Privacy drives the next wave of Social Media Apps (Graham Brown mobileYouth) << DOWNLOAD PDF

mobileYouth® - youth marketing and mobile culture
analysis of the latest research, insights and trends by Graham D Brown
http://www.mobileyouth.org
Privacy drives the next wave of Social Media Apps
THE RISE AND FALL OF HIGH PROFILE APPS
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Not a day goes by when some app asks you to link your profile to Google Plus or
upload or photo.
Back in the day, it was fun.
Now it’s becoming annoying.
Not only is it annoying, it’s scaring away the most valuable users.
WHEN DEVELOPERS CREATE APPS
Let’s create an app.
Let’s get users to fill in their bio, upload a picture.
Let’s get users to share their profile.
No, wait a minute.
People already have enough profiles.
And people are learning that profiles can work against them.
In particular young people.
YOUTH FLIGHT FROM HIGH PROFILE APPS
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72% of 18-24 year olds want the option to use nicknames given by friends instead
of their real names.
Young people want to use nicknames but the media doesn’t.
Young people today see profiles increasingly as a cost in their interaction but the
media sees it as another way of “engaging” customers.
More From Graham Brown's Series on How to Sell Technology
Privacy drives the next wave of Social Media Apps
The 90-10 Rule: Focus on the 10% that influences the 90%
The Paradox of Quality: Why Better Technology Fails
Change Your Metaphors: How great leaders sell technology
These 2 Social Experiments Show How Stories Sell Technology
Facebook and co are pushing towards increasing transparency and auditability.
Not of their processes but of your profile. Facebook implemented technology that
prevented users uploading phoney pictures for their profiles in 2013. Similarly,
every time you use Youtube now, Google coerces you into providing your real
name.
Their goal is to link your profiles across multiple services to build a picture of your
behavior, interests and emotions which they can then sell to advertisers - so
called HIGH PROFILE APPS
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facebook (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
For youth, there are few benefits in high profile apps.
The cost far outweighs the novelty factor.
Whereas adults have less social mobility and are supposedly more experienced,
young people are still out there exploring their worlds and making mistakes. The
difference with this generation and those that came before them, is that drunken
pictures at keg parties or smoking dope in the park will no longer be lost to history.
HIGH vs LOW PROFILE APPS
Higher Profile Low Profile
Examples Facebook, Linkedin,
Google Plus
Whatsapp, Instagram, Kik,
Viber, Snapchat, Whisper
Attributes Encourages users to
create extensive public
profiles. Links profiles
across related apps.
Profile attempts to reflect
real world, real name etc.
Can be used with limited
(or no) profile. Profile can
be avatar, representative
or nickname.
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Driver Advertising. Tracking &
Auditing of user behavior.
Building comprehensive
demographic and
behvioral profiles to sell to
potential advertising
Privacy. Users want Social
Space where they can
interact freely and express
themselves without fear of
public excoriation or
reprisal
Outlook HPAs will suffer gradual
erosion of customer base,
particularly in the sensitive
youth market. Effect will
eventually feed-through
until apps become old or
irrelevant.
LPAs will rise to
prominence and eventually
be acquired by larger
players. Their continued
significance will rest on the
acquirer's capacity to allow
the app to stay largely
unconnected to the HPA.
WHAT YOUTH DO WITH HIGH PROFILE APPS
If we promote a transparent world that demands customer data, we’ll also
promote a world where youth take their meaningful interactions elsewhere. We'll
end up with a world sterilized to suit our corporate needs.
Sure, youth will keep using their Facebook accounts but they will whitewall them,
offering only a blank sanitized version of their life that means nothing and offends
no-one. By contrast, the privacy of these low profile apps allows them to explore
their lives and do what teens do naturally in the process of learning i.e make
mistakes.
If we pursue an open auditable social landscape where privacy is non-existent,
marketers will reduce engagement:
* Users will whitewall their accounts
* Users will feel less loyal to the brand, treating the relationships as a game which
they need to cheat in order to get what they want
* Information will become less meaningful, creating false-positive echo chambers
Rather than complain about loss of privacy, people simply leave and the challenge
for brands is that this exodus is often invisible. The loss is not marked by quantity
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but quality: the subscriber numbers remain the same but engagement falls.
The danger in the big data - transparency - advertising cycle is the false positive
of an increased volume of metrics compounded by a decreased accuracy in the
data. This cycle leads to irrelevance - the opposite of engagement.
ADVERTISING IS AT ODDS WITH THE NEED FOR LOW PROFILE
APPS
Advertising drives the supply of High Profile Apps.
Advertisers don’t like nicknames.
Advertisers can’t trace nicknames back to users. They have to know everything
about you.
Advertisers don’t like privacy. But privacy is a means not an end. The end is the
relationship that privacy allows to grow.
Relationships require vulnerability and vulnerability needs privacy. Privacy gives
youth space to experiment, take risks and make mistakes - all key elements of the
development process.
Social Space needs privacy to grow. But privacy isn’t all about surrendering the
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marketing effort to the selfish needs of customers.
FACEBOOK’S DECLINE
As was Facebook in the days before advertising but advertising in its current
model cannot exist with privacy.
We need to know the customer, know all their behavior, their likes and
interactions.
The technologist’s dream of a single, converged platform for all social activity will
never happen.
Facebook and co will lose out to a gradual creep towards Low Profile Apps - apps
that require only the minimum of profile information, don’t link accounts or don’t
have profiles at all (apps like Whatsapp, Viber, Kik, Instagram, Snapchat, Whisper
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etc).
Either Facebook will buy out these competitors or lose its customer base one
teenager at a time.
LOW PROFILE APPS CAN PROVIDE THE DEEPEST INSIGHT
The information brands really need to build a relationship - insight into the hopes,
passions and fears of their customers - can only be found where there is privacy.
The world of transparency will result in a big loss for brands as they will lose their
only contact with what matters i.e. The Interest Economy.
If we give young people privacy, they’ll return honesty.
Privacy drives trust and trust impacts the bottom line:
* Increased word of mouth recommendation, decreased customer acquisition
costs
* Increased loyalty
* Increased likelihood of response to marketing call to action
We need to focus on solutions that give customers the space to do what they do
naturally and leverage that interaction without segmenting and interrupting it with
advertising.
That means creating an event, community or cause (a Permission Asset) for your
customers to connect with each other without fear of being tracked or audited by
the master brand.
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Privacy drives the next wave of Social Media Apps (Graham Brown mobileYouth) << DOWNLOAD PDF

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