweets and friends, and today of all days social media and retailers may have an affair to remember.

Several major retailers made significant Black Friday/Cyber Monday investments on a number of platforms including most notably Twitter and Facebook, in anticipation of a frenzy of activity today. Before today’s shopping mayhem began Sears, with more than 150,000  Facebook fans, held a sweepstakes on their website offering items at Black Friday prices early to selected customers they had engaged through their page while Toys R Us is letting its fans vote to determine which merchandise should go on sale Cyber Monday, the first business day after the holiday weekend and traditionally a busy online shopping day. For those interested in Cyber Monday deals I highly recommend www.goeyeball.com (check earlier post for more details)  where you can make your own time and money saving customized bargain hunter bot, AKA your eyeball, that scours the best prices online for selected items.

Social media as a marketing tool works great when you truly have something worth marketing. Regular prices don’t work people into a frenzy like they used to (did they ever?) and the value of social media as a contact point should never be doubted by retailers. I think what we’re seeing today though is a real coming out party for the new media, showing the utility of it in directly influencing consumer patterns over a smaller temporal scale but with incredibly high density or volume. It shows that social media when used strategically (like all marketing should) has profound utility. Just having a fan page or a twitter account isn’t going to drive people to your store (meaning larger temporal and low density or volume) but some of the imaginative uses of social media we’ve looked at in this post, and there are several others we have overlooked,  are examples of social media at work in the business cycle.  Large companies are finding ways to use it that directly can be quantified, hopefully silencing a lot of critics and naysayers in the process.

The question persists as to how social media can be transformed from idle and pedantic chatter to hard quantifiable profits. Marketing executive like the alchemists of old search for this answer; it is the philosopher’s stone of today’s advertising and marketing industry. A new emarketer survey shows that marketing execs do find value in social media platforms, particularly in engaging customers and communicating with customers, which is no surprise. I believe the very idea of being social is communicating and engaging with others around you is it not? Actually, according to the dictionary social is:

So how do we make the social profitable? And in a way is that act potentially threatening to social intercourse if taken too far?  Can you imagine sitting around with friends at dinner and having an ad pop up every minute? This is the wrong way for marketing and advertising in social media to go. Thankfully the internet (or at least Google) has been moving away from those kinds of bombardments towards interest based advertising, which more keenly anticipates customer wants and needs as specified directly or indirectly by customers.

But how to make money as a social media service yourself is something that even the mightiest of social media platforms, Facebook, struggled with since its inception. Only recently did Facebook post profits after years of being in the red or just breaking even, but some other social media services are getting wise.  LendingClub launched via a Facebook application earlier in May this year and some believe it might be the closest thing to a social media profit model yet.  The service links up Facebook users in a person to person lending network with lower interest rates and less red tape than institutional lenders.  The person to person or peer to peer lending service has been successful and growing, with nearly 350,000 users lending and borrowing more than $66,000,000 in volume. $6,000,000 in loans were facilitated just this past October according to Senior Product Strategist Rob Garcia who I spoke with recently. According to Garcia the company is currently growing at 15-20% peer month, making them the definitive world leader in P2P lending.  After dozens of bank failures over the past year peer to peer (P2P) lending may just be the most attractive alternative to major institutions. Lending Club has even been noted by  the Harvard Business Review for its innovative approach. So here’s an example of a social media business model, but it relies on having an intrinsically valuable commodity in its social exchange, money. Perhaps the old adage “talk is cheap” sums up why social media, like the philosopher’s stone of old, has been so hard to translate into profits. By relying solely on social media to try and make your company successful you’re making a cake solely from icing. It’s one tool, and an increasingly important tool, but don’t expect it to be the driving engine of your marketing plan. This is why CEOs and executives have consistently viewed it with bewilderment, and have rarely claimed it to be be a driving force for profits and market share. The driving force for profits ultimately rests on your product or your service, your image, your message, your identity, quality and your value.  Marketing is about implanting that identity and value in the public mind and attracting their use of your company.  Don’t expect social media to make these things up for you if you don’t have them, and before you sink money into marketing in social media make sure that you can back your hype. Companies can often fail fast if they don’t. All that being said,  across the board from transnational corporations to small businesses in Vancouver everyone has been clamoring to get savvy with this social media thing.  In our guts we’ve all recognized that it’s big and it’s changed things.

As for Lending Club, they might be a social media profit model but once again it’s not the social part that drives the profits. I still believe it’s the demand for what they offer beyond the social aspect that makes them their profit.  So maybe we are still left searching for the stone, but perhaps we’ve gotten a little closer. As Business Week has pointed out, regardless of what the accountants might think social media has drastically changed the nature of business and if they’re not on-board now businesses will be running to catch an increasingly fast train. When I spoke to Rob Garcia of Lending Club he agreed with that sentiment:

“Social Media is a core component of Lending Club’s product marketing and customer engagement strategies.  Person-to-person lending works best in an open environment where our members can engage freely and directly with our brand, where they want, when they want.”

Lending Club represents a new trend in social media that other companies may be wise to observe. The social media value isn’t in talk alone, as was stated earlier “talk is cheap”.  Imagine how much business would get done on the NYSE if everyone was just talking about whatever they felt like. In Lending Club’s case the talk is more focused and common, like those traders on the floor.The company supplants a chaotic social media model with one that has a more disciplined, directed and shared interest at its core. Maybe this is the philosopher’s stone of social media profit models we’ve been looking for.  Instead of wading into the jungle of social media and searching for revenue in the din of chatter, why not give them (us) something to talk about? Something they (we) want, and then give them (us) a place to do it. The city in the Jungle.

Social media profits don’t stop with Facebook. If anyone has proved that Lending Club has.

In what very well be a first incident of its kind anywhere in the world, a well-timed Facebook status update was the key to a teenager having a robbery charge against him dropped. Rodney Bradford, a nineteen year old from Harlem, was arrested for a robbery committed in a public housing apartment building in Brooklyn. He spent 12 days in the Riker’s Island jail, and faced a lot more jail time if he’d been found guilty of the robbery.

But luckily for him, he had an alibi. Not only did his father and step-mother state he was at home during the alleged robbery, he also posted a Facebook update from a computer at his home in Harlem, just one minute before the crime took place in Brooklyn. Facebook corroborated the fact that the update was posted by someone who had signed in with Bradford’s username and password, and that was that. And what was the fateful status update? “Where’s my pancakes?”

And while Bradford was rightfully saved from trouble by his update, the whole thing does have the potential to cause trouble. What’s to stop future criminal masterminds from getting accomplices to furiously post updates to their Facebook accounts, as the criminals commit nefarious acts? Regardless, it is nice to see social media finally helping someone get out of trouble. Usually, it’s the other way around.

As many have suspected, Google is working to develop social media into its search engine business model. I commented on a blog last month in which naysayers were claiming that Google had missed the social media bandwagon and that Facebook was going to crush them etc etc. Myself and one other poster pointed out a key thing about Google though- they have all that valuable information. Truth be told it is a lot less time consuming and arduous to create a social media platform than it is to index billions of webpages. So if anyone has the upper-hand going forward its Google. By combining social media elements to search engines Google is bringing together two of the most common online activites- searching and being social- into one platform and frankly they’ve done the hard work first. Communities of common interest can easily form around a new engine like this once it hits the market, and I’m pretty excited about it. I just pumped my fist again.

Google is being supported by Myspace and a host of other platforms including Linkedin in its efforts to socialize searching. Linkedin also recently synergized its platform with Twitter, making users of both services able to update both at once by cross filing. The new service should be available in a few days. Notably absent from Google’s growing coalition of social media allies is Facebook, who many feel is working to develop their own search engine service to their model. What an epic standoff that may become. Social media search engines will create another exciting chapter of the internet as we move forward, and businesses, schools, private citizens and public personalities will be forced to pay attention. Real-time information exchange and perhaps just as importantly idea-exchanges will be facilitated by these kinds of platforms, which is why Rupert Murdoch blocking Google from News Corp pages is just another example of how utterly closed minded and ignorant the Australian media tycoon is.

Murdoch recently suggested a full ban on the search engine as he has long accused them of being a parasite who feeds on his news tit without his companies profiting. Frankly it wouldn’t make a difference to me if he does, I can’t imagine any critically thinking person seriously referencing Fox News as a credible source. And if you yourself are on the fence about that just watch the documentary Outfoxed. If Murdoch really goes ahead with this he’ll be moving his media empire slowly back in time as the internet continues to develop and grow, having a continued impact on society. Google is one of the major players in that development whether he likes it or not and as their new intention to incorporate social media demonstrates they’re clearly thinking about the future. A future with or without Murdoch’s muckracking sensationalist “news”.

It’s a bit of an interesting dilemma for Facebook. Many people visit deceased friends’ pages and post to their walls much like a streetside memorial, creating sacred space in which they mourn. In fact Facebook’s new homepage released on the 23rd of this October generated automatic suggestions that people friend the profiles of the deceased until enough moral indignation was mustered against it and the practice discontinued.  Facebook still offers the bereaved an option to start their own memorial page for the deceased though. So on the one hand we have a moral obligation to maintain space where those who have suffered a loss can find comfort in social communion and on the other hand we have all that valuable information. Facebook and hundreds of thousands of app developers have made their bread and butter by gathering information about users on the site, and what they do with this information both while and after users have ceased living became a point of contention earlier this year for Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, among others.  

The Privacy Commissioner spoke just this week on the matter of Facebook privacy concerns after the site vocally encouraged the creation of memorial pages for the deceased (in response to the dead friend suggestion debacle). She remained resolute that the social media platform had not done enough since this August when the Canadian Federal Ministry made adamant claims of Facebook infringing on Canadian privacy rights. The policy changes that the site has made will be available next week but the Commission has been vocal that the site has not been particularly thorough enough in detailing how the information of the deceased is used. Imagine that, an explosively successful billion dollar corporation not being entirely transparent about its practices. What has this world come to?

And how does the photo at the top tie back to all of this you ask? I’m not sure it does, but it was too hilarious not to use. Feel free to leave comments below if you have some witty tie-it-all together comment.

I didn’t know this but apparently some people still think social media is a fad. There’s no link to those people in the previous sentence because they don’t own computers and are thus unable to voice their opinion online. In fact, the population of Facebook has now outpaced that of the entire U.S. and one of the most noticeable areas of growth is in PR and Marketing firms. But even more interesting is the entrance of the intelligence industry into the mix. Not to be lazy but I’m going to insert a block quote from Noah Shachtman of Wired who originally reported on the CIA and social media earlier this week:

“In-Q-Tel,the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.”

In essence they want the chatter and at this point mostly foreign chatter. There is no intention of focusing on domestic social media activity according to In-Q-Tel spokesman Donald Tighe. Within the din of social media there are trends that will appear and there are feelings or sentiments that may surface before we/they even realize as a culture that they are there. Knowing this gives the U.S. government and the CIA valuable insight into social or cultural thresholds (meaning how palpable current operations that may have blowback are to the public) as well as our general collective psyche. It will offer an “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” in the words of Tighe-who charminlgy refers to the CIA as Spooks in the Wired article. And for what direct purpose the CIA needs to gather this can be speculated on ad nauseum, beyond the fact that it’s their job to know everything. I doubt it’s for job performance reviews alone, least of all from foreign citizens. The agency will also be looking for signals that could forewarn of impending criminal or terrorist activity one could assume. Though at this point it has been expressly for foreign chatter, the CIA can also use the technology to turn its efforts inwards, gauging the domestic chatter if it wanted to.

To those of you who are paranoid about the CIA knowing everything about you, don’t worry. The technology is not being used to monitor Facebook or domestic social media yet, but most marketing firms already have every bit of information possible on you. They’ve probably grown a clone of you in a genetic marketing lab and are doing outlandish experiments on your clone brain to figure out how to win your consumer confidence and brand loyalty. I’d be more concerned about the large marketing firms than the intelligence community, they’re far more voracious.