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By Laurel Hart, 03/18/2010

I’m back from Austin, slowly catching up in the office and working on synthesizing my thoughts from SXSW Interactive 2010. This was my second time attending, and there were a few things that I did differently and that were different in terms of the conference than in 2009. The SXSW experience contains many different parts, so I thought I’d break them down into more manageable bits versus one big overview post. I’m planning to break the pieces into the following parts, and if meaty enough a particular speaker or discussion might have its own post:

• Part One: Solo Speakers
• Part Two: Panel Discussions
• Part Three: Technology
• Part Four: Fun, Friends, Food

Part One: Solo Speakers

From my experience last year, I found that I get a lot from the best solo speakers as SXSW, and that panel discussions can be a bit more hit or miss. There were both keynote speakers each day and multiple sessions daily of what they called “featured speakers.” I arrived a bit later than anticipated Friday afternoon and stayed till Tuesday morning, but was able to fit in a lot of content between Saturday — Monday.

danah boyd

Danah Boyd theme chart by jdlasica

danah boyd delivered the Opening Remarks for the conference, and she was someone I was really looking forward to hear speak. She’s with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Microsoft Research New England, and her research into social media (and youth & teens in particular) is something I’ve shared in both my consulting and teaching work. Her talk at SXSW, “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity,” centered on a few themes, and what I think she did particularly well was to shed light on the nuance of the debate around privacy online, which too often devolves into two extremes.

I took five pages of notes, but I’ll try to paraphrase what I saw as the main points from her talk:

• Privacy is about control of information flows. When people feel like they don’t have control of their information they feel like their privacy has been violated. This includes the opt-out versus opt-in debate.
• Technologists assume that the most optimized system is the best one, but forget about social values and social rituals. (e.g. discussion of Google Buzz launch)
• Merging worlds. Just because someone puts something online doesn’t mean they want it to be publicized (difference between public and publicity). There’s a security in obscurity – most people online have very few followers. Making something that’s public more public can be a violation of privacy.
• By continuing to argue that privacy is dead, technologists work to make data more public and things public that were never meant to be. We’re seeing a switch to public by default, private through effort.
• With privilege, it’s easy to take for granted things that not everyone gets to experience, and with privilege comes a different value proposition – what one person may gain from publicness, another person may lose. This affects not only groups sometimes thought of as marginalized (immigrants, victims of abuse, LGBT community), but also groups like teachers – they have more to lose by public information online. Public by default isn’t always a democratizer.

Her full unedited talk is available on her site here. I urge you to spend the time reading it, as I’ve captured only a small sliver of a very wise discussion.

[Note: this post is cross-posted on the Logos blog.]

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By Laurel Hart, 01/04/2010

Like many people today who are back in the office for the first time since before the holidays, I’ve been spending the day catching up, including going through my Google Reader. I subscribe to a number of corporate blogs, and as I got to the Delta Air Lines blog, I expected to read something – even a short post – about the attempted bombing on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it made its way to Detroit on Christmas Day.

But there was nothing about the incident on the blog, an incident which caused a ripple effect of newly enacted security measures and massive disruptions in international air travel around the world.

I went to the Delta Air Lines website, found the News section of the site and one very short official statement, “Delta Air Lines Issues Statement on Northwest Flight 253.” The official statement described a passenger who “caused a disturbance” on the flight and was restrained. The description of events is vague enough to apply to any number of types of potential “disruptive” activities, and wouldn’t necessarily lead one to believe that an attempted terrorist act had been committed. While directing “additional questions” to law enforcement, the statement goes into no additional detail about what happened, even though some of those details were already being reported by the media.

So, I checked Delta’s Twitter account, to see if additional information or context was being provided there. There’s exactly one tweet specifically about the December 25th attempted bombing:

Now, the Delta Twitter account appears to have sat dormant from June 17th till December 22nd of 2009, when traveler outcry over U.S. domestic travel delays due to various winter storms was reaching a fever pitch. But the one tweet about the 25th simply redirects back to Delta’s website, where no additional statements about the incident have been provided since the 25th. There have been additional tweets on @DeltaAirLines advising travelers to expect delays due to new TSA regulations, but nothing specifically about the incident on the 25th.

I’d guess that there were at least three factors working against Delta’s communication efforts:

1. The attempted bombing occurred on Christmas Day, one of the very few days of the year when almost no corporate employees are in the office. But in today’s age, it’s inconceivable that “the world’s largest airline,” a company responsible daily for hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, wouldn’t have some kind of chain of communication in place to deal with an event like this, even on Christmas Day.
2. Delta and Northwest have been in the process of merging in the last year, and just in the last week were given government permission to fully complete the merger. There’s some confusion (for an average reader) in the company’s statement, with Delta as the company issuing the statement and the flight branded/operated as a Northwest flight. I can imagine that there’s still confusion in corporate communication operational role clarity as well. I know, as a frequent Delta/Northwest traveler, there has still been confusion on the ground. Again, I can’t imagine that a company of this size and complexity wouldn’t have negotiated a crisis communication response process as part of the merger details.
3. From this and other articles, it appears that there’s some behind-the-scenes dissatisfaction between the Delta CEO and the government agencies responsible for airline safety. But “inside baseball” talk isn’t what the average member of the public needs or wants to hear in the aftermath of this kind of event.

Also, what I find unfortunate in this communication situation is that Delta had the two social media channels – its blog and its Twitter account – already established, had an audience eager for more information, and provided only the scant minimum of content or context. What I find particularly disconcerting about the blog is that there have been two posts since the 25th about totally innocuous content, which in the wake of the serious events of the 25th read as even more out of touch. (I imagine they were probably scheduled to post in advance, but again, when crisis happens sometimes the response calls for suspending business-as-usual activities.)

Other companies have used their social media channels in the wake of attempted terrorist attacks despite restrictions on detailed disclosure due to ongoing legal investigation. For example, look at the heartfelt message on the Marriott blog after one of its hotels in Pakistan was the target of an attempted attack in 2007, which lead to the death of a hotel employee and severe injury of another.

Thankfully, Northwest Flight 253 landed safely and disaster was averted, due in large part to the response of the flight crew and other passengers on the flight. But what a lost communication opportunity for the company to provide context, as well as show some humanity and thankfulness, for what in the end was as good an ending as could have been expected.

*Note: I’m a very frequent Delta/Northwest flier, but other than being a long-time customer have no professional ties to the company.