I received an email from WAYN.com purporting to be from one of my relatives who had added me as a friend on the travel-themed social networking site. The point to note here is that there is a fine line between effective viral marketing and spamming. My view is that manipulating access to users’ address books crosses that line.
Apparently wayn is in play, according to Mark Sweney’s blog for the Guardian, and maybe they’re tying to increase their user base to pump the value - although there are reports on the web of this sort of activity going right back to 2005, as in this post by Evan Erwin.
It is clear that many social networking sites are struggling to find a profitable business model, and that many will fail as a result. I was at a virtual worlds event not so long ago and someone was saying that they were looking to build traffic before they’d start thinking about how to moneterise the business. I’m old enough to have worked my way through the dot.com boom & bust and have seen this sort of woolly thinking before.
So much of the marketing in social media smacks of desperation - and as a result it is likely to cause real reputational harm. You don’t have to loath Facebook as much as The Guardian’s Tom Hodgkinson to be concerned about some of the industries recent antics, although I’m nearly there I must say. Facebook has had to backtrack on its Beacon advertising profiling mechanism following an outcry from users concerned at details of their recent purchases being posted on the site, including tech friendly folks like Charlene Li at Forrester. Her blog post is definitely worth a read.
If Beacon was a bit stupid, Phorm’s work with with BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media has really opened a box of vipers on crack. If BT is your ISP, as it is mine, the idea is that they will be able to track your browsing activities and present you with ‘more appropriate’ advertising on associated sites. The impact of this announcement has been pretty impressive - customers are up in arms and anti-malware firms including Trend-Micro and PC Tools are likely to include Phorm cookies in their adware warning databases. This has led Carphone Warehouse to develop an alternative architecture which will allow customers that opt-out to avoid any need for a Phorn opt-out cookie. BT have not gone down this route, and their proposals for allowing customers to opt out and protect their privacy are flawed. Opponents are now targeting the BT AGM in July, and a petition on the PM’s website has attracted over 13,500 signatories - Chris Williams has an interesting article on the latest developments over at The Register. Also by Chris on The Register, Virgin have announced that they are only ‘looking’ at Phorm - and have no plans for implementing it. In a further twist, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO)
has stated that, under European law, the system must be opt-in. The is likely to blow the revenue figures, which have been based upon an opt-out scenario. It is likely that the flaws in BT’s opt-out mechanism will end in tears if the ICO maintains this position.
The net-net of all this is that social media should be approached with a level of integrity, and the temptation to manipulate customers and their data should be resisted…
Tags: Facebook, ICO, phorm, social media, wayn
The launch of the BDO Showcase in Second life has been pretty high profile. Their Managing Partner, Jeremy Newman (who is the Accountancy Age personality of the year) has this to say on his blog; “I believe that the opening of a Second Life island puts us at the forefront of the latest technological social trends and that it will give us many business opportunities in areas such as cutting our carbon footprint with on-line meetings, presentations and events for staff, clients and alumni; enhancing our recruitment options and opening a new platform to engage with a broad international audience.”
