This panel is a part of course 95-800 Measurement and Analysis of Social Media Initiatives at the Heinz College of Carnegie Mellon University. This will be a panel discussion around issues corporations face in acquiring, storing and analyzing data from social media initiatives.

To cover this event live, we will have pictures and notes. If you would like to tweet about this event, please use the hash tag #95800.

(pictures courtesy of and © Manolis Kounelakis)

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To us, there were a few key takeaways from the panel. Before going into the detailed notes, here are some points we found interesting:

• It is our duty as consumers of social media to be aware of the associated privacy risks of this medium
• People will tend to give away private/personal information if they have something to gain
  • ‘Good’ example – let Amazon store your purchasing history so that they can recommend
  • ‘Bad’ example – employees giving employers access to their personal email account
• Companies are relying less on “gut-feeling” decisions, and more on quantitative analysis to determine what customers want
• The platforms for performing these quantitative analyses are converging.
• Rich real time tools (e.g., Foursquare) enhance communication in one sense, but pose a threat to privacy (e.g., Please Rob Me)
• Making personal data portable from one application/platform to another could be a way to maintain some level of privacy
• Regarding privacy issues in social media, there are associated moral, legal, and business strategic questions. Unfortunately, the corresponding answers to these questions often conflict.
• Social Web has the potential to finally create bottom-up change in organizations – this is exciting to some and scary to others.
• For now, privacy is dead. But do you think the benefits outweigh the costs?

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Below are our LIVE notes on the event (courtesy of Haris):

Gene Connors, Partner, Reed Smith
Companies should not try to control – this is a losing battle!
“If we’re not talking together, you are talking about me”
Companies should encourage social media engagement and transparency – many companies are doing this, employing some sort of policy

From a practical legal standpoint on maintaining privacy – keep educating ourselves on how we can avoid compromising our private information
e.g., facebook applications grab your information – know what you’re getting into!
Beware of hidden and unhidden cookies on websites

Companies intentionally looking for your information – studying when a person is most likely to give away compromising information
Usually giving away private information happens when people feel they have something to gain from it

In the end, whose responsibilities is it? Individual, legal, etc…
Would love to have a law that warns users before giving away private information

If so many sites should depends on trustworthiness – what is our duty? Spread the story! Social media can be a powerful force to do this.

There is no constitutionally recognized right to privacy in most states.

Even if we had a way of preventing privacy infringements, you won’t stop the scam artists – which was the same before the digital age.

Horror stories are what create laws – banking and other corporate abuses have added more regulation.
Same could happen with privacy.
Expecting on the regulatory side you’ll see a lot more big brother.
We should police ourselves, because otherwise others will police us.

On the topic of whether social web shift will happen top-down or bottum-up…
Maybe the bottom need to convince the top of the benefits and necessity.

Sean Ammirati, COO, ReadWriteWeb
Interested in real time nature of social web
Twitter was interesting 2 years ago, but now we’re even getting richer real time experiences (e.g., Foursquare)
Google buying Aardvark is testimony to this -> ask a question, route the question to the right person
Privacy implications – PleaseRobMe.com

Shocking rate of growth of blippy.com – broadcasts purchasing decisions. No trick, totally transparent!
What can we draw from this? People have different sensitivities to information privacy.

You should know what you want to keep private and what you don’t.
Hard to believe that the law will beat the scam artists – the community should do this.

The online battle for identity – google, facebook
Facebook connect has better authentication than openID
This battle is not getting enough attention – but one big player will most likely win
One thing that could help – make personal data portable

Mike Smith, Assoc. Professor IT and Marketing, CMU
How will organizations adapt to social media?
What will differentiate companies is not whether they will go into social media, but how they will leverage this medium to learn more about their customers
Companies don’t make “gut feel decisions” – they use quantitative tools to predict what you’ll buy and suggest it to you

As far as privacy issues, who owns this information is an interesting question. On one hand, most people would be comfortable giving some information to amazon to get better recommendations. However, some information like bank account information is something users would not like to shared.

In online privacy, there are three kinds of questions: Moral, legal, and business strategic.
Often the answers to these questions are not the same!

People are bad at evaluating low-probability, high-risk situations – giving away private information is such a case.

Rob Howard, Founder and CTO, Telligent
Personal identifiable information -> scary how much information can be mined!
For companies, put a human face on itself and foster community engagement.
Proctor & Gamble example – communicate better to consumers, but also improve internal company communication.
Challenge is not digitizing information, but finding relevant information – Amazon has done an excellent job in this!
Integration of different information systems is a trend – can collect different forms of information (analytics, engagement, etc) under one platform.

A resume is nothing these days – always searches people you’ll meet, and find their online face.

Measuring effectiveness of online campaigns:
1) Listen
Get feedback, measure engagement
2) User Type Analysis
Break down users into categories – who comments, creates content, consumes content, etc.
These types can shift – ‘askers’ can become ‘influencers’
3) Engagement
Social Media can give even more fine grained information on enagement
Can find out more demographic information and preferences

The tools for measurement are converging.

Some organizations base their culture around keeping information in – hard to create a top down cultural shift in the age of social media. Will this change happen bottom up?

Tim Stanton, Sr. Acct. Exec. LinkedIn
Key question – how to use social media
Organizations will continue to wrestle with social media
Still believes we are in early phases of social media

Q: Broadening or deepening scope of social media influence?
Both – important to spread out, but don’t spread too thin.

At LinkedIn, the community drives the content – that is how they deliver relevant information, which makes the community willing to provide them with information. LinkedIn has built their brand on this.

It’s hard to maintain privacy, even without online life. Sounds like privacy is hard to achieve today.
For professional reasons, getting found is very important!

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Many thanks to Heinz College for hosting this panel, and especially to my professor Ari Lightman for organizing this event. Please check twitter hashtag #95800 for tweets related to this panel, and for general discussions within our social media class.