The Daily Mail Fail are at it again. For some reason they keep on going after social media with a news article every week describing some horror of shared data.
This time the article was titled: “How ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account: secret new software allows BT and other firms to trawl internet looking for disgruntled customers.”
Here’s the link
My first gripe with this article is the use of the term “secret software” to describe something that takes literally 2 minutes to do and doesn’t even require any software to be installed. Any company can keep track of their brand through a simple Twitter search, but things like Google alerts are also useful. Indeed, a Google search for the term “social media search” reveals site after site who provide exactly this service, and almost all of the time it’s free!
Secondly, social media is an excellent way of keeping tabs on the general feel of your brand online. I would absolutely expect all brands to track their own name on social media sites as the bare minimum of online presence. In my opinion, a company with a good PR department will proactively solve problems that their customers are having using this mechanism.
Think about it, how likely are you to buy from a company a second time if they sort out all of your problems for you on a personal level? The fact that you might have had trouble in the past becomes irrelevant when they turn around and are actually nice to you.
One important lesson the Daily Mail seems to forget time and time again is that *ALL* social media sites allow you to protect your updates from everyone. People have full control over who sees any content on these sites (yes, even on Facebook), so any content they put there is done with the full expectation and understanding that it will be read by someone else.
I really don’t see the problem here.