Future Now
The IFTF Blog
If This Blog Post Offends You, I Have Insurance
Worried that your edgy new advertising campaign might offend a lot more customers than it attracts? Worry no more. The CBC has a great story about a new concept for how businesses and people can protect themselves from saying stupid things: Social media insurance. The idea is that, before engaging in some heavy Facebooking, a company can hedge against the possibility that they'll say something stupid by paying an insurance company for protection.
As the CBC describes it:
As employers increasingly use sites such as Facebook and Twitter to market products, communicate with customers and collect information, they leave themselves open to regulatory, legal and reputational risks.
And where there's risk, there's the insurance sector.
With the use of social media in the corporate world comes the potential for lawsuits regarding privacy issues, intellectual property infringement, and defamation.
The liability risk stems from the fact that many companies don't appear to be establishing clear, written policies for social networking, said Eric Dolden, a Vancouver-based insurance lawyer with Dolden Wallace Folick LLP.
" 'My boss is a big fat cow,' is a very common tweet," he said. "But people often stupidly then say where they work and who their boss is in the tweet."
The legal ramifications can hurt both the finances and reputation of a business."We've seen people, in their personal capacities — the 'big-fat-cow boss' bringing a lawsuit against the individual," said Dolden. "And we've also seen the company have to take action because, from a reputational point of view, their brand is now suddenly gone viral, negatively."
In other words, if some damaging comment goes viral, the insurance company pays out.
According to the CBC, social media insurance products are still too new for there to be anything like standardized prices, but even though the market is incredibly new, one analyst forecasts that in five years, individuals will be able to buy personal social media insurance to protect against the possibility of embarrassing himself.
The story is oddly reminiscent of a separate court case coming out of Spain, in which a group of 90 people have asserted that they have a right to be forgotten. By this, they mean that they believe that they have a right to not have old articles about embarrassing behaviors or poor choices appear in Google searches.
One man who wants to be forgotten is plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti. When Guidotti is searched, the first link that pops up on Google is for his clinic, complete with photos of a big-breasted woman and a muscular man to show off plastic surgery results.
But the second link takes readers to a 1991 story in Spain’s popular El Pais newspaper about a woman who sued him for $7.2 million for a breast job that she said went bad. Guidotti, who was later acquitted, is fighting Google to take that link down.
In combination, I think these articles point toward a set of broader questions about identity that stem from the rise of social media in the past few years, and that will become increasingly important over the next decade: How will we understand mistakes, indiscretions, and poorly constructed jokes? Will we be forgiving, or will we be harsh? Will we understand individual and corporate identities through whatever public proclamation or tweet was most controversial? Or will we have develop more forgiving approaches to understanding reputation and identity?
And these questions really will become increasingly important - as excited parents post pictures and data about their young children, it's fair to say that an average child born today will have a permanent digital trail that follows her from being a newborn into the foreseeable future.
At their core, both of these concepts--the right to be forgotten and social media insurance--imply that we will always assume the worst about people and organizations that make dumb statements on the Internet. Personally, I hope this won't always be the case--and my sense is that, as more and more of us make dumb comments in permanent digital space, the idea that someone said something stupid on Twitter will seem less and less extraordinary, and increasingly banal.
There's a second point I want to highlight here, though, and it has the potential to be far more transformative: It's that both of these, particularly social media insurance, lead to a natural monentization of identity and reputation. In other words, you can't really insure your reputation unless you have an idea, in specific dollar amounts, of what your reputation might be worth.
This is a very different way of thinking about reputation and identity-not as something abstract, but as something as exchangeable and financially meaningful as a credit score. It's here where I think we'll see some really interesting questions and transparencies emerge in the next decade. A good reputation could make a poor person seem rich; at the same time, a lot of money will, in an increasingly obvious way, make the need to build a reputation seem unnecessary.