Social Media: August 2008 Archives

CNN ran with a story today headlined "Online Student-Teacher Friendships Can Be Troublesome". The article discusses how some states and school boards are crafting policies to deal with student-teacher friendships on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. In most cases, as the article points out, the relationship is either benign or sometimes a positive thing. In some cases the students use the sites to ask questions about assignments, seek advice about school; as well as learn more about who their teacher is outside of the school. But there have been a few cases where teachers and students alike breach the bounds of acceptable behavior, and sometimes break the law with sexual relationships.

It is because of those rare cases that people want to restrict all teachers' behavior online.

Consider the following from the article:

...[S]tate legislator Jane Cunningham is sponsoring a bill in the Missouri House of Representatives that would ban elementary school teachers from having social-networking friendships with their students.

[Snipped]

In addition to the bill in the Missouri legislature, other school boards, teacher unions and parent-teacher associations across the country are drafting policies and issuing advisements about which online or text-messaging relationships are acceptable.

The Lamar County School Board in Missouri recently implemented a policy forbidding teachers and students from having any text-message conversations or social-networking friendships.

(source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/12/studentsteachers.online/index.html)

This is an emotional issue, to be sure. I'm not immune to sadness or rage when I hear about children being hurt and killed by predators. But it never benefits us to legislate out of emotion. So, walk with me as we think about it rationally for a moment.

If the teachers are such a big threat to the students online then why are they allowed around them at all? There are parents and teachers out that seek to restrict a teacher's behavior online but they're okay with letting these same teachers be with them in person five days a week? That doesn't add up. Furthermore, for a lot of these sites, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc, a good portion of the interaction happens in public. If a child and teacher are having some manner of contact online it's visible and searchable. Even private conversations between parties are stored on a server somewhere. It can be requested by the police and examined for evidence of wrong-doing. What a child and teacher do in person is not, so isn't this potentially safer?

This type of reaction comes from the "WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN???" argument. I have never bought that screechy argument. It is used so often by special interest groups and legislators to cram intrusive laws into the books. It is the exploitation of fear to achieve a political goal and I find it despicable. I don't think that all people are acting out of some ulterior motive, but they're exploiting fear to get what they want.

So I find this movement to restrict teachers' behavior online outright silly. I also find it a little sad. I understand that teachers are in a sense public figures, role models, and mentors, and therefore need to be more cautious about what they share and how, but does it hurt anyone if a student goes on Facebook and finds out that their math teacher is also a huge Iron Maiden fan? Or that their English teacher really loves to watch "Ninja Warrior"? I don't think it does. It humanizes the person grading their work, and builds a connection between them.

Thinking further out about this I find it amusing that culturally we bemoan the lack of social bonds between people, the empty homes that kids go to after school, and the separation people feel from each other, and yet want to reinforce the isolation for children by limiting the contact they can have with some of the most important people in their lives.

Clearly there needs to be some middle ground that can be reached between protecting children from legitimate predators and allowing our children to reach out and build the connections they should have with the people who matter. But banning contact outright between teachers and students is not the answer.

A story originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle and is now being discussed on the web about someone who created an account in the name of to be the ExxonMobil Corporation on Twitter and proceeded to interact with users.

When the Houston Chronicle contacted the company ExxonMobil to discuss the Twitter account, they were surprised to learn of its existence. According to their PR department, they didn't create the account, there is no one named Janet who is authorized to speak on behalf of the company, and they're not sure what to do with the account. Perhaps that's why some on the web think this is a case of someone on the outside attacking the company, but I don't think so.

Reviewing the posts from "Janet", they seem like they're positive towards ExxonMobil, and worked hard to defend the company from specious accusations. Consider:

indeed we date as far back as Standard Oil, with Rockefeller as the very founder! We did not have any association with the Nazis

(source: http://twitter.com/ExxonMobilCorp/statuses/878322300)

or

we are not an earth hating organization, and we're working on hard to improve how we drill for oil, these are difficult times. (source: http://twitter.com/ExxonMobilCorp/statuses/878310567)

I think the truth about the Twitter account is something Janet said herself not long before she stopped using Twitter:

I am an employee of ExxonMobil, who has decided to put forward her pride in her own company.

(source: http://twitter.com/ExxonMobilCorp/statuses/878323539)

Given the pro-Exxon nature of the posts, and her ernest endeavors to answer questions, rebuff accusations, and highlight the positives, I think she must be an employee at Exxon, and it seems she loves her company enough to take this initiative. The question of course now becomes: "What should Exxon do about this?" I say they should let her continue. Unchain her and let her continue being their rep on Twitter. There's some precedent for this.

There are a gaggle of companies on Twitter already but to highlight two of the more well-known examples:

• Comcast has a customer service rep, Frank, on Twitter who helps people with their problems: http://twitter.com/ComcastCares
• Online shoe retailer Zappos' CEO is on Twitter and regularly interacts with others: http://twitter.com/Zappos

(Full list of companies on Twitter can be found here: http://blog.fluentsimplicity.com/2008/04/07/connecting-with-customers-twitter/)

And this is great, yes? Absolutely! Social media, like Twitter is another outlet on the web. It's another place where companies establish their brand, connect with customers, and solve problems their customers are having. Furthermore, social media's not a fad that's going to fade away (though it will probably shrink in total number of users as time goes on and newer trends emerge). Given the newness of social media, it's an area that is not well-explored by companies, and so has the potential for abuse. Which brings us to "brandjacking", a portmanteau for "brand" and "hijacking".

When someone brandjacks they're assuming the name of someone or some company to either discredit or poke fun at them. And honestly sometimes the results are very funny. Other times, they're just plain libelous. For a long time there were doubts that the AndersonCooper account on Twitter was actually Anderson Cooper, especially given the sometimes raunchy things that were said about other CNN hosts, but it now appears to be a feed for his reporting, and the humor is gone. I miss it, personally. Brandjacking is a form of griefing or trolling, because it causes the people or company grief. I usually despise trolls, but, I admit to feeling torn about this form, maybe because it's done to be subversive.

Some might hold this up as just deliberate evil, but I find myself wondering if this happens because large companies no longer provide a simple way for customers to contact them. We hear a lot about the horrible customer service experience people have with companies like Wal-Mart, US Airways, DirecTV, Washington Mutual, Best Buy, etc. These retailers and service providers sometimes appear as monoliths to the customer, large inflexible bureaucracies whose only advantage is low prices. When someone has a problem local managers never seem empowered to help, and a person's only recourse is to call a number that goes to who knows where to speak to who knows who and usually results in nothing being resolved. The Consumerist is chock-full of stories from people fed up with having to call a company more than a few times to get what should be a simple problem solved. As these frustrations pile up, people start to look for creative and easy ways to vent, and I think griefing on social media sites is one way to do it. It becomes a form of protest on the web, and the social nature of these sites amplifies their protest beyond them screaming into a phone at a rep (which is never a good idea anyway) or telling their friends. As opposed to blogging, which a lot companies can dismiss as an acceptable level of noise, brandjacking becomes a very visible and loud form of protest that's hard to ignore. The company can't let the brandjacker continue, but shutting down the account just reinforces their image as uncaring.

Social media gives those companies a chance to put them in closer contact with their customers, and potential customers, and hear from them unfiltered. It is a more direct and amplified feed from the public, and in my mind, every company should want that. If you're not paying attention to your customers and what they want, you're not going to succeed. My message to companies is "Ignore social media to your own detriment".

In the case of the ExxonMobilCorp account on Twitter, I don't think that Exxon was brandjacked (in the traditional sense), and certainly I don't believe that Twitter users were mislead either. This was, instead the opposite of griefing. White-knighting? Someone at Exxon wanted very much to share "the good news" about her company and took the initiative to do so. I guess other companies, like the ones I mentioned above, can hope someone does the same for them, but if I were them, I wouldn't count on it.