Today’s prevailing attitude about the free exchange information across multiple platforms and applications, known to many as Web 2.0 design, is causing users to take a hard look at what constitutes personal privacy. There are many pieces of information people use to conduct daily business on the Internet that shouldn’t be publicly shared, such as credit card information or Social Security numbers. Many are also concerned with the unintended consequences of content shared on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. As these concerns show no signs of disappearing, they have become a key topic of interest for paralegal schools seeking to properly educate their students on how to approach this grey area in privacy law interpretation and application. With social media usage becoming even more widespread, more accounts of privacy violations are sure to arise.
The social media platform Facebook is designed to collect information from users and earn a premium from marketers paying for targeted ads. A March 2012 story published by ABC News reported that Facebook earned $3.7 billion in total revenue during 2011, contributing to a total profit of $668 million. These gains, earned by capitalizing on content freely shared by Facebook users, has led to intense scrutiny over users concerned about vague privacy information. Changes to the Facebook data-use policy, formerly privacy policy, in late March 2012 prompted complaints from more than 30,000 users, mostly German-based.
Facebook, compared to every other social media outlet, is the largest storehouse of many types of personal information on the Internet. More than 750 million Facebook users access their profiles at least once per month. Many of these users willingly provide personal information, including email addresses, age, name, phone numbers and other pieces of biographical information. Facebook also tracks a person’s web usage while logged in, storing information on their Internet activities. Facebook doesn’t automatically share information with third parties, but third party information authorization occurs every time a user downloads a new app or integrates Facebook with another service.
Social media can also cause privacy concerns in the real world as well as the digital realm. Employers have found it possible to research prospective hires through their Facebook page, revealing intimate information. A National Post story from March 2012 reports on the employer practice of asking for Facebook login credentials from users. Facebook has responded by saying that the practice violates the user agreement and could cause “unanticipated legal liability.” Until a suit is filed, though, there’s nothing to keep employers from continuing this practice. Government officials also have the power to access social media records with a subpoena through the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Access to personal information is an issue for many social media outlets other than Facebook. Twitter copies the address books of its users and stores that information in a database for up to 18 months. The reorganization of online Google services under a single privacy policy increased user anxieties over information shared across these applications.
Much of the work of protecting your privacy begins with your own actions, according to PCWorld’s Tom Bradley. “As a general rule, refrain from posting things online that you will regret later,” Bradley writes. “Odds are good that someone, someday, will stumble across it, and it may come back to haunt you.” Defining exactly what information you want to keep private and refusing to post that information online is the only way to ensure that your privacy will remain intact while using social media.
Drew Hendricks is a social media and SEO enthusiast that spends his free time browsing the internet and playing frisbee golf.
Symptoms Include: uncontrollable stalking, unintelligent use of new age acronyms in real life (e.g. OMG, WTF, LOL), unwanted relationships with people you have never actually met, awkward wall posts from parents that begin with she/he is cute and end with Love, Mom, emotional breakdowns due to an ex’s overwhelming happiness that is apparent on profile (see stalking), and in some rare cases deactivation from society.
If you are between the ages of 12 and 80, it is possible that you are a candidate for SNS – if you are between the ages of 13 and 35 it is highly probable. If you fall within this age range and have noticed that you suffer from three or more of the symptoms listed above, do not be alarmed, we are here to help.
The SNS pandemic began around 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg released Facebook and while over 300 million have been exposed to SNS only a select group is truly affected. In May of this year around 6 million people were cured of the disease and the future looked bright, until experts realized that the technology that caused the syndrome was being multiplied.
With the growing popularity of Google+ (or G+), it is possible that many more will become infected with SNS. Here are some ways you can prevent or take control of Social Networking Syndrome:
As technology grows it becomes more and more difficult to have self-control or any form of patience. Too much of anything can be dangerous. We recommend that you restrict your social networking time by allowing at least one hour between checking your Twitter, Facebook or G+ account.
Remember back in the day when you used to beg your parents to let you go outside and play? Now that you are older you can do this all by yourself. Get some fresh air, notice your environment. Don’t allow yourself to think about running home and checking your newsfeed.
If you have SNS it is very likely that you do not log out of your network when you navigate somewhere else or leave your computer. Try logging out and you will be surprised at how making that one little decision will send a signal to the brain that you are really done with this for a while. This hasn’t been scientifically proven yet, but it should be.
When your network sends you what others are doing or what is going on when you are not there, you lose all control. It is so easy to turn off, and once you do, you probably won’t even notice that you haven’t received 20 new messages in 45 minutes.
Trying to maintain all of your relationships on your social network is not the same as actually spending quality time with your loved ones. We propose that you set up a date with a friend and meet each other in the real world. Once you get back out there, you will remember what it is like to use all of your five senses again and you just might have a shot at a normal life.
Hello again my feline friends. It’s been a while and I thank you for your patience as my lazy humans have taken some time to get this site back together. While my biped associates have been busy on the blog scene, we feline followers have been busy on a cat project to further dominate the Twitter scene.
I guess I should start out by saying I was never really a Twitter addict; I was never one of those individuals that had to tweet every little thing or just take a peek at the Twitter stream every five minutes (though for a short time there my girlfriend might beg to differ). I was and continue to be fascinated by Twitter, but I’ve noticed that in the last several months that fascination is waning.
It has slowly begun to dawn on me that many of the folks I have, for some reason or other chosen to follow, are really just spewing useless crap that a) I care nothing about whatsoever, or b) has no bearing on my life or interests, or c) simply don’t understand because I really have no context. This has slowly led to an increased disinterest in even checking in on Twitter, and it’s got me to thinking about why I even use Twitter in the first place.
Twitter seems like the Michael Jackson of social media sometimes. Everyone likes it, but secretly harbors some doubts about its inherent goodness. It’s the thing that everyone in the know does, but no one seems to know why really.
Perhaps I’ve missed the boat, or I’m simply not smart enough to get it, but it seems that Twitter has become clogged with an incessant stream of marketing blurbs, product plugs, and self-serving conversations between a constantly shifting set of people one could call the ‘twitterati’. The alleged ‘in crowd’ of Twitter, the super-users, those that sit slightly above us mere mortals who can inspire interest in a random subject or product with just a few timely words. Social media noise. If Twitter were email, we’d call it spam.
But I’ve been asking myself lately: Why? Why are we listening to these people? Why do we care what they say, seemingly hanging on every word? Do they have their fingers so unerringly on the pulse of technology that they have elevated themselves to the status of today’s oracles? I don’t know, I really don’t.
I’m not mentioning any names here, and I’m not going to paste any tweets I feel might be relevant to my little rant, mainly because I have nothing personal against the individuals I have in mind, and hell, I even enjoy some of their social media antics at times, but I seem to have come to a point in my life that surely we must all come to in our increasingly digital culture: that is, how much of this massive fire hose of information is actual useful, or even truly interesting and beneficial to my life?
Alright, I will point to one example that perfectly demonstrates my point. Apparently, singer/songwriter(and I use that term loosely) John Mayer recently caused a stir by saying Twitter was dead.
OMG! NO!
Yes, it’s true. But my immediate question, regardless of my opinion of his ‘work’, is why should we care what he thinks? And does it bother anybody else that he went on to throw his hat into the ring for a different social media platform, Tumblr? Kanye West also just decided to join Twitter after disparaging it in one of his many useless . Again, who cares?
I don’t. And I don’t care about your new widget, or your new fool-proof method of making widgets which will subsequently make me rich beyond my wildest dreams, or how I can attract thousands of followers to my blog in 48 hours using your simple eight step method. Maybe I’ve just made some bad decisions on who to follow…
How did I come to follow some of these people anyway? Was it because I read somewhere that I should be following them? Were they supposed to be ‘gurus’? I’ll permanently pull the plug on my internet connection the day John Mayer becomes a guru of anything, much less social media. I’ve tried to the follow the pack in the past, but it’s usually left me stumbling along side the road racing to catch up, wondering where I went wrong. I guess this time, as the dust settles about me, I’m wondering why I’m running in the first place.
In my last post here on CT, I spoke of not being afraid to jump right into the social media pool and start paddling, not worrying about whether you really knew what was going on or what’s what. So I thought I’d continue that trend and talk (briefly) about that beacon of social media possibilities, lighting the way for all others, that pinnacle of Web 2.0 achievement, the place to be on the Net, because if you’re not–and we’re just being honest here, right?–you’re a nobody, a boob, and a general failure as a 21st century human being. Alright, a bit too far with that last one.
I’m talking about Twitter, my friends, and while I may have put the shine on a bit too thick just now, one might be remiss in underestimating the value and power of Twitter. Now I’m not going to tell you what Twitter is; everybody probably has at least a general idea of it, except perhaps David Letterman.
This isn’t a guide by the way, I figure that’s been done already, and more skillfully than I could probably manage. Also I realize that many of our readers will be familiar with all this, but maybe, just maybe, some of you don’t know. Maybe some of you are like Dave there, afraid of Twitter or anything social media-like. Let us not forget the beginner’s mind; it never hurts to review the basics right?
One of the complaints I’ve encountered when people talk about trying Twitter, or not as the case may be, is that they simply don’t know what to say. Or having said something, they fear they will look the fool for throwing it out there into the great Twittersphere. I understand; know that you are not alone friends, Twitter can be a little intimidating for some, and there is a non-trivial learning curve. I know after creating my Twitter account that I felt a bit overwhelmed and not a little confused by it all. Pile on top of that the fact that it’s kind of hard to follow conversations that you encounter with people you follow because they’re talking to someone else(this is less of a problem now, especially given the plethora of high quality Twitter clients available).
I introduced a close friend of mine to Twitter a while back, and noticed she wasn’t really tweeting much—OK, not at all really aside from her introductory, ‘Hey world!’—and since we communicate regularly through other means, like the primitive phone, I asked her why that was. She told me she wanted to tweet, but every time she brought up the update box, she just froze. She couldn’t think of anything important enough to say, and didn’t think anyone would be interested in what she was doing every minute of the day.
Behold, two common misconceptions regarding Twitter! You don’t have tweet about everything you do, and if you did, you would be right that no one would want to know what you’re doing every minute, and you would end up alone and followerless. But, if some of your friends were following you they might want to know that you are, (a) under the weather, (b) dying, or (c) just having a crappy day in general. Your tweets don’t have to be earth shattering revelations, or hot breaking news, unless perhaps you are @MSNBC (in that case carry on). You don’t have to sit and wait for the muse to hit you on top of the head with profound and pithy attestations (I looked at my word-a-day calendar this morning). Think of Twitter as a community of potential friends. I mean they don’t call it social networking for nothing right? Instead of worrying about being important or popular, why not share a link to a site or video you thought was interesting; if you thought it was interesting, somebody else just might as well. See an article that made you so angry you wanted to scream? Link it in a tweet, make others aware of it.
Keep in mind that we’ve been coming at Twitter from a more or less personal angle. More and more businesses are hopping on the social media wagon; maybe your company already has. It would behoove anyone in today’s market to familiarize themselves—at least somewhat—with the flexibility and power of Twitter, and other social media outlets. Earlier this year, Business Week put together a special report which speaks directly to executives on the wonders and possibilities of social media for their companies and/or brands.
And it’s not just larger corporations that are slowly realizing the benefits of social media involvement; small businesses are picking up on the vibes and possibilities well. Again from Business Week, this article discusses some advantages for business owners and tips on how to get started, and why. And if you check out that article you might notice the advice uncannily echoes a running theme in this post, and my last one: Don’t worry about the small stuff, jump on in and get wet.
Here are links to a couple of guides for Twitter. There are a gabillion of them on the Net, but these were most helpful to me. Good luck!
Jamie slogs through cyberspace in his free time, learning whatever he can, writes short stories, and tends his own blog www.residuetiger.com. You can follow him on Twitter as well: @residuetiger.
We’ve all seen it. What once worked in social media six months ago doesn’t work now. Why, for instance, does a large following on Twitter no longer indicate influence? Or why is blogging no longer as impressive as it was in 2003? Both these examples follow a predictable economic formula:
As “x” social behaviour multiplies, its social value approaches zero.
Let me break that down for you. The more you do the same thing, people’s appreciation of it lessens. The more you do the same song and dance, don’t be surprised if your audience dwindles. This should be obvious, but it’s not.
LiveJournal: An Example
Most of us think of LiveJournal as the walking corpse of the social media world, but it wasn’t always so. It was one of the first platforms to combine blogging with social networking. More fascinatingly, people who had a LiveJournal felt it gave them status: in order to have one, you had to be invited.
Then it happened. Danga Interactive, LiveJournal’s parent company, removed the invite requirement. Soon everyone who wanted one could have one. This was the beginning of the end.
The problem was everyone wrote about the same things: breakfast, cute kittens, and favourite movies. LiveJournal succeeded in the task of being a journal, but as the novelty of public journalling wore off, so did its perceived value. Soon, users left LiveJournal for the unique feature set of MySpace — and we all know what happened to MySpace.
State of the Social Media Union
Most popular social media tools have their time in the sun then go through a slow rigor mortis. Usenet was once the reason people paid for Internet. Chatrooms were how people dated online. MySpace was a “place for friends”. What happened?
Everyone was doing it, and everyone was behaving the same way. Usenet became so burnt out over flame wars, the term “troll” was coined and “Godwin’s Law” became a law. The acronym “ASL” became such an overused greeting in chatrooms, their very purpose became sexual gratification. As for MySpace, “making friends” became the basis of many a Catch a Predator episode.
We are seeing the same pattern of behavior happen on Twitter, Digg, and Facebook — and if people keep doing the same things, those social networks will soon have less social value than they currently have now.
How Can We Add Value?
The social media slide into rigor mortis is not inevitable. The only way to reverse the lessening of social value is to give your audience value. That is to say, behave in a different way from everyone else. If a platform is flexible enough for innovative forms of communication, and if communities are courageous enough to move beyond their own cliches, social media can thrive.
Want to remain relevant in social media? Behave differently.
Humans think they’re such hot stuff. Them and their opposable thumbs. I’ll have you know that us felines are really the strength behind Twitter. Don’t believe me? Apparently the San Diego News Network does:
Brians_cat and PETCO haz a conversation
That’s right folks. PETCO pays Natalie Davis, Director of E-commerce to talk to pets. We even convinced her to get her cat Leo to start getting up and running on Twitter.
We cats are better equipped than you humans for taking over the social media sphere anyway. Here’s just a few signs of our prowess:
The expression is LOLCats. Ever see a LOLhuman? Pssh.
Cats sleep 18 hours a day, so we’re better rested. Besides, humans are always too busy “working” to mess with Twitter as we cat professionals are.
We outrank you. @Sockington has 3/4 of a million users following him on Twitter. Ashton Kutcher and CNN are clearly fronts for the feline empire.
Twitter is a bird. Cats catch birds. We’ve caught you.
We are all used to “Sound Bites” – a short few seconds of words which are normally taken out of context to create sensational headlines. Few people realise that speech writers have for years worked on developing speeches to include a couple perfect “sound bites” for use by others.
Of course while some social media is audio based we are much more likely to rely on humble text to create a “social bite”.
What Is A Social Bite?
A social bite is a short piece of text to describe an article, post or idea which is easy to understand and easy to distribute through viral networks. A social bite must still carry the post’s message and goal but in a way that quickly impacts with users in essence:
A “social bite” is a short, concise and engaging message to gain traffic on social networks
The Perfect Social Bite
So what makes the perfect social bite, well it has two parts the hook and the line.
The hook are the words within the message – the thing to grab attention. This is doubly important as the hook will have no context once it has left the site. For example a hook is unlikely to reference the site so must be compelling, so that someone would visit the page without knowing where they were going.
The line is simply the url, sometimes this will be the page url but more likely to conserve space a url shortening service would be used. This compounds the need for a good hook as the only other potential reference to the site will be hidden.
The Twit Effect
Most social bites these days will have to pass through twitter at some point therefore a bite needs to be suitable otherwise people might change it. A normal tweet has a limited number of characters but while it may be tempting to use all 140 possible chars, this would severely limit the maximum potential of the social bite as it fails to take in retweets therefore the maximum number of characters is much more limited.
Twitter does not allow usernames longer then 20 characters and only shows usernames of 15 characters this means in practice to cope with every possible twitter name we would need to save at least 25 characters for retweets (20 for the name plus RT and two spaces one between rt and one after name and an ampersand before the name) even assuming 15 character names thats still 20 characters out of our 140.
With characters at a premium is it reasonable to expect usernames of 15 characters?
Taking a list of 1000 twitter usernames revealed the mean average length is 9 characters:
0-6 – 13%
6-9 – 58%
9-12 – 27%
12+ – 2%
taking these results its possible to assume the space needed for a retweet is 17 characters
Line Length
Assuming use of shortening service allows us to roughly determine how much room the line is going to take up. Its worth remembering users often swap out the url in favour of their own shortening service so as to gather statisitcs for themselves therefore even if your URL is shorter then the average it could be worth including a buffer.
Looking at various shortening services the average length is 18 characters including the http:// therefore the line length should be at least 18 characters plus a space making a line length total reserve of 19 characters.
Final Social Bite Anatomy
17 Chars
Reserved Space for Retweet
104 Chars
Hook / Message
19 Chars
ShortURL (TinyURL, zi.ma, cli.gs etc)
A hook within a social bite can potentially be longer than a page title, which in turn is not necessarily the same as a page headline.
It may also be important to allow for additional commentary to support the predetermined social bite, or to allow for SEO friendly URL shortening which can also boost response.
A single article can have multiple social bites that will attract different audiences.
Propagating a social bite
There are three routes to start a social bite on its move
Inject the hook without the line into your post article in much the same way as a sound bite works
Add the sound bite into the social networks yourself
Get someone else to do it for you
Of course you can always do all 3.
Many people reading this article may be thinking its very much twitter based but social bites have a tendency to cross social networks indeed that is the very point, and with social aggregators like Friendfeed and to a less extent Facebook something which starts on Twitter could well end up anywhere even getting to the ears of non twitter users such as myself
Do you use social bites? What other things should people think about?
Editor’s Notes (Andy)
Tim popped out to a bloggers meetup of Northern Gits Geeks, thus just adding a few additional references.
Dan Zarella recently took a scientific look at reteets over on Mashable
Louise wrote a similar article over on Twitip, but that was mainly aimed at retweeting tweets that originate on Twitter, where you know the length of your own Twitter usename.
Guy Kawasaki went into the psychological side of retweeting over on the open forum.
Many of you have heard of the 3 P’s of marketing: pills, porn, and poker. They are the bane of most people’s online existence, as we are constantly bombarded with seeing these kinds of “offers” being sent to our spam filter.
Enter Twitter.
As you know me by now, I like to look at the positive things in life. And after navigating through Twitter for some time, I’ve found that Twitter has the 3 C’s:
1 – Cats:
Sometimes a good lolcat can put you in the right mood. We can work endlessly on a killer blog post and a funny cat pic and caption will beat the post 9 times out of 10, though though Mr. Nielsen may disagree.
2 – Coffee:
I’ve put out breaking news and useful links, but tend to have more conversation when it’s around coffee time talk. @DunkinDonuts has achieved its twitter fame. Coffee Groundz, a local Houston, TX coffee shop, literally doubled their clientele through twitter by being the first company on record to accept orders through Twitter.
3 – Comedy:
Everyone needs a good laugh once in a while. Sometimes particular accounts aren’t what is funny, but rather what you find via Twitter. @Octane pointed out that he found this great piece from the Onion. The Twitter song is rather amusing as well:
You may have noticed a few small social changes that we’ve instituted for 2009:
Twitter. We’ve been quiet on this front for far too long.
While it won’t be all of us running the account, expect some solid updates from @nowsourcing and @thegypsy. Why follow? Well, we have some interesting things to say and will also be sharing great links collectively.
Google Friend Connect. You might call us Collective Forgetfulness if we didn’t have the latest and greatest blog widget from our friends at Google. So we’ve added Google Friend Connect. It’s an interesting concept, and will be fun to see what people make of it beyond the simple “here are the friends that like my site.”
MyBlogLog. You might say that this is old news, but we updated the MBL widget to the more sleek, iPhone looking UI. What’s really interesting about MBL is the community/site itself beyond the widget. Personally, I’ve liked the service for a long time because it allows you to visually see who your recent visitors are – a different crack at the data vs. a more 1′s and 0′s Google Analytics approach.
What about you – what have you done to make your blog more social for 2009?
Welcome to the new wisdom of crowds. Each member of Collective Thoughts is here because not only are they a known or rising star in their own field, but they also have a passion and unique understanding on social media. Together, we make up Collective Thoughts. More
Social media can also cause privacy concerns in the real world as well as the digital realm. Employers have found it possible to research prospective hires through their Facebook page, revealing intimate information. A National Post story from March 2012 reports on the employer practice of asking for Facebook login credentials from users. Facebook has responded by saying that the practice violates the user agreement and could cause “unanticipated legal liability.” Until a suit is filed, though, there’s nothing to keep employers from continuing this practice. Government officials also have the power to access social media records with a subpoena through the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Humans think they’re such hot stuff. Them and their opposable thumbs. I’ll have you know that us felines are really the strength behind Twitter. Don’t believe me? Apparently 
