mlr3cffjYhymHPTsI3vN3OD02lanAV: Privacy

Showing posts with label Privacy. Show all posts

Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Two Things That Influenced Social Media Privacy

Social media privacy is influenced by two things in the world. One of them is offline friendships and the second thing is the existing Pay per Click channels. These two things affected how the social networks set themselves up and how they would do business in the future. The offline friendships gave the social networks the free model that they needed to generate the user base, and the Pay per Click systems taught the social networks how to monetize that model.

The original social networks were run by college kids that were only interested in staying in contact with each other. They knew each other well and knew each other's friends. They knew if a person liked the other person then their network would probably be a good base of people to know as well. There would be familiarity and those people in their network may end up being good friends too if they met. This meant that the social networks allowed everyone to view everyone else's friends because that gave them the best chance to grow their database of friends and have more relationships.

However, this does not work in the real world. These sites became popular and started to be used for networking purposes. This meant people would add other people into their networks that they did not necessarily know well, but they wanted to have contact with in the future. They also had business contacts in their profiles that other business people should not see (because they were a secret provider of X and if every competitor knew about how to get X, they would put that business out of business). This means that the social networks are not well made for business purposes.

The existing Pay Per click channels added the structure for monetization. The social networking systems and the search engines have two things in common. They offer a free service and they offer an advertising model based on that service. The free service may be the most useful part of the system. It definitely drives the Pay per Click side of the business because the people who use the free part of the system are the people who the businesses want to reach on the systems. Social media is no different; they have a wide base of active people on their system that the business owner wants to reach. Therefore, the social networks copied the monetization methods of the search engines.

However, the search engines never could get as much information as the social media systems. The social media systems have the advantage that they were built for personal relationships. Therefore, people on the social networks are accustomed to releasing the information to the social network. This is not true on the search engines, because the paradigm is different. The people on a search engine are looking for a solution, on the social networks they are looking to be entertained and to socialize with friends. This dynamic alone makes it difficult for the search engines to get as much information as the social media systems can and do get from their users.

These two things influenced how social media would be used in the future and how they monetized their system. However, the friendship model was the most important piece of influence because it influenced how the default settings worked on the social networking systems. The setting is usually set to let everyone see the profile no matter who they are (friend, family, or complete stranger). Therefore, this is what influenced social media privacy the most.

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How to Use Social Media Privacy to Make More Money

The fact of the social media systems is that they are trying to gather as much information about a person as possible. However, a smart marketer uses this to their advantage because they are able to see how the social system targets their users through social media use. A marketer that uses a social system should know everything about how a social media system will target their target market.

Obviously, the first thing to do is to start a new profile to release information with the intention of seeing how the social system targets the advertisements to that profile. This means that the social user's intentionally giving up information that may or may not be false with the intention of deriving information about how the social system will work in the future for their business.

This is a very smart idea because a marketer who understands how a social media system markets their product is a person who can predict how much they will spend and how effective that spending will be on the social media system. This allows them to make judgment calls on how effective the social media system will be for the business in the future and whether or not the social media systems are appropriate for the businesses use.

This new profile is the key because a social user should not use their social media profile. This is because that will bring him or her closer to buying something on impulse that they would not have gotten before using the social media system. The new profile protects the user from making impulse buys while testing the system to see how effective it will be for the business.

If anything is the key to advertising on the Internet or in real life, it is the ability of a marketer to test a system before they roll it out to the general populace. The social networking systems are no different. This is because the system can be tested for effectiveness and therefore they can be tested to see if they will deliver a favorable result for that particular marketer.

Understanding a social system as much as possible before using the system is a very smart idea. This will give the marketer an idea of what to expect when advertising on the system. Most marketers do not know what to expect when using the social networking system, therefore, they are not prepared for the situations that arise when using a social system. A marketer who takes the time to use the system before they market on the system is better off than those who do not take the time.

In conclusion, it is smart to make the time to learn about a social system before using the social system to advertise. The people who take the time to do this are far more prepared than those people who do not take the time to get ready to use the social media systems. Therefore, a marketer should always try to learn as much about the system they are going to use before they have to use it.

How Privacy on the Social Networks Will Be Decided in the Future

Privacy on the social media systems has become a large issue. This is because there have been many times in the last few weeks where people and businesses have overstepped their bounds as it relates to the platforms. This begs the questions of how private are the social networks and how private should they be?

Social networking is a relatively new phenomenon in the world. Although, the idea of social networking has existed for many years, it was not until recent when the technology became available as it is known right now. There were bulletin boards and even e-mail itself that handled some of the things that people can do with the social networking systems. However, social media platforms are the first technology to grab such a large market share. In fact, it is hard to find someone who does not at least have a profile on the major social networks. That is just how big they have become now in the world today.

The size of the social networks and the amount of people using the systems now warrants the bigger companies' attention. They are all focused on, "how do we use this medium to make more money or do things more efficiently." There is nothing wrong with this thought process, however, businesses have started to use the social media systems inappropriately.

There have been cases of people who have been asked to surrender their social media login information to companies so that they could keep their jobs. This is a gross overstepping of the boundaries between work and personal life. However, in the current climate of rules governing social media, this is legal. This is because no rules have been made about the separation between where a person works and how a person lives outside their work. Politicians are clamoring to make sure rules are in place, but the system is slow. Therefore, a person must be careful with what social media networks they enter and how they manage what they say on those networks.

The real question in all of these fights is how private should the social networks really be, and what is considered public and what is considered private on the social media systems. Technically, social media could be considered public domain because of the amount of users who use the system. The status updates are available for everyone to see on the social networks, therefore, an argument could be made that the social networks are intended to be public domain. However, the users of the systems know better, the social network updates they post to the system are intended to be private and only for those friends and family they select on the networks. However, this is a battle that must be settled in the court room.

In the future, it will become clearer about what is the acceptable use of information contained on a social network. Therefore, there will be a clear cut way of making sure that the courts know what was intended for privacy. This may be as simple as setting the profile to default to privacy on every post and keeping the profile hidden unless the user chooses someone to be in their network. Whatever the case may be, it is smart of the user to keep everything as hidden as possible on their social network because that privacy will keep them out of trouble in the future.