I woke up the other day—after months of being off the social grid—and actually had the urge to go check out what had happened since deactivating my account. Truth be told, the real motivation was something I overheard in passing as a couple of colleagues were chatting about a comment posted on their social media site.
Before I could access this bit of office intelligence, I was confronted by a test to reactivate my account: a Pavlovian experiment fit for a lab rat to find his cheese. The task was to review five photos from people who either were too lazy or too scared to identify their friends themselves. With each photo, I was asked to identify more obscure people in the photos. A clever ‘fee’ for leaving the social party: doing the dirty work of meta tagging photos in order to keep the Facebook database and business model robust, and relevant.
Here in Europe, the concern is even more prominent as stringent privacy protection laws clash with Facebook’s bio-metric and even ‘Like’ tracking activities. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has even disavowed Facebook as recent reports detail how they are able to track people after logging-out.
It seems to me that these platforms are at the end of their ability to remain relevant as communities of people share as much content as technology will allow. It is only natural that these companies build tools that can search, track and (re-)serve up meaningful content. But this business model no longer comes as ‘freemium-style,’ rather at a cost of you being spoon-fed worthless data without your knowing it.
It is amazing that a similar progression hasn’t occurred for one of the original social channels: I mean of course email (which turned 29 years old this year). The maturity of email communications in business is still set in a default mode: communicate with one piece of software, and then switch to another piece of software to “get work done.” But where is the cry for a better email experience? Where are the (roughly) 2 billion emailers on their feet demanding that email—and the attachment(s), conference call, desktop-sharing, messengering “7-click-hell” to communicate a meeting—evolve away from lowest common denominator?
The social rat race for our personal data is the hottest commodity right now, but the opportunity lies in meaningfully connecting the magic that social context gives with the security, reliability and standard to change my data from information to knowledge quickly and with new value.
Got me thinking about what social media is actually up to, you know…from that old saying: ’if you can’t say what you do for a living in one sentence, it’s probably illegal.’ Me? I market and sell email and collaboration software. How about you: what do you do?