legal
Seven steps to nailing the perfect social media guidelines
Aug 5th
The use of the word ‘guidelines’ is apt for this sort of document. By definition, social media isn’t something that works well with strict rules and regulations.
However, it would be foolish for a company with responsibilities to investors, a board or even a stock market, to take an ‘anything goes’ approach to social media. This corporate protection element is important.
So guidelines should be put in place to protect the company, but also to nurture involvement. For many companies, especially if the driver for social media adoption has been top-down, getting grass-roots participation can be a challenge.
Guidelines, if put together correctly can give internal stakeholders the confidence they need to take up the social baton and run with it.
Where do I start?
Here are a series of steps and considerations that any company or marketing department should consider when putting together social media guidelines.
These won’t just ensure you end up with a set of guidelines that tick all the boxes from a legal and compliance standpoint, but will ensure that whatever you put in place has buy-in from the very people you hope to get involved.
- Seek inspiration. You don’t need to start with a blank piece of paper. There are lots of great examples of social media guidelines out there. Read through some of them, take the bits you like and discard the bits that aren’t relevant. It’s a great way to start getting the inspiration flowing.
- Get feedback from everyone and anyone. Internal involvement is obviously crucial, but why not ask for external input too. Ask your partners or suppliers to take a look and, if you’re really feeling plucky, you could even blog about your guidelines or post them on a Wiki for input from the wider community.
- Be organic and flexible, and don’t think of the creation of social media guidelines as a one-time exercise with a set start and end point. This should be a flexible document that changes and adapts over time. During the initial drafting period, encourage as many people as possible to review and amend them so that you have a fully collaborative approach.
- Write them in plain English. There is nothing worse that a long document with complicated and confusing terminology, especially when it comes to social media. Keep your guidelines short and to the point, with bullet points galore! Why not consider writing them in a series of 140 character statements.
- Beta test them. Do you have a team of people that are already involved in social media outreach? Why not give them an early draft to try them out for a few weeks. They’ll likely find that some of the points aren’t relevant and may even think up something else to add in. Running brainstorming sessions is another great way to get feedback.
- Summarise. If you end up with a lot of points that you feel are all valid, consider summarising the whole document with a couple of key statements at the beginning. If your social media activists don’t get around to reading and digesting the whole document, then hopefully they’ll take these key nuggets on board.
- Rinse, wash, repeat. Don’t expect to get a set of guidelines that can then be written in stone and forgotten about. This is fast paced channel and things are always changing. Save the guidelines in a central, easily accessible location so that they can be easily amended and updated.
Photo credit: jurveston via Flickr.
Is Google planning to kill SEO?
Jul 30th
If a recent patent comes to fruition, it seems the big G may have plans to undo all your hard work in favour of their own know-how.
Google recently received a patent for an ‘Enhanced Document Browser with Auto-generated Linkage’.
That’s right. Automatically generated.
What’s more, the description implies that the links would be individually tailored to the reader based on their browsing history. While this may sound great to users, it’s a serious concern for the online industry as a whole.
The patent, which is an update to a 2004 filing, was granted in February and can be viewed in all its SEO ninja-terrifying glory here.
If the patent description is to be believed, the implications are staggering.
I’m going to assume that this would only be implemented on Google’s own pages or third parties that choose to opt in. The already delicate and unpredictable art we know as SEO would be completely destroyed if this was worked into a browser, as well as raising a massively complicated web property rights argument.
To be fair, how exactly this would be used isn’t covered in any depth, and may just be a case of Google filing because they can. It’s a useful doodah to take some of the grind out of their day-to-day work.
On the other hand, it’s a dynamically generated, personalized link builder that works based on personal user preference, surely the Holy Grail of SEO.
How (and even if) Google decide to use this patent isn’t clear, but it for those of us involved in SEO (that would be every digital marketer in the world then) it means one thing. This is possible.
No more hours of keyword searching, running reports and front loading content, just write and relevant users will find you.
Sounds nice doesn’t it?
Consumers win with new DMCA exemptions
Jul 27th
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Librarian of Congress gets to evaluate DMCA exemptions every three years. And this year, he has decided that a number of “classes of works” deserve to be exempted from the DMCA, which was enacted in part to prohibit the “circumvention of technology that effectively controls access to a copyrighted
work.“
The two new exemptions that apply to the jailbreaking of mobile devices read:
(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute
software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose
of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully
obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.(3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used
wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network,
when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program
solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access
to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.
In other words, so long as a consumer is jailbreaking a device to install legally-obtained applications on it, or to use the device on the network of a carrier with whom the consumer is an authorized user, a company like Apple will have no legal recourse for a copyright infringement claim. Of course, those who engage in jailbreaking still do so at their own risk.
The new DMCA exemptions won’t prevent hardware manufacturers like Apple from voiding warranties for jailbroken devices, and for many consumers, tinkering around is probably not going to produce real benefit.
But even if protecting jailbreaking isn’t going to impact a huge number of people in the United States, it’s still important that there be clarification on the subject. In this case, the U.S. Copyright Office has used the power it was granted by Congress to clarify how the DMCA should be applied as technology changes, and has used that power to make sure that consumers retain the rights to use devices they purchase as they wish. That’s how things should be.
The even better news is that the Librarian of Congress didn’t just stop with new exemptions covering jailbreaking, which has been a contentious issue but is certainly not the only controversial copyright issue being debated. A new exemption was also created that allow individuals to circumvent the DVD Content Scrambling System in the creation of new works “for the purpose of criticism or comment” (fair use), and another exemption was created that allows the circumvention of protection technologies for security testing purposes.
At the end of the day, all of these things should be beneficial for consumers and society in general, and one can only hope that three years from now, the Librarian of Congress will do what is necessary to address the new copyright-related controversies that are bound to emerge as technology evolves.
Photo credit: Gudlyf via Flickr.
Fine print can make or break your business
Jul 16th
Why is that? WordPress is licensed under the GNU General Public License, or GPL. And the GPL requires that all derivative works be licensed under the GPL too. In other words, if you build a new piece of software that relies on WordPress to function (like, say, a WordPress theming framework or even a theme) and want to distribute it, you have to offer it up under a GPL license.
This has been a subject of debate and discussion in the WordPress community before, but it reared its head again in a big way recently when Pearson and Mullenweg were brought together for a live debate. Pearson believes that the GPL doesn’t apply to him and Thesis, but Mullenweg counters that top lawyers who have looked at the issue have advised WordPress parent Automattic that a theming framework like Thesis is indeed a derivate work under the GPL, and must be made available under a GPL license as well.
If the GPL does indeed apply to Thesis, Pearson is in violation of the WordPress license, and could find himself in legal hot water if he’s sued. But publicly, he’s not afraid; he has essentially invited Mullenweg to sue, and the online battle that is still ongoing looks like it might just lead to a court room. That might not be such a bad thing for everyone else, as it would set some much-needed precedent. But that’s neither here nor there.
Underneath it all is a point that’s important for many entrepreneurs and developers today: if you don’t handle the fine print, it just might handle you. This is particularly true given the number of businesses that are being built on third party ‘platforms‘. Whether you’re building your business on WordPress, Facebook or the App Store, chances are you’re required to agree to legal terms that may not be compatible with your goals and business models. Unfortunately, as the Thesis-WordPress brouhaha demonstrates, sometimes that doesn’t become evident until it’s too late.
So what should entrepreneurs and developers do? Read the fine print, obviously. But in some cases, reading it isn’t enough. As is clear in the debate between Pearson and Mullenweg, what agreements say or don’t say is often in dispute, and how specific terms may be applied isn’t always easy to ascertain. That’s where the advice of competent counsel becomes invaluable. While writing a check to an attorney is never fun, any entrepreneur or developer building on a third party platform just might find that not getting good legal advice is being penny wise and pound foolish in the worst kind of way.
Photo credit: gurdonark via Flickr.
Consumer Reports versus Apple: proof authority still matters
Jul 15th
How is it that Consumer Reports took Apple’s iPhone 4 problem and made it go from bad to really, really bad? One word: authority.
Consumer Reports is published by Consumers Union, a not-for-profit organization “…working for a fair,
just and safe marketplace for all.” Consumers Union has been around since 1936. The first print issue of Consumer Reports came off the printing press in that same year, and since that time, Consumer Reports has built up a reputation as a reliable, trustworthy and totally impartial source of product reviews.
The rapid evolution of technology has seen previously authoritative sources lose their consumer appeal, and in many cases, their credibility. Some consumers, for instance, have come to trust blogs over newspapers when it comes to political news. But despite the rise of online product reviews, social networks and blogs, Consumer Reports has managed to stay relevant. And at a time when newspapers are having a tough time figuring out how to get consumers to pay for their content, ConsumerReports.org reportedly has more than 2m paid subscribers.
The reason: technology may have changed, but what Consumer Reports offers — professional product reviews that consumers can trust to be unbiased — has inherent value. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the impact Consumer Reports has had on mainstream perception of Apple and the iPhone 4 highlights the fact that authoritative sources are often more, not less, powerful today. While there can be no doubt that user-generated content has forever changed the way consumers will exchange information about products and services, and ‘vote‘ them up or down, the truth is that we still give a lot of weight to authority.
Thousands of people can complain about the iPhone 4 on Twitter, for instance, but all it takes is one report from Consumer Reports to introduce you-know-what to the fan. There’s an important lesson for business executives here: you might still be able to thumb your nose at consumer voices, but you shouldn’t underestimate the power of a single authoritative voice. Such voices do still exist, and in these times of significant media fragmentation, they may matter more than ever.
Groupola’s £99 iPhone: a catalogue of major #FAIL
Jul 6th
It all started so well. On Wednesday last week Groupola announced that it had purchased a number of sim-free iPhone 4 handsets and was able to offer them as a loss-leader, at a heavily discounted price. It made for some excellent PR: the offer was covered by a number of high profile sites, including Thisismoney.co.uk, The Guardian, PocketLint, and other prominent discount blogs. Users simply had to sign up for Groupola’s daily deal alerts and then check their email on 1 July.
On Friday 2 July, at 9.30 am – as “more than five million” users clicked on the link – the Groupola’s website promptly crashed with users stuck at different stages of the buying cycle. Some were unable to visit the page itself, while others could not get through after clicking the “Buy Now” button. Others managed to enter credit card details only to find the site crashed before confirming their purchase.
The sale started at 9.30am, and with people who were sitting at their computers before 9am unable to access the site, it is somewhat unsurprising that users smelled a rat. To compound matters, many users found that clicking on the link in the email simply took them to the Groupola homepage, leading people to believe that they had been sent the wrong link in the first place.
Groupola says that the high volume of traffic to the link resulted in “an auto-redirect to the next available page”. However, another separate link was floating about on Twitter (that in fact allowed users to hit the iPhone page), and this led customers to believe they were being duped.
On top of this, a series of other major failures led to the erosion of customer trust. The number of iPhones available wasn’t disclosed until after the sale, when it emerged that only 200 were available. However, upon visiting the site, the site tracker in fact said that 202 had been sold. According to Groupola, this was merely a technical glitch.
This, coupled with the mixed messages that Groupola was sending out through Twitter and Facebook (initially telling customers to keep trying even though they could not connect to the site and later saying that the iPhones has been sold out when the website said they were still available) meant that customers were in complete confusion about what was going on. Perhaps worst of all, a rogue Twitter account with only a handful of Tweets and only a single follower (Groupola) sprung up on Friday morning, claiming to win an iPhone, leading to further accusations by customers that Groupola were trying to pull a fast one.
And the series of disasters for Groupola didn’t just stop there. One Twitter user claimed to have got through the buying process, only to receive an email from Groupola telling them that their order had apparently been cancelled. In addition, the broken unsubscribe link in the initial email certainly did not help matters. The fact that there appears to be no easy way to delete a Groupola account after the initial sign-up is also creating cause for concern. Subsequently, consumers have set up various Facebook groups to express their wrath against the site. Some publishers and partners have also withdrawn their support.
Needless to say, the whole debacle has been a major PR fiasco for Groupola. Unlike other companies before them, Groupola did have the right channels (Twitter and a Facebook page) for crisis management to respond to customers, but the manner in which they responded could undoubtedly have been better. For example, replying to every single message over and over again (not dissimilar to Vodafone before them) using a copy-and-paste approach did little to convince customers that the company was being sincere. Other blog commenters on Bitter Wallet claimed that Groupola had deleted their Facebook comments.
And in the latest development, Bitter Wallet goes even further, suggesting that Groupola is now astroturfing on its Facebook page getting staff to “pose as punters”.
What can start-ups and discount sites learn from Groupola’s mistakes?
From a customer acquisition point-of view, Groupola managed to gain an unprecedented volume of new registrations. The company was selling the iPhones as loss-leaders, which meant the strategy for the campaign revolved around the value of sign-ups and customers being higher than the £80k loss incurred purchasing all 200 phones in the first place. However, Groupola failed to recognise the value of customer trust and loyalty, and the value of long-term reputation. The key question here is, is there really any value in acquiring a high volume of customers, who don’t trust you and therefore, are ultimately unlikely to transact with the brand again?
Building customer trust is even more crucial for a recent start-up than it is for an existing incumbent. The group-buying concept works by offering a huge discount on products and services, but a certain threshold of customers need to purchase before the company takes money from your credit card and the deal goes through. Given that the concept is relatively new, there is a higher barrier for customers to overcome before making a purchase. In addition, entering credit card details before the customer knows whether the deal has gone through or not requires a higher level of trust than elsewhere online.
Other group-sharing websites such as competitor, Groupon and private sample sales website, Vente-privee.com understand this. In order to gain customer trust and fuel further future sales (thereby focusing on customer retention rather than acquisition), such websites must offer an impeccable level of customer service in order to compensate for the initial pain factor.
For example, Vente-privee.com offers huge discounts on luxury brands and designer products. The downside is that the delivery time can take anywhere from six to eight weeks. However, many consumers are willing to purchase regardless because the private sales website is open and transparent about the delivery stages, and offers good customer service in return for having to wait a long time for delivery.
In Groupola’s case, the whole process was mismanaged from start-to-finish, leading to a catalogue of failures, making the company appear to be disingenuous and resulting in diminishing customer trust. According to Groupola’s PR company, some winners from the deal have emerged, but perhaps this is too little, too late. In the end, Groupola fundamentally failed to estimate demand and prepare accordingly. It failed to prepare for such high volumes of traffic, which inevitably led to customer disappointment.
Groupola released a statement on Friday, which is available to read here. An email was also sent to customers who could not purchase an iPhone.
Photo credit: William Hook on Flickr
Ofcom: we don’t need no stinkin’ net neutrality
Jun 25th
In a discussion document entitled “Traffic Management and ‘net neutrality“, Ofcom concludes that “a prohibition on network operators/ISPs charging content and applications providers for access to consumers is unlikely to lead to efficient market outcomes.“
Why is that? Because internet access is a two-sided market — “the two sides consist of consumers purchasing internet connectivity on the one hand, and content, applications and service providers on the other.” Both consumers and providers benefit from the connectivity provided by the ISPs. Consumers gain access to content, applications and services, and providers gain access to consumers.
Proponents of network neutrality dismiss concerns about network congestion and the need ISPs have to manage traffic, and they are repulsed by the notion that ISPs should be able to charge providers for priority access to their pipes. Yet Ofcom notes that ISPs will have little incentive to act foolishly:
The main regulatory implication is that when a platform sets the prices on each side it should in theory take into account these linkages to get the right (most profitable) balance between participation on both sides. For example, charging too much to consumers, will lead to reduced take-up of broadband internet. The internet then becomes less attractive to content and application providers. Conversely, if network operators and ISPs overcharged content and applications providers for access to consumers, that would lead to reduced investment in content and applications, which would in turn make the internet less attractive to consumers. In theory, the ISP is well-placed to act as an ‘honest broker’ bringing two sets of preferences together.
ISPs as ‘honest brokers‘? While some simply look at ISPs as evil corporations that can’t be trusted, one fact above all others stands out:
At the heart of the traffic management and net neutrality debate, is a concern that traffic management could be used as a form of anti-competitive discrimination. To date Ofcom has received no formal complaints from industry that require investigation. [Emphasis mine]
In the United States, the network neutrality debate is largely the same: you’ll find lots of bickering between ISPs and major internet companies like Google about theoretical discrimination, but you’ll have a hard time finding legitimate complaints evidencing real consumer harm, something that the Federal Trade Commission has itself noted. The closest thing to such evidence: Comcast’s past throttling of BitTorrent traffic. That’s a dubious basis on which to engage in network neutrality fear mongering given that some surveys indicate 99% of the files on BitTorrent infringe copyright.
At the end of the day, it’s worth remembering that the internet, largely free of the kind of overbearing government
regulation that can choke offline economies, has brought the world great innovation
and opened up new global markets that never before existed. It’s nice to see that at least one government agency understands the wisdom of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.‘