TMI (Too Much Information)

Looking at social media, it is easy to see that there is Too Much Information out there and that could easily fall into the wrong hands.

Some PR professionals back in London introduced me to the benefits of social media in journalism and PR. One of the first things they advised me to do was to privitize my Facebook account. This came as a shock to me initially as I didn’t think anyone was interested in stuff like this but they informed me that the first thing they did as a firm was to peruse Facebook to see what sort of person they would be hiring.

So lesson No.1 when it comes to social media – never click this:

But it seems that many of us have a lot more information out there than we think that can’t be hidden with a click. According to Mischa Tuffield’s blog, my very own National Health Service, the British Government-sponsored healthcare scheme, has attached Facebook social features that allow your searches on the NHS website to be tracked and shared with a third party or even a fourth party.

I am used to living in a country where you are monitored quite closely but this is definitely TMI for the Internet. I can live with a few drunken shots of me trying to make out with a houseplant but to share my most private medical information is unnecessary at best and at worst a worrying move towards some kind of online Totalitarianism.

And why do they even need information this private, this specific? I can understand if Target or Walmart want to know what I am shopping for and to be honest that's information they can have (if I'm lucky my peanut M&Ms obsession will get them refilling those aisles a little quicker) but surely my medical searches help no one?

I worry about a future where, instead of being offered winter jackets when I check my email I am offered laxatives or pregnancy test kits. Where once I was put on mailing lists for new DVD releases now I am on lists for creams for rashes that I'd prefer to remain between me, my doctor and the inner lining of my jockey shorts.

I may be able to walk into the doctor's office and they'll already know what's wrong with me but then I might be able to walk into a bar and the bartender will also know what's up with me after a quick look on Facebook.

Unfortunately it seems that there are no handy privacy settings on the Internet at large, I can hide those pictures of me with my pants down but I can’t hide my most personal medical ailments. I am learning that while I want to share information using social media there is plenty of information I do not want to share. The best thing we can do is be careful what we say to who and when we say it. Much like real life, I guess…

Bad bloggin'

I recently found a statistic that says 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blogs. Straight off the bat I immediately wanted to know how much of that brand chat is positive or negative – it might be a glass half empty kind of view but I’m guessing a lot of that isn’t great advertising.

Looking for an apartment in Minneapolis recently, myself and my wife checked each rental firm’s customer reviews and searched them on Google to find any hate blogs that detail exactly how many mice they had in their kitchen or told us about the time the landlord kicked their puppy down the stairs. There were a few for each firm, people ranting about how they got stiffed for $200 or how the hall smelled of cheese, all the time. This didn’t enamor us to the properties but we went anyway and we met some firm’s reps and they were mostly quite lovely and their properties quite lovely also.

So were these bloggers lying? Probably not entirely. If you are pissed, you want to shout and the Internet is a great way of getting your voice heard but because there is no one to shout otherwise you can elaborate – the mice were massive, the cheese smell overpowering, the evil landlord was definitely a child catcher (just look at his moustache, dude).

Also, some of these apartments had maybe 100 renters, of which maybe five blogged. Simply, getting people to blog about how great a brand is or how wonderful a service is isn’t easy. Not one of the apartment blogs waxed lyrical about the quality of the AC or detailed how attractive the friendly janitor is, especially when he takes his shirt off to fix the young ladies’ extractor fans. You expect good service and hot janitors, you don’t feel compelled to write about it.

BUT this might not be all bad. A recent NYT article found that a particularly vile person was using complaints and hate blogs to up his Google ratings and get more custom. In the article, Google wouldn’t confirm whether it based its analytics on sentiment. It obviously doesn’t if Mr ‘I know where you live’ got into the top three searches.

So if Google doesn’t care if it’s bad news or good news, is bad blogging a good way of getting a message out there?

Maybe not forever. Threatening people down the phone can only bump you up Google for so long before the Feds come-a-knockin’ and there are enough people out there who can, you know, read and will notice a health food brand has made its way up to the front page because hundreds of cute kittens have been murdered by the firm, not because it makes a delicious cat-flavored health shake.

The key is to reply and get engaged. One of the landlords I asked admitted his firm would look better if it actively replied to bad blogs, maybe citing little things like 'the truth' and denied the scurrilous rumors about his facial hair. The lady in the NYT article would not have dreamed of buying from the evil online vendor if she had read any of the hate blogs posted and I doubt I'd be sipping on a health shake I'd found online if I'd taken the time to read about the kitty genocide.

A lot of goings on, it seems.

One of my main gripes against social media is that it isn’t very social. I mean it is social; it’s just that not many people I know socially use it. I asked, like all my friends and none of them Twitter and one of them thought LinkedIn was a website to buy sausages.

The problem is I have been asking the wrong people.

According to Jake Hird at eConsultancy 175m people log onto Facebook every day. That’s more than the population of Pakistan, and there are loads of people in Pakistan.

Thanks to @nickburcher, I found that there are 106m Twitter accounts, of which 15m are active. That’s a lot of text speech, in fact there are 640 tweets every second, and bearing in mind a M134 minigun only shoots about 50 bullets a second, there’s a lot of twittering going on as well as facebookin'.*

As for blogging, 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours a week doing what they love, which according to a scary coach is around the amount of time one would have to be working to be able to handle a triathlon (ironically more blogging means less chance of being able to handle even a junior triathlon but still, I digress).

Interestingly, 7 out of 10 bloggers mention brands without being pushed. Of course many mention the brand with the prefix ‘here’s why I hate…’ but still, all news is good news.

With all this twittering, facebooking and blogging it’s a miracle anything is done in the English-speaking world. But then maybe all the social networking is getting stuff done?

*That said, the top Twitterer on Earth is Ashton Kutcher, so there’s room for all those involved to clean up the network.

The experiment

I woke up yesterday and I realised I still lived in the first decade of the 21st century. I thought I was with it, I thought I knew what was what online. I use Facebook, I get all my recipes off of Google and tell people I invented them myself and I now even argue with my parents via Skype.

But I am not of this new decade. I still think Twitter is for Aston Kutcher to tell us what he had for breakfast. I mainly use Facebook to share my views on the weather and post drunken photos that would have been better off hidden before social media was invented. To me, LinkedIn is full of out of work weirdoes and blogging is the domain of the failed writer.

I still live in the world where social media is a bit of a laugh where blogging is the domain of the disturbed, the drunk and the angry. To us in the noughties, Blogs, Tweets, Links and Posts are primarily for people to share YouTube clips of children being hit by stuff.

So I need to speed up and realize that this isn't the case. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging - they are all tools to get the word out, to get the word around and to find out what the word even is. But it isn't as simple as logging onto my Twitter feed a bit more often and to tell people what I had for breakfast, it's about linking up with people, trading ideas and yes, laughing together at terrified fat kids.

So this is my social media experiment. Step one: find out what all the fuss is about.