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Nov 30 2009

Can Marketers Serve the Female Economy?

November 30, 2009 – 8:02 am

by Geoff Livingston

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Joan of Arc by D.B. King

Since the holiday shopping crush has begun in earnest, perhaps we can acknowledge one of the great undercurrents of our time, the rise of the female economy. To quote Harvard Business Review, “Women now drive the world economy.” This reality will become even more obvious as we pull out of the recession, but can marketers adapt?

Traditionally, when faced with a predominantly female stakeholder, marketers created the same product in pink, purple, and pastels, rather than design their products to actually meet the needs of modern women. Wrong approach. Dell learned this with its pink laptop controversy earlier this year.  The same thing can be said for some well discussed communications programs (hello, Motrin!).

With women driving a vast majority of purchasing decisions – yes, even those big screen TVs – marketers must adapt.  The days of pink TV sets won’t work anymore (though some will try).

Consider how brands like Banana Republic have evolved. From end to end, they have come to understand their female customer. The in-store experience matches their research, but so does their product marketing.

A Banana Republic size 6 is really a size 6, and will always be that.  Different style lines match women’s actual body shapes, from petite to tall, from slender to full figure. The result? Women don’t have to go through agonizing hours to see if the 6 is really a 6. That means online sales, ladies and gentlemen, lots of them.  Why? Because women really don’t want to go shopping, they want more time! They want to live, have a career and a family, and yes, maybe even go to the gym (source: the aforementioned HBR article).

Of course, that brings up another very savvy female marketing organization, Curves. Focusing on efficient 30-minute workouts designed for women, Curves has built phenomenal word of mouth marketing, revolutionizing the fitness industry. BTW, Curves is a male owned company. CEO Gary Heavin understands that marketing to women means understanding their fitness needs, not forcing preconceived gym notions into the market. Heavin has succeeded garnering a significant portion of the female exercise market in spite of his pro-life views.

So communicators face the great challenge of adapting or failing (as if social media wasn’t enough). It comes down to this: Because it has been a male dominated world marketing has catered to the presumed buying power. Now that buying power belongs to women, marketers must change theirfocus to what their “new” customer wants.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Geoff Livingston | Posted in Digital Marketing, PR Industry Trends | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (10)
Nov 23 2009

Top Ten Social Media Turkeys in 2009

November 23, 2009 – 7:44 am

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by Geoff Livingston

What better way to role into the Thanksgiving holiday than to poke a little fun at some turkeys? We can all use a laugh.  The following list represents some of 2009’s biggest Turkeys in social media.

1) Ashton Kutcher: Really? Really?  Did we really make this guy into the Twitter icon of the year? Dear God, help us all.

2) Jim Edwards, a Ketchum executive, who bagged Memphis on Twitter before rolling into FedEx HQ for a big meeting on digital media. Whoops!

3) Social media experts who got relentlessly bagged throughout the year, and rightly so. They never got beyond Twitter or Facebook.

4) Michael Arrington: I’m getting tired of the theatrics, from Le Web to the endless embargo drama to the libel thing.  Hell, the guy even hangs out with adults that still play with puppets. C’mon!

5) The Obama Administration: The promise of Gov 2.0 was overwhelming, and the incoming president and his team did nothing to quell the hype. The end result? Real bureaucracy crushed hopeful audacity. Now Obama has to deal with the Nobel Peace Prize fallout. Poor fellow.

Toptenturkeys

6) Social media conference organizers and agents who continue to turn the other cheek on potential female speakers. Big ole turkeys!

7) Miley Cyrus for the Twitter quitting rap song. I hear you, Miley, but was all of this drama really necessary? Just quit and move on.

8) Corporate America: For continued failures in social media adoption.  This one came in via an anonymous DM on twitter: “No one I work for gets (or even wants to get) social media.” All bark, no bite. Control means more to CxOs.

9) The NFL: The league that likes to control it all (pull up those socks!) goes even further! I’m not a football fan, but as a marketer does banning Twitter really make sense? Fans love real sports identities and their updates! 

10) Peter Shankman for taking Jim Edwards to task about his Memphis tweet, then doing the exact same thing to Rochester, NY nine months later for the 2009 Northeast Regional PRSA Conference. Shankman spent the first five minutes of his lunch keynote apologizing for his hypocrisy. Fortunately for Peter, it didn’t get widely tweeted.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Geoff Livingston | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (23)
Nov 20 2009

Conscious Capitalism/CSR Creates True Fans

November 20, 2009 – 12:05 am

The really old school capitalists like to say that the only business of business is to provide a return to shareholders. Long before the concept of “stakeholders” came into being, business was conducted, customers and suppliers were treated fairly or not, and it all somehow moved along. Now, companies need to do better. The concept of “conscious capitalism” is taking hold.

Companies concerned with social responsibilities are finding many new places to carry on their activities, and in the process of talking and doing, they are creating

Freedigitalphotos.net

Freedigitalphotos.net

value for all of their stakeholders. Add this expansion of business interests to the explosion of media and the advent of social networking, and you get very positive tools for boosting capitalism, as well as some strange phenomena.

It strikes me as  just a little odd, for instance, that a company can now attract a “fan” for good customer service, when it really was Bob in customer service who provided the heroics that resulted in getting what should be expected and given to every customer. Have we lowered our standards to the point where getting a normal result is exceeding expectations?  Also, I don’t think company fan pages is a trend that bodes well if too much celebrity is attached to companies. Many of them simply don’t deserve all the attention — and certainly not our adulation. (But, I digress.)

One very interesting frontier for this new dynamic is what’s being called the post-carbon economy. What previously sufficed as measures of good citizenship will no longer, as companies will have to show us their costs to society so that we can compare those costs to the benefits they bring us.  Customers are increasingly focused on this from the perspective of water, waste, energy use and other previously uncounted impacts. Other stakeholders are able to get their contrary perspectives before large audiences via social media. Good public relations demands a game plan for this new CSR environment, and, with a nod to CRO Magazine, here are a few ways to address some of the challenges they covered recently:

  1. If you are in a traditional industry — energy, mining, chemicals, heavy manufacturing and the like — get carbon savvy in the same way your process improvement teams are doing it. Be conversant it all of the measures being used in your company.
  2. Learn how employee health and safety, sustainability, governance, risk and compliance activities in the company are being conducted, specifically how they are having an impact on profit, and build this knowledge into your plans for various stakeholders.
  3. Track peers, competitors and best practices in Corporate Register or in CRO (link to sign-up page). There is a wealth of information on what others are doing to create value for their companies with the new capitalism.
  4. Help your company move from defense to offense. The public relations function is ideally situated on the “border” between a company and its stakeholders. There is going to be increased transparency by regulation, and the public relations function should be in the business making the transparency serve the business. It will be particulary important to translate business practices into benefits for stakeholders. Sometimes this will mean kudos for the company, but more often it will mean making and communicating changes that will allow the company to improve its citizenship over time. (This is tough work.)
  5. Don’t be sucked in by the “going green” mantra prevalent in so many businesses. In this age of increased transparency, it won’t be about the labels of “green” versus “dirty.” It will be about innovation in product, services and in citizenship.
  6. Move away from the “campaign” mentality altogether. Quarterly themes of green, sustainable, diversity, human rights, etc. must move out from the realm of messaging and into the realm of exchange of ideas. PR is ideally situated to help nurture the values that foster these principles in conscious capitalist companies.
  7. Consider a more interactive online presence, built by your Web consulting team or available through such products as Report-Works.
  8. Follow your peer group online if they are posting information about their programs. A good example is McDonald’s “Values in Practice” Blog, “through the eyes” of VP Bob Langert, who has posted, for instance, on “The Eighth Sin of Greenwashing,” among other topics.

I may never get used to companies having fan pages, but if just some of the coming challenges in this new social and media world are handled well, there will at least be a reason to salute the top practicioners of conscious capitalism. Corporate Responsibility Officer recently reported, btw, that the best companies in CSR outpoint their competitors in profits by 26%.

That’s certainly enough to create some shareholder fans!

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Michael Whitlow | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (9)
Nov 19 2009

HIPAA: The 800-Pound Gorilla

November 19, 2009 – 8:00 am
Photo courtesy of Kiwanja

Photo courtesy of Kiwanja

by Jenn Riggle

Let’s just acknowledge the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Social media gives legal departments heartburn. While this is a problem for all industries, it’s an even bigger issue for health care because of a little something called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, more commonly known as HIPAA.

The irony is that HIPAA standards were created to help hospitals and healthcare providers electronically share patient information. These regulations are so complicated that the Dept. of Health and Human Services needed 25 pages to summarize them on its website. Virtually no one, including privacy experts, understands the rules, which is why hospitals are hesitant to adopt new technology or find new ways to share information. This impacts everything from doctors using e-mail to contact their patients to establishing a hospital Facebook page or tweeting during surgery.

Historically, hospitals like to control the message and limit the number of people who can speak on behalf of the organization. However, this is no longer the case. Hospitals can inadvertently violate HIPAA regulations, even for something as simple as a staff member posting a video or photo taken at the hospital that has a patient in the background who has not given written consent.

The penalties for breaking HIPAA regulations are hefty, so like an 800-pound gorilla, hospitals need to take HIPAA seriously. Civil fines can be as high as $1,500,000 for violating the same standard multiple times in one calendar year. And if someone knowingly misuses patient health information, criminal penalties can range from a $250,000 fine to 10 years in prison.

To help address some of these concerns, the Massachusetts Medical Law Report recently published a set of guidelines for physicians who choose to engage in social media.

It’s only natural that lawyers and risk management people get nervous about social media. But the good news is that hospitals already understand the importance of patient confidentiality, requiring written permission from patients before using or sharing their heath information. So in many ways, they just need to take what they’ve been doing all along and apply it to social networking platforms.

Harvard Business Review recently looked at why organizations need “less lawyering and more encouraging” when it comes to social media policies. There’s something to this. Organizations can’t be afraid of using social media, but they need to know the rules and understand how to use it responsibly.

Educate employees so they know what is expected of them if they engage in social media in an official or unofficial capacity. This is particularly important since most hospital employees do not have Internet access during work hours and have to access hospital social networking sites from home.

However, the government recently passed some new HIPAA privacy and security rules. So get ready, things are only going to get more complicated.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (17)
Nov 18 2009

Should Photographers Rethink New Media Rights?

November 18, 2009 – 9:00 am

by Wyatt Wood

As a semi-pro photographer I encounter unique situations everyday involving photography, rights management and social media. Note: every locality has their own laws that any person taking pictures should abide by – this post is not about the legality or rights of taking photos as a photographer (while it may touch on these points). Also in this post I am only speaking about legal/regional areas where I have personal experience, please share your own experiences and knowledge in the comments.

Thomas Hawk, one of the most respected photographers in arena of photographer’s rights, has plenty to say about the moral and legal aspect of limiting a photographer’s public photography access.

As an overview, in the US, there may be limitations to publishing a photo which you take. Essentially, for an amateur photograph, “the display of the photo can’t be maliciously untrue, or humiliate, ridicule, or reveal embarrassing and personal facts about a non-newsworthy person.” So to publish an image of someone you need their permission. Thus photographers carry Model Release forms for such purposes. However, if a person is out in public, they have no reasonable expectation of privacy so you can take their picture. So what does this have to do with social media? Aside from each network’s definition of media rights the usage of this media is expanding the connectivity and control of said digital property.

Since the dawn of the Internet, there have been battles over control and usage rights of digital media pushing beyond copyright. Recently, Facebook jumped into hot water over the issue of digital rights ownership when they changed their terms of service. I believe they are the most notable of any of the digital rights issues based on how outspoken the topic became and overall community reaction. Apparently this was resolved to include more descriptive information protecting the company from content being residual on a users profile etc. However, it begs the question who owns the rights?

During a photo shoot this past weekend, I was asked to solely publish the photos to Facebook and Flickr and tag the models, make up artist and clothing designer. I have all the appropriate releases and permissions. This is the first social media network only publication “release” that I’ve dealt with intrigued me to think about the implications. My Facebook account has switched from a way to just post personal (family) photos to now a distribution platform for other individual’s media.

In my mind this raises the question as to who owns legitimate rights to the photo? Technically, based on copyright since I took the photo, I own it. But ethically, the models who posed and the designers and other individuals who made the shot are also “involved” owners. So what if I decide I want to remove the photos or modify my account in some way that they are no longer accessible to the individuals tagged – do they have a (present or future) right to the media or choices to its publication?

Aside from the legal rights issue – the technical ability to find and tag these photos has been overcome. The release of the automatic Facebook app Photo Tagger , a free third-party application uses facial recognition technology to tag photos of people. Even Flickr has added the ability to tag friends, similar to Facebook, in a photostream. So the question about “ownership” becomes more complex given the many levels of licensing that Flickr (and other social networks) utilize.

After reading this facinating report on exposing that social media sites are less than helpful at letting photographers maintain control of their intellectual property I began to question if social media will help shift the focus of a photo being an individual’s right to manage – to a captured experience that anyone involved has a voice in publication and distribution? Not necessarily talking about quashing or censorship of digital media but rather crowd-sourcing ownership and rights management. Is there good to come from allowing users access to images, video or other digital media that may contain an image or clip of themselves regardless of the media owner?

Finally, with the explosion of mobile usage and the ability to capture still imagery and video and publish – beyond just a photo-journalistic approach what aspects should be considered to properly handle user rights?

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Dave McNamara | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)
Nov 17 2009

Social Media: How Much Is A Good Thing?

November 17, 2009 – 1:06 pm

by Mike Mulvihill

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Photo: yospyn.com

A survey from the CMO Club bemoans that four out of five CMOs allocate less that 10 percent of their budgets to “experimenting” through social media and non-traditional communications channels.  This is juxtaposed against the rising use of social media – more than 35 percent of adult Internet users have profiles on social media networks up just eight percent in 2005.  Just to add to add more fuel to the fire, Oxford Dictionary just named “unfriend” as the 2009 Word of the Year.

 As a marketer, I just shake my head wondering why we keep measuring social media in old ways – like expenditures.  And using social media like other marketing tools to “push out” our messages. How often do we need to be reminded that social media is about engaging customers and potential customers in a meaning way. Is $5 million of a $100 million budget too much or too little?  Well, social media isn’t all that expensive in the hierarchy of marketing expenditures.  The best money you can spend is on people to staff your social media effort – just look at Southwest Airlines as a great example. (With Southwest, it doesn’t hurt that the social media effort totally supports a brand persona born through years of traditional customer engagement.)

 If the social media effort is old school, then the $5 million is way too much and it’s probably alienating more people than it is engaging (thereby decreasing the effectiveness of the rest of the marketing mix).  If it is well done, then perhaps one less $1 million TV spot is better spent on more, equally effective social media.

 Lots of people have lots of pet peeves about how social media is used in a disingenuous manner. Many organizations and corporations still don’t really know what to do with social media.  Some I know have taken more than a year struggling to create social media guidelines that “stop the productivity drain” while allowing social media to be used for customer support and marketing .

 On the marketing side, a year is an eternity, especially when it’s about half the average CMO’s shelf life of 23.2 months. Like many of my clients and prospects, CMOs are bombarded with requests from non-marketing types, emboldened by all they see and hear about social media, asking why the organization is not doing this or that social media tactic. The result can be launching any social media effort in support of other marketing efforts (i.e., push out strategies) rather than the right social media engagement strategies. Let’s just hope that the crossroads between the need to keep up appearances (increasing social media expenditures) and the real value of the social media programs funded doesn’t end up being the ruin of a good thing.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Mike Mulvihill | Posted in Digital Marketing, PR Industry Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (9)
Nov 16 2009

Should We Trust the Crowd?

November 16, 2009 – 7:48 am

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Overexposed crowd image by Victoria Peckham

by Geoff Livingston

One of the strangest aspects of newfound freedom is the want to run riot over everything. You can see this with attitudes towards free content, popular theories, unconference and crowdsourced conference content, and general crowd-sourcing initiatives. In reality, these initiatives bring great creativity to bear (many outweigh the one or the few), but they require management. Unfettered crowdsourcing leads to hit or miss wisdom.

One of the more interesting articles or blog posts I have read on the topic came from the Harvard Business Review’s discussion of Cisco’s recent crowdsourcing effort. Cisco found the effort to be very productive, but it needed to invest significant crowdsourced product management resources to effectively harvest the raw ideas.

MIT’s Alex Penton found the same phenomena in social networks. Idea markets can laud one idea over and over again, which may or may not be a good one. Meanwhile, other ideas are left to sit on the side of the street, regardless of their potential value. Popularity reigns supreme.

This matches my experiences as well. While I’ve seen some magnificent achievements via the crowd, I’ve seen some really bad things become popular, too. Twitter reminds me more of a high school cafeteria than a place of great wisdom, but then every time you give up, something like the Iran election happens.

One of the reasons I am very selective about attending the various unconferences you see is because the crowdsourced content has been hit or miss. For me the various X-camps have to be taken in the sense of mining. I know I’m going to get a lot of raw ore, and the diamonds are few and far between. If the topic is extremely prescient or the people in attendance meet one of my core targeted stakeholder communities, then I’ll go. Otherwise, it’s likely to be a waste of time (you get what you pay for).

Don’t get me wrong, crowdsourcing offers great benefits and true potential.  But like an unregulated marketplace, you may find it works, or goes terribly awry.  Organizations need to implement management tools to ensure they get the full benefit of the crowd.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Geoff Livingston | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)
Nov 13 2009

New GE Brains Boost Buzz

November 13, 2009 – 12:01 am

Paul Glader’s article last weekend in The Wall Street Journal online about a new twist in the ongoing GE up-from-the ashes saga gave me hope that public relations people will get their day in the sun at this famously left-brained outpost of capitalism.GE

I’m a great fan of GE — even took some Six Sigma green belt training. Generally,the company has been known for performance management and other pushing and pulling of the human psyche into line with things measurable. This new twist may signal a meeting of minds – left and right — with the new Immelt mantra of growth, change and flexibility. Glader characterized this new approach as ”striking a humbler note after stumbling badly in the downturn.”

GE has spent over $1 billion a year in training, and they are now putting 1,000 managers through their paces to learn how to react to sometimes imperceptible signs of change. They want executives to learn to listen. While this is not entirely new at GE or any other company, it is heartening in its admission: “we don’t have all the answers.”  And, it’s good for the approach to marketing and PR we advocate on The Buzz Bin.

This new wave at GE is also good from the point of view of the a right-brain dominant person who had to learn to deal in a left-brain-dominated world of engineers during a 15-year stint in chemicals. Daniel Pink says the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The new keys are going to ”the creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers” he writes in A Whole New Mind – Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (I didn’t notice in chemicals, BTW). It is interesting to read between the lines of Glader’s reporting to see that GE is wanting to deal more with context than text; the big picture as compared to details. From the company that applys “performance metrics” to almost everything, this is refreshing.

So, as we’ve moved from farmers to factory workers to knowledge workers to this new creator and empathizer age, public relations should find ways to reassert itself based on Pink’s advice:

  1. Integrate the emotionally engaging into the purely functional
  2. Create an involving narrative; not just the facts
  3. Conduct that symphony – synthesize in addition to analyze
  4. Look at what makes others tick (hint: it’s beyond logic)
  5. Play
  6. Do something trancendental rather than just accumulate experiences or things

Peter Merholz of Harvard Business Publishing was quoted by Andrew Taylor in his The Artful Manager blog:

The supposed dichotomy between “business thinking” and “design thinking” is foolish…. Instead, what we must understand is that in this savagely complex world, we need to bring as broad a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to bear on whatever challenges we have in front of us. While it’s wise to question the supremacy of “business thinking,” shifting the focus only to “design thinking” will mean you’re missing out on countless possibilities.

It seems to me that the business-savvy public relations leader will fit right in.

PS: Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop picked up Right Brain/Left Brain Marketing recently, where Barry Vucsko holds forth on the subject in the context of branding. Worth a look, too.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Michael Whitlow | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)
Nov 12 2009

Social Media vs. Corporate Carpetbaggers

November 12, 2009 – 8:02 am

by Jenn Riggle

Photo courtesy of Chrysaora

Photo courtesy of Chrysaora

Social media can help bring people together and drive social activism. And more importantly, it can help level the playing field when corporate carpetbaggers knock on people’s doors.

Not unlike the California Gold Rush of 1849, oil and gas companies are moving to rural areas across the country to access the precious natural gas that lies beneath the ground — and in people’s backyards.

Last week, I had an opportunity to meet with Chris Csikszentmihályi, director of the Center for Future Civic Media, to hear how the Center is bringing people together through something called “civic media” and “click-through activism.” The idea is that communities can use social media to support grassroots efforts, and in this case, help people defend themselves from opportunists who are using their money and political clout to their advantage.

The Center, which is on the forefront of social media activism, is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and is funded through a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation.

I was struck by the work the Center is doing with the ExtrACT project, which uses Web-based and mobile tools to help level the playing field when representatives from oil and gas companies, called “landmen,” knock on people’s doors to negotiate gas leases. Many landowners are caught unaware and don’t realize they have negotiating options – or that these companies often use toxic chemicals during the exploration and drilling process, which can seep into the ground water and pollute the environment.

To empower these people, the Center has developed the Landman Report Card (LRC), which provides resources for landowners in Colorado and Ohio, and eventually New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, states that are experiencing booms in natural gas exploration. The Report Card serves as a resource where people can find information, learn about the options they have and share their experiences with landmen.

We’ve seen social media activism gaining in popularity, with everything from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to videos posted on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that showed the death of 26-year-old Neda Soltan, who was hailed as a martyr and became the face of the Iranian protests. Even The Washington Post wrote about this growing trend earlier this year.

According to a 2009 report from the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of Americans 18 to 29 use blogs or social networking sites for political or civic involvement, compared to 17 percent of online users 30-49. By the same token, the report states that people who use social media for civic engagement are more active participants in traditional political and nonpolitical engagements.

Knowledge is power, and by working together, people can make a difference.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (14)
Nov 11 2009

Are You My Mother? And Social Networks

November 11, 2009 – 9:00 am

by: Wyatt Wood

Real life relationships are complex enough, add the digital medium with a sprinkle of ego and the relationship points become more complicated. In a social network defining relationships beyond friendship is a tough problem to solve.

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In the story “Are You My Mother?” by P. D. Eastman, the baby bird explores the world looking to find his mother, confused he asks if each character in the story is his mother. In the end a digger ends up dropping him back home to his real mother. Just like this, it seems every social network touts the idea of being a friend, but none offer ways to satisfactorily address the complexity of the relationship.

The issue of the complexity of digital relationships started with linking to other websites. Defining the link relationship has been an issue since the early days of the Internet, thus the creation of NoFollow and the XHTML Friends Network (XFN). These tools were developed to define in the code what human relationships exist between the two websites. According to Wikipedia, the “nofollow” HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Stemming from this concept the XFN specification outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. Thus, using XFN, machines that parse your web pages, as well as other humans, can see how you are related to the pages you link to.

But it doesn’t stop with links, relationships involve the action (or lack of action) taken between users on a given social network. It can be like high school all over again.

Of all the large digital networks, Facebook has the greatest to gain by improving relationship classifications and tools to manage the dynamics of human relationships. For example in the event of a relationship fallout – the possibility to loose digital property such as tagged images when the relationship status changes is a real problem. But taking an aggressive approach to the relationship such as disliking a friend or their action could add balance to the existing reconnect strategy.

The advent of life streaming added more dynamics to relationship algorithm with more immediate conversation tools and ways to define and track a relationship by time. Sites like LinkedIn have an advantage of defining the relationship based on a time and professional association. Yet, still fall short when truly giving information into how connected you really are with someone because you’re afraid of fallout from six degrees of separation. Below is an example of my Facebook network and how interconnected the relationships are with each other.

Social Graph on Facebook_1257924554568

In the early days of Twitter it was etiquette to just friend back anyone who followed you. Now, unless the user is of interest it is fine to not reciprocate the follow; however, with the addition of the list feature being exclusionary in nature misunderstandings in the network relationships have begun.

Now with geo-location tools like FourSquare – I believe some connections shouldn’t know every move you make. I understand the benefits of advertising your location – such as getting friends together for karaoke; however, I really don’t care if you’ve been to Starbucks 15 times this week. Or more dramatic, announcing your attendance to a Democratic convention with Republican parents who follow your stream can lead to icy conversations around the dinner table. Having location data is great for location aware networks and the ability to offer additional features, yet the ability to merge privacy with relationship classification will be a big advance in social networks.

When it comes down to it, being a big deal is not as big as you think, but I think there needs to be continued thought given to online relationship classifications. The next big thing in relationship dynamics online will be the ability to go beyond just measuring compatibility between individuals to being able to craft (control) your life message based on the individual audience. The concept of a digital “friend” will morph into the classification structures like we have in real life. Be honest, do you really want to be “friends” with a brand? What ways do you think relationship dynamics will change on the Internet in the next 3 months to 5 years?

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Dave McNamara | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)