Social media is ubiquitous. It’s entangled with every part of our lives. The average Londoner, for example, now spends about six hours each day checking Facebook, posting photos and interacting with friends. But social media has always offered the chance for a lot more.

Indeed, there are compelling examples of social media enabling tremendous achievements in knowledge gathering or problem solving. Wikipedia sits at the top of that list, but there are many others. It also facilitates collaborative working and convenient human interaction over large distances. In short, the social productivity story is under appreciated and, probably, not sufficiently understood.

There are countless other ways social media can help society become more productive, efficient, and effective. But equally, we are only just beginning to understand social media’s impact on society. So as its role expands, should we welcome it? Or worry about the implications of it becoming an even bigger part of our lives?

Just last month, the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) published a report entitled, “Contacting Emergency Services in the Digital Age,” which suggested that the emergency services embrace social media and allow the public to contact them through platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp and even Facebook.

This makes obvious sense. People across the UK are permanently connected to their smartphones. And it is easy to envision circumstances, like a burglar in your house, where a WhatsApp conversation might be a safer and more effective way to connect with emergency services than a telephone call.

Triage decisions could be greatly improved if people contacting emergency services could share photos or video of what’s ailing them. GPS could help police understand who is inside a building and where they are located before entering.

And of course, smartphones are full of capabilities that can help emergency services better understand the circumstances of a call. Consider the data available in Apple’s suite of health apps. Or everything that your Fitbit knows about you now, and the increasing amount of data that it is sure to collect in the future. It’s not hard to imagine your phone contacting the emergency services on your behalf before you even realise that you’re having a heart attack or stroke.

So, without question, the emergency services ought to offer more ways to connect.

But where do we draw the line? Should there be limits on what we can choose to share about ourselves? Especially in light of disclosures about government data collection and the impending arrival of the so-called Snooper’s Charter, what assurances do we have that government won’t misuse the information we provide?

This is a new expression of the old tension between privacy and convenience. But it’s increasingly clear that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was right in 2010 when he observed that that privacy was no longer a social norm. While his comments inspired much scoffing at the time, surveys consistently show that people born after 1980 rate privacy among their lowest concerns, and don’t really expect that the data on their phones or elsewhere is truly private at all.

Perhaps in 25 years, strong societal protection of data and privacy will seem as strange and far away as a world without rock’n’roll, television, or aircraft. But for now, it ought to make us deeply uncomfortable.

Once we surrender access to our data, we can never get it back. So we need to work towards clear limits, enshrined in law, to ensure that individual choices are respected. Decisions about what to share should be personal and private. Absent of probable cause of criminal behaviour, no one should ever be forced to share or surrender anything that they don’t want to.

With these protections, we can all rest easy in choosing to contact the emergency services and share information in whatever way makes us comfortable.

And herein lies the lesson for businesses and institutions beyond the emergency services. The choice and venue for a conversation belong to the user, not to the institution.

Marketers can and should promote those opportunities and provide added value for people who choose to engage. But they can’t force it. And in spite of the rich fabric of data and profile information now available, marketers must not be creepy. At the same time, societal norms will continue to evolve, and marketers will be challenged to stay on top of those changes too.

Still, the future is bright. With a bit of respect for privacy, the positive impact of social media on our society is just beginning to be felt.

 

By Marshall Manson, Managing Director Social, EAME at Ogilvy & Mather Group UK. 

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