Archives for category: Uncategorized

Recently a friend of mine came across a deceased ex-colleague on his LinkedIn account and it got me thinking about what happens to our digital footprint once we are gone and how we can make sure the accounts are shutdown or the personal data and assets within them passed on to our nearest and dearest.

Trawling through the major social media platforms they all seem to share the same view point, that is they won’t allow access to the account or give out passwords or transfer any of the content to the next of kin but accounts can be deactivated.

To deactivate accounts there are different levels of procedures depending on the company. For example LinkedIn allows any user to complete a Verification of Death form which when completed and verified shuts down their account.

Twitter’s process is more complicated, asking for the twitter account name, a copy of the death certificate, a signed statement and a drivers license of the person requesting the deletion to prove that they are a relation. For such a modern platform they strangely insist on you either faxing or mailing the documents.

Facebook like the above won’t provide login information but you can, once verified, either request the removal of the account but you have to provide the deceased’s birth and death certificate and proof that you are the lawful representative of the estate, or you can allow them to memorialise the account, this means that no one can log into the account and depending on their privacy settings it will allow friends to post messages to the timeline.

But what about the assets that have been uploaded? Most people will have amassed a considerable amount of photos during their lifetime online, how do you get hold of these?

Unfortunately the law doesn’t seem to have caught up with modern life yet so ownership of digital content is still a grey area with most providers not allowing it to passed on to your relatives. A high profile example of this is Bruce Willis’ campaign to pass his iTunes collection on to his daughters.

If your digital life is important to you it only seems sensible to include your wishes in your Will this should include your current passwords. Or there are companies out there like Legacy Locker that provide a secure repository for your digital content and allow access in the event of your death.

Either way it is clear, if you care about your digital assets you should plan and spell out in legal documentation what you want done after you have gone, otherwise your digital ghost could come back to haunt your nearest and dearest when they least expect it.

Categories Uncategorized

Instagram – Don’t believe the hype

December 23, 2012 //

By Stephen Fairweather

As everyone is aware, this has been a bad week for Instagram, it all started earlier in the week when they changed their terms of service without notifying its users. The rewritten rules gave them ‘perpetual’ rights to use any photo you took via the service in advertising without consultation or compensation.

Now my life is pretty boring, I work long hours and outside of work I have one major interest, my family. Thus my Instagram account was full of pictures of them especially my 5 year old daughter. Reading the news I reacted angrily and decided to close my account and urged others to do the same.

But the whole fiasco led me to think how naive we are as consumers in the social media space on who or what owns our content. Like never before we publicly display all sorts of personal information we wouldn’t dream of publishing in any other format and this private data is what makes Google and Facebook so profitable. I mean we all know companies like Google and Facebook make their money by recording and mining huge amounts of private data, and selling this on to third parties, mainly advertisers.

And these social media platforms have the power to change the rules whenever they want. As Michael Taggart wrote back in April 2011 you don’t own your Facebook page, Facebook does and can decide to delete it or change the rules whenever it feels like it. The only thing stopping them is the threat of losing vast amount of customers thus losing their precious data.

Facebook continually tests the waters with new iterations of its platform and its terms of service to see how accepting users are, and they don’t exactly publicise it either, so this week shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise.

Because of the huge wave of negative reaction and publicity, Instagram have apparently retracted the newly written terms and rolled back to the terms from 2010. All good you say. I think not. According to Digital Times, the terms from 2010 still include the rights to use your photos in advertising without your permission. So don’t believe the hype.

Tags facebook, instagram, social media

Categories Uncategorized

That was the week that was

November 28, 2012 //

By Stephen Fairweather

It has been an interesting few weeks with social media hitting the headlines on a number of occasions.

There was the case of Oprah Winfrey tweeting her love for the new Microsoft tablet Surface stating she liked it so much she was going to buy a dozen to hand out as Christmas presents to her closest friends and family but alas the tweet was found to have been sent from her iPad. Oprah and Microsoft own goal me thinks.

Then there was the expose from The Guardian that found out that Wonga employees had set up anonymous Twitter accounts to attack MP Stella Creasy calling her ‘mental’ and ‘nuts’ because of her campaign against the firm and the payday loans market. Wonga since has had to publicly apologise and promote a debt advice clinic in Creasy’s own constituency of Walthamstow. Another own goal.

There was also the case of Adrian Smith, a Christian who worked as a manager for Trafford Housing Trust (TNT). In February 2011, outside of work hours, Adrian posted a link on his Facebook page to a BBC website article entitled ‘Gay church marriages get go ahead’, with this comment ‘An equality too far’. In reply some colleagues asked him to explain himself which in reply he posted ‘I don’t understand why people who have no faith and don’t believe in Christ would want to get hitched in church.’

These comments that were not visible to the general public were enough in his employer’s mind to demote him from his managerial role, cut his salary by 40% and give him a final written warning.

Smith subsequently took TNT to court and won his case against breach of contract and was awarded a measly £100.

Whatever you think of Mr Smith’s comments they weren’t hostile or abusive and not open for all to view. They don’t fall into the same category as the Wonga tweets or the many trolls and abusive users that sometime frequent these platforms.

This case neatly illustrates the problems organisations have in understanding social media and how they should deal with it. For sure all companies should have a social media policy, which actually TNT did seem to have, but it clearly wasn’t descriptive or detailed enough for them to make the wrong judgement.

All employee’s need to know the boundaries that their employer places on their social media communications if not than the company has no excuse when someone strays over the line. In fact it should be part of every new employee’s induction programme.

But it’s not just your current employers that care about your social media footprint but also future employers. You are very naïve if you think that companies or the recruitment companies they employ won’t use social media to research your background before they decide to employ you.

So don’t post anything on your Facebook page or any platform that you wouldn’t want a potential employee to see, it’s just not worth it.

Tags social media

Categories Social Media, Uncategorized

Evolution of a brand

February 10, 2012 //

By Stephen Fairweather

ev•o•lu•tion – a process of gradual, peaceful, progressive change or development.

There are a number of global companies that over a period of decades have evolved their branding to keep them looking fresh and current while retaining their core values.

Look at BP, which radically changed its logo in 2000 from the shield to a sunburst of yellow and green. The original shield logo was a result of an in-house competition, won by a Mr Saunders in the purchasing department. It took BP 10 years to nail down what colours should be used.

Shell is another good example. In 1900 it initially used a black and white mussel shell, which changed just four years later to an equally monochrome scallop shell. It wasn’t until 1948 that the company started using the colours we recognise today. You can read the history of the logo here; it makes interesting reading.

One of my first jobs when I joined Castle Trust in April 2011 was to introduce a brand and just like BP’s it’s still evolving.

After both internal and external research, we had some keywords to guide a branding agency. They contained words such as innovative, fair, supportive, easy to understand, smart, bold, reliable, professional, risk-averse, trustworthy and transparent.

The results you can see on the Castle Trust website and literature is just the start of the journey.

But there’s a difference between branding and brand. In today’s society there has to be an acknowledgement that a company can’t completely control its brand. The branding elements we can control (logos, colours, typefaces), but in the digital era the actual brand will be defined by consumer experience and the connected masses. That’s why we are committed to living up to the keywords above otherwise the brand will never live up to the promise of the branding.

As a start-up, we have a number of milestones still to come, for example authorisation by the FSA, and just like BP and Shell, the branding and brand will evolve along with these achievements.

As you can probably tell from the above, I’m passionate not only about branding but also the company I work for. I’m looking forward to many years of evolving the brand.

Tags brand, branding, evolution

Categories Branding, Uncategorized

In death do us part

Evolution of a brand

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