rent

Your facebook, linkedin accounts, and all the other social media platforms with which you interact are not home, they are places you visit, and perhaps rent a space to leave something behind for storage and easier access and use. They can be taken away, moved, or you can be banned, excluded, or diminished without being able to do anything about it.

Just like renting a house, you have some rights, but ultimately, you do not own it, and the ones who do hold all the cards. When you own the house you live in, you can do pretty much anything you like. You own it, and it cannot be taken away.

When you think about your digital life with this simple thought in mind, it should change  the way you behave.

You know the old story, rental cars go really fast in reverse, they can be abused by those renting them, simply because they do not own them, and are not responsible for the damage done beyond the superficial. That is also true for rented space on the digital platforms others own. Your content, presence and connections can be misused, abused and lent to others without your knowledge or consent. Just ask the B class celebs who recently have had their nude pictures shared from the Apple servers.

Should, have kept their nude antics at home.

Anything you want to own that is held on a public platform, your mailing lists and personal photos for example, must be assumed to be at some point, compromised. If you do not want the risk of it being on the front page of the paper one day, keep it at private, at home.

At the very least, back them up onto something you own, leaving it where it is on a rented or worse, free platform, anything can happen.

ecosystemFor business, it comes back to the notion of owned, earned and paid media. Each has its place, and can be complementary as well as synergistic, but make sure you get the mix right, and that you understand the implications.

 

As a result of the increasingly powerful grip the social platforms have on the reach you can generate organically, driven by their business model. It is therefore ESSENTIAL that you have your own digital real estatre.In other words, a website hosted on your URL, which actd as yur home base.  .