Social Promiscuity

Today’s post comes from Brian Babin, from Actiance’s product management team.  Brian doesn’t blog very often, but we think, when he does he’s got some great things to say..  let us know if you agree!  This blog was originally posted here.

Your friends are promiscuous, well at least on social networks. How do I know? Let’s just say a friend told me.
This story is about the birth and rise of this friend and the conditions that allow him to exist at all. Think that imaginary friends are just for kids? Not anymore. What’s interesting is that the kids know their friend is imaginary, but the adults with imaginary social networking friends do not.

We Are Social Creatures

People join social networking sites to catch up with old and current friends, to share life events and opinions, and in general to be part of a community. We all want to feel loved and appreciated. For some people, their sense of popularity is measured by the numbers of friends, connections, and followers they have accumulated on their online identities.

More friends means you’re more popular. People may start with the same intentions, such as only becoming social friends with people you really care about and then extending to others you know casually, but over time people can get corrupted. They want more friends. They need more friends. Social networking friends, that is.

An Illusion of Privacy

Social networking sites generally provide security settings to control who is able to view your posts and information. Even if you’re very strict about your security settings you aren’t protected.

Settings change and sometimes go away without you knowing. For example, Facebook used to have a setting to control who could view your wall, now called a timeline. With one change that suddenly no longer applied and people you prevented from seeing your wall could now see it. Did you know it happened? Probably not.

Try to keep up with all the privacy settings and new options. You can’t. The visibility of what you post is controlled not only by your own privacy settings but by the settings of the people with whom you interact. Translation: You have no real control over where the content you post ends up.

A simple rule to follow is that anything you post on a social network can be viewed by almost anyone in the world.

A Social Identity is Born

As an experiment, I created a Facebook profile for a fictitious person. A complete fabrication. Not pretending to be someone else, or similar to anyone. A whole new, yet imaginary, person.

The first step was to choose a name. I decided the person should be male because that’s what I know. His name needed to be rather bland and generic – forgettable, if you will. A name that makes you think that maybe you’ve met or known that person in the past. I won’t say which name I chose because that would blow his cover.

The second step was to choose a profile picture. I wanted someone roughly my age so I didn’t have to be concerned with time-sensitive references, for example, knowing the popular music or cartoons for someone born in a different decade. Not that I planned on using this identity to engage in conversations or discussions, but better to be safe in case the need arose.

I searched for a picture of someone on vacation, because people love to post vacation pics. The picture needed to show the person but from some distance so you couldn’t study their face too closely. And finally, I wanted a woman present as well to ease doubts for females who would receive my friend requests. Surely, if his profile picture shows a woman then he is in a committed relationship and not just out to meet and pick up random women online.

Setting up the Facebook profile took all of fifteen minutes – most of that finding a suitable picture. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, he is not friends with anyone that I am friends with on my social identities. That was one policy I established from the beginning.

Looking for Friends

Now that the profile for my fictitious identity was established, it was time for him to make some friends. You might think it would be hard for a fake person with no friends to find some. Au contraire. I started out with some random searches to find people with more than 1000 friends. I was pretty sure that these people didn’t really know over 1000 people. And I was right.

He started sending out friend requests to these “very popular” people. At this point I had no idea what would happen. Could my imaginary identity make even a single friend? The answer was yes. One by one his friend requests were accepted. Not all of them – it averaged about one in three – but he was no longer alone in this vast social world.

He was making friends: 1 friend, 3 friends, 7 friends.

With each new friend he made he would start to target their friends so his network would grow. Some people may not accept a friend request from a stranger, but if that person is friends with your friends then that somehow makes it acceptable.

Have you ever accepted a friend request from someone you didn’t know just because they were friends with five of your friends, or twenty, or fifty? Maybe you haven’t, but your friends have. The same people who won’t accept a request from someone they don’t know with no friends in common will nonetheless accept requests if there are common friends. “If he knows Bill then he must be okay.” Well, it turns out your friend Bill is an idiot.

Popularity and Pitfalls

Little by little his friend count grew: 15 friends, 25 friends, 40 friends.

I spent about five minutes each day sending out up to ten friend requests. I kept track of each friend request sent out and which ones were accepted. I had to make sure he didn’t send repeated requests to the same person. If the person rejected his first request then they might show up again on the suggested friends list, so I didn’t want to select them again because that would be nonproductive.

Facebook doesn’t like it when you have too many unanswered friend requests, so I had to cancel his old friend requests that were still pending. Were these people afraid to say no to a request from a stranger? Maybe they wondered “How do I know this person?” and thought they might remember him later. Maybe they were too polite to outright reject a friend request. Who knows.

He received some warnings along the way from Facebook saying that he shouldn’t send friend requests to people he doesn’t know. Wrist, consider yourself slapped.

He plodded along, just a little each day: 60 friends, 75 friends, 100 friends.

The criteria for selecting friend targets became less strict. In the beginning he only considered people with over 1000 friends. In time that dropped to 750, 500, and even 300. Interestingly, the percentage of people who accepted stayed about the same, likely helped by the fact that he had friends in common with the new targets.

The Seeker is Sought

One day, not too long after starting, something quite unexpected happened. Someone sent him a friend request. Someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided to send a friend request to a fictitious person. And that wasn’t the only one – he received a dozen friend requests over time. Of course, these people were using the suggested friends feature of Facebook, just like I did. The point is they didn’t care that they didn’t know the other person. They wanted to grow their friend list. More friends on Facebook means you’re more popular in life, right? Being gracious, he accepted most though not all of the requests.

So what did he post as status updates while growing his friend list? Not much, really. Mostly inane comments in general, some observations on current events, and some comments and likes on other people’s posts. He generally kept a low profile, but wanted to show some activity for the sake of appearances.

And his friend list continued to grow: 130 friends, 160 friends, 200 friends.

He stopped pursuing new friends once he was well past 200. The point had been proven. It took about three months to get these friends using a made-up profile, more than I made with my real life profile in a few years. Then again, I chose to be friends with real people I actually know. At least I think they’re all real.

Warm Wishes

Another unexpected surprise came in the form of birthday wishes to my fictitious identity. I created a birth date for him because you need one to set up a profile. For kicks, I left it visible so people could see it. But still, I did not expect anyone to wish a happy birthday to someone who didn’t exist.

Not only did he get a few birthday wishes, he in fact received a large number of them. Many were the standard “Happy Birthday” and “Have a great day!” messages, but some people put more thought into it and posted a nice message. An actual message like you would send to an actual friend.

The next year he received even more birthday greetings. One contained a little heart icon. I found that one to be extra special.

So, feel good when your friends wish you a happy birthday, but know that they’re doing the same to people they don’t know and who don’t even exist. When a person you know from years and years ago that you never communicate with reaches out with a birthday message and you get to feeling special that they thought about you, then don’t. They probably send even nicer messages to people who don’t exist.

Fictitious, Not Malicious

I am continually amazed at what people choose to share online. Perhaps they don’t realize that it can be seen by almost anyone, or perhaps they don’t care. In my experiment I didn’t collect any personal information nor was that my intent. But were I so inclined, there was no shortage of personal and juicy tidbits to harvest.

And yes, I’m sure creating a fictitious identity violates the Facebook terms and conditions. Heck, they may even ban my real identity. It doesn’t matter to me, though. I’ll camp out on Google+. It’s much less crowded there, so I get more legroom.

Social Condoms

Getting back to where we started, what lessons can we learn from this experiment?

• It doesn’t matter how careful you are at screening your friends because you can’t control who they’re friends with and how careful they are.
• Your friends are socially promiscuous. Not all, maybe not many, but I guarantee that some are. Just like sex, it’s not only who you sleep with but who that person has slept with. Which means that anything you post that can be seen by friends and their friends is public information.
• What you post online can be used against you in many ways. People have been fired from jobs for inappropriate online activity. Medical conditions you discuss could pose a problem. Posting about vacations while you’re away can lead to break-ins. Does it happen often? No, but it does happen. Why put yourself at risk?
• If you are one who puts faith in friend decisions made by your friends, then at least change your security settings so that non-friends are not able to see your friends list. Otherwise, someone who wants to target you can first target your friends and accumulate friends in common with you before sending a friend request to you. Now instead of receiving a friend request from a completely anonymous person, it is from someone who has friends in common with you. What you don’t know is that none of your friends actually know that person.
• The only way to be safe is to protect yourself. Assume that anything you post online can be seen by anyone in the world who cares to find it. No court order, subpoena, or government intrusion is required. Just someone with a few minutes a day, half a plan, and a search engine or two.

Your PledgeRepeat after me… My social network friends are promiscuous. I will not share anything on a social network that I don’t want the whole world to know about. Ever.

Who influences you on social?

LinkedIn today added some new features to their “Influencer” program that they launched in October of last year – these influencers regularly publish posts that get special syndication on LinkedIn’s platform.

It’s an interesting add from LinkedIn – who are clearly serious about changing our use of the platform from how we might have thought about it a few years ago – the rolodex, the place to find your new job, or get the reference that helps you get there.    I remember conversations where someone would ask me “how do you know John?” – let me check LinkedIn would be my regular refrain.   As our networks become larger and we have more networks, keeping track is tough.

Robin Dunbar suggested that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”  – which for me is significantly less than the 2,000 plus connections I have on LinkedIn.  Our Dunbar number evens out at around 150.  That feels right to me… so long as its not a different 150 on each network!

This new functionality from LinkedIn now lets me – through threaded comments, engage with other folks who are commenting on an Influencers post and I can mention other folks.   It extends me reach beyond my network.    It’s pretty interesting that what I thought was my discrete network is now expanding exponentially.

Do I like that?  Actually I do.  Influencers by nature are not shrinking violets – commenting on and connecting in this way with those influencers and the folks who are commenting on like content, gives me brand association.    Currently if I want to reach folks outside my current network with content on LinkedIn, I post through groups that I’m members of, so this simply extends me reach to a whole new set of folks.  And yes, LinkedIn it keeps me on the platform.

I can feel my neocortical processor starting to need an overhaul!    But that wasn’t what I started out to say.  The influencer program is great, but its not where I get most of my content.  95% of the content that I read comes from a trusted network of folks who I have self designated as curators for me.  If these people share content, the vast majority of the time I read it.  I don’t have to go looking myself.

Who are they?  Industry colleagues, trusted partners, friends certainly.  How did they get to my (none published) list?  Time, good content and trust.

Which leads me to my questions.

• Who influences you?
• How did they get to that position?

Today’s blog comes from Sarah Carter, General Manager of Actiance’s Social Business. Find and engage with Sarah Sarah on Twitter @sarahactiance or via LinkedIn.

Coffee? Let’s meet in Sydney… #TravelTuesday

To say I have a deep relationship with Australia would be an understatement. I lived there in the 80s where I started my career in radio, TV and film. It’s where I met my wife, she was in charge of handing out the paychecks at a radio station where we both worked, (a very important person for a free-lancer to know), and our son was born in Royal North Shore hospital. It was all happening in Sydney in the 80s. What wasn’t happening in Sydney in the 80s was coffee.

In those days the typical cup of coffee involved boiling water and mixing it with a teaspoon of crystallized gunk from a jar. Instant bad karma and a complete affront to a caffeine-addled Yank accustom to finely brewed Columbia bean. If you went to a restaurant you could get an espresso. Try drinking espresso like Americans swill brewed coffee and you will test the limits of your nervous system like never before.

So you can imagine my delight when I returned down under in 2008 to discover coffee shops everywhere. Australia had become a café society! You couldn’t walk across the street without tripping over sidewalk-seated patrons happily sipping long blacks, short whites, lattes or cappuccinos. I wasn’t the only one who was delighted in this discovery. Both Starbucks and Gloria Jean were dead-set on cracking the coffee swilling Aussie market.

One failed, one flourished. The reason one failed and the other succeed is similar to why some companies fail to successfully leverage social media for their employees. They fail to be relevant and authenticate. Here’s where I’m going with this.

In 2008 Starbucks closed 600 coffee shops in Australia, while Gloria Jean continued to open more. The reason Starbucks failed is that they were irrelevant to the Aussie coffee culture. The Aussie coffee drinker doesn’t like brewed coffee, likes his sausage rolls and Lamingtons, and isn’t in interested in spiced pumpkin lattes in the fall and peppermint chai teas in December. To the Aussie, visiting a Starbucks wasn’t an authentic experience, it wasn’t true blue. On the other hand, Gloria Jean ‘aussie-fied’ by serving espresso based coffee drinks, Aussie tucker and provided an authentic, ‘fair dinkum’ experience.

When you’re crafting a social media plan for your company, you have to think in similar terms when creating content guidelines for your users. Start with these questions:

• What does my audience what to hear?
• How can I let my users have an authentic voice?
• What is taboo in regards to compliance?

Each industry will have different cultural and business nuances that will need to be understood. Your plan will change and evolve with your market, but if you commit to staying relevant by listening to your audience and successfully communicate your compliance issues to your users, you’re on the path to success.

And if you’re wondering what a Lamington is…. they’re worth the 15 hour plane ride.

What to do when social goes bad: The Lesson of HMV

It’s been a momentous day in the Twitterverse for HMV.  (For those of my US colleagues, who don’t know the brand, here’s a snapshot – from Wikipedia.. if you want more, click on the links).

HMV Group PLC is a British multinational entertainment retailing company with operations in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Singapore. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE Fledgling Index. The first HMV branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company on Oxford Street in 1921, and the HMV name was also used for television and radio sets manufactured from the 1930s onwards.

HMVSite Down

Now I had to go to Wikipedia to tell you more about HMV, because the company was put into administration on January 15^th, as you can see from this is all I get at www.HMV.com

As if that isn’t bad enough, what took place on Twitter earlier today should give any senior management team cause for social cold sweats.  Normally it’s great for the brand when you’re live tweeting an event (like we did recently at #IBMConnect)

But I’m not sure anyone has tweeted their own sacking before.  That’s right.  Just before 130pm local time, HMV’s official and verified Twitter account sent out the following: “We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!! #hmvXFactorFiring“.

This tweet went viral with over 1,300 retweets in 30 minutes.

This tweet was followed by 7 others, which told the social world what was going on.

Posts such as: “There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand. #hmvXFactorFiring” and, “Sorry we’ve been quiet for so long. Under contract, we’ve been unable to say a word, or -more importantly – tell the truth #hmvXFactorFiring.” Went out.  And a little bit like car crash TV, we all watched.

Here’s the one that really consolidated for me the difference between those who “get” social and those who don’t.  “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask “How do I shut down Twitter?” #hmvXFactorFiring.”

It gets worse.  Several hours later the offending tweets disappeared from the @HMVtweets feed.

Not, though before you could pick them up on places like Topsy – the news and screenshots of the offending tweets have been trending through the Huffington Post, CBS and Business Week here in the US, and the story continues.

You can see more write ups of the story at Holtz Communications, TwoFourSeven and I found the news out  through superstar @rhappe tweeting it (follow her, she’s great for breaking news like this)

So what can you do to make sure that #hmvXfactorFiring doesn’t end up at your door?

• Social has GOT to be part of any crisis management communications plan.  Period.
• Make sure ownership of your Corporate Social Network Accounts is with a group that is part of the planning.
• Transparency is key.  If you spin, lie or cheat, you will be found out.
• Deleting content, while it might be necessary sometimes (racist commentary, profanity and the like that you do NOT want on your Twitter feed have no place staying there in order to be transparent) should be undertaken with caution.
• If you do delete content, make sure you have a record of it.  You can be sure that the rest of the world already does.
• Engage, understand the mood and the sentiment of the audience and go with it.  Empower the team responding to do just that.  Respond.

What else would you add to how you can deal with social in a crisis?

Without mobile where would you be?

I’m on a train as I write this. From Montreal to Quebec and @via_rail is taking the strain as I head north. At the same time, my mum and I are messaging each other in real time on Facebook, I’m iMessaging a colleague, tweeting and also checking my email.

Every now and then I stop and think how much technology has adapted to,our mobile life and how lost we’d be without it. Certainly the lithium Batteries might be awning all lithium battery devic on planes, following a series of fires, caused a moments thought. I can’t take my cell phone or my laptop with me?? Wow, the providers of collaboration platforms will be rubbing their hands in glee if this one spreads. I can’t imagine that. I can’t even check my laptop or cell phone… That’s going one further than the travel restrictions after 911.

Mobile access to technology that we see for both our personal, and our professional lives has become ubiquitous. Who, for example watched, hero Felix Bumgartner’s Space Jump historic jump from space? My sister in law was visiting at the time. We don’t have a TV here in the USA, so we were watching on the Internet, from laptops. Until we decided that we needed to get a move on and head out – we wanted to catch the tide as we were planning an afternoon sailing in the bay.

No problem. As my husband drove, I watched the proceedings on my iPhone and the relies watched in the back seat of the car on the iPad as we drove to the marina.

There’s also news today that Bank of America is adding 10,000 mobile users a day. Wow. Time and money stand still for no one!!

Today happens to be a vacation for me, but my use of mobile continues, as the applications, the tools that I use in my professional and personal life morph into one, the devices that I carry for the business meetings I’ll be at later in the week, become my communications tools for catching up with the family, for checking out the hotel in Quebec and planning where I might eat a late lunch, or sharing the photos’s from the train and comparing my experiences with Via Rail and Amtrak (Amtrak increased my Klout by using my Amtrak from the California Zephyr on their Facebook page!!).

What would I miss the most if I didn’t have mobile? I think I’d miss the “share” – and that’s not just me sharing, it’s others sharing too.. I’d not see the updates from fellow travelers, or be getting real time suggestions as to what to see and do.

What about you? What would you miss the most if your mobile access was curtailed?

Can you have a social army without a general?

Sarah Carter

I argued recently in a discussion on LinkedIn that the future of social is the distributed team , that 17% of us trust a brand and 70% of us trust individuals in our  network – the personal brands.

The growth of that personal brand is a key tenet in the paper that I put together in 2012 on the Six Principles of Social Success.  It’s actually the second principle – immediately following that social needs to be an integrated element of your organizations business plan, not a stand alone solution.

The discussion came about, because of a great article from Erica Ayotte – who writes for Social Media Today – Erica wrote about the recent phenomena of “firing all the social media directors”, when the latest new big shiny thing comes along.    Believe me you want to join this discussion, there are some great comments and dialogues going on.

I do very much agree that the growth of social is about the development of the personal brand, enabling the distributed team, empowering them, and making them brand ambassadors.  This is where I believe we will see true value from social, the individual brand that we all engage with. That said. They’re the army, the foot soldiers, not the generals. Without a general you don’t have a strategy, a direction or a battle plan.

Strategy and battle planning takes experience and in the brave new world of social battle worn, campaign hardy individuals are absolutely what we need.

If you’d like to know more about what it takes to build a personal brand on social, then why not join me at 9 pacific on Thursday 17th Jan for 30 minutes and you can find out more – I look forward to seeing you there!

Competition goes Social for Financial Services

Its only 3 months, since I sat on a panel at the Finextra Social Media Day  at the Reuters building in New York, ruminating on the future of financial services and social along with Daniel Marovitz of Deutsche Bank and Frank Eliason, SVP Social Media of Citi.  Not content with discussing the future of financial services, social and mobile, we also talked about how social might impinge on the traditional bricks and mortar business of financial services.

Not far off, I said, referencing how Tesco (for those none UK folks in the room, that’s one of the largest supermarket chains in the UK) expanded out of groceries into clothing, household goods, furniture, electrical goods, AND financial services products – from banking to insurance, credit cards to travel products.  Tesco’s model of gaining my loyalty through my grocery shopping and its Club Card – and yes I’m a sucker for coupons – and then using my fixation with the money off vouchers and the loyalty scheme to convince me to place my financial services business (more points and points mean prizes..) with them worked exceedingly well.  Not just for me but for millions of others.  The initial partnership that Tesco had with the Royal Bank of Scotland – latterly morphed into Tesco Bank – and really proved that the loyalty network that this grocery store built up, the trust they created gained thousands and thousands of account holders for the organization.

Tesco Bank now accounts for 7% of the Tesco Group 62.5billion pound sterling revenues.

And my “not far off” came about this week, with a new launch from Google.

No no no, I’m not talking about Google +  – that so last week.

I’m talking about the Google credit card.  The AdWords Business credit card promises a competitive interest rate of 8.99% and no annual fee with the sole proviso that it can only be used for spending on Internet advertising over the search engine, according to a report from Finextra.  Google’s treasurer , Brent Callinicos says that the card will be offered to a statistically significant number of people as Google investigates how the card affects spending.  With more than a million users of the Adwords network – they’ve got a large enough audience to go after!

Hundreds of millions of people use Google every day to search through many petabytes of the world’s knowledge, in 146 different languages.   It goes without saying that Google has become a threat to the bricks and mortar business of our traditional financial services organizations.  They’ve built a loyal following (where would we be without Google maps these days?), a dependency ingrained within us (a colleagues 5 years old upon finding that her father couldn’t answer a questions retorted with an exclamation – “What do you mean you don’t know, why don’t you Google it?”) and that loyalty, that dependency is one small step for consumers, one giant leap for Google’s increasing domination.

We are in interesting times folks, interesting and exciting.  Now what remains to be seen is how the financial services market will take the fight to the social network  What’s your prediction?