'Turning the MSE forum into a true social network…' blog discussion

Company reps are useful and tend to try to be helpful but they aren't always good. Consider:

1. Person posts information here about a problem to get feedback on how to proceed before contacting the company. Company rep finds that there happens to be enough information about the situation to search for the person in company records and identify the poster and contacts them. That's two unfortunate issues:

1A. the company rep has breached the data protection regulations by collecting and using personally identifiable information* without prior consent by the user to that use and MSE has probably also breached them as the hosting site, because it shares some of the obligation to protect the data from use outside the ways for which consent has been given. Neither "identifying you from your postings on MSE by correlating them with the information you tell us" nor "companies using your postings on MSE to identify you in their records" are likely to be areas where the user has provided consent.

1B. it's undermined the forum as a safe place to seek feedback.

2. Same thing but done in a topic dedicated to the company that has a comment in the initial post saying that you're asking the company for help posing and the company may check details to try to help if you don't request that they not do so. The prior notification reduces the data protection risk, the ability not to be checked also helps to reduce it, though the Information Commissioner prefers opt in not opt out, the ability to choose between company and non-company topic may be taken as being sufficient opt in.

Case 1 puts the company in control, case 2 puts the consumer in control - they can choose to ask the company or community first.

For offers to help outside a dedicated topic it's probably good for company reps to wait at least until most of the initial discussion and opinion seeking has died down before offering to help, to try to reduce the potential undermining effect. It can't ever eliminate it because there's always the big brother effect of seeing that the company is watching if it's participating. But deferring and letting the consumer choose when and how to initiate direct contact with the company can mitigate the adverse effects while helping to facilitate communication.

Company reps definitely can be good. I actually won a user-nominated award this year in part as a result of my replies to blog posts related to my company's business, identified clearly as an employee of the company in those replies and with employees of several competitors involved in the selection as well. *2 So I'm a company rep myself, just not here - and never will be here, it's an unrelated topic. Having 15-20 years of online community experience and being very sensitive to the emotional, cultural and legal issues helps.

*personally identifiable information is roughly information that can be used to identify an individual either alone or when combined with other data. So an IP address isn't inherently personally identifiable information but if a company combines it with their web access logs it is. A few details from a question aren't inherently personally identifiable but as soon as they are used to try to find someone in a company database they are.
*2 details provided privately on request to MSE if interested.

What Facebook and Twitter do is provide aggregation and commonality of tools and presence. Not MSE, Mumsnet but the Facebook or Twitter common interface to MSE and Mumsnet communities if they were hosted by them.

This aggregation reduces the costs of interaction and helps with common company policy development. There's a common benefit to the various places not hosted at Facebook and Twitter in finding some common facilitation method to make it easier for companies and individuals to interact across multiple sites.

Get big enough and it's worth the overhead of the extra platform but it's a lot easier for a company to manage its involvements if it's not a different thing to learn and manage for each place.

Reaper, chat areas are a useful and necessary part of online community building. They can be troublesome sometimes but water cooler and tea break discussions are part of how people can build relationships. They also provide a dedicated off topic venue for things that would inevitably otherwise happen on the on topic areas, helping to keep those on topic.

I have, only once so far for an MSE-authorised rep and the rep was clearly trying to be helpful. One non-authorised rep did posit some positive personally identifiable information about a loan I had in response to a post here that I made, trying to contradict a mention I made of a DD being taken earlier than I'd be told it was taken, but non-authorised and authorised are different cases.

That prompted research in to the subject that in part showed up in my post and in part will be given later as followup to a report to the MSE team where I wondered whether they thought it was a good idea or not. Having done some of that research I ended up discovering that I thought it actually breached the data protection rules even though the cultural and community issues were what originally caused me to react.

I'm still contemplating just how to reply to that report but you can see how I've gone so far from my post. It's interesting because of the many "soft" issues involved as well as the potential regulatory bright lines. The real juggling isn't regulation it's what's best for a supportive community and those are seldom bright line decisions.

So agree Rafter, MSE should be the likes of Which and whistleblowing Private Eye. Not the best phrase but the late 'Consumer Revenge' fitted the bill.