The following is an image taken from the street artist Banksy.

Banksy is commenting on the ubiquitousness of closed circuit televesion and the spectre of living under a constant view of Big Brother. The irony is that Banksy painted this mural right next to CCTV cameras!

But this post isn’t about Banksy. It’s about privacy, or rather the lack thereof.

I recently attended a local technology meetup and met an individual from a company whose business model is based around collecting peoples’ information from social networks and providing them to credit bureaus. The rationale, is that businesses will pay money to verify an online customer/community member from said credit bureau. This is done to verify that a person is not a “bot” or a complete fake.

My conversation with this individual went as so:

Me: “So, you collect information on users from a variety of social networks and sell it to credit agencies?”

Person X: “Yup. And when businesses want to verify identities we put them in touch with the credit agencies (for a fee).”

“And how do you mitigate any privacy concerns?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Well, do people know you’re collecting this information? And if you’re storing stuff on a server in the USA, can’t the NSA examine this data?”

“Well all this information is public. So people must not care. Regarding the NSA…sure I guess. But I don’t think most people would care about this.”

I don’t know. I sure would care. But then again, if something is placed in the public domain doesn’t it become available for anyone to view? What’s wrong with making money off collecting public information?

Maybe nothing. After all this isn’t illegal. But just because something isn’t illegal doesn’t make it moral. The onus for people is to educate themselves and understand that privacy isn’t a privilege, it’s a right. Nobody has to know anything you don’t want them to know, and you should be aware that what you put online is never gone and is never truly hidden. As our lives shift more and more online, this online permanency becomes more and more important. Have videos of a drunken frat party on YouTube? Get ’em off before you graduate and apply for a job. Put your phone number in your Google+ account? Be prepared to get SMS ads sent to you. Share information publicly on social networks? Get ready for credit agencies to know every bit of detail about you.

So think about what you put online and treasure your privacy. Because like all rare commodities, one day we will run out. As much as I like Banksy, I’d like it a lot more if we never had to see another mural like this one again.

BAMA 513 Reflections

The course served as a nice refresher for a subject I was employed in prior to my doing the MBA. I did gain some new insight into certain aspects of digital marketing. The discussion around how website content flows into a CRM via Marketo was quite fascinating. I also enjoyed learning about the McKinsey model of the consumer decision journey.

At first I dismissed the model as more consulting jargon and an attempt to glean more money from consumers. But upon further reflection, I agree with a comment made in class that the model does a good job of focusing on the individual consumer as opposed to the macro-level analysis of traditional funnel models. Social media has given consumers (and everyone else) a greater voice, which forces companies to engage in honest dialogue.

I have believed since 2009 that social media should be viewed as a skill set rather than a dedicated job role. As the industry is quickly evolving, it appears that this belief is becoming a reality. It is rapidly becoming a point of parity for anyone working in marketing, communications and public relations (regardless of their specific job function) to have some aptitude in using not only social media, but other digital marketing fundamentals (e.g. SEM, SEO, funnel design, CRM, etc.) Just as using Excel or Word was a differentiator and then become the norm, basic social media knowledge will too become a standard of industry.

The field of marketing is evolving at a swift rate, and I for one am glad for this upheaval. My previous experience at print media showed me the dangers of complacency and the necessity to embrace change. It is a fundamental truth in business that the only absolute is the absolute certainty that shit will change. You can either ride the tide, or be swept underneath and smashed on the rocks. This applies equally to individual careers as much as it does to companies. Never rest on your laurels, and never assume that you have learned enough to quit learning.

Group Project – Koerner’s Pub

Our group project for Koerner’s Pub was a fun experience. I enjoyed the group dynamics and everyone on the team (Nash, Tom, Yacine, and Eric) provided some good insight. The owner was very supportive of the project and best of all, we got to drink copious amounts of beer and sample the delicious menu of UBC’s best pub!

The project consisted of utilizing Koerner’s Twitter channel to drive traffic to Koerner’s Facebook page. We tweeted about food, beverages, and “lifestyle” topics and included a trackable link with every tweet. The result showed that people liked Koerner’s pub, had trouble finding the pub, and responded highly to video and photos. We also performed a website audit and gave several suggestions for greater engagement. The entire project ran for 5 weeks.

Our group then presented our findings to the owner of Koerner’s. Unfortunately, I could not attend the actual presentation due to commitments with my employment, but I was informed from the other group members that it was well received, although it did not provide any ground-breaking insights.

Challenges

The largest challenge for me was mustering the enthusiasm to continue on the project. With several group projects on the go, working part-time and looking for gainful post-MBA employment work I was exhausted. Having said that, if I could do it over I would have been more actively involved in the project. The stress of finding employment post-MBA has been weighing on me quite heavily, and this obsession has been detrimental to my final MBA period.

A major challenge was the limitation in scope of what we could accomplish. Koerner’s website didn’t appear online until after we had started. Driving users from Facebook to Twitter is not an optimal tactic, as the audiences on both platforms are quite distinct. Furthermore, we did not really entice visitors to the Facebook page by posting any particularly relevant content. For example, we tweeted a fun fact about Koerner’s with the promise to learn more via a link, but once a visitor reached the Facebook page we did not follow up on the promise. This is a dangerous strategy, as visitors may get upset that the link they clicked on did not deliver on what was promised. Best to mitigate this risk by providing visitors exactly what they expect to find.

In June 2012, The Montreal Gazette ran a story on accused murderer Luka Magnotta, that featured a photograph of him holding a can of Labatt Blue. Labatt freaked out, as they were worried about the damage that would be done to their brand of seeing their top-selling product being consumed by an infamous individual. Labatt asked the Gazette to remove the photo. The Gazette refused and so Labatt then sent a case-and-desist letter.

Things got hairy when the Globe and Mail picked up the letter and published it. Labatt’s brand was damaged as a result, as the public saw Labatt’s letter as an attempt to stifle the media. The irony was that nobody other than Labatt’s cared that Luka Magnotta was drinking Labatt Blue. Why wouldn’t he, it’s Canada’s best selling beer internationally (yeah I was a little surprised by this too).

Labatt was so worried about their brand they tried to “protect” the public from hearing any negativity that might be associated with their product. Turns out that people are a lot smarter than companies often give them credit for and can make informed decisions. Nobody was going to boycott Labatt because an accused criminal decided to drink a bottle of Labatt Blue in a photograph. However, people don’t like it when they find out a company is trying to stifle free press because said company doesn’t trust their audience.

To their credit, Labatt recognized their blunder and had the VP of Corporate Affairs write a guest column in the Globe and Mail. Labatt admitted had they simply trusted their customers to begin with and not tried to suppress the original photograph, the fallout would have been much less severe.

So what’s the moral here? Despite the sophistication of a social media department, with dedicated staff and fancy tools, a company’s social media efforts mean squat if they can’t trust their customers with respect. This rule is not difficult and most of us learned it as soon as we could walk and talk. What’s changed is how quickly this lack of respect can be communicated.

So, the next time you see someone you don’t like using your product, hold off an hitting the panic button and firing up the ol’ “social media crisis response unit” and ask yourself “Will anyone really give a rat’s behind that this douchebag is using my brand of (insert product name here)?” The answer is probably no, and if you DO respond make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease.

Town criers used to be really important.

Imagine this: You are an illiterate peasant, toiling away in your cow pasture circa mid 16th century Europe. You know little of worldly affairs. In fact, you know very little of the world outside your village. Ok, once you sold a sow to the cooper living one village over, but that was the extent of your wanderin’. When it comes to what’s going on in the village, hey, you’re in everybody’s business. But you are ignorant as to what is happening around the world because you can’t read, you almost never leave your home, and visitors are very rare because almost everyone else is illiterate and never leaves their villages either.

Suddenly you hear the town crier from the main square call out “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” (which was really a fancy of way of saying “Hear ye!”) You immediately drop the piece of cow dung you’re holding and race to the square eager to hear the news the crier brings. This event only happens once a week, and it’s a big deal. What news of the plague? Is it another public execution? Has His Majesty gotten married? Most importantly, when will the monks finish brewing that wonderful wine of theirs?

Ok, so you’re probably thinking “What the hell does this have to do with social media? You lied to us Stanowich, luring us here with the promise of a poignant article on social media obsolescence. Instead you’re talking about town criers, peasants, and cow dung!”

Hold on gentle reader. There is a method to my blathering. I believe the role of the Social Media Manager will soon be as obsolete as the town crier. Let me explain why.

The town crier was the gatekeeper for information back in his day (they were usually men) as he could read, had contact with the outside world, and therefore had control over what information was conveyed to the populace. In many organizations, a social media manager performs a very similar role, as he/she (I’ll use she to keep it simple) often acts as the gatekeeper for social media within an organization. She’s often responsible for communicating and curating information from the outside of an organization to those within the organization. This usually involves spiffy graphs and lots of talk about sentiment and awareness. She is the voice of the organization to the public via social media, and in return funnels the vox populi to the power brokers in the organization.

But the very nature of social media makes it democratic and as its use becomes more and more ubiquitous, more people become comfortable with using it. As the rate of literacy and travel in early modern Europe increased the town crier eventually became irrelevant. As peoples’ comfort and skill  with social media increases, the sum effect will be that social media will no longer be seen as a dedicated job role, but rather as a skill set.

When was the last time you put “understands MS Word” on your resume? Everyone knows how to use MS Word and other basic productivity tools. As more and more Millennials join the ranks of the workforce, they will bring with them their skill with social media. This will make it easier to disseminate and collect information via social media channels throughout a workforce, making a sole gatekeeper unnecessary.

This will not happen overnight. A crucial point is that just because everyone knows how to use social media effectively for themselves, does not mean they know how to use it effectively for their organization. Comfort with a technology, does not imply mastery of it. Someone can post to Facebook or write a blog, but does this not make them an expert in social media for customer support, sentiment analysis, and increasing the bottom line.

But eventually in the not-to-distant future, people will be looking up from their wearable technology screens that will be darn near everywhere as they deal with their constant streams of social feeds and say “Hey, remember when we had ONE person use that thing called HootSuite to manage Facebook and Twitter? Boy, can you believe people were worried about this stuff?? Now excuse me while I get back to watching the Oilers game via the feed from the players’ Google Visor.”