The Tiger Woods saga continues. And though I have had fun (like this) at his and Accenture’s expense, the entire series of events did make me wonder again on endorsements, especially after Accenture dropped Woods. The topic of endorsements is something I have written about earlier too – of how blogging/tweeting ambassadors would react to uncomfortable questions about their brands (Big B – Cadbury’s worms), and the effect of celebrity micro-bloggers even on brands they don’t endorse. But this is on a slightly different note.
“As perhaps the world’s ultimate symbol of high performance, he serves as a metaphor for our commitment to helping companies become high-performance businesses.”, the Accenture site had said earlier. Like we discussed on Twitter, a lot of the audience are not just fans of a celebrity’s attributes, but even assume that he is equally good or flawless in every other facet of his life/character too. Its perhaps a wrong expectation, not just from the audience, but from brands too. (high performance on the course) Lack of context.
That brings me to the subject of the connections we make on social sites, most notably Twitter, because (for me) only a small percentage of following/followers are made of people who we knew from before. The connections, while they may evolve into relationships later, are built on trust, developed over time and actions, and in my case have a contextual nature to it too. I rely on specific people for expertise on specific matters. I am guessing many others do too, many Twitter lists are a manifestation of that. The recommendation economy, consumer ambassadors, and micro ambassadors posts I have written earlier are variations of the same premise of trust.
When I look at entities like newspapers, which were built on a trust model, I wonder how the newly formed trust relationships will shape up. Newspapers and later other platforms owned the power of dissemination..distribution. The net disrupted that. In the age of unlimited content and trust agents, the new networks start playing crucial roles in trust relationships. And that is why, the ‘url shortener’ war that is in its early stages now – Facebook, Google, bit.ly interests me. Reach, trust and context. Who will you trust all your data with? How much of data mining can be done with the links we share and consume, and how much context can be gleaned from it? Which network gives you the maximum reach? While FB and Google can integrate with their own networks, bit.ly is Twitter’s default shortener, and for now, it is doing things to maintain its lead.
And its not just this. These days I’m seeing more and more manifestations of power play around me – among people, organisations, communities. When Twitter plans to add ‘contributors’ to business accounts, and allow multiple users to be identified in a single handle, it means that the different people will have different levels of trust from their audience, it would also allow context. But when Marissa Mayer describes Google as “omnivorous” in its quest for indexing data, and when Facebook changes its privacy stance, I wonder whether a trust economy built among individuals and relying on networks for the reach, will get overshadowed by the networks themselves, and the way they use our data.
Tiger Woods might have been used by advertisers out of context with his permission. With unlimited data on you and fuzzy privacy settings, will you, without your knowledge, become a micro ambassador for something you have no expertise in, and thereby erode your trustworthiness? Silicon India profiles, Facebook Ads stating X friend has used an application, random RTs…..Paranoid? perhaps, but then, we share so much online, that maybe I can justify it. 🙂
until next time, deprived of privacy