Twitter Is Setting Marketers Up For FTC Lawsuits

As you know, the FTC recently published “blogger” and celebrity guidelines around disclosure. And, the most simple terms, it said that people should be able to discern whether or not you’re being compensated for talking.

No room for disclosure

On a parallel track, Twitter recently changed how their functionality works. Specifically, the common practice of re-tweeting, or saying what someone else said, has caused pains for a lot of users. In particular, the technology Twitter’s using doesn’t allow the original Twitterer to see that someone re-posted their content. Not a big deal, however for those of us looking to retweet client work are in for a bit of an education.

See, the current re-tweet function that is built in to the new interface just asks if you’d like to retweet something without the ability to post edits – or add disclaimers or disclosure. If I visit a client’s Twitter account or want to retweet something that is beneficial to a client, I have to manually cut and paste the tweet and re-type their username in order to meet FTC requirements of full disclosure.

Perhaps this functionality is something Twitter will allow or introduce . Either way the platform and FTC guidelines create a challenge for those of us looking to comply and will pose the question – will there be exceptions based on the actual use of each platform? For now it’s looking like we just need to be more careful and not use Twitter’s built in RT functionality.

BusinessWeek Lays the Smack Down on “Social Media Experts”

You may have missed it, but there was a wonderful article on December 3rd in BusinessWeek about social media “experts” being snake oil salesmen. It’s something those of us at agencies have wrestled with from day one – the combination of not having a job with the ability to self-publish and self-promote has opened the door for unqualified, inexperienced, ill-informed people to give advice and make claims without any evidence to back those claims up. And in the old days of PR that was the game – the more coverage the better. Although the game has changed a lot of people haven’t — credence and credibility, just or unjust, are or were given to those with the most readers or followers while those of us in the trenches, actually working on client business, were left on the sidelines to defend our business from “experts” writing baseless theories and best practices based on their personal experience using the then-explosion in social media tools. Add to the fact that the reality of communities is that someone jumps out and leads. It’s human nature, nothing new there. However in the online world, as in with real communities, when there’s a leader there are followers. It’s a perpetual cycle that builds upon itself, while those of us tied to NDAs sit quietly, until someone dissents and calls “Bullshit!” on the situation — which is exactly what BusinessWeek did.

A friend who works at a large firm, is brilliant and is also fed up recently said, “Never confuse visibility for talent.” Now that’s the truth.

How People Can Protect Their Reputation Online

I was recently quoted in the New York Times Gadget Blog around protecting your reputation online. Specifically, the question was if individuals with unsavory content online should delete it in an effort to hide it from potential employers. Before I give my answer I’ll give you the employer’s perspective on the question:

The Employer’s Perspective

As an employer and marketer/advertiser, I can tell you that it’s not that simple to just delete content and hope it goes away. I’ve seen companies and even individuals that go to great lengths to create additional content and spin incidents in an effort to bury bad news. The good news is that it typically takes more than one post, photo, Tweet or incident to make an employer pass judgment on you. Those college road trip photos you took as a senior four years ago? No big deal. A tweet that some may not agree with? Not a big deal either.

Momentary Lapses in Judgment

If you are concerned about isolated incidents appearing online, you can always untag photos of yourself on Facebook, delete a tweet or change the privacy settings on a social network or blog to remove it. This doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, as people may screen shot pages or it may be stored in Google’s cache forever, but it would help in the short term. Again, as someone who may want to do hire you, I may not think twice about it or, as a worst case scenario, would ask that you refrain from posting such unsavory content online publicly.

Reputations Aren’t Built Over Night

What’s more troubling to an employer is when said behavior occurs repeatedly over time. See, as an employer and marketer I can see patterns in behavior and assume that you will continue to do the same thing — thereby making me permanently pass you over in favor of those who are just as qualified. We all make mistakes and say things we might regret, and it’s difficult to judge what people may or may not find offensive, however reputations aren’t built in a day, a photo or a tweet. It’s a cumulative effect that, over time, will have employers looking the other way and in some instances flat out blacklisting you from being hired.

So what advice did I specifically give? “A better idea is to think twice before posting any public content you wouldn’t want found by potential employers.”

What advice do you give your employees? Have you ever had an employer pass you over because of something they found online?

An Open Plea to the Marketing Community for Help

Update: Official updates from Anissa’s husband are being posted over on Aiming Low. You can also follow @aiminglow on Twitter for updates. Please help Anissa’s family by donating here.

Hi everyone,

Anissa modeling at the Type A Mom Conference. Photo by @secretagentmama

I would normally never hijack my own blog for something like this but when you have the chance to help someone you just do it. A fellow blogger and friend, Anissa Mayhew, unexpectedly suffered a stroke earlier today and is currently in the ICU. I’m uncertain on how she’s doing as we only received an update via her husband on her Facebook status, but needless to say there are a lot of us hoping she’s OK. Check out the outpouring of support on Twitter from all of her friends.

Her group mom blog, Aiming Low, has a post on how you can help. Due to server issues I’m reposting this call for help for her family. If you’re a brand, work at an agency, whatever – please contact your clients or boss to see if they can help her family out:

As you may have heard, Anissa, our beloved friend and leader here at Aiming Low, suffered a stroke on Tuesday afternoon. She is in the hospital right now, in the ICU.

More than anything, Anissa needs your prayers and positive thoughts but to the many people in the Atlanta area who have offered help to the Mayhew family, we have set up a form for you to fill out so we can have everyone’s contact info in one place (please be assured your information will be kept private).

Things that would be helpful right now are gift cards to restaurants and gift cards to the movies or to Blockbuster (to help keep the kids’ occupied) and gas/hotel gift cards for her extended family. We will be setting up a PO Box on Wednesday and posting the address here along with any updates. Please don’t send anything to the hospital or the Mayhew home.

If you have questions, please email helpforanissa@gmail.com

We ask that you please respect the Mayhew family’s privacy by NOT calling the hospital and we thank you all SO MUCH for your outpouring of love and support for Anissa and her family.

With thanks and love,

The Aiming Low Team

Twitter Integrates with Google, Bing and Yahoo! – Now what?

Twitter finally lands a few business deals, but at what cost?

Truth in Advertising

Last week Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, networking, connecting and speaking at the Type A Mom conference in Asheville, NC. Kelby Carr did an amazing job and I was proud to bring my clients to the conference to help support the blogging community.

One of my panel sessions was called “Working with Companies”, moderated by the lovely and talented Lucretia Pruett Pruitt, aka GeekMommy. She and I spent quite a bit of time together discussing the industry and where it’s going, but I’ll save that for another post. The session was a split between a moderated discussion by the panel and an open Q&A with the 200-something attendees.

For those who know me, you’ll know that I worked my way up the agency ranks by innovating and creating opportunities – not only for myself, but for strategic partners. My clients value my experience and advice as do the Associations I belong to and regularly speak at. If you could see the feedback I’ve received from students, colleagues and conference attendees you’d know that I aim to please and usually put on a show. If you’ve never seen me present, it’s something like this: I get up on stage, share practical advice without any BS and am happy to share everything my experiences have taught me. It’s as real and as honest as it can be, because I have been an attendee at conferences, sat through classes and been lectured to and thought “Can you just tell me what I need to know? (without the fluff)?”.

This conference was no different. As the conference slogan asked, I “brought it”. And by “brought it”, I said things that some bloggers didn’t want to hear. While sitting on the panel I heard a lot of fluff and some “WHAAA?”s. One such “WHAAA?” was from a competing agency’s “social media” person: “Make it easier for me to do my job”. Another said: “You need to clean up your act”. The first is simply a plea from someone who doesn’t know how to sell. The second was a more aggressive stab at some of the more snarky behavior that takes place in the mom blogging community. I didn’t comment on how people should blog per se, but stayed true to the panel’s topic on how to work with companies. My advice was and is as follows:

• How to approach agencies/companies/brands. Have an idea? Sell it. “How am I supposed to find out who works for what brands?”. Here’s a tip: Google it. Subscribe to a few free trade publications. It’s not hard to find this information once you check out a brand’s “About” section and hit up LinkedIn.
• Don’t sign contracts that aren’t equitable. Some moms were quite vocal about receiving “Free cupcakes” in lieu of payment. Starting December 1st the FTC is going to make people disclose everything, even those free cupcakes. Update: One comment that was made at the conference was “we can’t afford lawyers”. They can be expensive so I totally understand, however reviewing basic contracts isn’t going to cost you an arm and a leg. In fact, for a 5-10 page contract my dad quoted me “$250 to review it”. Too much? Well, I remember him routinely handling traffic tickets for friends in high school in exchange for manual labor, e.g. sanding our deck or painting a room of our house. And this isn’t unusual. In fact, most lawyers will do work in exchange for work. Call around, I bet you’ll find one willing to work with you in exchange for some promotion online. If you’re not getting paid that much then I’d question why you’re even considering signing the thing.
• You are a brand. As such, companies try to match themselves up with personalities (see: Celebrity spokespeople) that match their brand equity and values. That being said, shallow people make judgments — sometimes unfair ones — based on what they read about you online. I know a lot of moms curse. I do too. And I’m telling you that it’s OK. I don’t want you to change who you are or how you write. But understand that brands are looking at this stuff and if you aspire to work with certain brands they will put you under the magnifying glass.Personally, I dig deeper to find out more about people than what I might find on their blog or Twitter stream. I don’t pass judgment for a few things folks might say or do because that’s not my job – my job is to find talent and work with it to the best of my ability. Case in point, I’ve been working with several conference goers and speakers by hiring them, supporting their ad networks, collecting resumes for future work and giving them advice when asked via email and Twitter in order to truly support the blogging community. Not by having flame wars, not by ostracizing people, not by being a jerk, but by having meaningful dialogue with people to find ways to work together.
• Understand your value. See above re: contracts, but your brand online is worth more than a few dollars. Most of the people I’ve spoken with since that conference, including some keynote-worthy speakers at other conferences, have no clue as to what they’re worth when it comes to negotiating with companies.

One point I was unable to make during the conference due to time constraints is what brands talk about when it comes to metrics. Ahh! Not measurement!

Most bloggers rely on their Sitemeter or Google Analytics to self-report their stats. Some bloggers and webmasters complain that third parties like Quantcast report their stats as being too low. Again, I’m not passing judgment, just telling you how you’re being judged: No one believes your self-reported numbers. Here’s why:

• Spiders and bots. Know how Google always seems to have your freshest posts indexed? That’s because it and other search and monitoring services crawl your site to index it or monitor it for specific keywords. If you see “Andiamo Systems” listed in your log files it’s a company called Techrigy. It’s someone monitoring you or specific content on your blog. Doesn’t count as a unique visitor, the same way Google’s spider doesn’t count.
• Your friends. No one wants their web site to have 0 comments. It hurts. I means that all of the effort you poured into writing a post, regardless of actual merit or quality, may have been read but didn’t provide any “engagement“. Fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of bloggers play deceptive games with comments and links to game Google and advertisers to make it appear that they have a lot of comments, when in fact if you clicked each commenter’s name or did some homework you’d realize it’s a big circle of fake link love and comments. Having a blog post with 20+ comments, all of which are from other bloggers, doesn’t count. You’re giving advertisers a reason not to trust you right off the bat.
• You. Everyone I know wants to know how their site and blog posts look when they go live. And they want to engage with their readers. Guess what? It doesn’t count. It’s like walking in and out of your own store over and over again. Sure, the security camera shows someone coming and going all day, but at the end of it you’re the same one unique visitor jacking up your numbers — which makes your monthly and unique post impression number totally false.

Twitter just became a little more irrelevant

Facebook announced that they’re integrating Fan Pages with Twitter and if you want to understand what this means for your business check out Jeremy Pepper’s blog post on it.

From a “What this means for Twitter” it’s pretty simple – they’re now just a channel that (even more so) drives people away from their site and over to Facebook. It also helps Facebook close the loop on owning your internet experience with brands. Today I linked my Fan Page with my Twitter account and it works seamlessly. Will I post every nonsensical tweet to my Fan Page? No — but I can probably post at least a quarter of what I tweet from my Fan Page, which means Twitter’s monthly impressions just went down. Oh, and as Facebook’s metrics and reporting system matures, don’t be surprised if the return bit.ly links are included in their administrative interface. Also – since Facebook is using bit.ly you currently lose the tracking from those truncated links unless you post your own links via bit.ly or whichever service you use as part of your status update.

Something else to consider if you are thinking “Great! My company only needs to update once!”:

Not so fast.

Sure, it sounds like the ultimate solution for consolidating your Twitter and Facebook accounts. But consider the audiences: People may follow you on Twitter but not be a Fan on Facebook (think subscribing to RSS vs. having an emotional connection to a brand). That’s a quite a difference when it comes to how you interact or choose to engage with a brand, as one (Twitter) may lead to the other (Facebook), but it’s not a given.

Contest: Vote for my SXSW Panel

I tweeted this earlier but if you go vote for my South by Southwest panel – and I make it - I’ll take you with me. No joke, I have set aside marketing budget and will pay your travel (hotel, flight) and ticket.

How can you enter?

Click this link to the SXSW Panel picker, then retweet it and you’re entered to win. You can enter every day, as much as you’d like until the voting ends.

Reading a blog post ripping “social media experts” from a so-called “social media expert”. Ugh. I’ll post a follow up that discusses this at length but just fyi – making accusations that others are frauds doesn’t exclude you from the lineup.

Twitter’s New Home Page Launches Today

Those using third party apps may not have noticed, but Twitter went live with a new home page today:

Twitter home page

It’s very clear that they aren’t targeting existing users, as evidenced by the lack of any change to the interior pages. You’ll find my take here.

Aesthetically it’s much nicer than the old home page, except for one thing: What the hell are new users to supposed to do? Search? I already have a reliable, scalable search solution – it’s called Google.

By the way notice how they’ve fallen in line with every other search engine by copying the leader:

Google home page

One minor addition is the use of trending topics/tags on the home page of Twitter. Not a bad idea so that people unfamiliar with the site can “jump in to” a discussion right away, however the usability of the site once you’re in still sucks. Unthreaded conversations about topics you may care about. Or better yet, a chat room for slow people.

What’s your take?