Marketing Roadmaps

Influencer Marketing

Update: Pinterest’s Acceptable Use Policy and Brand Pins/Pinboards

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Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

It’s not a secret that I am something of an ethics/best practices aficionado. As a result, I pay particular attention to the terms of service and acceptable use policies of the social platforms commonly used in sponsored programs. The good news is: I love it so you don’t have to 🙂

Recently (1/31/2014),  Pinterest changed its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to explicitly prohibit both compensated pins and ads that could be confused with Pinterest content.

Specifically prohibited per the AUP :

“Create or show ads that look like or could be confused with Pinterest content (for example, embedding Pinterest actions like Pin, follow or unfollow in your ads)
Directly compensate users for Pinning, following or unfollowing” 

However:

“a business can pay someone to help them put together a board that represents their brand. For example, it’s okay for a guest blogger to curate a board for a local boutique’s profile. We don’t allow that boutique to pay the blogger to Pin products to her own boards.”

How does this  impact brands that want to use Pinterest in their promotional efforts? Here’s my take.

Not Allowed:

Brands CANNOT compensate influencers to pin brand content on their own Pinterest boards. This includes asking them to curate from a pre-defined pool of content or Pinterest boards.

Allowed:

Influencers can create boards for brands on the brand Pinterest. Because the brand’s Pinterest is understood to be commercial, the board can include branded pins, and no further FTC disclosure is necessary.

Brands can license previously published blog content  to populate the brand Pinterest boards. These licensed pins can include branding. 

Finally,  influencers can create sponsored boards on their own Pinterest account using a theme that aligns with the brand messaging but does not specify content sources or include any paid branded pins. The board sponsorship would require disclosure per FTC requirements, as it is a compensated activity, but one that is more akin to an editorial sponsorship than sponsored advertorial.

Pinterest does not include an example of this type of board in the AUP update but I am confident that this is well within the policy. Here’s an example, built around the theme of beautiful things:

Sponsored Pinboard

That said, Pinterest can always change its mind about this, or any other policy in its Terms of Service or AUP, so it is wise to check the company’s blog for updates before finalizing any program.

In particular, if you want to do a contest or sweeps using Pinterest, something I generally do not recommend, the service regularly refines its policy on sweeps and contests. The current policy is much in line with the new position on compensated pinning. It states: “please don’t:

Suggest that Pinterest sponsors or endorses you or the promotion
Require people to Pin from a selection
Make people Pin your contest rules
Run a sweepstakes where each Pin, board, like or follow represents an entry
Encourage spammy behavior, such as asking participants to comment
Ask Pinners to vote with Pins, boards or likes
Require a minimum number of Pins”

 What do these changes mean for brands over the long term?  

Pinterest is still feeling its way around commercial use of the platform, and is simultaneously trying to maintain the authenticity of the experience that caused such dynamic growth while evaluating and building its own monetization models. Right now, it is being very restrictive on commercial use of the core functionality of the platform, much as Facebook did a few years ago.

Facebook has since loosened some (but not all) the restrictions it placed, particularly with regard to Pages (versus personal Profiles). I expect Pinterest will do the same: reserve some capabilities to itself while lightly loosening the restrictions in areas where it is not building its own solutions.

More to come, I am sure!

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Shining a Light on the Native Advertising Debate

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Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

In December, the FTC held a workshop on Native Advertising,  the practice of embedding/including advertising messages in editorial spaces. Prompted by concerns that publishers are not disclosing sufficient information to consumers, the workshop was mostly focused on native advertising on publishers’ sites and portals. Although there are some implications for sponsored content on independent blogs, there was nothing in this workshop that replaced or changes the endorsement guidelines updated in 2009.

The FTC regularly holds public workshops to discuss and document the points of view on a topic for which they might issue a regulation.  Nothing really new comes to light, but the workshops are a good way to understand the current market thinking on a topic. How it works in a nutshell:

  • Participants file a public comment on the matter with the FTC in order to be “invited” to the workshop (and not all are given speaking slots).
  • During the workshop, the participants clarify and defend these previously established positions.
  • Often participating organizations time related press announcement to the workshop date to maximize the reach of their point of view. For example, the IAB released its Native Advertising Playbook on December 4th, the day of the workshop.
  • Following the workshop, the FTC may (or may not) eventually issue regulatory guidelines.

If you aren’t on the hot seat, FTC Workshops are excellent policy wonk theater. From the coverage, this one did not disappoint. Seen on Twitter, largely paraphrasing commentary by columnist Bob Garfield:

raju: “We are all trying to make money” Yes, but with a “boatload of shit.” Arguments fly in US @FTC hearing on #NativeAds bitly.com/1bid3ie

sulliview: “A conspiracy of deception. A hustle. A racket. A grift.” And other kind words for native advertising:adage.com/article/media/… h/t @raju

If you were looking for a conclusion or a ruling, though, you would definitely be disappointed at the outcome (to-date) of the workshop. As is often the case, FTC workshops end with everyone realizing just how a) far apart the various protagonists/antagonists are on the issues and b) how confusing the topic is, both organically and as manufactured by the protagonists and antagonists.

Among other issues, the different players in the online media industry are using the term “native advertising” to mean  multiple, often disparate things. Many of which already existed in somewhat similar form, online and off.  At best, this makes conclusions about concrete action difficult for the regulators.  At worst, it makes it obvious that sometimes the lack of clarity is deliberately intended to confuse consumers about the paid nature of the content and implied endorsement. Online and offline, sometimes it is just hard tell where the editorial ends and the advertising begins. Blurred lines (the name of the FTC workshop) indeed, and certainly why the FTC intends to keep a sharp eye on native advertising in the coming year.

I’m watching the ongoing debate with some interest. In part because HULLO ethics policy wonk here! but also because these discussions about native advertising impact my work with brands and influencers at BlogHer. We’ve been doing sponsored content for years, both on BlogHer.com and on the blogs of our Advertising Network members, and have long been a proponent of clear and prominent  disclosure of sponsored relationships, even before the revised FTC endorsement guidelines.

Sponsored posts are considered a form of native advertising. I’d argue that sponsored posts are the original native advertising, and many of the newer portal- and publisher- based forms are attempts to mimic the word-of-mouth potential of an authentic influencer endorsement. Other native ads are advertorials that blur the lines between the native editorial of a publisher — the magazine content — and advertising. For example, did the sponsor simply fund the space, and the article was written with the usual editorial objectivity of the publisher, or did the advertiser place the article fully written? Both types of post have their place in the content ecology, but sponsorship and in the case of my example, the level and degree of sponsorship, must be disclosed so consumers can make an informed decision.

On one side of this debate, we have the advertising and publishing industry that wants to expand the opportunities to reach consumers with marketing messages. And on the other, we have the watchdogs who are concerned that consumers aren’t getting adequate information upon which to base their decisions.

No one denies the need for disclosure. The sticking point seems to be what is an acceptable, meaningful disclosure.

We are arguing about the wrong thing. We are having a debate when we should be having a conversation. And not about the best way to disclose. Shaded boxes versus color cues, or whether we call something an ad, advertorial or sponsored, trap us in the minutiae of old media models.

One of the most interesting topics discussed during the workshop was a study conducted by the McCarthy Institute for IP and Technology Law. Among other things the study found that 50% of respondents did not know what sponsored advertising meant.  The study also suggested that consumers don’t care that much. Reported website emedia|vitals:

One question looms even larger than how publishers label the native ads that run on their site: Do consumers care? One-third of respondents in the McCarthy Institute study said they are not concerned about the difference between ads and editorial and that they would actually be more likely to click on something they think is an ad.

“So the important baseline question is, what are we protecting the consumer from?” asked Franklyn [McCarthy Institute Director David Franklyn]. “A growing number of consumers enjoy the hyperstimulation of the work that advertisers and publishers do. They don’t care whether it’s paid or unpaid – they may just want to be entertained.”

Should consumers care? Does it matter?  It seems that consumers aren’t nearly as fussed about whether a message is paid or unpaid as long as they can trust its credibility and the message is relevant and interesting.  This shouldn’t surprise us — it is the foundation upon which social media, and social media marketing, is built. That said, it is extremely important to note that while the consumer may not care whether an endorsement is paid or not, it is still vital that she know whether it was paid or not. Without disclosure, there is no foundation for the trust upon which social media engagement relies.

Trust and Relevance. 

Rather than get bogged down making advertising look like editorial because we think it increases its trust value if it looks “native,” let’s take a deep breath and realize that the consumer doesn’t care whether it is paid, owned or earned. Shareability is the new social currency.

I have written about this before so I am no less guilty of using the FTC workshop as a soapbox than any of the participants.  But it bears repeating: Developing a story so good that consumers are driven to share is the real goal. It’s not an either/or — either you use paid media OR you use earned media OR you use owned media.The best marketing strategies rely on all three tactics.

  Sharing Venn Diagram

Shared Media: Social’s New Currency
Source: BlogHer

And don’t shortchange disclosure in an attempt to make the message more appealing. It’s not necessary, and when you do so, you begin your relationship with your customer based on a lie. And really, that never works out well. In life or in business.

Matching the social platform to the marketing objective

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Matching the social platform used in a marketing campaign to the marketing objective of the campaign is the first step  of successful strategy. Yet, all too often, early adopters rush to the shiny new object, regardless of whether it is the right choice for the specific need. And on the extreme opposite of the spectrum, risk averse marketers wait. And wait. Until all the proof is in, and any opportunity for first (or even second) mover advantage is lost.

We want to aim for the middle ground – to be in the right place for our audience with the right message at the right time.

Let’s break it down.

Right platform? Consider the social platform in the context of your marketing objectives.  Is the platform conducive to your marketing need?

  • Blogs: The deep content on blogs drives readers through to consideration and often purchase. More than 85% of the BlogHer audience has purchased a product based on a recommendation from a blog (BlogHer Social Media Matters 2012).
  • Pinterest: Its curated content with aspirational and inspirational appeal acts as  long term consideration sets for consumers.
  • Facebook: Personal connections pique interest and foster consideration.
  • Twitter: Broad amplification drives awareness

Drive To Purchase Funnel

The Social Purchasing Funnel
Image Source: BlogHer marketing materials

Right time? Is your audience actively using the social platform? If your customers aren’t actively using a social platform, it doesn’t matter that it is the hot new thing. It is not the hot new thing for your brand. Continue to monitor, but move on, at least for now, for your overall marketing strategy. If you sense potential for the platform, be vigilant for an inflection point – that moment when enough of your audience is actively using the platform for it to be potentially useful in your marketing strategy. Maybe even test it with small pilot projects, but don’t expect any ROI from these pilots other than knowledge about the platform and your customer base. You are asking for failure if you expect your pilot project to deliver significant sales results.

Right message? Is your audience receptive to hearing about or engaging with your brand on this social channel? That they might not want to talk about your product doesn’t mean they might not engage with your company on related topics, but be honest about what you are bringing to the online conversation. Some advice I wrote in 2008 about the secret sauce for a perfect blog pitch might prove useful in this exercise.

You should spend at least as much time thinking about WHAT you want them to say/do, HOW you want them to react and engage with your brand, as you do slicing and dicing the demographics. More really, but I’ll settle for equal time to start. The social platform may be perfect and your audience ready and willing to engage with you, but if your message is forced and inauthentic, it will at best fall flat. At worst, you’ll understand the dark side of “viral” which is far closer to the real world meaning of the word than the sentiment behind the oft-repeated mantra of the social era: <clueless enthusiasm> let’s hope our story goes viral !</clueless enthusiasm>

Spend the time to sanity check your message and your ask, against the audience and the platform, and once you get started, monitor the community reaction closely and adjust as necessary. Spelling your name right is not a good substitute for positive brand awareness and corporate goodwill.

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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Defining content marketing, native advertising and engagement

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Content marketing. Native advertising. Engagement.

These, my friends, are the buzzwords du jour. And there seem to be as many definitions OF them as there are letters IN them. Every publisher, every social network defines them in the context of their offer, their platform — what they are able to deliver to the advertiser.

Which is of relatively little use to the brand marketer trying to compare these disparate offerings and make decisions among them. In order to do that, you have to strip away the bells and whistles of the digital platforms and properties to get to a simple common definition of WHAT these things are. In other words, get to the apples to apples of things first, and then look at the embellishments offered by each platform/publisher.

To help us out, here are my simple definitions.

Content Marketing

Content marketing isn’t exactly new. In fact, it’s as old as the first testimonial, and I’m sure if we looked hard enough we could find that in the Bible. Not to start a religious war or anything but some might say that the Bible itself was an early form of content marketing. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Turn of the (20th) century woman’s literature.

Content marketing is storytelling used to persuade. Prior to the modern age, it was more often and obviously used for ideas, but first person testimony has been used for products since the very first marketplaces.

The digital form offers some twists that we don’t find in Paine, Genesis or turn-of-the century pamphlets for this or that medicine.

In digital, content marketing is far more overtly used for products. Sponsored content on blogs, consumer resource sites sponsored by brands, brand sponsored Pinterest boards and Facebook Pages. Even content driven advertising. Format doesn’t matter – editorial, testimonial, advertorial, advertising –as much as the simple notion that there is intrinsic value in the content. In other words, I don’t have to buy the product to get some value.

The value in the content independent of its role as a branded or brand sponsored message is what drives sharing. In the digital sphere, we can track and measure that sharing, and use that information to tweak our tale, adjust our strategy. A real-time option definitely not available to Mr. Paine. It took him years and an occasional stint in Parisian prisons to get his feedback.

Native Advertising

It’s no secret that I find this term unnecessary. It’s a buzzword in search of a unique meaning.

In some circles, it means an advertising message (of any length) delivered in the “native” format of the platform. This can be anything from a Facebook post or a tweet, to a brand logo perched on a blog post a la BuzzFeed. Even a brand-written advertorial “guest posted” in a blogger’s editorial space. The term can also be expanded to include all forms of sponsored content, even that which is not 100% controlled by the brand.

My question has always been – why do we even need the term? We have perfectly good terms — advertising, editorial, advertorial, content and sponsored content. Advertising is a message developed and controlled by a brand. Editorial is a message developed and controlled by the author or publisher. Advertorial is a blend of the two, and strictly speaking only should be applied to editorial-like content developed and controlled by the advertiser, although you will find it applied to independently written sponsored posts.

Collectively, digitally, all of these things can be considered content. Yes, even advertising. And when a brand sponsors and informs it, we call it sponsored content. So why exactly do we need the term native advertising?

I suppose underlying the rise of and desire for the term is the idea that native somehow makes it better. The thought process must be something like this: “Native. That’s like organic, right? So it MUST be better.”

Poppycock.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising. It serves its purpose in the marketing mix, as do all the other tools in the toolbox.

Engagement.

Simple right? Engagement is the measure of consumer interaction with the brand message. It’s an action – reading a blog post, retweeting or sharing a Facebook post, pinning an image.

Engagement is not exposure.

Exposure to a message is important, additive and critical. Without exposure, there is no possibility of engagement, and we know that repeated exposures increase likelihood of eventual purchase. Understanding the potential exposures to our message is the crucial base for a concrete action based model for engagement.

With advertising, we buy impressions but evaluate the success of our programs on click-through. In social, we acquire exposures (paid or earned, it really doesn’t matter) and evaluate the success based on actual consumer engagement with the message – by reading content, clicking through to a site, entering a sweepstakes, pinning an image, retweeting and so on.

This is all moving toward models that are predictive of sales, or at minimum can be used to forecast with some degree of accuracy. We aren’t there yet, and even when we are, it will never be perfect. Things that involve people never are totally predictable, but the more we understand what works to move the needle — what is effective —  the more efficient we can be with our marketing spend.

One tactic that will help in this mission is to design engagements — actions — that move the consumer along the sales funnel. For example, instead of simply collecting an opt-in email address for more information on your micro-site, develop an interactive widget that helps the consumer understand which of your products might fit her best, or provides use scenarios that she can try on for size. Whenever possible, engage your customer actively, not passively.

And that’s it for today’s vocabulary lesson. What popular industry terms and jargon do you think could stand a little deconstruction? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

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