Business

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.

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.
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.
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?
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.

How Pinteresting (360degreesofadvertising.wordpress.com)
Nordstrom Will Use Pinterest To Decide What Merchandise To Display In Stores (JWN) (businessinsider.com)

For the past few months, I’ve been head down working on Professional Blogging For Dummies, and there just hasn’t been a lot of time to write blog posts. A few things were just too important to let slide, like the FTC/Ann Taylor Loft story, but for the most part I’ve had to let many juicy stories go.

Like the pitch for an FDA approved douche sent to bloggers of both genders. Or the one for a snake repellent sent to mom bloggers in Manhattan. Seriously, outside of the zoo, how often do you see a snake of the reptilian variety in New York City?

Then there are the brand ambassador programs that seem to be multiplying like rabbits. For example, the Sears Outlet brand ambassador program with the laundry list of requirements for the bloggers but zero compensation.

Somehow, we’ve lost the distinction between public relations, which relies on a compelling story to “earn” the placement in the media outlet (hence the term “earned media,” more about that below), and promotion, which is a sales-related activity closely related to advertising. Many blogger programs are really about promotion, but they offer little or no compensation to the bloggers for what is essentially advertising space. Read Liz Gumbinner’s posts for more on this: Nothing is free, except it seems, a mommyblogger and In defense of PR.

And then there was last week’s dust-up between a blogger who took umbrage at, and posted about, a specific pitch, and a pretty strong response from the mentioned agency. I haven’t looked at the specifics of the post or program in question, but my immediate reaction reading the agency’s post was a certain amount of amazement that the author didn’t seem realize that the very questions she was raising in her post have been circling around the blogosphere for years. Read Julie Pippert’s The elephant in the room? Not so much for more about this specific post and its aftermath.

Earned media is a dinosaur
I participated in my first conference panel on blogger relations at BlogHer Business in 2007. More than 3 years later, I often feel like we haven’t moved forward at all. We’re still arguing about the same things — Are the pitches good, targeted and relevant? Are bloggers journalists? And so on. Blah Blah Blah.

This discussion is old and tired, and it’s not going anywhere except down a rathole. We need to move on. As Julie (@jpippert) and I discussed on Twitter after I read her post, earned media is a dinosaur. We need a new model.

One that understands that the blogger is also a customer, not just a reporter. That the old forms of engagement don’t work anymore. And that both sides — PR and bloggers — need to look at the relationship through a new lens. Companies and their PR agents aren’t doing bloggers “a favor” by including them in their programs. There’s an expected business benefit. And bloggers aren’t entitled to anything. If you want to participate in blogger relations or advertising programs, you’ve got to build a compelling blog that attracts an audience that the companies and advertisers want to reach.

The successful approach for reaching out to bloggers integrates public relations and advertising to achieve marketing objectives. If the story is compelling, PR outreach. If the company wants to control a message, advertising.

This flies in the face of the typical corporate organization and certainly agency alignments, and absolutely requires a change in the way we look at our marketing task. I’ve been writing about this changing model for some time now, and will continue to write about it here and at Shamable.com.

Expertise

True expertise is less about knowing how to do something than understanding why you’re doing it. Always start by asking Why? Then worry about How? Check out Toby Bloomberg’s e-book Social Media Marketing GPS for advice from 40 social media experts that truly understand the why and the how. I was doubly privileged with regard to this book — I was one of the people Toby interviewed on Twitter for the book and I was in Atlanta the day she launched, so I got to celebrate with her in person.

Also on my radar screen (and bound to be the topics of upcoming posts): more on measurement, including some thoughts on the importance of sentiment, and another look at Facebook after the privacy dilemmas of the past month. What are the implication for marketers and consumers?

Finally, thank you to the folks at Ignite Social Media for including Marketing Roadmaps (and me) on their list of 50 Women Bloggers You Should Be Reading. I’m not a terrific fan of lists, but feel privileged to be included in this company.

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