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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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Two levels of getting it right with blogger relations

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Mom out on the town
Image by marymactavish via Flickr

Recently I was interviewed by Chief Marketer about how brands are reaching out to women through social media. The reporter was interested in how brands were and were not “getting it right.”

As I wrote here last month (OMG, that long), it’s become increasingly clear to me that the brands that are doing excellent work using social media tools to reach their customers generally have done and do a good job in traditional media. Sure, even the best companies make the occasional mistake with a campaign, product or program but for the most part, their marketing communications are sharp (often clever) and do not patronize the consumer.

These companies already understand that it’s important to respect your customer. In all that you do. They just have to figure out how to translate that imperative using the social media toolset in a way that is authentic to the brand and relevant to the customer.

It’s more than just getting the mechanics right. That’s the price of entry into social media engagement with your customer. I’ve been saying it for years, and I’ll keep on saying it: there is NO excuse for misaddressed e-mail – for example, the “Dear XXX” pitch about toys (children’s toys) that many parent bloggers got last week – or grammar errors – like “conscious” for “conscience,” also from last week’s in-box.

As Marketing Mommy said on Twitter:

@sgetgood My reply to him: “Despite my efforts to break into the porn star business, I’ve yet to use the moniker XXX.”

The poor interns come in for a lot of flack when we talk about these often humorous mechanical mistakes, but really, it is management’s job to create a system with the proper checks and balances.

If you MUST mass e-mail bloggers (and I wish you wouldn’t), invest in a decent CRM system and assign your interns to getting the data entered properly. Not on cutting and pasting pitches. Buy everyone who drafts, edits or sends customer facing emails a dictionary and make it a requirement that it be displayed on their desks. Why? Because it will be a constant visual reminder to check not just the spelling of words, but their meaning. Spell check and online dictionaries can’t do that.

The mechanics are the first, most basic level of getting blogger outreach right. We can do it. I know we can.

Your message is the second, more important level of “getting it right.” My favorite fantasy is that next year, even more companies and their agencies will see the light and understand that what they should be doing is sharing compelling ideas and stories with their customers. Exciting things that will make them want to write about the brand.

Instead of trotting out formulaic pitches and recycling the same product launch templates from project to project, client to client, brand to brand.

Be careful though.This requires more than just identifying the blogger’s passion that drives interest in your product and inserting the message point in an otherwise bland pitch. That’s a start (I guess), but it’s not enough. There is honestly still far too much of this sort of pitch circulating in the ether.

Really getting it right requires that you connect with that passion. To do that, you need to know the bloggers you are reaching out to. It still comes back to the 3 R’s as coined by good friend and colleague David Wescott in 2007 – respect your customer, be relevant and build a relationship over time.

Good blogger relations is  still (and always will be) a commitment, not a one night stand.

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Pennsylvania Governor’s Conference for Women ticket giveaway – Stay tuned: I will pick a winner this weekend from the comments on this post. I also have one ticket each for the Texas Conference for Women in November and the Massachusetts Conference for Women in December. Watch for a post next week about the conferences and details on how I plan to give away those passes. More than likely it will be on Twitter, not here on the blog as finding time to write is a bit problematic for the next two weeks due to my schedule.

Next week, I will be in NYC most of the week, digging in to my second week on the job as VP Sales Marketing for BlogHer and speaking at a PRSA event on Friday. The following week, I travel to Orlando to present a social media workshop at AARP’s Orlando@50+ conference.

In between all of that we are trying to find a place to live for 3 people, 3 dogs and 2 cats. Fun times!  We need a rental within about an hour’s commute to Manhattan by train until we sell our house in Massachusetts. If you’ve got leads, let me know. We’re leaning toward western Connecticut but open to all suggestions.

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Travel blogs, ethics and the FTC endorsement guidelines

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IMG_8919This past weekend, I was in New York for the Travel Blog Exchange conference (TBEX). The primary reason I attended the conference was to represent Blog With Integrity on a panel about blogging ethics, but I also got some great tips and ideas for my somewhat neglected travel blog, Snapshot Chronicles Roadtrip.

This year, I’ve spoken at a number of conferences about integrity, disclosure and the FTC endorsement guidelines. In most cases, the audience doesn’t know very much about the guidelines beyond whatever version of the urban myths are circulating within the community. This is of course why the conference organizers invite Blog With Integrity and usually someone from the FTC and/or a lawyer.

The travel community  was grappling with the ethical issue of sponsored trips  well before the guidelines were revised last year. Travel bloggers are very passionate about ethics and receptive to the approach of best practices — disclosure policies that go beyond what the FTC minimally requires. In fact, many travel blogs already have published policies.

During the Q&A on Sunday, it was clear that the attendees wanted to comply with the FTC requirements,  but they were struggling a bit with exactly what had to be disclosed and how.

And then I had an “Aha” moment. Hard to believe that after all I have written about this topic for more than a year, there would be something I hadn’t thought of, but lo and behold, there was.

I broke it down to a simple equation for disclosure, which seemed to clear things up for a lot of the bloggers at TBEX.

Endorsement + Compensation = Disclosure Required

How to disclose

The best way to disclose to meet the FTC guidelines is within the post that contains the endorsement: “I was privileged to be hosted by…” “I was thrilled at the opportunity to take a trip to (place) courtesy of (sponsor).” And so on. It is not sufficient to disclose in your disclosure policy or About page.

However, I recommend that you also have  a disclosure & editorial policy on your page:

  • to let your readers know what they can expect on your blog, especially casual readers or folks that find you through a search engine, and
  • to inform marketers and PR people about your interests so they contact you with relevant, appropriate offers.

Relationships and SWAG

Another key point Mary Engle from the FTC and I both stressed on Sunday was the relationship between the marketer and the blogger. If the marketer is reaching out to specific bloggers with sponsored trips and free products, there is a compensated relationship that must be disclosed. If 300 bloggers all get identical SWAG (stuff we all get) at a conference, the reason they received it was as a member of a group, not as an individual. There is no relationship between the marketer and a blogger who got the SWAG. This is still true if distribution of the SWAG is managed using a list of bloggers at the conference entitled to receive it. A list doesn’t create a relationship. Communication between people creates a relationship.

That said, of course, you know my mantra — disclose anyway. The company that provided an item relevant enough that you decide to write about it deserves the props for supporting the conference SWAG bag.

Bloggers, journalists

A touchy subject was the idea that travel bloggers are being held to a higher standard than travel writers for mainstream media who don’t have to disclose. I’ve written about why the FTC doesn’t require disclosure from mainstream journalists many times, and won’t rehash it all again. The brief version is that it’s about the consumer reading the item, not the person writing it. If the consumer would understand that the endorsement was compensated  — in the case of a journalist, by his salary and probably the subsidy of his paper for the trip,  no further disclosure is required.

The predominant sentiment at the conference was that mainstream journalists should be required to disclose as well. I agree. Disclosure is a best practice, full stop, regardless of your publishing channel.

However, I reject the opposite argument, which wasn’t offered by the TBEX audience, but I’ve read elsewhere — if mainstream journalists don’t have to do it, why should bloggers? That’s grabbing the stick from the very wrong end.

I also think it’s counter-productive to worry too much about others. Focus on what you need to do to connect with your readers, provide them good information and entertaining writing, and be honest about any business relationships you have. Compensation or free product may not change your opinion or writing one little bit, but you have to let the reader make that call for herself. You shouldn’t attempt to do it for her.

Twitter?

How to disclose on Twitter always comes up during ethics panels, and Sunday was no exception. It’s also a bit more complex for travel writers taking sponsored trips, as opposed to someone reviewing a single product. A trip occurs over a period of time, and there are only 140 characters. If part of every tweet has to have a disclosure, the tweetstream would get pretty dull.

Mary Engle made an important clarification for us. You have to disclose that the trip was compensated or the product was free in tweets containing the endorsement of the sponsor/advertiser. When you are tweeting about something unrelated to the sponsor — for example,  your experience at a local museum or farmers’ market, there’s no need to disclose because you are not endorsing the sponsor.

Here’s my advice.

  • Start your trip with a tweet acknowledging the sponsor (and linking to a post on your blog with more details if you have one)
  • Be sure to disclose in some fashion in any tweets endorsing the sponsor: “I love my room at the Aruba Marriott #sponsor” “The beach at host hotel Swanky Resort is pristine.”
  • If the trip spans multiple days, make sure you have at least one tweet per day that discloses that your trip is sponsored and by whom. The easiest way to do this is to spread out your endorsements of the sponsor 🙂
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Facebook: the gateway drug to social media, & other thoughts on SOCIAL networks

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Repeat after me: It’s the SOCIAL that matters in social networks, not the network. On or offline, it’s the community that matters, not the structure. Even where there is no structure, community will emerge. Look at Twitter.

The engagement is what matters. Not the form of the network. Blogs, Facebook, communities like Cafe Mom and BlogHer, Twitter, LinkedIn, “Old fashioned” forums and bulletin boards. These are all forms of social media engagement.

The trick is to find the ones that matter. To you. To your business.

When I do my social media 101 workshops for business audiences, the thing I stress them most is that you want to be where your customers are. For individuals, where your friends are. Otherwise, why bother?

This week, Harvard Business Review’s report that only about 10% of Twitter users account for about 90% of the traffic on the network was quasi big news in social media circles. To which I say: what else did you expect? Twitter is most clearly an early adopter space, and early adopters are bound to be more active than users in general. @GuyKawasaki and @Scobleizer probably account for 1% alone. With (Kawasaki) or without (Scoble) ghweeters (ghost tweeters).

As it matures, the Twitter numbers may more closely reflect typical social network activity, where approximately 1% are active and the balance passive consumers of content, but for now, Twitter is the avant garde, the edge of social media. Trying to reach the early adopters? Ignore Twitter at your peril. We’re there. Every day. Using it on our phones and iPhones and Blackberries too.

Mass market? Don’t worry about it. For now.

More interesting were the Nielsen stats that time spent on Facebook had increased 700 percent, and on Twitter, more than 3,700 percent (hat tip Brian Solis).

nielsen

Look carefully at those overall number for Facebook. Nearly 14 million total minutes in April. Nearly three times the nearest competitor MySpace.

This is why Facebook is the gateway drug to social media. And why it should be part of your marketing strategy, no matter what you sell.

Before I delve into why Facebook is so important, let’s review some of the common characteristics of social network sites  like Facebook, LinkedIn, CafeMom, BlogHer etc.

  1. Consistent user interface
  2. Friend lists
  3. In-system messaging
  4. Ability to make and join groups
  5. Opportunity for commercial interaction with members
  6. Links in/out to other social media applications (blogs, other communities etc.)

We also hope to find our friends and/or people of like interests who might become friends. Every online community may not have everything on the list, and the implementation within the networks will likely look different community to community, but by and large, most online social networks have some flavor of these commonalities.

A social network is more fun when there are enough members to generate a reasonable level of activity. The easier the site is to use, the easier it is for members to connect with the other members, the more active members the community is likely to have. The more active, fun and useful a social network is, the more new members it will attract. Lather rinse repeat.

The limiting factor then becomes the core reason for the network in the first place. What brings the people together? The more narrowly defined the community, the fewer members it will have. CafeMom, for moms. BlogHer, women bloggers. And so on. It may still have many many members, but a “vertical” interest community won’t have everybody.

Which brings us to Facebook. Facebook is for everybody. Once you are in Facebook, you can make and join interest groups, but the only limiting factor on Facebook is that you must be willing to identify yourself by your real name. No anonymity.

It’s easier to use than blogs or MySpace, the distant second place finisher in the Nielsen reports, because the user interface (screens and functionality) is consistent user to user, page to page. The company fan pages even look pretty much like the personal profile pages. It’s easy to find what you’re looking for. Most of the time, and provided of course they stop changing the user interface.

Because it is all-inclusive and relatively easy to use, if a person is even marginally active online, it’s almost a no-brainer to join Facebook. Now, when a person joins a new social network, what’s one of the first things she does?

Yup. Recruit her friends to join her. It’s more fun when all your friends are there. Since there’s no limiting interest on Facebook, you can invite everyone you know, and most people do.

And so on and so on and so on.

Net? Just about everyone who engages in social media has a Facebook account, and once you step away from the technology geeks,  early adopters and gamers, Facebook is very likely to be the first adult social network a person joins. Gen Y and Millenials may start with things like Club Penguin or “white space” communities, but those are “childish things.” [My spare copy of The Tipping Point, if you want it, to the first commenter who can source this reference. Alternative prize: if you are going to BlogHer, I’ll buy you a drink.]

Facebook is a mostly grown up place. And it’s where most grown-ups start their descent into the madness that is social media. A dark dark place of addiction.

Oops sorry. I let my gateway drug analogy run away with the post. Seriously, though, Facebook is the point of entry into social networks for many users. Some may move on to mainline social media on the wild wild web, but many will be happy as clams hanging out in Facebook with their friends. Even if the more adventurous do go exploring Twitter and Ning and other cool stuff, they are bound to pop back to Facebook now and again to hang with their friends. Even if they hate it, they won’t be able to totally avoid it. Trust me, I speak from personal experience 🙂

Why? Because Facebook is the community where you are likely to find the largest number of all your friends and acquaintances, regardless of what your commonality with them is – neighbor, classmate, friend, relative, co-worker, colleague, fellow {fill in the blank} fan/critic, etc.  Exception issued to social media geeks who seem to have abandoned Facebook for Twitter, although I bet if we continue to build out our Facebook networks, they’ll include more people we know, or have known, in the real world than Twitter does. By a significant factor.

But normal people? They’re in, and will continue to be in, Facebook. Or if Facebook falters too badly, a successor that shares the same model of inclusion. [Note: this is an unlikely scenario. Merger or new management more likely than total fail.]

Normal folk may join one or two other special interest communities and LinkedIn for professional connections where applicable, but that’s my gut feel for the limit for active engagement. Reading regularly. Commenting, at least once in while. We may join other networks, but it’s hard to be truly active in more than a few.

So, back to my statement that Facebook should be part of your marketing strategy, no matter what you sell.

Rule Number One in my social media strategy book is that you should be where your customers are. If you sell a consumer product, you have customers on Facebook. If you are a non-profit, you have both constituents and donors on Facebook. Even business to business products may find their customer or constituent base on Facebook, especially if they have a business to community component, such as the largest employer in a community or a chamber of  commerce.

Making Facebook part of your strategy doesn’t mean you have to have your own fan page, although it will probably play out that way for most companies. It could be as simple as monitoring the activity on relevant groups and providing information through a designated employee representative.

Most companies though will take the step of setting up a Facebook fan page. This is smart business, but you have to feed the beast. You can’t just set it and forget it. In this respect, it’s no different than if you started a company blog – regular updates, engagement with the customer, responding to comments and questions. The big difference, and why it is attractive as a point of entry into social media for many companies, especially smaller ones, is that Facebook provides the infrastructure. You just pour your content into their framework.

Unlike the user example above, where I posit that many will be fat smart and happy staying in Facebook as one of their primary social networks and never feel the need to venture too far into the social media wilderness, I expect many companies will feel the limitations of the Facebook structure for their branding requirements, and supplement their Facebook presence with content on their own websites or blogs. More than a few will start with their own sites and branch back into Facebook to reach a larger constituency. The more you integrate the experience, on and off Facebook, the tighter the connection with the customer.

Just do me a favor please. Don’t create one of those stupid quizzes. Find another way to engage the customer.

Pretty please. With sugar and a cherry on top.