18 February, 202118 February, 2021 Louise McGregor social media

No News is not Good News

Good morning Australia!!! Today you will not get any news from Facebook. Tune in to your radio instead.

You also won’t have access to:

the bureau of meteorology
some emergency services in Western Australia
health services in Queensland and South Australia (yeah, in a pandemic)
parks services – clearly listed as a government organisation
Women’s community shelters (for women escaping violent partners)
charities
some politicians
news satire sites – much to the amusement of Australians everywhere.

This is genuinely what Australia woke up to this morning. Organisations have scrambled to point people to the right resources held on their own sites, post notifications on their Facebook pages, and work with Facebook to prove they’re not a news site to get their page reinstated.

Why is this happening?

The Australian government passed legislation that tech giants such as Facebook and Google should pay news organisations to publish their news.

As someone who has watched social media for more than a decade it’s a neat twist, we’ve gone from free social media, to companies paying to have their content displayed to an audience, to the tech giants PAYING for the content. In a logical sense it makes sense, Facebook takes the advertising money that once funded news publishers and would be nothing without content. According to the Guardian “for every $100 of online advertising spend, $53 goes to Google, $28 to Facebook and $19 to everyone else.”

The Australian legislation sets up a process for tech companies to negotiate with news outlets, and provides a resolution process when no agreement can be met. Google followed that path and came to an agreement with news publishers, meaning that Australians could still search for their news outlets today and find the other organisations they need to reach.

Facebook did not reach an agreement. Facebook is the richest social network in the world and 98% of their income comes from advertising, so it’s not surprising that they will resist any attempt by governments to regulate them. Their public statement is that the law is overly broad making it hard to determine when something is news, “As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted,” a Facebook spokeswoman said.

I’m not convinced, Facebook hires smart people, content in Australia is in English, they have an office in Sydney, they have the world’s best geeks working on AI. They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between a health service and a news organisation, legitimate news and satire, emergency services and a newspaper, community shelters and breaking news.

So this is a power play.

By halfway through the day a number of the affected accounts had had their content reinstated, and we have all been warned about the power Facebook holds. Time will tell whether governments give in to that power or seek stronger regulation.

Image by Maher Ahtsham from Pixabay

6 August, 20194 August, 2019 Louise McGregor social media

The Rise and Fall of Social Media Platforms

Turn the sound off and drop the speed, and watch as the companies bounce up and then disappear.

In 2003 everyone was on Friendster, and back then “everyone” meant 3,5 million people. Their membership peaked at around 50 million, but by then Facebook had 120 million members. The company is “on a break“, and has been since 2005.

By 2005 everyone was on MySpace, but they were overtaken by YouTube in 2007 and had a peak user number of about 73 million in 2008 by which time Facebook had also overtaken them. MySpace still exists, and has tried to position itself as a platform for artists, it still has 50 million monthly active users.

By 2011 Facebook had overtaken and has remained in the top position ever since.

It’s interesting to see how the companies go up and down the charts, but I’m not sure exactly what it tells us – I think a social media platform can be financially successful serving a smaller audience. Linkedin no longer ranks in the tables, and it was purchased by Microsoft in 2016, but it’s a revenue generator for them because of it’s bespoke business tools, and the high level of influence the members have in the business world. The biggest option might not always suit your purpose. Making a profitable business out of a social media channel needs to be about more than ad revenue.

This was compiled by TNV, and they’ve sort of explained how they did it in an article, nowhere on the graphic or the article does it say what the measure is, it seems to be monthly active users (I compared published data from Weibo and Facebook), but I suspect that the Google Buzz figure is not accurate – it plateaus at 170 million, and then is overtaken by other platforms.

Their conclusion was

One thing’s for certain, judging by how many times the top spot changed hands over the past 16 years, none of the social media giants should be resting on their laurels. Really, anything can happen.

Not really. Only three companies held the top spot in the first 8 years; Friendster, MySpace and YouTube. In the last 8 years the top spot has been held by Facebook, and I expect it will take the top spot again this year. Given that “everybody” is now on Facebook it enjoys a position of being an entrenched network, the more people are on it the less likely people are to leave – even if some of us are reluctant users.

If a challenger comes for the top spot I suspect it will be from China, Sina Weibo sits in 7th spot on the 2018 data. They started out as a Chinese only, but now produce a site in both traditional and simplified Chinese to capture much of the Chinese diaspora, and have started to support other languages. Tencent has a billion users already, but is China only so was not included in the data.

Meanwhile I suspect that groups disillusioned with Facebook’s privacy and data practices will start smaller interest-based sites. I’m curious to see where this goes.

8 May, 201912 May, 2019 Louise McGregor social media

Facebook’s Fall from Grace

Following the attack at a mosque in Christchurch in which 50 people were murdered, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called on Facebook to do better;

“They are the publisher, not just the postman. It cannot be a case of all profit, no responsibility.”

She has a point, during the shooting in Christchurch the shooter live streamed his rampage through two mosques. I have seen a couple of screen grabs from the video and the images look like a very graphic shooter game. We now know that the first man to see him at the first mosque greeted him with the words “Welcome, Brother” and presumably this greeting was recorded on the live stream. It’s now illegal to publish the video stream in New Zealand, and the article where I saw these images has been taken down. To give Facebook credit once the New Zealand police alerted them I understand their Global Escalations Teams worked to remove instances of the live stream from their platform. But technically, under US law, they cannot be held responsible in court.

The video may still be out there, I’m not interested in seeing it but when researching for this article I found an interesting autocomplete in a google search, and it seems the effort to remove the video was not perfect.

In the Easter shootings across Sri Lanka which had a significantly higher death toll, their government worked quickly to block social media, and continue to circumscribe citizens’ use of social media. It’s not the first time the Sri Lankan government have blocked social media due to concerns about the spread of extremism via social media sadly.

How is this possible?

Social media platforms have benefited from a piece of US law, section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act which says;

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”

It’s an important part of maintaining free speech on the internet and it means I’m not liable for comments someone leaves on this blog, and nor is WordPress. The EFF explains in more detail.

More scandal

This isn’t the only issue Facebook has been faced with, last year they admitted to a security breach that may have affected 90 million accounts.

There are also growing concerns about health impacts as research piles up about the harmful impact of social media, particularly on children. There’s also evidence that anti-vaccination activists are targeting ads to people likely to be wavering on the vaccination question, and the number of Measles outbreaks keeps growing.

More famously their algorithms have undermined democracy in at least two countries. This is via the link to Cambridge Analytica, here’s how that worked as explained by journalist Carole Cadwalladr;

With all this scandal, how is the company doing?

Well. Facebook is doing well.

Revenue continues to grow, user numbers continue to grow. User numbers have apparently levelled off slightly in the US and in Europe, but it’s not clear that this is due to scandals.

Facebook currently makes more than 1.6 million USD per employee, 98% of their revenue is from advertising (2018 annual figures). Which begs the question of just who the customer is. Remember that they don’t pay for any of the content placed on Facebook – in contrast to, say, a glossy magazine like Vogue which at least provides some content to dilute the advertisements. So we, the users are the content providers and our attention is the commodity sold to advertisers.

Regulation Required

It seems this isn’t a problem that the free market can solve. We’re now living with a platform that is with us 24/7, pulls together a global community of almost half the world’s population, and holds data on our every move – and tends to seek more data rather than less. One way that Facebook has grown is by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, and the company is now so rich that it can buy any competitor thus stifling innovation. Governments have seen the impact on their country – in Sri Lanka, in New Zealand with devastating effects – and in their elections. During the campaigning to appeal the 8th amendment in Ireland Facebook banned all ads that were funded from outside Ireland, showing that it is possible to contain the damage of foreign influence. The EU put the GDPR legislation in place, in an attempt to protect citizens against the power that Facebook and other social media companies have accrued, in response Facebook moved millions of accounts from Irish servers to US servers – out of the reach of EU legislation.

The US is also stepping up, with the FTC investigating Facebook’s use of personal data and a hefty 5 billion USD fine looming over the company. Even that might not be enough, there’s a bipartisan call for tougher protections on consumer privacy.

I started writing this post in December, it’s been re-written more than any other post I’ve ever made, but every time I thought I was ready to hit publish something else happened. I nearly delayed again to analyse the information coming out of F8 and more analysis on the appearance of a change in Facebook’s policy on privacy, there’s a pretty good analysis on the Vergecast – they’re not convinced and nor am I.

Image via pixabay

20 February, 201817 February, 2018 Louise McGregor social media

Twitter Basics; Part Three

It’s time to talk about follower strategies and tips for building a solid following. I spoke about this briefly in Part Two, but I’m diving into detail here.

My goal with twitter is to discover new content and new expertise. I also want to share my own content through twitter, so I have tried to build a following of people who will be interested in what I write about. This means I look for people with interesting expertise in the fields I work in and follow them.

Six Ways to Gain and Maintain Followers

1 Follow People You Know

Twitter has been around since 2006, and now has 330 million users, so you do know people who are already there. People who already know you through work or professional connections are most likely to follow you back.

Search using the full name that they usually use, if someone is using twitter professionally they want to be found and their name will come up in the search results. Only one person can have the handle @JohnSmith, but an unlimited number can use the name in their profile and a search will find them all.

Click on “People” in the top bar to list accounts using that name. Twitter lists anything close to your spelling, which means that when I searched for John Smith, I got also got Nick Smith. You can refine your search with more terms, John Smith digital for example. But Twitter search engine seems to only look in profiles, so unless John Smith has added digital to his profile it won’t help.

2 Ask People to Follow You

You’ve probably already got an account on LinkedIn in or on Facebook, ask your friends, colleagues and connections to join you on Twitter.

Create a short post telling people you’re on Twitter, include your twitter handle, and invite them to follow you.

3 Follow the Followed

Search for industry experts or thought leaders in your field, follow them for their great content and then check who they follow. When you’re starting out look for people with followers in the hundreds or thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands – they’re more likely to follow back.

4 Hashtags

Search for a topic of interest and find relevant hashtags. If you’re interested in social media use by companies for example then #socbiz is a relevant hashtag, if you’re working on building leadership skills then #leadershipmatters has thoughtful content. Look for the hashtags associated with events, the Digital Workplace conference coming up in June will use #DW18 for conference related tweets.

By searching on the hashtag you can see who is actively tweeting on these subjects/events, and follow them.

5 Publish Your Twitter Handle

Include your twitter handle on your LinkedIn profile, you add it under your contact and personal info. Add it to your profile on your blog or website if you have one. Include it in any posts you publish, it’s common to see twitter handles included in footers on LinkedIn or Medium, sometimes as the author’s preferred method of contact.

6 Follow Back

This is so important to maintain a following, if someone follows you, follow them back.

I’ll follow anyone back on twitter who is vaguely relevant to my themes of digital, communication, innovation and leadership.

Follower Limits

Twitter has put in place some limits around follower numbers in an effort to stop “spammy” behaviour.

You can follow up to 5000 accounts, although only 1000 per day. After that you can only follow more accounts if your own following/follower ratio is close to 1 (the actual acceptable ratio is not published). If you want to follow every politician in the world (for example) you would hit the limit pretty quickly, but there is a way around it by using lists (more in the next post).

I regularly search for new people to follow, and unfollow inactive accounts, but only perhaps 20 at a time. On Twitter aggressively following and unfollowing behaviour on twitter can also result in a ban.

These limits are put in place to limit spamming, and in a normal management of your account you probably won’t encounter them but it’s good to know they exist.

Your third assignment is all about followers

1: Publish twitter handle

Add your twitter handle to your LinkedIn profile (under the contact information section). If your Facebook page is somewhat professional you can add it there as well.

2: Hashtags

Search for hashtags in your field, just pick the keywords associated with your job and look for relevant content. Then see who is tweeting that content and follow them.

3: Follow the followed

Search for 10 people who absolute leaders in your field; influencers, thought leaders, and innovators who are active on twitter. Then look at who they follow, check the profile to find people whose interests match yours, and check their twitter account to make sure they’re active.

Aim to add 40-70 new people in total from tasks 2 and 3.

Image: Twitter via pixabay | CC0 1.0

18 July, 20176 October, 2018 Louise McGregor Communication, social media

Personal Social Media Presence

You’ve got a Facebook account, you know your memes, your CV is on LinkedIn. A colleague of mine once told me that everything you put online is public and permanent, and if you’re averse to risk you may have avoided building up a social media presence. But at a certain level it’s almost a job requirement, as part of your personal branding. So how do you create a professional online social media presence that survives scrutiny from your boss, new colleagues or your future partner?

Three steps;

Protect yourself
Set up your presence
Build your presence

1 Protect Yourself

Personal Audit

We’ve all created accounts and then forgotten about them. I had a very confusing time trying to use Flickr at one point as I had somehow created two accounts with very similar names. So check your existing presence.

search for your name on google
check your name and variant spellings on each platform
do a google image search on your profile image
set up a google alert with your own name in it

Company Rules

Most companies have social media policies in place that you will need to follow. In general a company can’t prevent you from being on social media but they have an interest in what you say if you represent the company. Some professions have best practices that you should consider. Check

whether you can include the company name in your profile
whether you should you use your own name per platform; some teachers use an alias because they don’t want students finding them
can you use the company logo; often companies don’t want you doing this
what work business can you discuss; I was once asked to take a post down because I had implied poor governance over our company’s intranet, the truth was no defence. Since then I’ve avoided explicit statements about where I work.
what privacy settings should you choose (varies per platform)

With the information from these two things done you are ready to start setting up your social media presence.

2 Set Up Your Presence

Choose Accounts

How many social media platforms are there? No body knows, I found an article from 2010 listing 57, and the first one doesn’t exist anymore. Another article from last year lists 20 including Vine which resides in the internet equivalent of a hospice. So you’ll need to to research which ones work for you. Think about the size of the platform in your market(s), the type of content you can create to share, and where your audience is. My strong advice is to pick one or two to get started and do those well before taking on more. Here is a summary of the biggest platforms.

Facebook Unless you’re in China or Russia, or have a very niche business you will need to be active on Facebook.

	FACEBOOK
Population	Almost 2 billion users (April 2017).
Demographics	80% of internet users are active on Facebook and it’s the most popular social media site in most countries of the world.
Content types	text, images, links, video all supported
Advantages	big audience all content supported reasonable stats on post views and engagement
Disadvantages	pay to play hard to get into the stream of even those who like your posts

You can have a personal page in your own name, and a page that represents your company, your interests or your community.

YouTube Everyone consumes content on YouTube, relatively few people create content. But if your company can find a content niche you can win viewers, customers and PR pages, like the “Will It Blend” channel.

	YOUTUBE
Population	About 1 billion users (April 2017).
Demographics	Broad reach, skews younger, gender balanced in most categories (except eg; gaming and beauty)
Content types	supports only video
Advantages	big audience highly used
Disadvantages	harder to create great content hard to get your content seen must monitor comments supports only video

LinkedIn Although this has a lower total population check its reach in your country and industry. For finance professionals in the Netherlands at least 80% are on LinkedIn, so if you want a professional social media profile as a financial expert here you will need to be on LinkedIn.

	LINKEDIN
Population	About 106 million users (April 2017).
Demographics	Roughly equal on gender, slightly older overall audience, skews towards higher education and professional occupations.
Content types	text, images, links supported
Advantages	professional audience LinkedIn strategy is to become a content platform most content supported reasonable stats
Disadvantages	(limited to) professional audience

LinkedIn works of a personal profile, allows shared content, and offers company pages.

Twitter

	TWITTER
Population	Almost 319 million users (April 2017).
Demographics	Very general user base, even split on age, gender and education.
Content types	text, images, links, video all supported
Advantages	big audience all content supported reasonable stats on post views and engagement
Disadvantages	pay to play hard to get seen as peoples twitter feeds move quickly text limit of 280 (ish) characters spam and trolls can make it hard to use hard to build an audience

I like Twitter (follow me @changememe), it’s like being at a conference during a break. But unless you’re following a range of interesting people there it will seem empty.

Instagram If you’re all about the images then Instagram is the highest audience sharing platform.

	INSTAGRAM
Population	About 600 million users (April 2017).
Demographics	More women than men, younger audience.
Content types	images and short video supported, with new tools all the time allowing stories, boomerangs, mosaic, and portfolio posts.
Advantages	big audience low spam/troll as Instagram takes them seriously
Disadvantages	images/video only hard to build audience increasing number of ads

I love Instagram, and post at least one photograph from amazing Amsterdam every day, but if you’re not able to produce visual content every day this may not be the platform for you.

Snapchat et al Auto-delete platforms are the rage with the kids (yes I’m old) and they are fun. Some companies, with a focus on millennial audience, have been making progress, if your brand is in this area you might want to play with his in the mix of your personal social platforms so you really know how it works.

	SNAPCHAT ET AL
Population	About 300 million users (April 2017).
Demographics	Even split on gender, younger audience, lower education level overall (due to lower age demographic).
Content types	images and short video supported, with stickers, faceswap and image distortion options available.
Advantages	big audience young audience fun culture
Disadvantages	hard to execute well few brands have credibility to even be here

Blogging Do you have a lot to say? Blogging is the way to go for long form text content. There are loads of platforms out there, this blog is run on wordpress, which powers about a quarter of internet sites. I also occasionally post on the LinkedIn content platform and on Medium. There are a slew of platforms out there, take time to look at the functionality (is it easy to write and easy to share your content?), audience building, and robust (will the company survive with your content?) before choosing one. I’ve used WordPress for about 7 years (having imported it from Blogger) and still like it, every so often I look at others.

3 Build Your Presence

Profile

Your profile consists of your name, your biography, a photo and, in many cases, a header image. These should all reflect you and be consistent.

Each platform offers you options to write a short biography, add a photo and, in many cases, a header images. The descriptions should be consistent, and the profile image should be the same headshot.

A word of warning about twitter bios, you have a 160 character limit, but only the first 110 are visible in search results, so put the good stuff first.

Follower Strategy

You want to build an audience, decide who you will follow and follow back. Be aware that some platforms have limits in place, Twitter puts ratio limits in place when you follow five thousand people, and Facebook has a limit of 5000 on friends (although more can follow you.

I recommend; follow those in your field of interest, who have genuine accounts. Search for these on individual platforms or based on blogs/websites of experts you’re interested in.

I use StatusBrew to manage twitter followers as it helps me identify people who don’t follow back or unfollow me, I want my ration of followers to following to stay at about 1, and this helps me manage that.

Content Strategy

You need to pick a sweet spot of subjects to write about; where you are passionate, can be useful and credible. You might be tempted to write about everything, try to narrow it down to a core subject area, this helps your audience know what expertise they can get from you. You can break out of your core subjects occasionally if your passion overtakes your logic; I write about digital, communications and innovation, but have broken out occasionally even to politics which I never thought I’d write about.

The next step is to think about your content calendar, social media is a hungry beast and you need to find manageable ways to feed it. One way to help is to connect your accounts to automate publication, when this blog post is published it will automatically land in my Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. Technically the best practice for social media is to build content specific to each platform, but out here in the real world cross-platform sharing is a sensible approach.

Social media on a personal level can build your personal brand, and build your credibility as an expert in your chosen field. I’ve had an invitation to speak at a conference via twitter, a freelance gig via Facebook and via LinkedIn? Still waiting for the job offer.

Image: Personal Social Media | Louisa Mac | CC BY-2.0

22 June, 201728 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Communication, social media

Engagement Ladder

There’s a figure that gets quoted about engagement; 1, 9, 90. Which is a ratio representation of engagement. For everyone person who contributes content, 9 might like it and 90 will see it. It’s a little simplistic, and there are more forms of engagement now so it’s helpful to think of the engagement ladder.

Starting from the lowest rung of the ladder

Seen / Read

How many people saw your image, watched your video, read your content. This is the lowest level of engagement as it requires the least amount of effort from your visitor. It’s roughly equivalent to reach, although you might want to consider how much of your content was viewed or read.

It doesn’t tell you much about the person’s attitude to your brand, or their likelihood to purchase. We’ve all read stuff we don’t agree with, sometimes because we don’t agree with it. To compare this to a classic sales funnel it’s at least awareness.

Liked / Facebook Reaction

The next rung on the engagement ladder is a like, a G+, a Facebook reaction. It’s low commitment, a one click easy reaction, Facebook reactions tell you a more. Personally I’m pretty quick to like posts on Facebook or Instagram, much less likely to do so on Twitter. As likes are visible to others this level of engagement does indicate that the visitor has a possible interest in your brand – but be careful. Facebook rates all reactions the same, but a thousand “angry” reactions won’t translate to sales for your company.

Commented

The third rung is comments, or reactions to your posts. If you’re posting on social issues, as Banana Republic did in the screenshot below, you’re likely to attract a lot of comments.

It takes more effort to comment on a post, positive comments are a public endorsement of your brand. It’s going to take some effort on your part to analyse the comments, or to parse the sentiment analysis provided by social listening tools.

Shared

If a person shares a post, retweets, embeds your video, they’re increasing your reach as your content is now (potentially) reaching a new audience. They’ve also added your brand to their online reputation, this doesn’t map easily to a step in the sales process, but sits between evaluation and decision. They’ve added your company to a mental list for possible future purchases.

CTA

Some of your content might included a specific Call To Action, or CTA. For many companies this is exactly how they sign up more customers or subscribers, you can see some examples of great CTAs in this article from HubSpot. (And I’ve just shared content from a brand I have never been a customer of, but I’m aware of them, and they remain a potential supplier if I’m ever in a purchase decision for their services in the future).

Your CTA might be a subscribe, follow, download, or purchase option.

Created Content

The ultimate brand accolade, when users generate their own content related to your brand. But it’s a tricky area, with brands needing to pay attention to copyright and privacy issues.

Spotify have taken the step of using the real titles of subscribers’ lists in their own ads, it’s a campaign strategy that is infinite since their users will always be creating new lists. It resonates with their audience really well – seeing your own list picked up for an ad is cool, or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

When your customers take the step of creating content around your brand and sharing it you can bet you’ve got the ultimate level of engagement.

Image: Ladder | Rich Bowen | CC BY 2.0

30 May, 201724 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Digital, Editorial

The Gig Economy

We’re in the gig economy, we can order food, dinner delivered, or cookies delivered at midnight if you’re in New York. We can share our spare room for cash on AirBnB, our trips with Uber, or garden tools we’re not using. We can have someone visit us to hang a picture, build a bookcase or unblock a drain. In France you can have someone do your homework. The people providing the platforms say it unleashes innovation and offers exciting opportunities, it’s supposed to be good for us.

The companies offering platforms to enable all of this are lauded as disruptive and for a long time new companies were launched and cited as “the Uber of X“, there is even a book called “The Uber of Everything” which has the positive-sounding subtitle “How the Freed Market Economy is disrupting regulated industries and delighting customers”.

I’m all for disruption, but sometimes the disruption isn’t where you expect. Take AirBnB, there are a lot of articles about how AirBnB is disrupting the hotel industry, and it’s a service I’ve used in half a dozen cities. But it’s not the hotel industry that’s feeling the impact in Amsterdam, hotel nights are on the rise up 7% in Q1 2016, and numerous hotels have opened since airBnB launched in 2008. What has been affected is the rental market, with hundreds of apartments taken off the rental market. Amsterdam is not the only place to see an impact on the stock of rental apartments, and the city has now put limits in place.

Uber started out as a ride sharing platform, and it has a lot of benefits in terms of lowering congestion, lowering car pollution, reducing parking problems in cities. It has, according to some reports, lowered the rate of drink driving. There are a lot of positives. But there is also a downside. The industry that Uber set out to disrupt is the taxi industry seeing it as over-regulated and ripe for reform. When I hear the term “regulated industry” I always myself “who benefits?” In the case of the taxi industry there was a certain amount of industry protection to stop new entrants into the market, which maintains higher taxi prices. However it also protected drivers, allowing them to have a reasonable work week, and it protected passengers because drivers were licenced – as opposed to the ‘random driver‘ you might get as your Uber driver. Uber drivers started out as freelancers, part of the gig economy, but many of them now depend on their Uber income and are starting to fight back with attempts to unionise in Seattle and New York.

If we follow the money, it’s accruing to the platform owners. Uber’s revenue in 2016 is around USD6.5billion and AirBnB’s reached USD1.7billion. These two companies are doing very well out of the sharing economy. But there’s one platform that’s doing even better, Facebook earned almost USD27billion in 2017 almost all from advertising.

Other platforms began in one form and have evolved to others. Amazon began as a retail outlet and Netflix as a movie subscription service. Both have evolved into content creators each with a huge, somewhat overlapping, customer/subscriber base. Although some local competitors exist, it would be almost impossible for a new entrant to compete with either platform on a global scale. This is fast becoming detrimental to those who work in creative fields.

For digital platforms the economics tend towards a “winner takes all” outcome, that is we end up with a single monopolistic player in each type of platform that evolves. This is because even if there’s room for several players in a market, ride-sharing for example, a platform can outspend – or outsmart – competitors to acquire all the suppliers or all the customers. Once it has all the players on one side of the transaction it’s almost guaranteed acquisition of all those on the other side.

Stakeholder management theory says that a company must balance the interests of employees, customers and investors otherwise business model not sustainable, but in the case of platforms there is an imbalance of power allowing them to focus on the interests of investors, particularly prior to IPO when they must satisfy the demands of the Venture Capitalists. It’s taken new regulation to protect the interests of consumers, employees and others affected by the platform’s success.

The gig economy is good for business, it’s not so good for workers.

Right now I could order dinner to be delivered to me via Thuisbezorgd (the local incumbant), Foodora, Hungry, Deliveroo or Uber Eats. I predict that in one year’s time there will be just one platform.

Image: Lost in the Gig Economy? | Tankesmedjan Futurion | BY-NC-SA 2.0

31 March, 20178 February, 2018 Louise McGregor Leadership

Facebook Dilemma

Scenario

Imagine you run a retail company. You find a Facebook account that is incredibly derogatory to your company. I think every company has unhappy customers but when you try to find out what caused the person to hate your company so much it turns out that the Facebook account holder is an employee. You have a policy in place to guide employees on using social media, which does state that employees should be respectful.

Options

What would you do?

Outcome

Well, this is based on a real event, at a real company. The manager of the webcare team who found this choose to contact the employee’s manager and ask them to have a discussion with their team member. The reasoning was that although the account was damaging to the company there was a bigger potential problem; a very unhappy employee.

It turned out that although the Facebook account used the person’s identity and a photo of them, they had never created the account and did not know it existed. The webcare team then helped them contact Facebook and get the account removed.

In companies there is a temptation to look for a rule to solve anything negative. Managers often ask “what is our legal position?” or “what’s at risk?”, which leads to blame and punishment. By stepping back, thinking about what might be really happening and asking what would be lowest level of response to resolve the issue the company should a great deal of trust in their employee.

The course chosen to address the issue tried to use the “Most Respectful Interpretation” of the employees actions. The team thought that it could be a case of identity theft or that something terrible has happened at work and the employee is lashing out. The course of action chosen would lead to a swift resolution in the case of identity theft, or to the first step on resolving a serious issue if it had been the later case.

What would you have done?

Image; Red pill/blue pill | tom_bullock | CC BY 2.0

17 January, 201719 September, 2018 Louise McGregor social media

Social Media Fails (again)

We’re all on social media all the time, and the social media platforms are stretching into new areas of our lives – Facebook now has an “at work” option called Workplace. So how good are we at using it? Back in 2013 I looked at some Social Media fails (and one brilliant response), now I’m looking again. Are companies making the same sorts of mistakes? Have we got better at using social media?

Some of the same mistakes occurred.

Confuse private and public accounts

This tweet came from the US Justice Department, clearly not something a US Justice Department employee should ever be saying, so what happened? The twitter app lets you switch easily between accounts, and many people use the app to access their personal and professional accounts. In this case the staffer’s access to the twitter account was revoked, the tweet deleted and an apology issued.

We’re still making this mistake. I advocated keeping accounts separate, or even using separate devices, but I think that this error has become so common that people understand the error and it doesn’t seem to result in lasting damage to the organisation. If this happens to you apologise, delete tweet and move on.

Misuse of Sensitive Hashtag/Event

Carrie Fisher died, and the internet mourned. Cinnabon tried to gate-crash the wake with this image, recycled from their May-the-fourth post. The geeks of the internet were not impressed, many pointing out that she was much more than Princess Leia, that she’d hated this hair style, and anyway it’s crass to use someone’s death to promote your product.

As a best practice do not comment on a celebrity death unless they had a direct tie with your company or organisation. If there’s an emergency or an event where people are in danger only comment on the event in ways that are offering practical support.

Some Social Media Fails were more prominent in 2016.

Geography is Hard

Social media posts almost always have images now, and that opens up a whole new world of pain, as Coca Cola found out when they used a map of Russia in their Christmas promotion. They managed to annoy Russia by not including Crimea, and then Ukraine by adding it.

There are a surprising number of tricky borders around the world and a surprising number of sharp-eyed people ready to comment on it. You’re in a no-win situation, you’re bound to annoy someone so avoid maps of contested areas in your imagery if you can.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence got a bit hyped in 2016, if Microsoft’s experiment with “Tay Tweets” is anything to go by humans aren’t ready for it. In just 24 hours twitter taught Tay to be a racist bully.

Within days Microsoft ceased the experiment.

Social Media Amplifies Your Bad Decision

UN hires and then fires Wonder Woman

The UN has a whole organisation devoted to gender equality which states that “UN Women is the global champion for gender equality”. But the UN’s track record isn’t so convincing; just three of the 71 presidents of the UN General Assembly have been women, and all of the Secretaries General have been men.

So when they announced that the new Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls was a fictional character, specifically Wonder Woman, it didn’t go well. There were protests within the UN, negative feedback in the mainstream media, and across social media.

The UN passed on 7 highly-qualified women candidates for secretary-general—but just picked Wonder Woman as its mascot:

Progress? pic.twitter.com/mJugNib5y2

— Splinter (@splinter_news) October 14, 2016

This is a case of a bad decision being amplified in social media, and it seemed to lead to a change at the UN.

Racism Isn’t a Joke

Maybe the people running the MTV Australia twitter account on the night of the Golden Globes thought the humour would work since America Ferrera and Eva Longoria were making fun of how Latina actresses are often mistaken for each other. But it’s one thing to make a joke about your own race/nationality and very different for a company to make a joke about someone else’s. Just don’t.

On the same theme; know whom you’re talking about. Total Beauty confused Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

Fake News

Fake news reached a whole new level in 2016, and is set to reach new depths in 2017. There are thousands of US examples out there but I’m going to choose a less contentious example from the UK.

The Grim Reaper was busy in 2016, and with Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds dying within days of each other we were primed for more bad news. So when Queen Elizabeth II stayed home from Church with a cold a fake BBC account reported that she had died and people fell for it. The report was quickly debunked, leaving twitter embarrassed but relieved.

Which leads to a prediction for 2017; this will be the year we get smart about our news sources. Once I’m earning again I’ll be supporting one or two sources of good journalism.

So what’s changed?

I didn’t find examples of people jumping on trending hashtags any more, or of people sharing information that shouldn’t be made public, so we’ve got smarter. The errors now seem to be more in the area of content creation, social media managers need to understand how their promotional content might land in a global market.

We’ve got better, but the job has got tougher.

12 January, 20168 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Scam File

Catfish; Facebook Scam

I have a Facebook account, with my real name, real photo. I’ll connect to anyone I’ve met. From time to time I get invites from rather random people. Somehow a lot the random people seem to be in the military.

Today’s invite was from John Carter. Here’s his Facebook profile.

So I did a little reverse image lookup and found an article from the Washington Post that begins.

Gen. John F. Campbell, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, has taken to Facebook with a warning: Think twice before assuming profiles you see of him on the Internet are real.

It goes on to say that his team have discovered more than 700 fake profiles. General Campbell has his own Facebook page on which he explicitly states that he has no other profiles.

So what is this about? It’s the beginning of a catfish scam, an example of social engineering.

Social engineering is a technique used in many frauds, it relies on the fraudster persuading the victim into revealing confidential information or taking action that they wouldn’t have planned themselves. Often the fraudster creates an elaborate scenario to achieve this, and may create an online/social media persona to carry out the fraud. When a such a persona is created the fraud is know as “catfish”.

Steps in the catfish process;

Catfish Scam Artist is active in a Facebook community or online game, seeking vulnerable target. Often they target someone who is older, lonely, isolated, not particularly knowledgeable about technology. They’re talented and picking the most gullible.
Catfish builds rapport and makes friend request, the relationship may move to a deeper friendship or even a romantic or (cyber)sexual one.
Catfish sets up scenario for the financial fraud to begin, they will create a legitimate sounding need for money. Perhaps for medical expenses for themselves or a close family member. Very often the first amounts needed are small but the ‘condition’ worsens and expenses rise.
When challenged the Catfish will go on the defensive and provide some evidence of their fraud such as some form of medical report, but these “documents” are fake. (As a side note I have seen fake rental agreements, medical records, financial bonds, passports and ID documentation).

Dr Phil regularly does exposé episodes, and provides ten tips on checking potential catfish.

The fake romances can scam thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars from their victims, in a further clip from the case above Dr Phil adds up the cost and gets a total approaching 200,000 USD. It is estimated that these fraud types are worth 82 million dollars in the US alone. That’s roughly a quarterly profit figure for Apple.

I’ve worked on cyber-security issues in a former job, I’m too suspicious to fall for this. I hope warning other people will help.

Image catfish via pixabay