Intro to Online Microtargeting

As more organizations, businesses and campaigns look to the internet for there advertising needs, I thought it would be helpful to give a really brief intro to this field and offer some interesting resources as well.

First, in any online advertising campaign, you need to determine whether you want people to click on your ads (conversion) or whether you just want them to see your ad (persuasion). Most advertising networks, including Facebook and Google offer you both options, and you should choose whichever option you are not trying to do. If you expect a high click-through rate it would best to purchase pay-per-impression ads. However, if you don't expect many people to click on your ad then it would be best to purchase pay-per-click programs.

Next, there are many different networks that you can advertise in. For example, Facebook is a great way to reach college students whereas Google has better geographic pinpointing. These are the biggest two, but more should be considered based on who exactly you are trying to reach. Google let's you define keywords that you can be relevant to and Facebook lets you select profile information of the people you'd like to advertise to.

Ensuring that you have something unique to show or give people can't be overlooked of course. If you are running a political campaign, you can even do some negative campaigning on websites where people are likely to be an opponent or undecided because you are not required to publish a 'paid-for' disclaimer in small text ads. Additionally, people often have 'source amnesia,' where they forget where they originally heard something. Although people may say they don't like negative ads, they often use the talking points learned there months later without remembering where they heard it from. If there are issues you need to clear the air with but are worried they might be perceived as negative, use contextual online ads. If people are clicking-through to your site make sure that one click is the last stop. If you're looking for donations, have the landing page be the only page someone needs to visit to complete the transaction. Every additional click people have to make will discourage many from continuing.

Check out the Personal Democracy Forum's website for a plethora of resources, like archived podcasts on exactly this issue.

Also:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/23902.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtargeting

Context out of Context

The idea of context is an interesting one, and a topic I've briefly covered in some past posts and columns, but I am beginning to realize that the idea of context is much more fundamental and important that it is gnerally given credit for. 

In Jaron Lanier's book You are not a Gadget, he argues that my generation (Generation Y or the Millennials) and the younger generations are loosing context as part of our experience with culture and media. No longer must you read the entire length of a work to understand it, you can just head over to Wikipedia and look at bits and pieces gathered from various sources (sometimes up to 300-400 or more footnotes on a single Wikipedia page) and loose much of the context and importance that was meant to be conveyed in the original work. Academic works are amalgamated into mediums like Wikipedia, and art, music and video are mashed up into remixed YouTube videos, again with the original context of the work being totally lost when it is viewed in such a tertiary form. In fact, in many cases it's quite possible that tertiary viewer doesn't even know anything about the original creation, or that there really was even an original creation that allowed for the viewing of this work.

I wish I had more of a conclusion to draw, or even more of a direction in which to ask questions, but alas the best I can do right now is bring this issue and promise to revisit the idea of context and what it means that I believe younger generations are beginning, in all aspects of living, to lose context.

"Dear Internet" - The Internet as a Distinct Community

The nascent ‘online community’ that has been given the opportunity to exist from the emergence of the internet is the topic of this week’s column. Although many may define a community as being a cohesive gathering of distinct parts, often unified around one particular theme, goal or characteristic, the ‘internet’ has itself become a discreet entity that can be interacted with, in effect it is more than just the sum of its parts.
    Before the internet, it was much more difficult to directly address a community without directly addressing specific people that make up that community. However, online social communication totally changed that idea.
    As the image shows, there is a lot of communication that takes place from one person to ‘the

internet.’ That is a snapshot of the trending topics on Twitter recently, where the most used keywords and phrases being tweeted are compiled into a list and displayed, with sometimes hundreds of updates containing that specific keyword happening every minute. This same type of communication can be seen on YouTube where users address videos directly to the ‘YouTube Community.’ These people often share extremely intimate details of their lives, and do so in a way such that they have a) no idea who might watch them b) when people might watch them and c) in what context people are watching them.
        Compare the type of things that people communicate on TV, or even radio versus the internet. TV communication is censored, is strictly controlled, the messages and images (even on reality shows) are incredibly carefully pieced together, only a very few people have control over who gets to transmit that information and it is only one-way. The internet is the total opposite. As long as we have net neutrality, there are no controls or filters on what people say. Online communication can be anonymous, cannot be controlled by anyone and there is an unprecendently low barrier to access for people who want to broadcast their ideas.
    This revolution in communication creates an environment where people push in two seemingly opposite directions. One direction is some of the most unintelligent, sometimes outright hateful and barbaric content one might imagine. There are entire websites like lamebook.com that are dedicated to displaying the incredibly bizarre and sometimes outright insane or mean things people say on Facebook, in addition to the many websites which are based solely on propagating hateful content, often towards specific people or groups of people.
    At the same time, there is a wealth of truly amazing community outreach, support and inspiration for people in various challenging life situations, charitable fundraising, government accountability and intelligent issues discussions that is literally mind-boggling as to their quantity and authenticity.
    A great representation of this dichotomy is something I saw on Facebook the other day. This was an update where someone had become a fan at the same time of both a page titled “Slapping the Sh*t Out Of Stupid People” and a page titled “Victims of the Earth Quake Disaster In Haiti.”

Neither of those comments are at the total extreme, as some comedic value is is most definitely part of the first one, but the juxtaposition was too good not to mention and does represent two distinct ways people use social media.
    I see the job of people in new media development such as myself, and anyone who might be reading this, to be brainstorming and promoting platforms that encourage the latter type of new communication - the kind that is supportive, caring, informative, personal and entirely authentic. People may be inherently dichotomous, and although there is no excuse to ever censor the ability for one to freely create content online, there is so much promise in pushing to develop ways to people to use their energy and ideas to contribute positively in civic life and to the lives of other people, and not just in their online community, but in that real-world community we all do still live in.

The Emerging Privacy Implications of Social Media

This is the full un-edited text of my News-Record Column:

Earlier we looked at the strange, and fairly recent, shift in human communication where information could be reproduced, repeated and widely broadcasted. This week, we’re going to look at online privacy.
    30% of employers admit to using Facebook alone to vet potential employees. If that weren’t reason enough to think about online privacy, the majority of young people find it socially acceptable to look through someone’s Facebook profile and photos to learn about them before going on a first date and many parents now use online social networking tools as well. I use Facebook as a prime example because it has 350 million active users, half of whom log in at least once per day.
    On a website like Facebook, where 2.5 billion photos (and climbing) are uploaded to the site every single month -  30 billion photos every year - how much privacy is left?
    Not much, at least according to President Obama. When speaking to a group of high school students last year, he said in response to a question from one student about how to become president one day: “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life,” Obama said. “That’s number one.”
    There is something epic happening in our culture when the President of the United States tells young people that the number one thing to remember if you are interested in becoming president is to be careful about content posted online.
    Even the way in which people converse on Facebook has seemed to change over the years. Conversations that used to happen either over phone calls, emails, text messages or private messages on Facebook now seem to happen right out in the open for, at the minimum, hundreds of people to see and save for eternity if they so desire.
    The way sites like Facebook or Myspace are designed encourage this, as the default means of communication is posting content to the semi-public wall of another user’s page. At what point did personal communication become a public spectacle?
    Most Facebook users do not have strict privacy settings and most Twitter users, for example, do not have protected (or private) updates. The mere action of communicating with one another has become a public event for people to comment on, reproduce, or save.
    On one hand, this new way of communicating is extremely interactive, to the extent that one can see on who is communicating with whom, can comment on any individual communication or even send it to another friend. This virtual community has an amazing upside - we have literally created new communities where there were non before. You can see what your friend thought of photos uploaded by another friend on the other side of the world.
    And not only do people publicly converse about normal things that used to be private by default, but people also tend to share more personal information about themselves online. Again, a double-edged sword - as this creates incredibly engaged, emotional and personal communities online, but also leads many people to put on display things they perhaps ought not, and in the future may wish they hadn’t.
    That is one of the downsides, related to what Obama said about online content being saved for eternity. And there is enormous social pressure put on people when their lives are literally on display for anyone to see. Relationships between people often start or end based on what happens on Facebook. Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan may have said it best, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
    Our ability to recognize this problem, however, is important and I think we can temper the negative side effects and gain more of the positive. As per usual, I don’t think I can fully answer any of these questions or issues here, but it is very important to bring them up and ensure that the implications of some of these new and emerging technologies are taken seriously and discussed.
    In the meantime, check out my blog for the 5 Facebook privacy settings you need to ensure you have control over your privacy online.

Quick Guide To Facebook Privacy

Facebook has 350 million users, half of whom log in at least once per day. Do you know want all those people to see all of your personal information? Here is a quick guide to understanding privacy on Facebook and the five privacy settings you should know about:

1) Friend Lists

These can be a little time consuming to set up a first time around, but they do help you have some control over who views certain content on your profile and make things easier potentially in the long run. Navigate to your friends page and you'll see an option to create friend lists. Maybe setting up Family, Friends and Co-Workers is a way to go, but whatever you do, friend lists are a very helpful tool that Facebook offers its users.

2) Tagged Photos and Videos

Go to your privacy settings page (Settings and then Privacy Settings) and you can enter a custom privacy settings for photos and videos that you have been tagged in, for example allowing only you to be able to see them.

3) Your Photo Albums

You can set privacy settings on each individual photo album that you upload to Facebook. With about 30 billion photos being uploaded to Facebook each year, odds are there are some photos that may be a bit more personal than others, and Facebook allows you to set the level for each album if you so choose.

4) Your status updates and wall posts

Recently, Facebook changed the way that you can control privacy when updating your status or posting to your wall. Now, each time you post an update you can select who (down to literally selecting friend by friend if you want to) will see your updates. The privacy button for the updates is right next to the "update" button when you publish a status update.

5) Your profile information

This is a basic one, but important. Go back to the privacy settings page and you can check off which information on your profile you would like to be visible to whom. If you are using Facebook for networking, you may want to keep work information viewable, while things like relationship status private.

None of these settings are any fool-proof way to ensure that you don't get embarrassed online or have personal information, private photos or videos or inappropriate status updates seen by the world. The best tip that anyone can give: If you don't want stupid photos of you showing up on Facebook, don't act stupid. If you must, then at least don't take pictures of it.

Studies routinely show that people are willing to share far more information online than they would be in a direct physical setting, so keep in mind how you would have felt about the information you are about to post to Facebook being on public display before this thing called Facebook came along - a time when communication between people was generally private by default.

Online Sarcasm

Have you ever been a situation where you made a sarcastic statement online, only to be rebuffed by an angry or confused colleague or friend?

Well, one company thinks they have the solution: SarcMark. A new character (to the right of the "SarcMark") to be used in online communication, the SarcMark is supposed to be able to designate that the sentence to which the punctuation is attached was sarcasm.

This is a brilliant idea, as no doubt many people have trouble communicating sarcasm online, an for the visually impaired, having a standard punctuation mark to denote sarcasm will really help with reading online.

Unfortunately, SarcMark costs $1.99 to download and use. Do they expect that the hundreds of millions of people using computers will each pay $2 to download this nifty punctuation mark? And thusly make hundreds of millions from this one product. Not likely. So much so, that the likely winner in creating a new punctuation mark for sarcasm will be a company who releases the character into the public domain so that it may be used widely. Hint: any graphic designers out there.

But then again, I'm just fine with writing sarcastically ambiguous statements online that confuse people. [SarcMark]


http://mashable.com/2010/01/15/sarcmark/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6995354/Sarcasm-punctuation-mark-aims-to-put-an-end-to-email-confusion.html

Intellectual Honesty and Modern Communication

Throughout the course of history, there have been many times when letters have been discovered posthumous which were written by a jurist, scholar or public official which contained controversial personal testimony or ideas far too radical for their time. That was a time when the original document or letter could not be reproduced in a way that could guarantee the authenticity of the reproduction. Meaning, people could write letters to colleagues, friends or even enemies across the country and the chance that the writing would ever leave the hands of the original recipient was very low. And furthermore, the chance that anything personally damning could be spread throughout the media was even lower. No longer is this the case.

I cannot fully express in this post how much that has changed. It has been a seemingly subtle and largely unseen transformation but it is inexorably fundamental to the core principals of how we communicate. No longer is communication, in any form, guaranteed confidential. Yes, some people have confidentiality notices on emails, or expect that “private messages” on websites are indeed private, but they are not. And not just because these messages often get stored indefinitely by a third party, but because in many cases these communications are stored, indexed, searched and cached - Indefinitely. Twitter posts, Facebook posts, blog entries, email list messages (yes, many email listservs are indexed and cached in Google) are often if not always available in search results. And forget all of the emails, IMs, text messages and private/direct messages that are private yes, but stored without any policy as to their lifespan on third party servers.

In fact, search engines like Google cache (save old revisions) almost all of the content it indexes for its search, and there are many companies, organizations and movements gaining traction to track and save as many revisions and history of all online content for historical purposes.

This means that everyone in our culture is held to an astonishingly high degree of accountability as to everything they do or say. 150 years ago, or even less, you could not play a video, a sound recording, or show a snapshot of a website against one from another time. Now, socially critical TV shows, radio shows and websites routinely show a sound bite from two years ago in one context next to a sound bite of another context, seemingly showing the person ‘flip-flopping.” And what is the implication of this?

Well on the positive side, it creates accountability for anyone, especially public officials. It’s easy at this point in time, to ‘check the record’ to see what was really said or done in any past situation. And in reference to tracking online content, it provides a fascinating look into the progression of information and human culture. Both excellent benefits, however, there is a downside.

I’ll call this downside it intellectual superficiality. This is the state of affairs, which we are currently in, which fundamentally started with the photograph or photocopier, where one must start to grapple with the fact that anything written, said or done, may at some point be exactly reproduced, and could come back to them in such a way that could easily be spread quickly via online audiences. How thoughtful and upfront do we expect each other to really be?

Is it possible that these advanced forms of communication are actually creating a culture that doesn’t value thoughtfulness, honesty or disclosure in all aspects of life, but perhaps favors plausible deniability and vagueness instead? And what does that mean for the future of technology and communication and the concept of what is private versus what is public?

Further Reading on Who owns the internet

Financial Times - Net neutrality required to spur innovation - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bf87c126-c571-11de-8193-00144feab49a.html

Wall Street Journal - Facebook and Twitter Founders Join Net-Neutrality Wars http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/18/facebook-and-twitter-founders-join-net-neutrality-wars/

PC World - FCC Votes for Net Neutrality, McCain Wants to Stop Them http://www.pcworld.com/article/174211/fcc_votes_for_net_neutrality_mccain_wants_to_stop_them.html


The Great Debate: What is Net Neutrality (C-SPAN) http://fora.tv/2006/07/17/Great_Debate_What_is_Net_Neutrality

Why Net Neutrality is Important: http://kensingtonvictoria.com/?p=323

October 29th News-Record Column: How the internet empowers the people:

Click here to read the article: http://bit.ly/2ORXJI