Business Insider is running a report claiming “Twitter is under federal investigation” from the Federal Trade Commission. This is related to how the company has dealt with third-party apps: acquiring things like Tweetie and TweetDeck turning them into proprietary apps, …
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Jun 30th, 2011. 
As earlier reported, the FTC is said to be planning a broad antitrust investigation into Google’s business practices, and according to the Wall Street Journal, they’re getting ready to serve Google with subpoenas, as well as requests for information from …
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Jun 24th, 2011.
As a social media professional at SAP, I get many questions from colleagues who are new to social media and would like to add social media to their marketing mix. The learning curve on social media is still steep for most people, and in this blog, I have aggregated the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.
Many of my consulting engagements start with the sentence “My team wants to have a Twitter handle” or “I need to increase the number of fans for our Facebook page”.
To that, there is only one answer: “Why”? And ,”Let’s take a step back”.
Before you get engaged in any kind of social media project, please ask yourself the following questions:
1. What are my social media objectives (these should align with your marketing, and on a higher level, your business objectives)?
- Maybe you are trying to create awareness for a product offering?
- Maybe you want to extend the reach of an event beyond a physical location?
- Maybe you are tasked to generate leads?
- Maybe…(fill in here)
2. Who is my target audience?
- I struggle with the answer “anybody who might want to buy my product”. Keep in mind that the less homogenous your target audience is, the more high level your messages will have to be. The more targeted you can get, the better you can address specific business problems.
- Or in simpler terms, if you are a B2B social media marketer and somebody sent you a Tweet about “The top 10 ways to create a lead”, you’d be somewhat interested. But if they sent you a Tweet saying: “10 tips how social media can be used to create leads that close”, you’d be very interested. On a busy day, you might click on the Bit.ly on Tweet number two but ignore Tweet number one.
- An example target audience could be: Retail, IT management, North America.
3. Where does my target audience participate in social media?
- It is a fallacy to think that “if you build a social media channel, they will come”.
- I’ve only recently learned that Global 2000 companies in Finland are not very active on Twitter; but they like to engage on LinkedIn. Hence, for every target audience you define, you need to do research where they lurk (= read) or engage (= comment, ask questions etc.). Your audience might frequent existing communities like IT Toolbox or read blogs on CIO.com. Wherever they are, that’s where you want to be.
- Of course, you can also create your own social media channels on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc., but remember that you’ll need to dedicate resources to manage these channels continuously. The only thing worse than no presence on social media is a social media channel where the last post is a month old.
Once you have answered these basic but often not easy to answer questions, you will need to develop an editorial calendar to feed the channels you have selected and define a cadence (e.g. blog once a week).
You’ll also need to define metrics to measure your success. For example, if your target audience likes to read blogs, you can measure views and comments on your blog. But you can also measure things like click-throughs to media (e.g. YouTube videos) embedded in your blog, referrals back to your web site, or the completion of a registration form; to only name a few.
I hope you found this blog useful, and I’d appreciate it if you could add your own “most asked” social media challenge or question and how you have addressed them.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Jun 22nd, 2011.
Numerous reports have been coming out that Facebook is taking down Facebook pages that are accused of infringing upon copyrights. The keyword there is “accused”. Apparently, Facebook does little (or nothing) to verify the legitimacy of the claims before taking action.
Should Facebook be doing more? Tell us what you think.
Several well-known tech blogs, including Ars Technica, Redmond Pie, and Neowin have had their pages removed by Facebook as the result of such a situation (though later the pages were reinstated).
“Prior to the account lockout, we had received no notices of infringement or warnings,” says Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher. “Truly, we awoke to find that Facebook had summoned a judge, jury, and executioner and carried out its swift brand of McJustice all without bothering to let us know that there was even a problem.”
“Further investigation has revealed just how flawed Facebook’s infringement reporting system is,” he adds. “To begin with, someone making a complaint can provide any third-party e-mail address they choose. So it is rather easy to spoof the origin of a complaint, while giving Facebook and the accused no chance for a direct rejoinder.”
Fisher also retweeted this:
@GlennF
Glenn Fleishman@ashponders @kenfisher Even with this, FB is better than Google. Google has no good appeals for _anything_.
3 hours ago via Echofon · powered by @socialditto
NeoWin’s Dave Legg wrote, “We (Neowin) tried to file a countercomplaint, but Facebook just refused to acknowledge it, they simply ignored the content of the email and said once again that we had to contact the complainant and resolve it with them or take them to court.”
Here’s the form for people to submit complaints:
Facebook is developing quite a reputation for being hard to get through to at a human level. David Fagin is suing the company for a dollar to make a point about this, after getting blocked from sending friend requests, being labeled a spammer, and having issues getting through to Facebook.
Facebook’s statement on the page takedown matter, as obtained by Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb goes like this:
We want Facebook to be a place where people can share and discuss openly while respecting the rights of others. We take seriously both the interests of people who post content and those of rights holders. We work to ensure that we don’t take content down as a result of fraudulent notices. However, when a rights holder properly completes our notice form alleging intellectual property (IP) infringement, we will take appropriate action including removing or disabling access to the relevant content. When we do this, we notify the person who shared the content so he or she can take appropriate action, which may include contacting the reporting party or following up with Facebook.
Submitting an IP notice is no trivial matter. The forms in our Help Center require statements under penalty of perjury, and fraudulent claims are subject to legal process.
Hmm. That’s it? They wouldn’t even say why they don’t validate email addresses, which is unfortunate, considering claims have been exposed as being bogus.
Facebook eventually responded to Ars Technica, simply saying it is “looking into the specific takedown request that was made.” Later, they followed with an apology and finally reinstated the page. Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng wrote in a later article, after the publication’s page was reinstated:
There are a number of things Facebook needs to fix, however. Let’s start with the vague notifications and slow responses: in nearly all cases, Facebook did not specify which content was supposedly infringing before taking down the entire page. According to Condé Nast’s crack legal team, a proper DMCA takedown is supposed to specify the infringing material, and that content is supposed to be removed immediately until a counterclaim is filed. Facebook did not do this—instead, it claimed “Ars Technica” was the infringing material, and subsequently removed our entire page.
Facebook also did not tell us who filed the claim until moments before the publication of this article—not technically required for the DMCA process, but providing the name of the claimant is industry-wide best practice. So, Ars has only within the past couple of hours found out who filed the bogus complaint against us, and we still don’t know why or for which content. (We’re hoping to follow up with this person, assuming he’s real, in order to find out his motivation for filing the takedown notice.)
This is the second copyright-related blunder Ars Technica has been a part of recently. A while back, Righthaven filed suit against a contributor to the site before realizing that it it didn’t have much of a leg to stand on and dismissing the suit, calling it a “mistake”.
Facebook can drive a lot of traffic to a site – particularly a news site or blog, so having a Facebook Page taken down can be a tremendous blow to such a site.
Facebook’s practice is drawing a great deal of criticism from the Blogosphere. The whole thing is rather interesting considering how Facebook is trying to cozy up with journalists lately.
Should Facebook be doing more to verify claims before taking Facebook Pages down? Comment here.
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Filed under Internet Marketing by on May 1st, 2011.
