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Who “owns” social platforms?

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Who “owns” social platforms? The user or the platform? The answer is both obvious, and yet not.

Clearly the developer of the platform (and its shareholders) own the business and its intellectual property. Deciding who owns the experience is a wee bit harder. Without the engaged users, there is no experience. In that respect the users are just as invested in the platform as its nominal owners.

This tension can sometimes get ugly. Nearly every time Facebook changes its terms of service, interface or algorithms, the users get restless, threaten revolt etc.

But what happens when a change in and enforcement of the terms of service impacts the business of its users. As when Facebook restricted sweepstakes and contests a few years ago. Restrictions it has since loosened. Or when Pinterest began applying daily pin limits to minimize spam and revising and enforcing its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes that involve Pinterest.

On some level, the platforms rely on creative users to experiment with business models to surface interesting ways of leveraging the platform. Is it then fair when the platform asserts its marks (pin, pinning), chooses to limit an activity (number of pins per day) or restricts something to itself alone as Facebook did with “advertising.” Perhaps not, but no one ever promised fair.

When you build your business on the back of someone else’s platform, you run the risk — always — of the platform making changes that impact your business. For example, when Pinterest asserted its claim to the concept of digital pins and pinning and signaled intent to enforce, a number of companies building third party Pinterest tools that used Pin in the name rebranded. Pingage became Ahalogy. Pinerly morphed into Reachli.

And last month, blogger Amy Lupold Blair was requested to not enforce a trademark she had registered for “Pinning Party” and to comply with Pinterest’s terms of service guidelines for sweepstakes and contests.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet, and my purpose for sharing this example isn’t to overanalyze it or decide who is “right.”

Because it doesn’t matter. Pinterest has a terms of service, and reserves the right to change its TOS at any time. If you want to use the service, you have to play by its rules.

The company also has to be consistent in its enforcement of its TOS and defense of the claim to the concept of the digital pin. That means pinning only happens on Pinterest and no other business entity can own pin/pinning in a digital context. It may seem draconian when applied to a loyal user like Amy, but if Pinterest doesn’t assert its claims consistently, it sets dangerous precedent for when it tries to assert against the inevitable copycat platforms.

I’m far more interested in exploring how we can use social platforms in our marketing and business offerings without getting tripped up by the inevitable tension of who owns what. Here are a few thoughts. Your Mileage May Vary.

  1. Build your offering on something you can own independent of a platform. It can certainly leverage a platform but for maximum flexibility, the underlying concept should be portable. This is why content-based plays are so powerful. The “product” is the story. The platform is simply the conduit.
  2. If you have a great idea for technology play on top of/relying on a single platform, be honest with yourself. Are you a bleeding edge first mover? Or is your idea a breakthrough for the platform? Then it’s possibly worth trying to position you/your idea/your company as an acquisition candidate quickly. Whether the platform wants to leverage your technology, get you out of the way or both, this is a strike-fast play.
  3. An independent technology concept that might plug into multiple platforms is also a decent bet, but again first mover or breakthrough has an edge, and shopping yourself may take longer than you have funds. Your idea needs to have legs on its own. Does it really fill an unmet market need?
  4. Pick a name for your product/service/company that you can own. You can’t own another’s trade or service marks, so don’t use ’em. Very few companies will be as lenient as Twitter when it comes to use of their name in your name. As we’ve learned with Pinterest, that a term is a generic like “pin” isn’t enough to rely on if the company can prove that use of the generic term in the specific context is something it created beyond the generic meaning.

And you know that just because a domain name is available, that doesn’t mean the name is, right?

For most bloggers, the content-based play is the simpler choice. It allows you to build on your strengths as a storyteller without being married to a platform. Your power is in your story, and in who cares to read it/engage with it/converse about it. Not in how you share it.

Bottom line: don’t build your empire — however large or small –on someone else. Build it on YOU.

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Changes to Facebook rules for contests and sweeps

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Facebook revised its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes this week,  removing the requirement that such promotions must be administered through a Facebook app.

Brands can now use their Facebook Pages directly for sweeps and contest entries, including core Facebook functionality like posting to the brand’s page, commenting or liking a post.

However, it is still a violation of the Terms of Service to require users to take actions on their own personal Timelines as entries.

Quite simply, Brand X can ask users like a post on its Brand X Page as an entry but it cannot ask users to share the post on their own personal Timelines as an entry.

Facebook also updated its TOS for Pages to make it explicitly prohibited to tag people in content they are not depicted in, or to encourage people to tag themselves as a sweepstakes entry. This seems a little weird and random but the folks over at Hubspot got this explanation from Facebook:

“It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize. It’s not OK to ask people to tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize.” – Source Hubspot

Important:  I interpret this restriction to apply to brands and Pages, the use of this tagging in promotional content,  and most specifically contest and sweeps entries. I do not believe this specifically applies to the common practice of tagging non-present people in photos on your personal Timeline. For example, tagging a picture of your niece with your sister’s name so other friends have a clue whose child this is. However, I am NOT a lawyer. Personally, I advise doing it sparingly and generally limited to the example I gave. That’s a nice privacy protection for the kids, and common sense would indicate Facebook would allow this. I am far less fond of tagging people in images merely to make them aware of the photo.

Why did they make the changes?
Facebook says it is to offer more flexible solutions to marketers. I don’t doubt it. Brands were using other platforms (Twitter, Instagram in particular) for their quick turnaround promotions.

Given the sheer volume of non-compliant stuff I continued to see on Facebook under the old rules  — usually but not always from smaller companies, I imagine the cost of enforcement also was well beyond the benefit. Rather than apply the rules inconsistently or try to stem the tide, Facebook decided to go with the flow.

Now it just has to go after promotions that violate the prohibition on using the personal Timeline. Bound to be a smaller task.

What does this mean for Brands?

Brands now have more options for contests and sweeps, particularly to execute things quickly when necessary. Facebook apps are still better for brand awareness and customer acquisition, as you can design a more engaging experience and capture email addresses for future promotions. They are also more expensive and take time to develop.

Activating a promotion on your brand Page is quick and easy, but you are also limited to the functionality of Facebook.

For Bloggers?

If you have a Facebook Page for your blog, you can now do promotions on Facebook, but read the Promotion Guidelines carefully. Facebook has other requirements for contests and sweeps, and you should always make sure that any promotion you administer complies with the law.

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Is Facebook the new website?

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This weekend is the Super Bowl, and while I will be paying slightly more attention to the game because the Patriots are playing, my main interest is in the advertising. This year, I will be watching closely to see how many commercials drive to Facebook pages, in addition to or instead of, a website.

Because Facebook is clearly where so many brands are going these days. It reminds me a little of the “web rush” in the mid/late 90s when mainstream brands realized what many tech companies had grokked since the first browser in 1993, that the browser had changed the marketing equation for good. It was a little like a gigantic penny drop. Suddenly every brand had a website, and URLs were promoted everywhere.

Now it is Facebook. Everywhere. Marketing strategies built around Shares and Likes.

This makes me very nervous. Your marketing strategy should include Facebook. With its user base edging every upward to a billion, you would be foolish to not use the social network in your marketing plan.

BUT, your marketing strategy shouldn’t be a Facebook strategy. No matter how small or large you are, don’t put all your eggs, even just for a single promotion, into one basket.

Especially this basket, over which you have no control. All those fans you are spending so much of your budget acquiring? Your connection with them relies almost entirely on Facebook. Sure, you can sign them up for email lists and such, but the community aspect? That happens on Facebook.

And what Facebook gives, Facebook can taketh away. Not literally of course. But it can change its terms or add fees. I am not saying it will hold your brand hostage, but it could.

So, when you are integrating Facebook into your marketing strategy, think about how you can leverage its benefits while protecting your brand’s assets and consumer goodwill.

Go Patriots!

Facebook just wants “to be a real boy”

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This is the time of year when some folks trot out the tarot cards and crystal balls, and attempt to predict the coming year. And others wax eloquent (mostly)  on what transpired in the year just past. Over the 7 years I have been writing this blog, I have generally tried to stay away from this sort of post.

This year, however, that is pretty much what you are going to get. There are a few trends that I have been watching for a while now, always intending to post about them but never quite having  the time. Here’s the first.

Facebook  just wants “to be a real boy” and become a social content platform.

Facebook gets lots of eyeballs — 800 million active  worldwide users, 50% of whom access it everyday according to the company’s stats page. And the boys behind Facebook are smart cookies; they know they need to give people a reason to keep coming back. But, it seems like they aren’t entirely sure that catching up with friends and family and sharing “stuff”  is unique and defensible enough. And mining user data only works if you keep the users.

So they’re hitching their horses to the content wagon, and setting themselves up to be a content platform. Brand pages, apps, timelines and other enhancements designed to make Facebook a source of information, not just connection.

Brands are diving right in. Everyone has a Facebook landing page, contest or app. The ubiquitous URL in advertising has given way to the Facebook like and share buttons.

At the end of the day though, the Facebook platform is inherently hostile to robust content development. It was developed for short form messages and social connections, and layering apps and other tools to make it more content friendly doesn’t make it so.

But we’re sure as shootin’ going to try. Facebook has the eyeballs that brands want, and doesn’t want them to go elsewhere.  The more of our activities and transactions it can own, the better that database gets.  In the coming year,  more and more brands will shift content to Facebook that in the “old days”  would have been on brand-owned microsites.

The $25K question is, will they really recognize sufficient benefit from being on the Facebook platform to make up for the inherent unfriendliness of the platform to branding and deep content. Not to mention the murky area of who owns what on Facebook….

The more transactional, ephemeral and social the content, the more successful the efforts will be. Deep thinking? Complex topics? I just don’t see Facebook as a hospitable place for this. The Facebook brand page just doesn’t have enough branding to make the brands happy, or enough information to make the consumer happy. For one thing,  all the custom developed apps bypass one of the key benefits of Facebook, the simple user interface.

Brands will try, but in the end, I think the winning strategy will continue to be to link into the social graph to promote or aggregate content that lives elsewhere on microsites and blogs. This allows the brand to leverage the social aspects of Facebook, but still own their own robust content platforms.

Unfortunately, at the moment, things are moving in another direction,  and 2012 is going to be the year of bigger and splashier brand pages on Facebook.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

Update on Facebook contest rules

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Earlier this week, the All Facebook blog reported that contests and promotions on the Facebook platform would no longer need a written pre-approval from Facebook. This removes a significant barrier to entry to hosting a contest on a Facebook Page for smaller organizations.

Under the old rules, promotions required pre-approval, but the only way to get it was to have a designated Facebook rep, and the only way to get one of those was to run $10K of Facebook advertising.

All the other rules remain the same, so you still cannot use status updates as a method of entry  or automatically enter someone for becoming a fan.