How do you know who you’re REALLY following plus other social media tales

Last night’s Social Media Café turned out to be a choice of two sessions – one on Twitter Titters and one on Futuresonic.
I attended the Futuresonic one hosted by Drew Hemment which provided a brief history of the festival and a look at some of the events coming up this year. (See my tweets for a more detailed commentary).
But it was the post-talk debate on privacy which sparked particular interest for me.

The questions it raised are issues which keep cropping up everywhere at the moment – does the ease of sharing information mean that greater legislation is required to basically protect people from themselves? Who owns an online identity? Do workplaces need to draw up employee guidelines? Is it acceptable to lie or mislead in the digital space?

Many of those attending tended towards the view that we as users should take responsibility for our own output and representation, but then a fascinating revealation from one attendee who has seemingly duped several hundred online “friends” into believing she is someone else by setting up a Facebook group under a different name with pictures, interactions et al.
To what end I can only guess at. Fair enough or an abuse of trust? Love to hear your thoughts on that one!
The other session was also well-attended and looked at the sourcing and creation of a book to raise cash for Comic Relief which I’ve previously blogged about at some length here.
Here’s a couple of postings on that topic from attendees.
* “Tips from the team on people wanting to use social media as a tool: Recognise the power of the retweet (and plan for this with the characters you use), use small hash tags and build in ways to use other social media tools so that the campaign can be bookmarked.” Democracy PR.
* “I also suggested that some of the behind the scenes planning done on email could have been done on a blog to save some of the ‘going public with issues as they happened’ that became necessary. However, I do think there is a trade off between planning on the web and behind closed doors.They also set up a Facebook page and raised support on the official Comic Relief Facebook page. Some of the team regret not blogging as much.” Real Fresh TV blog.
* “But in the midst of being charitable, a rogue Twitterer was being distinctly uncharitable, accusing the team of ”spamming” on Twitter, not being “transparent” and generally slating the project. Though experienced social networkers, the team was unprepared for a negative backlash – a potential by-product of the social medium that needs to be managed.” Jon Clements at PR Media blog.
* Catch up on the Twitter debate.
* See a couple of Qik video stream clips from Martin Bryant.
* Let me know below if you’ve blogged picced, tweeted, streamed or otherwise participated and I’ll add a link.