Social Media Surveillance and Visibility

Introduction

Social media make social life more visible to businesses. A broad set of organizational tasks – including market research, recruitment, and customer service – are augmented through a growing body of searchable personal information. Sites like Facebook have undergone a tremendous diffusion into the business world, the effects of which are only becoming apparent. These developments extend from marketplace surveillance of consumers' personal information. The large scale of information Facebook offers, coupled with its rapid spread to different social spheres, suggests new possibilities for market surveillance, including monitoring market segments through transactional data.

By mapping key sites where a personal information economy emerges on Facebook, this paper illustrates how organizations utilize social media. It offers findings from a series of 13 semi–structured interviews with professionals who use Facebook as a business tool, including marketers, brand managers, community builders, and communications officers. As this is an ongoing development, we attempt to move from industry literature on these practices toward a rich description of how these services are actually being used. In particular, this paper considers terms like 'listening' and 'conversations' meant to describe the way businesses collect personal information from a growing user base and deliver targeted content to those users.

Surveillance refers to the focused and sustained collection of personal information. This collection is fuelled by a political economy of personal information. The following research is aligned with the study of audience labor, political and economic concerns in the age of new media, as well as social media in particular. Popular literature highlights the revolutionary potential of new media. By treating the range of online services and mobile devices as a landscape of information exchange, authors like Shirky claim they enable 'organizing without organizations. Yet instead of redundancy, organizations face new opportunities by exploiting social media platforms. The rise of social media means an exponential increase in visibility for both individuals and organizations. Disgruntled clients and co-workers may broadcast compromising information on Facebook and Twitter, yet their own personal lives are also made transparent through their prolonged engagement with these sites. The risks and opportunities associated with social media cannot be decoupled.

So-called experts, 'gurus', and 'rockstars' present social media as an invaluable resource for businesses. Indeed, most technologies are ushered into the public by promoters. Facebook and other social media are no exception. Advocates claim social media help businesses by making it easier for them to communicate with and listen to their markets. Organizations are taking proactive measures to exploit these sites. In recognition of the heightened visibility of their brands, corporate actors are actively searching social media for conversations between users about their brand and its products. They are especially concerned about complaints and other damaging statements. Corporations are also using these services to gain new insights into their market. The open-ended nature of sites like Facebook allows for other possibilities for engagement and exploitation, which are considered below.

These developments resemble other kinds of institution–led surveillance. Yet market surveillance marks a further shift toward categorical searching instead of scrutinizing individual profiles. Market surveillance on Facebook extends from previous attempts by businesses to gather data on a large scale. These practices are fuelled by a number of initiatives, including the use of geodemographic information to locate markets. Market surveillance on social media intersects spending habits with personal information but also with relational information. These are sites where users socialize with others, yet they are privately owned and optimized for market-led scrutiny, searching, and sorting. This kind of scrutiny is important when considering market surveillance more generally. Social media go hand–in–hand with market power. They allow businesses that own or purchase this data to know their market at a greater resolution. Businesses can extract value from social media while they manage their own publicity. The growth of market scrutiny is facilitated by Facebook's push toward relational searching. In contrast to conventional, 'Google–style' analytics, Facebook search scours what users are saying and doing. This approach pulls categorical content out of social media information, yet this content is always bound to individual profiles and reputations.

Most social media content is a kind of personal information. Businesses are taking advantage of this, but their presence on social media demands new kinds of relationships. Will businesses make themselves entirely visible by providing their own content? Will they opt for a more surveillant approach and simply collect personal content from users? Or will they combine elements from both strategies in a conversational approach? This paper describes how people employed as social media experts began working with Facebook. Upon describing these participants, the following three sections focus on three business strategies involving social media: radical transparency, listening, and conversations. Based on respondent accounts and industry literature, these strategies are positioned from least to most effective in terms of exploiting social media. This paper concludes by reappraising the term social in social media in light of these findings.