Social Media Risk

Recently, there’s been some advancements in the apparent war between Google and Facebook that has to deal with the sharing of contacts between the two services. Basically, if you’re in Facebook and want to add your Gmail contacts, Google will display a hostile, yet cute, message that asks you if you really want to import your contacts into a service (Facebook) that won’t let you export them in the future. Here’s a screenshot of Google’s message:

While Google and Facebook battle it out over their “rights” to user information, users of these services should be mindful of what information they store there and what levels of control and access is granted to them. For example, if I were to lose access to my gmail account, I would lose hundreds of contacts. Granted, most of them are backed up on my phone and on my local machine, but there are dozens that aren’t critical to my personal and professional life that would still be valuable to access at will. For example, the small online bike store I recently bought a helmet from. What if I want to do more business? It’s nice to be able to have this seller’s contact info stored away as a Gmail contact.

From an enterprise’s perspective, Facebook and Gmail may not seem like critical apps on the scale of Exact Target (the email marketing people) or Microsoft. However, if you’ve been purposefully growing your Facebook fan base and use it as the rally point for your tribe, it would probably be painful to lose all that work, and those valuable contacts, if Facebook ever decided to close your account. Why would they close your account? Well, since you’re not paying for it, they aren’t necessarily beholden to you and your efforts.

So, what’s the take away from this recent skirmish between two of the largest information centers the world has ever produced? It’s to make sure you understand what you’re allowed to do with your data and to ensure you have a backup or redundancy strategy in place in case a service you rely on ever fails you.