Protecting Children from Social Media

Posted on April 19, 2010 by marc meyer

How can you protect your children from social media?

One might say, “Do we really need to”? and another would say “We have to”.. and still another will say, “We’re all overreacting”.. and you know what? All three opinions are in a certain way, correct.

Do some of the following questions and comments sound familiar?

“I’m on top of it, I know what this social networking thing is all about”, “My child doesn’t really use it”, “Does it really matter? It hasn’t been a problem yet”, “My kids are good, they’re responsible and know what they are doing, nothing has happened, nothing ever will”. “Facebook seems harmless”, and besides, all they do is text”.

Your children, and for the sake of this post I will keep it to those children that are under 18, are exposed to so many different forms of media and channels of communication, that one has to wonder…

How do you shield them from the dark side and at the same time allow them to explore, absorb and learn without acting or being perceived as the enemy?

Right?

Before we dig into the what to do, let’s review something real quick that may help you to understand the landscape a little bit.

Though the above graphic refers to adults, children are not too far off from this model. This graphic by Forrester Research, refers to the types of people that hang out in communities and what they do in those communities. Your children hang out in communities, both online and offline, and all of those communities have their own sets of things to do, their own sub cultures and their own cliques; and within those groups there is as well, unwritten rules and what not.

But more importantly, aside from the breakdown of percentages in that graphic above-look at the number of ways that people can consume and create content. It’s just the tip of the iceberg in ways that a child can communicate with their peers and others. We are, and they are, consumers of media and creators of it. We are, and even more importantly they are, in the digital age.

They can:

Text with their phone
Online Chat via AIM
Create video on YouTube
Comment on YouTube
Create a blog on WordPress
Comment on any blog anywhere
Create a song
Create a network via Ning
Upload music and comment on the music
Upload an audio podcast
Tweet on Twitter
Create hundreds of profiles on hundreds on networks
Update their status on Facebook
Share images on Flickr
Share music
Share audio
Share content
They can use a desktop computer
They can use a laptop, ipad or itouch
They can use a smartphone
They can use a mobile device
They can use someone Else’s device or phone
They can use someone Else’s account
They can rate someone
They can vote for someone
They can create a poll or survey
They can use a Webcam
They can build a website from scratch

All of these forms of communication are just that, forms of communicating-with context and without. And… the majority of these activities have incredible SEO ( search engine optimization) ramifications. Simply put, when this content is created and uploaded or shared, if it was not done in the ever dissolving walled in garden of Facebook- then it is essentially waiting to be found by someone. Good context and bad.

I repeat, Good context and bad. Simply put, If I create or write something about Thomas Jones being a jerk-There is a high likelihood that it will be found in search. The problem? Thomas Jones might be a great guy, but you don’t know that. You just read that TJ is a jerk and so you decide to tell someone else…and so it begins. It goes viral in a social network and people get hurt.

Your digital footprint has never been more impactful than it is now, here in 2010.

So how, as a parent, do we deal with the firehose that is electronic communication, that is social media? How can we at least protect, shield and monitor our children from this new media evolution but still allow them to enjoy all that is has to offer in a positive way?

The first determination is the degree of involvement if any. If there is none, and they say there is none, don’t assume that. If it’s not happening in your house, don’t assume that it is not occurring next door, or in the school library or on the playground.

Assuming participation in social networks is going to happen and or is happening, then you need to take an active vital role in education, in creating policies, and creating ground rules for participation.

Believe it or not, even at the small business level as well as the corporate level, two things that we implore companies and businesses to do from the outset is to: 1) Start listening and monitoring to what is being said about you, your company and your industry and 2) set up and create policies, rules and guidelines for participation in social media. If they didn’t do #1, they won’t know what is going on and, #2, just like children, adults will take advantage of the zero social media policy and the situation and zero work would get done. So the same applies to children.

So I mentioned education. Do you know who needs the most education? You the parent. That’s right. You need to educate yourself on what the social networking landscape looks like and the texting landscape looks like.

u ned 2 kno what asl is as much as idk, wtf and omg…

The more you know, the more you will be able to understand. What do you know and how much do you know will be critical; but more importantly, how much of what you think you know and is it accurate, might be crucial.

Once you have a firm footing it’s time to create policies, rules and guidelines for usage. It starts simply with no computers in the bedrooms. Having the computer in a medium traffic area can be a game changer. Next as part of your rules, policies and guidelines, you will want to know, have or have done the following:

20 point checklist for letting your child engage in social networking

Know all social sites that your child is a part of it
Have access to all content pages that your child has created
Know all user names, passwords and profiles that your child has created
Know all email accounts with user names and passwords that your child has created
Create rules of engagement on social sites that are built on being “accountable” to you for their actions-A 3 strikes rule is not a bad idea.
Create your own accounts in these networks
Explain that though you will have all this information, you will only access it, should there be a need to.
Establish Trust.
Understand that that trust may be breached
Review the privacy settings in your child’s social networks and map it to their profiles and then review their profiles
See who is following of “friending” your child and vice-versa
No adult, unless it’s a family member should be in any network that your child is part of.
Explain the dark side of social networks to your child, there’s nothing wrong with being scared straight.
Periodically evaluate the content they are sharing and consuming.
Know what they are searching for
Don’t forget or ignore texting and email. Establish usage guidelines for those as well. Never assume they are harmless or easy to manage.
If you feel the need to establish time constraints for computer and phone usage, do it.
You’re not trying to be a friend here- we’re trying to be parents.
If you have to shut it down-don’t feel guilty. Do it without remorse.
The computer is not a babysitter. Talk to them.

In closing here are some things that you need to know that I told a group last week and it’s something that I have seen first hand. For the most part young children could take or leave using social networks and in my honest opinion-the usage of them, from a learning and sharing and creating standpoint in high school can have great value. But the usage of social networks for those below the age of high school freshman and possibly sophomores, I see no need.

For parents, knowing what your child is doing on a day to day basis is normal, but adding the dynamic of social media and social networks to the mix is definitely a challenge. especially without a road map.

Understanding social media, becoming educated about it and learning how to use it and monitor it are things that companies of all sizes are currently wrestling with. Take heart parents, you’re not alone. It does get better though once we all are on the same page. Just remember that you need to be controlling the technology, not the other way around and certainly not by your children; and though we call it a fire-hose, that fire-hose can be turned off.

The free ride in social media is coming to an end

Posted on April 16, 2010 by marc meyer

As Twitter continues to edge towards more of a business model that will offer something close to a premium level offering, something else caught my eye this week and it was this…

Ning announced that it was doing away with its free product and forcing its existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. They also announced that the company has cut almost 70 people —accounting for over 40% of its staff.

In case you don’t know what Ning is: It’s a service that allows people to join and create social networks. Ning currently has more than 1.9 million Ning Networks created and 40 million registered users.

About 6 months ago, I mentioned on a panel that the free ride of social media had to end at some point. People need to make money with this social media stuff and hopefully it is not a model based on traffic/advertisers.

This is only the beginning.

When employees don’t care about customer service…

Posted on April 16, 2010 by marc meyer

So I had a nearly catastrophic event happen today. If it were not for me trusting my gut it would have ended badly.

Let me tell the story.

I had to meet a client at a local restaurant in Naples, Florida. I had a lot of things with me that I had to hand off to them and thus was a tad bit harried. Plus the fact that I was running late for another appointment meant that the normal focus was not there. Keep in mind the word focus.

I met the client for a half hour then dashed off to the other meeting and finally made it back to the office at 4pm. As I was unloading, I noticed that I was missing my thumbdrive. On this thumbdrive is everything. Now granted I do have copies of everything on the thumbdrive, it’s just spread over 2 machines and 2 external drives-so that little 3 inch long, black USB drive is my one stop shop for docs and what not. It’s vital.

It was missing and panic set in.

I backtracked and concluded that it had to be at the restaurant, so I decided to call them. Here’s how it went down.

Me: Hi I was wondering if you could do me a favor…I…

Them: Hold please

Me..Ok

5 minutes later

Them: Hello? (In a thick foreign voice)

Me: Hi was wondering if you or someone there could do me a favor. I think I left or lost my flash drive in the chair near the fireplace. Could you look for me?

Them: A what?

Me: A Flashdrive, it plugs into a computer, it’s black, about 3 inches long and made of plastic. I think it’s in the chair i was sitting in near the fireplace.

Them: What?

Me: A Flashdrive, it plugs into a computer, it’s black, about 3 inches long and made of plastic. I think it’s in the chair I was sitting in near the fireplace. It’s either in the chair or table.

Them: Ok.

5 minutes later

Them: (A new voice) Sir we couldn’t find it.

Me: Do you know what you were looking for? I mean that seemed awfully quick.

Them: Sure, but we couldn’t find it.

Me: Uhhh, OK. Can I give you my name and number?

Them: Sure hang on. (another 5 minutes)

At which point I had to repeat my phone number at least 4-5 times and wondered whether she really wrote it down. I say thanks and she says, “Yep”.

I got off the phone and thought to myself, that a) they didn’t look, b) nor did they care to look, and c) nor did they really know what they were looking for and d) could care less. I decided right then and there to make the drive back over and look for myself and this is what I saw when I went back to my chair.

Look closely. Understand that my camera phone is not a high rez camera but come on-Is this really that hard to see here? What do you think it looked like in person? Talk about being mad, lucky, relieved and disappointed all in one fell swoop! Customer service indeed. I know they are a restaurant but come on help me out here. It would be no different if it was an iphone- the fact of the matter is that they did not look. They didn’t care and thus when employees don’t care about the customer, or customer service, you’re screwed.

Yesterday afternoon, I really wanted to name names and based on a very large group on Twitter, I was given the green light to do it, but that’s not really my style. I will say this, there is chance for this restaurant to get it’s act together. We’re not talking about food quality here, but we are talking about an experience that a customer could share with others.

This weeks #Social Media Topic: Managing the Effectiveness of Your Social Programs #SM55

Posted on April 13, 2010 by marc meyer

Effective social media programs? Yeah right, how would you ever prove it? That’s the struggle of corporate social media marketers. There are tons of systems that help you listen and monitor, there are a lot of publishing tools that let you update multiple accounts and personas in the same dashboard, hundreds of social platforms and a few reporting tools. The problem is they are all just that, all disparate systems that are not connected and certainly not integrated.

So back to the question, How do you manage the effectiveness of your campaign? If you are like most social marketers today, there is little support for the social manager who is typically part of the marketing or communications team. Left to their own devices, they usually use the free tools and simply infer the results that they can patch together.

There is a new suite of tools coming onto the market that proclaim Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) that begin to couple two or three components together. Here’s the problem, even the specific SMMS solutions don’t provide a real look. The current SMMS solutions are tools. They were created as tools to measure other tools. What’s missing are the actual use cases, the tools that marketers need to track, analyze and report campaigns. In general, here’s a list of what’s missing:

Central Database – to pull the results together and create a single platform to analyze and report from
Proper Reporting – that integrates the different systems and provides true enterprise analytics and reports
Advanced Sentiment Analysis – not just positive and negative either.
CRM Integration
Traditional Marketing Comparison

Take a look at that last point. To truly understand the effectiveness of your social programs, you have to have something to compare them against. Think about it, a platform that could listen, suggest influencers (based on advanced sentiment), provide a place to respond from, track internal links and their paths/subpaths, manage digital ad spend, then monitor traditional ad spends, effectiveness and finally compare and recommend an optimized marketing mix based on real-time results and all at an enterprise scale. The panacea of managing the effectiveness of your social media programs. (From my experience, I have only seen this solution from one provider, Accenture Interactive (Disclaimer: Jason Breed works for AI)).

The reality is that only the top brands require the type of solution mentioned above. Every marketer has unique needs and unique results that will all have different values for each marketer’s brand. There is one marketer that has the experience to help us work through what’s most appropriate for all needs. That marketer is Tac Anderson. Tac has experienced the brand side at HP and the agency side from his current position at Waggener Edstrom. He will lead the discussion around the following topic:

Topic: Managing the Effectiveness of Your Social Programs

Q1: What type of planning should go into your social media campaigns? What is your process?
Q2: What metrics should you always be looking at?
Q3: What should always be on your scorecard to measure effectiveness? Are there any constants?

We invite you to join the conversation on Tuesday 4/13 at 12 noon EST by following #sm55 from any Twitter client or from our LIVE site.

via hashtagsocialmedia.com

Posted via web from marcmeyer’s posterous

The cult of social media celebrityism

Posted on April 12, 2010 by marc meyer

I’m starting to become acutely aware of the extreme amounts of entertainment vehicles, media outlets, media devices, content consumption and content creation that are being produced at massive levels all around me. Social media can do that. It can expose you to a lot.

But I’m also coming to a conclusion too.

From a media/content standpoint, what we consume and how we consume it for some of us, is in direct proportion to what we create and why we create it. Social media seems to be central to this theme that we need to be and can be validated through this “instant recognition”. We see it and we want it too.

Call it “social media celebrityism” if you will. In other words, we the content producers, want to be noticed, we want the attention that we see the “others” getting.

Why do you write? Why do you create vlogs? Why do you tweet? Why do you share your content? Are our motives altruistic? What is the bottom line reason? I don’t know your motives but I would guess that most of you don’t create content out of a vacuum.

What this really means is that all of us content producers have one goal in mind whether we care to admit it or not. We want to be noticed. We won’t shun it if it comes our way. In fact, on the contrary. We’ll embrace it in a heartbeat. I don’t turn down many opportunities, do you?

It’s like we all want, at the least, the 15 minutes that has been afforded us. Most of us would take more if we could too. We laughed when Warhol first said it, but the more I continue to sit back and watch how our wired world is evolving, I see a public that obsesses over being famous and in turn obsesses over the famous.

Social media has made us vain. Social media has made us want more. Social media has lowered the bar and social media has lowered the barrier of entry into this world.

Social media has made us conscious of the attention we can get and it makes us want it all the more. Most won’t admit that, but most won’t turn away from the recognition if it is somehow bestowed upon them by accident either.

There’s nothing wrong with it. but my concern is that as we become more desensitized to and inundated with UGC, either our desire for better quality will increase-which would be OK, or our expectations for more outrageous, salacious content will need to be met, or we will feel the pressure of sacrificing quality over sensationalism. Sadly, that may have already happened…

Being digitally shallow and outrageous will take on new meaning thanks to social media and search. Our 15 minutes of fame will be compressed and zipped to 7 1/2 minutes…

This isn’t happening to everyone but I dare someone to say that they have never written something that didn’t possess a certain amount of link bait. Who’s to blame? Me, you, our readers, new media, old media, technology..We’re all to blame and yet there’s not a thing we can really do about it. It is the world in which we live in now.

10 social sites you might have missed

Posted on April 9, 2010 by marc meyer

I haven’t supplied you with a post that directs you to some cool social sites lately, for that I apologize. So here we go.

1) Check out Tagxedo. It’s Wordle, but on steroids. Though you will have to download Microsoft’s Silverlight to really see it in all of its glory.

2) Start selling in 60 seconds with Tinypay. You want to see micropayments in a down n’ dirty fashion? This is it!

3) I love this deck, The Tipping Points of Social Media

4) If your not a fan of Social Media Today, you should be. Pay attention to this post by Coree Silvera titled 36 Twitter Resources: Advanced Twitter Search for Business, It’s loaded with advanced Twitter search tips you probably don’t know about..

5) Check out the funky named Goomzee. Goomzee helps increase sales through innovative solutions, specifically designed to connect buyers and sellers. It’s essentially a mobile advertising and lead generation tool for real estate sales and marketing professionals.

6) You knew something like this was going to be created didn’t you? Teneros has created a product called Social Sentry which provides corporations the ability to monitor the social networking communications of their employees. Delivered as a SaaS offering, Social Sentry enables businesses to monitor employee activity on all major social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

7) Tungle is cool. Get your personal profile and custom URL to display your availability, and let others schedule meetings with you (without having to sign up). Choose your availability, who you share your page with and when meetings get booked.

8. Though we all read a lot every day, Mitch Joel compiled a nice list of 20 books that you should read. The Digital Marketing Essential Reader

9) This is hilarious. The PPC Blooper pay per click humor blog, with the appropriate URL of…Yourppcsucks

10) Sign up for this and keep your eye out for Nebul.us

Lastly I want to give a quick shout out to the folks over at Junta42 they just released their eighth installment of the Junta42 Top Content Marketing blogs list. I was honored to place #7 on that list! Thanks guys!

10 little things SMB’s might be missing when launching social media

Posted on April 5, 2010 by marc meyer

I use SMB’s as an example here, but when reading Todd Defren’s latest blog post, apparently it is something that permeates organizations both large and small. What is it?

What are companies (SMB’s) usually missing when jumping into the social media waters?

They’re missing the point.
They’re misunderstanding the commitment
They think you can outsource it
They think it’s a switch
They don’t try as hard as they could
They don’t measure it or…
They measure the wrong things
They lack knowledge
They’re expectations are unrealistic
They don’t give it enough time

That’s it.

But you know what the great thing is about all of the above bullet points? They all can be fixed.

How?

Education. Education will help them get the point, but they need to know where to get that education. You can help them.
Understanding the hard work involved will address a lot of the unknowns. We can all relate to what happens with hard work. But there needs to be an emphasis and a complete understanding of how labor intensive social media can be.
You can outsource it, but it’s easier to understand when you don’t, the more you understand, perhaps the more capable you are of knowing what you can and cannot do internally.
It is a switch but when you treat social media as such, others can tell, they see your lack of commitment-they see the half ass effort.
If you don’t try, then what should you expect? I’ve always said, if you give 100%, then no-one can ever say that you didn’t try. You can take it out of the equation. But make sure you’re working smart.
You measure your efforts when you sell, when you advertise, when you hire, when you buy etc. etc. so this is no different. You just need the right tools to measure the right things.
Look up the definition of social media ROI and that will tell you what you should measure with social media.
Social media changes daily; the tools, the sites and the cool things, they change daily. Stay current. Pick 10 sites and dump them into a reader and read it every day.
Create reachable goals. Teams and coaches create goals-you should be no different.
Set up your expectations tied into your goals and give it all a legitimate time frame. But know it is a long term deal.

Now go get it done!

Social Media thought leader infographs

Posted on April 1, 2010 by marc meyer

I see social media folks who have, or don’t have the chops, called everything from guru, ninja, and thought leader, to strategist, heavy hitter, expert and beyond. With that being said, I’d like to keep this light on words and more on the visual of what some of those labels or designations mean to me.

I guess first and foremost, when I hear the word Ninja, this is what comes to mind..

So I’m not really feelin’ the whole “Social Media Ninja” thing..Do you know people who work like that? or go to client meetings dressed like that? I just don’t know if I ever would want to be called a Social Media Ninja, what about you? I can see it now, “This is Marc, he’s a social media ninja, he carves people up and destroys them with lethal precision…” uhh sweet, you’re hired.

Next up is the Social Media Guru

Is this the image that comes to mind when someone is referred to you as a Social Media Guru? Do you want to be a Guru? Do you know what the definition of a guru is?

A guru (Sanskrit: गुरु) is one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others (teacher). (wikipedia) Ironically, look at this “other” definition:

In Western usage, the meaning of guru has been extended to cover anyone who acquires followers, though not necessarily in an established school of philosophy or religion.

Is it me or does that sound like a traditional definition of Twitter… which would mean that perhaps a social media guru might look something like this:

What’s the word, smarmy? The above Guru, may even have some sort of social media certification..Who knows? I know of one person who I could slap the tag of social media guru on, and it would fit, but for a myriad of reasons.

What about thought leader, what does that really mean to you? To mean when I think of a true thought leader this is what comes to mind.

But ironically if you do an image search on the term “thought leader”, all you get is a bunch nameless, obscure, people you’ve never seen before, trying to self promote themselves as a..you guessed it…thought leaders.

There are just a few, true, social media thought leaders, but I think my problem with the term lies in the fact that there are too many. We slap the label on people too quick. and the label is affixed based on false numbers. The problem lies in the fact that we have diluted it.

What about heavy hitter? Here is what immediately comes to mind for a heavy hitter.

Yep, The Bambino was a heavy hitter, because he was heavy and he could hit. I will let you at this point, come up with your own list of social media heavy hitters.

Then there’s the social media expert. I’ll leave it at this which I got off of Brian Cuban’s website:

Here’s a quick “Universal search” exercise for you, go do image searches for all of these terms mentioned above to see what comes up when you add the word social media to the front of them. You get some interesting results. Essentially, you get nothing, which means, Universal search aside, the labels mean nothing..Call yourself a social media unicorn if you want, just bring the results.

In conclusion, I would like for us all to go lighter on the labels and heavy on the results. Sort of like this last image. He might be the exception. He had the label and the results.