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Whatever you do in the digital landscape, it’s important to deliver content that engages and excites audiences. This can be written, audio, video, image-driven – anything. Content should inspire sharing and conversations. Creating your own inspiring content is equally important as driving your consumers to create and share their own content.

I saw this post on The Vampire Diaries Facebook Page this morning, it’s relatively simple, but brilliant. It does the following:

1. Facilitates easy content creation.
2. Drives conversation and social sharing.
3. Incentivises consumers by rewarding them with ‘exclusive’ content.

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“The Internet has great strength as a medium breadth, depth, reach, immediacy, interactivity but also serious drawbacks, among which none has received as much attention as the threat to privacy.” (Hong, et. al. 2005:1)

Privacy is a key issue when it comes to digital interactions, and is therefore of concern to the new digital media. Privacy matters present myriad ethical considerations for the new digital media. According to Ess (2009:12):

“Privacy can be minimally defined as the capacity to control information about oneself. The new ability of others to record and quickly distribute information about oneself thereby decreases one’s control over such information.”

There are several ways in which new media decreases one’s control over personal information that raise ethical quandaries. Discovery of sources and information becomes easier with new media. For instance the majority of the population has a Facebook (the popular social networking site) account. Facebook holds many details about one’s personal life including: name, age, location, photos and much more. A journalist could use these details to track down and talk to a potential source, but should they? Hirst (2011:151) writes that:

“Facebook users have an individual responsibility to maintain their own privacy settings.”

Furthermore, New York times editor Craig Whitney states (Hirst, 2011:151):

“What people write on Facebook sites is publicly available information.”

But what of the person’s intent in sharing this information? When publishing this sort of information, even though it exists in the public sphere (especially if privacy controls are not properly used) most people think only of sharing the information with friends or acquaintances, not contemplating that it may be used as part of a news story. As an example of this, many television news broadcasts show a screen-shot of a deceased person’s Facebook profile in violent or suspicious deaths. This can then lead to harassing comments and photographs being posted on the deceased person’s Facebook profile. This in turn has a detrimental effect on family and friends who are already suffering. Although the information is publicly available, is it satisfactory ethically for journalists to use the information to their own ends?  Another consideration in relation to privacy is how the online media collect and store information about their readers. There are obvious ways of doing this such as subscription services where readers provide their name and email address, among other details.  There have been several cases of security breaches recently, including the Sony PlayStation network. If it is possible for a global technology company to be hacked, then nobody’s details are truly secure. The Sony PlayStation Network breach, among a few others recently, raised questions about whether companies should notify subscribers when their personal information has been compromised or the database has been breached (http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/privacy-crime-make-data-breach-notifications-mandatory-ck-93209 retrieved 16 May 2011). Although this is not a preventative measure, it should be part of any organisation’s ethical consideration when collecting private data. Another way of collecting user data online, which is less transparent, is the use of cookies that track general usage information such as session times, location, age, computer system used and more. The information gathered from cookies is then used by online publishers to sell and target advertising. Is it ethically responsible to employ user information (even though it is anonymous) which allows publishers to both sell and increase the price of advertising by offering highly targeted campaigns? It is important that online sites employing cookies to track their users ethically consider the privacy implications of doing so, especially as there are not yet any laws in place to govern or guide such practices. Having considered privacy in relation to the new digital media, some new and important issues have been discovered, however we have to ask, is this a new ethical issue in relation to the new media? Ethical issues relating to privacy have always been a concern to the media, for example when cameras became widely available, there were concerns regarding the publishing of photos and how this might compromise peoples’ right to privacy and in the gossip and tabloid news the personal lives of public figures has raised questions regarding privacy. Ess (20099: 96) writes that:

“Advances in technology tend to make us more vulnerable to privacy invasion.”

So although privacy is not a new ethical consideration as such, the issue of privacy in the new media presents new questions for ethical inquiry.

Stay tuned for the next post in the Digital Media Ethics series: Speed and Accuracy

References

Ess, Charles (2009). Digital Media Ethics. Polity Press: Cambridge.

Hirst, Martin (2011). News 2.0: Can Journalism Survive the Internet. Allen and Unwin: Crows Nest.

Hong, T., McLaughlin, M., Pryor, L., Beaudoin, C., & Grabowicz, P. (2005). Internet privacy practices of news media and implications for online journalism. Journalism Studies, 6(1), 15-28. doi:10.1080/1461670052000328177.

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Recent events on the Regretsy Facebook Page, and the owner’s response to said events have lead me to make this post. In summary (and the interests of full disclosure) a friend posted a link to an Etsy page, which she’d created to help raise money for a charity. In the post she apologised in advance if the post was considered spam, and invited the community owner to delete the post if she felt it necessary. The post was not deleted, therefore the community owner agreed by lack of action that the post was okay.

A slew of personal insults followed by other community members. The first comment was made by the alleged number one fan of Regretsy. Honestly, if you consider yourself one of the biggest fans and contributors to a community, you would respect that community and not act in such a destructive manner.

My main problem with this incident is that if you own an online community which has a following, you have a responsibility to all of your members, not just a few. Even if your community is not for a ‘business’ your reputation is still at stake, and considering the wisdom of the crowd, if they community becomes bigger than you, you’ll lose control and it will fall into chaos.

So here are a few points from my perspective on how NOT to manage an online community.

• Don’t have any rules, chaos reigns.
• Don’t manage or moderate your community.
• Play favourites. Your favourite community members rule. Screw the ones you don’t know or that aren’t regulars – they don’t matter.

Here’s the positive side, most communities are managed fairly well. Following are a few tips on what’s considered anti-social community behaviour and how TO manage an online community.

Anti-social and undesirable community behaviours:

• Flaming: making unprovoked and nasty comments to deliberately hurt others
• Trolling: making antagonising remarkes to deliverately start an argument that is not relevant to the community
• Spamming: advertising or posting links that are irrelevant to the community.

How to build an engaged online community:

• Before starting your community, define it’s purpose, this will help to,
• Create a set of  moderation guidelines or community rules to set expectations for what is and isn’t acceptable within the community.
• Ensure  you manage and moderate the community in line with the rules you set.
• Take responsibility for your community – as the owner or creator follow through on your vision.
• Treat all community members equitably – remember that even if they don’t interact visibily, they’re still ‘lurking’ and may be passive participants and therefore strong community advocates.
• Make sure all content shared in the community (both yours and member contributions, including comments) enhance the community objective.
• In addition to filtering out posts that go against your community guidelines, repost quality user-submitted content and give credit where it’s due to show your community members you value them.

So there you have it – now you can choose if you want a community built on respect, or chaos. The power is yours.

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I’m a big fan of infographics, and the latest from Online Schools: Obsessed with Facebook is great visual of Facebook in 2010.

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Big news this morning, Facebook has begun rolling out unannounced changes to their Pages product.

Aside from layout changes to match the new personal profiles,  there is added functionality for Page Admins. One confirmed change is the ability to log in / out of individual pages as and admin, giving users the option to comment on content from your personal account. This is an important change, and one that page admins have been wanting for some time. I’m also speculating that there will now be notifications when a new comment is made on a page’s content, again a major change for the good for page admins.

Some blogs and blog commenters are speculating that there’s no longer functionality for creating ‘Splash’ pages. However, until I see the changes and can test the functionality myself, I’m not so sure about that. It does appear that although ‘tabs’ are being moved to a left navigation menu and the functionality to create custom content will still be available. See below screen grab (click to enlarge – from AllFacebook.com) – the page has ’share freebies’, ‘email signup’ & ‘coupons’ links in the left nav. If the ability to create a splash page disappears, many organisations will have to rethink their strategy for welcoming new ‘Likers’ of their pages.

As with everything, don’t believe everything you read online (including comments on blogs!). Facebook have yet to update their blog about the changes, but when they do it will help to clarify what the changes are and what new functionality will be available.

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A current look at places on Facebook, reveals that Disney and other theme parks (in Facebook’s Museums/Attractions category) are most visited.

70% of the top 10 are Theme Parks

20% are Museums

10% are Destinations

The current top ten (English-speaking)

I’ll endeavour to put together a longer list soon, the stats aren’t great based on a sample of only ten

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The following is by no means a comprehensive list, but a starting point towards creating one.

If you know of any other pages that can be added to the list, let me know (minimum 10,000 likes).

To get an idea of where these pages sit on a global scale, here are some benchmarks:

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Another stroke of brilliance by XKCD. Although I’d call it a Map of online networks & memes as it covers more than just communities.

(Click the image, then use the magnifier to view full size).

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Facebook has announced a major suite of new features (not yet rolled out to all users), they all look to provide great additional functionality.

A quick rundown on three key new features:

1. New Groups functionality

“Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group.”

The new Groups features will enable you to create your own smaller networks within Facebook, and enable easier sharing of information to different groups of your friends.

The main features of the new Groups will be:

1. Easily create new groups from the left sidebar menu
2. Group chat functionality
3. Document sharing & collaboration
4. Ability to message the whole group from an email client if you’re unable to access Facebook

Drawbacks:

1. Unfortunately this does not enable easy sharing to the group from your own profile in the form of status updates. and is therefore not a  replacement for the under-used Friends Lists. Facebook, please upgrade to include!
2. You can add friends to a group without them accepting. However, there are no news feed stories generated by creating a closed group, so it will not post the fact that a member has been added to a group on their wall for all to see.

It also seems Facebook is testing an update to comments via Groups – you’re able to type your comment and hit ‘enter’ to post, rather than needing to click a ’send’ button. Or perhaps this will remain a feature only for Groups as it creates more chat-like interaction within groups of friends.

2. Download your Facebook data

Facebook will now provide the functionality to to download all your information: messages, photos, videos and status updates. This is great news for those who’ve been waiting for a backup feature and enables easier upload of information to other services . It looks secure, requiring a password to access the downloaded file.  It’s unclear whether this feature will be available for Brand Pages, for which it is greatly needed.

Read LifeHacker’s post on how to download your information from Facebook.

3. Applications Dashboard

The new applications dashboard provides more transparency about who has access to your data, giving users a greater sense of security. It will clearly show which applications and websites you have provided information to; what information they have about you and when they last accessed it. You can also easily update these settings, or completely remove access to certain applications.

Read Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post (including instructional videos): Giving You More Control.

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