01.30.10

Social Networking Threatens Another Jury Verdict

Posted in Best practices, Courts and social media, Criminal activity, Jury misconduct tagged jury instruction, Jury misconduct, social networking, technology in court at 2:34 am by bizlawblog

A recent article by Andrew Wolfson in the Louisville Courier-Journal recounts yet another in a rapidly growing number of cases involving allegations of jury misconduct. Jury misconduct has historically been a relatively rare occurrence, although certainly not without precedent. Wolfson reports:

A federal jury’s verdict exonerating a Louisville Metro Police officer in a Taser-related death has come under attack after the foreman was accused of researching the weapon on the manufacturer’s Web site and using the information to sway other jurors.

The case is one of a rising number nationally in which jurors have used iPhones, BlackBerrys and home computers to gather and send information about cases, undermining judges and jury trials.

The case involves the death of a man who died after police officers shocked him with a Taser. The lawyer for the man’s estate wants U.S. District Judge John B. Heyburn II to set aside the verdict because the lawyer said a juror called him to say that “at least two jurors, including the foreman, whom she described as ‘the principal advocate for police,’ consulted Taser International’s Web site and used information from the site to try to persuade other jurors.” The juror who made the call testified, during a hearing on the alleged jury misconduct, “that both jurors mentioned that the company’s Web site claims that Tasers are ‘non-lethal’ and cannot cause fatal injuries.” The juror is also reported as having said:

“It really, really bothered me that they were using that … instead of what was really said in the courtroom.”

Heyburn said at the hearing that he saw no need to punish the jury foreman, but he added: “It’s a teaching lesson for all of us that we need to be more careful about our indoctrination of jurors.”

These cases of social media related misconduct are literally running from one corner of the country to another, and are not related to jurors alone. An Oregon case reported in the Portland Business Journal related that:

Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Youlee Yim You was shocked during her inaugural trial to discover that a domestic violence defendant was texting the victim — his girlfriend — while she was on another floor of the building waiting to testify.

A number of technology and social networking related cases have popped up in Florida recently. An article in the Florida Bar Journal by Ralph Artigliere, Jim Barton and Bill Hahn, gives a snapshot of just how big this has become.

The problem of outside influence on jurors is no longer confined to high profile cases that are covered in the press or other media. Courtroom misconduct seems to be everywhere. Recently, a witness in Miami was discovered texting his boss about his testimony during a sidebar conference resulting in a mistrial; a South Dakota juror in a seat belt product liability case Googled the defendant and informed five other jurors that the defendant had not been sued previously; a juror in a federal corruption trial in Pennsylvania posted his progress during deliberations on the Internet resulting in a motion for mistrial; a juror in Bartow, Florida, looked up a defendant’s “rap sheet” online and told fellow jurors, resulting in a mistrial; and jurors in a Florida criminal case made anti-Semitic comments to each other and consulted one of the jurors’ accountants during deliberations by telephone. Nine of the jurors on a deliberating panel in a federal case in Miami admitted to the judge that they had been doing research on the case over the Internet, resulting in a mistrial. The judge learned that the jurors were Googling the lawyers and the parties, finding news articles about the case, researching definitions and information on Wikipedia, and looking for evidence that had been excluded in the case. All this was accomplished despite the judge’s repeated instruction not to do so. These examples represent recent transgressions that were discovered, and probably represent just the tip of the iceberg of juror behavior.

In another Flordia case, reported by Laura Bergus,

A Circuit Court judge in Miami-Dade County, Florida, this week dismissed a civil fraud case brought by Sky Development against Vistaview Development. The suit claimed that Vistaview misrepresented the number of units in a condo tower Sky purchased from Vistaview last year.

The dismissal comes after a mistrial mid-May, when Judge Scott Silverman deemed text messaging between two Sky Development officials in court, one of whom was on the witness stand, as “completely…absolutely outrageous.”

Jon Gambrell reported on an Arkansas case in a Law.com article:

A building materials company and its owner have appealed a $12.6 million verdict against them, alleging that a juror posted messages on Twitter during the trial that show he’s biased against them.

Another described what “Juror Jonathan” did today: “I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.”

Even judges and lawyers have fallen into the social media dog house, when involved in court proceedings. A California lawyer was suspended from the practice of law because of his blogging while serving as juror. Martha Neil reported in the ABA Journal that an appeals court reversed and remanded the felony burglary case on which the lawyer was sitting as a juror, and:

Although reportedly warned by the judge not to discuss the case, orally or in writing, Wilson apparently made a lawyerly distinction concerning blogs: “Nowhere do I recall the jury instructions mandating I can’t post comments in my blog about the trial,” he writes, before forging on with unflattering descriptions of both the judge and the defendant. He also failed to identify himself as a lawyer to the trial participants, the bar journal notes.

At least one court is trying to curb the social media problem by adding an additional set of admonitions to jurors. An “updated” set of jury instructions Supreme Court of Florida now includes the following language:

Many of you have cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices. Even though you have not yet been selected as a juror, there are some strict rules that you must follow about using your cell phones, electronic devices and computers. You must not use any device to search the Internet or to find out anything related to any cases in the courthouse.

In this age of electronic communication, I want to stress that you must not use electronic devices or computers to talk about this case, including tweeting, texting, blogging, e-mailing, posting information on a website or chat room, or any other means at all. Do not send or accept any messages, including e-mail and text messages, about your jury service. You must not disclose your thoughts about your jury service or ask for advice on how to decide any case.

NOTE ON USE

This instruction should be given in addition to and at the conclusion of the instructions normally given to the prospective jurors. The portion of this instruction dealing with communication with others and outside research may need to be modified to include other specified means of communication or research as technology develops.

Despite the efforts of judges to reduce the problem, the incidents of jury misconduct related to social networking seem to be growing by leaps and bounds. Thaddeus Hoffmeister acts as editor of the Juries blog, which is increasingly dedicated to recounting stories of such jury misconduct. Likewise, the Deliberations blog had added a new category, Jurors and the Internet, stating it was necessary for “pulling together all the posts here on the subject:”

Over the last two years we’ve accumulated posts on jurors who blog (lots of those, actually), jurors who read blogs, jurors on Facebook and other social networking sites, jurors on Twitter, jurors researching the case on the Internet, jurors who comment on news stories, how to ask jurors about social networking, how to find jurors’ on-line writing, why it matters, and how to deal with problems when they arise. The way things are going lately, there will probably be many more.

The title of yet another article seems to tell the story: If We Strike All The Facebook Jurors, Who’s Left?

If we strike everybody with an I-hate-jury-duty status update somewhere on the Internet, we’re going to run out of jurors really fast.

The legislative and judicial systems have historically been far behind advances in technology. E-discovery was, and perhaps still is, the case in point. Without a paradigm shift, we must wonder where all this is going, and what impact it will have on a system of which some have said, “the wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine.”

The wheels may grind slowly, but the news is sure travelling faster and further all the time.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

If you are really interested, I just started yet another free group on LinkedIn, Social Media Search and Forensics. Many of these articles and discussion about them are posted there. Please join us.

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01.01.10

In Search of a Social Media Expert (Part 1)

Posted in Best practices, Courts and social media, Productivity, Social Media Tools tagged Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Federal Rules of Evidence, Frye v. United States, Indexed, social media expert, social media expertise qualification, The Visual Thesaurus, Thinkmap at 8:37 am by bizlawblog

I’ve touched on the area of social media “experts” in a couple of posts on this blog. I first mentioned the topic in When Thought Becomes Reality. Because of some interesting comments on that post, I followed up in slightly more depth in Is Everyone A Social Networking Expert? This post starts a series, which will explain why this is important to both me and my clients, and perhaps to you as well.

I’m no stranger to the duty and privilege of helping clients fulfill their desire to obtain outside assistance with emerging technologies and non-traditional expertise. Many of my clients rely upon me, from time-to-time, to assist them in the process of finding and engaging “experts” in various fields. Sometimes, they ask me to simply review an engagement letter submitted by a supposed expert or to draw up an agreement to retain an expert they have already found and determined to be “qualified” for their intended purposes. Sometimes, they ask me to assist in locating an expert they would deem “suitable” according to their specifications. Sometimes, they’re not even sure what they need, but they think they need some sort of “expert,” and ask me to assist in the process.

In each of these situations, I need some knowledge of the goals of my client in retaining the services of an expert. In drafting a contract, I need to know what my client wants to achieve and to avoid. If they have already located and qualified the expert, my task is relatively simple. I review the contract presented by the expert, or create one for my client, ensuring the usual suspects are accounted for, such as deliverables, “avoidables,” benchmarks, term, compensation, termination options, the normal independent contractor provisions, and a host of other contract provisions most transactional lawyers are accustomed to dealing with on a day-to-day basis.

Assisting my clients with the acquisition of software programmers, hardware developers, Web developers and so-called SEO experts has been a main stay of my law firm for many years. More recently, the request has been for those who can “fix” the problems left by some of the foregoing “experts.” In the last year or so, however, clients seem to be increasingly interested in hiring social media expertise. It is one thing to help a client engage a structural engineer and quite another to help vet and then wordsmith contract language for a social media expert. Thus came my research into just what qualifies one to be called a social media expert.

If I am involved in locating an expert in a particular field, presuming it is one of the “traditional” fields, such as engineering, the role I play is still relatively easy. In such traditional fields, the process of locating and qualifying an expert typically revolves around ensuring the education and experience of the candidates meet certain criteria, including relevance to the task at hand. Educational degrees, professional certifications, licenses, work experience, and references from satisfied customers, provide some of the basic metrics upon which the candidates may be graded, along with availability within the given time frame, compensation formula, etc. There is nothing new here.

Much has been written about what makes one an expert, generally, and the various factors deemed to constitute expertise in many specific fields. When looking at this issue in the context of social media, however, I found quite a few articles contemplating whether anyone could deserve title of “expert” in such a relatively new field, and particularly one without generally recognized accreditation standards at that.

I decided to approach the project of establishing my own set of social media expertise metrics from a few angles. The common joke in the legal field is that the definition of an expert is simply someone with a briefcase who lives more than a hundred miles away. The quotes on expertise from “notables” span the full range. Here are some samples.

“I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.” (W. C. Fields)

“What’s an expert? I read somewhere, that the more a man knows, the more he knows, he doesn’t know. So I suppose one definition of an expert would be someone who doesn’t admit out loud that he knows enough about a subject to know he doesn’t really know how much.” (Malcolm Forbes)

“Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.” (Laurence J. Peter)

“An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.” (Steven Weinberg)

“One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.” (Admiral Grace Hopper)

Not finding those pearls of wisdom particularly helpful, I wondered if the simplicity of graphical representations might be helpful. Folks say a picture is worth a thousand words. An old favorite in this medium is Indexed, which produced one of its typically perceptive virtual three by five card drawings, labeled “But it worked in the 90s!” That deserved a chuckle, but not a cigar, so the search continued.

Next up was The Visual Thesaurus® created by Thinkmap, Inc., a company which says it “develops and markets software that uses visualization to facilitate communication, learning, and discovery” and specializes in “user interfaces and visualization mechanisms that allow end-users to more effectively browse and understand complex information.”

The visual thesaurus search results for the term “expert” rendered a mindmap-like spider web featuring the words adept, good, practiced, proficient, skilful, skillful, and tangential association of the word or concept “technical.” That produced what most would consider a pretty good sampling of terms to describe someone we already considered to be an “expert,” but didn’t provide much help in the more granular aspects of selection criteria.

Since few professions are more “granular” than the law, I returned home to more familiar ground and found something I wasn’t expecting. That unexpected thing was that both legal and business principles warned of the dangers of placing too much confidence in the opinions of experts.

The American legal system has long been concerned that the opinion of “experts” will unduly prejudice a jury, causing it to rely upon whatever the experts says, rather than weighing all the evidence and making it’s own determination. This system relies on the judge, as gatekeeper, as well as on procedural and evidentiary rules. Article VII of the Federal Rules of Evidence, for instance, provide a framework for matters such as separating expert from lay opinions, the bases of opinion testimony by experts, and limitations on admission of the expert’s opinion on ultimate issues.

Likewise, further clarification of the use of experts in litigation came in 1993, when the United States Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to hear Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. Most lawyers need only view the Daubert decision as establishing a standard for dealing with admissibility of expert testimony in court. For our purposes in looking at experts, it also points out that when a legislative body (i.e. Congress, which was largely made up of lawyers) decided to adopt the Federal Rules of Evidence in 1975, it created an opportunity for other lawyers to argue whether the rules impacted the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1923 case, Frye v. United States.

Although the issues may still not be entirely resolved, let’s say, for the sake of argument, it only took the legal system seventy years to clarify how it felt courts should deal with exposing juries to the opinions of experts. The “surprise” I mentioned earlier comes full circle, from the archives of the business world, namely Fortune magazine.

“Often companies will underestimate the abilities of their own people, opting instead for the supposed advantages–chiefly financial–touted by someone with a briefcase from 100 miles away.”

This sounds strangely like the business world’s version of what the legal system has long feared, which is that the opinion of someone denoted as an expert will cause normal folks to turn into jelly, forsaking the lessons they may have learned from their own education and experience. So if we can’t necessarily even agree upon whether we should listen to an expert opinion, how am I to deal with a client which insists on hiring one in an area which is still emerging and has no generally accepted standards? We will explore this in the next leg of this quest to determine who is or is not a social media expert.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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12.17.09

Employer Ownership of Employee Social Media Accounts

Posted in Best practices, Courts and social media, Employee issues, Facebook, LinkedIn, Productivity, Social networking policy, Twitter, Web 2.0 tagged employee, employee blog, employee use of social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, NDA, non-compete agreement, non-disclosure agreement, social media best practice, social media policy, Twitter at 1:13 pm by bizlawblog

Over the last 35 years, I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with disputes between employees and their employers. I’ve been on both sides of the table, drafting and enforcing non-compete agreements, and helping employees break those, which did not adhere to legal or moral principles.

In “the old days,” some of the primary issues related to whether the employer could keep an employee, or former employee, from using information the employer said was “proprietary” and, in many cases, whether the now departed employee had been using that information, while still employed, to set up or assist a competitor. With the onset of social media, many “prospectors” are now using social media to find business prospects and to maintain a relationship with them.

In some cases, the employer will mandate that employee are to engage in using social media channels, such as LinkedIn and Facebook to hunt for prospects or deal with customer service issues. In some cases, it is the employee who suggests this tactic or uses it, often outside of the office environment, to do the prospecting. As is the case with the enforceability of non-compete agreements, there is a great deal of misinformation and confusion about what the law says about all this. As is also the case with non-compete agreements, what the law says may be different in different jurisdictions. In Kentucky, for instance, the case law has matured in different directions on some non-compete issues, between the state court system and the federal courts in Kentucky. This is great for lawyers, but not necessarily so for those trying to find their way.

The relatively new world of social media adds a new layer of complexity to this, and the ownership of social media accounts, as well as ownership of the contacts and other data contained therein, has become an increasing source of questions for employers and their lawyers. Many employers ban the use of social media, on site or off, and particularly prohibit unauthorized references to the employer, brands, other employees, “the boss,” etc. Some of these fears, as described in David Kelleher’s article, 5 Problems with Social Networking in the Workplace, are well deserved, and some are not. Fortunately for employers, most, if not all of this is easily clarified with some basic but well drafted documents.

Long before the advent of the social media age, employers routinely required employees to sign non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. If properly drawn, these agreements defined what intellectual property, including clients, prospects, and other proprietary or “sensitive” information belonged to the employer and was prohibited for post employment or other unauthorized use. Likewise, courts have dealt for many years with the issue of the employer’s right to monitor and screen employee communications, including e-mail.

What is relatively new these days is the ownership of social media accounts and content. I have represented many client groups, such as those in the insurance business, where it is relatively common for agents to take their “book of business” or client accounts with them from agency to agency. In many cases there are non-compete agreements binding the parties. Since moving around is so common, however, many agencies will agree to allow a well-networked agent to come in, with the option to take their “book of business” with them upon departure. Only new clients generated at the new agency, or other particular “house accounts” might be protected, in order to induce a successful agent to come on board. This too can be easily defined, and I’ve drawn up hundreds of these agreements over the years.

The ownership of an employee’s “personal” LinkedIn accounts and contacts, however, has not been well defined by the courts, at least on a specific basis. Likewise, Facebook and Twitter accounts are becoming some of the most valuable tools in the hunt for prospects and retention efforts to maintain current business. In many cases, these accounts have been created by an individual prior to the employment situation in which they are used. In some cases, it is the employer which provides the basics, and may even be setting up the account used by the employee. Witness the note from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, providing employees with a Beginner’s Quick Start Guide and Tutorial to Using Twitter. Once again, a clear employee use policy and non-compete agreement and NDA can resolve the issues to avoid most disputes and win the rest. Having a well thought out damage control procedure is also helpful.

For those not endowed with good legal and HR backup in these areas, social media sources can provide the answer to the many of the problems involved in their use. Typically, the cases involving confidentiality revolve around the expectation of privacy. A subset of this issue relates to whether a policy is in place, existence of password use, and other indications the social media content would normally and reasonably be anticipated to be private or something in which the employer had an interest. This has been the primary rule on e-mail accounts and content for many years and has been often litigated, even prior to the relatively new federal rules on e-discovery. This is not much different from court decisions indicating an employer can secretly videotape an employee on the job.

Beth Harte’s nice article on this, Who owns your Twitter or Facebook Connections?, is a good start. As she points out:

You might not like what I am about to say here, but I believe that if a company is paying you to connect with people online on their behalf…they own those connections…

Take my Twitter/Facebook accounts, I am Beth Harte on both. If I were to join a company in marketing capacity and continue to increase my connections while they are paying me, I believe those connections are the property of my employer. Or are they?

How do we address this potential issue? Here’s one thought…

Prior to accepting a job, negotiate that all followers/friends (existing or new) will remain your property and that the company has the right to “borrow” your accounts and connections for the period of your employment.

Using the example of my insurance agency clients, Harte’s suggestion would probably be:

Prior to accepting a job, negotiate that all followers/friends (existing or new) will remain your property and that the company has the right to “borrow” your accounts and connections for the period of your employment.

Does that work? Would employers buy into that? Would we need to prove the value of our accounts before they would accept those negotiating terms?

Blogging provides an even more interesting set of problems. Some, such as Chris Gatewood, feel “Employers cannot control their employees’ online conduct away from the office, and for the most part, they should not try.” In many cases, employee blogs are primarily personal, but may contain statements about their employer, the employer’s products or services, and sometimes about policies, other employees, etc. Likewise, it is easy for a current or former employee to “slip” and post something about a new technology the person has worked on, or other information the employer would consider proprietary. Once again, a good non-disclosure agreement can deal with these issues in advance.

Joshua-Michele Ross points out in his article, A Corporate Guide For Social Media:

Big corporations are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to harness the benefits of increased employee participation while mitigating the risks. Clearly there is no one-size-fits-all: If you are in financial services you have unique concerns for privacy, if you are part of the YMCA, you must be aware that having counselors “friend” teenagers is not appropriate, etc.

While there are possible negatives involved in having employees on the social Web, most employees have common sense. Begin with a set of possibilities first (increasing awareness, improving customer service, gaining customer insight and so on) then draw up a list of worst-case scenarios (bad mouthing the company, inappropriate language, leaking IP, to name a few). Modify the guiding principles for your employees below to help mitigate the risks you’ve identified.

Once you embrace having your employees participate in the social Web, give them a few basic guiding principles in how they conduct themselves.

While issues related to ownership of social media accounts and content are relatively well defined, in those cases where there are clear policies and agreements in place, as well as where the activity is clearly sponsored or encouraged by the employer, and the employee is using the employer’s resources to engage in such activities, the law is less settled in the case of pre-existing “personal” accounts used with a new employer, or used without the employer’s knowledge or resources. These can likewise be resolved easily with a good agreement, but we lawyers are waiting to pay our kids’ college tuition, dealing with those cases where the employer or employee has not been perceptive enough to resolve this in advance with a basic set of written agreements and policies.

This area of the law is rapidly changing and newer technologies, such as Twitter, and concepts such as “followers,” will provide the need for professional assistance to help manage these issues, and the risks they entail, for many years to come. Yesterday’s non-compete and non-disclosure agreement, as John Jantsch points out in his article, Do You Have a Social Media Non-Compete?, may not work tomorrow, unless it is particularly well drawn to provide for such new technologies and concepts.

I try hard to be proactive with my clients, but I “love” clients who get their legal advice, and forms, online and then have to make “The Call” to the lawyer to seek help. I believe it may have been GM’s Mr. Goodwrench commercials, which proclaimed, “pay me now or pay me later.” In these cases, the pay is much better for the lawyers “later” and for the parties, earlier.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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11.30.09

My Big Fat, Geek Thanksgiving; Web 3.0 Takes Over

Posted in Best practices, Facebook, Productivity, Social Media Tools, Social networking policy, Twitter, Web 3.0 tagged avatar, Berners Lee, blog search, early warning system, evite, facial recognition and identification system, HomNet, Internet appliance, iPhone, iPhone apps, LG appliance, Minority Report, Scientific American, Sixth-Sense Technology, SkyNet, smart house, social media search, Terminator, Thanksgiving, The Semantic Web, Twitter, Twitter Geolocation API, voice recognition, Web 3.0, Wii, wireless 3D i-glasses at 1:01 pm by bizlawblog

I sometimes live on the bleeding edge of technology. Some like to call this being an “early adapter.” Others think I should join a support program with a twelve-step program. My office has a room devoted to hardware and software I’ve bought, tried out, experimented upon, recommended, and sometimes even installed for my consulting company clients, including quite a few law firms.

When I built a new house a few years ago, I just had to investigate the new energy conservation devices, which could lower my utility bills, reduce my “carbon footprint,” and save the world. Likewise, I just had to experiment with design of home theatre and security system wiring, and the home computer network itself. I sometimes chatted about these with others in the neighborhood who were building houses, but didn’t mention one “enhancement” I had secretly worked on.

As the house was being built, I realized it would be more cost efficient to do all the wiring I would ever need, up front, rather than piece-mealing it later. I had been reading about the strides toward creation of working “smart houses” and other Web 3.0 applications, so I decided to make an investment in the future.

I worked with the various vendors installing my alarm system, home theater, cable, phone and other electronic systems, and got them to lay the groundwork for me. Then, being the bleeding edge geek I am, I began my own tinkering, gradually adding new components, as they entered beta stage. Fortunately, one of my clients is an appliance company, so I was able to make some relatively good purchases and get great deals on some important components.

When Thanksgiving came up on my calendar this year, I decided it was time to give the new system a trial run. I really wasn’t ready for a full-blown trial run, but one of my sons knows a lot more about this stuff than I do, so I figured if I got some of the system up and running, he would be in town at Thanksgiving to give me a hand debugging the parts.

This was also going to be the first year with multiple grandchildren, in addition to some of our friends who had become annual Thanksgiving dinner guests. That meant we had to get out the extra leaf for the dining room table, but it really meant the logistics were starting to add up to the point of being almost unmanageable. The question was whether or not I somehow pull off this Web 3.0 Thanksgiving plan in time to really help.

I got out my copy of Microsoft Project and went to work. This had to be a collaborative effort and, fortunately, seemed to be an interesting challenge for the partners in the project. Admittedly, I felt a little like Chevy Chase in one of my favorite movies of the season, Christmas Vacation, trying to pull off wiring the house to win the neighborhood Christmas lighting prize, but eventually, I finished and it was time to send out the invitations.

I decided to start with an old favorite, evite®, so I could at least try to track who would really be coming and send guest updates in a burst. It also helped get a few other issues out of the way early, such as special dietary concerns of some of the guests, coordinating menu items for those who always insist on bringing Aunt Tillie’s famous recipe, etc. I know there are lots of invitation applications out there, but since I’ve used evite® for many events and was familiar with the foibles and periodic “surprises” as it continues to develop, it was an easy choice for alerting guests to “save the date,” and then to harvest the data as we got closer to The Big Day.

Like many American families, we have established some traditions over the years. That meant timing of various parts of the event had to be precise. With folks arriving at various times, subject to last minute variables, this was always a challenge. I thought it would be interesting to see if a preview of a Web 3.0 world would be any better.

Once the first round of evite® responses started to come back and we had our first estimate of the number of guests and basic menu, I was able to get some online counsel for wine pairings with the various dishes, estimate the number of bottles needed, and place my order. One task completed.

About the time we were building our new house, I happened to read Christoper Allbritton’s story in Popular Mechanics, Control Your Appliances Over The Internet. I tried to remain mindful of Albritton’s reference to the “Terminator” sci-fi movies, and scenario where the fictional military artificial intelligence defense system, Skynet, takes over for humans and then starts to eradicate them as a potential threat. Since my plans didn’t include any air-to-ground missiles, I decided that LG Electronics’ HomNet was a good place to start. After all, their home page says:

LG HomNet is the total home network solution providing a convenient secure, joyful and affluent lifestyle anywhere and anytime with the integration of various digital home appliances. LG HomNet makes the future lifestyle into reality. LG HomNet will usher into a future lifestyle that used to be possible only in the movies and the imagination, together with ultra-high speed Internet, artificial intelligence, and advanced robots.

LG HomNet, a home network system developed by state-of-the-art technologies from LG Electronics!

You will be provided with a new pleasant and convenient digital living culture of the 21^st century through intelligent networking of all-digital appliances, agnostic to any wired and wireless communication technology.

We invite you to a new living culture which has been dreamed about by the whole human race.

Aside from the grammatical issues in LG’s statement, and hoping their use of the term “agnostic” was meant to be closer to the original Greek, as opposed to the more recent religious interpretation, who could resist something, which would provide a convenient, secure, joyful, and affluent lifestyle, anywhere and anytime? Not me.

After taking the HomNet Experience online, I started with the refrigerator/server, adding the ovens, microwaves, and some other appliances in the kitchen. This proved a handy way to coordinate keeping foods chilled, cooking the hot foods, timing the warming of those foods in the food queue, and even providing a shopping list tied into the menu archive, and the family calendar, which is always visible on the door of the refrigerator. This was also great to avoid the previously inevitable, last minute return trips to the grocery for an item that didn’t make it on the old paper grocery lists. Now we could take remote inventory from the store, to make sure we really had walnuts for the dressing or enough whipping cream for the pie.

Once the big day came, we could actually sit back for the first time, and just wait for last minute evite® updates on arrival times. Granted, as James Gunter points out in his law enforcement blog post, Twitter is Not the Holy Grail of Emergency Notification, using Twitter alone as an alarm system is dangerous, but if only the turkey is at state, this may be sufficient. With our Twitter early warning system tied into the day’s calendar on our refrigerator, we were notified, in order, that: our oldest son and girlfriend were on their way; younger son and new grandchildren would be slightly delayed, due to a diaper change; our daughter’s friends would have to make a stop to pick something up on the way; and my old law firm partner and family would be here “soon.”

“Soon” always had a special meaning for my old partner’s arrival, but having done an earlier blog post on the Twitter Geoloction API, I had convinced him to start “tweeting.” With a little advanced coordination, I was able to tell they had not left home yet, was alerted when they started to move in our direction, and a new ETA appeared next to their family avatar on our handy refrigerator/server/message center. Our voice recognition system and data-to speech-program even announced that guests were arriving, making those already inside our “smart house” feel like they were early guests at a presidential ball, where dignitaries are announced as they enter. This was particularly helpful in marshalling the troops to help get the new twins inside before the fresh air woke them up.

Really Cool, New Sixth-Sense Technology was the pride and joy of my new system, even if it was still a beta version. The cobbled aggregation consists of off-the-shelf, Web cam, portable battery-powered 3-D projection system, and other devices connected to the user’s cell phone. The system’s ability to project keypads and other tools onto any surface, to make it a device like those used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report, proved very helpful in the game room. The RFID tracking system allowed us to locate the kids who were tardy in departure from the media room, turning down the heat in that room during dinner, and returning them to the appropriate spot in the movie they were watching upon their return.

We were able to use all this technology to time when dinner started, so the parents of the little kids enjoyed the rare treat of being able to eat in relative peace, coordinating with nap and infant feeding schedules for that optimal state of “joyfulness” promised by the appliance company. It also allowed us to finish before the preselected football games appeared on the adult’s monitors, cartoons came up for the tikes, and video games for the rest of the younger kids.

The background music, which gradually came up as we sat down to eat was a nice touch, as was the list of conversation points, which appeared in the wireless 3D i-glasses some had elected to wear. The ability to look through the glasses at a guest, allow the facial recognition and identification system enough time to identify the guest, and then call up conversation topics suggested by their Facebook references, and other social media search results, including their blogs, proved interesting, if not a little too revealing for some.

The great meal now being history, we can review the video record of the whole event to work on ways to improve it for next year. Using the facial recognition and identification system, we can piece together the level of “joyfulness” for each family member and guest, item-by-item, and plug these back into project software to start planning next year’s event.

The transportation alert module paid off in the first year, letting my oldest son and girlfriend know the system was well on the way to rerouting them back to Chicago, due to a snow storm interrupting their original plans to fly back into O’Hare. The placemats, inspired by some iPhone apps, allowed us to check just how much food each family member and guest had consumed, and for those who desired it, their iPhone apps would now “remind” them of the exercise plan the system had outlined to return them to normal size, including, of course, the appropriate level of play on their Wii Fit™ system at home.

Now, on to Cyber Monday Shopping.

__________________________________________________________

Apologies to Berners Lee, whose article, The Semantic Web, in a 2001 edition of Scientific American, gave rise to this story. Lucy, in the original story, instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser to conduct a search which started to define the term, Web 3.0.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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11.23.09

Oh the Horror! Weighing Legal Fears Against the ROI of Social Media in Business (Part 1)

Posted in Best practices, Courts and social media, Criminal activity, Employee issues, Facebook, LinkedIn, Productivity, Social Media Tools, Social networking policy, Twitter tagged Facebook, FTC endorsement guidelines, LinkedIn, social media expert, Social media fear, social media investment decision, social media measurement, Twitter at 1:15 am by bizlawblog

Social media use for individuals is becoming harder to ignore all the time. Some, like me, long avoided it, based on worries about spam and identity theft. In fact, the theft can actually exceed one’s identity. I feel concerned, when I see friends, neighbors, and clients posting online, telling the world they’re about to go on a trip for five days. Isn’t that like broadcasting to burglars? Some apparently think so. Rebecca Camber reports Facebook and Twitter users face pricier insurance as burglars ’shop’ for victims’ personal details on networking sites.

The social media investment decision is much more complex for business strategists. So, when considering jumping into or increasing your business social media campaign, how do you weigh the potential return on investment against all those horror stories you hear about the bad things that can happen?

Less than a year ago, I received an e-mail from a business associate inviting me to “link” to him on LinkedIn. He is a client and also my associate in a “virtual” consulting business, so I “trusted” his invitation and clicked on the link in his e-mail. “Poof,” with a few clicks of the keyboard, inputting some relatively low-level contact information, I became a member of LinkedIn, my first real social networking experience. Less than a year later, I have started two LinkedIn groups, manage another one, have started a companion Facebook group, and am regularly recommending social networking strategies for my small business clients. I just had my flu shot, but sounds like I’ve caught at least one virus, doesn’t it?

We’ve all read those stories, like The Social Media Revolution is Changing the Way We Do Business, presumably leading us, as entrepreneurs, to the conclusion we should jump on the paradigm change and invest heavily in social media marketing for our company. After all, as the article says:

The number of texts sent and received every day exceeds the Earth’s population! It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million people, yet Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months! If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest country in the world, after the U.S. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama! These astounding facts were published recently in the YouTube video, “The Social Media Revolution”. The world of social media is exploding, bringing people to people and businesses to people in a way never before imagined; and it’s having a profound effect!

Social media is no longer a casual social interaction. Businesses nationwide are jumping into the arena, not merely to gain the ear and attention of their constituents and clients, but more importantly, to create one-on-one relationships with the public at large.

But what about The Social Media Fear Factor? Rachel Happe’s article points out that “there is plenty to be anxious about in considering using social media for business.” Among other things, there is:

knowing your legal and cultural boundaries and limitations;
being prepared to respond proactively to criticism;
being sure enough of your intellectual property assets to engage in sharing them, to some extent, with competitors;
having enough interesting content

Of course, like anything else, if you don’t know what you’re doing there is always the chance of making yourself look like an idiot. Unique, relevant content is always appreciated, as Joe Hall points out in his article, Cup of Joe: How Not To Go Viral and Look Like an Idiot.

There are, however, much worse things to fear. One of those was telegraphed by the title of Jordan McCollum’s article, Are You Breaking the Law with Social Media Marketing? Her article focused on what some consider to be new regulations or changes in existing regulations by the Federal Trade Commission with regard to self-advertising. In fact, these new guidelines, available from the FTC, really clarify existing law, which provides that if somebody is paying you to endorse a product, you must disclose it or face a substantial fine. Unless you’re trying to pull a fast one on your customers, this really shouldn’t be a problem and the “new” guidelines should be seen as assisting in preventing mistakes, rather than imposing new regulations. Nothing to fear there, so what’s the problem?

One issue is that once we publish on the Web or the social media equivalent, if we’ve made an error, it never goes away. As Eric Enge’s article points out, The Web is a Permanent Record. Once published digitally, our error is always there, lurking just below the surface (if we’re lucky and it is not on the surface) for some customer, competitor, or regulator to discover.

Years ago, I discovered the Wayback Machine, which I found very useful in litigating trademark and trade secret cases, using it to prove information posted on an adverse party’s Web site. The site’s FAQ says:

Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web. Imagine surfing circa 1999 and looking at all the Y2K hype, or revisiting an older version of your favorite Web site. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.

Which of us had not clicked “Send” on an e-mail we wished we’d checked more closely before sending? Likewise, what company Web site has not posted something it wished had never seen the light of day? Knowing it can always rise from the archives to haunt us, can cause a chilling effect among the prudent. You say you are prudent so it’s not a problem. Well, can you say the same of all your employees? What about your customers and competitors? You will likely be “engaging” them by simply putting up a Web site, let alone pursuing an interactive social networking strategy with your customers and prospects.

David Berkowitz tells us there are at least 100 Ways To Measure Social Media. Is that helpful? It has to be if you know what you’re doing, but this is hardly a case of black and white. As Berkowitz says:

Some entries here can be interpreted several ways. Depending on how you define them, some of these metrics may seem redundant, while others may seem so broad that they can be broken out further. Many of these can be combined with each other to create new metrics that can then be tracked over time. It’s a start, though, so dive in and consider which ones may apply to programs you’re working on.

Sounds like we may need an “expert” here to help us determine which metrics will tell us what we need. The search for such an expert, however, creates its own set of issues, to some of which I alluded in a previous post, Is Everyone A Social Networking Expert? Robert Strohmeyer came to similar conclusions in his article, Beware the Social Media Charlatans:

For anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand bucks, you can hire a social media consultant to come to your office and put on a training seminar for your staff. They’ll spend an hour or two pontificating about the power of social media to raise awareness of your brand and the magical benefits of building closer relationships with your customers in 140 characters or less. They’ll probably even offer you a few “insider tips” based on their “deep expertise” in the field. The only problem? It’s a load of bull.

Unless you define success by the sort of loosey-goosey standards that might make your horoscope appear to actually predict the future, the real measure of any business undertaking is that it increases your profits. But in the vast majority of use cases, neither Twitter nor Facebook stands any significant chance of doing that for business users. And if you’re a small business that depends on, say, actually selling real products and services to actual paying customers, wistfully tweeting about your daily specials is almost certainly a waste of resources.

Admittedly, I’ve probably raised more questions than I’ve answered in this initial post in a series. This is a complex, ever-changing subject, which is one reason for this blog and the LinkedIn group I started, Social Media Search and Forensics. We have just scratched the surface of trying to weigh social media fears against the Ashton Kutcher comlex. We’ll turn next to a more detailed examination of the validity of social media fears, before going on to methods to weigh those risks against the potential return on investment of employing worthy social media strategies in your business.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

If you are really interested, I just started yet another free group on LinkedIn, Social Media Search and Forensics. Many of these articles and discussion about them are posted there. Please join us.

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11.18.09

Can a Well-Drafted Social Media Policy Save You Money?

Posted in Best practices, Employee issues, Productivity, Social Media Tools, Social networking policy, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 tagged competition, consultant, cost-cutting, defamation, employee blog, Facebook, intellectual property, marketing, Netcraft, risk management, survival, Technorati, Twitter, Web 2.0 at 2:28 am by bizlawblog

Netcraft, an Internet services company based in Bath, England, reported that, as part of its July 2009 Web Server Survey, it received responses from 239,611,111 sites, an increase of around 1.5 million sites from the previous month. I’m sorry, did somebody just say Web sites are proliferating at something like 1,500,000 per month?

A glance at Technorati’s annual State of the Blogosphere report reveals equally staggering numbers of blogs, unique visits, and Facebook members. It gets better. Jim Singer’s article on the IP Spotlight blog, Employee Blogging and Use of Social Media – Managing the Risk, notes:

Social media usage is exploding. Recent data indicates that Facebook has over 200,000,000 users, while Twitter has over 7,000,000 users. According to Technorati data as reported on Wikipedia, at the end of 2007 more than 112,000,000 blogs existed.

Blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts, texting, and the use of other social media by employees can create many risks for employers. Unlike conversations, social media postings leave a data trail — and that data trail can quickly be tracked, copied, and distributed to an unlimited number of readers. The news headlines are filled with stories of poor judgment by employees on social media sites. Microsoft fired an employee who published photos of Apple computers being loaded into a Microsoft research facility. Delta airlines fired a flight attendant who posted photos of herself in a corporate uniform. Google fired an employee who blogged about, among other things, Google’s compensation.

Singer summarizes employers’ risks from their employees’ social media activity as including:

publication of trade secrets;
dissemination of confidential information relating other employees, customers, or business partners;
copyright and trademark infringement;
libel; and
loss of control of business reputation

The problem for employers seems to be that they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. As marketing mavens turn from paper media, to Web, to blog, to Twitter campaigns and beyond, their corporate clients are feeling the pinch of a currently unfathomable economic slowdown, necessitating a higher ROI from potentially declining marketing budgets. One apparently easy answer may be to enlist and unleash employees with their low cost or no cost viral marketing abilities.

Although an instant army of marketing employees may seem a simple solution, Fred Abramson points out in his article, What you need to know about Defamation and Web 2.0:

Bloggers and anyone else using social media need to be aware of what they post online. There is a serious threat of what you post can result in litigation.

I recently reported that there has been a 216% increase in libel lawsuits against bloggers. Courtney Love’s Twitter defamation case is not going away.

Yelp, the popular review site, has been at the center of the debate because people are using the service to write reviews that are untrue.

A $1 million judgment, including an injunction and costs was granted against a defendant who persisted in posting false and defamatory statements in online forums regarding his fraudulent transactions at the expense of an online company.

OK, so maybe a little “sensitivity training” might be in order before unleashing the hordes of marketing hounds, but what if they turn on you? Deloitte LLP’s 2009 Ethics & Workplace survey indicated that:

60 percent of business executives believe they have a right to know how employees portray themselves and their organizations in online social networks. However, employees disagree, as more than half (53 percent) say their social networking pages are not an employer’s concern. This fact is especially true among younger workers, with 63 percent of 18–34 year old respondents stating employers have no business monitoring their online activity.

That said, employees appear to have a clear understanding of the risks involved in using online social networks, as 74 percent of respondents believe they make it easier to damage a company’s reputation.

With the explosive growth of online social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, rapidly blurring the lines between professional and private lives, these virtual communities have increased the potential of reputational risk for many organizations and their brands…

Could it be that lawyers may have the answer? Kate Early, corporate counsel for LexisNexis posted a nice article on her blog, “Social Networking Helps Cut Company Legal Fee Costs – How? Read on!”, which may give you a clue where I’m going with this. She notes:

Social networking is helping companies…cut legal fees by providing groups and forums for them to discuss and share ideas and answers to legal questions for free. For instance, on Linked In, there are topic groups that you can subscribe to, like Intellectual Property. You can then post questions and answer other people’s questions. Human resources professionals are also benefiting. Of course, there are issues about the lack of attorney-client privilege and there is no privacy to the questions. However, for general inquiries that are not private … these sites can really help.

Neetal Parekh’s article, Legal Cost-Cutting and Social Networking: Strange Bedfellow, goes a little deeper:

Breaking down the buzz word “social networking” you get two core concepts of communication. Social and networking. Whether you are in a conference break-out session, happy hour, basketball court sideline, or company luncheon you have an opportunity to interact with others in a less-formal, more-personal way. Similarly, social networking allows a candid flow of thought and exchange of ideas. Just like your career counselors encouraged you to do in law school in their odes to the power of networking, connecting and sharing online is a form of networking. And one that seems to be gaining some street cred from its offline cousin. And though three years of legal training has drilled in considerations of liability, privacy, and confidentiality, it is up to the innovative devices of in-house counsel to find constructive and ethical uses of social networking that will inspire progress and productivity within their legal departments.

Woody Allen is quoted as saying: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Many of the financial advisors I’ve talked to in recent months, as well as wealthy clients, seem to be saying the same thing about survival in our depressed economy. Their goal, rather than making money, often focuses on not losing as much as anyone else. In the final analysis, they speculate (no pun intended), if they are able to keep from losing more of what they have than the competition loses, they’ll still be ahead of the game when things turn around, as they always do.

The depth of “expertise” of most social media consultants must be subject to scrutiny. After all, the field itself is still emerging and changing by the second. We’re all just starting to explore this murky new territory. The maps we draw for our clients to follow may sometimes be no more useful than a sandcastle built too close to the ocean surf.

Given the shifting sands on which we stand, our greatest success may come from simply failing to make as many mistakes as our competitors, and, as Woody Allen suggests, staying around for the next act.

We may not have a firm grip yet on what really works in the universe of social media. We are quickly learning, however, what doesn’t work, and how large the judgments, legal fees, and lost profits can be when we make easily avoidable mistakes. It is the avoidance of those mistakes that a well-formulated, organic social media policy can easily prevent. A good policy can encourage the cost saving benefits corporate lawyers have already found.

This is far from a perfect solution or tool, but the process of creating a social media policy for your company, getting employees and managers to buy into the process and become stakeholders in the positive results it can bring, can go a long way to making your company one of the survivors. That may be enough to make you the victor in your arena. I’ll explore this process in a future series of posts on this blog.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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11.17.09

Shapeshifting; Using Social Media to Maintain Online Reputation

Posted in Best practices, Criminal activity, Employee issues, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media Tools, Social networking policy, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 tagged avatar at 1:42 am by bizlawblog

If you like science fiction movies, you may have seen alien entities, which can change their physical appearance, sometimes mimicking other creatures. If you’re more down to earth, perhaps you’ve heard the expression “Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. In either case, you might need a vet.

In the case of maintenance of one’s online reputation, social media can be either the tool you use to achieve your goal, or the jaws of your destruction. Aliza Sherman’s article, Don’t Ruin Your Social Media Reputation, points out one of the problems of social media, in the context of vetting information:

One of the continuing perils on the Internet– that is even greater now that anyone has the ability to publish online– is not knowing what information is credible or not. Misinformation can spread like wildfire across Twitter, Facebook and the like, and the last thing you want to do is get the reputation of being a conduit for misinformation. Take care when repeating what you hear from others in social media circles.

Sherman also gives us five things to avoid. As she puts it:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way some people abuse the online tools that many of us are trying to use for good things. Whether you are using the Internet and social media for business or for personal use, there are good ways to use these tools, but there are also ways that can get you into trouble that you might not anticipate.

Sherman’s list includes five ways she frequently sees people damaging their online reputations:

Social media spam, consisting of “irrelevant unsolicited sales pitches for strange and unneeded products,” spammy endorsements and other messages sent out automatically or unwittingly;

Indiscriminate “friendliness,” by those whose sole goal seems to be collecting as many “friends” or “followers” as possible, but for the purpose of treating them as cattle to be used;

Autopilot networking, with the help of increasingly efficient tools which end up giving the impression the interaction is canned rather than truly “social;”

Missing the appointment with the Vet, by failing to check information before passing it on as a thoughtless repost or retweet; and

Playing the undercover hired gun, where those with whom you interact online later feel betrayed or conned when they learn you’ve endorsed a product for pay, or otherwise played a deceitful role.

Lawyers like myself are known to love to say cute little Latin phrases like caveat emptor or “let the buyer beware.” A similar warning is perhaps in order for social media. A paradigm shift is occurring in our online communications. In the old ARPANET days, communications were between individuals and institutions where there was generally a high level of trust and respect. These days, using information obtained through social media channels may be closer to buying a watch from a street corner vendor.

Companies, which fail to recognize this shift in the reliability of information, are certainly at risk. A post on the Social Media Reputation blog makes the point as follows:

Having been a consultant regarding online media for over a decade, I am constantly growing very weary of informational white-paper companies that are charging top dollar for “analysis” of an industry that is forever changing. In my previous life working at a Fortune 50 company on interactive projects, I can tell you that far too many “big boy” companies are absolutely relying on the wrong informational sources to make huge decisions. This old-school system is leading more and more companies down the path of digital suicide.

Granted, many might be more likely to be cautious of a post on the Pissed Customer blog or Ripoff Report, than one found on Forbes or the Wall Street Journal, but how is one to really know? Typically, the longer a publication has existed without substantial challenge to the veracity of its reports, the more trusted it becomes. Recent U.S. political campaigns, however, have cast substantial doubt on the impartiality and credibility of many such long-standing main stream media reputations, and the economy continues to take its toll on others.

Queue Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels as the heirs apparent. As the paperless paper box becomes one of the next anachronistic surprises of our decade, we find data flowing at us from all directions at an increasing velocity. The volume of data confronting us is likewise increasing, leaving us with exactly the task Microsoft predicted in its book, Taming the Information Tsunami. Regardless of the techniques used to survive this digital perfect storm, the time in which we have the ability to vet the data barrage will continue to shrink.

The Web is full of hideous examples of damage to corporate reputations, whether deserved or not. We do, however, have the ability to take some steps to perform maintenance on our online reputations. A few simple tactics are outlined in an article by Lawrence Perry:

Always publish meaningful content- when you publish meaningful content, you can expect people who follow you to truly believe what you have to say in the future. If you send spam and post useless information in your accounts, people will not learn to trust you.

Be transparent- you do not have to be too personal or reveal too much information in your Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts but it would really help if you remained as truthful as possible in your interactions with clients.

Post your picture and your website in your profile- it would really help a lot if you use your own photo and if you link to your website and provide more information to your followers. These will help them establish a better connection with you because they really know who you are, what business you are promoting, etc.

Try to communicate in a personal level- do not use bots or send standard pre-written messages through DM. On Twitter, make sure you send personal direct messages. This may take a lot of time but don’t think of that as wasted time but an investment on your target market.

I’ll talk more in a later post about methods to monitor and protect both personal and company reputations online. For now, however, I wonder if there is some new twist coming down the pike to fill the need I think we all have, to more easily increase the level of trust we have for data received online. Where there is a need, there usually is a solution vendor.

We all know there have been innumerable snake oil vendors in the software industry, but VeriSign and PayPal seem to have become standards, through trust, in being acceptable allies in managing our risk with online transactions. Now all we need is a “veracity meter” attached to all social media output.

Some companies are struggling with methods to “pre-prove” the expertise of those who engage in online community discussions, such as LinkedIn. As a member of a variety of networks, one can gain “expert” points by being the “winning” responder to an online inquiry from another member of the group. This is a quality argument in favor of the member giving the best answer, but there are also quantity point in some networks, where part of one’s rating as an expert is based upon the number of posts accomplished during a period of time. Surely, there must be a more efficient way to increase our trust of online data.

I’ve come across those who say they can detect the aura of others, and tell if a person is good or bad, honest or dishonest. While I may question exactly what it is they are seeing, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a method to easily detect and read the aura of online communications. Perhaps such communications will, in our Web 3.0 or 4.0 world, come with a thoroughly vetted avatar emitting an aura of credibility. Could it be that the devious spammer’s message will someday come with a universal avatar bearing some sort of aura which looks like horns, while those honest and well vetted posts by yours truly will be embraced by my avatar, wearing an easily detectable halo of honesty?

Stories, like Dick Pelletier’s, Avatars will help us navigate tomorrow’s electronic maze, make it seem like they’re right around the corner. Others say they might work their own paradigm shift.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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11.15.09

Trick or Tweet? Is Twitter a Viable Emergency Notification System?

Posted in Best practices, Criminal activity, Employee issues, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media Tools, Social networking policy, Twitter tagged crash, denial of service, disaster, e2Campus, emergency notification program, Facebook, Ft. Hood, hack, military, security, social media, Twitter at 11:40 pm by bizlawblog

Trick or Tweet? That question is not intended to remind you of what you hear on Halloween, when your neighbor’s kid knocks on your door and asks the annual question with a lisp.

We recently finished Halloween shenanigans, where kids disguise themselves as fictional characters and knock on doors in their neighborhood, traditionally asking if you’d like to give them a treat or risk a less enjoyable alternative. The question raised in this post, however, is whether use of social media, and Twitter in particular, is a bit of the same situation. Is Twitter being touted as a viable emergency notification system when it is not fit for that important purpose? A companion question might be whether we, as customers (i.e. The “Twitterati”), are putting pressure on this social media channel to transform itself into something for which it was not originally intended.

Many schools may start using social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook as a more regular part of their emergency notification program. A variety of vendors are coming up with way to make this happen.

In a move that plenty of other institutions are sure to follow, Oregon’s Pacific University has integrated its emergency notification system with the popular social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. The move allows the 3,100-student university to send emergency messages to students via e-mail, RSS feed, or text message to mobile phones, Blackberries, wireless PDAs, pagers, and smart or satellite phones–and now Twitter or Facebook.

The university subscribes to an emergency notification system from Omnilert’s e2Campus that allows administrators to send a single message to a designated list of recipients on a variety of devices and in various formats. In November, e2Campus added Twitter and Facebook as options–and Pacific University was the first institution to jump on board.

University Links Twitter, Facebook with Notification System

My last post, Did Twitter Replace Cell Phones for Ft. Hood Shooting News?, mentioned that even the military recommended Twitter as an emergency information source, when a sudden surge in emergency traffic crashed the civilian cell phone system in the Ft. Hood area. As a country, the United States has been blessed with fewer natural disasters than many countries. Clearly, we are still trying to digest the disaster preparedness and recovery lessons from far-reaching events like hurricane Katrina, which likewise disrupted cell phone traffic in a number of ways. Is Twitter any better?

Matt Williams, Assistant Editor of Government Technology Magazine, posted an interesting article, mentioning some of the many uses the U.S. government is making of Twitter:

When Twitter’s founders launched the service in 2006, they advertised it as a way to keep abreast of friends’ everyday lives. The idea of “tweeting” in short bursts about mundane details – “I’m watching Dancing with the Stars!” – may seem narcissistic, or pointless. But a loyal following has found novel and unexpected applications for the service. This movement includes government agencies, which are use Twitter for various functions, such as real-time alerts about emergencies, election results and even science projects.

The most practical government applications for Twitter are in public safety and emergency notification. For example, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) updates its Twitter page with bulletins about structural fires, the number of responding firefighters, and injuries and casualties. A typical post is something like: “12126 Burbank Bl* No ‘formal’ evacuations; Firefighters maintaining 500′ exclusion zone pending LAFD Hazmat arrival…”

“The question really would be, why not do Twitter?” asked Bill Greeves, the county’s IT director. “It is 140 characters, so granted, you are limited in the message you put on there. But we’re not creating content for Twitter; we’re creating content to send out a message to the public, and we’re just taking advantage of the latest and greatest channels available.”

The beauty of it, Greeves said, is that if something better replaces Twitter or it all falls out of vogue, it won’t hurt the bottomline.

Governments use Twitter for Emergency Alerts, Traffic Notices and More

Williams’ article notes that one of the major hurdles to greater government use of Twitter may be “viewership,” but it appears even the U.S. State Department has taken note of Twitter’s potential use in an international context. An article by Lev Grossman, Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement, points out:

The U.S. State Department doesn’t usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time.

So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It’s free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It’s also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection.

This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren’t public.

This use of Twitter in a mass crisis has apparently not gone without notice at headquarters. Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams, in comments to the BBC about the Iran-related maintenance delay said:

“We did it because we thought it was the best thing for supporting the information flow there at a crucial time, and that’s kind of what we’re about – supporting the open exchange of information.

“So it seemed like the right thing to do.”

Twitter Iran delay ‘not forced’

Is Twitter the new boss in social media town? Even networks like LinkedIn seem to be trying to attach themselves to it, as Taylor Singletary points out in his article on the LinkedIn blog, You want Tweets? There’s an App for that…:

As you’ve likely heard by now, we launched our first Twitter integration features at LinkedIn earlier this week. For professionals who want to make Twitter part of their professional identity, you can now easily add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile, and seamlessly post LinkedIn status updates to Twitter, and vice-versa.

This launch also brings with it a brand new addition to the LinkedIn application platform: Tweets.

Tweets is an application that allows you to seamless integrate basic Twitter functionality into your LinkedIn experience.

Twitter itself, however, is not immune from interruption of service. Last August, it was the subject of an apparent denial of service attack. Eliot Van Buskirk’s article on Wired gives a nice outline of the event:

Twitter was shut down for hours Thursday morning by what it described as an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack, silencing millions of Tweeters. It was the first major outage the service has suffered in months and possibly the first ever due to sabotage. The outage appeared to begin mid-morning, EST, and affected users around the world. After about three hours, the service was coming back online in fits and starts.

In a denial-of-service attack, a malicious party barrages a server with so many requests that it can’t keep up, or causes it to reset. As a result, legitimate users can only access the server very slowly — or not at all, as appears to be the case here.

Not only was the site down, but client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout. According to June ComScore numbers Twitter has more than 44 million registered users and its user base has been growing rapidly for months as it becomes better known in the mainstream.

Denial-of-Service Attack Knocks Twitter Offline

Twitter’s statement was, of course, less verbose:

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

Update (4:14p): Site latency has continued to improve, however some web requests continue to fail. This means that some people may be unable to post or follow from the website.

Ongoing denial-of-service attack

Some, such as Roberta Whitty, a member of the Gartner blog network, clearly feel it dangerous for organizations to rely upon Twitter:

The denial of service attack on Twitter should remind organizations that are automating their emergency call trees and crisis communications that a single end point isn’t good enough. Given the growth in social networking, more and more organizations are starting to think about leveraging these sites for emergency/crisis communications. But if it becomes your only end point, you risk not getting your message out when it is most needed – during a disaster. In addition, no national telcom network has been tested for a regional disaster, so your phone messages might not get delivered either. Hence, build for emergency notification around multiple channels for best coverage. What is your organization doing to support best coverage?

Don’t Rely Only on Twitter for Emergency Notification

One must also wonder how the continuous barrage of scams might impact use of any form of social media as an emergency notification system. Michael Arrington’s article, Facebook To Increase Enforcement Of Anti-Scam Rules, points out:

Facebook says that deceptive ads are a widespread problem on the Web…

Anyone who doesn’t engage in scammy behavior right now is at a monetization disadvantage. There are real similarities between this issue and steroid use in baseball. As long as the MLB didn’t really enforce steroid use among players, it was a competitive necessity to take the drugs, and so many more players took them than otherwise would.

We know that companies such as Microsoft are the target of frequent attacks by hackers. Some of these may have gained insider knowledge as employees of their targets and are thus extraordinarily effective in their destructive efforts. How could any governmental entity, however, think it might be less likely to attract detractors?

Referring to last Augusts’ attacks against both facebook and Twitter, Ryan Singel’s article noted:

They don’t make any sense.

“I’m afraid two outliers make a line and there is something going on… We have entered the third generation of denial of service attacks, and anyone that plans on the rationality of criminals is at risk.”

What does that mean? It means if you make the assumption that the bad guys online are just a new breed of bank robbers, that can get you into trouble if there are a few sociopaths mixed in.

The ongoing attacks Thursday on Facebook and the micro-publishing site Twitter likely involve tens of thousands of compromised computers under the control of a single person. Likely the attack involves asking the sites to serve up a page of search results, or some other processor-intensive requests. That makes it hard to determine if the request is a real user action or a malicious fake.

Is There Rhyme or Reason to the Attacks on Twitter?

As the title of another of Ryan Singel’s articles tells us:

Security experts say the attacks on Twitter and Facebook are nothing new under the sun and that Distributed Denial of Service Attacks — which render a web server useless to real users by overwhelming the server with fake requests, are commonplace on the net. DDoS (pronounced dee-daas) attacks are usually carried out using a zombie army of infected Windows computers known as a botnet, where the controller tells the infected computers what site to bombard with requests.

“This kind of stuff happens every day, but when it happens on Twitter, people don’t know what to do with their thumbs,” said Paul Ferguson, a senior threat researcher for security giant Trend Micro.

And so far there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything particularly interesting about the attack from a technical perspective, according to security expert Tom Byrnes, the founder of ThreatStop, a network security company.

“Taking something down on the web is garden variety vandalism,” Byrnes said. “They aren’t doing anything new … someone has a botnet and they are just pounding on Twitter and Facebook.”

Twitter, Facebook Attacks No Surprise to Security Experts

So how do we reconcile these events? The government is recommending use of social media channels for emergency notification purposes. Schools and other organizations are rapidly adopting it as a significant part of their own emergency systems. At the same time, however, disgruntled employees and political activists are focusing their efforts at bringing down these emerging communication giants, and are doing so with amazing success.

If a single hacker can bring down the Twitter and Facebook networks, what damage could be done by a terrorist organization or, perhaps one of the many rogue nations we face in our global village? We can certainly hope these social media moguls will learn their lesson from these attacks and spend more of their effort on making these networks secure. We also know that, historically, the hackers often seem to be at least one step ahead of law enforcement, network security experts, and others upon whom we rely for protection.

We have likewise read stories about illegal probing of military and infrastructure networks, including those designed to make our nuclear facilities secure. Might we not anticipate that at least some of this probing may be leading up to attempts at breaching the defenses being tested. Sure, some of this may just be teens with too much computer time on their hands, or political dissidents whose focus in on something other than world destruction. On the other hand, are we setting ourselves up for the big bang by increasing our reliance upon social media for emergency news, rather than what this media was intended for originally?

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

If you are really interested, I just started yet another free group on LinkedIn, Social Media Search and Forensics. Many of these articles and discussion about them are posted there. Please join us.

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11.06.09

Did Twitter Replace Cell Phones for Ft. Hood Shooting News?

Posted in Best practices, Criminal activity, Facebook, Productivity, Social Media Tools, Social networking policy, Twitter tagged cell phone, crisis, Facebook, Ft. Hood, LinkedIn, paradigm shift, SCORE, social media, Social Media Search and Forensics group, social networking, trust news, Twitter, Twitter trends at 11:41 am by bizlawblog

For some time now, I’ve been seeing more and more articles questioning whether newer social media channels were in the process of replacing, rather than supplementing, more “traditional” means of communication. I know many of my neighbors, and a few of the lawyers I know, have replaced their traditional “land line” with cell phones.

When I moved my office to the ‘burbs a few years ago, after practicing downtown for nearly thirty years, I had to hire a third party phone company to “move” the phone number I’d been advertising on business cards and stationary. Otherwise, I was faced with losing my long-standing number, which most lawyers considered something of a death sentence in those days. The result was, until about a week ago, that I paid one phone bill just for the old number, and then paid another phone bill for my trunk service, internet, roll-over numbers, etc.

I am in the process of painfully shedding the now “fake” number. What I’ve found, in just a few, short years since I moved my office out of downtown, was that when anyone from my office called out, the recipient picked up the non-advertised, local exchange number. They often plugged that into their cell phone or office phone’s electronic “address book” and simply pushed one button when they wanted to call us. The number they dialed, ended up being the unadvertised, local exchange number. This made the “prettier,” advertised number something of an anachronistic situation, with fewer and fewer clients, lawyers, judges, and others using it.

Eventually, keeping the old number just made less and less sense, because advances in technology and the way people were using technology dictated a new paradigm. After all, we’re rapidly moving in the direction of virtual law firms and consultants. Because of cell phone technology and office automation advances, I’m using making less use of a “static” office and spending much more time, in my law practice, in my consulting business, and as a pro bono SCORE counselor, visiting clients in their offices. Since I typically pick up much more information about my clients’ need when I visit their office than when they visit mine, this is a “good thing” for my clients and me. The paradigm is moving for me, and I’m thinking I’m not alone in this.

“Way back” in August of 2009, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins’ article, posted on the siliconANGLE blog, asked the question, Could WordPress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook? As we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 the borders between competing software applications and even between software and hardware are likely to blur. For now, however, the question remains, whether newer social media channels are in the process of replacing, rather than supplementing, more “traditional” means of communication. Recently, some friends on facebook responded to a comment I had made there, indicating this question might be increasingly likely to be answered in the affirmative. The very fact that I had posted something on facebook, being a relatively new user, and that there was a growing debate on this relatively new social networking channel, gives a premonition of where my thoughts on this lie.

Some pretty wise people have opined that you don’t really know a person until you see them in a stressful situation. It is then that you often have a better view into what makes them tick. The same is often true in business. What a company is made of is often not really seen until a crisis develops and they either come out on top or start a downward spiral. The same may be true of communication channels.

Sarah Needleman’s Wall Street Journal article, Entrepreneurs ‘Tweet’ Their Way Through Crises, demonstrates that businesses are starting to use Twitter and other social media to handle day-to-day crises. Needleman’s article points out:

The social-media service — where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages — came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. owns Fox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. The company also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweets describing its repair efforts.

Twitter gave us an up-to-the-minute ability to take what would normally be a crisis situation and make it just another event,” says Mr. Bianchi. “You can’t do that with a 1-800-number.”

As of Monday, drankbeverage.com had more than 1,000 Twitter followers.

KD Paine points out in an article on her blog, Can Twitter replace Walter Cronkite as “the most trusted ‘MAN’ in America”?, that there is a debate raging about the level of trust in the news we get these days, and, in particular whether we can trust the news and views from traditional media sources. Trust is one thing and access is another.

The horrible tragedy of the Ft. Hood shooting yesterday confirmed, for me at least, that there is a growing movement to use Twitter and other social media, rather than more traditional media, to convey news in a crisis. I heard that cell phone service essentially “crashed” during this Ft. Hood crisis, as soldiers from abroad tried to call family and comrades in the Ft. Hood area to learn what had happened. The Honolulu Advertiser’s article, Shooting leaves 12 dead, 31 wounded reported:

The school and base were in lockdown. Normal phone lines were working but cell phones were overloaded.

“Now I can’t even get a hold of her. The cell phones are jammed. I can’t even send a text,” Biggers said. “They still have us on lockdown. I’m just staying right beside my computer with the news on and praying.”

Michael Winter’s article, A 13th death reported in the Fort Hood rampage, walks us through one version of the time line. Here’s a portion relevant to the point I’m making:

Update at 6:57 p.m. ET: Fort Hood officials are asking that family members trying to reach their loved ones should send a text message instead of calling, because phone circuits are overloaded.

Also, Twitter has three main threads for sending messages or following the story: FortHood, #FortHood and #FTHood.

Update at 6:30 p.m. ET: The Waco Chapter of the American Red Cross has a Web site where you can check on base personnel. Register here.

Eric Berlin’s article on Technorati, Fort Hood Shooting Spree: The Blogosphere Reacts, provides some insight, in terms of where all this might be headed:

The blogosphere is already responding in earnest to the horrific shooting spree at a Texas military base that resulted in 12 deaths and 31 wounded…

Twitter has become a central focus for communication, link sharing, information dissemination, and on the ground reporting during breaking news stories, so tech bloggers are looking at how Twitter is being used tonight. MG Siegler at TechCrunch speculates about how Twitter is influencing its Trending Topics feature to bring breaking news stories to the forefront immediately. “And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand,” Siegler writes.

Twitter itself, seems to periodically question just how effective it is. An article on the Twitter Web site by Jenna Dawn, Get to the Point: Twitter Trends, even acknowledges:

As Twitter grows and the number of tweets each day continues to astound us, we’ve noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics. Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation.

As one cable network might say, “we report, you decide…” When the military is telling folks to try texting to get information, the Red Cross is setting up a Web site to help people check on base personnel who might have been involved in the crisis, and Twitter replaces a broken down cell phone system, I have to wonder if my original thoughts on the paradigm shift might not have been right.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

If you are really interested, I just started yet another free group on LinkedIn, Social Media Search and Forensics. Many of these articles and discussion about them are posted there. Please join us.

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