Social Media

To say I was stunned to discover StalkScan today is an understatement. It’s value proposition is simple: enter the profile link of someone on Facebook….anyone…..and have instant access to all of their private data!

That’s right, everything like photos, videos, posts, friends, political parties, everything. I suggest you immediately do these two:

• Send a tweet to @facebook and to CEO Mark Zuckerberg @finkd and let them know what you think
• Fill out this form when you’re logged in to Facebook and complain.

While I am well aware that privacy and security online is an illusion, Facebook has has a history of doing a horseshit job protecting us. Let them know that you think so too.

Once you put in someone’s profile URL, you have instant access to all of these choices!

There is no easy way to say this but here goes: You are going to die and so am I. It is not a matter of if we will die, but rather when.

Now that fact is out of the way and on the table, what is going to happen with your digital life when you’re gone?

Really good article today in the New York Times about this exact topic: Is Your Digital Life Ready for Your Death?

You’ve probably thought about what will happen to your finances, your possessions and maybe even your real estate when you die. But what about your Facebook account? Or your hard-drive backups?

ACTIONS TO TAKE
The NYTimes article gives several practical actions to take and they’re easy to do:  Read More

If you have ever tried to convince a senior level executive in a company that investing in social media would have a payoff, then you know exactly how tough it is to answer the “So where is the ‘return’ on that investment?” question!

The McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm and ‘think tank’ of the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., has just released a new report entitled, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. Like all other reports they’ve released of this nature, this one is free and is absolutely worth your time to read if you have any interest in this topic whatsoever.

The authors of this study, James Manyika, Michael Chui, and Hugo Sarrazin, also wrote this post at the Harvard Business Review touting their study and I really liked their first paragraph in that post since it about sums up the value of reading this report succinctly:

How’s this for counter-intuitive? Social technologies — the software and services that make it possible to show off your vacation pictures to all your Facebook friends and follow your favorite team tweet by tweet — are not just giant time sinks that keep your employees from getting their work done. On the contrary, they may become the most powerful tools yet developed to raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers — the kind of workers who help drive innovation and growth, and who are going to be in increasingly short supply.

How productive did they find social media use? For many of us the findings in this report simply confirm what we know intuitively about the power of social media and connecting with prospects, customers, colleagues and industry peers. But one of the reasons adoption of new technologies always lags we early adopters is because there isn’t mainstream, business-centric and authoritative voices confirming it for organizational leadership.

This study, while still making a few leaps here and there, will go a long way on motivating executives to fund and accelerate the use of these new technologies. Just look at this graph and the “20 – 25 percent” productivity increase and you know this will get A LOT of attention!

After noticing that my friends in Facebook were posting EVERY song they listened to, EVERY video they watched and EVERY link they decided to share I was just about ready to delete my account due to all the “noise” of these lifestream sorts of postings.

Increasingly social apps like Socialcam, Spotify, Google Play and most others have set, as a default if you connect your Facebook or Twitter accounts, to go ahead and auto-post EVERYTHING the app does to your Facebook news feed! The result is a steady stream of stuff I don’t care to read or to see from an accelerating number of friends and family who are starting to use these social apps.

Socialcam's Facebook settings (click for larger view)

This morning my sister commented under a rant I did within Facebook (imploring people to go in to app settings and to please disable auto-posting to Facebook) and she pointed out she was seeing EVERYTHING posted from my Socialcam app. 

Sigh.

So I went in to Socialcam’s settings on Facebook and discovered that these were set by default:

• + Add your Facebook friends’ videos to your feed
• + Publish my Socialcam actions (Follow, Like and Comment) to Facebook
• + Publish videos I watch to Facebook.

Seriously? I kicked myself for not having taken more time when installing Socialcam — which I’d done some time ago but then deleted in favor of using another app called Klip but reinstalled it when so many of my friends started using it — and didn’t spend any time deciding what I’d allow the app to do and not do.

My bad.

The bummer is that this sort of “auto connecting” to Facebook is “EVERYONE’s bad” and newbies (or the masses who, for the most part, are not tech-savvy or aware) will quickly make Facebook more of a cluttered and horrible user experience as these “social apps” are adopted by them in droves. 

Though these default setups by social apps are undoubtedly making it easier for an app to go viral — it’s exactly what Instagram did and look at what happened to them — the result is that more and more people are becoming really agitated about this practice (like me) and will either have to go in to each app settings to find ways to turn the damn things off, or they’ll just delete the app…

…or slow their use of Facebook or delete their account altogether.