Entries from July 2008 ↓

By now most people are aware of the Meghan Meier case. For those that are unaware, Lori Drew, 49, of Missouri, allegedly created a fake profile on MySpace for a non-existent boy and then contacted Meghan Meier through MySpace. Supposedly after receiving some mean messages from this fictitious boy Meghan killed herself in the family home.

Because the case occurred over the Internet and MySpace is headquartered out of Beverly Hills, federal authorities have been involved with the matter. Charges have been filed, and prosecutors are arguing that by helping create a MySpace account in the name of someone who didn’t exist Drew violated the News Corp.-owned site’s terms of service and thus illegally accessed protected computers.

While it seems to make some sense, the potential ramifications of this logic are a little chilling unto themselves. As the AP article points out:

Legal experts warned Friday that such an interpretation could criminalize routine behavior on the Internet. After all, people regularly create accounts or post information under aliases for many legitimate reasons, including parody, spam avoidance and a desire to maintain their anonymity or privacy online or that of a child.

This new interpretation also gives a business contract the force of a law: Violations of a Web site’s user agreement could now lead to criminal sanction, not just civil lawsuits or ejection from a site.

The prosecution’s legal argument is that in order to access MySpace’s servers Drew had to sign up for MySpace’s service, which entails providing your name and date of birth. Beyond that, one must agree to abide by the site’s terms of service. The terms of service forbid using any false registration information, soliciting personal information from anyone under 18 and using any information gathered from the Web site to “harass, abuse, or harm another person.” Thus, by merely using a fictitious name Drew violated MySpace’s terms and had no authority to access the MySpace service.

The Drews are already on the defensive, and their lawyer has announced a legal challenge to this interpretation. They contend that this reading raises issues of constitutionality related to free speech and due process of law.

It is clear from this and other cases that Cyber Bullying and Bullying Online are real concerns for parents in the digital age. Parents can monitor their teen’s activity online with MyChild from ReputationDefender.

For some time there have been rumors around Silicon Valley and beyond about the magic that is the Google campus. It has been spoken of like some sort of Geek Nirvana or Coding Valhalla where you feast nightly in the Google cafeteria on any meal your heart desires as you guzzle Mountain Dew and debate Ruby on Rails with the ghost of Einstein. Some of this talk has turned out to be true. For instance, Google allows their engineers to take time in “nap pods” for a quick break during the day. It is without any surprise that I can see how they got their good reputation.

Which brings us to an important but often overlooked concept of reputation management. With the relatively new phenomena of social networks and blogging, a company’s brand name can be elevated to otherworldly heights with just a few keystrokes and clicks. Wikipedia defines reputation management as:

the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop. All entities involved are generally people, but that need not always be the case. Other examples of entities include animals, businesses, or even locations or materials. The tracking and reporting may range from word-of-mouth to statistical analysis of thousands of data points.

An important part of this process is understanding that social networks give consumers easy access to spreading news, and thus reputation management online is critical. A good place to start efforts in this vein is brand monitoring. You can track a company, brand, person, just about anything online.

Google itself has positioned itself in this space with its Google Alerts, automatic notifications that ping you when your search term is found online. ReputationDefender also offers personal brand monitoring with MyReputation. MyReputation from ReputationDefender goes beyond Google Alerts to search social networks, white papers, people search engines and the deep internet to return more information related to your person.

Monitoring a brand, whether corporate or personal, is a vital part of Online Reputation Management and, as the tale of the Googleplex shows, having a great online reputation reflects well on your brand and your business.

ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik was written up recently in the Chinese press. The piece seems to be about Online Reputation Management and Internet Privacy, although the finer points of the copy were lost in translation.

Besides the picture of MyReputation, there is not a lot of coherent copy to go on. To be clear, ReputationDefender and its management are certain that this article was a persuasive, concise, cogent and brilliantly argued piece of writing in its native language. Once the text was moved from Chinese to English though, it left us mildly puzzled. Here some highlights of the (mis)translated piece:

Besides made them to obtain good pouring out with the exchange, these behaviors also hatched each kind of organization, the association, the public relations website, the professionalism service, as well as new made money the way.

[SNIP]

This company chief executive officer Michael – Tike (Michael Fertik) said that because the lover bids good-bye the honorary question which initiates is they most often meets, “the people adopt enmity of the network incoming telegram sentiment.”

Exactly.

It’s Over. Finished. Kaput.

The search war has officially ended and Google is the undisputed champion of the internet, if these new statistics are to be believed. Both the efrontier blog and Digital Daily article at All Things Digital are reporting that Google is earning $1.10 for every search marketing dollar spent in America.

How is this possible?

It seems advertisers are pulling money out of Yahoo and MSN to give to the Mountain View search giant.

Today our US Search Engine Performance Report: Q2 2008 was released. Analysis of data from our client index showed that Google took more than its fair share of the overall increase in search spending: for every new dollar spent on search in Q2 2008 versus Q2 2007, $1.10 went to Google. Yahoo lost $0.09, and Microsoft lost $0.01. In other words, advertisers are putting all of their new search dollars into Google, and pulling money out of Yahoo Search and Microsoft Live Search.

There you have it. American search marketers are literally giving Google 110%. Yahoo and Microsoft should go home and think long and hard about how they are going to get back in the search, and online spend, game.

The New York Times reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced some major changes for the social networking site, including a site redesign and a new program called Facebook Connect. From the page:

“We are going to see the big social networks start to decentralize into a series of social applications across the Web,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think we are at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”

To carve out a piece of that future, the company announced Facebook Connect, a way that other Web sites can integrate parts of Facebook’s service. Web sites can ask users for their Facebook user name and password, instead of creating an identity verification system themselves, and offer their users the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook.

For example, the mobile service company Loopt, based in Mountain View, Calif., helps people find their friends and see what they are doing on a map on their mobile phone. It will use Facebook Connect so its users do not have to re-enter their connections to the friends they want to track.

Breaking out of the “walled garden” has been seen as the next paradigm shift for social networks for some time and this seems to be the first step toward carrying one’s identity across the open internet and connecting with others along the way.

Is this the beginning of the Social Web, where your friend list, wall and pack of roving zombies follow you across digital space? Will the popularity of Facebook allow them to set the standard for a potable digital identity in the coming months? Let ReputationDefender know what you think about decentralized social networking and the prospect of a new, digital ID issued through Facebook.