This morning I was a reluctant participant in third grade show-and-tell. Usually the kids bring books about dinosaurs, or vacation souvenirs, but my daughter took advantage of a little known provision that allows the children to bring people. I felt a little like a snow globe, or maybe a sock monkey, on display.

We ended up having a great conversation about online privacy, which was made all the more interesting by the students relating their experiences firsthand.

My daughter proudly introduced me to the class by saying, “my dad wrote a book about work.” I explained it was about social media (not a gripping topic for most nine-year-olds). Most of the kids knew about Facebook and YouTube. A few were familiar with Twitter.

In order to start up a conversation about privacy, I explained Foursquare, and how people “check in” at Starbucks, the movies, work, etc., but how parents should not check in at home, or at their children’s school, karate studio, friend’s house or any other location that divulged the schedule and location of their kids.

This opened a really interesting discussion about privacy, and the data collected by sites like Webkinz, Nick Jr., Poptropica, etc. One after the other, half a dozen students shared experiences with being online and being asked to provide their name, e-mail address, zip code, city, and in some cases, address. I emphasized that this information was nobody’s business and should never be shared with strangers, whether on the computer or off.

These are eight- and nine-year-olds. Who is asking them for this information, and why? Online marketers are asking, because the youth market is huge. According to a report on NBC’s Today Show last August, “Tweens (children 9-11) represent $43 billion in spending power”! It’s no surprise marketers want our children’s information.

There are some protections for children, though they are limited in effectiveness. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), effective April, 2000, outlines privacy requirements for websites that collect information from children under the age of thirteen, and mandates “verifiable parental consent” that must be verified by a confirmation e-mail or other means.

In practice, children can usually sign up for almost any site. They have to enter a parent’s e-mail address for verification (like I want my e-mail address given out), but even then, they can often use the site in some capacity without the verification.

And do online marketers really think a statement like “You must be 13 years old to use this site” keeps underage users out? No. In fact they hope it doesn’t.

The “answer” to the child privacy issue can only be found at home. Parents must educate their children and place technological controls in place, such as browser or desktop based privacy controls, and not allowing children unmonitored access to computers (including phones with browsers.)

Marketers looking to capture a slice of that $43 billion pie are just one source of attacks on the privacy of our children. Too much sharing on the Internet can also leave children vulnerable to sexual predators. It’s a scary world out there. As parents, we are the only ones who can adequately protect our children.

Tags: children, online privacy, COPPA

Many of us take for granted the meaning of the word “social” when we think of social media and social networking. But what does it really mean?

The term carries multiple meanings. For the techie, social software is most likely built using Web 2.0’s foundational technologies, AJAX, asynchronous JavaScript and XML. And while this definition might impress your friends or help you in a game of Internet trivia, it isn’t very helpful in determining the socialness (sociability?) of a particular site or tool.

From the perspective of people using the site, sociality (see how many forms of the word you can create) can probably be defined as:

The ease and variety of ways in which a visitor to a site or user of a service can create, comment on, add to, and share content, and create relationships with others doing the same.

By this definition, Facebook is probably the most social site. Facebook offers status updates 420 characters in length, easy sharing of links, videos and images; commenting, tagging, a one-click “Like” button, blog networking to display personal and business blog updates on Facebook, connections to Twitter and other social networks, and so on. Facebook arguably has more social features and more ease of use than any other site. That doesn’t make it better or worse just more social (by this definition).

Facebook also makes it easy to create relationships with others in more ways than other sites. In addition to search tools and detailed profiles, Facebook generally uses real, full names instead of “handles,” so people are easier to find. Facebook also recommends new friends, and does a good job making the activities of people visible to others with whom they are not yet connected, encouraging a network effect.

What are the least social sites on the Web? Any traditional Web site, with no provisions for user participation except perhaps a contact form, is certainly unsocial. But some sites thought of as social media aren’t really, or aren’t much. I’ve often heard Craig’s List called a social network or a social media site. I don’t think it is one. It has a few features that might seem social, like flagging posts, and discussion forums, but the site is decidedly anti-social, Web 1.0. Most wikis aren’t that social either.

Which raises a second question – Can socialness be added to an existing Web site or must it be built in from the start?

Part of what makes Twitter and Facebook successful social sites is that they were designed specifically to be social. Social functionality is natural and seamless on these networks. LinkedIn, on the other hand, was launched during the pre-social Web period, and for a time, struggled to become more social. Some of the additions the company made last year, particularly the LinkedIn developer platform, have really helped LinkedIn get up to date, and more importantly, made it easier and more rewarding for people to integrate their LinkedIn activities with their other networks.

There are many non-social sites that seem natural candidates for social features. One of these is eBay. There are so many common interest groups built in to eBay’s 88 million users, like auto enthusiasts, antique collectors, and crafts people. There is a wealth of content (hate the word but it’s the one that works) on eBay around which conversations ought to spring up naturally. With over 11 million movie fans, Netflix also seems to be a candidate for “going social.” Neither of these sites has capitalized on their potential socialness.

In some cases, the addition of social technology to an existing network can be transformational. Hyperlocal restaurant and retail site Yelp took its existing network of 26 million users, who visit the company’s regular web site, and gave them an iPhone app with the capability to check-in live at restaurants, clubs, theaters and other locations. Companies like Brightkite and Foursquare built their location-based iPhone check-in apps first, and then went out to build networks of users. Yelp already has 26 million users, so the number of users on their network will quickly (as those who own iPhones download and begin to use the app) eclipse every other network of this kind.

Often, attempts to make a site more social, fail. For example, Facebook’s “Like” button is too ambiguous to be effective. If someone on Facebook posts an item about the number dead in the earthquake in Haiti, and someone clicks the “Like” button, chances are they are indicating that they are thankful to have current information, not that they like the implications of the article. But it’s often hard to tell. And Facebook places a “Like” button next to advertising, some of which is likeable and some of which is decidedly not, or is so mundane as to not merit liking/disliking it.

A recent item on the NBC Washington Web site offered visitors a series of six buttons marked Furious, Intrigued, Sad, Bored, Thrilled, and Laughing, so they could comment on the article with a single click. This is more a novelty than anything else. Its informational value is questionable.

Another example of misplaced sociality is the comment capability that so many online newspapers have added to their sites. The problem with this feature is that most newspapers offer commenting on every article. The San Jose Mercury News, for example, allows comments on every article, including commodities reports. (Note that commenting, sharing, etc. features occupy over one-third of the “page.” I have never seen a comment on a commodities report. Somewhere, commodities traders are talking about the trucker’s strike or flood that is affecting pork belly futures, but it sure isn’t happening on newspaper web sites.

Ideally, online newspapers could apply the commenting feature to certain classes of news that merit discussion, although the day may come that a seemingly insignificant commodities report becomes a very important news story worthy of discussion.

It’s encouraging that Web 2.0 sites are finding new ways to allow user participation, and that traditional media outlets are looking into ways of adopting social media.

But one should not ask, “What is our social media strategy?” but instead, “What are our business and communications objectives and how can social media help us achieve them?” This will reduce the occurrence of one-size-fits-all and feature-driven vs. strategy-driven social media initiatives.

Tags: web 2.0, social media

Recently a couple of people told me they were thinking about unfollowing all of their social network friends and starting over. I’m not sure I understand the thinking behind this. Sometimes it’s done as a “grand gesture” to convey to the world that the quality of social network relationships matters more than the quantity. Sometimes it’s done to simplify one’s online life and eliminate the noise of too many followers. And sometimes it’s done merely to attract attention to one’s self, making it an ironic gesture. (”Having a lot of people follow my Twitter updates isn’t important, so I will do something that attracts a lot of attention, thereby driving more people to be interested in me, to prove that I don’t care how many people are interested in me.”)

Many Twitter users with a large number of followers (and similarly, Facebook users with a large number of friends) have either unfollowed in equally large numbers, or considered it.

One of the first people I recall doing this was Loic LeMeur, CEO of Seesmic. Jason Calacanis also did it. According to the tech news blog, they both unfollowed everyone but “kept” all their followers. I am not sure what that means, since you don’t directly choose or control who follows you. I suppose if you were really serious about recouping your privacy you could block all your unwanted followers, but that’s really inconsiderate and pointless as well.

Shockingly, I have been unfollowed and rarely do I give a rat’s ass. Loic was following me (and vice versa) when he unfollowed everyone. I don’t think I was following Jason Calacanis.

I will say there are a couple people who have unfollowed me on Twitter but have kept me as a friend on Facebook and even added me elsewhere, which is momentarily puzzling but does not affect my self worth.

Mass unfollowing as a gesture is like suicide. If you’re contemplating it just because you want to impress a bunch of people, don’t bother. No one will notice. (Even Loic and Jason had to announce to the world they were doing a mass unfollowing to insure they were noticed.)

Here’s why. Let’s say you unfollow 5000 people on Twitter. It’s not like there are 5000 people in an auditorium who came only to hear you, who are now gasping in amazement and stunned by your maneuver. That 5000 is made up of individuals, many of whom will be oblivious to the fact you unfollowed them and some of whom will be pleased. There is no 5000-person impact. CNN will not report it.

If on the other hand you feel the quality of your social network relationships has deteriorated, then maybe you do want to unfollow a bunch of people. Just keep it to yourself. Anyone who boasts they are going to ignore a bunch of people, essentially snubbing them, doesn’t have very good manners.

Tags: twitter, facebook, follow, unfollow, followers, mass

Mainstream media are having a field day scaring consumers into thinking that criminals are preying on users of social networks that disclose their geographic locations. The idea is that you “check in” with a service like Brightkite or Foursquare, letting your friends know you are at a restaurant, the office, the gym, etc., and this alerts criminals that you are away from home so they can burglarize you. There have even been some widely publicized incidents in which this has happened.

“God damn Foursquare! I’m ruined!” Image: neophobic.ro

The latest round of site traffic-building scare tactics was spurred by Please Rob Me, a web site that lists people who disclose through social networks that they have left their homes. And according to confused.com:

“Darren Black, head of home insurance at Confused.com, says ‘criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering, even using Google Earth and Street View to plan their burglaries with military precision’…He added that home insurance providers assessing claims are starting to take information revealed on the sites into account, noting that ‘we may, in (the) future, see insurers declining claims if they believe the customer is negligent’.”

Come on, folks. This is War of the Worlds-style panic. It’s too early for law enforcement to compile this data, but I would guess the percentage of crimes made possible by social network-derived information is statistically insignificant. The only thing that makes sense about this is the idea that insurance companies would be excited about a new way to deny consumer claims.

Do you still drive a car to work or school? Or walk to the bus stop? Because any one of these activities signals potential burglars that you are not home. And in fact, these indicators are much more accurate than a social network check-in, which can be faked or time delayed.

Are there privacy risks to using so-called location-based services? Absolutely. If you’re an adult, for example, you should never check in at home (except with services like Rally that are smart enough to hide the user’s home location), and never check in at your kids’ schools, karate studio, friends’ houses, etc. Letting people know about your schedule and destinations might be foolish. Letting them know how to track your kids is stupid.

For the sake of decorum, don’t check in at the movies or a bar when you’ve called in sick at work. Don’t check in at a competitor’s location. Don’t check in at a rehab center. Use some common sense.

One of the few people who have the right ideas about privacy is Charlene Li, former Forrester analyst and founder of the Altimeter Group, who calls Google’s new “Buzz” a “parental control nightmare.” After taking Buzz away from her children, Li checked out Google’s Terms of Service for Buzz and:

“discovered that buried in Google’s terms of service somewhere is that children under the age of 13 are not allowed to have Gmail accounts. But unlike Facebook, which requires that people enter their birthdates when setting up accounts, Google makes no such attempt to educate people signing up for Gmail that such a provision is in place.”

And my advice for younger kids using location-based services is, “Don’t your parents pay any attention to what you are doing? You shouldn’t be on Foursquare!”

Anyone who thinks Terms of Service will keep younger users from signing up for online services is deluded or lazy. As Li describes it, she tries to stay ahead of her kids by being informed about new services as they are released.

The bottom line is that privacy is a complicated matter. True social network privacy protection can only happen when a number of things are in alignment:

• Developers of social networks and services need to be more responsible about privacy protections and put the safety of consumers, particularly young people, ahead of advertisers’ needs
• Any compromise of privacy, release of information, or connection to another site or service, should only be done with full, open disclosure to the consumer and the opportunity to decline
• Social network new user registration should by default give the user 100% of the privacy protection available on the site, with the option to knowingly and affirmatively remove protections solely at the user’s discretion
• Users must take the time to read and understand the Terms of Service and privacy controls for a site
• Parents need to keep an open conversation going with their children, and educate themselves as to the potential exposure of any new technology

Don’t panic. The Martians aren’t really coming. As Marshall McLuhan said, “Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.”

Tags: Foursquare, location-based services, Google Buzz, privacy, please rob me

When I first joined Twitter, I could not imagine what it would be like to have 10,000 followers, or as I prefer to describe it, to have 10,000 people subscribe to my updates. (Jesus had followers. Twitter users have subscribers. It’s not the same thing.)

I got there honestly, and therefore, a lot more slowly than people who were better at amassing followers for the sake of numeric bragging rights. I never participated in any schemes to add followers, and in fact, did not participate in “Follow Friday” and came out strongly against what I saw as a pyramid scheme. When I was within a few hundred of 10,000, I offered a copy of my SocialCorp book to my 10,000th subscriber and a copy to a randomly selected person who tweeted about it, but by then I was certain to reach 10K any way. If you do the math on the cost of a couple of books, my 10,000th subscriber was really expensive.

When I signed up in June, 2007, Twitter, launched publicly in July, 2006, was less than a year old. Everyone was an early adopter. The conversations were engaging and stimulating. This has changed, and it’s partly my fault for following people whose tweets do not interest me, or in some cases, offend me.

It’s time to review my criteria for following/following back people on Twitter. Way back when (sounding like a wagon master on the Oregon Trail), I actively sought people in two distinct categories — friends and present/former colleagues, and people in allied fields, like public relations, social media, corporate communications, writing and publishing. As I spent time on Twitter, observing early adopters and the triumphs and missteps of the first businesses using Twitter as a communications tool, I became very well informed in these areas, and was often quite amused. As new users joined Twitter, many of them gravitated to me and the other one million or so people who were already there. So much of the early communications on Twitter involved discussions like “What is Twitter?” “Is it for real?” “How does a business use Twitter?” “What a waste of time!” and “What’s the etiquette here?”

Somewhere along the line, that all changed, and now about 25 percent of my new followers are multi-level marketers (MLMers), spammers, people actively trying to sell me goods and services, pornographers, and “make $3000 a minute while you sleep” hucksters. At the same time, Twitter grew from well under a million users to around 20 million today.

My original followers policy was to follow people in the categories I’ve described who interested me, people who came to my attention through an interesting article or presentation; and people I met at conferences and on panel discussions. I also looked for people who lived in my area, rural Santa Cruz County. I would follow back any new follower who appeared to be a “real” person and not a spam or porn account, or some kind of bot.

My online conversational style is to engage with anyone interesting. I don’t segregate by political affiliation, religion, profession, gender, etc. While this is an inclusive policy, it has led to too much noise in my Twitter experience. My inclusive policies regarding political discussion, for example, which once allowed me to see many sides to a political issue, have now subjected me to fringe discussions which are often hateful and offensive.

And I know I’ll get a bunch of grief for revealing this, but I don’t really care for pets. And I don’t have any. But I have early Twitter friends who have pets. (This is like saying I know people who wear shoes.) Others who have come along have observed that I have pet lovers as followers and have assumed I am one, too. But I am not. So people who sell/market to pet owners target me, and they couldn’t be further off their demographic.

I forged some great friendships during those early times, and had my brushes with celebrity, like many Twitter users have. It was great watching Comcast, Dell, Ford, and others as they joined Twitter and began to use it seriously. Recently, for example,  I noticed someone tweeting about their enthusiasm for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I replied that they should follow @kfc_colonel, the official Twitter account for KFC. @kfc_colonel replied to me “Joel, you’re the Colonel’s guy. You were there when we had more herbs & spices than we had followers. Thanks!” It’s nice to have a personal connection with a company. I’ve had the chance on Twitter to “talk” to Tony Hsieh of Zappos, MC Hammer, and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears. Alyssa Milano even sent me a direct message! (I sleep with it under my pillow.)

So Twitter is what I make of it. And it’s sort of cool to have 10,000 subscribers, but the number of followers I have is not as important as who they are and how I interact with them. And that’s up to me. Anyone who says “Twitter sucks, there are too many spammers,” or “Ashton Kutcher ruined Twitter,” can easily take back control of their Twitter existence. That’s what I’m trying to do.