It is impossible to miss the news about how Facebook has been found out for conscripting Facebook users without their knowledge to attempt emotional manipulation. Now one of the data scientists involved in the report and experiment has cried mea culpa and I suspect that now we have our sacrificial lamb we will all forget about it, after we had all expressed our public outrage. But that’s a nirvana for advertisers isn’t it?
It’s not difficult to imagine. You want positive reviews and commentary about your brand. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, “Mark, can you do me a favour?” – Or it becomes a chargeable item on the advertising rate card… Hey presto, you’re only being shown positive commentary about ABC advertiser. Clearly I’m cynical about the Facebook algorithm and how it shows content to individuals. I’m not the only one.
Why we care about that (ethics aside), in business, is related to who saw what and when. API’s available from the public social networks provide information about the users who is sharing the content and it is their content that is recorded. In the world of the financial adviser, that’s the FA themselves. Not their readers. So you’re unable to tell what exactly it was that I, Sarah Carter, saw as the reader of the FA in question. Earlier in the social evolution of the Financial Services Community I was asked by a firm to provide an archive of “Everyone who might have seen my tweet”. My flippant response of “that’s the entire Internet” had to be followed by a lengthy explanation of how Twitter (and indeed much of public social) content works.
Current legislation and guidance doesn’t take account for this, because it’s based on rules for old technology or even before the technology that we see as common place now – i.e. for the printed advertisement and offer, not the electronic one. It’s hard to figure out how this might be amended to take account for social content, even more so for deliberate algorithm manipulation, but it’s clear that it needs to be resolved one way or another.
It begs the question as to what can be done and there are a few simple steps that firms and individuals can take.
- Be very clear with employees, associates, clients, prospects, in fact ANY STAKEHOLDER as well as the regulators as to what your policy for record retention is.
- Ensure that any deficiencies with the content that is provided by the network themselves is clearly stated and understood.
- Ensure that changes in which content is captured and recorded is clearly provided both to you and to your stakeholders, to ensure that informed decisions may be made on future strategies and tactics for the business.
- While the example used here is Facebook, ensure that any changes to other social platforms, including internal platforms such as SharePoint, IBM Connections or Jive for instance don’t impact documented retention policies and procedures.
- A cross functional (internal AND external) team that comprises compliance, legal, social, community, marketing, sales, HR and any other stakeholder body ALONG with the IT implementation team should ensure that all gotcha’s are communicated
- Make “Change “a key agenda items on your social steering committee – that way, it has to come up in discussion, even if the documented responses is “no change”.
This is a brave new world that we continue to inhabit, and we’re breaking boundaries literally every day, there are bound to obstacles along the way, but, as Joanna Belbey, Actiançe’s Regulatory Compliance Expert can often be heard to say, “the regulators are looking for a common sense approach, that shows you have taken a well thought out and considered approach, they’ve not been saying no for a long time now”.
Guest blogger, social media guru, and citizen of the world Sarah Carter regulary shares her nomadic travel experiences and social insights here with our blog audience. To learn more about Sarah and her exciting travels, follow @SarahActiance on Twitter.
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