Louis Halpern's View

In an age where young people are connecting with their friends online every day, access to the internet and online communications services is no longer a privilege for the few that can afford it; it is now part of every young person’s daily life.

As CEO of a digital agency, and a parent myself, I’ve always been vocal about the need to educate not just our children, but also parents, and how youngsters can safely and sensibly make the most of the online world that is available to them.

Where adults have tended to be in the dark about what their kids do online, seeing it as risky and to some extent unproductive, young people have always been highly motivated to participate and engage with digital platforms. Unlike adults however, they’re not streetwise, they don’t understand the threats.

In order to get a picture of how UK parents’ perceptions to their children’s online activity, we commissioned the first ever Digital Literacy Report, launched today.

In the poll with research specialists YouGov, we were pleased to find that the majority of parents see a need to teach their children about how to conduct themselves online, and have demanded the Government introduce lessons to improve young people’s understanding of online privacy and the value of their personal reputation with 69 per cent of parents calling for compulsory lessons to be introduced as part of the national curriculum.

This in part is born of the fact that almost half (48%) of adults asked admitted they were worried that their children’s online actions will potentially harm their future chances of getting into a chosen university or landing a first job. Parents recognise that online comment or mistakes made by young people on sites such as Facebook, Bebo and YouTube will go on to impact their adult lives.

Unfortunately the report also showed there is a lack of control among parents over what exactly children are doing when they log onto the web. With more children accessing sites like Facebook through their mobile phones instead of family PCs, parents are struggling to stay on top of what their children do online, with 44 per cent conceding they don’t ever check the content their kids are accessing or what they are posting online.

If we do not proactively teach young people about the impact of their online activity how can they better protect and promote themselves? There needs to dialogue between parents and their children, as well as at school, where online socialising is recognised as a social and technical skill for contemporary society. Schools as well should be looking to ways to encourage children to use the online tools at their disposal in a positive way, such as setting homework that is based around hosting and reporting a group discussion online.

If we want to see a generation of digitally ‘literate’ adults emerge in years to come, it is our responsibility to ensure it.

Last night over dinner I was asked by a prominent friend of mine if he should let his kids go on Facebook. At first, this may not appear to be such a dilemma, but when he told me why he was concerned, it was easy to understand his reasons for being so cautious.

It’s an interesting dilemma. Children should be allowed explore the world whoever they are. However, I can also see that if you are a celebrity or a billionaire, then you have a different set of concerns to us mere mortals. My advice was:

• Encourage them to create an account
• Discuss if they are also on other services such as MySpace, Bebo, etc
• Really, really only accept friends they actually know
• Learn about the privacy settings
• Set the privacy settings to the maximum
• Think very carefully about the picture you put on your profile

Encourage them to create an account

You wouldn’t want them to be cut off from the rest of their real world friends. If you exclude them from these places then you are socially inhibiting them. Remember kids wonder how we ever managed to arrange to have a life before we had instant messaging, social networks, etc.

Discuss if they are also on other services

Most adults are aware of Facebook. A lot of grown-ups are on Twitter too. Well I have some news for those who are not in the digital communications business: there are lots of other social networking websites that your kids could and probably will want to use. The same sets of principles apply to these places too.

Really, really only accept friends they actually know

We all have acquaintances. Facebook encourages one to rate oneself by how many people are our friends. This blurs the boundaries. Quite rightly I was asked at dinner for this piece of reputation management advice because of the risk of acquaintances not being friends in anyway.

I advised that the real discussion my high profile friend should have with his kids is what is a friend? Whose house do they go to? Who comes to their house? And lots of similar questions – these are are criteria for accepting people as friends for this group (and perhaps everybody else).    If you want to be a bit extreme then tell the kids not to accept any inbound request, but my view is that we’re establishing some rules about being streetwise, which frankly, everybody needs to be.   Establish this and remember because of their unique concerns it is not rude to unfriend people too.

Privacy Settings

For these Celeb kids I think that the privacy and profile settings should be set to only “friends”. It’s no fun if your friends can’t see your pictures, posts, etc, but at the risk of being boring I’ll repeat myself – only accept those people as friends who are really your friends.

These guys have very valid security concerns, so one thing that’s very important is to monitor what other people are saying about them. The notifications settings are a very useful for this on Facebook in particular. My advice was to make sure that every time my friend’s kids are tagged they get an alert. They may even want to explain to their friend that they don’t want to be tagged as they have unusual concerns about their privacy. You can also limit who sees your pictures in the settings, that should be thought about too.

And the picture

In the case of my friend he’s not as paranoid as Michael Jackson, putting blankets over his kids’ faces when appearing in public. But there is still a desire in this case to limit the kids’ exposure, so obviously you should use the privacy settings so that only friends can see your picture and your profile can’t be found in searches. My advice is to be cautious here too. All your friends can see your picture and whilst they know what you look like, why not remove the temptation to cut and paste.

Each email an organisation sends to its’ customers forms part of that brand’s reputation; not just those thought of as email marketing. What does the customer think about the email confirming a purchase? How about the emails answering questions post purchase? Do organisations even think of these as part of their brand building?

Organisations know their email marketing is operationally important, particularly to drive sales in this difficult economic climate. Yet only 23% of the respondents could calculate the value of an email address to an organisation. How do they make a return on investment argument within their company for email marketing?

They report on the Open and Click rates. These are the most common measures of success rather than being able to calculate the value of an email address.

Their emphasis should be on integrating email campaigns with other channels. Those marketers who have tried this approach showed improvements across all channels. These can range from customer acquisition channels, like search engine marketing, to encouraging advocacy with loyalty. Add some good use of metrics and segmentation techniques to the mix then marketing performance can go through the roof.

The integrated approach would also improve a brand’s reputation just by bringing a consistent message into the mix. The better a brand’s reputation the higher the open and click through rate from email marketing. So it’s amazing that only just over a third of marketers rate sender reputation as the most important factor in deliverability.

Other interesting conclusions of the report are:

1. 70% of marketers expect expenditure on email to increase over the next 12 months coming at the expense of other channels, notably direct mail and print/press advertising

2. The most popular email tactic is the regular e-newsletter (used by 78% of marketers)

3. There is still much room for improvement, though, the use of: welcome messages, win-back campaigns and advanced trigger emails

4. Less than half of marketers have a strategy concerning maximum email contact frequencies

5. 12% do not know how many emails an address could potentially receive each month. Given that people regard “too many emails” as a reason for reporting messages as spam, this is a weakness that needs addressing

6. Amazingly only 27% of marketers segment their lists into six or more different audiences.

7. Marketers are removing inactive addresses from their lists without first conducting a dedicated reactivation campaign.

8. Almost 40% of marketers do not offer website traffic a way of signing up for emails, representing a huge missed opportunity.

Data from UK DMA’s 2009 Client Email marketing survey results (dmcommission.com) thanks to Samantha Binns for sending me the report.

What an employee posts online, even in a personal guise, can have direct implications for their employer. This is a problem that we’ve seen before, from naked policeman in public sector organisations like The Met to offensive retail staff in Currys and PC World, and it’s a problem we can expect to see time and time again unless businesses start taking a proactive approach to educating their employees about online literacy.

Following the sacking of naked bobby Malcolm Thomas, a senior Met source said on the incidence that: “Firearms officers must behave impeccably in their professional and personal life. They cannot lay themselves open to blackmail or disclose information that could put them or their colleagues at risk. Armed officers keep surveillance on terrorists and serious criminal suspects. It is not appropriate that their most personal details should be open for anyone to view.”

Employers need to be proactive in ensuring that their workforce understands the impact of their online activity not just for them, but for the wider business. To make social media work for a company, employers must:

• Discuss it; social media is about engagement so talk about it
• Introduce social media standards as part of a company code of conduct. whilst giving individuals room to communicate their ideas
• Train key members of staff as social media Tsars (perhaps with some younger staff who understand the digital landscape)
• Provide training as part of annual and introductory reviews for all staff
• Set up official social media accounts across the major platforms

Have a beef with someone? Why it’s time to wise up on Wikipedia

Wiki-bullying is at the top of the news agenda following the revelation that the Tower of London has suspended two beefeaters as part of a harassment investigation of its first female Yeoman Moira Cameron, with resulting implications for the legal system that will directly affect cases brought to court.

Wiki-bullying could result in criminal convictions that see the bullies responsible put behind bars. With direct legal consequences as a result of an individual’s online actions, internet users need to think before they edit what the ramifications of their conduct may be.

There are now legal implications for anyone posting inappropriate content to sites such as Wikipedia, as Scotland Yard yesterday demonstrated when they confirmed that a “56-year-old man received a caution under the Communications Act 2003 on Tuesday October 20 following an investigation by officers from Tower Hamlets. It related to inappropriate use of the internet.” We can expect to see this trend continue and the internet remain at the heart of future harassment, slander and other criminal cases that affect personal reputation.

I happen to agree that bullies should be properly punished for their actions, regardless of whether its online or offline. However, this story just goes to show the increasing importance of online reputation, and why we all must be more proactive in monitoring our online presence.

If internet users are more literate digitally they will be better equipped to protect themselves online. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. In an internet age, personal brands are never off limits and are always available to see.”

Employers and government alike need to be doing more to improve people’s understanding as to the implications of the internet and they can be profiled on it, helping them to take control of their reputation online. The most important considerations for individuals remain:

• Be proactive – Check your profiles online regularly and ensure the content on it is positioning you in a way you want to be positioned
• Have an online base – Create a personal home page (blog or even a basic website) and set up official social media accounts across the major platforms that link into that base, making sure the content across all of them is accurate and true
• Report inaccuracy – If someone has posted untrue or slanderous comment about you to an online site, contact the service’s administrators and encourage your circle of influence to post comment supporting your position