Responses – Katie Chow's COMM blog

RE: Nathania Ho’s “Facebook Needs To Earn Your Trust”

Facebook Privacy — How much of our posts are kept confidential?

In response to Nathania Ho’s blog post regarding Facebook and user’s confidentiality, I don’t agree that Facebook should have that responsibility to keep information that the users, who personally choose to put publicly, private.

Prior to making ones Facebook account official, Facebook kindly asks their to-be users of the social network to agree to their Terms of Service, which include the fact that whatever the users post onto the site will be a part of Facebook’s property forever, even after deleting the account. Here it states at #4, that you’ve given up copyright control of your material, and they give the example that if you were to upload a picture, Facebook could potentially copy it and sell it without your permission as well as paying you a cent. [1]

I do agree that it is not ethical at all that Facebook would do so, but it is our choice to what would be posted as well as our responsibility to read through that lengthy Terms of Service before agreeing. I’m sure that many hastily accept the agreement and, without thought, post whatever they liked, because they believed that their privacy was protected.

Read Nathania Ho’s original blog post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/nathaniaho/2012/09/13/facebook-needs-to-earn-your-trust/

References:

[1] http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/07/21/facebook-and-the-law-8-things-to-know/

RE: Kelly Gu’s “The new e-tool: SocialFollow”

I discovered through Kelly Gu’s blog that SocialFollow is yet another social media that links together all your social networks into one place.

tweetdeck_sproutsocial_socialfollow — Which one would you choose?

The public is bombarded with different websites that do basically the same exact thing, and to get people to notice their differences we have to keep in mind the point of differences that each website is offering. For example, TweetDeck and Sprout Social are both services that help link together all your social network profiles. However, their differences include that Sprout Social is a paid service but they also monitor and analyze your business data and let you know the effectiveness of your marketing, while TweetDeck is a free social media management site but doesn’t offer the same features as other paid services in the market. [1]

As for what Kelly asks: “How many are interested in the analytics [that SocialFollows features] such as how much they had tweeted in the past week?”, in a business’s point of view, I’d say it’s not the amount of tweets people make that is significant, but rather more of how active social media users are and how a business can use this information to develop a new market strategy. There are studies [2] that show the importance of analytic information and in turn, business could use the information to create new strategies.

Read Kelly Gu’s original blog post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/kellysongmeigu/2012/09/29/the-new-e-tool-socialfollows/

References:

[1] http://www.dreamgrow.com/the-five-best-tools-to-put-all-of-your-social-networks-in-one-place/

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-28652590/5-surprising-social-media-statistics-that-affect-your-business/