When Worlds Collide

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.