davidkamerer.com

Category: social media

  • How to disclose material connections on your blog or social media site

    If  you’re writing a blog or social media post and have received free product, services or enjoy a business relationship, you need to disclose it to your readers. Face it; you write for them and they deserve to know. It’s also the law, as the Federal Trade Commission has issued clear instructions on what constitutes a material connection and how you should disclose it.

    Disclosure is actually pretty easy. If you received something of value, tell your readers. Right there in the post. If in doubt, disclose anyway. If you just do that, you’ll be fine. But there are some other things you can do to fully inform your readers and stay on the right side of the law.

    A site disclosure statement

    In general, your disclosures should be presented with the relevant content. If you’re reviewing a new automobile and a local dealer gave you the car to drive for two weeks for free, you should disclose that within your review.

    But you may find it useful to write a general disclosure statement as well. You can place this on its own page or on an “about” page. This is your chance to tell your readers – and potential sponsors or affiliates – about your personal “rules of the road,” such any long-term financial relationships you have. If you accept product or services for review, you can explain your process and what the sponsor can expect. For example, in this space you may reserve the right to write a negative review, or you can explain your policy for a sponsor’s rebuttal of your review.

    Your disclosure statement doesn’t need to be long or complicated. Here are some examples of site-wide disclosure pages:

    Blog with Integrity

    At Blogwithintegrity.com, a handful of bloggers approach self-regulation for the online community, offering a broad set of good practice standards. Bloggers may “sign the pledge” electronically and then display the “Blog with Integrity” badge on their websites as a seal of good practice.

    Here’s what the pledge says:

    By displaying the Blog with Integrity badge or signing the pledge, I assert that the trust of my readers and the blogging community is important to me.
    I treat others respectfully, attacking ideas and not people. I also welcome respectful disagreement with my own ideas.
    I believe in intellectual property rights, providing links, citing sources, and crediting inspiration where appropriate.
    I disclose my material relationships, policies and business practices. My readers will know the difference between editorial, advertorial, and advertising, should I choose to have it. If I do sponsored or paid posts, they are clearly marked.
    When collaborating with marketers and PR professionals, I handle myself professionally and abide by basic journalistic standards.
    I always present my honest opinions to the best of my ability.
    I own my words. Even if I occasionally have to eat them.

    Blog With Integrity was created by Susan Getgood, Liz Gumbinner, Kristen Chase and Julie Marsh, each a blogger. It’s unclear if Blog With Integrity is a non-profit, a business, or a service project that reflects the partners’ personal interests.

    Cmp.ly

    cmp.ly/0 disclosure badge
    The cmp.ly badge clearly shows material connections on your blog.

    Cmp.ly is an online service that explicitly addresses the FTC’s material disclosure rules. It offers a simple and direct way for a blogger to disclose specific kinds of relationships. Because the cmp.ly tags are short, they’re appropriate for micro channels such as Twitter and Facebook. The service is free for individuals, with payment options for enterprise-level applications.

    To use the service, simply select and post the tag that reflects your specific material connection (click the links to see the badge and language for each):

    Cmp.ly/0 no material connection
    Cmp.ly/1 review copy
    Cmp.ly/2 sample or gift
    Cmp.ly/3 paid post
    Cmp.ly/4 business relationship
    Cmp.ly/5 affiliate program
    Cmp.ly/6 is reserved for custom disclosures that don’t fit the above categories.

    While cmp.ly covers the main categories of material relationships, it doesn’t provide specific information about them. So if you’re writing about four zoom lenses but have a relationship with one brand, it doesn’t offer any precision to guide the reader.

    The FTC has stated that simply putting a button on a post that says “disclosure” with a link to the disclosure policy isn’t adequate. This suggests that the best use of cmp.ly is in micro-channels, where the compact disclosure would fit.

    An alternative to cmp.ly for micro channels, also suggested by the FTC, are hashtags such as #ad, #paid, or #paid ad.

  • Social media ethics resources

    This is the handout from the Sept. 14 meeting of the Chicago chapter of the Public Relations Society of America meeting.
    View more documents from David Kamerer.

  • Social media: manage the risk, but don’t miss the opportunity

    Social media use at work is not a technology problem; it’s a management problem. And it’s also a management opportunity.

    Smart companies like IBM and the Mayo Clinic acknowledge social media and embrace it. In fact, there’s growing evidence that socially-empowered employees outperform their peers. Connected employees use social tools to get things done.

    Sure, you need to make sure employees aren’t wasting time online. Social sites are likely the most popular destinations for non-work online activity. According to Alexa.com, Facebook is the second most popular site in the United States, YouTube is fourth and Twitter, ninth. The top 20 sites are mostly social sites, or portals like Yahoo that feature social elements.

    But think twice before blocking them, which sends an explicit message that management doesn’t trust employees.  More importantly, blocking doesn’t work. With a smart phone, you’ve got the Internet in your pocket, out of reach of the IT staff. According to ComScore, between January 2009 and January 2010, mobile Twitter use soared 347 percent, while mobile Facebook use increased 112 percent. The mobile Internet is growing more quickly than any other technology rollout in history.

    A policy will help employees understand what constitutes appropriate social media use. IBM’s social media policy reads: “Don’t forget your day job. You should make sure that your online activities do not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.” Other policies acknowledge “incidental” non-work social use. Under this model, it’s OK to use Facebook to check in with your kids after school. After all, you’re a better employee if you’re not worrying about your children.

    The real benefits of social media are apparent when these tools are used in support of business activities. You can use social media to connect with your customers, put managers in touch with thought leaders, and solve problems at every level. You can:

    • Connect with customers: JetBlue has almost 1.6 million followers on Twitter, using the account to provide lightning-fast customer service, arranging wheelchairs for passengers, broadcasting weather delays and sharing service enhancements.
    • Find talented employees: “Social networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting — ever,” said Maureen Crawford-Hentz, a recruiter for Osram Sylvania, a lighting company. Through LinkedIn, 1,000 contacts can lead you to the profiles of 100,000 possible new hires. Instead of waiting for the right resume to come to you, you can use social networks to locate and recruit the best candidate.
    • Learn from the best: If you want to learn the best practices for search engine optimization, follow the top search blogs. If you’re a solar energy engineer, follow those blogs. Whatever your field, there are experts writing about it, literally giving away current, high-quality content you can’t find anywhere else.  Alternately, if you’re the expert, you can establish your own leadership position and reach new customers through your blog.

    John Dunne famously wrote, “No man is an island.” Any business leader will tell you that relationships power success.  So don’t lose sight: amid the “LOLs,” the snarky Twitter posts and the Roomba-riding cats, there are millions of smart people, connecting and sharing information as never before.

    New knowledge. New relationships. Available at the click of a mouse. It would be dumb to miss out on the business opportunities afforded by social media.

    A version of this article ran in the Wichita Eagle business section on June 17, 2010.

  • Facebook: privacy settings change again

    In our hectic, public social lives, there’s always Facebook, a gated community where you can let it all hang out with your friends. What you say or show on Facebook is safe from those outside forces that might otherwise ruin the experience: your parents, your students, your ex, and yes, search engines.

    But Facebook is rapidly becoming more public. It’s important that you understand how public your data on Facebook has become under new privacy settings. One of these days, your Facebook session will be interrupted with a request to update to the new privacy settings. 
    When you go through the new privacy screen, you’ll notice that the “recommended” settings are more public than before. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a nice post on the subject. 
    I recommend you don’t take the default, more public options. For now, keep your data more private. In the next few days, think about what Facebook says about who you are. Go through some photo albums and some old posts. Upon reflection, you may be fine with the new settings. But remember: at the end of the public road lies Google. 
    Your Facebook posts are ephemeral, like bubbles. You blow them, they float beautifully, then they pop and are gone. But as public data, they’re more like a tattoo. Do you want Google to permanantly attach them to your public persona?
    It’s a big question.

  • Location-based services about to blossom

    Foursquare.pngSo what’s hot in social media today? Location, location, location! That’s right, location-based services appear to be gaining critical mass. This trend is driven by the proliferation of handsets with built-in GPS receivers, including the iPhone, Android devices such as the Droid, and the BlackBerry, as well as the proliferation of social networks.

    I often marvel that my iPhone is smarter than my computer. This is because the phone knows where it is. On the iPhone, a Google search turns up local options at the top of the list. The iPhone knows which buses go by this street, and when they arrive. When I’m traveling, I can pull off at exit 275, and the phone knows which hotels are nearby, making it easy to find the best deal for the night.
    Marketers are licking their chops over this. It’s one thing to have a thousand friends on Facebook. But businesses want customers. They want to drive transactions. Location-based services close the gap between relationships online and IRL (“in real life”).
    Any discussion of location-based services must include Twitter, even though Twitter is not directly a player in the location-based services marketplace. What Twitter does bring to the party is the largest mobile social network, real-time data and the open API that breeds third-party invention and reinvention. Most location-based services seamlessly integrate with Twitter.
    Twitter has added geolocation to its database (to turn it on, log in to your account, and go to settings > account). While Twitter does not post your location, third-party applications can now access it. Twitter is essential for the growth of location-based services because it is by far the largest mobile social network as well as the also the largest real-time network.
    Today, the hottest location-based service is Foursquare, which Mashable’s Pete Cashmore has called “Next Year’s Twitter.”
    Foursquare links to your Twitter account, and broadcasts your location and comments to people in your network. As you visit places, you “check in” and in the process unlock badges. The highest badge, Mayor, entitles you to discounts and other offers. Foursquare was developed by some of the team from Dodgeball, an earlier company that was acquired by Google. While Google has a location-based service (Latitude), the company doesn’t appear to have done much with Dodgeball.
    Foursquare functions as a “Saturday night leaderboard,” for friends across the city. It helps answer the question, “Where is the fun tonight?” Soccer moms use Foursquare to arrange play dates.
    While this sounds fun (and also trivial), it’s important to think about this important characteristic: on Facebook, we talk, but getting together is an abstract concept. Foursquare drives interaction in real life. Think about your last visit to a coffee shop, with all those autonomous individuals in their own little bubbles, typing away on their netbooks. Foursquare has the potential to link those people together. Definitely a good thing.
    Foursquare has just published its API, which means that programmers will be taking the code, mashing it up and creating new applications. This is exactly the same sort of innovation that has driven the success of Twitter, so give it some time and pay attention to how the service changes. The next killer app could be in here somewhere. 
    Foursquare has also just expanded to new cities. To see a complete list, visit Foursquare’s home page and look on the bottom right of the screen.
    Foursquare and Latitude are but two of many emerging services that wrap up social features with real-time data and geolocation. Also in the mix are Loopt, Gowalla, Layar, Whrrl, Brightkite and Buzzd. Can you say shakeout?
    While these emerging services may seem like silly uses of such powerful technology, I urge you to try one or two, and think about how they might evolve given the right mix of people, hardware and imagination.
    We’ll revisit location-based services and discuss some of the players in future posts.

  • Mash up and share feeds with Wiffiti

    Wiffiti is a tool for capturing a feed and displaying it in a dynamic screen, which can be published in a variety of places.

    The National Communication Association is currently meeting in Chicago. Attendees are using the Twitter hashtag #NCA09. A screen based on this tag could be pushed to flat panels throughout the venue as a way to publish distributed intelligence about the event.
    Here’s a sample Wiffiti screen made using the #NCA09 hashtag:

  • Google Dashboard and online privacy

    The Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff famously said, “In Soviet
    Russia, TV watches you.” Today, he might say, “on Internet, Google watches
    you.”

    Indeed, Google is like Santa Claus: it sees you when you’re
    sleeping. It knows when you’re awake. It knows if you’ve been bad or good, so
    be good for goodness’ sake.

    But you don’t have to be bad in order to want to protect
    your privacy. Plenty of good people mistrust Google. An entire culture has grown up around being skeptical of Google’s
    informal motto, “Don’t be evil.” To catch a glimpse of that culture, check out
    the paranoia – and hilarious cartoons – at Google Watch.

    This context is helpful in understanding Google’s latest
    privacy product, Google Dashboard.

    Here’s what Google says about it:

    In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and
    control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be
    simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use
    (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your
    personal settings.

     

    The Dashboard covers more than 20 Google products, including
    Reader, Gmail, web history, YouTube and Blogger. Over time, Google will add
    other products, such as Analytics, that are not yet included.

    But a close look shows no new features, no new control for
    the end user. Dashboard just puts all of Google’s existing privacy settings in
    one place. A convenience, yes, but not a breakthrough.

    What could Google have done? Plenty, according to critics:

    According to John Simpson at Consumer Watchdog:

    If Google really wanted to give users control over their
    privacy it would give consumers the ability to be anonymous from the company
    and its advertisers in crucial areas such as search data and online behavior,”
    said John M. Simpson, consumer advocate with Consumer Watchdog. “The Dashboard
    gives the appearance of control without the actual ability to prevent Google
    from tracking you and delivering you to its marketers.


    “What the Dashboard does is list all the information linked
    directly to your name, but what it doesn’t do is let you know and control the
    data directly tied to your computer’s IP address, which is Google’s black box
    and data mine,” said Simpson “Google isn’t truly protecting privacy until it
    lets you control that information.”

     

    And here’s David Sarno, information technology reporter at the LA
    Times    :

    … and though much of the concern about Google’s data storage
    revolves around precisely how and what the company does to analyze and profit
    from user information, the Dashboard offers little insight into those domains.
    It does not specify which services keep user data, or for how
    long. Neither does it alert users that, for instance, their Web search
    histories and e-mails are constantly scanned for the purposes of selling
    products to them and others.

     

    While you’re waiting for a more open approach to privacy,
    there are some easy things you can do:

    • Don’t rely exclusively on Google products. Today, you often
      have a choice; you can use WordPress instead of Blogger, for example. A healthy
      diet includes a variety of foods; use this pluralistic approach when choosing
      internet services;
    • Log out of your Google account when you’re not using Google
      services;
    • Reset your browser occasionally; this wipes cookies and
      browsing history. Or use “private browsing” settings.

    You can further manage your privacy, but it will require
    some effort. Here are two articles that provide specific tips.

    6 ways to protect your privacy on Google, by Robert L. Mitchell, Computerworld

    Online Privacy: How to Hide Your Google Search Trails: Eight steps for keeping your search-engine data private, by Amit Agarwal

    Or, you could just move to a “remote mountaintop village,”
    as suggested in this Onion satire:


    Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

  • More criticism of the FTC disclosure ruling

    Here’s a hilarious video review – with disclosures aplenty – of the book “Inbound Marketing,” by Steve Garfield.

    Meanwhile, Ron Hogan at MediaBistro takes the ruling apart in equally funny fashion (courtesy of Maggie Bronny, student at Loyola University Chicago).
    No humor here: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) makes the case that the ruling is unconsitutional.
    Read more on the FTC blogger disclosure decision at the Loyola University Chicago School of Communication blog.

  • Lessons from the Netflix $1 million prize

    netflixlogo.jpgThis week Netflix announced a winner in its contest to improve its movie rating software. A team of seven computer engineers, statisticians and machine learning experts, Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos, won $1 million for creating an algorithm that improves the current software by more than 10 percent.

    Some context: Netflix wants happy customers who see the value from its movies-by-subscription service. If its customers love their movies more, they’re likely to remain customers longer, tell their friends to sign up, or spend more on the service.
    There are two key takeaways here. First, by crowdsourcing the contest, Netflix gained access to the intelligence of a large community of experts. The prize is cheaper than the cost of developing the software in-house. Multiple teams from across the world participated, including a team of 20 that created the same result but demonstrated it just minutes after Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos. Darn that coffee break! Darn that crosstown commute!
    Second, the teams all worked from the same data – the API, or application programming interface, was provided by Netflix. An API generally consists of a ball of data, coupled with rules about how to access and process it. This trend is increasing. A large part of Twitter’s growth is linked to its open API and the constant reinvention that accompanies it. For example, Twitscoop uses the same data as Twitter Search, but delivers a graphic interface, tag clouds and other enhancements.
    Kudos to these newspapers. Inside the API lies all the goodness of traditional journalism, which is desperately trying to establish a sustainable business model. Opening the API makes possible the kind of reinvention that we’ve seen with Google and Twitter.
    Who will save newspapers? Perhaps it’s time to look past the usual suspects like journalists, investors and foundations. Let’s see what the programmers can do. 

  • Respecting copyright on your blog or social media page

    copyright.gifIt’s a new semester, and that means students everywhere are jumping in to digital publishing, either for fun, self-expression or as part of a classroom assignment.

    While student work may seem to have limited scope, at some level it’s no different from a page at nytimes.com. If it’s published online, it is a public document and can potentially reach a worldwide audience. So it’s essential that students respect copyright.
    The bulletproof way to avoid copyright liability is to create all the information yourself. Your words, your images. If you’re writing a blog post, shoot your own photo or create your own illustration.
    But there are sources of images that you can use and avoid copyright liability. You can search the Wikipedia Commons for an appropriate image. The terms of use are generous, but not unlimited, so be sure to read the guidelines for use. 
    Under Section 105 of Title 17, which covers copyright law, the United States government does not hold copyrights, so you can generally use images from government websites. 
    Copyright has a “safety valve” called Fair Use, which allows people to incorporate copyrighted works into other works. This allows a book reviewer to reproduce a passage from a novel, for example. But be careful – the boundaries of fair use are uncertain. Case law only provides a set of general principles, which include: purpose and character of the use; nature of the copied work; amount and substantiality of the use; and the effect upon the work’s value.
    A newer concept for protecting intellectual property rights while accepting that we live in a “Remix” culture is the Creative Commons License. Under this model, online content can be shared under conditions that the author permits. For example, you might be able to use someone else’s photograph on your blog, provided that you credit the source and link back to the original. You can learn more about finding licensed work on the Creative Commons website. The photo sharing site Flickr has a “Creative Commons” filter on its advanced search page to help you find sharable images. 
    In the end, no matter the source of your words, sounds and images, responsibility for their legal and appropriate use is yours. So inform yourself, and choose wisely. This prudent practice will also help you avoid trouble when you’re creating messages for an employer.
    Additional resources to help locate copyright-free images: