1. Sharing

Social media is built on the foundation of exchanging information. Or, as Wikipedia defines it:

And sharing is instinctively social. Whether it’s sharing advice, a funny joke or the latest gossip, people want to come across to others as helpful, knowledgeable or simply the first to know about something.

see: viral videos, chain emails, gossip, social currency

2. Status

A double meaning! It can indicate “What am I doing right now” (as in Facebook status), or represent a person’s prestige within their personal and professional circles. A person’s online status could range from informational, to too much information (“our baby just threw up the rug – how cute!”), to outright bragging (“I’m poolside at some tropical resort in January while you are all back home buried in 3 feet of snow – suckers!”). This has evolved into the realm of game mechanics, where users are motivated to gain “status” (or some embodiment of how influential or special they are) based on the social actions they take and achievements they reach.

see: status updates, tweets, Badges, Mayorships, Klout scores, “social capital”

3. Support

Another “S” with more than 1 definition. On a consumer level, it means real-time customer service conducted in public view, or consumer-to-consumer support via support forums where others have already found a solution . On a personal level, it means seeking the support or encouragement of others in times of need (loss of a loved one or job, motivation to stay on diet, or simply seeking sympathy because one woke up with a sore throat this morning). Social media has made people realize that the social web is one giant support group.

see: Twitter, customer support forums, Get Satisfaction, insight panels, Wikis

4. Shopping (and Savings!)

Social media relates to shopping in 2 ways – leveraging research and recommendations to make purchase decisions, and the emergence of new commerce models.

Social media has shifted consumer behavior from the traditional “sales funnel” to what McKinsey refers to as the “Consumer Decision Journey”, where once a consumer decides they are going to buy a product, they move into a stage called “active evaluation”, where the number of brands they are considering *increases* (the opposite of the premise of the original funnel). This is the stage when the consumer is intent on purchasing and they are actively researching the product, and begin to rely on reviews and ratings, comparing prices and tapping into their social circles for advice.

Shopping in itself has become more ‘social’, with a number of copycat Flash sales, group buying, location-based “deals” and coupon code aggregation/sharing sites popping up over the past few years. Who pays retail anymore?

see: Online reviews, Groupon, Gilt, group buying, flash sales, Foursquare deals

5. Search (and SEO)

A secondary benefit of UGC (user generated content) is that social media driven content is weighing more and more heavily in search result rankings. Social SEO is defined as traffic to your website via search engines, based on the relevancy of consumer-generated content on your site to keywords. You can apply all sorts of SEO to a product page on your ecommerce site, but all of the “likes”, shares, and consumer-submitted reviews and ratings will play a big factor in your content’s relevancy. And the relevancy of that content can be short-lived as trends/memes come and go and your content isn’t dynamic and gets “stale.”

see: Google +1, social seo, Facebook Likes, twitter trends, reviews and ratings, Social Mention

6. Sweepstakes

Who doesn’t like winning stuff? In the social landscape (especially on more light-touch touchpoints such as Facebook and Twitter), an easy way to quickly amass lots of fans/followers is to conduct a social media-driven promotion. Brands are running contests and product giveaways, and those entries in turn virally promote the promotion to others (as well as increase exposure the brand). For other brands, they are seeing the opportunity to leverage social promotions as way to begin developing larger scale CRM and loyalty initiatives.

see: Facebook contests, Twitter giveaways, product samples

The final four “S’s” deal with the darker side of social media…

7. Scandals

It’s not that people’s behavior has changed much over the past 100 years so much as technology has brought into the public eye what has traditionally happened behind closed doors. And more often these days, social media has been the medium in which the scandals occurred. Politicians and athletes have always had affairs. Band groupies have always been around. But with the prevalence of camera-enabled smartphones, the public has become a mass paparazzi who can snap a compromising photo and post in real-time.

Also, social media has provided a direct way for celebrities/public figures to engage directly with the public, which has historically been a tightly controlled PR machine. Many of these forms of social media scandals are the result of spur of the moment actions – an insensitive tweet or a public message meant to be private. These public figures need to be given social media training in the same way they are trained to handle press conferences and interviews. Imagine if Joe DiMaggio, Bill Clinton, Robert Plant or John F. Kennedy had Twitter or Facebook around during their heydays?

But at the end of the day, the biggest social media “scandals” really didn’t become such until they were picked up by more mainstream media. How many actual consumers actually got worked up about the whole “Motrin Moms” controversy?

see: Wikileaks, Anthony Weiner, Brett Favre, Kenneth Cole, TMZ

8. Stalking (and over-Sharing)

Doesn’t it seem like just yesterday that most people were afraid to use their real name or even post a real photo of themselves online? The social web has lifted the guise of online anonymity, as people have shifted from using online personas/usernames to their real identities. By connecting a user’s online profiles and social media-based actions with other data, companies can mesh your social data with online behavioral data so they could, for example, better target ads based on your gender, age, number of children, or interests you have shared through any number of social media touchpoints.

Law enforcement, collection agencies and prospective employers are now using this information as well to track people down, conduct background checks and catch people lying (“I can’t pay my credit card bill, but here are photos of me on a luxury vacation!”)

For minors, there are legitimate concerns for parents about their children’s use of social media, what information they reveal and who they interact with.

see: Facebook privacy, Spokeo, Rapportive, PleaseRobMe, check-ins, online bullying, online predators

9. Sex

The adult industry has always been on the bleeding edge of technical innovation because, quite simply, they’ve had to be. They pioneered anti-credit card fraud checks in the 90′s, online subscription models, online dating, video delivery (including secure video, video chat systems, etc.), anti-piracy and even were a key player in the success of the Blu-Ray DVD format winning out over HD DVD. Any new innovation that gains wide adoption was most likely pioneered in the adult space first. While the “old” guard adult publishers are fading out of existence, the online industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry. “Innovate, or die” indeed.

see: chatroulette, webcams, online dating

10. Scams (and Snake Oil Salesmen)

Not to end on a downer, but it was only a matter of time before unsavory types would jump on the social bandwagon and figure out ways to make a quick buck off of others.

While historically online scams involving Nigerian princes looking to share their wealth or phishing scams that would trick people into sharing their banking info were done my mass-emailing people and playing a numbers game (assuming that even 1/100th of 1% of people were fooled, that would still translate into millions of dollars), scams can now spread at scale by leveraging the social web and the trust of users among their social media peers (from “Free iPads” to fake Japan charity scams).

In marketing circles, an entire cottage industry of social media ‘experts’ have emerged who have little previous experience other than reading Mashable or some presentations on SlideShare (what the heck is a “Twitter coach”, anyway? Were there “email coaches” 20 years ago?). “Books! Speaking engagements! Consulting gigs!” Don’t buy into the hype. Check their CV and see what they were were going 5 years ago (most likely flipping real estate). Ask to see actual work and case studies, and less jargon and hand waving.

At the end of the day, if you come across something that is too good to be true, then it most likely is. Caveat Emptor.

see: social media scams, phishing, botnets, fake charities, consultants, Twitter coaches

What does social media mean to you? Do you have any additions to this list? Leave a comment below or drop me a tweet!

After a few warnings from my Facebook friends I checked it out and searched my name.  What I found were two mailing addresses, an estimated income of over a million dollars, and that I was single.

My Spokeo profile is so much sexier than I am.

In truth I no longer live at either of those addresses, I do not make over a million dollars (I have no idea where they got that but I would love to know), and I’m engaged.  I didn’t pay for the premium version so who knows what dirt they have past the pay wall, but unless they’re displaying my social security number, credit card or bank info I can’t imagine there’s much there.

Spokeo isn’t the culprit, they’re merely showing the level of access anyone has to your information.  Delisting will fix the problem, but it’s not a solution.  There’s nothing stopping another 100 Spokeos from launching tomorrow, or Facebook from further convoluting or changing its privacy settings. People care about their privacy, but sometimes don’t realize how their information can be accessed.  For the most part we are complicit in the publicizing of our information online, and it’s just a matter of education to understand how to curtail the sharing of information you’d rather keep private.

Ironically enough I was just wrapping up this post when Mashable published an item on the 10 Facebook Privacy Settings Every User Needs to Know.

That’s a start.

So who’s doing it? OAuth has been the buzz in the tech world for the past few months. Enough so that that Facebook, Twitter, Google, MySpace, FourSquare, Netflix are in. Although there is no specification regarding what a 3rd party site should or shouldn’t be allowed to do on the OAuth-providing site, most provide enough APIs to replicate a good portion of the site functionality. Twitter and Foursquare allow you to do anything that you can already do through their web interface/app. This is great for developers as they can build their own twitter/foursquare clients. And of course this isn’t just limited to small party sites and applications; Facebook uses OAuth with Google for it’s friend finder feature.

To the end user this is great! Services are now integrated together. Say goodbye to the creation of countless user accounts. Everything could be accessed via your Facebook login. If you want to share something with friends, you can do that via 1 click as opposed to being redirected to the specific OAuth provider’s share page. Aside from simplicity, security gets a benefit. Facebook’s friend finder asks for a user’s email and password so it can access the contact list. With gmail, if your original email account is with gmail, all you have to do is log in and that’s it.

Excitement aside, it can be easy to overlook the potential security/privacy issues. When logging in with OAuth, you are allowing a 3rd party to act on your behalf. So, let’s say you have logged in with Twitter on a 3rd party site – a year later, that 3rd party site could potentially spam tweets from your account. The counter argument states that twitter can then instantly disable any actions from that 3rd party site, but that doesn’t help against the initial occurrence. Another thing to note is that when logging in with OAuth credentials, it is possible to give away all of the personal information available to the OAuth provider. So when logging in with Facebook, the 3rd party site gets the user’s email address, name, location, relationship status, friends, etc… As it becomes easier to integrate services it also becomes easier to spread your personal information unknowingly. None of this is a problem of OAuth specifically, but rather stems from improper implementations.

All in all, OAuth is an excellent tool that will bring a more seamless web in the future. It is possible that we may end up with a central social hub that allows us to control all of our servers. Imagine going to a movie theater and posting a status update from Facebook. It would instantly check you in with FourSquare and post to Twitter. In addition to Netflix learning which movie to suggest to you later. We’ve written about Data Portability before, and looks like OAuth actually won.

UPDATE: Facebook has returned to their prior Terms of Use until they can work out issues people have raised. Read more about it on their blog.

Below is a simple social media “gut check” that any organization (or even individual!) should find helpful…

Own Your Presence.

With the proliferation of online social platforms, tools, and services, how can you keep up and maintain your presence in all of these places at once? Aside from unscrupulous third-parties (or just pranksters) claiming, or “brandjacking” a brand’s presence/username/vanity url, some sites actually create one for you, whether you want it or not. Consumer review sites like Yelp!, and customer service platforms like Get Satisfaction are launching thousands of automated brand profiles to build (typically consumer-generated) content around. Some of these services are allowing brands to “claim” their pages/ids through verification… or a price.

Fortunately, some sites such as Facebook have policies in place to allow brands to report/take down fraudulent profiles/pages or reclaim a brandjacked profile.

So, what to do? You can either focus your efforts on the more popular sites/services out there, or use one of several services that will notify you when a new social network/tool launches so you can quickly claim your profile (or you can just read Mashable

Own Your Relationships.

Just to be clear – “presence” is not the same thing as engagement!

Perhaps you are thinking of “outsourcing” your word of mouth efforts to a third party word of mouth “network” consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of consumers. If all you care about is getting your product into a bunch of people’s hands and (hopefully) generate some “amplified” (versus organic) word of mouth, these types of services can be effective…

Are these really your consumers or your target market? Is the word of mouth authentic or are these just a bunch of folks who want free stuff? Are you even directly engaging/communicating/sharing with these consumers? Do you care if competitors are able to access/engage the same users?

Big brands (especially CPG ones) are starting to realize this distinction, and have begun developing their own dedicated consumer engagement programs. While they may still rely on the help of word of mouth marketing companies to launch their programs, they want to own the relationships.

Own Your Data.

What’s the point of creating relationships if you can’t get closer to your customers and integrate your social platform touchpoints into your larger CRM initiative? (you have a CRM system, don’t you??

Given Facebook’s enormous user base (they just reached 150 million users), it’s a no-brainer for brands to “set up shop” by creating a Facebook “page”.

Here’s the rub – when you create a presence on most stand-alone, third-party social platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, “white label” social networks such as Ning, etc.) you are in control of your relationships but not your data! It’s the network effect, which these services have built their business models upon – as more people use a given service, it increases the utility and value of said service. In other words, every person you engage with via a platform must in turn create an account, thus adding to that platform’s user base (and increasing it’s value). Those 10,000 customers you got to join – you’ve just handed them over to someone else!

It’s ok to play on their turf, but maintain your own – at the very least, make sure to hook your CRM tentacles into all of your social media and word of mouth initiatives.

Hopefully, this spurs some dialog, or at the very least makes you think a bit more as you ramp up your word of mouth/social media/consumer engagement strategies for 2009 and beyond.

Thankfully, she was found safe a few days later (turns out she had run away and was not abducted). End of story, right?

Not exactly. In an effort to protect her privacy (and not have the incident “follow” her for the rest of her life), people are being asked to remove any mentions of the incident, the child’s name, as well as photos, etc. – essentially, an attempt to give this child a “clean slate”.

A totally understandable request (which is why I haven’t linked to any of the aforementioned content), but therein lies the problem. The web is a hydra of information, and every piece of content posted online – every blog post, photo, status update, video, tweet, comment, etc. must now be treated as permanent, decentralized record. Even if something is deleted, odds are that the information has been archived and/or reposted elsewhere and will no doubt be discovered in the future. Not a big deal for the average “joe the plumber” (oops, scratch that…), but you never know when something like a moment of, say, teenage indiscretion can come back to haunt you later in life when going for a job interview, running for office, etc.

Censorship versus Privacy versus Slander

I’ve identified the following types of social media “messes” that we will all need to face at some time. If you can think of other categories, definitely drop me a tweet or post a comment:

1. Censorship – Attempt to wipe out or suppress the creation of any factual information that may harm the reputation of a person or organization. See China and Scientology.
2. Privacy – Attempt to protect the personal information of an individual that can put their identity or safety at risk. An example would be a crazed fan posting a celebrity’s email address, phone number, social security #/credit card info, location of schools attended by children, etc.
3. Slander/Libel – Attempt to challenge/rebut damaging (let’s assume false) information posted by an individual or a in more organized, calculated manner. But whether something is considered libel or slander is up for debate.

A Social Media “Fixer”?

So, how do you deal with/clean up a social media mess? Like the Harvey Keitel character in “Pulp Fiction”, could there exist a social media “fixer”, i.e., someone who can clean up a social media “mess”? That would be virtually impossible. Sure, there are plenty of companies out there who tout “reputation management” services, but those are more ongoing/proactive and often involve trying to “bury” the offending information in search results.

I’ll admit, these are somewhat uncharted waters and my analysis may be way off base but this is pretty eye-opening issue. Please don’t take this to mean we must all fear social media, but rather that we must understand how to co-exist with it (and if done properly, embrace it) and choose to accept the consequences of the actions by both ourselves and others (and have a strategy in place to deal with any future social media “messes”). Come on, we were all young and stupid once…

Facebook has an array of privacy settings. In fact, they may be too complicated, and most users probably don’t pay attention to them. An application only has the permissions of the person using it, so if you install an application, by default, it can generally access all the information on your friends that you can. However, users can set the information available to applications their friends are using to be essentially nothing.

On MySpace, applications’ access to information is even more restrictive; only the name and image of a user’s friends who haven’t added the application are available through the API, although for some reason age, gender, and location are listed in the settings which also allows users to completely block apps from accessing their information. A developer could actually get more information on users just by scraping publicly viewable pages than through the API.

The real area for concern is that when using a Facebook application, it can access everything about yourself that you can, which is almost everything. On MySpace, an application can get most of the profile information on users who have added it, but this information is usually already on a public page. Unscrupulous developers could then store this against the sites’ policies and do what they want with it.

The bottom line is, if you don’t want something to be known by the whole world, don’t put it on a social networking site regardless of your settings. The only information required to register for Facebook is a name, email, and birthdate. On MySpace, it’s this plus country and zip code. Everything else is voluntarily, as is using the sites themselves.

Social networks are amazing tools to communicate with friends and make new connections. They just have to be used with common sense and intelligence, things that seem to be missing in journalism.