Filed under: Digital Strategy
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Tired of losing your audience due to toilet breaks? The I Need To Go Campaign poses this question for ING- you can pick up this widget. The promise:
Paste this code into a blog post, your readers will be delighted at this convenience. Works on most blogs as well as MySpace and Facebook!
Okaaaay.
The announcement and resulting activity (which I’ve been following here) of Google’s Open Social platform last week (and the ‘don’t track me’ movement) has got me thinking about online privacy. About how much you want people to know about your life, how much you want to know about friends and colleagues lives. Do I really want to know when anyone goes to the bathroom? Do I really want anyone else to know when I do?
What happens when we can aggregate and understand behaviour (as well as serve information) through an App?
As my friend Tim would say: What would happen to social networking if you could write a widget that would tell you how often your girlfriend visited any of her ex’s profiles?
Differentiating layers of intimacy describes degrees of trust and discretion around information. The closer you are the more access you have. Permission to access also gives permission to know and also conveys the ability to share.
As we take down the walled gardens we’re going to need some privacy screens!
UPDATE: Nice piece of work from Colin
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Hey Katie – what a coincidence – check out what I did at my office job on this very subject?
http://canuckflack.com/2007/11/06/walking-the-talk/
Comment by Colin McKay November 7, 2007 @ 1:47 amNice one Colin- thanks for sharing.
I’ve embedded that- you can pick up the code (it runs automatically but you can distribute it now).
Comment by katiechatfield November 7, 2007 @ 3:35 amWe need something set up to avoid the fruition of George Costanza’s worlds collide theory that occurs in social networks.
Love your blog by the way. Long time reader, first time commenter.
Comment by Anthony November 7, 2007 @ 5:38 amI hate to do this, but this is a trend I pointed to well before this whole trend. Check it out here: http://jburg.typepad.com/future/2007/10/when-you-need-t.html .
As advertisers, we need to learn to respect the “white space” users expect, lest we become the brand equivalent of “close talkers”.
Comment by Jon Burg November 7, 2007 @ 11:05 pmThat’s a nice post Jon.
Comment by katiechatfield November 8, 2007 @ 12:48 amWhat I’m talking about is not marketers having access to information and being able to read online behaviour, but I think that we all agree that there is an increasing imperative for marketers to extend privacy (I love your term ‘white space’) and provide the choice to allow freedom from brand messages.
And THIS! THIS is gold:
And BTW (by the way) if anyone out there is in the mental health or personal development fields, this is sure to be a hot emerging market. By the year 2020 there will be an entire professional counseling field devoted to teaching consumers to draw these lines in their own lives. By 2025 this lesson will be part of state mandated health class curriculum’s.
Where my concern is also focused is not merely on marketers having access. It’s anyone who can write code that can have access to your data with the growing lego like functionality of building widgets to disseminate and learn information across social networks.
Who do you trust?
Comment by Gavin Heaton November 9, 2007 @ 12:44 amOf course, if you are in this space you understand the risks. But the vast majority of people do not and will not. In the showdown over brand trust I wonder if even Google will be left standing.