- Dec 09
- 16
Before You Jump: Know the Dangers of Social Media
- Posted by Lisa Wigetman
- Published in Advice and Tips, Social Media
Where are you Jumping?
Thanks to social media, we are now able to connect to the world in ways we never thought possible. Whether you are writing on your friend’s wall on Facebook, texting or tweeting, there is always a way to communicate and most of us don’t think twice before doing so. However, did you ever consider that you may not be communicating with the right person or that what you are tweeting may be used against you at work next week? Unless you have experienced the dangers of social media firsthand, these thoughts have probably never crossed your mind.
The Dangers Of The Public Domain:
Are photos ever put up of you on Facebook that represent you in a way that may get you fired from your job or in trouble at school? Did you ever update your twitter status and write something that was not necessarily PG-13? You may not think twice before posing for a picture or updating your status, but this could backfire. When something is posted online, it is permanent and open to the public eye. Even on certain applications, your privacy settings may limit who can see your profile, but your friends profile may not be limited and what if they display a negative photo of you? There isn’t much you can do about that. Larry Johnson of the Kansas City Chiefs recently experienced the dangers of the public domain firsthand when he decided to use twitter to tweet some comments that were not necessarily “politically correct”. Once his tweets were out there, they drew more attention than Johnson had intended , which has resulted in his release from the team. In today’s world we need to be extra careful when doing something that could land us as victim of the dangers of social media.
Chiefly a Twitter Problem
Identity theft:
Social media platforms have made many of us more vulnerable to identify theft. By providing too much information on sites such as Facebook and My Space, many of us are making it simple for criminals to create false identities and access our bank accounts. Have you ever received a message on Facebook asking you to verify your Bank of America account number and password? I have certainly received messages similar to this. Although I do not fall for these counterfeit messages, a user new to the world of social media may not think twice before giving out their information. With the increase in identity theft now a days, users of any type of social media networking sites need to be extra cautious with what information they provide to the public.
Who are you really connecting with?
Are you sure Twitter user Soccer452 is really your best friend Suzie? What if it is somebody pretending to be Suzie? Celebrities have so many users trying to impersonate them on twitter that they are now given verified accounts to help the twitter community decipher the authentic accounts from the phony ones. What about on Facebook? I don’t think twice before accepting a Facebook user who has requested to be my friend. However, there have been incidents where Facebook users have been impersonated. Take for example, the tale of Facebook user Bryan Rutberg. In January ’09, an unknown user got in his account and updated Bryan’s status to say “Bryan NEEDS HELP URGENTLY!!!” The unknown user then sent one of Rutberg’s Facebook friends a direct message saying that Rutberg was robbed at gunpoint in London and needed money in order to return to the United States. Rutberg’s friend wired him over one thousand dollars thinking he was helping him out. Meanwhile, Rutberg was safe at home during this whole incident and the money was never to be seen again. Impersonating people on social media platforms is becoming more and more common these days. Although the warning signs may not be clear, we need to always be on our toes when trying to connect with our friends.
Social media has changed most of our lives for the better. It helps us maintain relationships with family and friends, promote our brands and products, and communicate more clearly across borders. However, we need to make sure to be very careful when using any form of social media and watch out for the danger signs. For brands, the ramifications are multiplied. With more people and resources on the line, it’s crucially important that brands know what they are doing when enacting a social strategy. With the typical faceless brand, people often lose sight that a brand is really just one face for an entire community of people and treat brands even less respectfully online. Vigilance and foresight are the only winning strategies.
The two biggest pieces of advice that can be given to any user of social media to protect yourself, whether you’re an individual or a representative of a brand, are the following: Make sure to be careful of what information you put out there else it may come back to haunt you later, and do your diligence when connecting with others. Getting your safety squared away first allows you the freedom to reap the multitude of benefits of the social sphere.
No CommentsSci-Fi technology may impact your marketing sooner than you think
In the last few years, the physical and virtual worlds have been coming together in new and interesting ways. Virtual information can be overlaid on top of physical, real-time information, creating a mixed reality. “Augmented reality” (AR) is the broad term used to describe this blending. Some older examples are simpler in nature. For example, AR has been used in sports broadcasting, such as the comet-like tail of a hockey puck for NHL games, or the yellow first down line in football games.
AR in smart phones has the ability to utilize features that already exist on the phones including a camera, built-in GPS, solid-state compass, accelerometer (measures acceleration/shaking), and decent computing power. The technology of the phone can be used with downloaded apps to find the nearest public transit stop (London and NYC, among other major cities have apps that accomplish this), see restaurants near you (with reviews from Yelp!), or even find a pint of your favorite beer.
Your Favorite Beer?.
AR has also been used with specific marketing purposes in mind. For their December 2009 issue, Esquire, used AR in an attempt to extend the shelf-life of a monthly magazine and provide added value. The magazine is used with a web cam and software that is downloaded from the magazine’s website. Throughout the issue there are different black and white square icon-like images. Each image uses an algorithm to trick the web cam into seeing (and projecting back) something other that what is actually on the magazine page. Consumers need to hold the magazine up to the camera for the experience to work. The square icons trigger different interactive scenes that are displayed on the computer monitor (which relates to the actual content on the magazine page). Some of the interactions change based on the direction in which the magazine is held, or even on the time of day, which also drives repeat visits. For more information, go to: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/augmented-reality
Pool-tron
A good (non-phone) example of augmented reality (and a possible source for up-and-coming pool sharks) was developed by the RCVLab at Queen’s University and can be found on YouTube (if you don’t want to wait, skip ahead to 2:14). Cameras are used to interpret the physical space and show the line up of possible shots (by using basic geometry), as well as the trajectory of the balls once they’ve been hit. By mixing the physical space with the information of the computer, a real-time augmented reality training tool is created.
In the future, augmented reality can provide marketers a new way to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and also find a way to better integrate the virtual and real worlds. How is your company planning to use this tool as a draw to spark conversation, attract consumers, and win business?
1 Comment- Apr 09
- 15
Social Media: From the Fringe to the Front Page
- Posted by Megan Weintraub
- Published in Social Media
In recent weeks, I’ve found myself in a staggering number of conversations with family, friends and coworkers about social media. I attribute this not only to their recent adoption of new technologies, but also to the surprisingly ubiquitous presence of social media in our regular news stream. These days it seems as if the New York Times can’t grant enough front page real estate to stories about Facebook’s fabled founders or how Snickers is taking advantage of the social media revolution.
Running parallel to the coverage of social media has been analysis of the precipitous fall of the economy. Given the overlapping timing of these two sea-changing stories, I can’t help but think about the connection between them. Obviously both the global economic crisis and the ubiquity of social tools are complex phenomena with causes and effects too large to number on these pages, but at the same time, it’s clear that the faltering economy played no small part in the explosion of social media services. Continue reading »
6 Comments- Mar 09
- 19
Fleeting Fad or Here to Stay? The Meme of the Meme
- Posted by Megan Weintraub
- Published in Social Media
The history of Internet memes is as old as the Internet itself. In fact, you could say that one of the major wonders of the Web is how it has scratched our human itch to share pointless twaddle with everyone we know. (As a disclaimer, I should point out that I mean, in no way, to ignore the Web as a revolutionizing and often positive force in our lives. I simply want to illuminate how it has also handed us a way to indulge our obsession with offbeat cultural phenomena.) To put it bluntly, we have never seen a cat in a onesie that we didn’t feel compelled to broadcast far and wide. Continue reading »
4 Comments- Feb 09
- 12
Twitter’s Value Has Been Proven, But What About The Shorty Awards?
- Posted by Jamie Bull
- Published in Industry Commentary, Social Media
At this point in its evolution, enough businesses have found effective ways to use Twitter as an effective communications tool to successfully squash those who still doubt its impact. Yes, it can actually be used for something other than posting stupid pictures of your cat or tell your friends what you just ate for lunch.
While Twitter’s ranking on the “shiny new toy” scale has waned recently, you should never worry that there isn’t always something new waiting in the wings to hold the attention of social media geeks around the world few more minutes.
Enter: The Shorty Awards - for the best producers of short (140 characters or less on Twitter) content in 2008.
While it has evolved and proven itself, Twitter is still a pretty immature technology. If Twitter is like high school, consider the Shorty Awards a loosely organized popularity contest, complete with class clowns attempting to stuff the ballot box.
The Shorty Awards are completely driven users tweeting their votes and nominations for their favorite users in a number of different categories (best brand, advertising, business education, etc) helping to organically spread the word about the contest and spur even more voting.
But the truth is that most viral content on the web is complete fluff – eye catching, but lacking in any sort of real value, and that is where the Shorty Awards come in. As long as you have your expectations in order, you won’t miss a thing. Just try replacing The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal by getting all your real news from Digg.com and you’ll see exactly what I mean. And no, I’m not calling the latest apple product news or tech toy “real news.”
After a quick look at the list of Shorty Award nominees and those that weren’t named (but clearly should have been) it is clear that this is really just a group of Twitter users who have become the best at pimping themselves out to their followers with no clear understanding why they were doing it in the first place. The contest may be one of the worst ways of actually measuring public opinion, but may do a pretty decent job at measuring someone’s ability to blindly market themselves for an award that they themselves don’t completely understand the value of.
Even Melanie Notkin, a finalist in the Shorty Awards “Brand” category for Savvy Aunty, points out that a far more influential twitter user on behalf of their brand, Zappos CEO Tony Shieh, wasn’t even a finalist and decided to gracefully bow out of competition.
Everyone wanted to win, but no one is quite sure why. There is no big prize at the end. No BusinessWeek cover story. You just know that someone else wants it, and on that premise alone, so do you. Thankfully not everyone was so heavily struck with a case of shiny new toy syndrome and were actually able to call the Shorty Awards by what they actually are.
@mvolpe: “I think the shorty awards are total crap. Just saying.”
The ultimate winner in the brand category @MarthaVan, who tweets on behalf of Action Wipes, noted that for her “The challenge for a small business such as mine is always getting national publicity. I entered the contest in hopes that the national news would pick up on the awards and thus bring awareness to all the winners.”
For Martha, the time investment in promoting herself and outreaching to her followers for votes was well worth the gamble that winning would actually provide some real business value and lead to additional sales or national visibility for her company. So far, that time hasn’t come.
So much of what is emerging in social media is new and needs to be experimented with, tested and measured to fully understand its ultimate value, so I’m not blaming the Shorty Awards for any of their missteps along the way. I actually give them credit for playing around in this new area, but the true danger comes in when people begin mistaking what they are actually measuring and replace a fun experiment with a new are of technology for something with legitimate value.
2 Comments- Feb 09
- 6
When you automate Twitter, respect your audience
- Posted by Eric Pratum
- Published in Advice and Tips, Social Media
Technology should make our lives easier, and the internet, in part, should bring us information faster and allow us to communicate better. Many of these benefits result due to automation of previously manual tasks. For example, do you remember AIM’s news ticker? Who needed to check news websites when you could just have that open and click on the headlines you liked?
Okay, maybe that’s a bit old for some of us. How about RSS feeds for news sites? Who needs to check CNN.com when you can just grab the RSS feed and be alerted about new stories?
One of the nice things about RSS is that it automatically brings news to me. New post on your blog? I don’t have to remember to check every day. RSS tells me when there’s something new.
Similar to this, we’ve seen the emergence of auto-tweeting in the last year. For those of you who don’t know, services like Twitterfeed allow twitterers to auto-tweet any RSS feed. Mostly, that takes the form of, for example, “New blog post: Day 46 of the Mayonnaise Diet http://nondescriptURL.com.”
As well, services like Tweetlater and SocialToo allow twitterers to automatically direct message or @ reply new followers. Sometimes, that takes the form of, “Just wanted to say hi and thanks for following. Looking forward to tweeting with you.”
These are great tools when used politely, but too many people have gotten lazy with these things and are obnoxiously taking advantage of them.
The problem that many of us have is the blatant, over-the-top advertising that is done. Personally, I think Twitterfeed is really useful. I like knowing when my tweeple post something new. I won’t always read their stuff, but at least, I have the option. The problem comes when you auto-tweet things like, “If I suggested you read one thing today, it’d be this http://URLshorteningservice.com.” To me, that sounds like you found something interesting, and you’re not just shamelessly promoting yourself.
Have a new blog post? Think it’s spectacular? Set your auto-tweet to begin with something like, “My new blog post,” not, “Let me mislead you just to increase my pageviews.”
Now, a lot of so called Twitter experts will complain about auto-tweets for hellos. Truth be told, I think they’re great. I simply cannot send a personal hello to everyone that follows me within a short time of them doing so. Sometimes, I’m too busy. Other times, I’m just not on Twitter. So, what do I do? I auto-direct message a polite hello and then follow up later with a personal hello to anyone that has responded.
This has two benefits. One, it’s simple for me to welcome people, and two, it cuts down the number of people I have to say hi to because there are so many twitterers that follow just to see if you will follow back, but they have no genuine interest in you. So, I figure that, if they message me back with a hello, I should take the time to check out their profiles, maybe their blogs too, and then tweet them a genuine greeting.
The followers that I ignore are the ones that direct message me something like, “Your the coolest person ever! So, I’m giving you access to my new top-secret post on making money the easy way http://ShameShameShame.com.” Notice the confusion between your and you’re, as well as the person just assuming I’m interested in that sort of post, and saying I’m the coolest person ever when s/he likely has never met, or even heard about, me? That’s just poor and annoying salesmanship there.
Chris Brogan would say, “I offered to shake your hand, and you stuck your tongue down my throat. Yuck.” Wait until you’ve built a relationship with me before you assume I’m even interested in your moneymaking tips. If I am, you’ll get lots of pageviews from me instead of just an immediate unfollow due to the uncouth hello you just sent.
What does this all mean? Automation services are great when used correctly. When they’re used incorrectly, they burn bridges that you’ve barely begun to build. Go ahead and auto direct message me a hello and maybe even your URL. Go ahead and auto-tweet your new blog post. Just don’t make any assumptions about what your new followers are interested in, and definitely, do not mislead them. This way, you can join the ranks of Twitter for Smart People and not Twitter for the Socially Inept.
5 Comments
America’s Navy – A Social Media Force For Good?
In a previous blog post covering the basics of social media, I discussed a few major goals of social media (Creating community through two-way communication, creating and providing the opportunity for content that can be shared, responded to and evaluated, and finally, being personalized/customized). To better explain these goals, I decided to profile an organization that has dived in head first –pardon the pun – the U.S. NAVY. For full disclosure, I am a proud NAVY sister, and I have found the branch’s use of social media beneficial for keeping connected to my brother, as well as to other military families who “get it.”
The NAVY has reached a niche market by providing parents (and relatives) the opportunity to unite with others in similar situations and get support through the social networking site NavyForMoms (NFM). As seen in other markets, the “mommy bloggers” are an influential group and the military branch tapped into an older version of this consumer. These moms don’t have infants – they have full-grown children. The NAVY specifically targeted mothers due to the impact of their opinion on those interested in joining the branch. They realized that if they could reassure Mom, it could result in higher recruitment rates. The NAVY created a marketing campaign focused entirely on this target market and launched the NFM website as a social media test in March 2008. There are currently 27,481 enthusiastic NAVY family members (predominately mothers) who are very proud and supportive of their sailors, and are advocates of the NAVY. The NFM site concisely states their goals:
“NAVYForMoms.com was created for the mothers (and loved ones) of those who are currently serving or considering serving in the U.S. Navy. The site gives members a place to discuss issues with others who share common concerns. Here, content is member-driven. Questions are asked and answered. Moms share with fellow moms their fears, dreams and personal experiences. The ultimate goal is to provide an environment of understanding, comfort and belonging to all involved.”
Discussions include how to best handle emotions when a sailor leaves home for the first time, advice on attending a sailor’s PIR (’Pass in Review’ aka boot camp graduation), and brainstorming ways to support those who serve when they are away from home, including “Adopting-A-Sailor” during the holidays. Members share and respond to each other through personal blog postings, forums, photos, videos and local events. They customize their experience by writing posts and comments, configuring the look and feel of their avatar and profile and by choosing groups to be involved with. I am a member of NFM, and I belong to the “Proud NAVY siblings” group. It was through this network that I learned about the NAVY tradition called “blue candle lightings,” which is done when a sailor can’t make it home for the holidays – a candle is lit in their honor. I was upset that my brother couldn’t make it home that year, but I felt a sense of connection when I set-up his blue light, knowing that I wasn’t the only family member in the U.S. going through those emotions on Christmas Day. I was one of thousands that day, and since my family doesn’t live close a naval base, I don’t have a chance to physically interact with other military families. Social media has allowed for people similar to me to connect on a virtual naval base, when support is otherwise unavailable.
The NAVY integrated NFM into their overall PR and marketing communications strategy for the branch. OOH environmental ads were created through “Blue lightings” of historic landmarks (a nod to blue candle lightings) and by completely transforming the look of subway stations and sporting venues. Print ads and 30-second spots promoted the site by introducing actual active members, including Karen Gallagher, a proud NAVY mom (Yes, she is a real person who lives in NH, and her sons are NUKES, just like my brother. She is a rather nice lady.). The efforts did not go unrecognized by the community as NavyForMoms campaign won Silver in the AMA’s 2009 Effie Awards in the Government, Institutional and Recruitment category.
We've come quite a long way, haven't we?
The U.S. NAVY has made it a priority to utilize social media. By doing so, they have created a virtual version of the tight-knit military community that has previously only existed for our sailors and their familes on physical bases and naval yards. In other words, NFMs is a great example of how to utilize the power of social media.
3 Comments