Showing posts with label Facebook Inc.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook Inc.. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

ProPublica's Lois Beckett on how politicians are presenting themselves to different audiences and whether they have a responsibility to tell people about the personal information they collect about them on Facebook, Google and other social media

http://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-win-facebook-friends-and-influence-people
ProPublica

How to Win Facebook Friends and Influence People

by Lois Beckett, ProPublica,  
March 13, 2012, 1:31 p.m.

Instead of picketing outside company headquarters, an advocacy group is using Facebook ads to try to influence people whose profiles identify them as employees of Freddie Mac or JPMorgan Chase.

The anti-foreclosure ad campaign, which launches today, asks Freddie and Chase employees to talk to their CEOs about a veteran -- a former Marine -- who's facing eviction in California.

"This is not any sort of attack on the employees there," said Jim Pugh of Rebuild the Dream, which is running the ad campaign. "We're trying to let them know what's happening."

The ad that targets Freddie Mac employees features a small picture of CEO Charles Haldeman's face, and the message, "Freddie Mac did what???? Freddie Mac is evicting a former Marine who's been trying to pay his mortgage. Tell CEO Haldeman to work out a fair deal with him!" according to a copy of the ad provided by Pugh.

The JPMorgan Chase ad is similar, but with a Chase logo instead of an executive's face.  

We've contacted Freddie Mac and JP Morgan Chase spokespeople for comment, and also reached out to Freddie Mac and JPMorgan Chase employees on Facebook. If you've seen one of these ads, please let us know.

 Targeted online advertising is nothing new. (As anyone who has changed their Facebook status to "engaged" can tell you, a simple update can bring a deluge of new ads.) But political campaigns and advocacy groups are increasingly adopting the same microtargeting tactics that companies use.  

Rick Perry's campaign, for instance, targeted faith-focused ads to people in Iowa who listed themselves as Christians on Facebook, and ads featuring his wife to the state's female conservatives, Politico reported.  

According to FEC data, Endorse Liberty, a super PAC that supports Ron Paul, has led the way on Facebook expenditures, spending a total of $241,508 through January 2012.

And it's not just Facebook and Google where campaigns and activists are doing microtargeting. The music site Pandora announced last year that it would be selling political ad space targeted to the zip codes of particular listeners, the Wall Street Journal reported.

There's nothing inherently problematic about targeted ads. Campaigns have been using direct mail to target particular voters for decades. Digital targeting can be a cost-effective way of spending advertising dollars, especially for smaller groups, like Rebuild the Dream, which sees the ads as a great way to get more bang for their buck in terms of reaching their intended audience. (The group also launched a special donation drive specifically for the Facebook ad buy.) ProPublica even used Facebook ads to try to find sources for our 2009 series, When Caregivers Harm.

But as the ability to use data to reach particular people grows more sophisticated, targeting risks crossing privacy lines, as demonstrated by a recent New York Times article on how Target knew a teenage customer was pregnant before her father did.

What's clear is that if all this microtargeting translates into electoral gains, the scale and sophistication of these efforts will continue to grow, and the data science that gained traction in 2008 will become a regular part of campaigning. In the meantime, the Obama campaign's already substantial data team continues to hire statistical modeling analysts and analytics engineers.

The increasing ease and flexibility of online targeting also raises new questions about how politicians are presenting themselves to different audiences, how much campaigns need to tell their supporters about the personal information they collect -- and what will happen to the massive databases of voter information collected during the 2012 presidential campaign. Will they be sold? Passed on to other politicians?

Rebuild the Dream, which focuses on economic issues, was launched by MoveOn.org in 2011, but has been independent since January, Pugh said. The group's president is former Obama green jobs adviser Van Jones.

Pugh worked on the Obama campaign's digital analytics team in 2008 while also trying to finish a Ph.D. dissertation in robotics, and later did similar work for the Democratic National Committee. He said he was not sure what kind of reaction the ads would receive.

"I would imagine that people are fairly used to targeted ads at this point," he said. But while people who work in politics and advocacy may be used to receiving Facebook ads targeting specific causes, "It's hard to know in advance how unusual it will seem to the employees of Freddie Mac and JP Morgan Chase."
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Reader comments at: http://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-win-facebook-friends-and-influence-people/single#comments

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Blogger.com's new Editor is dreadfully S-L-O-W -when it works, i.e why no posts here for 6 days; Google's Eric Schmidt on The Charlie Rose Show

I love Google but... Google's Blogger.com new Editor is dreadfully S-L-O-W -when it works. That's why there have been no posts in this space for the past six days.

I have gotten progressively more frustrated and in order to get information out, was forced to send some of the info out as emails with suggestions to forward it.
I hate doing that, plus it's much more time-consuming.

Every time I got into it and was staring at a blank box, my computer, using Mozilla Firefox, immediately begins to "hang" for minutes at a time, and that's after it takes forever to load.
I was constantly having to re-start my computer!!!
Much longer than the old Editor, which was/is positively breezy by comparison.


Friday night I watched the fascinating 32-minute interview with Google Inc. (GOOG) CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt on The Charlie Rose Show.
http://www.charlierose.com/

Interview at http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11217
Past
Schmidt interviews at http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1007

While I usually enjoy seeing Schmidt and other high-tech types on Charlie's show, along with certain authors and columnists, given what I have been dealing with for the past week, I couldn't help but watch a little more incredulously than usual...

(Cue dream sequence music...)


Given the overwhelming unpopular opinion and problems that bloggers all over the world have had with this new "improvement," I'd have happily agree to buy Charlie a coffee and a sandwich at his favorite Starbuck's in NYC if he simply had interrupted some of the more self-congratulatory chit-chat and asked Schmidt the following:

"It's said by many that the Blogger.com platform more than anything else helped usher in the blogging revolution, but it's hard not to notice the crescendo of criticism surrounding the introduction of your new "Editor" that is supposed to allow the customer to proof the post more accurately than ever, but yet is beset with all manner of functional problems that remain unsolved as of this taping, and reportedly, you even neglected to incorporate something as basic as a spell-checking widget function in the new version.
Tell me, why would Google introduce a new version of something important to writing a blog but
neglect to include a spell-checker?
Is this an example of Google NOT listening to your customers?"

Google's Eric Schmidt Talks to Charlie Rose

Google's CEO on the power of Facebook, the rivalry with Apple (where until recently he sat on the board), and trying to do the right thing in China

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_40/b4197039435964.htm

Can you PLEASE not get rid of the Old Editor?

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=734e63d2afe481b4&hl=en

New Editor gives "server error" when trying to upload images

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=452f0957bd0f7028&hl=en

See also the interviews on the topic of The Growth of Google with Michael Copeland , Chris Anderson and Jessica Vascellaro at
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11174