I’m sure you heard the same thing from your parents as I did. Don’t hang around with a “bad” bunch of kids because you get known by the company you keep and their lousy reputation will stick to you whether or not you’ve engaged in the same bad behavior. You probably haven’t thought about that quote in terms of your business but there are some things going on these days that might cause you to do so. Let me explain.
If you’re a brand (and every company is) and especially if you’re the person responsible for marketing that brand, you’d have to be under a rock not to be aware of what’s going on with social media and data protection. I’m not talking about hacks in which data is stolen. I mean the willful use of your private data by these companies as part of their business model in ways that you never contemplated nor to which you explicitly agreed. I received an email the other day from the folks at Business Insider which contained some of the results of a study of confidence in social media companies’ ability to protect users’ data. The study was conducted among their “BI Insiders” (disclosure, I’m one of them) and the results aren’t great news for Facebook in particular:
Over half (56%) of Facebook users have zero confidence in the platform’s ability to protect their data and privacy. This was the lowest level of confidence of all platforms and highlights the uphill battle Facebook faces to regain the trust of its users. To be fair, users weren’t all that confident in the other platforms either, but the gap between Facebook and the others is significant — at least 18 percentage points from all other platforms. Meanwhile, LinkedIn came out on top for the second year in a row.
The problem for you is that your mom was right: you’re known by the company you keep, and if your brand is active on these services, your reputation is damaged as well. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer study...
Consumers are not forgiving when it comes to brand safety. About half of the survey’s respondents said that it was a brand’s own fault if its advertising appeared alongside hate speech or other inappropriate content online; 47 percent said that the points of view appearing near advertising and marketing are an indication of that brand’s own values.
This is what I found to be of great importance to any brand:
70 percent of digitally connected people around the world think brands need to pressure social media sites to do more about fake news and false information proliferating on their sites, and that 71 percent expect brands to pressure social media platforms to protect personal data.
In other words, if you’re keeping company with social media and they’re misbehaving, you need to exert the influence you have as a client and get them to change. Leave the platform if you must to get their attention – that’s what consumers are doing. If you don’t, you’re risking getting blamed for their bad behavior.
Consult Keith 