Do You Use Social Media? Guess What…You’re a System Administrator

By Matthew Lees

The New York Times recently ran an informative article by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now.” It’s about changes that Facebook made last December that affected user privacy, and what you can do about a few key pieces of personal information.

The article got me thinking about a Patricia Seybold Group report I wrote in 2007, entitled (rather cleverly, I thought), “Helping Customers with Self-Control…of Their Own Content.” The discussion and perspective in that report are even truer today than they were a few years ago, with the trend toward user control only increasing.

The upshot of the report was that, whether you blog or spend time on social sites or online communities, you’re doing more than participating in conversations, seeking out people and information, and creating content. You’re probably also deciding (1) who can see what, and (2) what they’re allowed to do with what they can see.

Well, guess what. That’s what system administrators do. Did you know you’re a sysadmin?

(Tell your parents. If yours are like mine, they won’t understand what it means, but they’ll be impressed. Actually, if your parents are on Facebook or any other social network, they’re sysadmins, too!)

Of course, professional sysadmins are trained and experienced in the subtleties and ramifications of managing access rights, setting up group/subgroup permissions, and troubleshooting things when problems arise. The rest of us are doing this as amateurs, whether we’re…

• setting permissions on our Flickr photos
• managing the privacy settings in our Facebook accounts
• determining what our public and private LinkedIn accounts look like
• deciding if your blog will accept anonymous comments or if people need to be logged in to comment
• deciding which groups of people (e.g., everyone, friends, or family), if any, can comment on our YouTube videos
• deciding what URLs in del.icio.us to share and what to keep private (for example, I’ll let most of URLs I tag be publicly viewable, but not the ones of my financial accounts)

As the Internet has enabled more and more of us not only to be Content Consumers, but also Content Creators and Publishers (the simplicity of blogging laid a lot the groundwork for this), the natural evolution has been for us to have control over this content as well. And it’s not just the content itself (your blog entries, forum posts, comments, video clips, photos, pictures, animations, etc.), but also the information about you (such as your profile information, both personal and professional).

The advantage of all this is that systems are increasingly giving us more control over both our content and profile information. Some platforms offer impressively – perhaps overwhelmingly – granular control of pretty much everything. This is a great trend, since it’s generally better to give people control over their own stuff.

But the disadvantage is that most of us don’t naturally take to this role or have the time to do it well. It takes attention to think through things and set them up the way we’d really want them to be. Most of us don’t have the bandwidth to do this for one site, let alone all the social sites and communities where we spend time. (Plus, things change over time, as with the Facebook situation above.) Therefore, as inexperienced and part-time sysadmins with a few other things on our plates, we may not be setting things up as well as we could. We typically rely on the defaults, which may or may not be in our best interests.

Why is this important?

• If you’re a technology vendor, you’ve got to figure out how to balance giving users granular control while making things easy for them to use. More tools, capabilities, and control is usually good, as long as you don’t confuse people, and having control over too much stuff can easily become overwhelming. Having an intuitive user interface can certainly help, but product managers have to draw the line somewhere.
• If you’re a social media user (and who isn’t?), you’ve got to decide how much time and brainpower to give the various settings on your content and personal/professional information at all the sites where you have an account. Most likely you’ll rely on the defaults, making changes only when a friend or colleague brings an issue to your attention, or when you come across a relevant article (or blog post!) that prompts your taking action.
• If you’re a community business sponsor, manager, or moderator, you’re looking to generate participation and sharing, while at the same time maintaining a safe and friendly environment. Participation can be enhanced by more open settings – the more people who can view things, the more discussion and collaboration will ensue – but if things are too open, particularly if users don’t realize or understand, conflicts can arise. How you set defaults, and how you communicate privacy and control settings is crucial. (Think about what can arise when a Facebook user doesn’t understand the consequences of giving visibility to Friends of Friends, for example, who you may not know…or trust.)

We haven’t even touched on other, non-sysadmin-related choices social media users have to make, such as how your content looks (control over design and layout; e.g., your blog header and Twitter background), and what people can do with your content (e.g., what license do you select to govern the photos you upload to Flickr?).

Decisions, decisions, decisions. For better or worse, though, in this do-it-yourself, connected, and increasingly social world, we’re all sysadmins now.

Help Wanted: Metric Reporting Analyst

Impact Interactions is a market leader in strategic consulting & moderation services for organizations using online communities and social networks to drive specific, real world, business results. We also help clients to understand and report on their web metrics as an outsourced analytics reporting service. Our clients include AARP, Cisco, Intel, and SAP among others. For all of our client engagements, we provide scheduled reports covering all interactive touch points with site visitors.

Due to our recent growth, we are looking to add the right person to our team here in Maryland. Specifically, we are looking for an individual who wants to learn our business while helping our clients to understand the way that visitors use their site. The selected candidate will have the following responsibilities:

1. Prepare daily, weekly, and monthly reports for our clients in Wordand Powerpoint
2. Stay current on metric trends and techniques by attending seminars,webinars, and reading white papers published by the major analytics vendors
3. Interact with client teams to resolve reporting issues and topresent reports (requires some overnight travel)
4. Learn about online communities, user generated content, and socialnetworks (including moderation) in order to understand their impact on business goals
5. Update client ROI analysis on a quarterly basis

To be considered for this position, you should have the following qualifications:

• A degree in a mathematical or business related discipline(Statistics and Marketing preferred)
• Strong proficiency in all Microsoft Office Products
• Familiarity with Omniture, WebTrends, Site Intelligence, HitBox, or other analytic tools
• Basic understanding of PPC, SEM, Conversion techniques, and Engagement measures
• Strong writing skills
• A sense of humor!

Impact Interactions is located on beautiful Kent Island on the Chesapeake Bay across from Annapolis. Our benefits include subsidized health insurance, gym membership, a casual work environment, PTO, and a quarterly bonus plan. You can learn more about us by visiting our website. We are an equal opportunity employer.

If you’ve read all the way to here and are still interested, please send your resume and a cover letter to JOBS at Impactinteractions.com for consideration. No phone calls please. We will contact all qualified candidates to schedule an initial telephone interview.

Online Community Expert Dan Bruhn Joins Impact Interactions

Dramatic growth in High Tech clients focusing upon user generated content on web sites has increased the need for experienced executives who can bring strong real world business processes to manage the submitted content. To help our clients in this sector, Dan Bruhn has joined the Impact Interactions team as our Senior Consultant for High Technology engagements. A graduate of Bradley University, Dan brings over seven years experience in online communities, marketing, technical support, and analytics to our client engagements.

Prior to joining Impact Interactions, Dan worked with Cisco Systems’ award winning Networking Professionals Community (NetPro). In his role with Impact Interactions, Dan will continue to lead all engagements within Cisco, including the ongoing moderation engagement for NetPro. Additionally, Dan will provide best practices for Impact Interactions’ business-to-business clients pursuing online community-based interactive strategies.

“Dan provides our clients with an additional level of online community expertise. He and I worked together in the early days of NetPro at Cisco and his experience in using online communities to drive measurable results is significant,” states Impact Interactions president Mike Rowland. “With the addition of Dan, Impact Interactions continues to build the strongest database of best practices in the online community world for our clients. His deep knowledge of technical support, marketing, and partner communities brings tremendous expertise to Impact Interactions which in turn will help our clients succeed.”

For additional information regarding online moderation or user generated content strategies, please contact us at ImpactInteractions.com.

Wanted: Online Community Team Associates

Impact Interactions is expanding again…

We are actively seeking people interested in online community to join us as associates, both in our online moderation group and in our online consulting group. These entry-level positions are based in our offices in Maryland. These are not virtual positions, you must be able to work in our offices.

For associates in our online moderation group, we have both full time and part time positions available for all days and shifts. The basics of the job are:

• Familiarity with online communities, MMOGs, Virtual Worlds, and other interactive web based destinations
• A college degree with an emphasis on writing skills (English, Creative Writing, Education, Marketing, or Journalism preferred)
• The ability to work as part of a larger team, while independently meeting your client’s needs for reporting, moderation, and facilitation
• Proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Basic understanding of web traffic metrics
• Ability to travel to client sites around the globe as dictated by our clients

For the associates in our online consulting group, you should possess all of the above and additionally:

• A strong understanding of web metrics including experience in using at least one of the major analytics packages (WebTrends, Omniture, Hitbox, Google-Urchin, etc.)
• A basic understanding of SEM, SEO, PPC, and PPA and how to measure results
• The ability to create blog entries for our blog to provide our view of the online community world
• At least one year in a web-oriented position
• Fluency in a foriegn language (German, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Russian, or Polish) is a plus

We are an equal opportunity employer. Disabled and older workers are encouraged to apply. Proof of eligibility to work in the United States is required.

To learn more about these positions or to apply, please send a current copy of your resume in Word, a cover letter, and your salary requirements to Jobs at Impactinteractions.com. Due to the anticipated volume of responses, we will only reply to those candidates who meet our needs.

Thank you for considering Impact Interactions!

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