It seems like there are a lot of dangers out there on the Interwebs lately - but unfortunately most of them seem to self-imposed.
You have services to prevent ‘drunk posting’, by testing your reflexes or shutting down your access to certain profiles when you’re out and about. After all, what happens after 1am might be best left off your profile, right? You have I Shared What?!, which will show you the amazing amount of data that you have made public or shared with companies you interact with online. You have campaigns from Brands like Pringles about Helping The Oversharers. You have Location-Based Anti-Services like Please Rob Me Now. And, you have spoofs from SNL about keeping your content ‘mom safe’ - the Damn It, my mom’s on Facebook Filter. (Sadly that technology may still be a little ways off… Well, we can dream.)
In all these examples, we are seeing the tremors and precursors of difficult times coming for heavy users of social media, where their need for connection will eventually exceed their comfort level at how responsible (or, more commonly, irresponsible) they have been with their data. As Paul Adams from Google pointed out in his excellent slideshow, even though some people practically live on social networks, that doesn’t mean that they understand how their choices about their data can affect them down the line.
Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft, was quoted at the Family Online Safety Institute conference in a recent Reuters article that cybercrime is so rampant that all internet companies now have a responsibility to protect user data, and for sure it’s true that Brands could be doing more.
We have to ask how Brands can help people to take responsibility for their data. And there are a lot of ways to do it.
- By adopting responsible opt-in practices and making opt-out easier. There’s no excuse for not having a clean subscription list, and for marketers that means two things: A. You don’t want anyone on it who is unaware that they subscribed. And B. You don’t want anyone on it who does want to receive your material or information. It’s a waste of money to send communications to people who don’t want to participate, and in some cases you can actively damage your brand: just imagine what the person will say to their friends about you if they say “WHY do they keep SENDING me these things!” every time they check their email.
- By just protecting unauthorized access to customer data. It should go without saying, but your security processes and infrastructure should be secure, including both restricted physical access and data access for both profile and transactional data. It doesn’t matter how good your policies are if someone walks off with your customer’s emails.
- By providing centralized, simple to edit privacy pages. It’s amazing that some sites still don’t offer one page in your profile that has all the controls on it.
- By giving visibility to how others can see the customer’s data. Ensuring that any externally-facing profiles have a view for the user to see what they shared.
- By offering additional services that organize and visualize data exposure. Educating your consumer can lead to long-lived, positive and profitable relationships. If your Brand doesn’t control data, then consider partnering with companies that specialize in visualization/redaction services. (Even light-hearted ideas like the anti-drunk-posting service can be helpful here.)
- By not collecting more data than is needed for segmenting and personalizing for the customer. We all know that long forms are a sure-fire way to ensure increasing uneasiness for your customer. But even more important is the need to partner with the customer. Let them know why they should provide you any information at all. People respond better to companies who trust them enough to be honest about why they want certain data. Ensuring that users have a clear benefit to providing the data in the first place means never having to say you’re sorry.
How are you protecting your consumers from themselves? What trust can you build with users through how you treat their data?
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