Chris Anderson claims, in a very controversial article, that  that The web is dead, long live the internet.

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web.

THE WEB IS NOTHING WITHOUT ITS USERS.

An  infrastructure,  an array of apps – once it is commoditized, it is hardly the issue anymore.

From a task oriented, information and communications points of view, the web is a utility, like an electricity grid. Supplied through solar energy or through other kinds of plant – important environmentally or economically – but its very existence taken for granted, and from here on the only issue for me, the user, is what do I use it for.

The  web’s ubiquity has become a given, the application economy is flourishing and now it’s getting closer to the users and their dominant place as the anchors of web based systems.

The mobile web brings the web closer to me, wherever I am. The social web harnessesmy social sphere for sharing,  building a trust base and leveraging marketing, communication, commerce and information seeking.

The next stage is concentrating not just on interaction between users as leverages on the web economy, but on the individual itself, as an Itom in a people’s grid. Putting the user at the center will empower a new dimension to the web.

From such a user centered point of view, the only real issue for me within the web’s amplitude of offerings, is personal relevance.

The web will evolve to truly serve people individually.

The semantic web will revolutionize use of browsers, applications and web based sociality to evolve around individuals’ contextified experiences, interests and activities. It will be about the attention economy – personal relevance to personal user, optimization of applicability to suit their dynamic interests, activities and automatically serve their fluctuating needs.

The missing link is contextification syatems that perceive the individual as a whole, contextifiy  her experience,and create an attention economy based on context as a measuring scale for services, transactions and degree of relevance.  

 The web is not dead – it is evolving towards its ultimate goal – a people’s web – a web that will eventually become  what is destined to be –  an Icentered  web of life, for each of us, individually – the web according to me.

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But what about me? How can I, the individual Facebook user, feel comfortable on this huge platform and still maintain the intimacy, selective privacy and trust within our social spheres that reside in this huge digital society?

  Facebook defines itself as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The turbine that runs this infrastructure is a swarm of personal digital connections, conversations and exchange of informations and experiences. In such intricate cobwebs of personalized social spheres, its inherent increasing return cycle will bring about its exponential future growth with exponential privacy, control of personal data, trust and scope of personal interactions related issues and apprehensions, and on the other hand, will make it harder to leave, as it increasingly becomes a commodity magnet.

Does the huge expansion of Facebook mean that I can have more friends on my social graph? Will that be any criterion to my popularity, value or place? The Dunbar number of 150 as representative of the upper limit number of social relationships that we can manage on an individual level, is also much too high when it comes to meaningful digital sharing within ones social sphere.

The most burning questions is not FaceBook’s dominance in the social networks markets – it’s the place of the individual in such an omnivoring social commodity.

The individual personal prism is the differentiating factor that sorts out the noise, creates a relevance hierarchy of importance, significance and degree of ties. That is true for both sides – me, the user, who wants to share with relevant people around relevant interactions, as well as providers and advertisers who want to target relevant customers for their offerings and not just shoot into the crowd.

Every personalized Facebook page becomes a personal pillar of individualism, shared through the eyes of the beholder with her Facebook friends. This individualized personal prism creates singular pages in a huge global yellow pages like digital address book.

Ideally, entrance, sharing and participation in these personalized windows to the digital lives of the owners’ pages are restricted to the friends and friends of friends of that individual.

In reality, flocks of hungry advertisers lurk under these windows, plotting  how to enter these personalized circles and harness the private social spheres. Their aim is to turn  those trusting friends under the auspices of the individual camp fire, to their advocates, ambassadors and evangelists to their offerings, be it through willing participation or  piggybacking by turning social sphere lists into social graphs in social marketing mixes.

From my point of view, I, the user, want to be in control of what I share with whom, how and by what degree of connectedness. It is subjective, individual, dynamic, and transcends the boundaries of Facebook as a connectivity platform.

My context in Facebook, is a beacon that should shine for my entourage, and only if I choose to, be made available, under my explicit consent, to be shared as part of a commercial CRM effort.

Yet my Facebook context is not separated from my overall context as I surf the web, search, converse, communicate, read and interact.

Restricting context to my Facebook interactions, even if they are part of a huge global social infrastructure, does not reflect my whole context as a person. I call a world that will have a personalized contextual prism – Contextivity.

Contextivity  is about MY Context all through, across platforms, providers and predefined issues. Contextivity turns imprisoned, fragmented personalization into  a harmonized experience that meshes my context with connectivity. It makes my digital choices and interactions natural, intuitive, gives it my personal colors.

Facebook’s platform is perfectly situated to become a central junction that combines connectivity to context and become the infrastructure for digital relations, based on selective context lens, relevant to a specific exchange, a true personal experience.

However, once such holistic contextification services are developed, that very combination makes it all the more acute that all context based activities remain user side, in her control and not be owned or manipulated by any single provider, especially as big and fundamental in the utility like service it provides, like Facebook .

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• The missing component in the marketing measuring matrix – From ROI, through SCRM and up to measuring individual context. (0)

Integrating social media into the marketing mix arose the need for measurement of social relationships in a way that will provide data to help decision making as to how to build the marketing communication/social CRM mix efficiently to optimize ROI, so that their brands/offerings/services become impacting touchstones on a very diverse customer base.

  Jeremiah Owyang’s social media CRM report and The social metrics and analytics show the complexity and evolvement of monitoring SCRM activities, since they require higher level analytical tools to help plan forward.

However, to me, the customer, it’s a completely different ballgame. The efficiency is measured in ROA (return on attention). The measuring scale should be based on relevance which by definition it is subjective and dynamic, based on the subjective proximity of mutual context around a specific interaction, not just around the analytics of a social graph – but around the specific combination of a particular instance of interaction around a particular topic  with particular social contacts.

From an individual point of view the mindset is different. I, the customer/user am not looking for collective values that will keep me under the auspices of the tribal campfire.  To me, any interaction is part of a long tail world  of individualism. In my world, the needle in the haystack is optimal relevance to what suits/interests me best, and the measurements for responsiveness and immediate applicability to what I need now.

The icentered lens strives at optimal individual relevance, and that makes market and customer share immaterial. Allowing personal context to become the prismatic angle, through which I interact with the digital world, turns the overpour of web interactions into selective experience.  I use/buy something because of its relevance to me, I share it with my social sphere because of its relevant value, not because of some corporate direction as part of a  planned SCRM campaign .  Its measuring purpose should reflect flexibility, adaptivity and responsiveness..

That requires a whole different measuring mindset.

  The key is context.  To start with, it transcends the boundaries of a specific product or service, and takes a holistic view of contexting people and not just specific interactions.

The context is two folded – the context of the social ecosystem that has just been created ad-hoc when I share something with someone from my social sphere, and my relevant context to become part of such an ecosystem.

My presence in different value levels in many ecosystems creates different value points both for me and for that ecosystem. I can be the center of this ad-hoc ecosystem, a close or remote node – but always   within context to this ecosystem.

My different context values in different ecosystems is based on the ability to contextify me as a whole – the principle of contexting people and not the interactions. For each context based interaction a subjective scale of me within that food chain is created. This relativity of subjective values constantly fluctuates, depending on its merit in various context based ecosystems.

Analytics of the environment must take into account both participants – providers  as well as  users and mesh their points of view into models that reflect bilateral relations between them. It is clear that putting me, the individual, as a primary factor in measurement and analytical processes will lead to a new kind, not only of measuring tools, but to new food chains and economic models that will stem from putting the individual at the center and building all these tools around her.

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A car is not merely a faster horse

And email is not a faster fax.

And online project management is not a bigger whiteboard.

 And Facebook is not an electronic rolodex.

Play a new game, not the older game but faster.

Seth Godin

Paradigm shifts have to carry an authentic voice, visions that not only defy existing orders, but create alternatives that echo  new zeitgeist and worldviews,  and suits all parties’ needs.

 A paradigm shift for digital relations must provide a reciprocal alternative. Bilateral relations. It has to build on a dialog that is not necessarily initiated by the provider as a marketing discourse, but rather as an answer to customers’ wishes and compatibility to what suits them best.

The current marketing discourse in the digital world undermines trust because it is manipulative and unilateral. Providers tend to take a patronizing attitude where, in the name of owning what customers need, they hold the keys to what is good for us and what suits us most, and under this pretense have the right to try and get hold of our attention wherever we are.

We, consumers, have to constantly watch for proofs of whether marketers indeed adhere to the policies and values they declare, to what extent  they manipulate us, breach our privacy, unsolicited invade our social spheres and capitalize on our data without really considering us equal partners in other than lip service statements.

Times have changed – digital platforms, social media and new technologies have turned us into active choice makers. As consumers – we are aware of our power and place in the food chain and do not automatically succumb to marketing stories.

A new pact is needed to accommodate that.

The icentered paradigm shift calls for looking at the digital universe not from a global corporate based world view, but from a truly personal vantage point – and reconcile both into a meshed reality where we, each individual I that inhabits the web, exercises a personal web where “I am the center of my web experience; in the driver’s seat with the reins in my hands”. In such a paradigm, relations with providers respect that anchor and are reversed to empower it, in a way that although they will have to relinquish control and hegemony, they gain trust and respect and thus increase profits through genuine choices of the clients they serve.

 The shift from push marketing, where marketers want to be present with their monologues wherever they can find us, to pull based interactions where we choose what suits us most, requires new marketing tools, new platforms and infrastructures to create a new trust base. This reverse balance is a trust enhancer, does not menace users and makes everybody equal participants in transparent and trustworthy food chains.

The culture, ethics and codes of conduct of the icentered paradigm stem from a total sense of freedom, self-control and a clear notion of the value of individual distinctiveness. To embrace that, providers need to realize that they can’t just talk the talk of putting users in the center, protecting their privacy, considering them as partners in a conversation…. They have to start walking the walk for a completely different ballgame.

The notion of personalization, the holy grail of marketers for keeping customers captive in their walled gardens, shifts into a concept of Itoms, the smallest comprehensive unit that describes each one of us  as a whole, as a unique individual, through all interactions, across all sites, platforms and media.

 Looking at the digital world through a prismatic view of each individual Itom, creates a new vantage point for web based relations. Once we look at it through the lens of a people’s web, it’s an “I in the center” paradigm,  where each user becomes a distinct anchor. It makes categorizing, segmenting, profiling, and treating users as a means for an end …. Impossible.

It will enhance many new forms of service and goods providing, because it forces reciprocal relationships instead of vendor initiated manipulations. It requires soft attributes, formerly unknown to the traditional marketing world. Relationships by definitions require trust, ease and open endedness that are counterintuitive to the prevailing marketing paradigms and therefore require new interaction modes and food chains.

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 So, when I  read Jeff Jarvis’s latest post  If  Facebook  were smart , I identified very much with the message that  I choose to bring it in its entirety.

If Facebook were smart

If Facebook were smart and open and meant what it said about the benefits of publicness and transparency that it now expects of the rest of us, then:

* Today’s company all-hands meeting about privacy would be public.

* It would find the Apple-elegant way to express its privacy policy rather than its current Talmudic tangle, something like: “Everything you put into Facebook is shared with your friends but in each case you may limit who sees it or choose to share it with the public. That is always your choice.”

* It would find the Apple-elegant way for us to execute that choice: let me make it every time I do something.

* It would find easy ways to show us how the world sees us through Facebook (and help us change that).

* It would not change its privacy settings and policies constantly. Set it. Explain it. Stick with it.

* It would not attempt to hoover up and share my implicit activity on the web. It should share only that which I explicitly choose to share. Execs should recognize that that’s what set users off; that was the line too far, the straw too many.

* It would recognize how much their defaults matter because, even if their privacy policies and functionality were elegant, they know most of us wouldn’t bother — and many of their users are young and not necessarily savvy about how their information can be used in the future. They would see their defaults as a responsibility.

* It would define evil. I said that on the latest This Week in Google: Google, by enabling its employees to ask whether it is evil, defines evil every day and that’s only for the good of its business: If it oversteps a line, if it does evil, it will lose trust and lose business. Facebook must make the similar calculation. It should define that line openly and let us and their employees challenge it constantly.

* It would use today’s meeting as an opportunity for soul-searching, enabling employees and unhappy (would-be) former users to criticize and thus help Facebook find its way.

* It would open-source and federate and put in users’ control any data and functionality about their identity online. That is, it should use open-source standards. It should allow me to extract and host my own identity and data. It should enable other companies to build atop this, with my consent.

* Facebook should decide whether it is in the relationship or the identity business and should learn that trying to be in both put it in conflict with itself and us. It was and likely needs to stay in the relationship business and that is precisely why it can’t become the host and publisher of our public identities.

* As I suggested here, it should study 16th century history about the origins of the public and private and understand that it is playing with bigger, more powerful and profound forces than even it knows. I just wrote in my next book that we are undergoing a similar shift in how society organizes itself with similar tools. Mark Zuckerberg says that he is enabling big change in society. I say examine that belief.

Facebook is smart. That’s why I remain surprised that it is blundering so. When Peter Rojas killed his Facebook identity (as Leo Laporte did last night on TWiG), he said in a Twitter conversation we had that Facebook may be blinded to its problems by its meteoric growth; it can’t see people leaving for all the people joining. I think he has a point. Any and every company would be wise to hear from unhappy and former customers, no matter how many new customers they have.

And they should do it in public.

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A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

Voices calling to quit Facebook, industry leaders actually opting out or the call to start building an open alternative to Facebook  are the culminations of a feeling of being fed up to the brim with the shameless, open, exploitative  way in which Facebook is taking liberty to abuse its most valuable asset – namely us, each one of us, and on its way to world web dominance, forgets some very axiomatic business and customer related truths:

• We are here to serve you is not just a lip service of marketing departments.  Consumers’ trust in this statement is the umbilical cord that ties us to a company or service. Abuse of this trust has a longer memory than the count of the no-nos that company has performed.  Making personal data public by default is a direct abuse of what was originally a private service for people to create their social spheres for their personal use. A company given such data in trust, should have the same moral obligation as if it were trusted with our money. Money comes and goes – privacy breaches can have long term ramifications that money can’t undo.
• Facebook is guilty of a lack of distinction between our social spheres – personal social circles created for personal use and the desire to invade them because it somehow came to see our private circles as social media that can be searchable, usable, and as such turns each of us into a miniature promised land:
  • A legitimate targeting spot ( fighting for our attention with their offerings and ads)
  • A usable  point of reference
  • A  point of sale for the commercial ends of the providers.
• Hubris caused the fall of mighty and powerful all along history.  What kind of arrogance allowed Facebook to assume they can become the master of publicy and privacy – and for its own business model, mind you. It is not up to Mr. Zuckerberg to decide for us that privacy is over. No doubt  Zuckerberg’s vision when he founded Facebook stems from a deep understanding of  the time he lives in. Yes, he even shapes it -but does he own it? Introducing new technologies and services, even creating revolutions, is not a permission to thread on the wings of sharing that allowed it.
• Confusing what belongs to us with what companies can do to increase their profits, and assume that most users are not savvy enough to understand and actively undo, is a blinding vanity of people who think they are above laws, norms and regulations.  Facebook’s history of  users’ privacy abuse spells more than a series of local  mishaps, it is a manifestation of a total ignorance of what fed Fecebook to grow into the superpower bully it has become.. 
• Facebook started out as a personal service that allowed me, the user, to express my personal distinctive colors, namely my interests, activities, emotions, with my social sphere. It is not public domain. It is not our place as users, to keep arguing with Facebook about what our privacy should look like and how basic, transparent our active privacy settings should be. For a company that provides an inherently trust based personal service, that should have been their basic design mission to start with.
• Where does it stop? Two recent moves – The Like Button and inserting location awareness have very disturbing ramifications:
  • Facebook’s Like button will create a new kind f ad platform that personalizes content on both ends – matching the content of what you like through your like button marking with the content of the ad. That’s a more intrusive kind of personalization, because the matching is done to a personal attitude, not site visiting.
  • Once exposing users’ locations without our consent  or awareness, it  will not stop there. What will stop Facebook from getting into the actual content of what we do, or think of doing?

Some will say this is what the semantic web is all about. Well, it is not about an Orwellian big brother future. It is certainly about the technologies that will allow it and about smart agents working on our behalf to automate some of our web interactions.

• In giant wars, casualties can eventually lethally wound the warriors. Was Facebook that blinded by its war against Google over web dominance that they really think they are invincible? In many historical revolutions the means became its actual end. When a commercial company, in prey of  revenue streams, claims to be the canon of privacy related zeitgeist – you can take it at its face level or understand that you are watching  the sliding door to Heart of darkness.
• Transparency is a central  trust enhancer. How dare Zuckerberg take liberties and take control, like in totalitarian regimes, in the dark, without our knowledge, over our privacy taps? Who gave Facebook the mandate to define what current social norms are? Facebook, as part of its sharing policy, has recently allowed 3rd party applications and sites to be added to our profiles, without us actively registering to those sites and without our being able to opt out on this.
• In an interconnected world, interdependence, co-existence and mutual are the building blocks for a sustainable business. Threading upon customers’ trust, manipulating business partners –overplaying the business space – will eventually turn that space against you.
• The right of consumers to preserve their privacy is constitutional.  Sure, having 400 million users spells a lot of potential money and a lot of potential power. I totally agree with Ryan Singel who says:

It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish.

Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be using a free service that’s ad-supported, which could be offered by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services like Dreamhost.

Indeed, all it takes to bring about the inevitable fate of narcissistic  abusers is a   small fraction of fed up Facebook’ users, that will spread the word, opt out on it and build an open alternative.  Creating bottom-up, open-code, community owned social tools, that will ensure our active handling of our privacy and sharing policies will bring about creating new foood chains.

Taking the icentered way, everybody can gain from the food chains  created around us. It can be done with our consent, our cooperation, bringing real value, fair reward to all participants in the food chains, including us.

That way a real value can be achieved, and  providers of services and applicatons will realize that there is a better, more moral and not less rewarding, transparent and ecological way of conducting profiable business. It will reflect an ethical, value based new business culture that respects all, benefits all, can be trustworthy  and  embodies Lincoln’s free spirit namely, of the users,  by the users and for the users

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The EU adopted a new strategy called EU2015 that emphasizes the need to implement a charter of citizens’ and consumers’ rights of respecting their privacy, giving them control over their data. This charter:

Emphasises that all EU citizens should be made aware of their basic digital rights and obligations through a European Charter of citizens’ and consumers’ rights in the digital environment; believes that this Charter should consolidate the Community acquis including, in particular, users’ rights relating to the protection of privacy, vulnerable users and digital content as well as guaranteeing adequate interoperability performance; reaffirms that rights in the digital environment should be considered within the overall framework of fundamental rights;

 Believes firmly that the protection of privacy constitutes a core value and that all users should have control of their personal data, including the ‘right to be forgotten’; urges the Commission to take account not only of data protection and privacy questions as such, but especially of the specific needs of minors and young adults with respect to these questions; calls on the Commission to submit a proposal for the adaptation of the Data Protection Directive to the current digital environment;

Citizens should be made aware of the privacy impact of their behaviour in an online context, and should be afforded the right to require the removal of personal data even when the data was initially collected with the consent of the data subject. The fight against cybercrime is another significant challenge. The effective enforcement of EU legislation in this field is often obstructed by cross-border legal issues, such as competent jurisdiction or applicable law.

Is this a milestone in the realization that the giants’ wars over our data control, where Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft…. are doing all they can to control our data, as the basis for their business models is abusing us, users, robbing us of our most basic rights?

Is this a wake up call to exert authority to empower the basic rights of our web, in the spirit of Barlow’s declaration of independence and the realization that still today, it is far from being so?

In 2007 there was a wave of voices reclaiming our rights. I want control over my data, web privacy manifesto, Time to write our own rules, but none of them took it to the place of exploring the real meaning of users’ control.   

With the advent of the social web, it only seems worse. The debate over the death of privacy and the era of publicy  grows as the users’ data are increasingly being manipulated – and the call for an open alternative to social networks like Facebook, as a result of the growing to aversion Facebook’s latest manipulations, is a good example.

The Icentered paradigm takes the Eu’s 2015 initiative to its rightful place – starting out by placing the individual at the center, and claiming natural control.  It calls for a new mindset, a fundamental paradigm shift for an active control at the users’ hands.  

Icentricity is very much a product of the evolving web’s zeitgeist of the era of the user. I in the center means that I am no longer the “user” as defined by web site owners and digital merchants – I in the center means a truly user centered web.

The time is ripe for new definitions that will better reflect the increasingly central place of users’ controlled web culture.

The  Icentered vantage point defies providers’ site centered interests where we find ourselves depending on one-sided privacy and trust management policies of providers. We can choose to agree to these policies, and enter the site – or decline and go away.

These providers use our data as the basis for their business models, as advertising platforms, to target us, invade our social spheres and unwillingly turn us into points of reference and of sales. They use our profiles as glue to ensure user stickiness. 

Icentered calls for a new paradigm that puts the user at the center and places me, the individual, as the anchor point, so that  whereas to corporate, process and service the world is flat, opportunities are global and digital users are everywhere, to be manipulated for their commercial ends, to me – the digital me, this flat world has a center point – a gravity anchor – it’s a personal I in the middle – for each and every one of us individually.

• It is My web of life
• I am the center of my web, its gravity anchor
• I am a unique individual, a micro universe of one.
• Each of us is an Itom – an individual painted in unique colors, and yet a member in the web’s people grid.
• I have a personal context – My web is personal
• My personal context is the only prism through which I converse with the world
• There is one harmonious me interacting and roaming all across
• I am dynamic  - what I deem relevant is transient
• The only one who knows all about me is me
• It is my data – nobody owns me
• I and only I proactively manage my privacy and trust
• I am in the driver’s seat with the reins in my hands
• My web of life is my fortress and the keys are in my hands alone
• On my terms – The web according to me
• It reflects me and is there  to serve my needs
• I am at the head of food chains that are all about me

The Icentered paradigm calls for a cleaner, more transparent, trust based digital ecology. Once individuals are recognized  as the centers of food chains created around them – corporates will also realize that they are there to serve them, and not they dictate the terms.

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• Would you respect as a marketer the freedom and self control you as consumer would want marketers to preserve?
• How do you reconcile a natural tendency to be restrictive in what you allow your colleagues to collect about you when  these same manipulations are the ladder for  your marketing aspirations?
• How do you personally, a micro universe of one, reconcile your  individualism with being defined in terms of categorization, segmentation when you pursue market segments?
• How do you reconcile the provider’s oriented culture, traditionally sugarcoated with consumer bound lip service, with your interests as a consumer to get what you want, when you want, how you want – your way?
• How much would you as a marketer accept my authority as a user/customer to personally define for you to what extent you may do what you want to do, regarding your relations with me? Would it coincide with the way you would personally instruct a marketer hovering around you regarding your digital relations?
• Would you willingly participate in allowing your private  social, real time and location based interactions become tagged, uniquely identified and searchable, so that your life becomes displayed, measured, intruded and played about in the same way you would gladly purchase these data  to promote your brand “anywhere your audience and the action” are?  Are you equally open as prey as you are as predator?
• Would you accept a situation in your personal life where your social sphere becomes a liability because aggressive marketing technologies introduced elements you don’t want to be associated with or referred by?
•  How do you reconcile your natural inclination for freedom of choice in the brands you consume with the ardent desire to preserve as large a part of your customer share all along the customer’s  life cycle?
•  Would you apply the same methods to build relations with customers as you would do with a personal friend?
• How would you draw the line between social influence within your trusted social circle and the constant search for data and content by which you can reach and capture my attention?
• Would you as willingly open your digital doors to marketers pursuing you in the same cordiality you would welcome a friend?

The new realities of digital marketing are changing our lives, and not for the better. Lines are blurring – trust is a central issue for users and providers alike, privacy and publicy, private life and work related, offline and on line, locality and globality become more balanced, softer values of integrity and transparency dictate new personal and work related practices. 

As consumers, our private information, the watermarks of our web interactions and our personal social sphere are our digital DNA. It is ours to share at will and not some ethereal information out there to be manipulated by interested parties.

As a consumer I want to cut off the umbilical cord marketers put so much effort in building, sustaining and cherishing. I want to freely roam from site to site, from one interaction to another, with the benefits, wisdom of accumulated profile from previous interactions, and spontaneously choose my next move.

As, marketers, you  want  to hold me captive in  your siloed site, keep my profile hostage, unseen, without allowing me portability of my profile, and extend my customer share based on the comfort of your offered personalization through pinpointed knowledge already  accumulated about me.

As a user, I want my private social sphere to be humanized by me solely interacting with my friends on our mutual interests. As a marketer, you want to tap into my social sphere and build social media strategies that will capitalize on my private circle of friends and acquaintances, and strike conversations around your brands, that would capitalize on the trust my friends have in me as a private person.

Would you be as willing to yield your personal social sphere to the same manipulations?  Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter started out without a clearly defined business model. It took time for Google to develop its ad   placement auction system.

When we started using Facebook and Twitter, part of the magic was in the fact that they had no business model. They offered a viral building and spreading of our social sphere – for our use.

We never intended our social spheres to become social media for marketers and ad hunters.  Facebook and Twitter have spread their social networks to become almost a commodity in our lives. Now they are introducing business models and in doing so are breaching the very trust we put in them to start with. When a new guy comes into town with a new offering, and has an explicit business model around it – it’s easy, clear and transparent for me to see the real costs. But to discover that there is no free meal and the cost may be  higher  than foreseen after it has become a commodity – that’s a different ballgame.

 I am sure that as private people – you enjoyed it as well. How do you reconcile that in your personal digital activities?

Once my data become factor in measuring social data ROI – there’s a problem. Would you, dear marketer, engage in all those measuring methods knowing they would apply on your and your kid’s social sphere activities?  Where do you draw the line between your social circle and the measuring stick you need to justify the marketing budget to your superiors or your board of directors? How does my personal recommendation to a friend become part of a commercially initiated conversation, tracked and enhanced through supportive commercial and social technologies?

The answer lies in changing the paradigm and the customer provider relations, towards a new mindset. Instead of the natural marketer’s inclination to totally dominate the whole CRM process throughout the whole customer life cycle  – shifting to direct transparent dialogs that relinquish control over  customer information ; shifting from brand performance measurement and application of technological and social means to enhance it, to an open offerings that cultivates the customers who actively choose to be wooed, accomodating each individual with what suits her best – on her terms.

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The magnitude of the issue is highlighted as for the first time transparency and trust outweigh product quality in corporate identity in the 2010 Edelman trust barometer.

 Two important findings in the latest trust survey – in western countries trust and transparency in business influence corporate identity more than product quality. Trust in business has risen from 53% to 83%, while trust in media has fallen from 48% to 45%. Expert spokespeople and information sources are more trustworthy than messages through traditional media.

After a decade of recession, fraud, customers’ manipulations, repetitive breaches of privacy and trust, these numbers indicate a fundamental change to interactions between consumers and providers.

The new consumer is following trust agents of her choice to relate to a brand’s trustworthiness  and reliability, therefore brands must use completely new forms of dialogs to gain  credibility;  all the more so in trust related crisis management situations.

Whereas in the digital world, building or abusing trust is facilitated by technologies and infrastructures, it is interesting to revert to the world of traditional goods and see this tendency as an indicator to a new kind of dialog initiated by companies whose trust and credibility barometers have dramatically sunk.

 Tiger Woods is a golf brand. Nike is a mega brand. In the first Tiger Woods ad produced by Nike after the Woods infidelity scandal, Earl Woods, Tiger’s dead father’s voice is scolding him, while the ashamed Tiger Woods just stands there, listens to the questions poured,  and doesn’t say a word.

The simplicity of a black and white ad featuring Tiger Woods wearing a Nike outfit, listening to his own father, should invoke a feeling of authentic remorse.  Did you learn anything? What your feeling was? Asked the reworking of the father’s voice. But the scolded son does not utter a sound. Very powerful. You may like or dislike – but you can’t ignore the extreme effort, personal touch and powerful messages that were put into play.

Yet it raises questions that go beyond the reinstitution campaign of a fallen icon.

Tiger Woods is a business. A huge endorsement business that directly affects the companies who chose him. His personal acts cost him endorsement contracts with companies like Gillette, AT&T, Accenture and Gatorade that distanced themselves from him, while Nike, one of his major  endorsing companies, stood by him.   

Should a commercial company  spear head the public “mea culpa” guilt driven star’s attempts to make amends? At the end of the day it’s about $ – lots of $. Tiger Woods is an industry. Nike’s standing behind its presenter during the crisis and their support of his comeback campaign, carry a very strong marketing statement.  

Is an invocation of a dead father’s voice to scold a strayed son’s personal life an authentic trustworthy brand loyalty reinstitutioner? How questionable is the authenticity of past speeches of a dead person, enhanced by technological manipulations of voice recordings, in reframing an image?

What makes our trust? To what extent is a personal rehabilitation campaign sponsored and initiated by a commercial company trustworthy? Is it legitimate to work domestic issues with a dead father, who did not choose  or approve his participation in this appearance, to enhance a commercial corporate?

Was it made to move us to re-embrace the Tiger Woods image with whom we do not directly interact, or is it a means to feed on the corporate identity and Nike brand?    

What are the real relations between such a Nike produced ad and Tiger Woods’ redemption to commercial glory, now he is back to playing professional golf?

Do we buy it? Does it really matter? Do we hate it, resent the manipulation – but still talk about it and thus pave the way to what may seem the most extreme remorse.

Would this really enhance our loyalty to Nike, Gillette or any other brand Tiger Woods was endorsing at the time?

 Another kind of apology advertising has been recently launched by Toyota. In the following  commitment ad,  Toyota tries to restore faith in their company, after the millions of cars recall,  and promises to live up to its customers’ expectations for quality and safety.

This is a different ball game. It is no longer about sports shoes or shaving cream, it’s about quality, life endangering safety faults and a direct damage to the brand itself.  Millions of cars’ recall for safety hazards are not like indirect projections on a consumers’ brands’ image  due to an endorser’s fall.

Admitting directly we have messed up, harnessing all the workers as committed to amend and restore your faith in us, is a very straightforward act of owning the mistake and committing to do what is needed. This commitment ad, together with an open letter in the Washington Post  from Toyota’s president that enhances the  commitment ad, are very brave direct  steps to reinstitute credibility, trust in the company and brand reliability.

  No doubt the impact on consumer in an icon’s commitment to marital fidelity is a lot less endangering than the commitment to absolute future car safety. In either case it’s an indicator of a zeitgeist that cherishes transparency, trust and credibility  – where companies must go to great length to show how meaningful they are in their declarations and marketing communication in order to regain trust.

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Icentered means the individual user is at the center, with the wheel in her hands,  a personal vantage point on a web that is personalized, trusted, contextualized, private and safe –  a truly user centered web.

 It’s a reversal of trust empowering mechanisms – Instead of providers asking us to take a leap of faith in their protection of our privacy and data management, and claims of preserving an ethical code and transparency as trust building mechanisms, Icentered will look at trust from different aspects, as a new mindset, a new web paradigm.

The prevailing paradigm driving web interactions today is based on a silo approach where the context of sites, providers, and platforms… is the key. Users are required to adapt to the provided scheme. Site centered leaves users no options. They depend on one-sided privacy and trust management policies of providers, can choose to agree to these policies, and enter the site – or decline and go away. Most trust related discussions are centered on how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting information sharing and relevance enhancement.

 The basic questions at the heart of trusting site centered paradigms are:

•  Do I trust them? Am I relieved with privacy assurances provided by the sites with which I interact
• Do they abuse this trust?
• Do I have any means to check?
• Do I really know what knowledge they accumulate about me?
• Is the bargain of sharing information for receiving targeted offers or expose information for free services a bargain from hell?
• Am I in any real position to verify that the privacy policy stated is actually preserved?
• Do they save records?…Track movements?…Follow my activities?
• What security measures can I take?
• How paranoid should I be?

 Shouldn’t I at least be in a position to proactively manage my privacy and trust relationships? It is my data, my privacy!

 From an Icentered view, I am no longer the “user” as defined by web site owners and digital merchants. In all three spheres of interaction (people, content and services), there is one holistic harmonious “me” interacting with all of “them”. It is me driving all such interactions, in my context, from my point of view, under my control and my direct proactive management

The essence of the Icentered trust and privacy paradigm is that I, the user, am with the wheel in my hand and I master the process. My data will be kept at my end and not within the walled servers of the providers. I will expose/ share/hide as much as suits me personally. There is no need to pay 3rd party companies to monitor me, invade my social graph and provide tools to lure me.

 Contextualization infrastructure, cloud computing, user side filtering mechanisms, proactive privacy and trust management solutions that reside locally for each user, completely visible to her, and under her full control,  will empower a true Icentered web and create new trust based transparent food chains,  taking into account and rewarding all the willing participants in the food chains.

The reversed trust management has context  as the reference base of all explicit and implicit targeting efforts. To empower that a context based measuring scale is needed, that will become an open tool of the trade for enabling trusted context based offerings. Once our data are distributed, harmonized around contextual strings, trusted user centered services (contextual equivalent to Visa for money) can manage user context based transactions that reward all the participants in the food chains and still create a transparent, trustworthy web ecology.

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