Socialmedialand

Archive for the ‘News & Curiousities’ Category

The FTC has released a set of proposed new guidelines for endorsements. These are particularly relevant in their application to social media. Several admendments were made that directly refer to new media and the application of these rules in this sphere.

The report is fairly long so I read through it to summarize the main points that are relevant to its application in social media campaigns. If you blog, or are involved in blogger outreach, you should begin following these new guidelines, that way if they are enacted you won’t have to worry.

1. If you present an opinion and recommendation to use a product that is an endorsement. Even if you use your own words and present your own views (not use exact messaging from the company) it is still an endorsement.
2. Liability for advertisers
   1. You are liable for false statements made by an endorser (such as a blogger you asked to review a product) so you should be clear on the product details and make sure to convey all the information you have to them. In addition you should check their post for any false or unsubstantiated comments.
   2. You have to provide full disclosure. The blogger must clearly indicate if there is any material connection (payment or allowing them to keep the product.)
3. Liability for endorsers
   1. As the endorser you’re also liable for your statements. If you write something false or make claims about the product that can’t be proven you’ll be responsible for them as well as the advertiser.
4. You must disclose any material connection between the advertiser and the endorser. This responsibility falls on both parties.

This quote from the document sums up the changes related to new media.

New Examples 7, 8, and 9 apply the general principle that material connections between the endorser and the advertiser should be disclosed to several new forms of marketing – blogs, discussion boards, and “street teams.” The Commission specifically seeks comment on these examples, with particular focus on the expectations held by consumers as to the relationships that exist between advertisers and endorsers in these new marketing contexts. The Commission notes in this regard that WOMMA, a trade association whose members are engaged in word-of-mouth and other new types of marketing, stated in its comment that the relationship between endorsers and advertisers should not be concealed, and that the principles of transparency that form the basis of its code of ethics require, among other things, that endorsers not misrepresent their opinions or their identities (for example, by creating artificial entities to endorse products).103 The Commission has long believed that industry self-regulatory codes play an important role in consumer protection, and that the development of ethical standards emphasizing transparency for marketers who engage in new forms of marketing is an important step to this end.

I believe transparency in social media marketing is a key principle to success, and the key point in this quote is just that. From this point on, disclosing all material connections between advertisers and endorsers will be critical. Make it easy on yourself and start now. My thoughts on authentic blogger outreach campaigns are that they should be based on this kind of transparency. You shouldn’t misrepresent paid employees as a consumer and have them recommending (via blogs, comments, forums, Facebook or wherever) people to try your product based on their fake review and experiences. This amendment from the FTC has come about to protect consumers from companies who’ve been practicing these deceptive tactics.

The FTC report includes this example which may help you understand the changes better:

Example 5: A skin care products advertiser participates in a blog advertising service. The service matches up advertisers with bloggers who will promote the advertiser’s products on their personal blogs. The advertiser requests that a blogger try a new body lotion and write a review of the product on her blog. Although the advertiser does not
make any specific claims about the lotion’s ability to cure skin conditions and the blogger does not ask the advertiser whether there is substantiation for the claim, in her review the blogger writes that the lotion cures eczema and recommends the product to her blog readers who suffer from this condition. The advertiser is subject to liability for false or unsubstantiated statements made through the blogger’s endorsement. The blogger also is subject to liability for representations made in the course of her endorsement. The blogger is also liable if she fails to disclose clearly and conspicuously that she is being paid for her services.

For a while new media has been relatively self-policed. However, its adaption by a larger segment of the population added to the borderline deceptive advertising practices that have been utilized in the past have led the FTC to feel the need to step in and regulate our communication here. I firmly support the FTC’s proposed amendments, but I’m concerned on how effectively they’ll be able to enforce them. What do you think? Necessary? Or over regulation? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Photo credit: dbking [Flickr]

Tonight is the night (at 9:01pm). We can all finally pick out a Facebook profile name to make an easy to remember URL. Oh the joy – we can finally print it on business cards, put it in our email signature lines and more!

Amidst all the excitement and pledges to logon at 9:01 exactly to get the most sought after common names first, Facebook issued a warning to be careful what name you pick because – you’re stuck with it FOREVER.

When I first saw that; I dismissed it. My name really isn’t that common. I found one other Katie Van Domelen on Myspace back in high school, so I guess it’s a race between me and her. Then I started to think about it a little harder. I plan to get married one day; will I then wish I’d picked a different name? And what about my friend Lacey? She’s currently engaged and I wonder if she’ll pick her maiden name or her soon-to-be married name? Is that bad luck? What if someone is married now and they use that last name in their URL but then they get divorced- could become a pretty big thorn in their side. On the other hand, who’s going to insist on using a maiden name in case they get divorced? That has to be bad luck.

The more I thought about this the more it bothered me. I won’t pretend to understand all the technical issues that go into this and I definitely realize that making it permanent might make it easier to keep things straight (Myspace’s URLs are permanent as well.) But I know other networks have found a way to make change possible. LinkedIn, Google Profiles, Twitter, and Friendfeed all let you easily update your name/username and URL. Some even include a space for a maiden name to make searching easy.

Am I being overly sensitive to think that a social network should take into consideration that roughly 50% of the population will experience at least one name change in their life? Or is this another one of those things that we, as women, will just have to adjust ourselves to?

I’ll probably follow in the footsteps I’ve seen other women take on Facebook – keeping their maiden name on their profile  in addition to their taken name (i.e: Jane Smith Brown) or simply using their maiden name for social networking purposes. So I plan to sign up for katie.vandomelen to create my Facebook URL (no one take it!) what will you do?

I normally use Tweetdeck, so I didn’t even notice the change in Twitter’s UI until (ironically) people I follow started tweeting about it.

Twitter Integrated Search Functionality

Assuming you’re like me, you might not have even seen this yet so I’ll explain. Twitter has updated the side bar navigation to embed a search box and the trending topics list right there on your profile. The search results show up on your profile as well; they come up where your feed normally is. There’s an additional option to save that search – all your saved searches will appear as shortcuts under the search bar, above the trending topics.

Everyone is talking about how cool it is. And it is cool. But why? Why did Twitter spend the time to take the same basic functionality from http://search.twitter.com and integrate it into your profile? Here are my two possible theories (based on my thoughts alone):

Facts

Twitter is extremely popular. Their popularity has been growing exponentially in the last few months alone, and if I remember correctly (without double checking my facts) they’ve grown 1000% in the last year.

All those growth and popularity numbers are based on visits to the site, and they know that as many people as visit the site there are twice as many (probably, maybe more) who use applications like TweetDeck, Twitterrific or Twhirl instead of visiting Twitter.com.

People who use Twitter regularly know that they can often get updated news from Twitter before it hits anywhere else (think attacks in Dubai and the crash in the Hudson.)

Twitter is beginning to feel pressure to come up with an effective revenue model. Sure they’ve got venture capitalists. Sure they’re not quite desperate for a way to find money. But they must be thinking about it on a regular basis.

Conclusion #1

The update to the UI is a bid to make visiting Twitter.com more valuable than using services like TweetDeck, etc. If they make it so that you’d rather visit the actual site, their traffic numbers go up. If their traffic numbers go up…they could attempt an ad-based revenue model a la Facebook or Myspace.

I think it’s obvious that they are trying to increase the amount of people who use the site versus third party apps by making the site more appealing and easy to use. As for why they’re doing that, I’m just speculating. Twitter is in a unique position because their initial openness with their API (which everyone loves) has made it so that everyone else is able to capitalize and build on Twitter’s functionality and the result is that you don’t have to go to Twitter.com to use Twitter. 

The other networks didn’t start that way, which is why they can support advertising on their sites. For example, you have to go to Facebook.com to really be able to use it. Sure you can do limited things from other places, but you’re still probably going to go to the actual Web site most of the time; meaning there will be impressions for advertisers to buy. Twitter is the opposite. I get more functionality everywhere else and I only need to go to actual Web site for limited things – like checking on my followers and following people back.

What’s Next

I think we’re going to start seeing more updates to the Twitter UI to make it as robust as other services. As it is right now, this update doesn’t even come close to challenging TweetDeck or Twitterific for their users. From Tweetdeck, I can have saved searches, trending topics, AND I can organize my feed by groups, use built in URL shorteners, and share pictures and videos using Twitpic and 12seconds, all from the same interface. Until Twitter can do that, I don’t think they’re going to make a significant dent in the amount of people using third party apps.

Conclusion #2

My other theory is that Twitter is looking to get a piece of the Google pie. Since Twitter is quick and viral, it’s an effective way to get news out and get it spread to millions of people. The update to the UI was based solely on search capability and since Twitter lets you save a search, and create a feed of that search – you have instant access to that information and you can also export and display those results anywhere. For example, CNN could create a tip line where, if you include the hashtag #cnntip, it shows up in an “Twitter updates” box on their homepage. Of course that could be easily hijacked, so there are some logistics to work out. But imagine if the Twitpic of flight 1549 going down in the Hudson had been tagged with that – it would have gotten into mainstream news that much quicker.

This theory also explains why trending search terms were highlighted – to try to increase the benefit of the viral side of Twitter. If a topic looks interesting, you might search for it as well, and then if you retweet the news you find you’re increasing the volume of that same topic, continuing the trend. This would make Twitter a go-to place for news and information; like a leaner version of Digg with the search capability of Google delivered in a real-time updated feed.

What’s Next

Like I said, the logistics included in this are a little hairy, so I think we’ll see Twitter trying to work some of that out. Hashtags will get updated – they’ll become links in the tweets on Twitter (they already are on TweetDeck and other apps.) We might see a more “homepage” like entry portal to Twitter with trending topics and news displayed (making it easy to retweet…) Basically anything that will increase the viral nature of Twitter and help to classify tweets into topics and categories are activities that would support this theory.

In reality, these theories aren’t necessarily exclusive; a mix of both could be closer to the truth than either one. What do you think? Disagree with my conclusion, or have your own take? Leave me a comment!

Update: I saw this post on the possibility of Twitter using the tip link space for advertising in the future…hmm..

 Twitter, meet paid advertising. Paid advertising, Twitter.

Twoogel launched today – it’s a Google powered search engine for Twitter, complete with, you guessed it, PPC ads provided by Google.

( @Twoogle is a third party site that’s not directly affiliated with either Google or Twitter – simply using the technology provided by both to create an integrated search experience.)

The mix of paid advertising with Twitter search results is interesting. Seach.twitter.com doesn’t include paid ads to Web sites or other landing pages – just search results full of tweets. It’s possible that if a page full of positive tweets about your company comes up in search results, and next to it there’s a paid advertisement directing people to your landing page for a free trail or coupon or whatever, they might be more inclined to click on that ad secure in the knowledge that other Twitterites seem to like you. At the same time, a page full of negative tweets might be just as equally detrimental.

Users may have a different reaction to it – why use Twoogle when other twitter search engines provide social elements (trending topics, tag clouds, sentiment, etc) and all Twoogle has are ads? Ads aren’t a big attraction for users. I think Twoogle will have to step up in those areas in order to get a significant amount of search traffic in order to support their paid ad model.

Time will tell whether a service like this takes off with users or not, but in a way it’s a logical extension of the same old “how will Twitter make money” argument. One of the ideas put forward has been including paid advertising space on the network, on search results, on profiles, anywhere. It seems that instead of waiting for Twitter to make a move like this on their own, someone else has harnessed the power of Twitter with the money making ability of Google ads and made their own search engine.

I’d predict that if it does take off, either Google or Twitter (or both) will take notice and integrate a similar idea into their own search sites.

Thoughts? Like it, don’t like it, don’t care? Leave a comment and let me know!

Can’t get away from these giants this week.

Facebook is updating its homepage to include more real-time functionality and sharing mechanisms which has the whole industry a flutter with rumors that Facebook is trying to “crush” Twitter, Google is ignoring Twitter’s true capability, and what Twitter’s response will be.

I have the exact same message I had about email and IM v. Twitter: No one is going to beat anyone.

*Disclaimer – this is my opinion, I have no crystal ball to base my prophesy on*

I don’t think that people truly understand the major differences between all these online services.

Twitter - Mass, short messaging to a large group of people allowing others to join into public conversations and quickly share small doses of info.

Email - One to one (or One to a few) messaging where you can send information, content, attachments, etc to a specific set of interested people and thread the discussion and back and forth of said information/content.

IM - Direct (normally short) messaging, one to one (or One to a few). Allows short term sharing of content, information and conversation. (I say short term because normally you sign off and that conversation is over where email lives in inboxes and folders for longer)

Facebook - Advanced content sharing, profiles and community building. Rather than quick messages, Facebook lets you share (visibly rather than through links) video, longer message, photos, notes, blog posts, messages, audio with your friends or post to your profile to share with anyone who visits you.

Is there some cross over? Yes. But is the functionality of any of these identical? No. Can anyone of these fully replace the other? No.

The real-time messaging in Facebook is weighed down by the amount of content that is also shared through the network. The real-time messaging of IM is not public. The real-time messaging of Twitter is confined to 140 characters and links. The real-time messaging of email is not public and with too many messages/day can get cluttered.

My prediction is that all these forms of communication continue in their separate ways, but that a new platform is developed to connect them together so the user can easily flip between them and their respective functionality. That’s the idea with the upcoming Palm Pre’s combined messaging and I see that evolving in subsequent smart phones and migrating to the desktop.

What do you predict? Take a glance at your crystal ball and let me know if I’m missing something (also feel free to mention the winning lottery numbers if you see them…)

My coworker, Andrew, attended a Digital Summit with Google where they gave the attendees the following quiz to test how digitally immersed everyone is. He created this quiz for Sitewire’s blog but I wanted to repost it here as well. He scored a 92. I got an 88 – where do you rank?

It's not one location anymore - it's everywhere.

Today at work we watched a webinar on mobile technology by Comcast (MMetrics) that got us all thinking about the future of mobile. As the adoption rate for smartphones accelerates, the need to adapt marketing strategies to mobile technology decreases because these phones will be able to access standard web pages. Interesting stuff. 

And what about for social media? I read this great article by Om Malik on Facebook’s mobile future that @chrisbrogan twittered about. The integration of social media with your phone contacts will further integrate those networks into your “real” life. The mobility of using your cell phone to connect to your networks when you used to need a computer will make them an even bigger part of your daily life. This exponentially expands the reach of the network, advertising on the network and the depth at which the network, and the people in it, affect you and your decisions. 

The blurring of  lines between the “real” world and technology is dizzying. Just yesterday my coworker, Brandon, sent out an email about a new mobile technology that will allow your phone to interact, through mini projectors and image sensors (that’s about as technical as my understanding goes), with the world around you. At one point the article suggests you could meet someone at a party and the phone/device would project their social profile information onto their shirt so you could access the most important information about them immediately. Crazy.

To me this further creates the need for authenticity in our world and in our lives. The time of a “public” face and a “private” face is over. Your information is public, you are public. You have to be yourself because if you aren’t, people will know. They’ll easily see you don’t match up with how you describe yourself in this or that profile and vice versa. 

This applies to brands as well. If you want a “family” business reputation, you have to act like it 24/7. If you want to be the “hip” new thing, you actually have to be hip. Branding as we know it will be forced to evolve. A “family” based ad campaign won’t give you a family image unless your company lives and breathes family and community service. Just putting a rap star in your shoes won’t make you “hip.”  And it’s seeping into politics too. We can see what our House Reps and Senators are doing, and hear what they’re thinking straight from their own mouths.

What about you? Are you ready for the real world?

Viper: Top Gun rules of engagement are written for your safety and for that of your team. They are not flexible, nor am I. Either obey them or you are history. Is that clear?

Ok so rules of engagement in social media might not be quite as dire as all that but I ran across a link to this chart when I was reading KD Paine’s blog today (doing some research on measuring PR and social media – what else?)  and thought it illustrated the process extremely well. Definitely worth sharing:

KD Paine got this chart from Jeremiah Owyang who got it from Joey Devilla who found out about it from David Meerman Scott - so I’m relying on that chain as to its authenticity, but authentic or not it’s a great way to visualize the correct way to respond to a blog post about your brand.

Pass it on.

*Top Gun quote courtesy of IMDB

Picture courtesy of Media Bistro

It may have been a prediction a month ago but I’d say that fad is well under way only 2 full weeks into the new year. I hear my coworkers complaining about over tweeters (people who twitter more than X times per day and fill up their feed) and discuss the etiquette of unfollowing them. People have started cutting their facebook friends down to only those people whose names are easily recognizable.

For brands with Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, or any other social network presence, this can get tricky. This is like trial under fire – either you stay relevant and make the cut or you find yourself the victim of a massic social layoff.

Burger King is taking a creative approach, made popular by 13 year old girls. They are encouraging people to layoff their other friends in exchange for a coupon good for one free burger. The old “if we’re both busy excluding that person, I won’t end up being the one excluded” tactic. Anyone with a Facebook account can download the Burger King widget where your list of friends will appear. You choose the 10 you’d like to sacrifice and the story will show up in your newsfeed saying “Caroline sacrificed Josh Lowensohn for a free Whopper.”

It’s definitely cute, and it shows a remarkable grasp of current trends. Burger King realizes people are predisposed to clean out those few “friends” who aren’t really friends and is making sure that they have a reason to keep Burger King while doing that. It’s kind of a cheap trick though, whose to say that once the coupon is done the person won’t simply turn around and delete Burger King? It’s definitely what a 13 year old girl would do.

I think a better strategy for brands during this time is to focus on staying relevant to their customer base. This is the most important time to make your customer/”friend” your primary concern.

1. Provide information, advice and content that matters to them, your message isn’t what matters now.
   1. This means listening to them in the first place
2. Don’t overwhelm them. This isn’t the time to start blasting messages that could be annoying or spammy feeling. Keep it light.
3. Don’t dissapear entirely, if they haven’t heard from you in a while (or haven’t heard anything worthwhile in a while) it’ll be easier to just delete you while they’re running down the list rather than seriously consider it.
4. Stay real. This is the worst time to seem like just an impresonal brand. That means no autopilot!
5. Set up tools like Qwitter (for Twitter) to manage your friend lists and keep tabs on when/who you’re losing. In some instances it may be worth reaching out to a friend who “quit” you to see if you can repair the relationship. This will at least show you care about them and value them as a customer.

What else am I missing? Leave me a comment!

I haven’t been this excited since…well I don’t know. I guess I tend to get excited a lot. I’m a nerd what can I say. Anyways, the point is that I’m super excited about Facebook Connect and you should be too.

The easiest way to think about is that it’s like a passport for your social world where various social sites are the countries you’re trying to visit. Before if you wanted to visit StumbleUpon, you had to apply for “citizenship” or get a specific login on that site. Then you have all the paperwork – you have to create a profile, upload a picture, find your friends, etc. And, ok, you do that at StumbleUpon because it’s a really important site to you, you see the benefits and you want to belong there. But as time goes on, you visit so many new “nations” or networks, and you have so many different profiles and identities that you can barely keep them straight or remember if you have a login when you come back a few months later.

For us social media lovers, this is acceptable. This is the price of admission. Some of us (or maybe just me?) create worksheets to track all the logins. I even sort mine by major sites vs. the small ones I sign up for in case they make it big in a few months. But for the average user – if you see a site you want to participate on but you’re not sure you’d ever want to come back (maybe you just want to leave one stupid comment! come on!) you might just skip it and not participate at all.

Facebook connect changes this. Sure there are others that have come before, OpenID for example. Or the browser based solution, Flock, that my coworker Andrew F wrote about. And there are many others competing to be the one, but the large acceptance of Facebook leads me to believe that it has a good chance of winning this war. Google might have a shot too – but let’s talk about Facebook because that’s the title of this post.

So you go to Facebook and you make your passport. You take a photo, fill in your information. You’re now a citizen of Facebook and you make connections there, build your home and everything is great. But now you want to travel. So you head over to Citysearch (for example) because you searched for the restaurant you want to try and that site came up in results. The next day you want to go back and write a review because you had a great time. But they want you to login. No problem, get out your Facebook passport by clicking “Sign in Using Facebook” and you’re in. Not only are you in, but your passport will get stamped giving you a record of your visit. In other words, what you do on the Citysearch site will communicate back to Facebook and you’ll get a message the next time you login asking if you would like to publish the story about the comment you left on Citysearch.

And it all comes full circle. Now you have ONE identity. You have ONE place where you can publish the things you do around the social globe. I love it for its simplicity. It makes me want to go out and delete all my accounts and resign in using Facebook instead. I won’t yet. Because the system’s not ready for that – there’s still a limited list of sites that use Facebook connect. But I have high hopes for this in the future.

Think of the implications. For users, it opens everything up. Nothing will be off limits and you can keep your info and network in tact as you travel around the web. For marketers – it means reaching your audience in new places. It increases the need to monitor your brand across all available channels and actively interact across all the networks. But you can make a Facebook account too – so it should be just as easy for you to travel.

And this is perfectly in line with the future of social. Social has to get easier, not more complicated. The expert predictions for 2009 all centered around the idea of simplicity: culling your friend lists to remove any unknowns or annoyances, cleaning up the news feed and tying your activities together through apps and widgets. One step further, Facebook connect centers your true online identity – just like a passport represents your true identity in the real world.

If analogies aren’t for you and you’d like a little more detailed explanation with some visuals – check out this slide show from VizEdu:

The next step is watching to see which major player wins out and becomes THE place to maintain your passport or identity – Facebook, Google, Myspace, AOL, Yahoo!, OpenID, Others(?). One of them will become the widely accepted standard and the others will eventually have to concede and allow us to sign on using our standard ‘passport.’ It’s like the HD DVD v. BlueRay thing all over again (or VHS v. Betamax if you remember that). Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?