December 22nd, 2011
The FBI brought William Lawrence Cassidy to trial for sending more than 8,000 distressing tweets over 2 months, to a leader of a Buddhist group. During that time, he threatened her life and wrote tweet haikus containing disturbing images of violence. His efforts scared her so much that she refused to leave her house for 18 months, but the judge overseeing the case ruled that Cassidy’s tweets were protected speech under the First Amendment, as they appeared on a public bulletin-board-like forum.
The judge said:
“…while Mr. Cassidy’s speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the government’s indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: anonymous, uncomfortable Internet speech addressing religious matters.”
According to the New York Times, the judge compared Twitter to communications during the colonial period:
He said, “A blog is like a bulletin board that a person of [the colonial period] might have planted in his front yard. If one colonist wants to see what is on another’s bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor’s yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so.”
With Twitter, he went on, news from one colonist’s bulletin board could automatically show up on another’s. The postings can be “turned on or off by the owners of the bulletin boards,” he wrote. In other words, one can disregard what is posted on a bulletin board. “This is in sharp contrast to a telephone call, letter or e-mail specifically addressed to and directed at another person,” the judge concluded.
Posted in: Governance, Legal and Regulatory
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December 21st, 2011
The FTC recently closed an investigation on Hyundai, with no sanctions against the brand, after one of their agencies gave bloggers gift certificates as an incentive to “… incline links to Hyundai videos in their posts and/or to comment on . . . forthcoming Super Bowl ads.” The FTC provided two reasons for closing the investigation, as follows:
- Hyundai did not know about the incentives in advance. They were offered by an employee of Hyundai’s marketing agency.
- Offering an incentive to post about or endorse a Hyundai product violated the social media policies of Hyundai and the agency.
While the FTC decision seems to encourage adopting a social media policy, the FTC hasn’t generally accepted affiliate agreements as substantial evidence of a brand policing its affiliates. And we are all still waiting to see the FTC take action against celebrities who violate the terms of the Guides.
View the FTC’s closing letter.
Posted in: Uncategorized
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December 7th, 2011
A lot of folks are off track in their criticisms of the Apple social media policy that was allegedly leaked recently, and here is why:
A company’s social media policy should support the unique qualities that make the company successful. In fact, the elements of a successful social media policy must exist in concert with the unique culture and business context of any organization.
In Apple’s case, secrecy has been a critical key to success. While many social media pundits claim that Apple should be more open, very few of those people are running billion-dollar corporations, and the notion that all companies should apply the same level of “open-ness” is, at best, over-simplified.
Comparisons to IBM abound, but that just makes no sense. IBM and Apple take completely different approaches to differentiation, which has led them to create very different cultures. They also rely on different business processes to create growth and value. Both companies are well-run and highly successful, but for very different reasons. (In disclosure, IBM is my client.)
And those differences are the keys to understanding why they use different social media policies.
The chart above shows the business factors that companies should consider when developing an effective social media policy (which I published in The Social Media Management Handbook earlier this year).
Posted in: Uncategorized
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December 5th, 2011
31% of global marketers say that existing digital metrics do not adequately quantify the financial impact of their online tools or channels, and, almost half of executives whose companies use social media say that quantifying the impact of social media is difficult. In my experience with large brands, there are usually two primary causes for the gap between what marketers need, and what they get from their measurement:
- Standard Tools do not Provide Insight: Many teams simply rely on automated metrics from social media monitoring tools, and those kinds of metrics never provide insight — they just provide data. You can absolutely measure the relationship between paid media and social media — to determine how much your social media lifts your paid investments, and to identify which individual site visitors are sending you more conversions via social media. But most people have no idea how to do that. Yes, it requires a little technology, and a little expertise, but you can do it. (If you’re interested, my colleague Neil Beam can help.)
- Standard Metrics Are Not Tailored to Your Business Goals: Using standard metrics from a tool — which are the same as what everyone else gets — means that the metrics are not tailored to your business goals or needs. You need to translate your business goals into the few KPIs — and supporting metrics — that will help you optimize your social media marketing.
It is no longer acceptable for the 2 in 5 global companies who do not track ROI for any of the money they spend on social media marketing, or the 26% who say they can only attribute an ROI figure to a tiny amount of the money they spend on social media.
If you want insightful and relevant metrics, you need to put in the work. You need to allocate some amount of resources to produce insights, and report them to the people who need them.
When you plan your social media campaigns, do you allocate resources to measure the impacts? Most brands do not. And that is why only 2 in 10 say that digital-related marketing has increased their access to data and insights. And only 17% say they have experienced a greater ability to increase productivity in various business processes through technology.
Too many businesses are still investing in social media without also investing in adequate measurement and feedback, usually under the guise of “test and learn”. But if you don’t have adequate measurement on place, it is impossible to learn.
Social media measurement is not a mystery. You just need to ask the people who know how to do it.
Posted in: Governance, Scaling Social Media
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December 2nd, 2011
Facebook reports that publishers using new Open Graph features announced at f8 in September are seeing significant traffic increases, impression growth, and app installs that are reaching new audiences for the publishers. A few data points:
- More Traffic: 600% increase in traffic coming from Facebook after 10 million people turned on the social news experience at Yahoo! News
- More users: 1 million users connecting to the social news experience each month at The Independent
- More impressions: 1 million extra impressions per day from 4 million installs of the Guardian app.
- New Audiences: 83% of 3.5 million app users are under the age of 35 for the Washington Post
View the source data on Facebook
Posted in: Product Development
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November 18th, 2011
A few people have emailed me seeking examples of social media policies for schools or school districts, but I don’t have any such examples, so I would like to ask readers to help find any folks who have worked through social media policies for schools. If you send me example policies, suggestions or lessons from working through such school policies, I will gladly publish them on this site.
Please ask anyone you know who works with schools and policies, so we can find and share the best thinking with the many education professionals who are working through the challenges of social media in their schools.
You can send any suggestions here.
Thank you.
Posted in: Governance, Legal and Regulatory
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November 14th, 2011
This is why you need a written agreement with each employee who manages any brand social media account: A federal judge ruled last week that news site PhoneDog (@PhoneDog) has a potential case against former employee Noah Kravitz (@NoahKravitz) for taking Twitter followers with him when he left the company. When Kravitz left the company, they asked for the account credentials, but, instead of surrendering the account, he changed the account name. PhoneDog says that Mr. Kravitz owes them $2.50 follower — per month — for each of his 17,000 followers, for a total of $340,000, and the judge required that the company present more evidence.
PhoneDog claims that the account and its followers were a company asset because Kravitz acquired the followers as part of his job responsibilities.
According to Eric Goldman, PhoneDog is suing on three fronts: “(1) misappropriation of trade secrets, (2) interference with economic advantage; and (3) conversion.” Eric also examines each of the claims in his blog.
PhoneDog claims that $2.50 is the “industry standard” for the value of a Twitter follower, but no such industry standard exists to my knowledge.
Kravitz argued that the value in a Twitter account really “comes from . . . efforts in posting tweets and [an] individual’s interest in following . . . not from the account itself.”
Regardless of the court decision, all brands should implement written agreements with employees who maintain brand accounts in social media, so this kind of situation never becomes an issue for the courts.
Its not just a problem on Twitter. Google+ requires their newly released brand pages to be created within a personal account. If you have someone creating a brand page on Google+, you better think about what happens if they ever leave the company. I’d start by only letting long-term employees create such accounts.
Posted in: Governance, Team Building
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November 8th, 2011
In a speech to summer interns at Microsoft, David Meerman Scott suggested that anyone interested in Marketing or Communications simply decline to work at any company that bans social media use by employees.
Before readers who work in pharma or investments industries get too excited, David sits on our Advisory Board at Converseon, and I know he understands the realities of regulated industries. He worked in the investment business for years. He simply believes that the most talented people coming out of college today can choose to work at companies that let them communicate in the channels where they live and breathe every day: social and mobile.
David also cites a recent study of 3,000 international college students and recent grads, by Cisco, which found that:
- More than two in five would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility.
- One in three consider the Internet to be as important as air, water, food, and shelter.
You can see David respond to questions from one of the interns here:
Posted in: Governance, Scaling Social Media, Team Building
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November 7th, 2011
In August of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a web site for employees to report violations of securities laws, and if a submissions leads to enforcement by the SEC, the submitter can earn 10 – 30 percent of any fraud recovery or monetary sanctions of over $1 million..
In addition, the SEC will publish a list of 170 enforcement actions taken in the past year, and any whistleblowers involved in those cases can claim their rewards through the site.
Rewards can be substantial. For example: in July 2010, the SEC forced Goldman Sachs to pay $550 million for misleading investors about a subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligation they marketed.
(via Aarti Maharaj at Corporate Secretary magazine)
Posted in: Governance, Legal and Regulatory, Uncategorized
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November 2nd, 2011
The leading trade organization for market research professionals — CASRO — published guidelines for anyone conducting market research in social media.
The President of CASRO told research magazine that, “These are not mandated standards. We expect these guidelines will evolve based on changes in the social media environment and research industry. As such, comments, additions and edits are welcome and will be given careful consideration by our task force.”
There has been significant debate in the research community regarding the need for guidelines and standards in social media research. In particular, many researchers argue that such research is unethical without express consent of the consumers whose conversations are analysed. Others argue that any publicly available data is OK to use in market research.
Read CASROs guidelines here.
DISCLOSURE
My employer, Converseon, is an active member in CASRO.
Posted in: Governance, Legal and Regulatory
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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.
