Oh Snap! Snapchat Hack Brings Rocky Start To New Year For 2013’s Breakout Social Media App

2014 is less than a week old and already social media crises are mounting.

Facebook is getting sued by users who allege it’s been scanning “private” messages sent over the network and mining them for data to share with marketers.

Then there was Wednesday’s Snapchat hack, in which account info and phone numbers belonging to millions of users were exposed to the public.

The $3 billion dollar rebuff

Snapchat made headlines of a different sort late last year, when they politely declined a $3 billion dollar cash buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

At the time, just a few weeks ago really, the two-year-old startup was lauded by the tech press for its unwillingness to cash in.

But following Wednesday’s hack, many of the same tech press are now wondering if Snapchat might’ve missed the boat.

Minor hack, major fail

The hack itself, while not generating the kind of press a hot startup wants to go into the New Year with, was actually pretty minor; only phone numbers were compromised, not credit card info, or what everyone might really have feared – the private, and often risqué images and videos many Snapchat users send to one other.

But what’s been off-putting has been Snapchat’s sluggish and rather insensitive response. The breach was made public on Wednesday but it took until late Thursday for the startup to finally respond in a company blog post. And even that response offered little in the way of an actual apology.

Privacy as a currency

Snapchat’s main draw is largely that it’s perceived as more private than other social media networks. This notion of privacy has helped fuel its rapid ascension. Users, enticed by the discrete, titillating, and most importantly, disappearing photos and videos they can send over the network have flocked to it, with user-ship now estimated to be upwards of 26 million.

And yet, Internet security experts twice warned Snapchat’s founders about the potential for such a breach before the hack occurred. So it’s not just the hack that could potentially damage the trust users place in the service, but also Snapchat’s unwillingness to preemptively address these concerns when they had the chance.

Time for a rebrand already?

Snapchat’s sluggish, unapologetic response also helps reinforce the perception of the app as a callous, ‘brogrammer’ infested, frat-house turned startup. Founder Evan Spiegel and his partners need to distance themselves from this perception, and quickly!

They may also need to rebrand Snapchat as something more than just the go-to platform for sexting if, as pointed out in an excellent article by Charles Warner on Forbes.com, they are to attract advertisers looking for a brand-safe environment to place ads in.

In the company blog post addressing the hack, Snapchat said it will soon launch a new, more secure version of its app. They’ve also made public an email address that security experts can contact when they uncover potential security vulnerabilities.

Still, it remains to be seen just how many advertisers will jump on-board with a social media network that’s perceived as primarily being for sexting. As of now, Snapchat has no revenue source.

Were this hack and others like it to further erode the trust from users the network so depends on, that $3 billion dollar offer from Facebook may prove to be a huge opportunity lost.

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via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/social-media/oh-snap-snapchat-hack-brings-rocky-start-new-year-2013s-breakout-social-media-app-0730426?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oh-snap-snapchat-hack-brings-rocky-start-new-year-2013s-breakout-social-media-app