Beware the BCC: Copying Can Make Us All Blind

Assuming E-mail is the original social network, this Web 1.0 tool continues to have a large role in how we communicate and share ideas. With the exception of the clear GMail/Buzz integration or the recent Outlook/LinkedIn tie-up, for the most part, e-mail has not been dramatically revamped to take advantage of today's faster-moving, highly featured social networks. But despite e-mail's longevity, some basic attributes of the form continue to cause trouble between contacts who haven't mastered their core functionality. One of the most troublesome, the infrequently used, but often abused, BCC.

With BCC, the recipient doesn't know all who got the message.

As you no doubt know, BCC stands for "Blind Carbon Copy", providing a way to send e-mails to people without revealing their e-mail addresses. This can be an aid for mass mailings without exposure, but also used to be sure an individual gets a note without the direct recipient's knowledge.

For every blow-up around poorly-trained marketeers who copy their entire customer base, or PR flacks who display all the intended reporters by dumping their contacts database in the TO or CC field, you have quieter mistakes that happen when the intended recipient who thought they were having a private conversation sees a third party jump into the discussion without warning. As the intended public recipient sees the third party elbow their way into the conversation, they may lose trust in the original sender, and wonder what other messages were being shared.

Often, those BCC'd blow the cover of the messages' routing.

Some e-mail clients (such as a BlackBerry) will automatically make it clear to the recipient that they were BCC'd on a conversation, which hints they should not reply all. But not all people are as discerning and recognize their role in the world of BCC to be a silent observer. I know that when I get a BCC message that any reply I provide goes to the originator and not to the others in the thread.

Given my goal to be public about communication, my own use of BCC is extremely infrequent. Due to the potential issues that can arise as trust is perceived to be broken, I tend to follow up a BCC note to the individual saying "You were BCC'd. Make sure not to reply."

If you are someone who tends to BCC individuals as a normal course of business, I have no doubts that you can get caught by this process. Not all recipients watch the To and CC fields closely, and they may expose your willingness to overshare. With so many other ways to have private conversations 1-1, and the ease of which forwarding prior conversations via e-mail can occur, it makes sense to get above board, and preserve the BCC option for simply obscuring mass mailings.

Can We Live In Private and Demand Companies Be Open?

The growth of social services enables us to share an ever-increasing granularity of our lives with complete strangers who opt in to sample our updates. From traditional blogging to Twitter to location sharing services, and now, Blippy (which displays my purchases online and lets me follow others' spending habits), I can live my life open and transparent, letting you know what I like, what I do, where I go, and how I spend my time. In parallel, we are also asking businesses to be more open. Thanks to SEC regulations and Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as best practices, we expect public companies to tell us how much money they have, how much profit they made, where they made that money, how many employees they have, how much they intend to make next quarter, and a blizzard of other things that fall under the guise of information.

Now, we're even asking some companies to open up their kimono and blog themselves, to respond on a personal level with Twitter and other social networks, or open source their code, and let us know who their investors and partners are, lest we find they may have some bias. So yes, it's easy to see that open, open, open, is the word of the day.

This Week's Target: Facebook

Looking at these trends, it seems clear to me that the overriding move in both personal and business is to remove barriers and enable more visibility into activity. Yet, there are still pockets on the Web who see the data they share as needing to be under lock and key. The most recent kerfuffle was flamed by the often independent Marshall Kirkpatrick, who slammed Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg for moving the once-closed social network toward increased openness, and reduction of what he termed "privacy". While others, notably TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, thought that argument to be overblown, Kirkpatrick followed that post with another line of questioning, asking how we would react if, for example, Google revealed our contacts in GMail and our subscriptions in Google Reader.

In the non-connected life, one was always taught that there were a few things one does not ask about in polite company - including politics, one's salary, and sex. Yet, the Web has made finding out most of those things very obvious for public members of society. We know what the vice presidents of many companies make, and we know the dollar amounts on contracts. We can do searches online and discover what political parties people are registered to, and where they put their money in the last elections and fundraising cycles.

Forget Location. Who Have You Slept With?

Although I was only joking, somewhat, I suggested to a friend this week that a new social networking service should be introduced that updates your stream with your sexual partners, and encounters, complete with their partner history and total number of partners. Given some's willingness to post all their data online, and the rising casual nature of some behavior, this isn't so far out of reach to be completely ridiculous. Just think of what message that would send if you were the "mayor" of multiple places on that particular network?

Yet, before that level of debauchery occurs, we still have to recognize that the trend Zuckerberg and his team are recognizing is true. The first rule of sharing things online is to expect that they will be discoverable by search engines and viewable by anyone. Even the closed, secure, password-only sites are usually potential victims for copy/paste, and are always susceptible to screenshots.

From Anonymous to Open. We're Getting There.

I understand the Internet's roots require a level of privacy, and you see many people still clinging to the antiquated hope of anonymity, assuming one can hide behind a user name and avatar to mask their true identity. I understand the concerns some have that the more data which is shared online makes them more vulnerable offline. But I am seeing prominent people talk out of both sides of their mouth when they claim to push companies to get more open and more transparent, while at the same time, clinging to the hope that we can push our content into a safe place on the Web and consider it "private".

During the week's discussions around Facebook and privacy, Marshall had some solid points, in his comments on TechCrunch, saying that people were joining groups and "fan pages" on the social network that had to deal with sensitive personal issues, such as infertility or friends of same-sex couples. His concern was that this data would be surfaced and revealed in a way that was not desired. In a week of drum-banging and emotion, I thought those examples to be the most reasoned. It makes sense, then, that sites like Facebook make the ability to hide certain affiliations from public view if so desired. If I chose to sign up and follow Fox News, and not want my left-leaning friends on Facebook to know, then I should have that option to hide the details from my page. But to fight against the tide of open in our own lives while demanding the tide of open be ever loosened when it comes to the companies we engage with seems bizarrely silly. Let's pick one and stick with it. If you don't trust the companies, then why should we trust you? What are you hiding?

Of note, and I mentioned this in comments to ReadWriteWeb, the notion of Facebook data being private is in itself the exception rather than the rule. You can see my Twitter stream and who I follow or don't, just as you can with FriendFeed and other networks. I have chosen to share my Google Reader feeds with you on Toluu and encourage others to do the same. The world is trending open and transparent, and you can embrace that or you can fight until you are blue in the face. But choose a side.

The Era of the Faceless Giant Corporation Is Over

It wasn't all that long ago when the names of companies were more likely to make me think of unfeeling skyscrapers reaching toward the heavens with their steel and glass than I was to think of the people inside who made the brand stand for something, and architected the products to make them do what they do. But the last decade's increased potential for transparency and public visibility of company employees and leadership, culminating in some's active use of social media has made many of these previously faceless giants - Google, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Amazon... human. And this transformation adds a clear expansion of loyalty between these previously untrusted, unseen companies, and their customers - as those who see the companies as a collection of humans not so much as cogs in a massive machine, but instead as peers.

While many a blog post or Twitter stream has sounded out a screed against a company or a product, I am now more cautious than ever to avoid emotional critical rants against companies and brands I feel may have done me wrong. Some of this is due to the increased transparency of said companies - and no doubt a good amount of it has been my lucky position to gain access to some of the most respected brands in the business, to meet the people who make the decisions and see each day as a challenge with aims to shared goals, just like we do.

In March of 2006, I wrote a post titled "Giving Microsoft a Human Face", highlighting the work of the secretive "Mini-Microsoft", saying the blog helped provide "a clear view into the struggles and triumphs and wishes that are true in any corporation", be it Microsoft or a small business. I was similarly impressed with Robert Scoble's work while he was at Microsoft, and blogs from tech leaders like Jonathan Schwartz at Sun. Two years later, I admitted to you that I have a bias in favor of small companies, and am less likely to give the big ones a pass. But as time passes, I am seeing even the biggest companies as a collection of small units. And the more engaged they are in the blogosphere, or on Twitter, the easier it is to reach them for product feedback and customer service, the more the image of the skyscraper melts away.

In the 2008 post, I used the example of Google as a company big enough that I could still shake my fist in the event of bumps. I said, "The big guys are held to higher standards, and always will be. It comes with the territory." But even in the last eighteen or so months, Google to me has changed. Through interactions with many on the Google Reader team, discussions with Matt Cutts, and getting to know Rick Klau on the Blogger team, Google seems just as accessible as any other corporation, despite its large size.

On Friday, I spent three hours at Google headquarters in Mountain View, working face to face with Rick and a pair of skilled Google engineers, working on making changes to my blog. Though the front end should not have changed in appearance, you can see that posts now display as coming from blog.louisgray.com instead of www.louisgray.com/live as they did before. While the URLs have changed, so too has the hosting. I've been hosted on FTP for four years, and made the big move yesterday, while aiming to avoid any issues. Rick, seeing me as a good test case for an established blog with more than 2,000 posts, wanted to see if we could find any hiccups that could possibly befall other Blogger users in the same scenario. And despite the fact I was in one of the world's most tech-savvy corporations, we definitely ran into issues. Some were possibly my fault. Others were probably due to my old Web host, Register.com. But we worked as a team, and finally got it all figured out, a little behind schedule.

Google (and Rick specifically) didn't owe me any special hands-on effort. In the old way of customer service, companies tend to just post guidelines on the Web, and should you not have all running perfectly, it's either your fault outright, or you need to be hand held with customer support. But the new era of customer service, marketing and sales is transparent and personal - and this should go for every company, big and small.

Before I get any comments saying that Google reached out to me because I'm "A-List" (I'm not) or anything of that note, trust me, I know I was lucky, and I let Rick and his team know I appreciated their elite intervention. I try to provide Google and all other services I work with a good amount of customer feedback, and yesterday was as much about that as it was them providing me aid.

I look at the technology space, and for the most part, companies have made that transition from closed to open, from inert to living. I believe that many other industries could serve to improve and open up. After all, who is the public face of a company like GE? Fisher Price? McDonalds? These companies that would probably sit immobile in the face of a hate-filled rant still look like buildings to me. And I believe that they too will open up. The era of being dark and hidden and untrusted is over.

FTC Disclosure: Google let me eat lunch at their place for free yesterday. It was yummy.

Being Transparent is Fine, But Please Use Smart Filtering

The current generation of Web users is sharing more than ever online - in ways my parent's generation would visibly flinch over. They are sharing their locations, their relationships, their personal photos, and their thoughts in real time. They are posting their updates to Facebook, to Twitter, and to MySpace, as they move toward being ever more transparent. On another level, personal brands are being built with transparency as the foundation, as they share personal photos, their music preferences, family news, and a constant stream of comments and observations on the world. And in parallel, companies are being pushed by an army of self-appointed social media experts to become more open and transparent themselves. But as with every new approach, there's a right way and a wrong way to do things.

Steven Hodson of WinExtra tonight questioned, "Just what is all this transparency getting us anyway?" Meanwhile, Silicon Valley gossip rag, Gawker, knocks transparency so often that it has its own tag. (See here)

At the SXSW conference last week, I sat down with Michael Sean Wright of Nice Fish Films for a 30-45 minute interview, streamed live on Ustream. During that interview, Michael commended me for being transparent. To paraphrase his comments, he said that not only was I blogging, but I was frequently sharing pictures of my kids, showing what music I was listening to on Last.fm, and making comments on blogs big and small across the Web.

But here's the thing. While I do intend to be transparent and share with you what I'm thinking, or what factors are in play when I say what I do, or where I might have bias, I am sharing only a subset of everything I do. I have intentionally filtered out information about my personal life and work life which I decided wouldn't add value to you, or wouldn't add value for me to share. For as much as I may be "putting everything out there", you're not seeing much from my hours at the office. You're not getting live tweets from me during church meetings, and you're not getting the minutiae of the day - from what television I'm watching, where I'm driving, or what my wife and I are discussing - even when it's tempting to quote her out of context and send it to Twitter.

The net result is that everything I share with you is intended to add value - either to you where you can learn something for yourself or about me, or to me, where it might further enhance this theoretical term so many people are calling "a personal brand". To say what I share with you is calculated might be overdoing it, but I am very cognizant of how what I am doing or saying is potentially interpreted downstream. I am hyperaware of how when I update something on FriendFeed, that it may also flow to Twitter or Facebook. I know that when I make a comment on Disqus, it is searchable by Google, and by BackType, and copied to FriendFeed. I know when I hit share on Google Reader, that it represents my endorsement of that content or find it interesting, and see the result shared to Socialmedian or other aggregation services.

If you want to be transparent, and build a personal brand you are proud of, you must always be thinking about filtering what gets into your stream, and how it could benefit you and your audience. Even for as much as I share photos of Matthew and Sarah, it's a subset of all those we have, and I try not to overabuse the privilege on the social networks where we participate. Even though I share songs I love listening to on Last.fm, I don't hit that button too frequently. Even though I have made nearly 2,000 updates to Twitter in just over a year's time, I am conscious of not overdoing it, impacting my followers, and confusing them in terms of what I stand for.

Earlier this week, Hutch Carpenter showed us how you can tweet your way out of a job by not thinking about how being transparent can negatively affect you. Similarly, ValleyWag uncovered photos that one tech employee chose to share with the world from his Honeymoon that would make you blush. In each case, the transgressor's transparency had not been filtered in such a way that benefitted them - but stepped well beyond the line of what's intelligent. But it shouldn't take a big mistake that costs you a job or your privacy to make you think about how transparency is possibly hurting you. Choose your filters, and you can mold the way you are interpreted into something you are proud of.