The last couple of days have really made my brain work… but I’ve really enjoyed the mix of sessions (strategic and practical), and been able to listen to a number of them whilst doing other bits and bobs, whilst capturing some of them for Twitter! It’s encouraging to se how much the Church of England digital work has moved forward over the last few years (I used to run training sessions at Church House, London, especially on ‘Social Media for the Scared’, and always felt more was needed).
I found the Whova app really straightforward to use (I’ve only used one other online conference platform – Hopin)… although of course there will have been work put into thinking how to use this well. I used a mix of the web platform and the mobile platform – and aside from having to manually connect to the audio for each session – it was easy to find each session in the agenda, and connect to the associated Zoom. I can look back at each session and see the Q&A and chats that happened down the side, though I never quite made it to the community chats (which looked very busy). Delegates could contact each other, upload photos, comment/enage (and there was a competition with scores for those who engaged the most) – and the slides were available at the end of the event – plus a few other bits of functionality.
Another book that I’ve managed to buy twice, and finally read once!
I love this description of marketing (often a dirty word – especially in church circles where I’m trying to persuade people to make the best use of communication skills) on p.62:
To Dave, marketing isn’t about trying to convince people to purchase things they don’t want or need. Marketing is about tapping into their genuine enthusiasm for products and services that they find useful. Or fun. Or beautiful. Marketing is about spreading the love.
The book is essentially a masterclass is how to make your story/product ‘contagious’, or ‘viral’ in a digital age, largely around creating “buzz” aka “a conversation piece”. It considers human desires and behaviours, and how that translates into understanding what they might share, and why… and how companies with little/no budget can get their story out there (also, many of the churches that I’m working with!).
Sometimes products catch on because they are better than others/easier to use, others because they are cheaper, others because of advertising that brought things to people’s attention, but Berger argues that there’s more to it than this!
People are social creatures – we talk, we share, and we recommend! We share stories, news and information with others around us, and with those online – and these conversations affect 20-50% of all ‘purchasing decisions.’ Advertising is not seen as credible because it ‘has an angle’, whereas we trust our friends to ‘tell it to us straight’. Stories are also targeted, as we’ll typically direct the information towards an (already) interested audience. Berger gives an interesting story of being sent books to review (which are often just one copy), and being sent TWO copies, with an offer to pass one onto someone else who might be interested – starting the targeting at ground level!
Berger emphasises that ‘word of mouth’ is available to everyone, as it just requires ‘getting people to talk’. Research in 2013 (when this book was published), indicated that only 7% of word-of-mouth happened online – but because online is more visible than the larger percentage of time that people spend offline – we have a record of chats and conversations in a way that we don’t of other aspects of our lives. The book seeks to understand why some stories are more contagious, and certain rumours are more infectious, and highlights 6 areas:
Social Currency: We share things that make us look good
Triggers: Things need to be in our consciousness to want to share them
Emotion: We want to share the things we care about (exciting is more shared than sad)
Public: If something is public, and on show, it’s visible to others and enters their consciousness
Practical Value: People like to share useful bits of information that we think will help people
Stories: Humans tell stories – and useful information can be embedded in what seems like idle chatter!
Berger appears to be indicating that most of what we share is not ‘virtue-signalling‘ (not a term around in 2013), but a genuine desire for connection/to find our place. It’s not about how ‘influential’ we are (it takes a lot of ‘little’ things for something to catch, even if the spark is provided by someone known), how much money we’ve got, but more about are we talking about the things that people are concerned about, and are we applying the STEPPS model to connect relevantly?
This morning, it’s Safer Internet Day (see #SID2015), and I arranged to chat to BBC Radio Newcastle about a story they are featuring, involving a Newcastle woman whose Instagram account was cloned by a 15-year-old girl from down south, and then used to build fake accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and a dating profile. The 15-year-old seemed to be enjoying the attention she was gaining as an attractive older woman, whilst the woman herself was concerned at how young her impersonator was, and discovered who it was via the girl’s school.
[Audio to add here when available]
What behaviour is typical at what age?
Here’s a brief extract from Raising Children in a Digital Age (2014), summarising information from Professor Tanya Byron’s government report as to what to expect at different ages:
Eleven to fourteen years: This is typically an era characterized by hormones as puberty strikes, and the emphasis for children moves largely from home and the family towards the external world, their peers, and “idols” in the quest to become “independent”. This means a shift from parental identification to peer identification, requiring a degree of experimentation that may involve taking risks. Brain changes cause an inherent drive to seek out social experiences: “these are more likely to be sought in the digital world as we restrict children’s and young people’s access to outdoor, offline socialisation.” Children and young people may start to actively seek out age-restricted material and games that are designed for adults, so keep the communication channels open for discussions of risk and challenging content.
Fifteen to eighteen years: In Western culture this is officially the last stage of “childhood”, when young people are still the responsibility of their parents but take increasing responsibility for their own decisions and identities. Abstract thinking is likely to be well developed, and evaluation of information and making judgments is becoming more balanced as young people develop their own set of values and beliefs (which may be different from their parents’), for which space should be allowed. This is a good opportunity for young people to experiment with different roles and identities, and make decisions for themselves, while still within the safety of family support.
What are the issues that cloned social media sites raise?
Questions we were seeking to consider in the radio interview include how easy is it to clone someone else’s account, how common is it, and what might one do to protect oneself? Also, what does it say about the cloner?
For me, this raises bigger questions about our online presence – what ‘reality’ do we project online, so if there’s a new account, will people recognise that it’s not you? Have you developed a clear ‘tone of voice’, so that, like plagiarism, there’s an “off-tone” that warns others that it’s not you. Question what you want to achieve through participation online – how do you share holistically without oversharing – and have you made good use of privacy settings supplied by each of the social networks? Social media accounts can make it much easier for people to undertake identity fraud, so we need to be aware of what is going on, educate ourselves, and ensure that we don’t become digitally agoraphobic!
How big an issue is digital cloning?
In January this year, the Guardian published a video, featuring Aleks Krotoski, looking at ‘The Power of Privacy’ – definitely an area of growing concern – and a sophisticated internet user can also fall for it:
In trying to establish the commonality of this, it seems difficult to track down numbers – this report indicates that in 2013, 6.19 million Facebook profiles were cloned in South Africa, in 2014 LinkedIn was closing down thousands of cloned accounts, and in 2009 Twitter was having to close down a huge number of fake accounts – each of which was opening up security flaws. These examples and this paper on ‘Detecting Social Network Profile Cloning‘, published in 2010, indicate that it’s certainly not a new problem – but the number of users, and the complex number of social media accounts that we sign up to – certainly mean that it has become a more common problem.
I’ve been recommended to watch Catfish, a film described by an Amazon reviewer as:
…a wake up call to the millions of social media addicts who tend to forget that appearances in the virtual world, that is the web, can be so much more deceptive than those in real life. People lie and can be devious in the real world, but once behind a computer screen, almost everyone feels safe enough to appear as ‘awesome’ as possible, sometimes creating a persona that is an altar ego of a naturally flawed personality. Such deceptions can be just innocent in most cases, but they can lead to abuse and violence in extreme instances.
What motivates scammers, hackers and cloners?
As the number of startups continues, privacy policies are often an afterthought, rather than integral to the site build. Most scammers, hackers and cloners and looking to expose human vulnerabilities – the need for human connection, sharing, building relationships, and to take advantages of the opportunities online. Typically, people will clone another user for one of three reasons:
For profit (to extract favours and money from friends, or hack into organisational systems)
For revenge (sharing compromising or confidential information to cause harm)
For fun (trolling as a sport).
If you’re susceptible to hacking ‘for profit’, check out this article as to potential motivations.
11 tips to ensure that your social media account is not cloned:
On Facebook and LinkedIn, don’t accept people you don’t know as friends or connections (or at least undertake conversations, or establish ‘true’ relationships in common) – this isn’t true for public sites such as Twitter.
Divide your Facebook friends into interest groups (family, close friends, colleagues, schoolmates, parenting groups, acquaintances, etc.) and post information only to the relevant groups
Limit access to your Facebook data only to your friends – take care when choosing what to publish publicly. Understand Facebook privacy basic settings.
Think about what you are sharing online – care with oversharing information about where you live, your children, and when you’re on holiday except with close friends.
Help your friends by letting them know if you receive an invitation from a cloned account.
If your friends spot an invitation to a new account, when they know you already have one, ask them to get in contact with you.
Report cloned accounts as soon as possible: Facebook; Instagram; Twitter – those of us who are more tech savvy need to be particularly vigilant in helping friends who are unaware of the potential. Organisations also need to be aware of this.
Use a variety of passwords across different sites, so that the problem is less likely to spread outside the initial network.
Ensure you have good anti-virus software installed and updated, so that data on your computer itself is not at risk.
Social media sites themselves will identify unusual behaviour – such as a Facebook account that normally logs in in the UK, logging in in France – and will ask for re-verification.
Note that it’s not always famous people who are cloned, or even those with the largest follower/friend connections. Hackers are looking for vulnerabilities, and personal, social and corporate responsibility all come into play here. One thing to remember is that as the digital throws up ‘new’ problems, it also offers new solutions – the report mentioned earlier highlights steps that are being taken to use the power of digital (it’s pattern recognition and algorithms, along with its connectivity) to identify potential clone accounts before human beings notice them.
Interacting Online
I’m often heard saying, we are not interacting with computers, nor have we become computers – we need to remember that behind each computer, there is a human being with feelings, vulnerabilities, etc. and we need to think about what our interactions online look like:
Thanks to my Facebook friends for providing so many suggestions to think about!
Tuesday 9th February 2016 is Safer Internet Day, a global event first held in 2004, seeking to promote the safe, responsible and positive use of digital technology for children and young people, with a theme this year of ‘Play your part for a better internet!’
I wrote Raising Children in a Digital Agein 2014 to encourage people to look beyond the many negative representations of young people and social media, and consider the opportunities to create a better, more positive, Internet experience for everyone, but particularly young people. Education in this area, for children, parents, and others involved in ‘raising children’, including teachers and youth workers, is far more important than shutting conversations down.
For many with responsibility for children, there is a certain amount of fear attached to the idea that children ‘know’ how to use the internet, that they ‘speak a different language’ and therefore we can’t interfere. Terms that have been coined, such as ‘digital natives’ or ‘net generation’, all perpetuate this idea that every child knows what they are doing online by reason of their age. A more useful idea has developed from a team at Oxford University: that of the “digital resident” and the “digital visitor”, defined more by attitude than by age. “Visitors” use the internet as a tool: go in to complete a task, and leave. “Residents” regard themselves as members of communities that exist online, rather than having access to an online toolbox. I am most definitely a digital resident, though I’m far too old to be a ‘digital native’, but the digital, as Martha Lane Fox quoted in the Dimbleby Lecture in 2015, is not optional: “It’s not OK not to understand the Internet anymore”.
The Internet in general offers access to a wide range of viewpoints, with opportunities to learn to distinguish between good and bad content, to make choices about what to engage in, developing “digital literacy” – a core skill in the Twenty-First Century. Peer pressure and bullying in particular can be challenged when families or groups use stories raised through digital media, allowing young people to identify and live out their core values, online and offline.
This morning, a brief mention appeared in February’s Youthwork magazine:
