Author Archives: Lindsay Lewis
After nearly a year of engaging with my client’s beloved fans about the product that they all owned and “Liked”, the community had grown thrice over and evolved into just another dissonant group of Facebook users who really just “Like” to converse about themselves.
So how do I know they weren’t like that all along? Unlike the playground bully’s Mom, I have the metrics to back it up and went straight to our Marketing Science team for help. The whole situation felt like the beginning of a bad joke.
A scientist and a social media-ist walk into a room…
It didn’t quite end with the punch line I’d hope for but from what I was able to make of their findings, this was no joke. The product passion had fizzled and the community was a narcissistic nightmare.
To get a better grasp of the affect of our posts on the community over time, I examined similar page posts from each of the community’s life stages (5,000+ fans, 10,000+ fans, and 15,000+ thousands fans) spanning the last 8 months and did a little AB testing. Not the kind of AB testing done on websites but I compared post semantics. It must have been something I said.
Whether you seek to praise or offend a community, you’re going to have to go through a pronoun first so I took a look at how I was using or misusing them in my posts. Some examples of pronouns are I, you, me, we, it, us, and they; basically the most self-involved rhetoric in all the English language so it only made sense to start there.
What was once an experience extraordinarily distinctive, recommendation engines have fluidly become commonplace. Ironically, voices suggestively murmuring in your ear, “if you like that, you’re gonna love this!” seem far less perverse coming from a robot than a car salesman. In fact, that gentle nudge we once felt at the check-out counter can now be found on the sidelines of social networks like Facebook, whispering sweet “Likes” in your ear; putting the stumble in StumblUpon with links you’ll undoubtedly fall for- it’s turned browsing music into discovering new artists and compiling new playlists; it single-handedly puts the “con” in “conversion” and is questionably the most trusted “con” on the internet today.
While now a ubiquitous staple in our online experience, what time we once allotted to searching, we’ve re-appropriated to weighing options. What was once a matter of finding an answer is now a matter of finding the best answer for us; and what once felt like a process of executing functions is now a process of functional execution. Recommendation engines have quietly woven their way into every facet of the computing experience, as we know it.
Never have 9 years and yesterday collided so seamlessly as they do today- recalling the morning of September 11th, 2001. The story, first delivered publicly, was outlined by the words of news reporters, colored in by shaken witnesses and brought to life by cell phone, local surveillance, news, and citizen-owned camera footage. Live TV updates kept the nation on edge hour after consecutive hour, with replay after replay of the most obscene act of cruelty most of us had ever witnessed that close to home. We watched the stories cautiously retold and re-angled on the nightly news then again on morning shows and everything in between for months.
A year later, the memory of this day came vindicated in books, chronicled in documentaries, honored with memoirs and collectible debris, mail-order commemoratives, TV specials, cable network dramas, and internet exclusives. The destruction was cleared as we began to rebuild and the way we remembered 9/11 would dramatically change.
Taking shape on the same time line, the digital web began serving as an archive to all things 9/11. Web apps brought digital, broadcast, and social content together to retrace and relive attacks from the cockpits of hijacked planes, traffic control towers and inside of the towers themselves. Digital infographics and “Streaming Culture” gave victims, hijackers and Air Traffic Control a voice. The events of 9/11 were retold by conspiracy theorists on YouTube, digital tributes to victims and digitally animated 3D dissertations giving the quiet fall of Tower 7 a voice.
Lindsay Lewis | Critical Mass Chicago
The electro-bass voided, the rock and roll of the high-tide faded, the scene of holiday boaters and people dancing on boats for the sake of a three day weekend blurred into a distant background and suddenly my ears fell numb to all but the words “Finding these vulnerabilities, you can train a monkey to do it… But at the same time, hacking is about the path of least resistance. There’s no need to overly complicate things if a simple sequel injection can work.”
Those chilling words, spoken by Patrick Stoey, a key contributor to the Biggest Cyber Crime in History, were recanted in the June 10th issue of Rolling Stone. Albert Gonzalez, commonly hailed the “Capone” of Cyber Crime, enlisted Stoey and dozens of other hackers to execute some of the most sophisticated hacking heists of all time- targeting hundreds of high-profile companies like TJ Maxx, Barnes & Noble, and 7-11. The most pervasive of them all pirated the credit card numbers of over 130 million Heartland Payment Systems customers.
I put the magazine down for a minute to digest what I’d just read. As sympathetic for the victims as I naturally wanted to feel, my rationale classified both parties as naive. If a monkey had the brains to make off with hundreds of millions of credit cards and check out with millions in cash from a series of hacks that impacted an unquantifiable number of people, then “farming” money from 400 App Store Users seems like no-brainer to me.
Catching both stories simultaneously put a lens on the state of my own information security, pin-pointing it’s gaping holes and flimsy insulation and the more I sought to isolate my vulnerabilities, the more of myself the lens began to reveal. In a World boasting ease of access, we can quickly and efficiently maneuver into, out of, and between windows. So easily in fact, that we’ve begun treating them like the ones on our homes, leaving them open for a cool draft of cyber crime to circulate within and swiftly cash out. As the evolution of Web 2.0 has begun shaping the way we work, it has blindsidedly begun to shape the way we are.
Our everyday social behavior on Web 2.0 and mobile applications, can tell us a lot about our vulnerability to cyber crime because web applications and related technologies accounted for 82% of all security vulnerabilities on the web last year, according to a report released by Cenzic, a leader in web application security. More sobering than that, are the vulnerabilities themselves- Cyber Criminals not only capture our private data but our behavior as well. The top ten vulnerabilities on the web today fit seamlessly into the little things we do online everyday, living on the profiles of those we “add as a friend” but vaguely know at all, yet we trust to share our play-by-plays with and trust the info they share too. They patiently wade in the background of sidebar widgets on websites we trust enough to visit everyday. They hang out behind the buttons we so love… I mean “Like.” They dress themselves up as character limit-friendly little links and do all of the things we do on the websites we visit most
Using a scenario we commonly run into on Facebook as an example, the Flow Chart below demonstrates the ease of access a hacker has to execute the top ten types of attack mechanisms on the web today in one fell swoop.
