The outrage over the privacy violations in Google Buzz reportedly took the company aback: tested internally at Google, the employees apparently loved it and assumed the general public would too. That was not the case. Buzz, when it was first released, connected people to those with whom they had been emailing the most - whether they opted for it or not.
Furthermore the network was transparent, meaning that contacts could see who else was in the network. Google received more than 9,000 angry comments, a complaint filed at the FTC by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and most recently, a suit filed at a the San Jose federal court seeking class action status to pursue the privacy violations alleged in Buzz.
Google has since tweaked its privacy settings. The outrage generated over it, though, is prompting some in the industry to wonder if a tipping point - of consumer fatigue - is nearing for social networking.
Microsoft announced its own iteration of social networking this week - the Outlook Social Connecter with a link to LinkedID. The company has inked deals with Facebook and MySpace for similar integrations later this year. Microsoft is taking a similar tact, integrating Outlook - another email client - to social networks. But as it hastened to explain in its blog post, there are strict privacy settings to the application.
The Limitations
Still, though, the number of social networking applications and networks is becoming mind numbing, Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence tells MarketingVOX. "It is almost becoming a parody - every company has to have its finger in this space. For people who follow tech - including marketers - such developments are intriguing to follow. But what about average people who don't have all day to devote to following such issues? I would suspect a lot of this is white noise to them."
Social networking is hardly about to become obsolete, Sterling says. But increasingly, more people are becoming aware of its limitations. A recent survey by Edelman found that 75% of consumers don’t believe their peers will give them good advice or information about a company. Last year that number was 55%.
Legal Issues
There also potential legal issues that need to be considered by companies as they use social networks, Recommind VP and general counsel Craig Carpenter tells MarketingVOX. “Many professionals have come to rely on the stream of instant updates they receive from social media applications like LinkedIn and Facebook. The risk is that many people have a habit of blurring their business and personal lives when they use social media."
Applications like the Outlook social media connector will pull these updates onto the company’s servers, where they obliterate the line between "personal" and "business", potentially making far more information discoverable in litigation, Carpenter says. "Social media applications are powerful tools for business, but companies using the Outlook social media connector need to weigh the potential risks, and to regularly cull unnecessary data from their archives."
