Chances are you may have at least heard of Dropbox and Pinterest. Dropbox is web-based file-hosting and sharing service––think your “My Documents” folder synced to a “cloud” and accessible within seconds (if not instantly) to other devices and synced computers. The service also makes it very easy to share documents or folders with anyone via a link or email. Pinterest, on the other hand, is a visual, social photo-sharing website and app. Users can “pin” photos, videos, and discussions onto a board that can represent whatever commonality or association they desire. The end result is a series of visuals linked by an author-determined common theme. The posts can be re-pinned, “liked,” or commented on across public posts or among friends.
Stand back for a moment. Both Dropbox and Pinterest were new functionally to the market. Both applications define a new, compartmentalized function (synchronized online file-sharing/storage and social photo-sharing, respectively). Both applications are based on the sharing of content, whether that content is files or visual content organized on “boards.”
Both Dropbox and Pinterest have simple concepts and are beautifully designed, but they do something that the average user doesn’t seek. They provide an innovative method for sharing files and visual content in an organized and intuitive manner. Innovation! Both are thinking about traditional functions in other mediums or systems and reapplying the concept to an online use. Any social media user, specifically someone familiar with Facebook, knows that with the expansion of the “Like” and “Share” buttons to every website, it has become easier than ever for any user to share content on Facebook. In turn, the content shared on friends’ news feeds has become less and less useful. An application like Pinterest enables you to collect visual content (that you may or may not have shared on Facebook or other social channels already) and curate it on a board conveying some general idea. Single-function, well-designed applications that are built on a social backbone enable users to filter out the noise from the deluge of content plunging down our news-feed waterfalls.
In contrast, Dropbox is a natural progression of cloud-based file storage and sharing, but the cost of the application (free up to 2GB) and desktop/mobile app compatibility make relying on it second nature as we use our mobile devices more and more. Draft a word doc on your iPad on the train on the way to the office, open the same file on your desktop and make final changes, then run to a meeting and send a link to the doc to your colleagues from your iPhone––simpler and more seamless than carrying thumb drives or the email-download routine.
Dropbox and Pinterest––use them, get to know them, try to break them. The apps and their core functions are the future of concentrated, single-purpose content sharing. Learning how to use new applications early on can help you develop a clearer picture of how you will interact and share content in the future as the world becomes more and more mocial (mobile social).
Author: John Carew
Posted in Technology
Tagged Dropbox, Facebook, mobile, mocial, Pinterest, social, Social Media
I started my second personal blog the other day. I won’t shamelessly promote it here, but my friends have been inundated with requests for support. I received an interesting response from my good buddy Joe. After reading a few posts he wrote to me, “Impressed how easily you put yourself out there to the masses. I find it easy to present a character for audiences, but feel less comfortable broadcasting myself. Brave.”
Although brief, I was taken aback by his commentary. Was I really wearing my heart and soul on the sleeve of this blog? Was I laying it all out there for the world to see? Surely I wouldn’t be so stupid as to be one of those people who just say whatever comes to their minds, right? You know the type. The blogger who thinks the world gives a damn about the mundanity of his or her life: “Today I bought shoes and already I have blisters. Wait, hold on a second, need some water. Okay, I’m back. Anyway.” Or someone who shares inappropriate confessions, driven by insecurities and the need for drama: “My boyfriend isn’t romantic and often looks around the room when we kiss.”
Is this who I’ve become but in a less exaggerated sort of way? The answer, I’ve come to discover, is maybe. If some of the things I write about come from a place of truth, then maybe I really am broadcasting myself to the world. The thing is, it doesn’t feel like that. For years now I’ve considered these public displays of personality to be fiction.
I’m talking about personal branding. I’m talking about the line, which has become incredibly blurred, between who we are and who we pretend or act like when we participate online, particularly in social media. When I think about the message I put out there for the world to view, I wonder if it’s really me. And again, the answer is maybe.
Personal branding is not a new topic. In fact, it’s become our way of life. Today, people can obtain or lose jobs based simply on the way they brand themselves online. What I wonder is, are we even aware we’re doing it anymore?
I’m reminded of my Facebook page from 2005 (Ah, the gloriously elitist days when you needed a .edu to get in). The page allowed you to fill in fields about your personality: favorite songs, books, movies, etc. They still exist today, but they’re certainly not as exposed and important as they were back then. I remember all the clever things I’d post: Favorite artist—post-mortem Tupac; Favorite activity—avoiding death; Interests—onesies; Favorite quote—“Sometimes I question your dedication to Sparkle Motion.”
It became a persona—a way for me to make fun while having fun. It was also the loss of my creating-a-personal-brand virginity (and just as experimental). It was me choosing to show the world, “Hey, I want you to think I’m funny!” And this has carried on for years. We all do it. Every time we post a Facebook status update or send out a tweet, we’re communicating something about ourselves. We’re making a choice, cognizant or not, about who we are or who we want people to think we are.
Larry Kimmel of the Direct Marketing Association recently said to our company, “Kids today begin branding themselves at the age of 16.” In fact, he’s right. The millennials today learn very early on how to portray themselves in social media. I think it’s going to become harder and harder for future generations to recognize the difference between this online community and the community of our neighbors.
Thanks to my pal Joe’s insightful observation, it made me realize that maybe we’ve all gotten a little too comfortable with our pen names. We ought to step back and think about the content we’re putting out there for the world to see. Whether it’s for privacy concerns or some other reason, unintended vulnerabilities could come back to hurt us. And if I get hurt, you may end up reading about it in my blog.
Author: Eric Swenson
Our online associations basically represent relationships that exist in real life, relationships that we document by adding people to particular social networks. In today’s world, the act of researching someone’s online presence before (or after) a meeting, date, or social interaction might be a requirement. LinkedIn can give you an idea of a person’s professional résumé, a Twitter profile might reveal his or her publicized interests or influence, and if a Facebook profile exists, well, you can learn possibly far too much about an individual depending on what he or she shares and how open the profile is to an outsider. Putting account settings and user preferences aside, apps that make connections to our physical social networks and marry those networks with our location via a mobile device are very interesting. These apps can show users how their social networks connect with strangers they pass on the street, but they can also teach users the value of real-life networks that are stored, structured, and validated online. Let’s look at three apps and how their features redefine our online social networks, showing the power that mobile, social, and location-based apps can have on our everyday life.
Foursquare + Facebook + Twitter = invisible connections around you. Next time you check in on Foursquare to one of the busier spots in your area, an app like Sonar would display a screen indicating how you are linked to people in your immediate location. Sonar can tell you that you share three Twitter interests or two Facebook friends and enable you to see those specific connections and those users’ photos. You can then introduce yourself in person, if you want. Don’t fret about security, either––you opt in, so all Sonar users have chosen to associate their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts in order to see their relationships.
As Path advertises, Path is “the smart journal that helps you share life with ones you love.” It’s Facebook boiled down your real friends and not the extended network of acquaintances and familiar faces that Facebook has become just to see the friend-count edge higher. The app has a fresh way of displaying important content with a beautiful user interface. Path has the same sharing and “journal” status-type features that are found on the other social networks, but the platform enables smaller circles to interact with pertinent content more easily.
As its tagline reads, “Know. Now.” Localmind is seeking to build “a real-time, location-based Q&A platform that sits on top of existing check-in services.” Localmind uses location-based check-in services likes Foursquare to allow users to send a question about a physical location and receive answers from users who are currently checked in to that location. It lets users contact someone outside their network or circles to determine what is happening at a particular check-in spot.
All three apps provide very different services, but all are based on mobile technology and how it can augment our interaction with our traditional, terrestrial social networks and our location on terra firma.
Bottom line: Use these apps, learn what they do, and be aware that these features will be the next thing to come baked in to our mobile devices. Jumping on the edge of the wave can increase the position of your company or application earlier.
Author: John Carew
These are the 5 need-to-know things in technology for 2011:
1. iPad domination: The late Steve Jobs said that 2011 would be the year of the iPad. The numbers confirm this: iPads are outselling Andriod tablets 24 to 1, and Condé Nast says its Newsstand subscriptions have increased by 268%.
2. Social media continues to grow: It is predicted that by 2012 Facebook will reach 1 billion users, and with that the demand for privacy will also increase. Social media by nature will become more mobile.
3. Smartphones have outsold PCs worldwide: Over 100 million smartphones were shipped in 2011, while only 92 million PCs were sold. The processing power of mobile phones now rivals PCs, with most phones coming with a standard 1GHz processor.
4. Supercomputer: Earlier this year, a supercomputer named “Kei,” or K, was introduced in Japan. K is capable of making a quadrillion calculations per second and is equivalent to one million computers. Supercomputers will not be showing up on your desks in the near future; they are used for climate modeling, rapid stock trading, and earthquake simulations, as well as for other large calculations.
5. HTML5, CSS3, JQuery and JSON: All these developer tools help a developer to make a fluid site without relying on Flash and other animation tools. They open the cyberworld not only to developers, but to designers; fonts are not limited to the web-friendly few, and these items can be viewed on all devices.
Click here for an example of HTML5 and JQuery.
Author: Susan Hallinan
Posted in Technology
Tagged ipad, tablet, Social Media, Facebook, smartphone, HTML5, supercomputer, Kei, CSS3, JQuery, JSON
The introduction of the Internet as significant competition for traditional advertising sources opened the door for wider adoption of hooks, or cross-media connections. Now advertising is containing more and more integrated forms of communication geared to take people from one medium to another. The medium in which advertising is consumed is a factor in the success of the campaign, which accounts for the massive advertising industry with its unique niches carved out by agencies vying for some of the more than $100 billion spent on advertising (last year’s figure) in the US. Whether in out-of-home mediums like rail and subway advertising or the sometimes-more-focused print magazine advertising, cross-media hooks like QR codes, social media badges, and hashtags are used today across various market segments. Based on a recent casual survey of the latest issues of seven magazines, however, cross-media hooks are not used as frequently as one might guess.
Cross-media hooks in these magazines included references to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn either by use of the traditional square badge, tag line (“Follow” or “Friend”), or URL. Among the seven titles reviewed, no one cross-media hook was used by more than 20% of the advertisements in each title. So here we have a market of 4.8 billion mobile phones worldwide, with 428 million units sold in 2011 alone, many of which may correlate to a significant portion of the 175 million Twitter and 800 million Facebook users worldwide. Why don’t more magazine advertisers focus on implementing cross-media hooks? In the age of the downward spiral of circulation and poor conversion to electronic media, why aren’t more magazines pushing the use of cross-media hooks in their advertising sales and internal advertising efforts?
The higher use of QR codes points to the prevalent misuse of the technology, as many of the codes in the sample group lead to non-mobile-optimized webpages. With the right social media metrics platform in place, traffic from cross-media hooks leading to social networks like Facebook and Twitter can lead to a better understanding of how particular market segments respond to advertising.
This all begs the question: With the massive expansion of social media and the use of cross-media hooks, are we isolating any one group of our target audience? Fifteen years ago, with use of the Internet rising, many advertisements contained references to mailing addresses and 800 numbers for consumers who wanted more information. Websites were in the minority, but now a company logo, tag line, and website (and legal disclosure) are standard for virtually all advertisements. In other mediums, like out-of-home advertising on mass transit, the use of cross-media hooks like hashtags and social media references are significant. They tell the viewer, “Look, we are trendy and current––find us on social media.”
Are we isolating the portion of the target audience who doesn’t get the contextual clues of a square of color with a letter or bird and an octothorpe (#) used in front of a word? Yes, we are, but the numbers don’t lie. The exponential adoption of Internet-capable devices with cameras and an operating system capable of supporting third-party apps shows that the collision of mobile, social, and local is the future of visual communication. Use cross-media hooks and integrate social media into marketing and advertising efforts to be one step ahead of the curve.
P.S. Infinite Utterly Orange points for anyone willing to submit a book report on the ISO 18004:2006 IT specification for automatic identification and data capture techniques––just the type of winter reading this author loves!
Author: John Carew
Posted in Technology
Tagged Advertising, cross-media, Facebook, hashtags, LinkedIn, magazine, publishing, Social Media, Twitter
It’s the time of year when life as we know it begins to change. Our long, warm, sunny days become short, cold, and gray. Life all around us begins to shrivel up and die. I’m referring, of course, to our never-late-to-the-party season: autumn—elder brother to Father Christmas and Mother Nature’s pimp.
Fall is our reminder that the best part of the year is now over. So suck it up. Life is about to get a lot more difficult. If I were a drug user, I’d have to imagine fall to be the drug user’s final hit before rehab. Enjoy it while it lasts; you’re about to get locked up for six months with nothing but chamomile and reruns of Hawaii Five-O.
This is the time of year when many people in our society celebrate the changing of the seasons. I really don’t see what all the fuss is about. People find fall beautiful and often comment on the changing color of leaves. “Look at the beautiful leaves––they’re changing colors,” one might say. “Isn’t fall beautiful, what, with the color changing on leaves and all?” another might say.
“The leaves are dying!” I might say. When you see a majestic bird recently struck by an 18-wheeler, you don’t comment on its beauty, do you? Would you say “Look at that doe-eyed, little deer lying peacefully on the side of the road. I think it’s taking its last breaths. What a wonderful sight!”?
Sound depressing? It shouldn’t be. At this time of year I’m reminded of an Associated Press article I read that has that Halloween sort of vibe. The article encouraged those with an affinity for the morbid to check out a website called MyDeathSpace.com. At first, I was confused about what MyDeathSpace.com was. My first thought was probably similar to yours: “Here is a website for people who are frustrated with their current social environments and want an online vehicle to acknowledge their discomfort.” I mean, think about it. How many “death spaces” do we all have?
Death Space #1 – You’re waiting in line at Target as the 95-year-old woman uses a debit card for the first time in her existence. You can literally count the minutes until the cashier will inevitably take the card away from the old hag and do it herself. Yet you sit there, impatiently, waiting for the show to unfold.
Death Space #2 – I think we’ve all been here before.
(For more relatable situations like this, check out: www.pleaseshutup.com)
Death Space #3 – You’re waiting in line to pick up a new license. It’s not that it expired, it’s that you lost it. Well, you didn’t really lose it. You put it on the table that night when you had your friends over and everyone did that thing where you show each other what’s in your wallets. But then you get drunk and don’t want to drive, and Liz is being her typical self—crazy—and you just want to get her out of there. So you offer to drive, but then Jim—also crazy—is trying to be the responsible one but always ends up getting way too drunk to make any sense. So you just kind of look at him, as he leans, and try to remember why you’re friends. You decide to put both Jim and Liz in a taxi. The next day you find out that Jim accidentally grabbed your ID instead of his, but it doesn’t matter because he left it in the cab.
Maybe I’m alone here. And maybe I spend too much time in lines. The point is I assumed that the site discussed our personal death spaces as a way to create a sense of camaraderie. A way to say, “Hey man, I’ve been there. I think about putting my boss in a Porta-Potty and tipping it over too.” Well, I was wrong. MyDeathSpace is actually a social networking website for the recently deceased members of myspace.com. If someone dies, you submit his or her death and people can chat about the––sometimes grotesque––details. Oh, and there’s a forum section where you can complain about things like the new features of Facebook that really T you off.
What!? Are people really into this? Are we really so voyeuristic? Burning ants with a magnifying glass: okay. Discussing profiles of dead friends: not so okay! Maybe I just have no clue of what it’s like to be this creepy. I think the darkest thing I’ve ever done was get up in the middle of the night and pee without turning on the light.
I suppose we’re all entitled to our own niche likes and dislikes. You’re able to like the changing of leaf colors for example. And I’m entitled to loathe you.
In the meantime, this begs the question: Can a forum like this really be considered a social medium? Hell, these people are dead.
Happy Halloween!
Author: Eric Swenson
Posted in Design, Marketing & Advertising, Technology
Tagged Advertising, design, fall, Halloween, Marketing, MyDeathSpace, network, networking, seasons, social, Social Media, social networking, winter
The Internet is built on information, and often the information that is time-sensitive gathers the most traffic, i.e. news. Back in the day, AOL and their keyword ivory tower tried to keep users in their “portal” for as long as possible to keep the targeted advertising in their face while raking in the results. One little glitch though, the Internet grew beyond the walls which AOL had built and they would fall into history remembered for “you’ve got mail,” that annoying AOL Instant Messenger icon with sound and, last but not least, they would be known for littering the planet and landfills with millions of mostly useless CDs.
Fast forward to today and we see Facebook following some of the very same footprints which AOL laid, made some cash and then fell extinct. In March 2011, Allfacebook.com, the unofficial facebook resource, covered a story depicting how the New York Times handles inbound links to their content from social sources versus search engine traffic. The key difference was the inbound traffic from social sources would receive unlimited reading on the NYT site, while search engine driven inbound traffic would receive a cap of five free visits per day. Any Facebook user has probably experienced someone in their network sharing content from a major news outlet, but wouldn’t it improve the user experience if the news source pushed their content directly into a social platform like Facebook?
Why yes, it would, and the Wall Street Journal announced last week the availability of WSJ Social, which lets users share content directly through Facebook. The service is free for now, but with financial partners like Dell and Intel, one can only wait so long for the paywall to be erected around that content. Yes, paywall in a social network, you are not suffering from double vision. As news media history can reinforce, news organizations have no idea how to properly price their product in a digital market. News companies are used to the model where they controlled the distribution of their content with little outside intervention, except for a few strategic partners. Now, they have to negotiate getting a vehicle in the right market which carries an optimized form of the news content to the receiving device or online platform. Not only has it complicated the distribution channels, but it has also introduced significant technology learning curves which even the largest organizations in both news media and magazines have yet to truly understand. Communication-minded professionals learn technology mostly by experience and not by discipline, where technology-minded professionals are taught from the ground up how to build a platform and market that platform. Both parties need one another as a complement to either side of the brain if nothing else, but failure in the digital market backed by the speed at which content is shared on the social web, can make or break any marketing communication effort.
Facebook and a paywall model for organizations requiring that level of division is a natural step for the mega-social site, but will it improve the social web? A better solution would be to build a split advertising model where both the social platform and the news service get paid for clicks and views to their ad content. Any online effort that puts a barrier of any kind between a user and their desired content will eventually be made extinct by a more creative method to attain that same desired content. The wild west entrepreneurial spirit of the net, made innovations like Netflix, Groupon, and Craigslist. Competition to the social web behemoths like Facebook from the likes of say Google+, will push the platforms to innovate and maybe bring better features to the users. Either way, as communication professional in any field, remember that every barrier erected between you and your desired reader/audience/customer/client make the communication less effective. Share content in the social world to gain visibility and expand your brand presence, but don’t muddy the waters with convoluted revenue mechanisms which separate the haves from the have-nots.
Author: John Carew
Photo Credit: Jonathan Baker-Bates
Posted in Technology
Tagged Facebook, google, Media, news, Social Media, social web
Hmm, does the social web work in a crisis? Irene, Steve, Virginia, and Jason––four names one might give to a child or possibly a pet, names that over the past few weeks have left a lasting impression on the social web. Let’s examine what these events and their aftermath mean to our social web efforts.
Fail: Social Web + Mobile Service After Hurricane Irene
As someone who lives in what is technically called New England, Irene did some incredible damage not only near coastal areas but also far inland, as the media has covered along with the devastation in New York. Densely populated areas in these early Colonies developed back in the days of our first and only Revolution! Geographic barriers (rivers, mountains, etc.) often defined the boundaries of these old towns, and municipal infrastructure has been tied to existing human populations and often governed by poor, short-sighted legislation ever since. Fast-forward to Hurricane Irene and the reliance on above ground power, cable, and phone lines––thousands were without power for 14+ days. Ironically, major electrical providers like Connecticut Light & Power have advanced online systems that can give the percentage of affected customers by town, but once an over sized toothpick-to-be falls on the lines, off goes the power, phone, and––often––the Internet. The natural backup was mobile devices, which were also affected by damage from the falling trees, so the basic online functions that help people stay in touch were gone, leaving many in the dark in more ways than one. Connecticut-area Cox Media stations, including 95.9 The Fox and Star 99.9, banded together and broadcast three FM and two AM stations simultaneously, providing old-school radio information to those without Internet access. Hurricane Irene made it clear that:
It must be stated, however, that many community officials and local news sources had outstanding hyper-local coverage after the winds subsided, with reports on closed roads, delayed school openings, and locations where people could get fresh water, charge phones, or shower. Some municipalities used robocalls or Twitter or Facebook, but that meant that users had to be connected to the social web via Twitter or Facebook (primarily). We love touting how deeply social media penetrates into the average American home, but not everyone is online and, even more important, not all have smartphones or know how to use the social web in a mobile environment. The argument can be made that the radio of the 20th century has been replaced with the smartphone of today, but the cell signal needs to be strong enough to hold the masses once they jump from one channel (landlines) to the other (mobile).
Steve: A Resignation Sends Its Own Vibrations Through the Tech World
On August 24, the media reported that Steve Jobs had resigned from his position as CEO of Apple. The vibrations were not the phantom feeling on your hip from your vibrating phone of choice––no, these vibrations were of a different sort. Analysts jumped at the news and hinted at an uncertain future for the tech giant. Former Apple COO Tim Cook has now taken the helm, and many believe that the iPhone/iPad-creating innovation machine still has two to three years of Jobs-era technology in the works. A pretend screenshot of Steve’s new schedule currently making the rounds on technology blogs jokes about his new daily task of managing Cook from afar. Regardless of the future, Apple brought innovation and put good design first with its operating systems as well as hardware. Without Jobs and his positive force, we might all still be coveting BlackBerrys with their amazing “scroll wheels” (but poor RIM’s future looks grim either way).
Farewell to the black turtleneck and jeans. Thanks for the leading Apple toward better products and forcing the rest of the market to catch up. Your efforts made the marketplace more competitive, and toddlers, fan boys, gadget lovers, and soccer moms the world over have you to thank for the delicious visual goodness that is iOS, the iPhone, and the iPad.
Virginia: Quake Rocks the East Coast
Sitting on the twenty-second floor in Midtown Manhattan Tuesday with two of my tech-loving colleagues, I was surprised by the shaking of my chair at 1:55 pm. While other employees leapt from their offices and cubicles, the sub-thirties jumped to social media and the mobile web. Utterly Orange contributing blogger John Mehl found mentions on Twitter that confirmed our experience as an earthquake, and I sought answers with the iPhone Quake Watch app by LateNightProjects. The intraplate earthquake situated in Mineral, Virginia, kicked off a social tidal wave (tweetquake) of content surrounding the natural event. Check the video below and coverage from Mashable. If people were watching Twitter in NYC, it is highly possible that they found earthquake posts before they felt the vibrations. The mobile web exploded with laughter shocks, and the left-coast folk were amused by the right-coast crazies as we screamed and ran from our homes and offices.
Jason: Coffee Lounge “Cyberpadlocked” on Google
Maybe it is the lingering sensation that someone or something is out to get you. Something perhaps in the social web. As reported by the New York Times, Jason Rule, owner of Coffee Rules Lounge, was the victim of a false “permanently closed” status on Google Places. As the article points out, this is an increasing trend, and the source could be competitors or angry customers/ex-employees.
The article highlights some important issues:
Author: John Carew
A decade ago, supporters and pundits predicted the end of analog ways, classifieds, bulletin boards, and libraries. It wasn’t until the explosion of social networks and the expansion of smartphones/tablets, however, that the digital services that replaced the analog processes had the momentum to take off exponentially. Now, smartphones and social networks, in conjunction with trusted gatekeepers, are spinning the threads of social connection that were once made through local social groups.
Check out this list below, which includes both start-up and established online entities that have built digital pathways for analog problems. If you have additional suggestions, post a comment and we will expand the list.
| Books | PaperBack Swap |
| Classifieds/Goods Exchange | Claz Hand Things Down |
| Disaster Relief Housing | Sparkrelief |
| Platform for Reporting Local Issues | SeeClickFix |
The grandparents and great-grandparents of the current generations lived in a time without mass transit, without telephones, and without worldwide networks. Social groups were small and heavily rooted to geography. Technological and logistical breakthroughs like the United States Post Office (now the USPS) parcel post service, railroads, the combustion engine, refrigeration, radio, telephones, and television connected ideas, services, and goods with people from afar. Before those breakthroughs, local social networks centered on societal kingpins, the social butterflies of a group who acted like the router and switch between not only conversation but the ability to fulfill needs within social circles.
For better or worse, today’s gatekeepers are the “admin” and moderators of trusted online sites and communities. Often, an organization’s legal team develops terms and conditions that govern the operation of the body, and then a team (paid or unpaid) manages the operation of the sites. Others are even more laissez-faire and use a self-policing model where users report issues to system administrators and moderators to correct. These websites have replaced the classified ads and the grocery store bulletin board and are infinitely more useful because they are more timely, targeted, searchable, sharable, and integrated.
The major benefit of analog networks was that the user’s anonymity was protected much farther down the line than with today’s digital variations. A user could traditionally wait until literally the moment before completing a transaction before exposing his or her identity (assuming that no one involved in the process knew his or her face). Anyone could anonymously tear the contact information off the bulletin board, jot down the information for an event, or browse the shelves of a bookstore without leaving a trace. Today, the entities that have built pathways to connect users to their needs put up tollbooths to collect information on those who want what is on the other side. Sometimes the data is used to safeguard the community from the likes of criminals and those who detract from the conversation. The amount of data that users must give up varies from site to site, but the burden of protecting this data falls to the builders of the pathway. The financial and healthcare industries have been saddled with this data security issue for the full length of their tenure on the Internet, with every possible transaction requiring a high level of data security to protect both the organization and the end user. Much of the security in both industries is tied to professional standards or government legislation, further placing data security as the focal point of operations for any financial or healthcare organization.
So what about all these new online organizations and the data that users are providing in order to gain access to the pathways and communities that they have built? The same level of attention needs to be paid to any information a user gives to any sort of online community or entity for no other reason than trust. An online hack or security breach, whatever the size, undermines the fundamental trust of users in an entity, ultimately eroding the very community they built.
Whether user or pathway builder, both must remember to be vigilant about data security and support the community with whatever means possible. Recent news of organized online “hacktavist” groups and their high-profile targets are the digital protests of today, comparable to the nonviolent protests and sit-ins of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the middle part of the last century. These online communities and tools––the replacements for the analog bulletin board distribution systems––are the future. The rate of adoption is yet to be determined, but they will become more and more mainstream as the user base increases. Sites will come and go, with brands starting and ending as the economy and market shift, but look at eBay, Amazon, and Craigslist. Founded in 1995, 1994, and 1995 respectively, each has defined a transactional service in three distinct areas––and has seen the subsequent rise of competitive online services––but each is still a strong entity in its particular segment. Entrepreneurs are taking risks with new ventures to provide digital solutions to analog processes. Wait until the next wave of start-ups carves out niches in the interwebs and replaces existing analog needs. The world we live in, the Internet-connected world, can be as global or as local as you choose––you just have to change the search radius.
How will you leverage trust (and innovation) in the communities that you build around your brand, service, or product?
Author: John Carew
