Social networks are great places to share links, photos, status updates, and more. It often appears that we are the beneficiaries of our personal information sharing. However, we are not the only ones. A much greater benefit accrues to an industry that is, at its core, about public manipulation. Whether we want or need something that they’re pushing is not the point; this is about moving goods, selling units, enhancing commerce and the GDP.
What does this industry see in us (besides our wallet)?
Coaching moment: As a culture, we’ve never been in a position before where we needed to be so self-aware about our communications. We’ve never been so open and vulnerable to the slings and arrows of others. Like any profitable middleman, the Advertising/Marketing Industry justifies its existence in ways that extract a value from our shared information. Their efforts target us with more effective and personally customized messages, but at many different costs to us.
Does advertising make us better people? Does it contribute to more enlightened culture? A better world? All arguable points.
How does it benefit you? What personal information are you willing to give away in support of this industry? Have you found a balance between your personal interests and the influence of others? Do you like television and magazine ads, or highway billboards?
Yes, there are tradeoffs with advertising. I’m just asking if you like these things as a mode of communication. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Creative commons photo credit: x-ray delta one on flickr. Thanks!
Voluntary personal information sharing comes naturally to most of us. When given an opportunity, a few tools, and a community in which we can share our most intimate details, many people don’t hesitate to document their every movement and mood. We readily identify our friends and our preferences, and even document our vices.
Facebook is the place right now where a great many people share the most detailed information about themselves. Are you on Facebook? If so, you might be interested in a new site called I Shared What?!? that will open a window for you into what Facebook sees–and lets others see.
Coaching moment: Did you know you were sharing this much information? Do you know who has access to it, for how long, and for what purposes? Does this make you uncomfortable? Why?
At this past IIW, I convened a session to ask if and how it might be possible to do a stateless distributed membership for a website. There are two main ideas behind this proposal. First, I don’t really NEED to have a membership database of my own. That is, I don’t need to have another place for you to create an account, user ID and password. We can use OpenID, Information Cards, or other technologies for authenticating and authorizing you. Second, if I want to move toward a world where you control your own data, I don’t need to maintain the database of your comments. I only need to know where your comments are stored so I can properly assemble things as needed. It’s convenient but not technically necessary to own and control all the bits myself.
My proposal for a Stateless Distributed Membership is a mouthful, so I’ll unpack it a bit. There are three parts: a membership, being stateless, and being distributed.
Membership
Let me start with the easy part. You probably understand the idea of membership as a group or association of people contributing to something like a conversation or project. They’re members of a group, or in my case, members of a conversation or project on my site. Nothing unusual about this idea.
Being Stateless
Next is the idea of being stateless. In computer science, the http protocol that you use to call a web page and associated resources is stateless because you call a page from the URL or a link in your browser, the server responds by sending the page, graphics, or whatever, then you see it. Each request is separate; there’s no need to stay connected to the servers. In my case, being “stateless” means that each transaction is independent. Eve Maler talks about a stateless identity in her post Both a data borrower and a data lender be:
This is a kind of data statelessness, in that when you tell various sites they can set, read, and republish your [information from your Personal Data Store], they’re letting go of any pretense of exclusive hosting control so that they can offer you a different kind of value.
Now, in the IdM and VRM worlds, some of us have been talking aboutidentity statelessness for a while, which is similar but looks more like straight data-sharing (reading) rather than arbitrary service access (setting).
For some reason this is a tougher sell — even though CRM systems and user accounts are shot through with pale copies of stale data (and, in the enterprise case, even though syncing directories and replicating databases is brittle and no fun).
Even when one party — say, you yourself — is authoritative for some piece of personal data (like your home address), all the sites insist on making you provision a copy of this data into their profile pages by hand and by value, and insist on thinking they own something truly valuable even after you move and forget to tell them.
The bottom line: if I don’t insist on “owning” your data, we both will realize more value from our trust and flexibility. It’s daring, and in the larger scheme of things, I believe it’s a Good Thing.
Distributed
Finally, the term distributed refers to the fact that all parts of the conversation or projects are stored elsewhere on the net. If you wish to add a comment to a conversation on my server, your comment is added to your personal datastore (wherever it is, and whatever form it might take). When you wish to read the conversation, my server compiles the contributions as needed.
In this model, I do need to maintain a database of where to find your comments and a way to authorize you as the person who granted permission for me to include them in the conversation on my website. But think of it: if you want to revoke permission for me to use your comments, you can. How revolutionary (and potentially messy) is that?
Furthermore, you may choose to log in using an identity that’s different from the last one you used. That works on my server. For example, you might wish to be a regular person contributing to most conversations, but if you’re a professional fundraiser and one of the threads is about raising funds for a non-profit, you may wish to disclose your work and position in that context. Your two identities describe different parts of your life, and you may have good reasons to keep those parts separate.
The IIW Session
In my session, I described this concept and asked what people thought about it. I offered three scenarios where people might interact. One of them: a conversation or forum where blog posts and trackbacks can help create a threaded conversation. The session is an hour-long exploration and discovery of the possibilities. If you have questions or can add a piece to this puzzle, I’d love to hear from you.
My heartfelt thanks go to the people with whom I’ve spoken about this, including =JeffH, Eve, the guy at the end of the video talking with me about trackbacks (I’m sorry I can’t find your name), several others who made great suggestions and shared ideas at my session, and Joe, who spent considerable time exploring underlying frameworks with me.
Coaching moment: You probably have more than one account online, and have likely cursed the problem of forgetting user names and passwords. You may have wished that the picture of you holding a beer wasn’t online for your boss to see. Maybe you’ve been spooked by an advertisement for something that you really didn’t want. If you could do things differently, what would you do? How do you handle your accounts now? Do you feel secure about your online practices? Do you even want to be in control? Not everyone does.
This is the delicate balance that exists for those of us representing our companies thru social media. Since conversation is king, those who are great at engaging in dialog both online and offline will likely become the voice of their company whether intentionally or by accident.
We become part of “the brand”–the marketing and communications efforts that help distinguish our company from the rest of the marketplace. In a sense, we become our work and our work takes on life through us. This is interesting because people don’t always have good filters to separate their personal “self” from their work persona (or lack the ability to be professional enough to represent their company).
I asked my friend Neenz Feleafine for her thoughts on this. Neenz uses social media tools like Twitter and Facebook for her professional life.
JC: Do you think people ever find this confusing–as if you were being a commercial?
NF: A few years ago when I first began participating in social networking sites it was out of curiosity. Today, it’s purely for business. I use social media tools to build my network, but I engage in relationships through other more intimate forms of communication: emails, VoIP, IM, telephone calls and most importantly real life meetings to maintain my network.
One of the greatest things–although making friends was never a goal for my use of social networks or social media tools–I have discovered very good people, and am developing not only solid business relationships, but lifetime friendships.
JC: Do people ever confuse you and your personal network with the companies that you promote? I mean do people think that Alltop is involved with some of your personal interests?
NF: My role with Alltop is Chief Evangelist which means that I am to spread the good news of Alltop without ceasing. And, it’s my honor to do so. I have been blessed with a much coveted opportunity to work with Guy Kawasaki–learning and growing, loyalty and perseverance, and grinding it out are my personal interests.
I have also recently launched my social media marketing startup, Pono Media–as an entrepreneur there isn’t much else to be interested in except for its success.
I am fortunate to have the unconditional love and support of Lilinoe, Chelsea, and Jayden for me to invest so much of my time in Alltop and Pono Media.
JC: What are your thoughts on managing your digital self in mixed purposes?
NF: More than 95% of my network met me as “Alltop’s Chief Evangelist”. Only in the recent months have my classmates, friends, and family members taken an active interest in Facebook. And, I have exactly 2 friends that I knew since childhood whom have joined Twitter, but very rarely participate.
Coaching moment: Social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and LinkedIn often work to blur the distinction between our personal and professional lives. It’s not enough to compartmentalize yourself with the confines of a specific service. For example, your personal (e.g., Facebook, MySpace) life can–and sometimes does–crash into your professional life (e.g., LinkedIn, or a potential job interviewer Googling you before your interview). Your Twitter stream (sometimes referred to as a form of “life streaming”) likely contains conversations about all parts of your life.
Whether you are online to represent your inner personal self and/or companies that you do business with, it’s worth noting that services and people on the Internet are archiving everything, and they have no particular reason to keep everything in context. Until tools are developed to help us manage our conversations, transactions, and relationships, we’ll need to be mindful of who we really are.
It turns out that ice cream and VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, have a lot in common. VRM is like the truck that drives into Scoopville in this video.
Here’s a video by Rob Knight that explains VRM pretty well. The whole idea behind social media and VRM is that it empowers people. You and me, our friends, our relatives, people we don’t know, and even people that also represent companies. It’s about people, and it’s about time.
Coaching Moment: Do you use social media like MySpace or Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Flickr? There are many more, but you don’t need to use them all. The current set of sites and tools aren’t for everybody. What’s the worst thing about the current “social media” tools? Each one is proprietary, so you have to find and connect with your friends in each one. What a pain! Think outside the box. What would your ideal network do for you?
Note: There are two conference coming up next week that deal with topics of VRM and Identity. I’ll be blogging both. Stay tuned for updates!
Social networks are great places to share links, photos, status updates, and more. It often appears that we are the beneficiaries of our personal information sharing. However, we are not the only ones. A much greater benefit accrues to an industry that is, at its core, about public manipulation. Whether we want or need something that they’re pushing is not the point; this is about moving goods, selling units, enhancing commerce and the GDP.![[del.icio.us]](http://digitalidcoach.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
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