Category Archives: Social software

The power of online comparison

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Have you read the new report ‘Your Brand: At Risk or Ready for Growth?’ from social search specialists Alterian which argues that the world of online marketing means big changes in terms of  delivering individualized marketing to consumers? Check it out here: Brands at risk (pdf, 1mb).

I was interested in the points made (jump to page 15) about price comparison and the power of finding similar folks and cross-checking with them, and using multiple sources of online information to make a purchase. Plus the point in the summary that never mind all the tech talk about the power of cloud technology, from a marketing perspective it is really about expressing/representing the individual.

The power of comparison

Consistent with our earlier findings, ‘formal messages from the company’ or ‘brand’ rate very low, with ‘advertising’ placed last with only 5% (4% UK, 6% US), seeing this as at all trustworthy. Second to last was ‘what the company says about itself’ with 8% (9% UK, 6% US), all well behind the hardly surprising ‘friends and family’ (40%).

Perhaps more interestingly was ‘professional reviews on the internet and magazines’ (28%) and the next most trusted source ‘people that are similar to me’ 19% (16% UK, 24% US). Recent research has indicated that, overall, people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped to 25%.

Importantly, Edleman* believes this can be interpreted as ‘it is a sign of the times, and the lesson for marketers is that consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it’.

Key Points

  • Empowered consumers are massively connected, always available, expect others to be available and are used to directly interact with content.
  • Individuals ‘assemble’ relationships/experiences/things about themselves in an on-demand manner, by doing so they build rich and highly personalized structures.
  • Devices and media are clustered round the individual, often providing a ‘rich tapestry’ of multi-mode/channel communications.
  • Many of these developments can be traced back to a growing social sense of individuality developed over several decades.
  • Social media is one manifestation of this much deeper social change.
  • Although the cloud potential of the media receives much attention it is really about expressing/representing the individual.
  • Much of the communication/engagement by the individual should be seen as a means to express and establish identity.
  • Building strong engagements requires organizations to interact at a personal level.
  • Trust is increasingly seen as something established in an interactive manner.
  • Beliefs or information are tested by verification from several sources, these may not all be in consistent agreement, the final choice arises from ‘active dialogue’.

* ‘In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust their Friends Less‘, Edleman Trust Barometer, in Advertising Age, (12-02-2010)

A bill of privacy rights for social network users?

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I spotted this via Twitter this morning – a bill of privacy rights for Facebook folks, and social network users in general:

Proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy and control. Based on what we see today, therefore, we suggest three basic privacy-protective principles that social network users should demand:

1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making

Users should have the right to a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.

Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.

Whenever possible, a social network service should give users notice when the government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that users have a meaningful opportunity to respond.

2: The Right to Control

Social network services must ensure that users retain control over the use and disclosure of their data. A social network service should take only a limited license to use data for the purpose for which it was originally given to the provider. When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user. The right to control includes users’ right to decide whether their friends may authorize the service to disclose their personal information to third-party websites and applications.

Social network services must ask their users’ permission before making any change that could share new data about users, share users’ data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. Changes like this should be “opt-in” by default, not “opt-out,” meaning that users’ data is not shared unless a user makes an informed decision to share it. If a social network service is adding some functionality that its users really want, then it should not have to resort to unclear or misleading interfaces to get people to use it.

The Right to Leave

Users giveth, and users should have the right to taketh away.

One of the most basic ways that users can protect their privacy is by leaving a social network service that does not sufficiently protect it. Therefore, a user should have the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service. And we mean really delete. It is not enough for a service to disable access to data while continuing to store or use it. It should be permanently eliminated from the service’s servers.

Furthermore, if users decide to leave a social network service, they should be able to easily, efficiently and freely take their uploaded information away from that service and move it to a different one in a usable format. This concept, known as “data portability” or “data liberation,” is fundamental to promote competition and ensure that users truly maintains control over their information, even if they sever their relationship with a particular service.”