social media

Friendly tip to people planning a felony: don’t do it. And if you still want to, you might want to avoid planning your escapade with the internet or your phone.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

If you are planning to do something that our society says is a felony, or even thinking about it, please don’t.

Please change your plans. You won’t like the result.

If you are still pondering something that our society says is a felony, you might want to avoid using electronic devices that record your planning. Definitely don’t use your phone in commission of the actual crime.

Here are a few examples of what not to do, for amusement of people who are inclined to read my blog.  People likely to go ahead with felonious plans probably are not in my audience.

 

Tip #1

Don’t take along your location recording fitness device while conducting reconnaissance to plan an assassination and definitely don’t take it along for the ‘hit’:  Runners World -1/17/19 – This Runner is a Hitman. His GPS Watch Tied Him to a Mob Boss Murder. 

A competitive distance runner who moon lighted as a contract hit man took along his fitbit watch as he conducted recon and planning runs for two different assassinations. Also wore it for one of the actual hits. Police looked at the recorded location information on the watch which showed him making recon runs and placed him at the scene of the hit.

Result: Life in prison.

 

Tip #2

Don’t conduct an Internet search with questions of whether your plans are illegal: Cleveland.com – 10/19/18 – Brooklyn Woman falsely accused Parma Heights police chief of rape, investigators say.

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Jim Ulvog

Get control of every domain that refers to your name, including all extensions

Back in 2013, I offered An illustration why you should gain control over your name on the ‘net, both through buying domain names and reserving your name at social media sights (oops, meant to say sites!).

To illustrate the concept that you should grab control over your name on the ’net, I pointed out a pro-Second Amendment activist who bought a domain and turned it into a pro-gun website to poke fun at an anti-gun politician.

The domain?

  • www.senatorfeinstein.com

I just checked that address and found out it is a dead link. It used to be an advocacy site. However, the joke (if you are into such things) and the point (which is the reason for this post) stand.

In recent weeks, a politician from the opposite side of the aisle got zinged. She is former head of a large technology company. Someone grabbed a domain including her name and put up a one-page site criticizing how many people were laid off during her tenure.

The domain? (more…)

Jim Ulvog

Shame storm. Or 1984’s two minutes hate. Or just another day in social media.

We are seeing an increasing number of shame storms in social media. The goal of a shame storm is to severely rebuke and embarrass someone who stepped out of line.

Doesn’t matter if the person loses a job and is emotionally destroyed as a result. Doesn’t matter if the storm is completely out of proportion to the offense. As long as the instigator and following mob have a good time, they don’t care.

I discussed this issue earlier: Be careful on the ‘net. It is cruel and unforgiving. Draw wrong attention and you get dissected, then shamed.

Here are two more articles on shame storming.

4/20 – About Last Night – The shame sharks – Terry Teachout suggests that yes, he does self-censor what he says, or what is called crimestop in the novel 1984.

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Jim Ulvog

Be careful on the ‘net. It is cruel and unforgiving. Draw wrong attention and you get dissected, then shamed.

If you are in any social media platform at all, you need to be really careful about what you say. You need to be cautious in saying things that are flippant or can be misunderstood.

The twitter shame mob

A PR manager from a company sent smart mouth tweets to her 170 followers. Sent a few before travelling to London. Checked her phone there, found no reaction, and sent a few more smarty-pants comments.

While on the 11 hour flight to Johannesburg, another person saw her tweet, and sent it to his 15,000 followers hinting the person was a bigoted racist.

You know where this is going. Oh, her extended family she was on her way to visit? They are all ANC supporters.

The attack tweet went viral.  By the time this person landed in South Africa, there was someone waiting to take pictures of her as she turned on her phone and saw the deluge. Huge numbers of people around the world were trashing her and visiting Orwell’s two minute hate on her.

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Jim Ulvog

Yet another embarrassing tech error – sending a text message to the wrong person

Double check who is getting your texts.

We’ve all heard the stories of hitting ‘reply all’ instead of ‘reply’ when discussing something in an e-mail that shouldn’t go to ‘all’.

Here’s a new oopsie I learned about personally but at low cost.

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Jim Ulvog

An illustration why you should gain control over your name on the ‘net, both through buying domain names and reserving your name at social media sights

Check out the web address www.senatorfeinstein.com. The address forwards to a blog.

You would think the blog is related to the senator from California, right?

Not so fast.

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Jim Ulvog

Always remember that anything you post in social media could one day be revealed to the world

Today’s lesson is that no matter how you set your Facebook settings, someone else could reveal your membership in groups.  Remember every day that anything you post in a social media space could eventually become public.

Say, for example, you are out-of-the-closet at college but your parents don’t know. You join a choir and the choir director announces your membership in a group whose very name announces your sexual orientation.  The public announcement of your membership to all of your Facebook friends is the first thing your parents know of your previous secret.

That’s the very short version of the story in the Wall Street Journal – When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook.

You are not the customer

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Jim Ulvog

Ideas for using social media in crisis management

Deloitte Australia has a good list of tips for the social media aspects of managing a crisis. Planning beforehand is key.  It’s better to do some planning before you have a disaster, but life sometimes gets in the way of planning.

If you find yourself in a mess, their ideas will get you started.  If you want to do some planning, they have some good ideas.

A few key thoughts:  (more…)

Jim Ulvog

The price of free apps is not zero

You may not hand over money for that cool app, but you might pay in other ways.

Like handing over personal information.  Or perhaps the personal information of your friends.

An article in the Wall Street Journal, Selling You on Facebook, reports on their research into the data obtained by a variety of Facebook apps. Many apps look for personal information, sometimes including your political or religious beliefs.

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Jim Ulvog

Three skills for living in a social media world

There will be three career fields in huge demand in the social media world. That is the idea Mark Schaefer presents in his blog, {grow}.

I discuss this in my post Three Skills for Living in a Social Media World at my other blog, Outrun Change.

At an individual level, I think these three careers point to skills each of us need to develop if we wish to function in a world dominated by social media.  The career fields and individual skills are: (more…)

Jim Ulvog