Who is Facebook’s Customer?
Business is simple. You create a concept for a product. You build the product. You sell the product. The people who buy your product are called customers. If your customers complain, you fix the product to keep them happy so they will buy more. If the improvements cost you a lot of money and improve the product dramatically, you might even be able to charge more for the product.
Time goes by and your product becomes more and more popular. You decide that in this capitalistic society, you can charge more for your product due to the laws of supply and demand. You make more, you sell more, your business grows.
read moreMy Privacy is More Important than Your Privacy
Consumers are spending more and more time protecting their privacy by locking down their social networking access to the outside world. Yet they quite often adopt a “my privacy is more important than your privacy” attitude when they decide to share that embarrassing photograph of you from the office holiday party. Once they share the image to their friends, it falls into the privacy settings of all of those people. And if one of them decides it can go viral, you can end up in the reputation toilet. Here are a few scenarios that actually happened on the web where the victim was completely helpless.
A young girl was chatting with her friends about the upcoming prom. They were trying to arrange a limo to take a group of about 30 kids to the event and were discussing how to pay for it. Our young girl said something along the lines of, “I can pay most of it because my dad just got a new job. He hates his boss but he says it pays better than his last job so I’m sure we can afford it.” One of the kids in the conversation said something to his parents and it turns out they knew someone who worked for the same company as the first young girl’s dad and before long, the first young girl’s dad was being invited into his boss’s office for a chat. What started as a seemingly innocuous comment may have cost her dad his job.
read moreWhat Happens in Vegas, Stays on Facebook
When the Las Vegas visitors bureau came up with the catchy phrase, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’, I doubt if they were suggesting that visitors travel to their fair city solely for the purpose of committing adultery. But it does appeal to an inner self in all of us that craves “letting our hair down” and hopefully, keeping those moments private. As comedian/actor Dane Cook says, “It happened. It only happened there. And it happened far enough away to have any negative effect on the ‘the here and now’. And anyone who wasn’t there at the time need not know about it.”
But protecting your privacy regarding what happens in Las Vegas goes only as far as your friend’s video-equipped cellphone can broadcast it. The belief that any public action you take in any city could in any way be private is as absurd as ‘non smoking’ sections within a restaurant. You may not want the smoke to drift your way but someone forgot to tell the smoke that it had to stay on the other side of the room. You may WANT your activities to remain private, but what is embarrassing to you is most assuredly hilarious to a bystander equipped with a high-definition cell phone camera and an always-on internet connection providing a direct pipeline to Facebook and all of his waiting friends.
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