(An insight into things that could get you into trouble for saying/posting on your social media profiles)

Users of social networking sites disclose a lot of information to providers and users of those services, and this raises a number of legal and commercial questions.  What are the basic do’s and don’ts of posting profile data?

Do:

• Be savvy about the personal data you upload.  By posting information, you may unwittingly be making your data available to strangers and there is potential for that data to be misused.  Some parts of social networking websites are public spaces; once the information is “out there”, it may be difficult to control what happens to it because others may be able to copy it, alter your photos, etc even after you take it down.  Therefore certain information (details of “real life” location, e.g. home, school, work place) should not be uploaded to public spaces. 

• Bear in mind that information posted could be embarrassing or damaging in a different context outside the social network.  There are various reports of people missing out on employment opportunities due to potential employers reviewing social networking profiles as part of their recruitment procedure.  However, potential employers need to be cautious using this as a recruitment tool.

• Be careful what information you post about your employer.  If you post information about your company which is inaccurate, or misrepresents what the company does, this could constitute misrepresentation or a breach of advertising legislation/codes of conduct for which you and your employer could be liable in some situations. Furthermore, for listed companies, by posting certain information you could be in breach of insider dealing regulations.

Don't:

• Use content belonging to a third party.  Where content is uploaded that is owned by or based on content owned by third parties, this could amount to infringement of the third party’s rights, such as copyright.

• Post personal data relating to someone else. You shouldn’t upload data relating to someone else, unless that person has consented, because this could impinge on their privacy and data protection rights

Also, the social networking site’s terms of use will usually specify that the third party should consent to any of his/her data being posted.  Defamation may also be an issue.

I am a firm, solid believer that no matter what kind of business you are, whether it be a local barber to a small garage, up to a small chain of business and then all the way up to an international corporation, your business can have its' place and reap benefits from social media.

It's not necessarily about just having the bare essentials; a Facebook page, a Twitter account and maybe a LinkedIn company page though. It's more about ensuring that your time spent on these social media sites is worth your while. The golden rule is that if it's not going to help your business, whether it be financially or branding-wise, then don't do it!

The way to go about social media is to find your target sites, understand your demographics and your target audience, and then incorporate it into your marketing.

Are you a small restaurant in a local town? Set up a Twitter account, find and follow as many residents and local businesses as you can, and then offer a free drink if they mention a code or a phrase that you send out through Twitter.

Are you a barber? Do the same as above, but offer discounted hair-cuts through social media.

It's not necessarily just about giving stuff away, and using promotions to get people from their computers/mobile phones and into your store. Engage with your audience, talk to your followers and your fans. Find out how their days are going, what they do for a living… become friends with them!

If you have any questions about social media, please leave a comment or give us a call!

When thinking about engaging in social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Its best to understand the audience, as it is with all marketing, but more importantly in these online circles, it's vital to understand who is going to be contributing, creating or just spectators to the conversation.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just plug in an age range, a location, a gender and discover what the percentages of creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and also inactive people there are in that group?

There is obviously more to the pot of strategy, but knowing that only 19% of female 25 to 34 year olds in the UK actually create content in social media sites compared to 38% of 18 to 24 year olds. Have a little play with this created by Forrester's, it's quite interesting and useful, especially if you don’t have the resources to create a full social media strategy.

Understand the different engagement names with this slideshare.

Normally when I get woken up by my 5 year old son Zack at some atrocious time in the morning, his needs are very simple! "Can I play with your phone daddy?” he asks, to which I reply “Yes, now shhh son, Daddy’s sleeping".

Yesterday, his hour of alertness was earlier than normal at 04:30, so he got hold of my iPhone 4 and started to play, after, of course, ensuring the volume was turned all the way down. Ok, so now wind forward a few hours and Zack goes off to a party and I settle down to look at my emails and read through a few articles I’ve been meaning to catch up on. As my PC whirls up I remember thinking that perhaps I should have done this on the iPad as it starts so much quicker, but take a sip of my coffee and decide that it is Sunday and there is no need to rush.

So Outlook opens and I have 54 unread messages. This is unheard of, I mean I cleared my inbox on Saturday night so I must be being spammed. Damn that spam filter we purchased, what a load of shhhh…… Then I realise, that these are actual contacts emailing me, all with a very similar subject.

Re: Hey! I need a wingman.

I of course get an instant flashback to 1986 to Goose and Maverick dog fighting, but that’s a whole other story.

It turns out that Zack was playing with some jetfighter game and he must have been prompted to invite others to play. Not knowing what he was doing, my little angel selected “Yes to All” and off went a few hundred emails.

So now I have to send an apology email to my whole contact list explaining why they received the email. Needless to say, I was not happy.

As it turns out, the email was affective in making contact with people that don’t normally respond to our marketing emails. Yesterday and this morning I have heard from people that I haven’t been in contact with for a very long time, so in actual fact Zack was quite an effective viral marketer.

Viral marketing is not about selling a product or service; it’s about engagement and getting people talking. Since these emails went out everyone I have come into contact with today and yesterday afternoon has, in some way, mentioned or alluded to a “wing man”. So if you are thinking of a good viral campaign, don’t think product, think more about capturing peoples imagination or simply giving them something to smile about.

Companies are always eager to nose-dive into Social Media.

If you're a small business owner, a Facebook or twitter account seems like a fantastic idea; a free utility in which you can advertise to a seemingly endless number of potential customers and clients. A nice product push here, and a little awareness-raising competition there, there's no end of ways to communicate and engage with your market.

However, as with the majority of free things, there's a downside.

Imagine, if you will, a potential client is in the market looking for a piece of software. There are two small, independent software developers (we'll call them A and B) offering similar software that this new potential client is looking for, and they both use Facebook to interact with their community.

Now, here's the scenario:

• Both websites sell their software at the same sort of price.
• Both are similar pieces of software.
• Both have FAQs, a forum and such on their sites.
• Software Developer A has a bustling Facebook page, over a thousand 'Likes,' comments, pictures, videos and regular comments.
• Software Developer B has a desolate Facebook page, 11 'Likes' and a handful of comments from 8 months ago.

Who would you choose?

I don't know about you, but if I, personally, was looking for a piece of software and presented with this scenario, I'd almost definitely go for the developer who has the active Facebook page. Why? Because it shows commitment, and, more importantly, it presents another useful way for me to get help and network with other users of the software.

The moral of the story is that, in our eyes, no Facebook page is better than a quiet, unattended, old and unused Facebook page. Why? It's the image it presents.

When you're setting out to gain some footing in the social networking community, stop, have a think, and decide whether you do in fact have the time and resources to invest in a social media platform, and treat it as any other project. Invest your time and efforts accordingly, and don't let it fall by the wayside.

Twitter is probably to blame! But Url shorteners are becoming more and more prevalent with a multitude of providers and differing services.

Just a little while ago, tinyurl.com was the king of this realm, but then came a whole host with http://bit.ly often being cited as the market leader. However, now that Google has entered the space, we believe they are well positioned to make an impact in this area. Then again, Twitters http://t.co soon native shortener may well give Google a run for its money.

What do shorteners do?

In basic terms a Url shortener take a large web address and converts it into a manageable length, for example;

http://www.mylongwebsitedomainname.com/somefolder/yetanother/a_long_page_name.php?parameter=long+bit+of+test&anotherparam=evenmore+text

Into something like;

http://shorturl.com/W4f8Jp

All that happens, in this example, is that the shorturl.com website, creates a permanent redirect to the full page.

However, behind the scenes there are 2 things going on;

1. Trust is one, the person clicking the short Url must decide to trust the url shortener system. Google is likely to have this trust already. Within the Twitter community, bit.ly and also t.co have the trust already, so Google have a little work to do.
2. Protection is where we believe Google will be able to flex their muscles more. Google already verifies its search index against known and pending web threats such as suspected malware, phishing sites and spam sites, so applying this against the shortener system will be easy.

We are switching all tweets to http://goo.gl for the moment and will perhaps look closer at t.co in the future.

Social media is everywhere you look. Not just online but in the papers, yes even the broadsheets, television, radio and mobile phones, it's just everywhere!

The question is how are large national and international businesses engaging in this arena and how are they managing the communication?

Well, there are a few methods, dispersed services and applications available such as KickApps, Sparta, Small World Labs, but move over KickApps, Comment Technologies truly Kicks Ass!

So Comment Technologies is the new kid on the block, but rather than just being a platform, it's a social marketing one stop service.

All of the other platforms are just that, platforms! They are something you need to learn, adapt and manage. This means slow lead times to launch, increased workforce and a very steep executive management learning curve.

Comment removes all of these adoption issues by providing a full end to end service of implementation, data migration and management. Meaning that any company can have there social media solution in place extremely quickly without resource constraints. Furthermore, while executive management and marketing departments are getting up to speed community engagement, growth and moderation can all be managed by the full range of Comment Technologies services.

However, it doesn't stop there! Where other platforms either focus on just building communities and/or selling advertising space, Comment provides a cutting edge back end reporting and analysis service comparable to best of breed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

So you want to target a new product launch in the central states of North America, focusing on married women aged 20 to 35, no problem. The information is available at a touch of a button.

Along with such powerful reporting and export features comes enterprise quality slice and dice import facilities. Got your customers in SAP or JDE? Hey no problem, import and synchronisation are a breeze.       

We feel the real value of Comment is not just its top grade, financial services quality, infrastructure but the services that can be bolted on to enable the business to adopt quickly and integrate into its day to day activity gradually.

If you are looking at social media as a marketing strategy and would like to know more, feel free to fire us over an email or connect with us on Linked-In, Twitter or Facebook.

You may have started to find that people you follow on Twitter are appending the hash-tags #in or #li to their tweets.

Basically, what has happened is, Linked-In (www.linkedin.com) has started integration with Twitter allowing its members to make their Twitter feed available to their Linked-In profiles.

Unlike many similar integrations, Linked-In allows you to select all Tweets to display or just the ones with the #in hash-tag appended.

A word of warning, Linked-In say that you can append #in or #li in their newsletter, but in the settings it only mentions #in, so if you want to feed your tweets into Linked-In be safe and stick with #in.

As an example, I just tweeted the following post. You can then see it displayed in our Linked-In status without any copy/paste or other nonsense. Very cool!
Don’t forget, appending the #in hash-tag to your Tweets will save you time as you don’t have to post the same status to Linked-In also.

Feel free to connect with me on Linked-In at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/fasttrackit

So you have created your marketing video and now want to promote it, well, everywhere!

YouTube is an obvious start, perhaps Bebo and the countless other video hosting websites and networks around. Eventually you’ll also add your video to Facebook, but in our view, Facebook should be the first place you go.

Facebook has a powerful tagging feature which allows you to associate your video post with your friends names. When you do this, your video will become visible to those peoples friends also. This means more exposure to people you don’t even know!

However, you can only tag friends of yours, in other words people whom have agreed to share their information with you.

So if video marketing is something your thinking about, try to do the following first;

1. Look for friends that are in a similar profession to you and mix in the circles of your target audience
2. Check out how many friends they have, you’re looking for people whom are active on Facebook and have upwards of 500 friends. 500 friends equates to approximate exposure of around 1,500 other people. This is calculated assuming a minimum of 3 unique friends per connection. (Drop me a comment if you want me to expand on this.)
3. Request to become friends with them, if you don’t know them, you may want to find out something about them first which you can use as an introduction. For example, see if they are on Twitter, mention them in a tweet, follow them there and then send a Facebook friendship request saying that you liked their Twitter page. Compliments get you everywhere!

Now in the production of your video, try to find a way of incorporating these people into the video in some way. If you find it tough, don’t stress, that’s what the credits at the end of the movie are for, simply add a list titled “Thanks to;” to the end of the video.

Don’t abuse it! If someone feels like you are piggybacking too much they may well kick up a stick with Facebook and you could get yourself cut off. Think carefully and strategically, and this system will work well for you.

You've probably seen it on the end or beginning of a Twitter tweet, it normally looks something like "#FF @BeginInterMktg", but what does it mean?

Well, #FF stands for Follow Friday and the hashtag (#) is a Twitter search feature which allows users to group information into a category of some kind. Try a search for #FF here. OK, I know that hasn't really answered the question, so what does Follow Friday mean?

People, especially marketers, want to grow their followers. #FF is a way to recommend others to follow them. In doing this, you can also grow your followers because of a kind of mutual gratitude.

Here's how it works:

You identify people you follow and decide to recommend them. You obviously can decide who to recommend yourself, that part's up to you. You may like someone's tweets and find them useful, so you want to share them, they may have previously re-tweeted one of your tweets, or they may have already recommended you, the choice is yours.

Next, pull up Twitter and start an update as follows:

#FF @UserName1 @UserName2

Where you replace @UserName1 and 2 with the users you want to recommend, but don't forget the @ sign in front of their user names.

Hit the 'Update' button and your done. Now make a note of your current follower numbers, you should see it increase over the next few hours.

The reason your followers are likely to increase is because anyone watching the #FF stream may well follow the people your recommending but are also highly likely to follow the people doing the recommending.

It's that simple, so don't delay, get Following on Fridays, and then have a great weekend.

The Google Wave is gathering momentum and the beta testers are having quite a ride. The question is what and how can the Wave be leveraged by business users? Firstly take a look at this superb video which contains strong language but does demonstrate the Waves amazing functionality of the search mega giants embrace of social media.

Wow, the system is a fully integrated media extravaganza, with the ability to pull in images, movies, sound clips, background tracks and multiple format text. The user can start multiple waves (conversations) and select participants by their wave avatar (image or photo) and then start collaborating.

The end result is a single platform which looks like it can be used by business, not only for marketing, but customer support, project management, quick internal and external conversations, the list just goes on.

Many dispersed workforces have been using chat-room technology to connect quickly for quite sometime, but the interactivity is normally limited to some text and a smiley :o). Recently with Facebook and Twitter, some have started to use these slightly richer platforms to perform the same tasks. However, the very real and rich components of The Wave may well be so compelling that business once again migrates to the better platform.

From a marketing perspective, the Wave will need to encourage the same mass buy-in as Facebook and Twitter. Googles Friend Connect hasn't yet hit the big time but we are sure The Wave is going to hit much harder.

On the 16th to 17th October 2009 the Internet saw a new trending topic. Promoted by Social Media Marketing of Atlanta GA. People were told far and wide to post to Twitter, Facebook and on their own blogs the hashtag #beatcancer.

Superb sentiment and with 209,771 recorded posts, a superb result, which is now being proclaimed a world record. Twitters' search of the hashtag reported that eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors would be donating 1 US cent for every recorded hit. Well as far as we can tell, all three companies could afford to bump that up to a nice square dollar, but hey, I'm not one for spending other people's money!

So what now? Although the intention in this case was obviously sincere, what's going to happen next? There's enough SPAM on Twitter as it is, all we need now is a bunch of copycat marketers "Trying to beat the world record". Suddenly you're being asked to tweet #abcelectrics because they want to hit the 300,000 recorded mentions.

I know it's grumpy and perhaps a bit sceptical, but I just hope we don't see an overuse of this strategy, at least, save them for the really important things.

Having said that we got involved with our partner iPhone App iCamWait which donates 10% of pre-tax profits to a number of charities one of which is the World Cancer Research Fund. So at least we can say we did our bit, however #abcelectrics? Well Goodluck if you do try I guess!

On the 15th October we wrote about corporate management of social media. The article was titled "Manage the conversation with Comment" which introduces a new platform for larger organisations to engage their audience through social media.

The article also demonstrates the key issues which face corporate business where social media is concerned. We feel that these issues are extremely compelling and certainly pose a very real challenge.

The key concepts which we are sure are keeping many marketers up at night are the ways social media can be used to promote products/services and brand along with crisis and negative feedback management.

It's the crisis and negative feedback management which poses the real threat. Flare-ups of negative attitude and posts occur within the Twitter time-line stream, as an example, on a daily basis. Just a few weeks ago, a major mobile telephone network had significant outages and their brand name made it to the top of the Trending Topics (TT). That may seam like good news for some in the marketing department, until they actually looked at the posts from disgruntled, upset and downright annoyed customers. So how can such organisations manage such criticism?

Social Media is real-time, business doesn't have a 24 or 48 hour window of opportunity to devise a response and react to negative reports in newspapers, television and radio reports. If it's happening now on social networks, it needs to be addressed now!

The key to tackling this very real and growing problem is to take more control.

Companies can attempt to engage their customers and prospective customers on their own turf and setup networks of their own. In order to do this they need to build solutions which they can integrate into there own Internet Marketing Landscape. This is where we feel Comment Technologies can help greatly. Its platform is sophisticated and feature rich and provides the tools required to setup such an environment. 

However, the corporate companies also require the tools to allow them to keep track of mentions on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, Google Wave etc. This is one of the most important parts of the puzzle. So we have started our search for what looks to be the holy grail of social media reporting. We'll keep you updated on what we find. Please feel free to add a comment if you know of any such solution.

Here are a few links you may find of interest;
Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com) is a Twitter client which allows organisations to manage their Twitter accounts as well as reporting on Brand and statistics.

Comment Technology (http://www.commenttechnologies.com) is a Social Media technology company which provides a feature rich platform for companies' to produce and manage their own networks.

The age of social networking is well and truly here!

Facebook™, Twitter™, Linked-In™ and Flickr™ are just a few of the household names we stumbleupon™ on a daily basis. We may not use them all or even know how they all really work, but you just can't help switching on the TV, radio or even browsing your favourite website and not see or hear about one of these services.

The question is not are you doing it yet? It's have you dugg it with digg™ yet?

Companies large and small are trying to leverage this new form of word-of-mouth marketing to spread their message in a passive, but effective manner. However, there in lies a problem. This problem is especially true for larger organisations where the control of information is paramount. Maybe the word control is a little too strong here, perhaps we should say "Analysis & Response".

What I mean by this is, the larger the company, the more they are in the spotlight and bad news can hit like a tidal wave. Companies need a quick way of responding to trending discussions on such news and leveraging social media is fast becoming the new, and lower cost, way of doing this.

Ok, that is the bleaker side of the commercial use of social media, simply transmitting flight information as Lufthansa's has started with its http://myskystatus.com/ service is a cool use of the medium along with the growing trend to promote movie releases and new products and services are all there too, but it all does come back to control, management and marketing finesse.

There are a few services around that offer social networking solutions for companies, KickApps.com has been on the playing field for quite sometime, but released just recently, at the end of last year, Comment Technologies launched with a new angle on corporate buy-in to social networking.

Their philosophy is to "bring the conversation back home" and the platform appears to do just that. With common tools and services like RSS boxes and content panels (Facebook wall etc.), Member profiles, Member pages, Blogs, Polls, Opinions, Surveys, Forums, Photo Albums, Messaging & Groups to name just a few. They promise the epitome of a dream social networking solution for any wide-eyed and bushy tailed corporate marketer.

The Chococo Community is a featured implementation of the platform and you can take a look through it here http://community.chococo.co.uk/.

As for Comment Technologies? We think this is going to be a very interesting few years for them and I look forward to reporting back to you on their progress.

Google^TM today informed the community of a simplified way of integrating Friend Connect into their websites and blogs. Friend Connect is a collection of widgets website owners can use to encourage more community use of their on line content.

Typically, the widgets are very easy to use and implement and are often just small pieces of HTML and Javascript which are placed on each web page. Previously there was a complex file validation process website owners needed to perform, but its just got better.

View the recent blog post to read more about the changes on Google Friend Connect. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-friend-connect-no-more-ftp-just.html

You can also browse more information about the service generally here. http://www.google.com/friendconnect/