alex de carvalho » Social media

Securing the Clicks: Network Security in the Age of Social Media

Alex — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:03:41 +0000

A milestone is a stepping stone

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a new chapter opened up in my life years ago. More than a chapter, really — a whole new volume was started back then. For the more I learned, the more I cast off what I had previously learned. And looking back, some stepping-stones in my path were big milestones in disguise.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” ~Steve Jobs

When I started this blog seven years ago, I could not imagine how profoundly my participation in social media would affect me, by opening new doors and perhaps closing some others. Every single one of my professional opportunities over the past four years has stemmed from my use of social media. In this respect, online participation has been as significant a part of my learning as completing an MBA previously had been. In many ways, social media has also represented the unlearning of parts the MBA — but that is the subject for another post.

Yesterday, a new and unexpected door was opened when McGraw-Hill published a book I co-authored, my first: “Securing the Clicks: Network Security in the Age of Social Media.” I say “unexpected” because in the overall scheme of things, knowing myself, the thought of becoming a published author was most certainly another one of my self-delusional flights of fancy. Or so I thought. Over the past year, I also learned that writing a book is no easy stroll in the park — it’s an obsessive, ~~chimeric~~ convoluted process that will lay you to waste. However, thanks to the rigor, persistence, and intellect of my co-authors, Gary Bahadur and Jason Inasi, the hard work was completed and the dream became reality; I am forever grateful to them.

Why this book and why now?

As we know, social media platforms and tools now dominate people’s attention and time spent online. It is no surprise that social media is also the preferred vehicle for hackers interested in compromising corporate systems. There have been numerous high-profile corporate attacks and hackers are becoming more sophisticated.

In this book, we describe a framework for analyzing the corporate threat level from multiple angles, to uncover risk areas and vulnerabilities. We define a matrix which outlines a systematic approach for developing plans, policies, and processes to reduce risks and to keep up security over the long-term.

The book includes notable case studies, recent examples, and best practices from around the world, and covers third-party software and services. Most importantly, we emphasize a cross-functional collaboration across the organization, including IT, HR, and marketing & PR.

Social media security is a nascent field and we hope that this book contributes to advancing the conversation about how to create safer and more secure corporate environments that promote the use of social media internally and externally.

As significant as social media has been to me so far, it is clear that it is just the beginning, it is developing very quickly, and we all still have a lot to learn. Writing this book taught me a lot and I hope you will find our methodology useful for the business your run.

Update: Here is a favorable book review of “Securing the Clicks” by security expert Ben Rothke that summarizes our approach and highlights important chapters in the book.

Social Media Through The Product Lifecycle

Alex — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:48:20 +0000

tl;dr Compared to other industries, healthcare and pharmaceutical companies have historically been slow to market online, partly because of strict advertising regulations (FDA) and patient-privacy (HIPAA) laws. However, as new market realities push pharma companies online, these firms will find that social media supports the more agile business model some will pursue.

By 2016, the world’s pharma firms will lose over $140 billion in annual sales from major drugs as key patents expire and cheaper generic versions hit the shelves. This upcoming “patent cliff” is a legacy of the blockbuster drug manufacturing and marketing model, where massive R&D led to billion-dollar drugs. The current crop of expiring patents include well-known brands such as Pfizer’s Lipitor, GlaxoSmithKline’s Advair, AstraZeneca’s Seroquel, and Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myer’s Plavix.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem for drugmakers if new monster products could take up the slack. However, the discovery rate of new drugs have declined even while regulatory hurdles for new drug approvals have increased over the past decade, making it impossible for big pharma to sustain historically high, double-digit growth rates.

In addition to acquiring new molecules, partnering with academic groups, and diversifying their core business, drug companies are responding to these new realities by cutting headcount, increasing DTC marketing, and launching digital and social media initiatives. Budgets are moving to the web, with increased activity in online recruiting, marketing, market research, social media monitoring, community management, app development, and more. As they move online, pharma firms will find that social media will positively contribute to their products’ lifecycles in at least three ways:

Market Research: As of March 2011, the Internet counts over 2 billion users. These include key opinion leaders, patient opinion leaders, healthcare providers, and individuals across hundreds of therapeutic areas who have joined branded and unbranded communities to discuss symptoms and treatments. These platforms are changing pharmaceutical firms’ approach to market research, since they can now track and monitor these discussions to draw new conclusions. These platforms facilitate new qualitative and quantitative market research techniques, including asynchronous, private, and anonymous forums between physicians and/or patients, sentiment analysis, adverse event monitoring, and more.

Big data: Patient information is being shared and aggregated online through blogs, social networks, patient, physician, and association communities, health-tracking devices and applications, and electronic medical and health records. This is akin to large unstructured clinical trials, where people worldwide are recording and discussing the results of millions of trial and error experiments associated with the management of their health and medical conditions. With the use of data-mining technology, such data will uncover vast opportunities to improve tratment protocols and patient outcomes.

Comunications: The embedded slide presentation below compares the legacy blockbuster model with a more agile specialty model, highlighting how social media market research, communication, and community management complements the product lifecycle. The specialty model includes product extensions and new delivery methods which can be more quickly tested and brought to market. Such extensions require continuous adjustments of strategy and marketing, which are more easily facilitated by social media. Through community engagement and relationship building, social media can effectively complement quick adjustments and changes to brand strategies.

Pursuing these strategies will require a new mindset and a more agile mentality. These types of activities are probably better pursued by creating “incubators” within pharma companies, where dedicated resources can experiment with new online technologies and platforms before rolling them into operations. For those that take the leap, the future is social.

Social Media Throughout The Product Lifecycle

View more presentations from Alex de Carvalho

That was fun! My chat with #jms220 students

Alex — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:55:05 +0000

journalism, social media, jms220

Want to create a vertical social network? Answer these 10 questions first

Alex — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:01:20 +0000

A nicely recursive pattern in the walled garden at the Brownsover hotel near Rugby, England.

In our age of the ever-expanding Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIns of this world, companies, associations, nonprofits, and other types of organizations are also thinking about developing their own communities, to create more relevant and focused places to network:

The biggest challenge facing these niche or vertical network is selling people on the idea that size doesn’t matter. These networks are more about the quality of connections rather than quantity. They are places where like-minded individuals can connect with each other with far less noise.

The road to creating a social network can be a winding and perilous path. Before embarking on the adventure, it helps to have ready answers to these questions:

1. What are your objectives?It may make sense to build a community for any number of reasons, including Marketing, Education, Association Members, or Marketing Research, to name a few. Some important differences exist between these types of communities.

Marketing and Association Membership communities tend to be longer-term or indefinite in nature, with lower average participation by members and with a greater churn (turnover in active members). These communities may grow large, but will require community management, stimulation, and fresh content to keep members interested and coming back.

On the other hand, Marketing Research communities tend to be set up for a defined period of time, with precise research objectives and measurements, and with more active and stable participants. These communities are generally smaller and require less community stimulation, but do require more active moderation in the form of directed questions and possibly incentives or remuneration for participation.

The type of community you are building determines your communication strategy, the resources required, and the metrics to follow. Oh … it’s better to think about internationalization right from the start, rather than layering that in afterward.

2. Should you partner with an existing community or use a white label solution?
Your company may wish to develop sponsored sub-communities in partnership with an existing community. This would allow you to engage members more quickly and will be more cost-effective, compared to developing a community from scratch on a new platform. On the other hand, the latter approach allows for total control over branding, but may take much longer to implement and to customize.
If you choose to host the platform yourself on your own servers rather than use a cloud-based solution, then be prepared for some technical challenges, including user experience and interface, server architecture, content delivery management, social network configuration, customization, and design, software development, member authentication, security, and maintenance. The decisions here have to do with selecting between open source versus proprietary platforms versus coding your own from scratch. Do you have a development team? Hosting your own will give you more flexibility … but at much greater cost and potential frustration.

3. What is the community’s expected lifetime?
Will the community live indefinitely, or will it be for a set period of time, like 3 or 6 or 12 months? It doesn’t do anyone any good to start a community just to let it languish some time later because you met your objectives; if the community is limited in time, it’s better to be open up front about the objectives and length of the community. Generally, focused Marketing Research communities are conducted over limited time periods while communities for existing products are more variable in timing, depending on their stage in the product lifecycle.

4. How will you recruit and authenticate new members?
Where will members be recruited from, and do incentives need to be paid? Can growth occur organically, and how are members encouraged to invite their peers? Can an opt-in mechanism be tied into the company’s existing customer communications vehicles? How should your platform interface with the authentication and engagement mechanisms of other social networks, and particularly with Facebook Connect?
For private, “gated” communities, member authentication is a big issue, especially if you have paying members enjoying premium benefits associated with belonging to the club, trade association, or social network. How will you keep unauthorized users out?

5. What’s the business model?
Do you have a membership model? Or maybe it’s sponsorship-based? Do you have premium features for different membership levels? Running social networks are costly in terms of hosting, content delivery, maintenance, new feature development, and community management. Make sure to budget these over the long term so the community doesn’t suffer … or end abruptly. On the other hand, if you’re running an active vertical social network, it’s likely you’ll find your business model quickly.

6. What is required for community management?
Whether resources are dedicated to stimulating a Marketing-oriented community or to moderating a Marketing Research-oriented one, member interaction is always initiated and kept alive by active community management. These resources are dedicated to the community and perform vital roles, including keeping the community clean and focused. Language is important here as well, when opening membership to different regions.

7. Which features do you need?
Social networks have a number of features that may be used in combination. For example, member profiles, adding colleagues, private messaging, forum areas, blogging capabilities, articles, events listings, newsfeeds and activity streams, and much, much more. What are your priorities? Adding too many features at once will take time, slow the network down, confuse your members, and provide for poor user experience. It’s better to start simple and to test new features … and to be wary of feature creep.

8. What about content?
In addition to community management and user created content, communities are also kept alive by content that is provided to the members, whether through relevant articles, or through directed marketing research moderation. Your company, an external publisher, or both may provide media content. When considering members from multiple countries, language is again a big issue.

9. How will the social network integrate with existing company systems and processes?
As more people in the company access the new community to observe and to interact with members, it’s important to create new business processes and to integrate with existing CRM systems. If your salesforce is shifting online, how will they interface with the community without turning members off? Can you add educational modules for making the up-sell or cross-sell more comfortable? How about just listening and applying what you learn from the community to improve your products and services — do you have a process for that? How does your customer service team participate in the community?

10. How will you measure success?
The answers to the above questions will largely determine the measures to implement. It’s not always about the volume of activity, it’s also about the quality of contributions, the overall cohesion and sentiment of the community, and how this changes over time.

What else should be considered before taking the first step?

Social Media Course Syllabus, Fall 2010

Alex — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:42:09 +0000

Last Wednesday marked the end of the Fall semester for my course at the University of Miami. Together with 19 students and invited lecturers, we explored the workings of social media from multiple perspectives, including identity, community, branding, PR, and journalism. The class developed on three levels, covering the practice of publishing and sharing; online culture, behavior, and sociology; and, relevant case studies about PR and journalism online.

As with previous classes, I am grateful to my class for putting up with some of the shortcomings of the course. The course gets better with each new iteration, thanks mostly to feedback from the students and their performance.

Posted below is the original syllabus for Fall semester 2010, which we mostly followed and with the one big exception of not covering virtual worlds. Second Life did take a big hit this year with the departure of its Founder, but other worlds are doing exceedingly well, including Blue Mars and World of Warcraft, of course.

Based on learnings from this semester, I’ll be modifying some things for the Spring 2011 Semester, as follows:

* Cover the sociology later in the course
* Quickly ramp up individual publishing and collaborative tools
* Spend more time initially on the mechanics of some platforms, including WordPress, LinkedIn, Facebook, and third-party apps for Twitter
* Invite guest lecturers later in the semester, rather than right away
* Provide more direction and structure regarding class projects
* Space the student presentations out throughout the semester, rather than grouped at the end
* Emphasize learning the vocabulary from the beginning, since vocabulary helps to structure the learning and to solidify key concepts

Without a doubt, I learned a whole lot more about teaching and about myself while teaching this semester. The more I teach, the more I am humbled by the profession and by my colleagues who are full or tenured professors.

The original course syllabus for the Fall semester follows below. If you read through it, please let me know your thoughts.

CNJ595: Social Media for Mass Communication, University of Miami School of Communication, Fall Semester 2010

Instructor: Alex de Carvalho
Meeting place and time: WCB 2046, Wednesday, 6:25pm – 9:05pm
Office hours: Please schedule

SYLLABUS

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE:

In a few short years, social media has profoundly changed online communications. With the advent of new tools and platforms, more and more people are publishing and participating in conversations online. Mass adoption of social computing technologies has led to new types of mediated interaction as people maintain more relationships than any time prior.

As former members of the audience become the creators of content, corporations and media organizations lose control of their marketing message and individuals face new challenges in terms of privacy, identity, and the maintenance of virtual relationships. This course explores implications, opportunities and challenges for the communications profession, including journalism, public relations, advertising, and marketing.

The course is grounded in practice, and you will be required to participate in social networks, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, and more. Class discussions, presentations by students, readings, case studies, and invited speakers, will highlight new effective strategies and applications of these platforms.

The class is highly participatory both offline and online. Between the weekly scheduled class meetings, this course’s discussion continues in a variety of online and virtual environments. Those who complete this course will know how to use social media productively, and have a framework for understanding and evaluating new tools and platforms.

COURSE PREREQUISITES:

The class is open to all; there are no prerequisites for this class.

MATERIALS FEES:

Students will not be required to purchase any materials or books and all Readings will either be handed out or available online for free. We will read research papers, studies, and press articles. These readings are organized by week and are available online via the course wiki.

FORMAT:

This course combines lectures and student presentations. Classes are generally a semi-structured topical discussion based on readings and questions. Guest lecturers will be invited to lead class discussions on certain topics. Active participation is expected.

ASSIGNMENTS/COURSEWORK:

We will be using a shared wiki, individual blogs, a bookmarking service, and individual twitter accounts as the web platforms for this course.

The wiki functions as the central space for collaboration, where assignments and readings will be posted and discussions will be held. The wiki will also have the Readings list, which may change during the course according to our progress.

The online requirements serve both to familiarize you with new web communication technologies and to continue the discussion beyond the confines of the campus.

Online participation through social media utilities and platforms– 30% of final grade. Create a blog and a Twitter account and publish several times a week on topics relevant to the class discussion, as described in the syllabus and context of the readings. Students may also blog about a topic of their own interest. Each blog post should link to relevant resources on the web. The blog will be evaluated on the quality of engagement with themes of the class (or on specialized topics according to a student’s interests), the clarity of expression, and the cultivation of community through regular posts and comments. Each blog post must include the tag “umsocmed”. Participation through other social media platforms including video and photosharing websites will count as well.

Topical Presentation and Discussion – 30% of final grade. You will be required to deliver a presentation during the course. You may choose to research and present an existing relational technology (a citizen journalism website, a social network, or a social media utility), covering the following aspects: what is the history of the technology or platform? How is identity developed? What types of activities create digital traces? What are the relational aspects and functionalities? How are relationships created and displayed? How are communities formed and managed? How does the social discovery of information, news, and events occur? How does the platform or technology integrate with external web services?
Alternatively, you may choose to interview a recognized thought-leader or entrepreneur in social media, including: how did they get started with social media? What is their field of expertise or strength in social media? What were the milestones in their own online development? What do they consider to be historical milestones in social media (case studies, new technologies, etc.)? What challenges have they faced and what battles have they fought along the way (anecdotes are important)? What is the future of social media?

Presentations should be 20 minutes in length with accompanying visuals.

Participation — 30% of final grade. Class participation is required. Students are expected to do all the Readings for the course, to attend classes regularly, to have completed the reading in advance of classes, and to participate actively in class discussion.

Final Exam — 10% of final grade. The final exam will evaluate your familiarity with social media concepts, case studies, and vocabulary.

Recognition will be given to those who demonstrate consistent improvement over the course of the term.

TEXTS:

Readings will be as current as possible and the instructor will regularly assign materials. In addition, students will be responsible for keeping up to date with the course’s blogroll which will be presented in the beginning of the semester. Handouts may be provided in addition, in the class and students are responsible for reading assigned materials and the blogroll prior to each class.

COPYRIGHT STATEMENT:

Use of copyrighted materials is strictly prohibited for any assignment or class presentation unless permission is granted by the author. You may use Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) materials as long as you comply with the licensing requirements. Licensing information for materials used are to be submitted together with your assignments.

COURSE TOPICS OUTLINE

The order of course topics may vary from the syllabus based on the availability of guest lecturers, as well as on students’ progress in assimilating course materials and learnings from class.

Session 1 August 25, 2010
Course introduction: who are we and what are our interests; what do we expect and want out of this class?

Instructor and students introduce themselves, instructor explains objectives, assignments and expectations.

Discussion topics:
* Brief overview of social media
* Differences between traditional media and social media
* Suggested books for reference and to acquire greater proficiency
* Product vs. process journalism
* Rapid cognition online
* Discussion about social media literacy
* Introduction to object-centered sociality
* Our class tag / hashtag: umsocmed / (#umsocmed on Twitter)
* Blogging culture: presence, credibility, identity, reputation, authority, and influence
* Introduction to WordPress, including hosted and self-hosted blogs
* Introduction to Twitter
* Some notable Twitter accounts to follow
* Overview of location-based services, particularly foursquare
* Aggregation with friendfeed and distribution with Ping.fm
* Twitter desktop and mobile apps, including Tweetdeck and Seesmic

Assignments:
* Read the assigned readings for the next class and be prepared to discuss.
* Set up a Twitter account and post an update with the hashtag #umsocmed. If your Twitter account is private, please advise the instructor.
* Set up a WordPress blog, whether hosted on WordPress.com or self-hosted
* Publish a blog post, with links to something on the Web that is relevant to class topics, as described in the syllabus and context of the readings. The blog will be evaluated on the quality of engagement with themes of the class, the clarity of expression, and the cultivation of community through regular posts and comments. Tag your blog posts with “umsocmed”.
* Contribute one comment to the blog post of another class mate each week
* Post to Twitter daily (except weekends).

Readings:
* Wathen, C.N., Burkell, J., (2002). Believe It or Not: Factors Influencing Credibility on the Web. Journal Of The American Society For Information Science And Technology, 53(2):134–144, 2002
* Hargittai, E., Fullerton, L., Menchen-Trevino, E., & Thomas, K.Y. r — (2010). Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content. International Journal of Communication 4 (2010), 468–494

Session 2 September 1, 2010
Theme: WordPress, SEO, journalism tools

Clarification on how the class will be graded
Social media glossary
Review of WordPress setup, hashtags, commenting. Widgets
Disqus commenting system
Review of Twitter accounts
Introduction to the class wiki
RSS, feedreaders, Google Reader, OPML, and FeedBurner
Introducing social bookmarking and Delicious
Introducing the course blogroll

Guest lecturers:
* John Carcutt, President, Applied SEO, Inc.
* Greg Linch, News Innovation Manager, Publish2

Discussion topics:
* Search Engine Optimization: definition, importance, techniques, tools, blog search engines
* Social Media Optimization
* News innovation: how is traditional media responding and adapting to changes in the media landscape?

Assignments:
* Read the assigned readings for the next class and be prepared to discuss.
* Add your colleague’s blogs’ RSS feeds to your feedreader account and add the course blogroll OPML
* Keep up to date with the feeds in your feedreader and comment when appropriate
* Sign up on the wiki for the presentation for which you will lead discussion.
* Publish two blog posts, with links to something on the Web that is relevant to class topics, as described in the syllabus and context of the readings. The blog will be evaluated on the quality of engagement with themes of the class, the clarity of expression, and the cultivation of community through regular posts and comments. Tag your blog posts with “umsocmed”.
* Contribute one comment to the blog post of another class mate each week
* Post to Twitter daily (except weekends).

Readings:
* Saveri, A., Rheingold, H., & Vian, K., (2005). Technologies of Cooperation. Palo Alto CA: Institute for the Future.
* Levine, F., Locke, C., Searls, D. & Weinberger, D. (1999). The Cluetrain Manifesto. The End of Business as Usual.
- 95 Theses: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html
- Elevator Rap: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/elevator.html
- Introduction: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/introduction.html
- Markets Are Conversations: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/markets.html
- The Hyperlinked Organization: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/hyperorg.html

Session 3 September 8, 2010
Theme: blogging concepts, ethics, terms, tools, and techniques. Wikis. RSS. LBS.

Blogging culture: authenticity, transparency, authority, influence, ethics, and credibility
Writing for the web
Basics of HTML and CSS
Trackbacks, links, tags, sidebars, blogrolls, widgets, and feeds
Blog search engines
Realtime search
Blogging workflow, tools, and browser add-ons
Wikis: PBWiki, SocialText, MediaWiki
Wikipedia
Publishing and distributing your media online; syndicating your media and content to your communities through RSS
Monitoring your reputation, your brands and your keywords
Setting up feeds and alerts for the information that matters to you
Facebook feeds, Tumblr, Posterous, FriendFeed
Location-Based Services: Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Brightkite, MyTown, Google Latitude, Loopt, scvngr

Assignments:
* Read the assigned readings for the next class and be prepared to discuss.
* Keep up to date with the feeds in your feedreader and comment when appropriate
* Publish two blog posts, with links to something on the Web that is relevant to class topics, as described in the syllabus and context of the readings. The blog will be evaluated on the quality of engagement with themes of the class, the clarity of expression, and the cultivation of community through regular posts and comments. Tag your blog posts with “umsocmed”.
* Contribute one comment to the blog post of another class mate each week
Post to Twitter daily (except weekends).

Readings:
* Travers, J., Milgram, S., (1969). An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem. Sociometry, Vol. 32, No. 4. (Dec., 1969), pp. 425–443
* Granovetter, M. S., (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, Volume 78, Issue 6, (May, 1973), 1360–1380
* Knorr Cetina, K.D. and Bruegger, U. ( 2000). The Market as an Object of Attachment: Exploring Post-Social Relations in Financial Markets. Canadian Journal of Sociology 25(2): 141–68
* Counts, S., & Stecher, K. (2009) Self-Presentation of Personality During Online Profile Creation. ICWSM ’09. * Adams, Paul (2010). The Real Life Social Network. PDF document available online
* Meeker, M., Devitt, S., Wu, L. (2010). Internet Trends. Morgan Stanley Research.

Session 4 September 15, 2010
Theme: social networks, identity, and your brand

Your life online: your brand persona vs the brand you represent
Your online CV: business networking with LinkedIn
Social Graph: 6 degrees of separation, in theory and practice
Social object: friend-based sociality vs object-centered sociality
Online communities and social networks: becoming an active member and participating
The social media starfish and the conversation prism
OpenID and Oauth
Social networking for promoting people, products, and services
How does social network design and architecture affect participation? What else affects participation?
News feeds, activity streams, life streams
Comparing the platforms: LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, and more
Facebook apps and Open Social
Whose data is it? Closed gardens and network data portability

Readings:
* Please consult the course wiki

Session 5 September 22, 2010
Theme: Copyrights, DRM, Images, video, social bookmarking

Photography on the web, Flickr
Copyright and Creative Commons
Harnessing collective intelligence: social bookmarks, folksonomies, collaborative and active filtering
Normal distribution vs. Power laws
Net Neutrality
Video for the web
Mediasnacks. Filming, editing, and publishing a short video online
Recording an audio interview, editing, and uploading it
Use of images, graphs, and maps to illustrate texts

Guest lecturer:
* Jessica Kizorek, Founder, Two Parrot Productions

Readings:
* Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon (2010). What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? Proceedings of the 19th International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference, April 26–30, 2010, Raleigh NC (USA)
* Zhao, D., Rosson, M.B. (2009). How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work, Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work, May 10–13, 2009, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA
* Brooks, A., Churchill, E.F. (2010). Tune in, Tweet on, Twit out: Information Snacking on Twitter. CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Session 6 September 29, 2010
Theme: social media for fun and profit

Special guests: local bloggers and journalists are invited to class for a roundtable discussion on their experiences.

Discussion topics:
When and how did the invited bloggers start using social media?
How has social media affected their lives and their careers?
What were some of the highs and lows?
How can social media complement your career?
How can one make a living from social media?
Building a persona and a brand
Creative writing on the web

Theme: your identity online and offline.

Online behavior affects credibility, authority, and influence
Writing for the web
Building your persona and brand
Meetups and tweetups
What about privacy, security, and ethics?

Guest lecturer:
* Maria de los Angeles, Writer, Blogger
* Carlos Miller, Photographer, Blogger
* Patrick Barbanes, Consultant, Blogger

Readings:
* Please consult the course wiki

Session 7 October 6, 2010
Theme: virtual worlds

Virtual worlds exist in many forms, and many more are sure to be created. We first discuss World of Warcraft, and SecondLife, the immersive virtual world.

Readings:
* L. Wu, et al., “Vaue of social network — A Large-scale analysis on network structure impact to financial revenue of information technology consultants,” presented at the Winter Information Systems Conference, Salt Lake City, 2009
* Paek, T., Gamon, M., Counts, S., Chickering, M., & Dhesi, A. (2010) Predicting the Importance of Newsfeed Posts and Social Network Friends. AAAI ’10

Session 8 October 13, 2010
Theme: getting things done online, collective action, and sharing economies. Cloud computing, SaaS, open source, browsers, and standards

Discussion topics:
What can be done alone? What can be done collectively? How do individuals build up social capital? How can self-interest be leveraged to create public goods? How do people organize online into groups for cooperation, collaboration, and collective action? What are the relationships between collective action, community, and democracy? What mechanisms facilitate collective action and community? Do social networks allow for new forms of production (ie., “non-market peer production”)?

Overview of open source culture and software. What factors lead to success? What motivates contributors?

Does most of your data reside on your hard drive, or in the cloud? Which data is where? Why? Which factors lead to greater migration of data online?

Does the desktop matter anymore? How does the browser continue to change, and why? What about new desktop (and mobile) clients? Also, we take a look at browser extensions.

Overview of software as a service providers and platforms, for private, personal business, and corporate use. What are the business models?

Readings:
* Please consult the course wiki

Session 9 October 20, 2010
Theme: the changing role of PR and marketing

How has online participation in social media affected brand, positioning, advertising, and public relations? What role for community?

We explore case studies of successes and failure in social media communications by brands. Are companies having a hard time adjusting, and if so, why?

Readings:
* Please consult the course wiki

Session 10 November 3, 2010
Theme: the changing role of PR and marketing

How has online participation in social media affected brand, positioning, advertising, and public relations? What role for community?

We explore case studies of successes and failure in social media communications by brands. Are companies having a hard time adjusting, and if so, why?

Readings:
* Please consult the course wiki

Session 11 November 10, 2010
Theme: citizen journalism

What are the models for journalism online? How do they leverage the community? What are the elements of citizen journalism sites? How is the information structured? In which ways do readers and the community participate? How to maintain relevance and quality? If you could build a citizen journalism site, what would it look like?

Readings:
* Please consult the course wiki

Session 12 November 17, 2010 — FINAL EXAM

Session 13 November 24, 2010 — Thanksgiving Recess

Session 14 December 1, 2010 — STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

Session 15 December 8, 2010 — STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

Implementing social media: brand monitoring

Alex — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:01:09 +0000

Table of contents for Keys to Implementing Social Media series

Implementing social media: the adoption matrix
Implementing social media: brand monitoring

tl;dr: So you’ve been tasked with “tackling” social media for your organization: now what? At the EyeForPharma eMarketing Summit 2010 in Berlin, I presented “5 Keys to Implementing Social Media,” a framework to help you define your organization’s social media activity. This post summarizes the first key, monitoring your brand online. As a disclaimer, I am the co-founder of a brand monitoring service for the life sciences industry.

If markets are conversations …

“Any savvy party goer knows to listen before jumping into a conversation at a cocktail party.” -Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Altimeter Group

“There’s no tagline” to conversations, according to the Cluetrain Manifesto: “For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.”

All sellers and brands may not be fully aware yet (see the social media adoption matrix) but their consumers sure are talking about them. Whether you believe these interactions should be called “conversations” or “self-publishing,” research by Penn State University found that “20 percent of all tweets—or one out of every five updates—mention specific brand names or products.” As for the value of these tweets? “There’s room to glean qualitative analysis about brand perception and affinity from them, at least.” -Jim Jansen, Penn State (and some “Companies court tweeters and bloggers”).

A large proportion of these conversations are related to health. According to Pew Internet, 61% of American adults look online for health information (June 2009).

Fully 42% of all adults, or 60% of e-patients, say they or someone they know has been helped by following medical advice or health information found on the internet.

In Germany alone, “there are more than 100 health-related search queries per second,” according to Jens Monsees from Google, citing 2010 search stats at EyeForPharma in Berlin.

… are you listening?

According to Jeremiah Owyang, “In the social media communications lifecycle [pictured above], companies often fail to listen .… One of the biggest problems for [online] communicators today, just like a real conversation, is learning to listen.”

For example, do you know:

Whether your clients and consumers are mentioning your brands, products, and service experiences?
What are physicians discussing online, and who’s becoming influential?
How do patients feel about your brand?
Is the medical content accurate?
Is your promotional activity effective?
In what context are your brands mentioned?

By becoming aware of your online mentions throughout social media sites and platforms (see the conversation prism), you will effectively and quickly gain new insights, to:

Understand your customers and your community
See how and where your brands are mentioned
Pinpoint customer satisfaction issues
Find out what really concerns physicians and patients
What and where is the false information?
How are competing brands perceived?

Social media monitoring tools help keep your team organized and on top of market trends. For example, like a canary in the coal mine, online mentions of Avandia were clearly multiplying preceding the announcement of the drug’s recall. On a more positive note, the buzz on Herceptin increased five folds following publication in Europe’s Lancet about positive results clinical trials for Herceptin, a part of the chemotherapy regimen for HER2 protein positive breast cancer (The Lancet, 2002). However, some physicians and patients had allegedly been using Herceptin treatment before chemotherapy, to reduce the size of lumps in HER-2 positive patients, and sharing their experiences online. After recent clinical trials were performed, these proved the drug did indeed improve progression-free survival before starting the chemotherapy regimen (The Lancet, January 2010).

That’s all very well, but how does one keep track of online mentions?

Brand monitoring platforms

There’s a growing category of Software as a Service called brand monitoring, with a number of systems that work to collect and analyze the online buzz about your brand and the key words that matter to you. Rather than conducting daily manual searches through blog search engines, these systems are convenient when you need to perform the following activities:

Pull mentions from blogs, videos, medical resources and forums, patient and physician social networks;
Track speciﬁc topics, drugs, disease, therapeutic areas;
Graphically display daily mentions, rolling averages;
Conduct sentiment analysis and other types of data mining;
Create automatic alerts for unusual or increased online mentions activity;
Filter out low-value or irrelevant mentions;
Delegate mentions for further action by your team;
Ticket mentions to keep track of issue resolution and problem solving;
Annotate and archive mentions for record keeping and future retrieval;
Export weekly, monthly, or quarterly internal reports;
Post responses on social sites like Twitter;
and more.

Your social media business case and resource allocation

When considering social media for your organization, there are few steps as important as understanding where you fit in the conversation online. Social media monitoring allows you to more effectively manage your reputation, track your competitors, and monitor market trends. As a side benefit, what you find out in terms of the quality, volume, and scope of mentions online regarding your key terms will help you create the business case for social media adoption (or not) by your organization, and determine the resources you will require.

If you are interested in the “5 Keys to Social Media Implementation” and the “Social Media Adoption Matrix”, please see the full deck on Slideshare:

social media, brand monitoring, strategy, implementation, marketing, online mentions, pharmaceutical, pharma, herceptin, avandia

Previous in series

Implementing social media: the adoption matrix

Alex — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:20:17 +0000

Table of contents for Keys to Implementing Social Media series

Implementing social media: the adoption matrix
Implementing social media: brand monitoring

tl;dr: First post in a series summarizing the “5 Keys to Implementing Social Media” presentation, starting with “The Social Media Adoption Matrix“

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, and the pharma industry

The recent EyeForPharma eMarketing Summit 2010 was held in Berlin, a fitting place to talk about social media for the pharmaceutical industry. The Mauer Museum at Checkpoint Charlie exhibits the many ways civilians and soldiers attempted to escape from East Berlin. By air, land and sea, people tried to cross the border by every conceivable method, including light aircraft, balloons, ziplines, hidden compartments in cars, underwater propulsion, and so on. Their imaginations were limitless in breaking down that great barrier to communication, the Berlin Wall.

This was my second visit to Berlin; I love the energy and creativity with which the city reinvents itself, as it distances itself from the past. Pharmaceutical firms and regulatory agencies must also reinvent their communications practices as quicker and easier to use tools allow physicians and patients to publish to vast audiences online.

The Social Media Adoption Matrix

At the EyeForPharma conference, I presented “5 Keys to Implementing Social Media.” If you’ve been tasked with looking into social media for your company, this is a suggested framework to help you define the business case and strategy, determine resource requirements and allocation, and set internal controls and performance metrics.

Let’s start with the adoption matrix. In short, it’s a representation on how active your company and your customers are in conversations online. The horizontal axis plots how engaged your customers are about your company and related products and services; the vertical axis plots how aware your company is of the social media activity surrounding your brand, products, services, competitors, and industry. In other words, are people talking, and where do you fit in the conversation?

First quadrant: The Marketing Neanderthal

Neanderthals and modern humans were contemporaneous species, co-existing with Cro-Magnon in Europe for about 10,000 years. Despite their larger physical size and brains, Neanderthals are believed to have expired due to behavioral and cultural traits not shared by their more successful rivals.

Are your company’s marketing efforts floundering while your competitors achieve milestones online? Are you aware of your customer’s online conversations about you, if they exist? If your community is not active, do you understand the trade offs you’re making?

Most hospitals (some exceptions here: Hospital Social Network List) and educational institutions fit in this quadrant, with neither the interest nor resources to devote to researching how to develop and connect with their community online. However, they are meaningful spaces which are potentially rich with conversations.

Second quadrant: The Wise Monkeys

So you suspect your customers are engaged in conversations about your brand, products, services, or customer service online, but you’d rather turn a blind eye? Maybe only Apple can get away with that, and only while their products rock. At least they no longer sue leakers. But Internet bastions Google and Amazon paid their dues recently. Motrin too.

What about Nestlé, who was absent from the conversation, and then showed snark? Here’s a summary, from imediaconnection:

Now, by all accounts it was Greenpeace that “started it” – with the creation of a snarky viral video (more on that in a moment). Then, enter Nestle legal claiming trademark infringement and asking that the video be taken down. This resulted in a fairly coordinated protest (some have called it attack) on Nestle’s Fan Page. Then, Nestle certainly didn’t do itself any favors – with a few ham fisted responses. Helpful Safety Tip to every corporate PR / Social Media Manager: deleting comments, or whipping out the “copyright/intellectual property” justifications are the social media equivalent of “let them eat cake”.

But, here’s the interesting part, whether you believe them or not, Nestle did respond to the Greenpeace report by “assuring” everyone that they will not use Palm Oil produced by the vendor that Greenpeace is asserting. Why they aren’t doing this more vociferously on their Facebook Fan Page is something of a mystery. Greenpeace then responded that their concessions “don’t go nearly far enough”.

Their conclusion is stunning:

But I wonder if, after a few more of these types of storms, we won’t see corporate brands tighten up and kill off some of the social media channels. One thing I do know (and I’m not saying this about the Nestle case in particular) is that as practitioners we are going to have to start to call bullshit on the mob as often as we do the mobbed. Just because they’re outside some company’s walls with pitchforks doesn’t mean they’re right. Or does it?

You guessed it: corporate Wise Monkeys see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Check off quadrant two of the social media adoption matrix.

Third quadrant: The Prisoner; The Thinker

Ok, so you know there’s something going on, and that you might tap into the potential of finding or developing or connecting with your community online. Unfortunately, you’re held in check, a Prisoner to your company’s restrictive policies, perhaps set in place by an overzealous legal department.

For instance, how many institutions block everyone from Facebook, like the high school I graduated from (many eons ago)? Not even the school’s administration is allowed access the platform that their students are so obviously using during the schoolday on their iPhones. Or what about Lehman Toyota, where I had my car serviced last weekend? I had many hours to spare while I waited, so I brought my laptop. The dealer had three locked wi-fi systems and informed me and another customer that access was indeed restricted. Graciously, a manager offered to hook us into landlines.

To their credit, AstraZeneca is trying out different social media platforms. The Nexium Facebook page and their AZHelps Twitter account are still a far cry from community management. Of course, part of the blame sits with the FDA (see this), which has not set out social media policies for the pharmaceutical industry.

“Thank you for all the recent comments! We are in the process of reviewing and posting them. We’ll have some new discussion topics shortly and in the coming weeks.” -Nexium on Facebook

The Thinker, on the other hand, suffers from paralysis by analysis, reading a lot about social media and attending conferences, yet not taking actionnable steps. 5 Keys to Social Media outlines a clear roadmap for implementation. Which companies are over-rationalizing social media? Here’s an interesting post comparing Ford (which “gets it”) with Chrysler. There’s a lot of room for improvement, there.

Fourth quadrant: The Pioneer

Many brands across many industries are actively engaging their community online. Kudos for taking the lead and showing the way for others to follow, and case studies abound highlighting emergent best practices. Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are good places to start for regular coverage of social media successes and failures by big brands and small.

Where does your organization fit on the adoption matrix? And where do you fit?

A warm word of thanks to Brett Petersel for retweeting (@brett) this presentation many times, driving it to thousands of views in under a week. The full deck is on Slideshare:

social media, adoption matrix, implementation, strategy, business, marketing, process, berlin, pharma, pharmaceutical

Next in series

SXSW Live blogging: ER 2.0

Alex — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:58:18 +0000

This is a live post from a SXSW roundtable on ER 2.0, March 14th, 2010

Hospitals and health care providers are slowly but surely using new media and social networking software for some of their primary objectives–treatment, research, education and outreach, and patient-provider communication. This presentation will feature best practices from case studies and prescribe future uses of new media in public health.

Presenters

Ed Bennett
University of Maryland Medical Center

Aimee Roundtree
University of Houston-Downtown

Also panelling is Jen McCabe of Contagion Health.

How does this technology complicate HIPAA compliance?

There’s a saying: “Don’t say no, just say HIPAA.” There’s a lot of fear and trepidation around what might happen, but best practices are emerging from those providers who are experimenting first. For example, some have written commenting policies that protect them, and so on.

The involvement in physicians in the social space is disappointing. They have a disinclination toward transparency because of the traditional patient — physician relationship that has been ingrained since medical school.

Why are hospitals so slow to adopt social media?

Crossing into the space where patients have direct online interaction with their physician is still a long way away, because of security issues. However, when dealing with hospitals, it is a matter of showing them how much good is possible by using social technologies. We don’t remunerate doctors for interacting with patients in this way. Also, we are legally bound by regulatory bodies, and these social channels must comply with regulations as well. Twitter feeds are admissible in court.

One of the heaviest “things” to move is human resources. For example, the question of who is the person or people who are going to address “the tidal wave” of coming complaints.

The real-world experience is that 99% of comments are positive or neutral, and there are very few complaints: “the unexpected outcomes of social media for hospitals will be positive, because we’ve anticipated all the negatives” — Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic. Monitoring is the first step to understand how much is negative, how much is positive, where are the reported variances, and who is doing the talking. One of the most efficient means of communicating is to attach a face to an institution, and to add 10% to 20% personal tweeting into these accounts. Examples are Scott Monty of Ford and Frank Eliason of Comcast. By the way, it’s great to get negative feedback, because that highlights what needs to be changed. Liability poisons the environment, but fewer lawsuits arise when people treat people like people, rather than withholding information.

What are victim’s rights online?

The place to start for patient advocates is with systemic advocacy for patient rights in general, so people start to trust you over time on a case by case basis.

What are the agents of change in hospitals and who should we work with?

Understand who holds the budgets and who is involved with patient care. Understand their community engagement strategies in the real world and show them parallels online. However, understand also that it is too early to prove that social media changes behavior, so it’s challenging to legitimize these tools.

What about compatibility with hospital systems?

Hospitals use lots of systems that don’t talk to each other. Some hospitals are blocking Facebook access, for instance, whereas patients are using Facebook to talk about the hospital. The implementation of EMR is addressing this to an extent and driving a change in behavior. Vendors need to adopt open source standards and look at innovations like microsyntax and HL7 from MIT.

What about communicating with patients through mobile devices, particularly for improving the customer service experience? By the way, hospitals provide the most opaque and worst customer service experiences.

Some hospitals and surgeons are using Twitter to provide updates during an operation, after waivers are signed. This way patients’ families can be kept up to date during the hours of waiting. It’s a small but important step in customer satisfaction.

In Africa and the Philippines, social media adoption is increasing because social tools are the most inexpensive to use for communications, compared to legacy or traditional systems.

The developing world is driving innovation out of need. Maybe the answer in developed nations is to identify organizations like freelancer’s union, irobot, and others, that have an incentive to disrupt the healthcare system. Just build really awesome stuff and you will start to see behavior change and integration.

We already have a well developed social media strategy, but our challenge now is to get the physicians engaged. Is this even possible?

Hire for that. Find physicians that are already blogging. Find a leader that sets the example. Find someone that others will follow.

What about crisis communications?

If as an institution you start to communicate and to tweet, then you start to become the source of truth (rather than the media or someone else). Go through @swhealthcare’s Twitter account to understand how they responded to crisis.

One of the best ways to drive change is to demand it as the healthcare consumers we all are.

What tools are missing? What are the new trends?

One big trend is curation of health information, which is growing at an astronomical rate. Demand will never match supply, so curation is absolutely key.

er20, sxsw, sxswi, social media, health20, health, hospitals, healthcare providers, social networks

SXSW Live blogging: Story.Next — Narrating the Crowd

Alex — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:00:46 +0000

This is a live post from a SXSW panel about StoryCorps, March 14th , 2010

StoryCorps was built on the principle that ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share — you just need to ask. Social networking and hand-held technology now enables communities to capture and distribute these stories with unprecedented scale and quality. Panelists will discuss the art of blending storytelling with social networking.

Presenters

	Suneel Gupta Kahani Movement
	Dr Sanjay Gupta Kahani Movement

“Story”: a narration of the events in the life of a person or the existence of a thing.

Saneel and Sanjay are brothers. The panel starts off with a clip showing an family in India and the Kahani Movement: “Some stories are never told … because no one asks.”

Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The ingredients of a story include a central character or a hero and this project itself has a hero. StoryCorp’s hero is Louis “Studs” Terkel, the “premier chronicler of American life,” according to John Stewart. Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to tell. More importantly, if you don’t capture these stories, there is a time limit and the stories disappear. The Guptas are taking this mission to the web. The word Kahani means story in Indian. Every community has stories worth preserving.

If technology is a catalytic, what would Studs do?

Chronicle the story by shifting the conversation from the studio to the living room
Expand from audio conversations to film, photos, and writings
Everyone is a Storyteller, so they are creating a network of storytellers who are collaborating, connecting, and sharing each others’ stories — to tell one common story
We’ve made it approachable — give clips a sense of optimism and hope. Steven Spielberg is advising Kahani Movement with the experience he garnered from his work with the Shoah project, where he captured many stories before they expired.
We’ve made it focused. The focus is Indian Immigration to the United States from the 1960’s to the 1970’s. Creating a community around a central topic

So, where is this project headed?

As happens with any population of people, there’s a tendency to paint that people with one broad brush stroke. A project like this adds heterogeneity to a population. Things that surprise are already starting to emerge. For example, because the immigrants were not fleeing persecution or prosecution, there was no galvanizing force to tie the people together. So what helped created the community?

Technology allows for deeper engagement for each member.

Remix. Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons license. A lot of derivative works are being posted and shared on the site.

Studs passed away in 2008, so the Guptas have been doing a lot of homework to understand what he was thinking and what was driving him. “People are ready to say ‘Yes, we are part of a world’.” This could lead to broadening out Kahani, to create more Kahani’s, by archiving and spinning out other initiatives. There could be a long tail of Kahani Movements. Our call to action to you today is start, and start soon, because time is limited.

Questions:

What about controversial or sensitive stories, like about abortion?

The Kahani Movement or StoryCorps are great opportunities to share intimate and difficult conversations by recording conversations within families, as family members interview each other.

What incentives are there for people to be involved in online communities if they don’t live online?

What Kahani is trying to achieve is online but much of it happens offline, around family living room tables. Some of the gaming panels at SXSW are interesting, because some of the motivational aspects around gaming could be applied.

Are the guidelines for storytelling, particularly around the questions to ask and also about how to use technology to accumulate stories?

Skype has been a good tool. One of the most powerful tools is to pull out a picture and ask: “tell me about this photo.“

How does the social network work?

It starts with the profile and with the visual and textual elements you are sharing with others. That’s when the connections start to happen between people. Collaboration ensues from connections, which are based on shared interests.

Is there a structure or best practices about how to capture an entire lifespan? What about technical best practices? For example, my parents are not comfortable in front of a camera, so how do I capture their stories?

The top priority is the story, not the technology. As far as best practices, it traces back to you and your own comfort. Ultimately, we are comprised of moments of life, so let’s go back and explore thoroughly the moments that mattered.

Note to self: An important aspect is the creation of social capital by building credibility through mutual verification of stories.

Creating a marketing ecosystem for social media

Alex — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:58:50 +0000

The following is paraphrased from a presentation made by Allison Cerra, Chief Marketing Officer, Americas Region — Alcatel-Lucent, at the Social Networking Conference 2010 in Miami, FL.

Consider the following identified marketing challenges in the current online social media ecosystem:

Service providers are constrained: Today, just 20 households consume more broadband than the entire bandwidth used in 1995
Developer community aren’t making money: They need to launch and maintain services that end-users want for free
End-users are frugal: How to get users to pay for things when they are accustomed to having things for free?
Marketers are strapped: Very few in the marketing space have figured out how to monetize things

The common thread above is that current business models aren’t stable in today’s social media ecosystem.

However, research indicates that conditions can be created to market services better online. Based on a survey and focus group sessions with over 1,000 social networkers, three key points stand out:

Social networkers are not that social

A recurring theme in the study was: “I have a lot of relationships I try to maintain, but I don’t have time to develop deep substantive relationships.”

Also, social networking is all about the users: their social networking experience “validates” them. For example, being tagged in a photo is an egocentric pleasure: to the user, it means “I am important”.

In contrast, MMORPG players are not introverts at all, quite the opposite. These people love the network, not the game. It’s about sharing a passion so intimately with a small group of people, that the relationship becomes more important than the game.

Social networkers can be convinced to pay

People online are used to having things for free. But what if you know your friend’s status at any time, regardless of the device you’re using? What if you know where your friends are at any time? How would this change the social networking experience?

Let’s think about an “advanced friend finder” application: I land in Miami and I can know where you are and what places you recommend and whether you are free to meet or not, based on your location data, your presence, your history of geolocation, and your shared calendar. If this type of ecosystem of services is put together, would you pay for this type of information?

Another example is, what if you meet someone at a conference and two weeks later they call you and you don’t remember them well anymore? But how about if when they call you, their LinkedIn profile pops up automatically? Would you pay for this type of information, if services were integrated in this way?

Research show that social networkers are willing to pay for these types of value-added services. (Also, they are not as averse to advertising as we might like to think.)

Privacy is a concern … or is it?

If I’m going to give you my presence and location, isn’t that too much info? In focus groups, people are not comfortable with sharing information. However, in practice, people do share this information when the following three conditions are met:

You allow users to opt-in (rather than opt-out) — the user must remain in control
Social networkers are more concerned about when information about them is released, than who has access to it
Social networkers overwhelmingly trust service providers more than social app developers with their sensitive information

Conclusion:

The above suggests that when privacy concerns are addressed and social applications are combined with service providers, new conditions can be created to develop an ecosystem that is more conducive to marketing and monetizing online services.

snc2010, social media, business, models, marketing, umcnj595, monetization