Capsule: Digital media turned an important personal growth corner this week. The Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook and MySpace were betraying friends while friending advertisers. Exactly how excited must the Journal have been to put the screws to the digital revolution by spying on the spies? Pretty excited, except when it came to inquire about News Corp's MySpace and its intelligence-sharing policies.... Can democracy be crowd-sourced by private enterprise? Should people ever entrust their personal rights to a digital media business? Was the digital euphoria of this last pre-recession decade a product of utopian wishful-thinking in a social climate of greed and excess? (Oh, grow up!)
The Wall Street Journal
Forget Email
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
Yahoo! on MySpace
Last week, digital darlings Facebook and MySpace were caught sharing their "users'" personally identifiable information (e.g., names and hometowns) with advertisers. Like any predictable pre-teen, Facebook claimed it had been misunderstood and "changed" its policy after the deception was revealed--but not before protesting that there would have been no deception had its registered users bothered to read the terms and conditions they signed up for in the first place.
By using the caveat emptor defense, Facebook unfriended its users as well as the digital "opt-in" concept at a critical phase. Advertising is trying to find its market through new business models in a determinedly digital world. To succeed, digital marketers will have to take the "opt-in" concept to new bankable heights. They'll have to be clear until it hurts when it comes to informing online customers of the terms and conditions of their digital business relationships. And, digital customers will have to grow up and recognize that they're just customers to those digital brands that seemed to understand them so well.
In the same week, Google was caught by Germany--how do they have the time? weren't they still chasing Greece?--collecting e-mails through intercepted wireless paths while roving German neighborhoods to improve their Google Maps product. Google quickly revealed the screw-up, claiming that the wireless data interception was unintentional--tough to believe given that Google admits to combing g-mail for attitudinal data that pegs its users to specific commercial segments that appeal to advertisers. Is Google really reading our mail? What about our blogs? (Let's hope so.) Did we inadvertently sign up for that by failing to read that never-ending bore of a terms-and-conditions micro-screen pop-up?
Maybe it's time for everybody to take some personal responsibility for this wacky state of affairs. For years, while the global consumer market was enjoying the fruits of past, present and future labors, the digital economy was setting its ground-rules. Rule #1: the "user" is king. More than profit, more than revenue, online usage is the number one metric of online success. Build crowds and the money will follow.
And follow it has, through advertising contracts that have made the digital advertiser the most important user of all. The brands are in on our lives; they're in on our conversations; and, they're even in on our pictures, if useful brand data can be gleaned from our digital albums. Yet, even with all of this personal access, the ultimate digital advertising money won't be realized until the theory of personalized advertising as a new direct marketing hybrid pays off.
Because it bets on future buying behavior (for now, in a recession,) digital ad revenue is more of a loan on future results than cash for the rest of us. Like hyper-inflated values on digital real estate, usage metrics have promised advertisers a rich future that has only been realized to date by the equity participants savvy enough to get in and get out through the very tight ownership window. Everybody else--including both advertisers and regular people who have made the investment of time and heart it takes to build a Facebook page--has paid without equivalent profit.
Digital payment currency for the consumer includes unsolicited advertising approaches as well as the foreboding of knowing you're being watched by interested fans who might easily turn into an angry mob led by your creditors (or your ex-spouse.) But don't worry: freedom (i.e., peaceful anonymity) can come through an actual "Facebook suicide"--the bathos-filled term used for erasing all traces of your Facebook page.
NPR Now entered the privacy debate last week by analyzing the potential personal cost of social media in a report on online privacy violations. According to NPR's legal sources, Facebook is commonly searched by attorneys looking for incriminating tidbits that can strengthen workers' compensation and divorce cases--all admissable in court. Those pictures of you obviously drunk with a too-familiar co-worker? If they show you standing, they can cost you your disability claim. If they show you canoodling, they can cost you your prenup in a nasty divorce.
Lucky dogs, traditional media have been slow to take what they know about the experiential habits of their customers to the digital bank. Federal regulators prohibited wired distributors from using personal data to exploit their customers years ago. Strangely, in its balancing of traditional and digital media, the federal government's regulatory instincts have been inconsistent in concept and execution. While cable operators are prohibited from revealing personal data (like name and home address) linked to TV viewing habits, few clear rules apply to protecting online users surfing through a media world far more exotic than angry Fox and MSNBC editorialists, Playboy on Demand and the occasional disreputable infomercial.
So, now that we've eaten from the tree of Knowledge of Digital Good and Evil, must we live outside the Garden? Yes.
Of course, digital nirvana never really existed. As painful as it is, this truth can set the media free. At least, it can help establish new blended advertising values built on the best intentions as well as the best results.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Trading Places
Capsule: Could Arizona's new people-control law be a reincarnation of world attitudes following the Great Depression--the one that followed the US Stock market crash of 1929? Sometimes, you've got to move to the edge in order to see what the edge really looks like.
This week's media coverage of Arizona's new people-control bill is whipping up a storm of protest. It's also reacquainting our country with our unresolved relationship with our American identity.
Helping things get better and get worse, the media has a few neuroses of its own to de-kink. In 2009, CNN stepped up to the pro-immigration plate by releasing TV host Lou Dobbs, who had opined loudly that our nation was going to hell because of Latin American immigration. On the con side, Fox News is still the number one rated cable news channel, proving the power of American entertainment over culture at a time when we could use a real stab at the news.
We may be saved from our claustrophobic video-dome by our new online tools of crowd-sourcing, social media and social activism. Have social media replaced the face in the mirror with the faces in the crowd? Will American cultural leaders heed the call to move from Visionary Narcissism to Visionary Social Entrepreneurship because, in the end, diversity profits?
There are over 6.8 billion people in the world. The United States has 310 million of them, meaning that if the world were a democracy where every person had a vote, America would have to make friends quick in order to influence policy. "Friending" India or Indonesia or Brazil could do a lot to lift our numbers; and many public and private hands have turned to the task of firming up those connections. Still, a better online connection with our global knowledge base has reintroduced some facts that are fanning US paranoia, aided by our stubborn insistence on blindly confusing the news with entertainment.
The United States represents less than five percent of the world's population. As our relative size sinks in, it's also whipping up a familiar destructive instinct to protect our borders with force as the last bastion of America's eternal influence. Of course broadband power, courtesy of America's largest media distributors, has delivered the tools to break those illusions down to size. And, at cross purposes, media content is giving neo-American-isolationism a greater berth than reality actually affords.
American media influence on the global dialogue remains far larger than one might expect for a country with 5% of the world's population. The American GDP exceeds $14 trillion--three times the world's second-largest economy in Japan and twice the GDP-per-person of China. And even though the national debt has soared to 87% of US GDP, the American economy remains the largest in the world. The American media voice breaks through walls around the world--a nearly $1 trillion global industry--some of which now carry the angry faces of Arizona and the angry faces of the rest of us facing Arizona.
Some of the American media influence comes from the commonality of the English language--the prominent language in the most socially mobile parts of India and, up until recently, the prominent language on the web. But English language web dominance is changing rapidly as different world voices are building web businesses and social media in their own languages. A rapidly growing percentage of today's internet sites are written in a language other than English.
For the English-speaking parts of the world, there are web translators, but these translation engines make English trade places with each site's native tongue, fueling our language isolation and failing to provide a real taste of our dialogue with the rest of the world. Our media economy may be missing more than a few coins in its sofa cushions as a result.
America's largest loss may be a newer deal than our nationalist approach to language. US media content has embraced commercialism so completely that much of the news isn't even the news anymore. Newspapers were always faced with this dilemma--the one that pits making a living against making a profit from hysteria that scorns objectivity. Today, even the liberal news media give too much press significance to hate-mongering and far-right-wing bathos. The coverage given to extreme Tea Party activists throughout 2010 is one example of the so-called liberal media falling off the other side of the horse.
Comforting news persists from the media cynics who've studied our historical ideological dialogue closely. The media point-of-view swings between left-and-right via a very narrow arc. The difference between the American right and the American left is small when looked at closely--in part because the American fabric has interwoven diversity through constant cycles of immigration into its DNA.
People coming up always moderate the views of those running in place. The viewpoints of the young balance out the viewpoints of the old, for better and for worse. New immigrant struggles remind us of how America became the nation that dreams of freedom and justice in the first place. Our idealism balances our fears armed with statistics and hope.
In this light, it would be pretty to think that the Arizona legislature will walk its recent immigration bill back a giant step toward a constructive position that's actually on our ideological arc. That process would be hastened if we acknowledged that--as mighty as our economy and our military make us--we are routinely digesting and transmitting a relatively small arc of ideas, making us less than uniformly great and less than uniformly hateful. Our highest point on the American arc is reserved for hopes and dreams, balanced on our lowest point by fear.
When American ideals soar, they represent some of the greatest egalitarian poetry of the human spirit. We should expect nothing less from this nation of immigrants that built its 20th century wealth fighting some portion of its wars to free the world from tyranny, influenced by the often liberal immigration policies that have given America its trans-cultural face.
Wikipedia on World Population
Wikipedia on The Great Recession
This week's media coverage of Arizona's new people-control bill is whipping up a storm of protest. It's also reacquainting our country with our unresolved relationship with our American identity.
Helping things get better and get worse, the media has a few neuroses of its own to de-kink. In 2009, CNN stepped up to the pro-immigration plate by releasing TV host Lou Dobbs, who had opined loudly that our nation was going to hell because of Latin American immigration. On the con side, Fox News is still the number one rated cable news channel, proving the power of American entertainment over culture at a time when we could use a real stab at the news.
We may be saved from our claustrophobic video-dome by our new online tools of crowd-sourcing, social media and social activism. Have social media replaced the face in the mirror with the faces in the crowd? Will American cultural leaders heed the call to move from Visionary Narcissism to Visionary Social Entrepreneurship because, in the end, diversity profits?
There are over 6.8 billion people in the world. The United States has 310 million of them, meaning that if the world were a democracy where every person had a vote, America would have to make friends quick in order to influence policy. "Friending" India or Indonesia or Brazil could do a lot to lift our numbers; and many public and private hands have turned to the task of firming up those connections. Still, a better online connection with our global knowledge base has reintroduced some facts that are fanning US paranoia, aided by our stubborn insistence on blindly confusing the news with entertainment.
The United States represents less than five percent of the world's population. As our relative size sinks in, it's also whipping up a familiar destructive instinct to protect our borders with force as the last bastion of America's eternal influence. Of course broadband power, courtesy of America's largest media distributors, has delivered the tools to break those illusions down to size. And, at cross purposes, media content is giving neo-American-isolationism a greater berth than reality actually affords.
American media influence on the global dialogue remains far larger than one might expect for a country with 5% of the world's population. The American GDP exceeds $14 trillion--three times the world's second-largest economy in Japan and twice the GDP-per-person of China. And even though the national debt has soared to 87% of US GDP, the American economy remains the largest in the world. The American media voice breaks through walls around the world--a nearly $1 trillion global industry--some of which now carry the angry faces of Arizona and the angry faces of the rest of us facing Arizona.
Some of the American media influence comes from the commonality of the English language--the prominent language in the most socially mobile parts of India and, up until recently, the prominent language on the web. But English language web dominance is changing rapidly as different world voices are building web businesses and social media in their own languages. A rapidly growing percentage of today's internet sites are written in a language other than English.
For the English-speaking parts of the world, there are web translators, but these translation engines make English trade places with each site's native tongue, fueling our language isolation and failing to provide a real taste of our dialogue with the rest of the world. Our media economy may be missing more than a few coins in its sofa cushions as a result.
America's largest loss may be a newer deal than our nationalist approach to language. US media content has embraced commercialism so completely that much of the news isn't even the news anymore. Newspapers were always faced with this dilemma--the one that pits making a living against making a profit from hysteria that scorns objectivity. Today, even the liberal news media give too much press significance to hate-mongering and far-right-wing bathos. The coverage given to extreme Tea Party activists throughout 2010 is one example of the so-called liberal media falling off the other side of the horse.
Comforting news persists from the media cynics who've studied our historical ideological dialogue closely. The media point-of-view swings between left-and-right via a very narrow arc. The difference between the American right and the American left is small when looked at closely--in part because the American fabric has interwoven diversity through constant cycles of immigration into its DNA.
People coming up always moderate the views of those running in place. The viewpoints of the young balance out the viewpoints of the old, for better and for worse. New immigrant struggles remind us of how America became the nation that dreams of freedom and justice in the first place. Our idealism balances our fears armed with statistics and hope.
In this light, it would be pretty to think that the Arizona legislature will walk its recent immigration bill back a giant step toward a constructive position that's actually on our ideological arc. That process would be hastened if we acknowledged that--as mighty as our economy and our military make us--we are routinely digesting and transmitting a relatively small arc of ideas, making us less than uniformly great and less than uniformly hateful. Our highest point on the American arc is reserved for hopes and dreams, balanced on our lowest point by fear.
When American ideals soar, they represent some of the greatest egalitarian poetry of the human spirit. We should expect nothing less from this nation of immigrants that built its 20th century wealth fighting some portion of its wars to free the world from tyranny, influenced by the often liberal immigration policies that have given America its trans-cultural face.
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