Category Archives: Ethics

Ethical Ways to Attract Visitors To Our Site

Posted on by
Reply

For a social website, especially  a new website, it is important to know how to attract more visitors.  We have thought about this and found some useful and also ethical suggestions from Forbes where this information is sourced.

  1. Focus on content creation. Good content markets itself. When you put the effort into building and promoting great pieces of content, the natural result is more traffic to your website via shares and referrals.
  2. Add social sharing buttons to your website. Don’t assume that your readers will take the initiative to share your content on their own. Instead, make it easy for your site to accrue more visitors from social networking sites by adding social sharing buttons to your company’s blog posts.
  3. Answer questions on social networking sites. When you see people asking questions online, provide whatever helpful information you can. Doing so will earn you both website traffic and customers for life.
  4. Distribute press releases for actual achievements. While you shouldn’t abuse press release distribution websites to promote insignificant accomplishments, take advantage of this traffic stream whenever you have something noteworthy to share.
  5. Use SEO responsibly. Don’t over-optimize your website, but do make use of current SEO best practices (which put the emphasis on looking “natural”) to let the search engines know where they should list your site in the natural search results. High rankings will result in plenty of new visitors to your website.
  6. Invest in your website’s blog. By publishing high-value posts consistently, you’ll build your relationship with your readers, resulting in visitors who check back frequently to view your latest posts.
  7. Share slide decks and other presentations. Posting informative materials to sites like Slideshare will help you to increase both brand awareness and website traffic through exposure to new markets and new potential customers.
  8. Build a killer email newsletter. When readers find valuable email newsletters, they tend to share them with others. If your current email followup sequence is lackluster, making improvements here could result in significantly more referral traffic.
  9. Publish a helpful podcast. Similarly, producing a regular, high-quality podcast will increase referred website visitors, while reaching new visitors through podcast directories.
  10. Deploy infographics. Infographics get shared more often than most other types of content. This makes them ideal candidates for traffic generation campaigns that make use of content marketing.
  11. Run a YouTube channel. YouTube is one of the web’s largest search engines, making it a great way to expose new audiences to your brand.
  12. Ask visitors to share your site with others. Simply asking your visitors to forward your articles to others or share them on their social networking profiles is a great way to quickly boost page views.
  13. Write guest posts for top industry sites. Ask other websites in your industry if you can pen guest posts for their blogs. Having your content featured there isn’t just great for traffic – it’s a good way to build your perceived authority as well.
  14. Connect with influencers in your niche. Having an authority figure in your industry share just one of your blog articles can result in a tremendous amount of new traffic, subscribers and buyers, so make relationship building a key part of your company’s marketing strategy.
  15. Pay attention to up-and-coming social networks. Newer social networks likeTumbler and Pinterest are sprouting up all the time. Because there can be a significant “first adopter” advantage to the people that establish a presence on these sites early on, keep an eye out for these future opportunities.
  16. Eliminate website errors. If the search engines aren’t able to index your website properly (which can occur due to a number of different errors), you may not be receiving all the search traffic you should be.
  17. Add pillar content to your website. Every website should have at least a few pieces of “pillar” content — in-depth, well-written content that will always be of interest to readers — to help drive traffic via person-to-person sharing.
  18. Over-deliver on your company’s products or services. From a word-of-mouth traffic standpoint, over-delivering can’t be beat. When you go above and beyond in your industry, customers will recommend you to others – leading to more traffic and a higher marketing ROI.
  19. Interview experts within your industry. People love hearing from experts, so if you can snag an interview and publish it on your site, you’re in for a big surge of traffic from the authority’s existing audience.
  20. Comment on other websites. Leaving valuable comments on other websites’ blogs can be a great way to build traffic back to your own site. Just be sure to say more in your comment than, “Great post!” or “Thanks for sharing!”

Reference: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/31/20-easy-ethical-ways-to-attract-more-website-visitors/

Potential Risks

Posted on by
Reply

There are several risks that may arise when using social networking sites which users may tend to ignore. These are described below.

Identity theft (IT) – IT is one of the major concerns related with social media. So much information is provide by the individual on these platforms that it is obvious to guess the rest of the information, which leads to identity theft which is further used to commit cyber crime such as fraud.

Sexual Predators – Once again due to disclosure of a lot of confidential information on the webpage, sexual predators are one of biggest concerns faced by social media website. As an individual could easily hide their true identity and target young vulnerable children who are not capable to distinguishing if an individual is legit or a sex predator.

Stalking – Staking is something which raises alarm again and again and is something which is faced by social media website on a regular basis. As individuals cannot see if anyone is looking at their personal information such as pictures or videos it makes it so much easier for a stalker. Even though the majority of the big social media website are providing a lot of facilities to privatise your personal profile there will always be slight chance of stalking.

Unintentional Fame – This is also very lethal form of harassment. This kind of situation occurs when the picture, video or piece of music created by an individual is sent around on social media websites without their consent. As a result of such harassment many young teenager have committed suicide. Once again social media websites have provided the user with the facilities to report such contents which can be cause such circumstances and miXXers will do the same on its site.

Employment concerns – Personally I believe social media platforms and employee do not mix together. This is an issue of many organisation and their employee. This issue has been raised and talked about numerous time by academic research. A lot of individual have lost their job due to uploading inappropriate information regarding working, personal information or information about desecrate circumstance about certain individual, inappropriate images or videos and many more.

Online harassment – This is something which is commonly seen in teenage groups, where teenage are victimised because of their physical appearance , ethnic background etc. This is an extremely serious issue as it can lead to fatal circumstance, this also leave negative impact of social media platform as they are created to keep in touch with family and friends socially rather than for bullying and harassment. (Wikipedia.,2015.)

Privacy Concerns – Privacy of confidential information about an individual has always been a major concern for many year. Due to the fast improvement in the technology and availability of data, this concern is increasing as an individual can share large amount information about their themselves or other without even realising via single click.

According to Acquisi and Grossklags (2007) privacy choices are affected by incomplete and asymmetric information which is defined by ‘bounded rationality ‘. In addition ignorance is rationalised (rational ignorance) because users may consider that truly learning about and understanding privacy implications and acting on that knowledge would actually outweigh the benefits of ignoring the risks.

A lot of personal information such as date of birth, contact details, employment and education history information is broadcasted in Facebook which can easily be for unlawful purposes.

Individuals are sharing their current location via Facebook chat. This can be extremely dangerous as teenager or pre teenagers can leave their current location on which can result in stalker or sex predators follow them and the result of that could be fatal. Here the ‘Valence Effect’ outlined by Acquisi and Grossklags (2007) can be seen to be in effect as a behavioral anomaly as users over-estimate that there will only be a positive effect.

This is something which has been highlighted via a board of member at the university. University students taking pictures of each other or members of staff and uploading them online without their consent.

Invasive privacy agreement is something which always catches the attention of law abiding citizens. This agreement means that an individual is agreeing that all the information which they upload on the website such as their confidential information including pictures and videos are property of the service provider, which seems a bit odd.

There are thousands of agencies which are standing in the queue to retrieve confidential information regarding individual, in order to understand individual behaviour better. Recently, Twitter has admitted that they were scanning the telephone numbers of their customers in order to understand their behaviour better without their consent. This shows there is a lot more going on behind the scenes without your knowledge. It hints at another behavioural anomaly from Acquisi and Grossklags (2007) that users are ‘over confident’ in their knowledge and ability to actually protect their privacy. There are no technologies easily available to users that lets them delete all confidential information about themselves from internet. (Wikipedia.,2015.) There is also essentially a Privacy Paradox (Zafeiropoulou M 2013 et al) because though users may say they are not willing to share information on these sites in practice they still do it. This helps to highlight that despite the dangers that may arise in using these sites, even when aware of them users still usually decide to use them.

Reference:

Acquisi and Grossklags. What Can Behavioral Economics Teach Us About Privacy?, Digital Privacy: Theory, Technologies and Practices Auerbach Publications (Taylor and Francis Group) pp. 363-377 (2007)

Wikipedia.,2015. Privacy concerns with social networking services. Available from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services#Privacy_Concerns [Accessed on 23th april 2015]

Wikipedia.,2015.Privacy issues of social networking sites. Available from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_issues_of_social_networking_sites [Accessed on 23rd april 2015]

Zafeiropoulou, Aristea M., Millard, David E., Webber, Craig and O’Hara, Kieron (2013) Unpicking the privacy paradox: can structuration theory help to explain location-based privacy decisions? In, ACM Web Science 2013 (WebSci ’13), Paris, France, 02 – 04 May 2013.

Ethical Considerations for miXXerS

Posted on by
Reply

image

“Further well trodden themes in social networking research – such as identity, use/non-use, motives for use, privacy, surveillance, friending, commodification, and user exploitation – all surface issues with ethical dimensions”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I was tasked with looking at the ethical issues that may arise in developing miXXerS. Ethical issues that arise with interactions between users, online and offline communities, social network developers, corporations, governments and other institutions are complex. Social networks have changed how we create and/or maintain social relationships/roles and there are ethical implications of this.  Each stakeholder can have diverse and also conflicting motives and interests and the same will be the case for the mixed audience of miXXerS. Social relations between people who have/desire some type of relationship or affiliation personal, business or otherwise are at the core of social networks. For miXXerS this is no exception.

Moreover, in building technological systems computer scientists often tend to build what they think would work best for the user without necessarily considering ‘disclosive computer ethics’. Instead of viewing the technology as a neutral actor this instead focuses on the moral norms and values embedded in information technologies, applications and practices. We therefore would like to build a system which considers the ethical implication of the technology itself as well as the ethical use of the site.

“the emphasis in technology design should be on achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, and developers of social networking sites are seen to have ethical responsibilities for ensuring that their designs are oriented towards achieving the desired goal. The developers, on the other hand, appear to hold a user-oriented view – they make social networking sites for people to play with.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Social networking sites can facilitate deception, social grooming and defamation. Given miXXerS is a site which combines not only music but also parties we must be aware of this. Users will be able to report unethical use of the site per our policies and we will design features which will help to support ethics. This is important. One report found that “active social networkers show a higher tolerance for activities that could be considered unethical.” and that “It appears that they are more willing to consider things that are ‘gray areas’. However, there are skeptics of such arguments. In addition, given the data that is derived from free use of the site is important for our business this also raises ethical questions which all social network sites struggle with as it has become a defacto business model for the web.