Simon Booth-Lucking

The title of this great piece of research by the Brand Science Institute of Hamburg was irresistible to the sober judge in me. I recommend taking its 24 pages with a glass of water if you've done a heavy night on the social media Kool-Aid.

Hat tip for the find to We Are Social.

Micro-bots attacking surveillance cameras are seen as a growing threat. Photo by Matt Biddulph.

Yesterday I listed privacy as one of three problems that will define the next five years of social media. In his post, A Privacy 9-11 Could Derail Social, Steve Rubel describes the threat to social media's (commercial) success.

Anyone in security will tell you that a good defense is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. Yet, no matter how hardened our technological defenses are, it's my bet that somewhere someone will suffer a major privacy leak that impacts millions, sends shock waves through our system and makes us feel less secure than we did before. Such an event could slow interest in social networking and derail its marketing potential.

He points to design decisions by the big platforms (Amazon, Facebook etc.) that are aimed at improving things, and calls on marketers, government and the media to pull their weight.

How might marketers contribute? An immediate thought is inspired by the way that it has become accepted that opt-in rather than opt-out is the right way to do email marketing: must marketers now develop and adopt social permission models? For example, I need to explicitly opt-in to let you tell that hot new Facebook game to invite me to a game. Of course marketers might see that as stopping them creating a viral hit but, as with email marketing, accepted practices do change.

A seemingly small step, but given the growing popularity of social gaming one that potentially changes behavioural norms.

Where will social media be in five years? Mashable, the hyperactive yet still damn useful social media guide, has celebrated its fifth birthday with an article asking just that question. Predictably it is now trending through the TweetBook-o-Sphere quicker than Usain Bolt on skates.

Never one to miss the chance to sober up a passing bandwagon, here's my alternative next five years in social media.

Privacy problems

In January Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg caused a fuss when he was interpreted as effectively saying privacy is dead. Around the same time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was saying, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Creepy.

I find these attitudes uncomfortable, and the skeletons in my cupboard aren't even that exotic!

A backlash is growing. Advocacy groups like Consumer Watchdog and Electronic Frontier Foundation run critical ads on giant screens in Times Square and help internet users keep up with the privacy settings of new services like Facebook Places. Even Schmidt himself is aware of the risks to vulnerable members of society.

Users need safeguards and control. Companies need the advertising revenues that keep their services largely free at the point of use. This is a big issue to resolve in the next five years of social media.

Identity crisis

Related to privacy problems is identity. In real life we present different selves to different people; clients, colleagues, friends, family. And within those groups we have different circles based on past experiences and future hopes. In the last five years social media has largely put that element of human nature in the ignore pile, leaving users with the choice of self-censorship, potential oversharing or just plain old giving up.

Plenty of research has been done into this problem, with the best I've seen coming from Google researcher Paul Adams, leading to speculation that Google will swoop in and solve it. Whoever solves it in the next five years will have to pay much more attention to:

• How we really think about "friends"
• How we influence and are influenced by other people's opinions
• How we control what others can put in our profile and vice versa
• How we don't understand how big our audience is (for example, here are people slagging off their boss in public)

Power to the people?

In these disengaged and cynical times there's a lot of excitement about social media's impact on democracy. David Cameron and friends are busy talking with Mark Zuckerberg and just about everybody. The best exploration of the potential I've seen is the documentary Us Now - well worth taking the time to watch fully.

But when Clay Shirky, an intellectual cheerleader for online democracy, says that actually it's a bit broken you know there's a problem. So far social media has increased noise but not impact, with politicians disliking or plain ignoring the bulk e-petitions we've all signed. And well-organised but non-representative groups, whether they be lobbyists, football fans or pranksters, have been able to hijack attempts at online consultation.

Despite predictions, the 2010 general election was the TV debate election not the internet election. Social media has got five years to change that next time.

During a social media workshop with a client today a question was asked about the IP of content you submit. I wasn't too happy with the answer we gave so did some research on some popular services, a summary of which I've put into a Google Docs spreadsheet below.

An important thing to bear in mind, which is common to pretty much all these services, is that you will retain the ownership but the services will grant themselves a wide-ranging licence and often sub-licences. These kind of licences are absolutely necessary though if the services are to do their job of sharing content with other users.

See the spreadsheet in Google Docs or view it below:

During my research I found these other useful resources:

• "Facebook terms of service compared with MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter" by Amanda French
• "Online Policy Primer: Flickr Terms of Service" by Paula L
• "Facebook's New Terms Of Service: "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever."" by Consumerist.com
• What is Creative Commons - for those not familiar

I attended the Local by Social event yesterday, which was inspired by a recent NESTA pamphlet of the same name. The event brought together people who work in local government and social innovators to discuss what impact social media and social networking can have in realising what has been dubbed public services 2.0.

I don't work in local government, nor am I a social innovator, but I find the subject fascinating as both a citizen and someone who has worked in social media and digital service design for years. These are my reflections on the day.

It's not about new tools... but gosh they are fascinating

One of my favourite lines for putting social media in context is "it's not about new tools, it's about new behaviours" and it featured here from the speakers. Yet in the group discussions afterwards the tools still dominated. Twitter this and Facebook that. Given the imminent public sector budget cuts it strikes me that the conversation really needs to urgently move on from tools and to behaviours.

What needs to happen now? Someone needs to start to put all this stuff in the context of social marketing and behavioural economics. I'm sure someone has. Can they please come to the next event?

Social innowhatnow?

The social innovators who shared what they'd achieved were really inspiring, but again there seemed to be a huge gulf between where they and local government people were at in thinking about social media. A feature of the innovators' presentations was the impressive diagrams showing the success integration of social media into an overall service to deliver social impact. Great. However, in the group discussion the question that got people most animated was "how can I get my councillor to start tweeting?"

Why was this? My intuition says three reasons: it's an easier place to start; marcomms people outnumbered service delivery people; and people tend to focus on tactics rather than strategy.

What needs to happen now? A local government technology leap. Skip all the marcomms stuff and start building social innovation and service design capacity on the frontline instead.

Risk, meet Agile. He's your new friend

Social media brings lots of exciting new risks for local government people to think about, with its magic combination of immediacy, permanency, and ubiquity. Also, the general approach of social innovation tends to conflict with traditional ways of managing risk such as command and control management and policy designed to guarantee certain outcomes.

Some suggested agile methods as a way to manage these risks while keeping the iterative approach needed for solving novel and complex problems. +1 to that. However, as I know from personal experience, this is not an easy sell to procurement officers and finance directors.

As a sidenote to this: given the perceived risks of social media it was surprising how few local councils had a social media policy.

What needs to happen now? A common framework for local government to implement agile methods, including agile contracts with suppliers. A collaborative effort to produce a simple, shareable, social media policy for local government wouldn't be a bad idea either.

These reflections and suggestions are offered up without the in-depth knowledge of the domain that I'm sure many others attending possess, so please feel free to add, amend or delete.