The saga of the “Dickileaks” affair now being played out in Australia where the Nude Photos of Australian Football Stars posted by a Teenage Girl have gone viral provides yet more insight into the problems of managing reputations in a SoMe world and just who difficult it is for our established political and legal institutions to cope with SoMe. As the League, the Club and Players struggle to contain the fall out the unfolding tragedy continues today in the Federal Court with the Teenager promising to release 5 new pictures today and the news the Girl has now received death threats.
This is what the emerging business of reputation management is really all about. Damage control at worst. Preemptive strike at best.
Sadly these very public SoMe sagas (e.g. Lara Bingle and Shane Warne) are now becoming the morality tales of our times.
As this presentation on Social Media and Young Adults from the Pew Research Center demonstrates the problem is wide-spread amongst the younger generation. In this presentation you will see on slides 13-17 that % American Teenagers have used their mobile phone to send explicit images or videos of themselves to others. You will also note the figure increases as the Teenagers get older. For example slide 15 suggests that 30% of 17 years have received explicit images or videos.
These stats are supported by an earlier study conducted in 2008 by The National Campaign for Unwanted Pregnancy in the US [PDF].
Not surprisingly Pew has also discovered that Online Reputation Management has now become a full-time job, especially for the young .
“Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many internet users, especially the young. While some internet users are careful to project themselves online in a way that suits specific audiences, other internet users embrace an open approach to sharing information about themselves and do not take steps to restrict what they share” – Mary Madden Pew Internet
That’s because SoMe is fundamentally changing the way a generation of consumers under the age of 30 are interacting with the Internet.
This graphic displays the long wave of social media as it rolled through 2007. What it shows us is the percentage of people online involved in Social Media activities like Twitter, Facebook and Blogging across the various age groups from Teenagers to Retirement. More granular detail is available in this article from BusinessWeek: What people are doing with the web.
“Today we have a whole new generation of emerging consumers who are not only happy to embrace “FaceTime” they invite the world to witness their most private and intimate moments.” – Has Apple stolen Facebook’s future with the launch of FaceTime?
Today the anarchy that is being inflicted on the reputations of Brands and People by SoMe seems far removed from the post modern world of D.I.Y Branding celebrated so enthusiastically by Tom Peters in his 1997 article for Fast Company on A Brand Called You.
Here was a brave new world of Me.Inc where everyone could build a public Brand because the internet made it so easy. Push the fast forward button a decade or more and we discover here is a world where personal brands are trashed on a daily basis simply by the click of a mouse or mobile phone.
When George Orwell wrote 1984 back in 1949 his ideas for the future were based on the centralised media platforms of his day. Thanks to the decentralised media platforms of our day and the emergence of platforms like Wikileaks it isn’t the Government and the corporate news services we have to be worried about. Increasingly we have to worry about each other. Because today everyone is in the mass media business.
Posted on December 23, 2010
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