The Hawthorne Effect

A few weeks ago I had the chance to discuss the issue of Facebook and Cyber bullying on CNBC (see one post down). The tragedy of the Alexis Pilkington along with other reports of cyberbullying prompted a few interesting questions. Is Facebook responsible? Should brands in social networking sites be worried about things like this happening on their watch? Is there more that can be done?

For the sake of clarification, this isn’t a post about privacy. That horse is being flogged repeatedly and everything about the topic has probably been covered already. I use Facebook all the time and am of the belief that you can protect your privacy well enough by simply being discreet about what kind of information you choose to supply. If you don’t put highly personal information in, people can’t ever get at it, and we’ve all heard about sites like Pleaserobme.com.  A modicum of common sense goes a long, long way.

With tragedies like the one involving Ms. Pilkington it’s easy to look to blame someone. The classmates, Facebook, the parents, all in some way, shape or form can make tantalizing victims for a blood-thirsty media outlet looking for a attention-grabbing angle. I’m a big proponent of parents having tighter relationships with their kids, schools taking a more active role in monitoring student activity and everyone making more responsible decisions to make the world a safer place. In this case, several classmates used the virtual world to torment Alexis to the point of suicide. Their crimes were so egregious that they even kept taunting the poor girl even after she was dead. Could the Pilkington tragedy have been avoided? I don’t know, but I don’t think Facebook and it’s bevy of privacy issues are the problem here. Whatever the means, some people are going to act aggressively and stupidly whether the technology is there to help them out or not.

The disturbing thing about cyberbullying is that it’s most often done by someone you know. In cases like that, your privacy isn’t what has been violated, your identity is. We’re obviously not talking about identity theft here, but rather blatant attacks on your personal identity; how you feel about yourself, and what your outward persona is to others. What makes cyberbullying so damaging is that the teasing can be incessant and come from all angles, all in plain view of your circle of friends, 24-7. It used to be that when kids picked on other kids, they could at least look forward to escaping the pressure by getting on the bus and going home.

The internet has the ability to bring everyone into our personal space, whether we like it or not.

As I write this, Facebook has very quietly been asked by some parental groups to install more safety features to help protect kids. In England for instance, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOPC) has asked Facebook to include a “Panic Button” on all group pages. The feature would allow kids to alert someone in the event they feel threatened or unsafe. Facebook has flatly rejected including any such features its site, declining to comment as to why.

So this begs 2 relevant questions:
1. Why won’t Facebook provide more safety features on its site? And,
2. What features should they provide if they were willing to do so?

Mark Zuckerberg’s well documented abhorrence to personal privacy aside, I don’t think Facebook is deliberately obfuscating its responsibility of providing a safer community experience. I do think they worry about the precedent it sets. If you live in New York, from time to time there will be visible and formidable increases in local police and security forces in the subways. If you’re like me, the first thing you do is to feel a bit safer, but then you might begin to wonder: Why are the extra forces are needed? Is something going on? Should I be worried? It’s this very thinking that I believe Facebook is looking to avoid. If you begin to see features like panic buttons and parental alerts, I’m sure the next logical question parents will indeed ask themselves is whether Facebook is safe at all.

We all want to feel safe as long as we don’t have to think about the danger.

So what kind of tools should Facebook, or any social site for that matter, be developing? While not an exhaustive list, here are a few that I can think of.

1. A simpler privacy settings dashboard
Privacy issues for Facebook users aside, the dashboard and default settings for restricting access to personal information are a joke. Facebook should create a much simpler system for managing these features and have them all located in one place, rather than scattered throughout your profile. And, by default, they should all be off so that users would have to opt in to making information available. Their recent updates to the privacy settings system are a good start, but not remotely close to optimal.

2. An online cyber safety councilor
For anyone under the age of 18, a councilor, trained in helping people who feel they are being threatened would automatically included in the chat list of a user when they come online. Don’t want to include a panic button? This is the next best thing. A trained specialist could help guide individuals through what to do and where to go for help in the event that they feel unsafe when on Facebook. You could even take this idea one step further and have a councilor’s chat window automatically appear and offer to help should someone type a phrase like “I’m thinking of committing suicide.” Think of it as a real time 9-1-1 operator.

3. Sentiment bots to detect predatory conversations
Facebook claims that it already has tools like this in place, but if they are anything like some of the tools most social media agencies use to analyze conversations, they are most likely woefully weak. Conversation analysis tools can’t detect things like sarcasm or humor, so honing in on keywords becomes essential to determining relevancy. If these tools do exist, beef them up. Make the API open source and offer $10,000 to the person or team that could make them more accurate. Would it be perfect? No. But it would be a good start.

4. Educational programs
There already exists a page on Facebook dedicated to understanding cyberbullying, but if I hadn’t searched for the words “Facebook + cyberbullying,” I probably wouldn’t have found it. Plus, I’m not entirely sure Facebook sanctioned this. The bottom line is Facebook has the ability to drive awareness, education and support to lead the charge on this issue, and their efforts to date have been muted at best.

Privacy issues not withstanding, in my opinion, Facebook is at a crossroads. The site is already getting heat from congress about their “opt-in” privacy options, and have, to date, capitulated to a certain extent. This has made users a tad more anonymous, but not necessarily safer. Tragedies like the one that befell Ms. Pilkington are horrible, and should be met with a swift and decisive eye towards preventing a repeat occurrence. But for now, Facebook seems inert. I can only pray it doesn’t take another, higher profile incident to make them rethink a more proactive stance on the subject.

What do you think?

As someone who grew up with the Internet and made it my career I can tell you, the era we’re in right now looks and smells oddly familiar. How? Well, back in my day* the Internet was just a thing, conceptual, new. No one understood it but everyone was talking about it. Consumers played with it. Brands tried to use it. The media talked about it endlessly. Like with most new things, objectives for success were often poorly defined, but money, gobs and gobs of money were thrown at it.

Strategies evolved that more or less correlated to success. People got smarter. The tools got cheaper and easier to use while the barriers to working the ‘net got smaller and easier to manage.

Inside of pharma, regulators and brand managers alike struggled to define how to use the Internet properly. Adoption happened slowly. Things seemed risky. Hands were wrung, and decisions delayed until others took the lead.

More case studies were needed.

Soon everyone was an Internet ‘expert’ and the scrum began. Every agency, freelancer, and Johnny-come-lately tried to get digital work. Innovation was sought at the expense of meaningful results. Things had to be new. They had to be shiny. And they had to have lots and lots of Flash.

Prices fell. The talent pool swelled. Expertise was defined by what you’d just launched. The noise level rose. Soon it became hard to tell what was great from what was working. Flashy was the new good.

Now, reread the previous paragraphs and replace the word ‘Internet” with the words “Social Media.” All of this has happened before.

Then, terrible things happened. The economy tanked. 9/11 occurred. The dot–conomy imploded. All those people dreaming of their Internet riches and piles of stock options e-lost all their virtual iDollars and ended up in thepoorhouse.com.

The party was over.

But that tragedy led to the rise to an aristocratic class of digital talent that had gained the specialized skills needed to survive while living through those volatile experiences and creating bigger and better tools. These are the survivors. These are the few. These are the Digerati.

Look around any major marketing meeting. Chances are there’s a late thirty something “smartest-person-in-the-room” that knows everything about anything digital you could want to talk about.

Strangely, I see the lessons of the past not informing the decisions of today. Social media is too new. It’s too different. It can’t be measured. Sound familiar? It should. All of this has happened before.

What I find most astonishing about this is that the very people who seem so flummoxed about how social can be applied to real business challenges are the very same people who should know better. They lived through the pain, and they fought the battles and struggled to be relevant. Yet, here we are again. Square one.

The same regulatory challenges that slowed the adoption of the Internet are playing themselves out all over again in this socially driven age. Remember when the biggest concern about creating a website was whether showing images of packaging  would somehow lead to fraud or a rise in fake products being sold? It may seem quaint now, but the fear was very real and very, very time consuming to navigate.

The challenges faced during the beginnings of the Internet age may be somewhat different than those of today, but the methods for success formulated during those times are just as relevant now.

So where does that leave us? Looking back at the past it occurs to me that 4 key lessons emerge. These may seem like “well, duh” tips, but I assure you, they are often ignored, usually at the expense of some really great ideas which never end up seeing the light of day.

1. Have a defined objective.

The seduction of new tools and technologies are that they generate opportunities to create some really “wow” stuff. That’s all well and good, but often the tried and true works better. Have an objective. Stick to the plan. Generating buzz can be a perfect objective for some programs but is definitely not a one size fits all outcome. Chase the shiny object only if it gets you somewhere. After all, it would be far more valuable to have 1,000 highly targeted, highly engaged patients than 10,000 outliers that will never ask for your product.

2. Understand your audience.

Your audience wants value. They want you to fill a need. If they’ve raised their hand by fanning your page, give them something in return. If your social strategy is merely to repurposed content that already exists elsewhere, chances are you will fail. People in social channels want content and experiences that are useful and in some way shape or form entertaining or interesting. How you write for social is going to be fundamentally different than how you write for a website. Giving them yet another BMI calculator isn’t going to get it done. Location based tracking tools for Alzheimer’s caregivers? Now you’re getting somewhere.

3. ROI matters.

More often than not, I read articles and blogs proclaiming that social media is too unique to measure, that it’s more important to experiment than worry about results. The problem with this mindset is that we all work in a results oriented culture, and showing how every dollar made an impact is very applicable to ensuring you have dollars available next year and the year after, let alone a job. Digital people use metrics like time on site, page views, opt ins, click through rates, likely to be referred, lifetime value and a whole host of other data points to justify the exorbitant money thrown at e-marketing tactics. If your agencies or consultants tell you that they can’t measure the impact of a social program, fire them. Do it now. There are plenty of smart people out there that can help you get the data you need.

4. Put your money where your brain is.

The proximity bias dictates that for the most part, people will go with what they know. I’ve seen brand after brand push money into failing programs simply because they are familiar and “seem” to work. Take a look at how much money you spend on display ads. What’s your click through rate? 2%? How many websites do you have? Do they need to be redesigned? Why? Amazon hasn’t changed its interface in 7 years, but it does reinvigorate it’s offering all the time. Other programs, especially in social may be able deliver far better results for far less money. Challenge assumptions. Push innovation. Demand value. Hard metrics are your friend.

The era of social is here, whether you like it or not. It’s an exciting time, one fraught with challenges, opportunities and adventures. But the lessons of the past should inform the decisions of today and tomorrow, not be forgotten. Mistakes should be learned from and strategies adopted. After all, all of this has happened before.

But it doesn’t have to happen again.

*Get off my lawn, you damn kids!