Sometimes when we meet with organizations they wonder how important this whole Internet thing really is to their organizations. The folks at South Park continue to have their pulse on the national mood. What happens when the Internet goes down?
Hat Tip [Fred Wilson]
Link [South Park Studios]
A couple of years ago someone said to me, Michael, why doesn’t Flickr, which already allows for uploading of photos just add video. Wouldn’t that be a smart business thing to do and a natural, given that they already have the key elements in place. Well, yeah.
Late for sure, today Flickr launches Flickr Video.
This is not YouTube. Flickr has a limit of 90-seconds for video and what it looks like is that they are going only for those videos you record on digital camera, not all out movies.
In a bid to broaden Flickr if not actually crush YouTube, Yahoo is adding videos to what has just been a photo-sharing site.
The change, which the company plans to launch publicly later Tuesday, is a modest but significant extension of Flickr’s features. The videos, limited to 90 seconds and 150MB, will be shown as thumbnails alongside users’ photos, and will inherit all the features of photos stored on the site: users can add comments, captions, comments, geotags, and privacy restrictions so only friends or family may view the videos, the company said.
The product is not a YouTube clone by any means. The Flickr team, led by Director of Product Management Kakul Srivastava, spent considerable time debating the feature set and user experience internally before launch.
The goal is not to have people upload long videos or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size (however these limitations may be changed later, Srivastava says).
In a phone prebriefing, I was very critical of the length limitation. But the team then brought me in for a demo and I was sold. The short clips are a perfect compliment to event photos, in my opinion.
I was quoted a bunch in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The article is about the decline of direct mail and the rise of online prospecting. Four — count ‘em, 4 — of our clients are mentioned in the article. Amnesty International, American Jewish World Service, AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corp and ISIS.
They even linked to the microsite we did for AVODAH, Jews4NewOrleans.org. If you haven’t seen it, go there and donate.
Here’s the article:
From the issue dated April 3, 2008
New Rules of Attraction
As traditional fund-raising methods falter, charities look for new ways to appeal to online donors
By Holly Hall
This week the Nature Conservancy will kick off a campaign to ask online donors to give $1 apiece to help the charity plant a billion trees in Brazil’s rain forest. But conservancy officials have no idea if the electronic drive will meet its goal of raising $1-million.
The Plant a Billion campaign is designed to attract people who have never previously given to the environmental organization. But it could “go gangbusters or be a flop,” says Sue Citro, the charity’s senior manager for digital membership.
For an organization that raises more money than all but a handful of charities, such uncertainty is unusual. But at big charities across the country, fund raisers face that same queasy feeling as they try to figure out a solution to an unsettling reality. Traditional approaches to seeking new donors by mail or telephone are growing less effective and more expensive every year, yet online appeals are not raising enough to replace them.
“Direct mail is on life support,” says Michael Hoffman, chief executive of See3, a Chicago consulting firm that specializes in nonprofit fund raising and communications. “Charities that have relied on direct mail to get new donors have to start thinking about what’s next, or they will wake up one day and find that an aggressive start-up has taken their place.”
Mailings Lose Ground
Plenty of charities still raise most of their contributions with direct mail, but mass mailings are losing their power to attract new supporters. In 2007, the number of new donors who responded to charity mailings dropped by a median of 6.2 percent in a study of 72 of the nation’s biggest charities, on top of another 10.4-percent median drop in 2006.
Online fund raising offers a promising alternative, especially since people who make their first gift to charity online give one and a half times as much as those whose first gift was made by mail, according to Target Analytics, a Boston company that conducted the studies of both online and direct-mail results. Repeat gifts by online donors also tend to be larger.
But persuading donors to give online for the first time is not easy, says Ettore Rossetti, associate director of Internet marketing at Save the Children. The charity has solicited donations from people who signed an online petition to help needy children, but that approach has achieved only “mixed success,” he says.
“Advocacy people tend to be engaged in lending their voice, not necessarily opening their wallet.”
To figure out what approaches will attract first-time donors, many charities are hiring extra staff members to devise and test new ideas, and are upgrading software to analyze the results. Until such solicitations become more lucrative, however, most charities are still spending about as much as they did on direct mail, telemarketing, and other traditional ways of finding new donors.
“I get executive directors all the time who want to abandon direct-mail acquisition completely,” says Jeff Patrick, president of Common Knowledge, a San Francisco company that advises charities on online fund raising and marketing. “Online fund raising will continue to grow, but it will not replace direct mail in five years,” Mr. Patrick predicts. The movement from offline to online giving, he adds, “is an evolution, not a revolution.”
Other fund-raising experts agree that online fund raising has a long way to go before it becomes a successful way to attract new donors.
“This is an extremely confusing period,” says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a Takoma Park, Md., fund-raising consulting company. “The old ways aren’t working, and the new ways are not clear.”
Still, fund raisers have found some new approaches in recent months that are helping them better attract donors who can eventually become the lifeblood of an organization. Among them:
Make pitches in person. World Vision, the international relief group, asks people who make monthly gifts to “sponsor” a needy child overseas to volunteer to seek donations from other people.
Two and a half years ago, the charity started recruiting people to give presentations about monthly giving to their colleagues at work or church. People who give at least eight presentations a year are named “Child Ambassadors.” Members of the ambassador group, which has grown to 255 people, must apply for the volunteer position and agree to a background check.
Last year, volunteers recruited more than 4,000 new monthly donors.
Vicki Casper, a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines, is World Vision’s most successful recruiter. She has single-handedly persuaded 400 people in the past two years to become monthly donors, including a passenger on a recent flight to Indianapolis. He offered to sponsor a dozen children for at least a year and, as he got off the plane, handed Ms. Casper checks for each child totaling more than $5,000.
If her results don’t attest to Ms. Casper’s dedication, the recorded greeting on her cell phone does: “Hi, this is Vicki Casper, World Vision Child Ambassador, standing as a link between you and the poor and needy of this world.”
With the ambassadors, “we’ve seen big potential,” says Miyon Kautz, World Vision’s national director of volunteers. In fact, she says, the charity has just finished training three new staff members who will recruit ambassadors regionally. The goal for each region: obtaining 1,000 new monthly donors over the next 12 months.
Tap existing online donors. Charities can take a lesson from the “member-get-a-member” drives held by professional societies, says Kevin Whorley, a Bethesda, Md., consultant. After running direct-mail fund raising at Catholic Relief Services for several years, Mr. Whorley now advises associations.
Holding contests and offering prizes or other rewards can improve charities’ ability to get donors engaged in finding new supporters, he says.
As an example, he points to the National Association of Home Builders’ annual membership day, in which local branches compete during the year to see which one can sign up the most new members.
Winners receive modest prizes, such as an upgrade to a better hotel at the association’s annual conference or a fleece jacket, notes Mr. Whorley. The most recent membership day yielded more than 12,000 new members.
“It is fascinating to me how the member-get-a-member thing, which is an old-school technique, gets new traction in this new world of online relationships,” says Mr. Hoffman, the consultant. He is now working with American Jewish World Service, an international relief group, to design an online campaign to persuade the charity’s donors to get involved in finding new supporters.
Mr. Hoffman suggests, based on his research into what makes such campaigns successful for associations, that charities include in their pitches to existing supporters incentives such as the chance to win a trip, a clear description of what difference donors’ participation will make, easy-to-use online tools, and concrete goals for enlisting new donors.
“You can’t just say, ‘Tell your friends about this great organization,’” Mr. Hoffman says. “It is far better to say, ‘Help us recruit 500 new members by June 1 so we can send 5,000 mosquito nets to Africa at the beginning of mosquito season to fight malaria.’”
Couple advocacy projects with online fund raising. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America knew that anti-abortion protesters planned to show up at 10 of the charity’s clinics over 40 days in the fall, so it used the occasion to start “I am Emily X,” an online video diary and blog.
The site featured videotaped statements from Planned Parenthood clinic workers who described the effects of the demonstration on both themselves and patients, some of whom were harassed by the protesters.
Visitors to the site were invited to post comments and messages to the clinics throughout the protest, and they were asked to pledge a small amount of money, anywhere from 5 cents to $10, for each of the 511 protesters Planned Parenthood counted in front of its clinics.
The site, coupled with e-mail appeals about the project, raised $96,531, and more than half of those who gave were new donors, says Tom Subak, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for online services. “We got a phenomenal response.”
Test fund-raising elements of Web sites. Amnesty International is using new software to randomly send online visitors to slightly different versions of a single Web page so it can see which online elements do the most to persuade people to make a donation or visit other parts of the organization’s site.
After two months, Amnesty found a version of its donation page that increased the number of people who made a gift from 35 to 55 percent, says Steve Daigneault, managing director of Internet communications. In the month of December alone, he says, Amnesty raised $128,000 more with the improved donation page; than it would have otherwise. Those returns, he adds, are many times greater than the cost of the software.
Mr. Daigneault is now conducting additional tests to improve the organization’s online action center, where visitors can sign petitions and engage in other forms of advocacy; that part of the site is the main way in which Amnesty collects e-mail addresses of potential donors.
“I don’t think many nonprofits realize how important this is,” he says of the tests. “Once people catch on, it will be huge.”
Get a celebrity to talk up an online appeal. Save the Children recruited 1,800 new donors and generated more than $50,000 with an online campaign that enabled visitors to its Web site to download or send electronic Valentine’s Day cards in exchange for a donation of $1 or more.
But the holiday alone was not enough to make the online greeting cards work for the children’s charity. The key to success, Mr. Rossetti says, was the actress Julianne Moore, who agreed to lend her support to the effort. To that end, she promoted the online cards when she appeared on The View, a popular daytime current-events show aimed at women. The actress has agreed to promote the e-cards again next year.
Do a year-end campaign online. Planned Parenthood has recruited thousands of new donors by sending a series of e-mail messages during the final month of the year. In December, before asking for any money, the charity sent 50,000 people a survey via e-mail to assess their interest in Planned Parenthood programs. That was followed by two other e-mail messages: a holiday greeting and a link to a YouTube video slide show highlighting the charity’s work over the past year. A fourth message asked for a donation.
The monthlong online campaign raised $1.6-million, including more than $500,000 in a single day, December 31. Out of the 8,957 donors, more than 1,200 contributors who gave a total of $246,000 last year were new to the organization.
The online year-end campaign has proven to be “one of our primary recruitment methods,” says Mr. Subak, the charity’s vice president for online services.
Promote online projects in social networks. Internet Sexuality Information Services, an Oakland, Calif., group, initially drew few entries when it asked people age 15 to 30 to enter an online video contest to express their views on sex education.
That began to change after two staff members began combing through social-networking sites, commenting on blogs, searching online news outlets, writing to reporters, and sharing the group’s own news — that it had received the first 10 entries, for example. By the time the deadline for entries passed three months later, the charity had received 70 entries.
While the video contest was not designed to raise money, the publicity efforts are helping the group attract contributions from new donors, says Deb Levine, executive director of the organization.
Three foundations have asked the group to submit proposals, two for six-figure grants. “This is a result of the visibility we generated through the contest and our positioning ourselves as thought leaders online,” she says.
Build a dedicated Web site. Some charities are creating stand-alone Web sites for specific projects, rather than just sending people to find information on one big site. The separate sites can be promoted to potential donors with related interests.
Avodah: the Jewish Service Corps, which involves young people in yearlong public-service projects in Chicago, New York, and Washington, has a new Web site that promotes its plan to start working in New Orleans in September. The charity tested the new site in December, using it to raise $15,000 to match a grant of the same amount contributed by an anonymous donor.
“People went to this site who we wouldn’t have contact with normally,” says Ilanit Gerblich Kalir, Avodah’s associate executive director. She says that the charity is seeking another challenge grant and plans to promote the site more aggressively online in coming months to people who have an interest in New Orleans and relief work.
“This is a low-cost way to get the word out to an audience you would otherwise not reach,” says Ms. Kalir. “We are a very small organization. We don’t have the money to do acquisition with direct mail.”
One of my presentations at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (08NTC) was The Age of YouTube: Using Online Video to Reach the Masses.
Here is the session description:
Broadband is finally here and the organizations that are creating compelling and viral video content are reaping the rewards. Those gala dinner videos are no longer enough. Readily available digital video cameras and editing software allow your organization to capture stories and introduce a wider world to your mission. Video content can be seamlessly integrated into your website and provide the compelling hook for fundraising and advocacy. Portable media players enable you to embed your message in hundreds of sites. But, how do you capitalize on the opportunity?
Takeaways:1. The benefits to using web video
2. Case studies of innovative uses of video
3. How to effectively use video in your e-campaigns
I opened the session looking at the world we live in — the environment nonprofit messages are competing with. Here is the video I showed at the start of the session:
Here is the slide deck I used for the session. Mostly, these are just illustrative of talking points.
Here is are relevant links to the videos we talked about from the session:
The power of video to breakthrough all the clutter. Example: Yes. We. Can.
The dinner video.
Other pieces you can make from a dinner video. (American Jewish World Service Passover Video)
Bread for the World video we showed as an example of something easy you can do with your staff.
Videos from Amnesty International showing both the man-on-the-street technique and how you can use video in an online campaign and how you can make videos with very different tone out of the same source material.
The funny video.
The serious video.
The PSA type video. An example from Chicago Foundation for Women and a very edgy UK one from Greenpeace International.
A documentary-style video from Columbia College Chicago.
Care2 is an online community where you can promote a video and seed your list in order to reach new audiences. If you are interested, you can learn more by calling Clinton O’Brien
Vice President, Business Development
Email: partners[at]earth.care2[dot]com
Phone: 202-785-7308
AOL quietly offers a program of free banners for certain organizations. If you are interested you should call us at See3 and we can tell you more about it.
If I left something out of this list that I mentioned in the session, please let me know with a comment.
Steve Grove’s YouTube for Nonprofits Tip Sheet. (Steve did not make the session at the last minute, but we got his tips. I will ask Steve some of the questions and publish the answers.)
The Basics
• Reach Out. Post videos that get YouTube viewers talking, and then stay in the conversation with comments and video responses.
• Partner Up. Find other organizations on YouTube who complement your mission, and work together to promote each other.
• Keep It Fresh. Put up new videos regularly and keep them short—ideally under 5 minutes.
• Spread Your Message. Share links and the embed code for your videos with supporters so they can help get the word out.
• Be Genuine. We have a wide demographic, so high view counts come from content that’s compelling, rather than what’s “hip.”
Your Channel:
• Design Your Channel. Go to Channel Design, then choose a color scheme to match your logo or other materials, and decide which modules you’d like to display on your public profile.
• Add Banners and URLs. Go to Branding Options, upload your icons and banners, and enter any of the other options you’d like to use.
• Choose Your Top Video. The top video on your channel automatically plays each time someone visits your page—choose it wisely. Update this video regularly to keep it fresh, or keep your most important video there as an introduction.
• Get Donations Flowing. Sign up for Google checkout, then go to your Google Checkout Options, enter your ID and Merchant Key, and choose donation amounts. Once you’ve filled in the information, the button will appear on your public profile and all of your video pages.
Your Content:
• Direct Dialogue. Make videos that create a dialogue about your work and what you’re trying to achieve. Ask questions and solicit video responses.
• Call to Action. Harness the power of user-generated content by asking supporters to submit videos to your cause. Create a group to collect these videos together; find ways to give recognition to the best ones.
• Tell Serial Stories. Engage viewers with a series of videos that tell a story around a specific theme, and keep them coming back for more. Once you’ve created a few episodes, put them into a playlist. This allows you to develop several video narratives targeted at particular demographics.
• Respond to Current Events. Address relevant news stories by posting videos that explain your position. You can then embed them in emails to your supporters—a video message can be more effective than a text-laden email.
• Use Endorsements. Whether they’re from celebrities or people you’ve impacted, it helps to have supporters chiming in about why your work matters.
Networking and Distribution
• Tag and Title Well. Tag and title your videos with relevant keywords—that’s how users will find your content as they navigate YouTube.
• Embed, Embed, Embed. Broadcast your videos over the web by embedding them on your website and encouraging supporters to do the same on theirs.
• Click “Subscribe”. Subscribe to the YouTube channels you’re interested in to stay up-to-date on their content; they may return the favor.
• Engage and Interact. Draw attention to your work by interacting with both allies and adversaries through video responses, text comments, or joint projects/debates.
• Make Web Traffic a Two-Lane Road. Use your video description field and branded banner URL to drive users to your website, and link to your YouTube channel from your website to encourage people to interact with your video content here.
For video production tips, go to: http://youtube.com/video_toolbox
Today is a BEAUTIFUL day in New Orleans. It is perfect weather and even more perfect since I got a call from back home in Chicago saying they are expecting snow. Ha! Suckers.
The Nonprofit Technology Conference has been super so far. Yesterday, David Pogue from the New York Times (and lots of books) did the keynote. It was very entertaining.
I did two sessions yesterday. The first was about video centered microsites. The second about nonprofits using online video for fun and fundraising. I will be sharing some video from those sessions as well as session materials next week when I have time.
Modern technology being what it is, you can see David Pogue’s music from yesterday for yourself.
Thank you Javier Avellan Veloz.
And, here’s the original iPhone the musical.
Heather Mansfield over at DIOSA | Communications give us the heads up on how the MySpace experience is evolving:
MySpace soft launched Apps yesterday… a list of those currently available can be found here:
http://apps.myspace.com
I am testing the “Rate My Page” and the “iThink” Apps on my page:
http://www.myspace.com/nonprofitorganizations
It’s definitely going to have a huge impact on how people use MySpace… and MySpace design… I’ll be curious to watch how nonprofits on MySpace use Apps. Anyone else out there experimenting?
Heather will be demonstrating the new MySpace Apps in a webinar in April. You can learn more about her webinars here.
Firstgiving is a service that allows individuals and organizations to set up personal fundraising pages. They just added the functionality to allow users to embed YouTube videos on those pages — another step in the general recognition that video is effective for fundraising.
Here’s the release:
Somerville, MA (PRWEB) March 12, 2008 — Firstgiving, a leader in providing Web-based fundraising services for individuals and charities, today announced the ability for its users to add YouTube™ video and Flickr photos to their personal Web pages. Mark Sutton, Chief Executive Officer of Firstgiving stated, “Experience shows us that the more personal the appeal, the more successful the fundraiser. Therefore, we made it easy for people raising money on Firstgiving to add their personal videos and photos to their fundraising pages.” The end result he says is more people raising more money for their favorite charitable causes.
Firstgiving fundraisers can choose from among hundreds of thousands of U.S. certified 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations for which to raise money. Many individuals use the pages for event-based fundraising such as marathons or polar plunges. Others set up pages to raise money in lieu of birthday or wedding gifts or in memory of a loved one. Charities themselves can also use Firstgiving’s fundraising pages for events, special appeals or general donations. At any given point, there are 15,000 - 18,000 active pages on the Firstgiving Web site. Since 2003, they have helped over 100,000 people raise more than $50 million for more than 12,000 charities.
Experience shows us that the more personal the appeal, the more successful the fundraiser. Therefore, we made it easy for people raising money on Firstgiving to add their personal videos and photos to their fundraising pages.
Sutton noted that there is no “right” tone for the videos or photos that people post, but rather that it’s more important that they reflect the personality of the individual making the appeal. “Some are funny, others are serious and then there are those that are so inspiring they knock your socks off,” he said.
Sutton added, “Firstgiving’s goal is to make raising money for non-profits as easy and simple as possible for our users. By putting the right tools in their hands, we can help them make a positive difference for the charities they support.” For more information on how to set up your own Firstgiving fundraising page visit www.firstgiving.com.
As my readers know, I have been saying for a while now that the Obama campaign is a tremendous case study in the right ways to use the web, Web 2.0, and new media to energize and engage supporters.
There is an interview in Fortune online with Rishad Tobaccowala, who has the title of chief innovation officer of the media buying division of Publicis, which is a giant advertising company. While we in the not-for-profit world are looking at how the Obama campaign can be a model for what we are doing with issues and organizations, those in the advertising industry are also taking note.
What Mr. Tobaccowala does is see the Clinton campaign like the big established brand and the Obama campaign as the upstart. For him, it becomes a cautionary tale for big companies. For me, it is something the more established organizations should take note of. You can read the whole interview with Mr. Tobaccowala here and below I have excerpted the highlights.
Fortune: Who is using media more effectively in the Democratic primary - Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?
Tobaccowala: Definitely, Obama. He is a digital candidate while she is the analog candidate. Don’t misunderstand me. They both primarily use traditional media. In fact, he’s outspent her in traditional media. But his Web site is amazing. It’s completely and continually updated. It feels alive and energetic.
His campaign also actively uses e-mail to keep you totally informed. Like if Obama is debating live, they say go watch him. They also created these challenges - when Clinton donated $5 million to her campaign, the Obama campaign sent out a note saying we have to match this quickly. In 24 hours, people donated $8 million to Obama.
They use the Web to support their grassroots community approach by getting people to make supportive phone calls, arrange for rides and places to stay in states where primaries are being held and more.
Why else is it better to be the digital candidate in ‘08?
Well, think about it for a minute. Unlike Obama, she’s used traditional media almost entirely, like her town meeting on the Hallmark Channel. She got maybe 250,000 viewers. But the Black Eyed Peas made this great music video about Obama. It gets almost a million views a day online. The Obama campaign quickly realized how powerful it was and ran it on their home page.
So part of their ability is to figure out from the blogosphere or via crowdsourcing, whatever you want to call it, what works and begin using it. A lot of the Obama campaign messages are not their own but they point to and highlight stuff created by others. It’s created by the crowds.
In fact with over a million donors contributing, they position the entire campaign as one owned by the people. That’s what makes it so authentic. While both teams spin stuff, Clinton’s team tends to be rather unsubtle in their use of spin and attack and this really does not work as well these days.
…
Think of it this way. Traditional media is based on command and control. But the digital world is all about grassroots. Traditional media is about authority. Digital is about authenticity. You can see it in the language they use. Obama uses the language of “we and you,” which is inclusive and nods to the wisdom of the crowds. She uses “I and me.” His stuff is about “yes, you can.” Which is about the buyer. She talks about “experience from day one.” That’s about the seller. That doesn’t resonate anymore.
One key thing you recognize from everything from MySpace to the blogosphere is that people want to have a voice. We keep talking in my business about how the buyer is in control. Her campaign believes the seller is in control. That’s why it’s better to be digital. That doesn’t mean you knock out analog. Obama still relies very heavily on traditional media, too.
…
In the digital world you want to get signals from all over. But in what appears to be in her campaign a command and control word, Hillary just has loyalists. It’s like an echo chamber of nonsense. On the blogosphere everyone is laughing at her staff. They had a tin ear about what’s going on in the real world.Meanwhile, Obama has used the Web to learn things and continually refine his message. His campaign knows exactly what works and what doesn’t, what pictures are right, what messages, and when to send it all out. He’s continually adapting. The only thing he never fiddles with is “Change you can believe in.” That’s been his slogan from day one.
…
Getting back to Hillary, do you ever run into any advertising clients with troubles?Sure. I actually use the campaign as a case study. I work with a lot of market leaders. I tell them think about Clinton as a market leader with a brand name and to think about Obama as an upstart without a brand name. I spell out all the things we’ve just talked about - command and control vs. grassroots and authenticity and the two candidates’ different approaches to the media. Then I say which one of those do you think is your company. The first guy I did with say, “You’re right. We’re Hillary!”
Marc Andreessen has a blog post called “ABC thinks you’re an idiot.” What this post is about specifically is ABC’s launch of on demand programming as a way to get people to stop using DVR (digital video recorders, like TiVo.) The ABC people say, if we give you all of our shows on demand, then you want need the DVR. And on their on demand programming, you can’t skip the commercials.
Quoting Bill Carter from the NY Times
“This does counter the DVR,” said Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC television group. “You don’t need TiVo if you have fast-forward-disabled video on demand…”
Ray Cole, president of Citadel Communications, which owns three local ABC stations, who is also the chairman of the board of affiliated ABC stations, was even more direct about the goal of the new service.
“As network and affiliates, we both have an interest in slowing down the explosive growth of DVRs,” Mr. Cole said. “This is about combating DVRs. As we developed this at every stage, there was an agreement that however we put this together, disabling the fast-forward function was key.”
Ha. ABC thinks we’re idiots. And this is the bigger point I want to make. Do you, in your work, project your goals onto your audience in unrealistic ways. ABC’s efforts will fail. It is a joke really. They want to believe so badly that they can stop the world from changing that they don’t tell themselves the truth. The truth at ABC is that people will watch what they want when they want, period. You can’t make them do anything. You better come up with other revenue sources, product placements, in-programming sponsorships, and the like, because the world you knew is gone.
When you think about your work and your goals and you think about the changes the internet has brought, are you telling yourself the truth?
One thing I have learned about the Internet is the persistence of information. Once it goes up, it’s up. A fun thing to do is to go to the Internet Archive’s “Way Back Machine” which has 85 billion web pages archived from 1996. Here’s what Yahoo! homepage looked like exactly 10 years ago today.
A common story is one where a blogger posts something and then regrets it. Maybe they were too candid about their company or their boss. They take the post down. No one noticed the original post, and few people read the blog, but once they take it down lots of people are interested in what it says. Someone found it archived, reposted it, and now many more people saw it than would have originally if it was left up.
In today’s NY Times is an article about Facebook and the difficulty of getting your data removed. It’s a little complicated because when I send you a message that message is in my account and your account. So to really delete my entire life on Facebook would mean deleting data from many individual accounts.
The lesson is, be careful what you put online and maybe, just assume all is lost on the privacy front.
“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
…
Facebook’s quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has increased concerns about the network’s potential abuse of private data, especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature.That application, which tracks and publishes the items bought by Facebook members on outside Web sites, was introduced in November without a transparent, one-step opt-out feature. After a public backlash, including more than 50,000 Facebook users’ signatures on a MoveOn.org protest petition, Facebook executives apologized and allowed such an opt-out option on the program.
Tensions remain between making a profit and alienating Facebook’s users, who the company says total about 64 million worldwide (MySpace has an estimated 110 million monthly active users).
You are currently browsing the archives for the Web Tech category.
