RIOT – You Can’t Hide, So Don’t Even Think About Running

February 11, 2013 Leave a comment

“Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Sense a theme here?

Raytheon, the fifth largest defense contractor in the world has developed software that scours the internet and social networks and creates a profile capable of “tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.” (source: Guardian UK). named RIOT – Rapid Information Overlay Technology (see video).

In other words, it quickly identifies who you and your friends are; where you’ve been; what you’ve done and by analyzing all of that data can predict where you’re going and what you’re going to do. It amplifies the concept of GAFA (pronounced, “gaff-ah”). Simply put, if you are active online, GAFA knows just about everything about you already: Google knows everything you’ve searched on including medical conditions; movie times; travel plans and more; Apple knows all about your musical taste and podcast subscriptions; Facebook is all about your friends and family, relationships, photos, etc.; and Amazon knows all about the things you research before you buy and your ultimate choices.

Now, add to that all of the GPS related services now commonplace on smartphones and tablets. Check-ins on Facebook, Foursquare and other location based services; and actual images of every photo you’ve uploaded online. All of that information — about you — fed into a system that analyzes, categorizes and theorizes to predict your future activity.

Privacy (whether real or an illusion) is the price we pay as a modern society for the benefits we enjoy every day from the Internet and smartphone technology. Want to go back to directionless maps? How about online dinner reservations, flower ordering or any of the other day-to-day activities that made our lives easier. As Huxley wrote, “for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better”

My advice? Don’t sweat it. Live a good honest life and you won’t have to worry about what breadcrumbs you’re leaving on the Web. But also keep up-to-date on Internet privacy law. Every society needs the gadfly — one who upsets the status quo by constantly questioning it, and so I belong to the Electronic Frontier Foundation which constantly monitors court cases and legislation that threatens to reduce online freedoms. I don’t agree with every stand they take, but I value the role they play.

None of this is new, by the way. Back when I worked for AOL during its heyday members constantly accused us of reading every Instant Message posted (we weren’t). Back then, we were processing more IMs daily than the pieces of mail handled by the U.S. Postal Service (and this was back when the Post Office was still big).

But if information is indeed power, then technology that quickly analyzes and predicts the behavior of individuals or groups is a powerful — or dangerous — tool.

But for most of us, the old adage rings true:

You wouldn’t worry so much about what other people think about you, if you realized how little they did.

Filed under Privacy, social media, web2.0 Tagged with , , ,

Great Infographic on Social Media in 2012

January 9, 2013 Leave a comment

The State of Social Media 2012 by The SEO Company
The State of Social Media 2012 by The SEO Company

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It’s Marketing; It’s Social Media; It’s Social Media Marketing

December 20, 2012 4 Comments

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

I’ve written before about who “owns” social media in any given organization (see: Who Owns Social Media? Ultimate Answer: The Opposites) During my decade at AOL (Community and Social Messaging), we worked in the Product dept., although viewing “product” as the home of social media may have been  unique to the situation, both in the company (one of the first online community hubs) and the time (mid ’90s — mid ’00s). At BusinessWeek, it was the digital dept and for sure, what better place for a digital tool like social media to live? But at Bloomberg LP it was the Communications dept and that certainly made sense and where I am now, KPMG LLP, it resides in marketing.

So, I can tell you from experience, there are arguments for social media being based in whichever department I (or perhaps, you) work in at the time. As stated in my prior post it the goal should be that social media live everywhere in a modern organization and so usually I try to stay departmental-agnostic. So I am always on the lookout for some function-based thought leadership piece that makes a good case for why social is a key tool for them.

That brings us to this article,’12 From ’12: The Ultimate List Of The Year’s Top Marketing Lessons‘ on Forbes written by Lisa Arthur (CMO of Aprimo), where she lists her key marketing developments from 2012:

1) Marketing is transforming 2) It’s all about engagement 3) Accountability means transparency
4) Social is a strategy 5) Mobile is moving to the top of the agenda 6) Showrooming is here to stay
7) Zombies live among us 8) Technology rules 9) If you don’t have expertise, partner with someone who does
10) We’re stronger together 11) It’s never too late to start changing the game 12) Stay agile

It struck me that, without exception, what she is saying about marketing is also true about social media. Read more of this post

Filed under digital marketing, social media, social media marketing Tagged with , ,

Obama, Romney, an Orca, Zombies and Socal Media

November 13, 2012 Leave a comment

obama-romney cloudThe company I now work for has a relationship with a market research firm that analyzed the effectiveness of social media in the Obama vs. Romney election for CBS.  As part of their findings they created a word cloud of the terms people on social media associated with each candidate. And that got me thinking about how quickly social media has evolved.

Back when I was at AOL during its grand ascent to being the largest social network in the world at that time, we realized that time progressed online at an accelerated rate and so we needed to a release new version of AOL about every six months or so to stay up-to-date with the competition. Part of that acceleration relates to Moore’s Law which stated (in 1965, mind you) that (paraphrased) computer capacity doubles every two years. That trend continues and with it the viral spread of social media. After all, Twitter is only 6 ½ years old, Facebook 8+ and LinkedIn a bit over 9 years old – and all of them (following the hockey stick graph of online social network growth) have really only come into their own in the last 5 years or so.

When viewed through the snapshot lens of a cyclical event that growth, and therefore impact, is magnified. Take, for example, the 2008 Olympics in Beijing which had some social media component, mainly relating to reporting outcomes before they were available on US television broadcasts, but four years later organizers of the London games, recognizing that the growth of social media influence was so relentless official policies for athletes were created and instituted for fear of affecting the performances of the athletes and the reputation of the games, became known as the “Social Media Games”.

And so it is with General Elections. Four years ago, Obama was the first to organize grassroots efforts in the social media environment and did so at a pace that dwarfed (both in size and effectiveness) anything the McCain camp had to offer. Four years later, social media is such a driver of political support that it was instrumental in re-electing the president and will be a requisite in all political campaigns going forward.

Two things some may find of interest: Read more of this post

Filed under history, social media Tagged with ,

#BlogActionDay 2012: The Power of We – Crowd-Sourced Funding

October 15, 2012 Leave a comment

When you think about organizations receiving funding from a large number of people, some of whom donate very small amounts, you typically think of two scenarios – political parties and large charities.

 

And certainly, those two types of organizations have greatly benefited from the advent of social media, where they can solicit donations from targeted groups of individuals where they congregate online. Individual donation pages set up by everyone from walkers in support of breast cancer research to triathletes training to compete on behalf of blood cancer prevention, detection and treatment.

 

Donations

Donations (Photo credit: Matthew Burpee)

 

. My daughter Kate, a public school teacher in inner-city Philadelphia twice leveraged DonorsChoose.org to fund first basic equipment (and when I say basic I mean bats, gloves and even the bases) for a girl’s softball team she had volunteered to coach at her school which lacked its own means to support, and again to take her students to see the documentary ‘The Bully Project – 1 Million Kids’ in hopes of bettering their lives today and building better citizens for tomorrow  Social Media now has Kickstarter.com, a way to invest in new start-up companies. I even helped fund getting clean water in Africa via CharityWater.org and co-funded the recent Broadway revival of ‘Godspell’.

 

So the ‘”Power of We” is strong, wide-ranging, and helps bring things to life for philanthropy and for-profit projects alike.

 

Give a little to the project of your choice — you know you should.

 

Filed under Blog Action Day, Blog Mob, philanthropy, social media, web2.0 Tagged with ,

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