Mega post: What does digital communication really mean?

Yes, it’s a big one.

Filed under: Advertising, Branding, Culture, DCS, Facebook, Marketing, Media, New Media, Opinion, SEO, Synergy, Theory

Zuckerberg. He’s not the messiah; he’s a very naughty boy!

Ethics of social media, web 2.0 and their potential utilisation by brands.

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The ethics of UGC/web 2.0

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In 2006, TIME magazine proclaimed the year of ‘you’, the year of web 2.0. The year where ‘the many wrested power from the few and help one another for nothing.’

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That sounds very new age and hopeful, but looking back (and considering Gartner’s hype cycle), although things have changed, we didn’t get the ‘community creative utopia’ we were all promised.

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What happened?

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I wouldn’t describe myself as a Marxist, but Andrew McStay’s theory of UGC/web 2.0 as ‘surplus labour’ (Marx, 1867). Today we call ‘surplus labour’ unpaid work. UGC and web 2.0 is the work which creates value on the respective websites, drives traffic and earns revenue. Facebook users, Wikia authors, and YouTube gurus are ‘at work at the wheels of capitalism’ as much the Tesco checkout assistant.

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Q:  UGC is ‘working for the man’, why do people participate in web 2.0 at all. Why do people work for a for-profit company without pay?

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A: People do not know they are working for free, and they enjoy it.

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Where’s the unethical behaviour here then? I don’t believe it is unethical in and of itself  for users to submit UGC as ‘surplus labour’; users are getting a ‘free’ medium to discuss their content, and sites need to cover their running costs, and generate acceptable profit margins (the web is not, in large, a charity). If users don’t have a problem with working for free, who are we to tell them otherwise?

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For me the ethical problem lies with audiences (in general) not knowing that they are effectively working for free. If those audiences knew that it is their work that generates billions of dollars of revenue for web 2.0 sites across the world, they act differently online. Users should be told (in the nicest possible way) that they are being ‘used’.

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Some Marxists will take offense to how UGC creativity is assigned a market value with web 2.0, but I believe this is a bit of a straw man argument; if people value something, and are willing to give time or money to acquire or experience it, it has value whether you like it or not.

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Moving on… to Facebook

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Since my (and my friends) Facebook statuses (and other FB UGC) earn Facebook the majority of its revenue (through advertising), it would be fair to assume that Facebook would pay more respect to their ‘workers

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Despite Facebook’s disregard for privacy, it is still one of the most popular tools used by brands for CSR, and brand-consumer conversations.

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What does it say about the brands when they use a site like Facebook, to promote them being ethical and considerate to consumers? It’s like a vegetarian buying groceries ar a butcher’s; a complete contradiction. How are audiences expected to take CSR seriously, when the medium itself is ‘tainted’?

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Web 2.0, TIME: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

Gartner hype cycle: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp

Marx’s ‘surplus labour: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_labour

Andy McStay: http://advertising-communications-culture.blogspot.com/

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Also, Shephard (2009) ‘participation on web not equal’, therefore UGC creation not equal either. Balance of creativity on the net damaged. The net is populated by ‘the loud kid in the class who would always shout out the answer’.

Filed under: Advertising, Branding, Creative, Culture, DCS, Facebook, Marketing, Media, New Media, Opinion, Points of interest, SEO, Social

I know what you did last summer, and last night.

Online privacy in the UK/Airstrip One.

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Havard law man Charles Fried, defined privacy in volume 77 of the  Yale law journal (1968) as “control over knowledge about oneself”, or controlling access to your personal information. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the internet, this privacy is nowhere to be seen. The ease of access to your information, and the demand for ‘free’ online content has, in part, caused us to lose huge chunks of our online (and offline) privacy.

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Websites all across the net need a source of revenue to meet web design, management and hosting costs, and this revenue has to come from somewhere. If you are not going to pay for it, value will be stolen from you, often without your consent.

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Public awareness of the issues surrounding privacy, and the misuse of public information, have been bought up by literary works such as Orwell’s ’1984′ and Kafka’s ‘Zer process’, which have highlighted the importance of privacy in ‘modern’ times. Fried (19680 argues that privacy is a fundamental part of liberty, if we don’t have privacy online, how can we have true liberty.

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The scary thing is that most of us do not know that we are being ‘watched’, by business and digital miscreant alike.

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The main enemies of online privacy include:

Browser cookies: often just make the web more convenient to use, like storing site settings and usernames, but can be used to track site history and browsing habits.

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Flash cookies/LSO/super cookie: This reclusive menace is similar to browser cookies in what they do (convenience and tracking), but different in that most people are unaware of their existence, and are more difficult for the average user to remove.

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Google (http://www.theonion.com/articles/google-responds-to-privacy-concerns-with-unsettlin,16891/): basically one of the worst anti-privacy offenders in the world, including snooping on people’s homes, recording unsecured wireless connections and trespassing on private housing peabody estates to take pictures of the front of houses for local youths to eye up for theft. Thanks Google.

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BT Webwise: BT will soon be rolling out their new ‘service’, which uses ISP based deep packet processing, to record every bit of up and downstream data to analyse your (well, BT customer’s) browsing habits and interests. This information will be sold to advertisers to provide you with more personalised adverts. Interestingly, there is no true opt-out. Scarily I’m with BT, not only am I being ripped off, but soon to have my every online action recorded, analysed and categorized. Lovely jubbly.

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Social networks/Facebook: An interesting one, apologists would claim that social networking sites only make public what you allow, but Facebook have changed privacy permissions in the past. Also, Google and Facebook, make most of your information accessible by all by default. This would not normally be a problem but, even though I said in my last blog post that people are not stupid, most people are –digitally- stupid, and make assumptions about the service they are using, sometimes with incredibly embarrassing results. Then there are the countless Facebook apps just squirming for the chance to access you and your friend’s private information.

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Spyware: Given that many online users don’t really understand the risks of spyware and browser exploits, it is unsurprising how common spyware is on PC’s around the globe. Spyware is essentially a virus, but is different from viruses in that they very rarely make themselves known to the PC user, do no physical damage but steal information like keystrokes, bank account details etc, and are not detectable by most of the popular anti-virus programs.

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It has got to the point where, if the information is online, or on your PC, then it is publicly accessible by all.

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What does this mean to advertisers? The more the industry ‘takes the mickey’, the more public distrust and anger will be towards businesses. As privacy becomes more of a concern, users will be more difficult to engage with digitally. I believe that if privacy was better respected online, people would ‘lurk’ less and engage (2-way) more with online content.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/19/facebook_privacy_sucks/

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/articles/lso/ Straight from the horses mouth#

http://www.google.com/privacy/faq.html

https://www.privacyinternational.org/

http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/index.php

Filed under: Advertising, Branding, DCS, Facebook, Flickr, Marketing, Media, New Media, Points of interest, SEO, Social

So, you want a new jacket? Right this way sir.

Google AdWords, SEO and Blacks retail store.

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This week, I’ll be directing my ‘little grey cells’ towards Search Engine Marketing, it’s components, and using Blacks (link) as an example, show what I believe to be general best practice when it comes to an effective SEM campaign.

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By my definition, search engine marketing (SEM), features two main strategies; ‘paid’ and ‘organic’.

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‘Paid’ SEM refers to the practice of paying search engine companies in order to get higher rankings in search results. In practice this means Google AdWords; where businesses ‘bid’ for the right to pay for their site to be included on the first page of search results (typically the top 3) based upon search terms they have chosen. This is either paid for via CTR/PPC or CPM/Cost per K-impressions.

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Do this now, (or don’t, I can’t force you), type in ‘android phone’ into Google search. When I did this the top 3 search results were from UK mobile network operators trying to sell me phones. They have paid for the terms phone and android so that I see their websites before any others. This also allows brands to reach me without me actively searching for that particular brand directly. People only search for a brand they know, which means AdWords could save brands money on traditional message-based advertising.

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The second part of SEM, organic search, or search engine optimisation is a much more complicated ‘theory’. Once upon a time, it centred on ‘meta data’ and site word content, which was used to gauge relevance to the search topic (webmasters fine-tuned this information to get better page rankings), but due to abuse by unscrupulous site owners this technique is rarely used. Nowadays, most search engines measure the amount of links back to your site, which Google sees as ‘votes’ to a particular websites legitimacy and relevance, to certain search terms (though this is also vulnerable to abuse, see ‘spamdexing’).

This new ‘voting system’ has created an interesting scenario for brands and businesses; to get your brand high up on the organic (and trusted) page rankings, you must get people to link to you. But how do you get people to link to you (and talk about you online?).

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In my opinion, the key to truly effective SEM, is through ‘content creation’. People link to content that represents added value to them, and using AdWords to promote the content. This goes hand in hand with the ‘new’ wave of advertising theory; post 2010 is the age of permission marketing. We can’t tell people what to do or feel, we cannot interrupt their productive life; we must become part of that productive life. Consumer/audiences are not passive, they are not stupid, and we must get them to come to us.

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Take for example, Blacks, a hiking and camping retail store. Being a camping and hiking specialist means they could easily create how-to videos on various aspects of camping, like the best place to pitch a tent when it’s raining, or the best sleeping bag to use in certain conditions. They could also maintain a forum where ‘industry professionals’, ‘prosumers’ and enthusiasts could get advice and opinions from each other on all things outdoors. Blogs can’t hurt either, as long as they are sincere and interesting, serving the interests of consumers and not just ‘company/product updates’. Paid for Adwords would be best used to direct relevant traffic and audiences towards your online content.

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If you contribute to the (relevant) communities, those communities will link back to you in blogs and forum and, BOOM, up goes your page rank.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_adwords http://www.blacks.co.uk/home.html http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/925-why-online-pr-and-seo-go-hand-in-hand

So what, I’m linking to Wikipedia, get over it. They are not in alphabetical order either. Shocking.

Filed under: Advertising, DCS, Facebook, Marketing, Media, SEO, Theory