Businesses that wish to take advantage of the social media space in their marketing strategies should be aware of recent developments in the courts with regards to the privacy and confidentiality in online sites. In these cases, unsuspecting site users have had their private conversations violated by site owners, who furthered their own interests by passing along valuable user information, navigation habits etc. to outside marketers.

In March of this year, judgment was handed down in the Facebook privacy lawsuit – the “Beacon Settlement,” in which user information was leaked to advertisers via banner ads – which resulted in Facebook being levied a $9.5 million fine. Furthermore, the court stipulated that Facebook set aside $6 million for the purpose of setting up a foundation, to be headed by a three-person board, tasked with ensuring the privacy of information for Facebook users.

It would appear that the online privacy issues have been resolved with social media users free to Twitter and post at will without fear of private conversations being violated.

However, the judgment which was levied down brings with it its own liabilities. The Facebook privacy foundation will be helmed by Tim Sparapani, the current Facebook director of public policy, which has led critics to call this a conflict of interests. In fact Ginger McCall, a lawyer for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, filed an appeal in the U.S. 9^th Circuit Court, calling the settlement “deficient and illusory.”

In addition, lawsuits have been filed against social media networking sites MySpace and Google Buzz for similar lapses in user privacy. MySpace applications – including TagMe, GreenSpot and RockYou Pets – have allegedly been passing user information to its advertisers.

Buzz – Google’s social networking service – has been charged with passing along personal information that might be held in a user’s Gmail account, making it public, and releasing what was confidential information if users did not specifically change the default settings. Google was recently forced to pay $8.5 million in damages.

Critics like McCall have lampooned the courts decisions, saying the penalty award amounts are misleading with only a small percentage of the damages go to the individual users who filed the lawsuits with the bulk going toward watchdog foundations.

Google admitted the February launch of Buzz was premature. But critics knew about these allegations beforehand and called Google out on its services deficiencies, but they continued with the launch anyway. This brings into question the security of social media more than ever. It is one thing when sites are passing consumer information to advertisers, but it is quite another when the safety of your confidential and personal information is jeopardized.

Even though a precedent has stemmed from these cases, McCall and others are left unsatisfied, even with millions of dollars made in settlements. They wish to go further and set additional legal precedents that will protect the privacy of social network users by having the site that violates those laws face serious penalties.

Buzzphoria believe that companies must carefully monitor where and when their messages appear online. We adhere strictly to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s (WOMMA) Code of Ethics along with those set fourth by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), as well as our own sense of keeping our clients’ best interests in mind.

As with all marketing mediums, there’s a lot of dialogue and discussion on how to measure the success of a campaign or marketing initiative.  Within the social media space marketers, companies and brands have been trying to figure out the holy grail of social media measurement.  For many, they try to say that the logical metric is the number of fans or followers that a brand or company accumulates across platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.  We beg to differ.

At the end of the day, any campaign, whether it be in the social or traditional marketing space lives, breathes and dies based on how well it ultimately moves the sales meter.  While from an analytic standpoint, it’s nice to have cost per impressions and reach costs, we also need to understand that today’s consumer has “constant partial attention”.  So, while you may be reaching them with impressions, or having them click on a like button or a follow button - are you really reaching through the clutter of marketing messages and noise that are competing for that consumer’s attention?

In reality, many consumers will click a like button or a follow button because a friend of a friend of a friend of the marketer reached the consumer and told them to click.  They’ll click and never look back.  So, at the end of the day, you’ve got a false population of fans/likes/followers who could care less about the messages they’re being blasted via Twitter, Facebook and the other platforms in which the brand is trying to engage their attention.

From our standpoint, the real measurement of both traditional and social media marketing success is multi-layered and lies between the actual engagement of those consumers — are they becoming evangelists?, are they engaging with your brand or company?, are you having viable dialogues that bring value to the consumer (and to the brand)?, and - most importantly - is there a positive impact to your brand or company’s bottom line???

How are you measuring your current campaign success?  We’d love to hear your thoughts…

A big question for those interested in social media marketing today is effectiveness. What drives customers and businesses to my site? How do I engage my customer base to create a two-way dialogue that promotes positive interaction?

A recent survey conducted by MarketingProfs in September 2009 of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers found that the marketing tactics most often used on social media sites aren’t necessarily the best.

Simply friending customers and attempting to drive traffic to corporate websites with status updates on Facebook, ranked among the most common tactics. But brands cannot expect to gain traction with these simplistic one-way communications.

Looking at MarketingProf’s survey of B2B and B2C marketers, the most effective tactic for consumer-oriented companies was creating a Facebook application. However, less than 25 percent of the total number of those surveyed used this approach. A close second for both B2C and B2B marketers were fan surveys, although ranked as the third most-common tactic attempted.

Coming in dead-last as effective were Facebook ads. Even targeted ads, using Facebook’s improved ad targeting package came up short.

Not a surprise really when you recognize that social media users, especially those savvy to traditional communication techniques, expect companies to provide value, interactivity and ultimately open up a human dialogue.

Twitter is another application where the goals don’t match the approach most marketers’ take.

Because of Twitter’s features, brevity and fairly recent entrance into the web its user base is different from Facebook’s and so is its utility to marketers. Those who used Twitter as a tool for monitoring and person-to-person communication, instead of as a sales channel, reported 40 percent or higher success rates.

Buzzphoria knows that success in social media means going that extra mile down the road less traveled to interact with customers and clients in a dynamic way. One-way traditional communications aren’t how real people talk to one another and it shouldn’t be how companies going forward address their consumers.

Has your company embraced social media’s human communication?

Do you know what your employees, past employees and stake holders are saying about your company and brand?  While many brands and corporations are focusing their social media efforts on consumer/customer dialogues; many fail to monitor what their internal audiences are saying.

We’ve been seeing repeated patterns among employees of companies, both publicly traded and privately held…Does your company fall into this pattern?

At Buzzphoria, we use proprietary software to measure what’s being said about companies, brands and their competitors across all social media and web-based communications channels.  When we first begin working with clients, we run historic searches to provide a benchmark for where they are in social electronic conversations - who’s talking about them, what’s being said, where it’s being said, what’s the tone, sentiment, relevancy of the conversation (ie., how many people are monitoring that particular conversation and what is the level of influence of the sites, platforms and individuals who are having those conversations, etc).  This Social Media Reality Check, as we call it, provides valuable insights that shape our recommendations, strategy and implementation of our clients’ core social media outreach.

In addition to consumer/customer communications, we also spend a great deal of time working with our clients to identify the social media discussions that are taking place by stake holders within their organizations.

From an internal corporate communications standpoint the pattern that we’ve been seeing:

1.  Most of the clients we’re called in to work with (both private and public companies) do not have a blog/twitter/social media strategy policy related to employee communications.  Many have been calling us in to a) see if they need a policy, b) run a baseline to see what’s being said and c) craft a policy for them that is easy for employees to understand, is easy to monitor and enforce and is respectful of protecting proprietary corporate information while also being respectful of the employees’ personal rights…

2.  It has been more of the rule, rather than the exception, that we’ve found multiple employee run groups on social networking sites (not just business sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo; but also more generalized personal sites such as Facebook).  The groups and pages we’ve uncovered have by and large been using the corporate logo, have identified themselves by the corporate name and have encouraged and have been populated by both present and past employees.  In nearly every instance, the corporation hiring us was unaware that these groups existed.

3.  In addition, for each of the corporations that we’ve done this for, we have also uncovered both employee blogs and Twitter accounts.  While the bulk of the Twitter accounts and blogs we’ve found have been for personal use, we have found that in nearly all instances, the employee with these accounts is also sprinkling their personal conversations and communications with corporate information.

Since one of Twitter’s best uses is as a content aggregator, we’ve found that most Twitter accounts held by corporate employees has also been programmed to aggregate Twitter communications onto multiple social networking and blog platforms the employee possesses (for example - they send a Tweet on Twitter and the tweet is updated to their Facebook, Linkedin and Blog pages).

Some specific examples of information we’ve seen that can be damaging to the corporation:

-   employees conversing about new clients they’re going after

-   employees conversing about job and company dissatisfaction

-   employees conversing about looking for new jobs

-   employees conversing about problems (product failures, forthcoming earnings statements, possible recalls)

-   employees conversing about product development initiatives

Most of the time, the employees are not even aware that their conversations could potentially be having a negative impact on the corporation.

4.  For the majority of publicly traded companies we’re working with, we’ve found that both media and analysts are conversing on multiple platforms (Twitter, blogs, discussion groups, social media pages, etc) and that our clients were unaware these conversations were taking place.

Do you know what your employees and stake holders are saying about your company and or brand?

In our last posting, we talked about how we’ve made ourselves our own best case study by putting our own brand on the line to illustrate how we can help you protect yours.

As we discussed last time, there are unscrupulous individuals and groups who are hijacking brands for both sport and profit.  In our case, a hijacker registered and began impersonating the Buzzphoria brand on Twitter.

The first step in defending your company and brand when a hijacker hits it to verse yourself on your rights within terms of service for the social media platform or site in which your brand has been compromised.

Below is a screen shot from Twitter’s Terms of Service:

Twitter Terms of Service

Notice that the Terms of Service clearly state that:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.
2. You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
3. You must not, in the use of Twitter, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws).

Twitter General Conditions - Terms of Service

Please note the following:

1. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Use.
2. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Below, we’ve share the final section of Twitter’s Terms of Service - Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours):

Twitter Terms of Service - Copyright

Please note the following:

Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
2. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
3. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;
4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;
5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

At the beginning of the .com boom, it was squatters grabbing brand names they felt were valuable and holding them for ransom to corporations.  In the past weeks and months, it was employees at a Dominoes who disparaged the brand by posting YouTube videos, causing the company to go into crisis communications mode.  It hasn’t just happened to Dominos:  with the rise of user generated content, comes the crush of corporations being impersonated and spoofed across user-generated mediums, creating more publicity nightmares, crisis communications situations and expensive legal battles.

Equally as deadly and dangerous to brands, are imposters who grab brand names within popular social media platforms such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, to name a few…

Thus, the Buzzphoria case study continues… We too were a victim of brand high-jacking and the retrieval process to gain our brand back.

Within Scott Allen’s original blog post about Buzzphoria, he essentially posed a call to action for someone to high-jack the Buzzphoria name and identity within multiple social media sites.  Someone took him up on it and immediately grabbed the Twitter identity @buzzphoria.  The individual(s) then took elements of artwork from the Buzzphoria website and set up a branded page, representing themselves as our brand.  From our tracking, we witnessed the individual(s) populating the page with tweets representing themselves as us, sent to the followers the culprit(s) had begun amassing.

When we spoke to Scott Allen, he told us that the culprit(s) had reached out to him and had let him know that they would give us our brand back…if we asked.

Unfortunately, most corporations don’t see that level of generosity and kindness (I’m being facetious here…).  No…brand high-jackers do not usually reach out to a blogger or journalist to say - “hey, if you do talk to that company let them know I’d be happy to hand them back their brand…”

So, what’s the journey for a corporation or brand to retrieve its identity?  (without an expensive and protracted legal battle?)

Our next few posts will show you step by step how we were able to retrieve our identity from Twitter.

In our last post we talked about Buzzphoria being our own best case study. Our example was blogger journalism and some of the comments received helped to also illustrate other elements of our case study such as freedom of speech and brand hijacking.

As part of our case study we decided to illustrate the mistakes companies often make in thinking they absolutely have to have a blog…

Perhaps that’s why there are estimates that there will be 110 billion blogs by 2010.

See, so often companies feel compelled that they have to have a blog just because they have to have a blog.

They never ask themselves the critical questions:

- why they have to have it,
- how are they going to maintain it,
- what do they want it to achieve - what’s the blog’s purpose,
- how are they going to build a following for it,
- what voice do they want to set with it,
- what do they want to say,
- more importantly, do they have something to say?

Instead many companies rush to set up their blogs. They post a couple times, get side-tracked by other projects, lose interest and ultimately abandon the blog.

They enter into the blogging endeavor like Kevin Costner clones in Field of Dreams thinking all they have to do is say, “Hello World”

And they wait, and they wait and they wait…a long time. Like a tree falling in a forest, did anyone hear it fall?

Waiting…Waiting…For that one person to say hello back.

For most no one ever says hello back.

In our case we waited patiently for 5 months from the time we posted that blog page for the first hello.

In our case it came through five months later through a tweet by Jim “Genuine” Turner who was first to note that we had left the original Word Press message “Hello World” sitting out there.

This led to Mr. Allen. That led to tweets and blog re-postings and link backs chastising us for what these folks perceived to be our foolishness, a novice error.

Thank you gentlemen for proving another of our points to our clients:
You don’t need a blog just for the sake of having a blog. Only do it if there’s a reason why anyone would care…

And then maybe, if they’ve developed the right strategy, done the proper planning and knew what their end game was the pollination effect will begin to take hold. 

In our last post, we talked about having the end game in mind when you enter your brand or company into the social media stratosphere.

We figured the best way to illustrate what brands and corporations often do wrong (without pointing fingers at brands and corporations that are doing it wrong) was to create a case study and example.

Congrats to journalist, blogger and social media guru Scott “Social Media” Allen for revealing typical bungles brands make and special thanks for also illustrating our point about the dangers many companies don’t realize when they embark on the social media journey. Naive mistakes, they make, but that’s what happens to the naive.

Numerous studies estimate by 2010 there will be over 1 billion blogs worldwide. 

According to Reuters, many people see blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media. Reuters goes on the say that many bloggers do so as a hobby rather than as a vocation, with 77 percent of them saying they post to express themselves creatively rather than to get noticed or paid.

Reuters pointed out these specifics:

37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topic, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.

About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism.

 Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.

 More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly.

11 percent said they post corrections.

61 percent said they rarely or never get permission to use copyrighted material.

55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym.

Nearly 90 percent invite comments from other readers. 

Four out of five blogs use text, while 72 percent display photos and audio links play on 30 percent of blogs. 

82 percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. 3 percent say they have quit. 

We especially appreciate Scott Allen’s help in communicating an important message to our clients by  dissecting many  of the things we intentionally did wrong or left incomplete. (See his blog posting published March 27 @ http://scottsocialmediaallen.com/index.php/buzzphoria-social-media-reality-check/)

But Mr. Allen never called the subject of his critical story prior to publishing it.

Had Mr. Allen — who admits in his post about Buzzphoria that he had contact information (it is after all posted on our website), contacted us he would have learned the end game strategy around our public launch.

In fact, we reached out to Mr. Allen via email through his blog and received a response in less than 24 hours.

The good news is that Scott Allen is an exception to the complete point we were looking to illustrate.

After our reaching out to him and letting him in on our end game, he’s turned out to be an amazing good sport.

Mr. Allen makes the #1 point we needed our clients to realize:  many bloggers feel no responsibility to contact the subject of a critical story . . . at all!

Thank you Mr. Allen. You helped us achieve our end game…generating social publicity for us and reinforcing the many points we evangelize to our clients about the dangers of lack of proper planning and the potential irresponsibility of bloggers and journalists who do not properly fact check.  This is EXACTLY why our clients hire us and why we generate such great results for them.

Watch for posts over the coming days and weeks as we reveal more of our end game…

It seems everywhere you go people are either talking or writing about Social Media.  Articles herald that Social Media is a must-have in any brand or company’s marketing mix.  Corporations are converting large segments of budget previously allocated to traditional marketing channels into social media marketing.  Many of these corporations and brands end up being disappointed or disillusioned with the results.

The reasons?  Lack of planning, entering into social media without understanding the mediums they’re leveraging and not identifying upfront the brand or company’s end game for engaging social media into the marketing mix.

When clients work with Buzzphoria, we feel the questions we ask are as critical as the planning of the campaign, the campaign implementation and our client’s end game results. 

Some questions you should ask yourself in the planning phases of your campaign:

Why are we doing this?  What do we hope to achieve?  How will we measure results both on and offline?  How will our social media activities enhance other activities within the client’s communications and marketing channels?