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Facebook: We own everything

16 Feb

Facebook have announced they own all content published by users. The chat that this has subsequently caused across the blogosphere (and twitosphere) has been noisy and unsurprisingly not swinging in favour of Facebook owning pretty much everything that they possibly can.

Looking at their terms of service (taken from their site as of 16/02/09) the points to note that:

- The user is solely responsible for all content that they upload. This removes any accountability from Facebook for any content that is infringing any copyrighting (or future) legal disputes. Its at this point they want the user to agree to be responsible for content.

- Facebook is then granted a license for all content that they upload. From the definition below this can be used in pretty much anyway they possibly could ever want! (See bold below) Its a big list of rights and its a big issue that the majority of consumers wont be aware of. It hardly warns you of this when you upload a photo and publish it to all rather than a select view - nor when you post an opinion / video / comment (or pretty much any interaction at all with the site).

You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settingsor (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

The interesting point to look at here (from a professional perspective) is where this leaves brands. I currently work on Bacardi and, like many brands have invested in a social network page that facilitates a relationship outside of their brand site.  In this situation could brand published assets (such as exclusive video or images that we strictly administer digitally to adhere to their corporate social responsibility guidelines)  be re-purposed or used by Facebook for analytics, ad sales, consumer advertising, etc, etc…. ?

The key point to note in their clause is the importance of users privacy setting to what Facebook can, and can’t, share. They claim to adhere to publish material in line with your settings that you agree to (or apply to your account). From this I presume (but am by no means a legal voice!) that should your privacy settings restrict who can view your profile, see your photos or comment on your wall it will also mean that facebook will have to respect these same settings and have restrictions imposed on how they can use your material (should they choose to).

This makes users vulnerable who operate an open door policy to their settings. It links back to the cases seen recently of social identity thread where users who are open in their self promotion are seeing identity problems reflect back onto them.

With identity theft becoming more evident and people becoming more aware of the issues through the media – the chatter around the ownership and privacy policy that is being reported by Facebook can’t fail to be picked up and expressed by the press and make users aware of other reasons why having an access all areas pass to the intimate details of their lives isn’t necessarily a good idea.

The advice: To lock down your profile, be careful what you share open source versus behind closed doors. Use the simple rule that if you are happy for it to be viewed whenever, by whoever and exploited by whatever channel seen fit (at any point in your life) then keep it open and shout out loud. If you’re more conscious of that Saturday night photo that shouldn’t have been made public for the world to see you in your 2am glory – think twice…

Last point: Its not just your images – think about the scenario where your mate has published that 2am photo and her policy is unrestricted. Its her photo so her IP and, according to the law, Facebook’s right to license and distribute as they see fit.

Be careful who your friends are and think twice before that pose (or video) in front of the lens! Remember Aleksey Vayner….

Facebook: The data possibilities continue..

4 Feb

It was with no surprise that I read the mass of press releases across the weekend and saw it announced that Facebook was planning on offering consumer insight on the back of its “150 million strong database” (Guardian.co.uk) -its been a long time coming! Since the commercialisation of the channel it was only a matter of time before the insight that was building the adsales guys cases (why you should reach your audience here) could be turned into a much more interesting tool: One that allows individuals to actual read about where people are going.

Currently we’re constantly faced with a Facebook conundrum. It’s important to play in the space – particularly when so many brands will see such a high propensity of their target audience whiling away their hours in the space BUT to what point is it accountable. Until recently we’d been stuck (in agency / client stand offs) to using fan pages (as these could be tracked) and struggled to make those in the marketing team not so familiar with the digital space to regard those interacting with the brand, away from the brand site, as important as those who visit their .com presence regardless of whether we can report back numbers or not. We’ve now moved out of fans and into the friend influencer category whereby data isn’t tracked but immediately the experience we can have with users and the experience they can have with us has increased dramatically seeing more affect in a 7 day period than previously we’d achieved across 3 months. Its with this relief that the potential for insight to be made availability that makes the numbers analyst in me excited and the creative proportion of my brain (admittedly smaller than the analyst!) groan.

Facebook has always dabbled in its potential to track and provide insight. Their new Lexicon shows quite clearly where the revenues could be coming from as the tool begins to model things like user Sentiment, Association and Demographic information on users posting about particular terms. The demo model they’ve produced merely hints at whats to come (you can’t yet input your own terms) but you can bet that unlike the current tracking tool you wont be able to simply type in your own terms and view how these things are tracking (although I’d be happily surprised if this isn’t the case!)

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Interestingly the current Lexicon tool has very limited worth to a client (more a pictoral representation than anything of statistical value) but, based on the initial glance we’ve been given of the new version it has learnt from the likes of Google Anayltics and one of many of the reputation monitoring companies to be able to give agencies (and brands) the information they need to be able to listen and influence (if thats the objective).

It will be interesting to see how quickly facebook’s intention to sell data becomes a marketable product. It will also be interesting to see how much more complicated brands who are dabbling in the space suddenly find the fact that data availability suddently stops them offering the more experiential led tactics that aren’t as trackable.

Will this simply become another example of the constraint of data availability begining to put creativity and user experience back in shackles…

Twitter…. The next big thing?!

27 Jan

Twitter this and Twitter that…

It came to my attention a few months ago and I signed up, had a poke around but couldn’t really see how this would take off – seemed like a rip off to facebook status updates…

Now it seems that its growing in popularity as “Micro-blogging” looks set to send the UK twittering. I’d argue that at present the twitters are still in the early adopter stage (within the UK) and it will be a few months yet before friends are packing up their facebook updates and focusing on twittering to their hearts content but, by the looks of it, it could happen.

twitterusergrowth

The figures look good and this article looking at user numbers (released in Dec 2008) paints a robust picture.

Let’s think about the UK market. Twitter is still not on the radar for many. In week ending 17/01 Twitter was the 291st visited website in the UK. (Hitwise Intelligence, 09) – definately nothing for Facebook to be worrying about yet.

Yet how is it useful? I looked into some Twitter user stats and found the top poster doing 920 updates. On investigating this user was simply spamming users. Another Top 10 Twitter (in terms of usage) according to Tweetrush is On Time who (yep you guessed it!) sends a tweet update to its followers ever 2 – 3 minutes telling them the time. Is this of value or is this simply spam?

Going into it with a bit more detail the slightly more useful hitwise findings found that:

Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months.

Sites are using their tweets to sucessfully generate top of mind reminders to their consumers – serving as a prompt to visit. I haven’t found a huge amount of brands doing this to their advantage although Innocent Drinks and their twitter shows some nice examples of users using the tweet to give feedback on products and the ease of response Innocent then have to give the users feedback.

As with anything the adoption by brands is unlikely to hit until the consumer mass take up the technology yet getting in early and helping set the model for success will stand any brand in a position to gain followers quickly (as commerical noise is less minimal) but, as with anything, playing in the social space requires a strategy that is mindful of the environment and has clear objectives as to what the presence is set out to achiece – briefs of “I need to be on Twitter as it’s popular” look set to hit inboxes of digital agencies everywhere by end of Summer this year – triggering waves of panics as reasons for being there are totally overlooked in favour of self-indulgent positings.

As celebs (and brands) use it and discuss the platform openly adoption is likely to tip relatively quickly. Hitwise have even updated their report to include the impact of Jonathan Ross / Stephen Fry’s discussion on Twitter to show how it positively affected traffic.

Looking at the daily data from last week, it seems that the exposure granted by Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry discussing Twitter on TV (Saturday 24th increase, the day after Friday Night with Jonathan Ross) had a slightly bigger impact on the site’s UK usage than Obama’s inauguration (Jan 20th).

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Still curious? Check out Britney Spears, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross – all twittering away (with varying degrees of success!)

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