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Mark Zuckerberg just spent two days in front of Congress, explaining, justifying, defending his company and its business practices.

I continue to find it fascinating that the company that develops the tool that so many brands, individuals and even public entities rely on to build and nurture their communities, neglected to foster its own. Facebook has no friends. We use it, we run our ads on it, we publish our news on it. But we don’t like it.

Which is why, now in its moment of need, Facebook is more or less twisting in the wind. Other publishers, other platforms have committed similar offenses. But in the court of public opinion, Facebook will pay for the crime.

Contrast this to Apple which as a company is equally as arrogant. I say this typing on one of my 5 Apple devices so know that I have drink the Macintosh-flavored Koolaid deep. Apple however always — well before social media — understood the value of community and built its marketing strategy from the get-go around cultivating evangelists. We love the brand. So much so that we forgive an awful lot. Lousy overpriced computers in the late 90s. Batteries that drain far too fast. And we pay a premium to use the thing we love.

It has always been true that if you are not paying, you’re the product.

We now are starting to understand the true cost of using Facebook.

This is the opportunity for a viable replacement to make its move, something that a year ago, I would have said was foolhardy. And no, I am not predicting the fall of Facebook. That is ridiculous. But it is vulnerable.

Reddit, long mostly off limits to commercialization, has recently relaxed its stance about corporate conversation on the platform. Ditto Pinterest, which has extended the hand of friendship to publishers of late. Snapchat, still not dead even though Ms. Jenner claims to no longer use the service. There is a little more room at the inn right now for smart players that figure out how to reconcile the competing demands of commercial results and consumer privacy.

We are finally, after 20 years, at a point where consumer data privacy in the US matters. To everyone, not just a handful of folks. We’ve also realized, I think, that even though regulation may stifle innovation, the cost of not protecting privacy through regulation is too steep. I personally wish we could rely on tech companies to police themselves and protect their consumers. Cambridge Analytica, and all the other extant examples for which the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica mess also serves as proxy, proves that we cannot.

In Europe, privacy is considered a fundamental human right. Its data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulations, codify consumers’ ownership of their personal data as well as the obligations companies that use or control consumer data have to that consumer.

Our attitude toward privacy in the US is a little different. It is largely viewed in terms of individual rights vis a vis governmental authority. It is not a fundamental right, and our privacy laws such as they are, reflect that.

Nevertheless online data regulation in the US now seems inevitable. Senators Markey and Blumenthal have already drafted a bill, and these are smart guys who have been around the online privacy debate for years. Markey in particular. They know the dangers of over-regulating technology.

Interesting times.

This week in influencer marketing: New York Times “discovers” Influencer fraud; Washington Post columnist laments changes in online mom influencers; Facebook changes the rules. Again.

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NY Times article about fake followers

In my post on January 22d, I noted that there was at least one article about influencer marketing every day, often more.

This week was no different, except for a change, the articles weren’t only in industry press. They also were in the papers that many consider the newspapers of record of the United States, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

New York Times “discovers” influencer fraud

This is not news. We’ve long known that the social platforms are chock full of fake accounts. ALL OF THEM. But most especially Twitter, the subject of the NYT story last weekend and follow-up posted on Thursday.

What is news is that it made it to the front page of a paper of record.

The NYT article dug into the business practices of Devumi, a firm used by celebrities, politicians, athletes and other prominent Twitter users to boost their followers. Long story short: lots of fake followers, often based on the identities of real people, artificial scale at best, fraud at worst.

The follow-up article reported that in the days after the original piece, many fraudulent accounts just vanished. Oh, and the company moved OUT of Florida, where it was about to be the focus of an investigation, reportedly to Colorado.

Lots to unpack in this, from the responsibility of the social platforms to better secure their systems to the imperative of scale to prove influence. The latter is what interests me for the purposes of today’s post, although I expect I will comment on the responsibility issue at some future point.

Certainly, there are celebrity influencers with huge Twitter followings on the roster of the companies that sell fake followers. It stands to reason that in the search for scale, some took a shortcut. Not news. Influencer marketing agencies and platforms know this, and have taken what steps they can to guard against it, as reported in Digiday.

From my perspective, this news is one large exclamation point to the value of quality over quantity when it comes to influencer marketing. Don’t get trapped into a numbers game that is easily gamed. Focus on building real relationships with the influencers who are your customers, your fans, your advocates. Less is more.

Advertising is and always will be about scale. It’s job is to cost effectively reach the largest number of interested people with your message in the shortest amount of time.

But influencer marketing is a different animal. Solid influencer marketing builds on relationships with influential customers who choose to advocate for your brand to reach other customers in authentic ways. Too much focus on scale perverts the fundamental nature of social influence. Not that scale isn’t important. But not at the cost of everything else that makes social influence effective.

Perhaps now the demand for scale will be tempered a little bit with an understanding that scale does not necessarily equal quality. My hope is that more folks will be receptive to this approach and stop chasing BIG follower numbers, choosing instead to match their influencer approach to their marketing objectives. When scale makes sense, such as launching a new product, and you need to raise awareness, turn to microinfluencers or celebrities to spread the word fast to many. But your bread and butter influencer strategy should be grounded in your true advocates, of any size, whose passion for your brand has real influence, and convinces others to try, buy, believe.

I am the eternal optimist.

WaPo columnist laments the changes in online mom influence

I feel like I have read this piece before. That’s not true, of course, but I have read so many like it in the past 15 years. From the fears of the longtime netizens when the web first began to commercialize to the circa 2008/2009 lamentations about the commercialization of blogs (which BTW led to the creation of Blog With Integrity,) and regularly since then, the constant refrain is that somehow sponsored content must be less authentic than spontaneous endorsement because it is solicited and curated.

In this article, the author misses the good old days of mom blogs, which she recalls as the authentic stories of parenting challenges, and bemoans the careful polish of today’s sponsored Instagram posts. Fair enough, and everyone is entitled to an opinion, But here’s the thing: the good old days always look better than today in the rosy glow of history. Some day, today will be the good old days.

The reality? There was good sponsored content and bad sponsored content “back then” and mom bloggers didn’t necessarily share everything even if it appeared more raw. The social currency was then and will always be the trust of your audience and the care which the endorser takes to ground her endorsement in a context that resonates for her readers.

There is no single perfect social platform, only the one where your customers are. “Back then,” blogs were the logical successor to forums and chat rooms, where many of the early parenting communities took root. Today, 15 years later, the new parent is likely from a completely different generational cohort. One that largely grew up digital, mobile phone in hand. Bottom line, if you are trying to reach millennial parents, visual formats like Instagram, Snapchat and video are a good bet for your marketing message.

That doesn’t mean that long-form is dead, or that no one is writing blogs anymore, or that Instagram has simply become a product billboard. Your social experience is what you make it. There is plenty of good writing, video and podcasting out there, if you want to find it. It may be advertiser supported, or part of a more traditional media property, or even behind a paywall, but it’s there, in parenting and any other vertical you care to name. There will ALWAYS be people who want to tell stories.

The question you have to ask yourself as a reader, is how do you want to support those storytellers? If you are getting the content for free, whether through Instagram, a podcast or a blog, you need to accept a certain amount of advertising with your content. You can decide how MUCH you want, but it isn’t fair to deny the storyteller fair compensation.

For their part, marketers need to be honest with themselves. Very little endorsement is truly spontaneous. Very few brands can generate unsolicited endorsement at scale. You need to pay to play somewhere. Isn’t it great that we can direct some of those dollars right back to our customers? I think so.

eMarketer is bullish on Instagram

eMarketer reports that Instagram is the most popular influencer platform, per research by influencer platform Zine.

Of course it is popular. It is easy to do, for the brands and the influencers, perfect for fashion, beauty and food, fast (no waiting 6 months to see uptake like with Pinterest) and the metrics are still squishy enough that “engagement” still counts as success. There are more Instagram influencer agencies, networks and platforms than I can even count any more, and new ones every day. All vying of course to be acquired by a bigger fish. Maybe even the biggest fish, Instagram/Facebook itself.

But it isn’t the only way to engage your influential customers as online advocates and evangelists. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, bespoke online communities, your own website, media sites, even Reddit, Twitter and Pinterest, all have something to offer to the influencer marketing mix, depending on your objectives, your product, your timeframe, your customers themselves.

So use caution when faced with data showing Instagram as the winner in the sponsored content stakes or as doubling in size from 2016 to 2017, as one recent study from Klear touted. Of course the use of Instagram for sponsored posts grew significantly year on year, but Klear measured based on the presence of a disclosure hashtag, either #ad or #sponsored. This leads to a faulty analysis. You can’t compare the market in the (relative) wild west of 2016 , when many were largely still ignoring FTC rules, to 2017, when the FTC regularly issued warnings to influencers about poor disclosure and people started cleaning up their game.

Increase, yes. Double? Doubtful. There are probably a whole lotta posts in 2016 going uncounted. But, yay for better disclosure practices in 2017. Better disclosure is a good thing for consumers and for the social marketing industry, and about time.

Facebook changes the rules. Again.

Facebook has narrowed the acceptable uses of its branded content tool. In a nutshell, the person or entity POSTING the item must be the creator of or significantly featured in the content being promoted. You can post a sponsored video you created or star in but you can’t post a video for the sponsor in which you did not participate. Effectively making ads the default solution for most current video distribution.

In my opinion, this will translate into a short term decrease in opportunity for influencers who use their Facebook page for sponsored content, but a long term gain, as brands return to using more influencer generated/featured content in their marketing programs.

Wanna hear me talk about all this?

I was a guest on This Week in Digital Media, a Facebook Live show hosted by Chloe DiVita , and we discussed all these topics at some length. Watch here: https://www.facebook.com/PerceptivePresence/videos/182048805886795/

Photo credit: Matt Britton

Initial report card on my 2018 recommendations and a prediction: the influencer marketing industry will see significant consolidation

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So far, so good.

One of my key recommendations for digital success in 2018 was to diversify your content distribution strategy and focus on building a loyal audience that regularly returns for your content.

January isn’t over yet, and Facebook has demonstrated the critical importance of this. Its pending algorithm changes are forcing publishers to shift their strategies. As reported in Digiday:

“Some are returning to old standbys like search and email; others are putting more resources into different platform products. […] In most cases, the goal is to build sustained engagement with publishers’ content, rather than chasing the flyby traffic that Facebook sometimes drove.”

Another recommendation was the critical importance of your editorial voice. Dan Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of Sharethrough, agrees. Discussing brand safety concerns in an interview with eMarketer, Greenberg said

“brands are shifting back to buying from premium, curated, real publishers that have an editorial voice, instead of just putting a box on the corner of a random webpage.”

I am batting 1000, so figured I’d drop one more on you. The influencer marketing industry will see significant consolidation by the end of 2018. It’s already started, with the acquisition of Whosay by Viacom earlier this month.

Every day, I read at least one, and sometimes two or three, articles announcing that 2018 will be the year of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing as a marketing practice has been around for a decade or so, since the very first blogger relations programs circa 2007/2008. Customer centric marketing, as a buzzword if not in practice, has been around even longer. The idea of using your customer as an evangelist, as an advocate, is not news.

What IS news is that it is now an important element in the marketing plan for many brands. A must-do, not just a nice-to-have.

This trend has been developing over the past couple years. You can almost follow its growth by tracking the growth of influencer marketing agencies, platforms and networks. Ten years ago, it was a handful of companies. Now, there are countless specialized agencies and technology platforms, nearly every consumer publisher has some influencer offering and the integrated agencies, not to be left out, have both practices and products to offer their clients.

As Digiday reported this morning, brands are also increasingly bringing all or part of their influencer marketing in-house, using a combination of internal staff, agencies and technology platforms/tools.

While there is plenty of work to go around, I predict significant consolidation. Here’s why.

You shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s platform. As influencer marketing increases its importance in the marketing plan, it will be critical to protect the investment. That is certainly why Viacom bought Whosay rather than continue to work with it as a vendor. Bonus — acquiring the platform you use removes it as an option for your competitors, another common reason for mergers.

As a result, the most promising small companies will be acquired, by media companies, agencies and larger more established competitors that can extend the platform (and the acquisition costs) across multiple advertisers. Some of the big consumer brands are possibly also in the mix as acquirers, but I think that less likely overall.

All these companies could develop their own solutions from scratch, but honestly, there are so many start-ups in the space, it is a far smarter business decision to buy, not build.

Not every brand that wants to use influencer marketing as part of its strategy will have the means or interest to acquire a platform in-house. There will still be need for independent software companies and agencies that sell various combinations of platform, services and influencer access.

But consolidation will reduce the industry back down to a reasonable number of tech companies, some of which will focus on small and mid-sized business, and others that will operate on the scale, enterprise level. Much like any other SaaS product. It is an inevitable right-sizing. Some firms (see above) will be acquired, some will acquire smaller competitors, and some will close their doors.

The key for brands that choose to use outside platforms will be to protect their data. To retain control over their results and the influencer relationships they nurture. This means making sure that they can capture and keep the data about the influencers they work with, and the results of the campaigns they do. Otherwise, they risk becoming hostage to a technology platform. You want to make absolutely sure that your information is stored to be portable to another platform, and that you are contractually permitted to do so. You need that fail-safe, because, I repeat, you shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s platform.

Who will be the winners? It’s anybody’s guess about the tech platforms (although I have a few,) but no matter what, the customer is a winner. Those that have nurtured their social influence, whether big or small, are getting a piece of the advertising pie. And for all of us, sponsored influencer content is better, more authentic, more engaging advertising.

Facebook changes algorithm, but nothing really changes for brands. It’s a pay for play world.

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Facebook announced last week that it was changing the algorithm to favor posts from friends and family over those from brands. It also recently gave users access to the SEE FIRST button for personal profiles as well as brand pages, allowing users to note whose updates they wanted to see first. This is great news for Facebook users, who have been complaining that the algorithm seemed to deliver posts from the same handful of friends, ignoring many others. “I never see your updates,” the oft-heard refrain.

Cue, immediate uproar from publishers, advertisers and brands that these changes would prevent their fans and followers from seeing THEIR updates.

Tempest in a teapot. The only way for brands to reliably get their content in front of their audience on Facebook at scale is to advertise. Facebook ads, boosted posts, branded content. Now it is simply more obvious.

In the short term, yes, these changes are unfortunate for those brands that have developed models for organic Facebook success. They will have to rethink their models and consider using paid posts to get the sharing started, rather than just relying on their content to drive organic shares. But, as long as the content is good, and worth sharing, does it really matter that you have to invest in a small amount of paid to get the party started? I don’t think so. I have long believed that what matters isn’t whether something is paid, owned or earned. It’s whether someone wants to share it. Previous posts on this topic include Shining a light on the native advertising debate from 2014 and Is earned media an anachronism from 2011.

Net, not much has really changed for brands. Facebook is just loudly fixing something that has hampered its user experience, and basking in the brownie points from billions of users.

By this week, the digital advertising press seemed to agree. Nothing new here, more of the same said both Digiday and Adweek.

Disclosing sponsored content: Celebrities, Instagram and the FTC

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Picture1Last month, the FTC sent letters to a bunch of celebrities, reportedly chastising them for improper disclosures. Here’s what this means for marketers and influencers creating sponsored content.

First things first. There are no new FTC Guidelines for Advertising Disclosures. Still the same basic rules we’ve been working with for years:

  • Disclose material relationships. If an influencer is compensated, whether cash or in-kind, she has a material relationship with the brand.
  • Clear, conspicuous disclosure in proximity to the endorsement. Unambiguous language. Placed where the consumer will see/hear it when she sees or hears the brand mention, the endorsement.
  • Accurate. The influencer and the advertiser both have an obligation to strive for accuracy and correct errors.

More details in my  FTC Disclosure Guidance deck.

What we did get in April was additional FTC guidance on the disclosures.

FTC guidance typically comes when the agency takes an enforcement action. In this case, it was the 90 letters to various celebrities and celebrity influencers who regularly promote brands using insufficient or unclear disclosures, sent in response to a complaint from watchdog group Public Citizen last Fall.

Generally, FTC guidance focuses on what to NOT do by highlighting practices that it deems insufficient. The FTC does not give an exact blueprint on the right way to disclose a brand relationship. If someone tells you (and I have heard this): “This is the official FTC disclosure,” they do not know what they are talking about. There is no standard, official disclosure. Just guidelines and guidance and the business practices we have developed to comply.

What was in the current guidance? Nothing surprising to those of us that have actually read the guidelines and previous guidance. The only surprising thing was that the agency took the step to reach out to influencers. Typically it focuses on advertiser compliance, for example the Lord & Taylor Instagram dress campaign of March 2015, settled in March 2016.

Here are some of the reasons I think they took the step of addressing influencers directly.

First, letters were sent to celebrities with massive followings. We don’t know exactly who received letters but names in the Public Citizen complaint included David Beckham, Mark Wahlberg, Jenny McCarthy, Chris Pratt and Kendall Jenner. Whether or not celebrities have to disclose has been a source of much confusion, but the test is pretty clear — what will the consumer understand? When the celebrity is in a television or print advertisement, or an athlete is wearing her sponsor’s gear as she performs, the audience has a good understanding of the relationship of the celebrity to the brand. The context tells us. On Instagram, where most of the reported infractions were posted, we have no such context. Everyone is technically, literally technically, the same on Instagram. My posts are viewed by my followers in exactly the same interface as Kim Kardashian West’s view hers. Without disclosure, we don’t know whether the endorsement was sponsored.

Second, the disclosures that folks were using were inadequate. Phrases like “in partnership with” or “my partner,” the hashtag #sp (which has been on record as inadequate for years) and branded hashtags are not sufficient disclosures. Mixing up the disclosure with a bunch of hashtags or putting it at the end of a post where it might not be seen are not sufficient disclosures.

The clearest disclosure on platforms that don’t have character limits is Sponsored Post (or Video or Content), and on platforms that have character limits, #sponsored or #ad. Placed at/near the beginning of the endorsement, especially on posts that truncate on mobile like Instagram. In fact, the FTC was unusually specific when it came to this point, apparently in all the letters:

“…the letters each addressed one point specific to Instagram posts — consumers viewing Instagram posts on mobile devices typically see only the first three lines of a longer post unless they click “more,” which many may not do. The staff’s letters informed recipients that when making endorsements on Instagram, they should disclose any material connection above the “more” button.” (from the FTC press release)

Finally, the problem was spreading. Increasingly, brands are turning to influencers instead of traditional agencies.  Especially on Instagram. The longer the FTC let the inadequate disclosures stand, the harder it would be to rein it in. Issuing enforcement letters to celebrities, not just big social influencers, guaranteed a certain amount of media coverage to help the agency get the facts in front of consumers and influencers. In addition to its press release and media outreach, the agency posted the news on both its consumer and BTB blogs.

Bottom line — we are far better off creating amazing content that our audience will love, sponsored and unsponsored alike, than trying to evade the disclosure requirements. Using obscure and inadequate disclosures, especially when there is intent to deceive, betrays the trust of the audience. Don’t do it. It’s not fair to your audience and the FTC is watching.

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In other disclosure news, Facebook has expanded the availability of its branded content tool. ALL Facebook pages that post sponsored content must post it through the branded content tool, which labels the post as PAID. This ensures that sponsored content is adequately disclosed on Facebook even if the organic disclosure is not strong. The branded content tool is currently only available for PAGES. Apply here; turnaround is about 2 days. You no longer have to be verified, and approval to use the branded content tool does NOT mean you are verified (blue check.)