Legal, Policies, Ethics

Sometimes, it’s best to just keep some thoughts to yourself.

Arguably the best and worst thing about the internet is that it gives just about everyone a voice. Once upon a time all you could do was rant about the Raiders’ offense to three of your friends – now, you can get on a message board and say something deeply poignant like “CARSON PALMER SUCKS!!!” and get 15 responses in an hour. The upside is increased feedback, efficient communication and instant responses. The downside is that a phrase like “CARSON PALMER SUCKS!!!” is Shakespearian compared to 90 percent of the drivel you will come across on any open internet forum.

As I said earlier, some thoughts are better off left unsaid. This American Life recently reran one of my all-time favorite episodes, “Right to Remain Silent.” The first segment of the program focuses on Joe Lipari, a man who became infuriated with the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City and made his anger abundantly clear in a Facebook post later that day. After watching the movie Fight Club, he posted a paraphrased quote from the movie that said, among other things, that he might “walk into an Apple store on Fifth Avenue with an Armalite AR-10 gas powered semi-automatic weapon and pump round after round into one of those smug, fruity little concierges."

One of his Facebook friends saw the post and reported him to the police, and it wasn’t long before he was visited by the police and charged with two felonies. He has spent the last few years in and out of courts fighting the charges. Although the ordeal appears to be over (a judge dismissed the charges in February), he definitely paid a price.

Lipari was obviously being sarcastic. But sarcasm doesn’t come through on the web quite like it does in person. Additionally, it’s probably a good idea to avoid any sort of references to pumping rounds of ammunition into people.

Extreme cases like Lipari’s are the exception and not the rule. The First Amendment is thriving in today’s era of social media, according to an editorial in the Dallas Morning News. In 2006, 45 percent of students surveyed said the First Amendment guaranteed too many rights. That number dropped to 23 percent in the 2011 survey. The increase in use of social media has also led to increased tolerance of opposing views. A group called the Knight Foundation “found a link between social media and tolerance of unpopular opinions; daily users were the most tolerant and infrequent users the least.”

Let’s just hope these people eventually come up with something cleverer than “CARSON PALMER SUCKS!!!”

Apps

Apparently, one screen isn’t enough to keep us entertained any more.

A recent article on CNN.com says that numerous studies show that 80 percent of TV viewers of all age incorporate a “second screen” – laptop, smartphone or tablet computer – into their viewing habits.

The most likely reason for this trend is that people like to talk about TV shows and event while they are happening. Zeebox is an app developed to take advantage of this scenario. It “determines what show is currently being viewed and then provides streams from relevant social media, as well as offering targeted links to spin-off products, and background information about the actors, music or writers drawn from online resources.”

I appreciate the concept behind this service as much as anyone. I’m always going to the internet during shows to see what other movies/TV shows such and such actor has been in. During a sporting event, I like to see other people’s responses to the ref’s last call or Coach Jackson’s decision to go for it on fourth down.

But, the old man inside of me worries about whether this type of technology will dumb down TV. For example, my favorite show of all time is Lost. I would turn my phone off while I watched an episode, and if anyone ever tried to talk to me I would pause it. It’s too cerebral of a show to allow yourself to be distracted by apps or any type of second screen. Since Lost went off the air, I have been worried about whether I will ever see a show like it again. Now, as shows try harder to be second screen compatible, I am even more worried.

In addition to being fun and neat, apps can be genuinely useful. Jayne O’Donnell wrote an article for USA Today about how apps can help consumers save money as the Christmas season approaches. eBay has its Red Laser app and Amazon has its Price Check. Both are price comparison apps that quickly tell consumers where else they can get Good A and at what price.

Ms. O’Donnell offers a few other tips on how to use apps to help you shop smartly. One of the coolest apps she highlighted was Lemon, an app that keeps track of receipts. As someone with no organized method of keeping receipts, I can quickly see how that app would make my life easier.

Search Engine Optimization

Last month, I interviewed a USU graduate student named Rain Christensen for a story I was writing for the Huntsman Post. Rain started and runs banktruth.org, a website that evaluates banks and provides detailed information about them. After a great deal of sacrifice and hard work, the website has become a remarkable success. During the interview, he typed “best banks” into Google, and his website was the second result to come up out of nearly 300 million.

A lot of our discussion centered around search engine optimization (SEO). Phrases like “best banks” and “bank rankings” are typed into search engines thousands of times per day, and most people don’t look beyond the first set of results. Having your website appear in the top three is like owning beachfront property.

Rain told me there are three things that Google and other search engines look for when they rank websites:

1.     Contain quality content

2.     Updated frequently

3.    Engage social interaction

All three of Rain’s suggestions for better SEO performance were mentioned in an article on forbes.com by Eric Savitz. Savitz also says internet marketers should watch out for trending keywords, create sub-topic landing pages and properly tag and categorize content.

In addition to all of this, there is one other thing that drives SEO performance: blogging.  Savitz quotes Hubspot Director of Brand and Buzz Marta Kagan as saying that companies that blog get 55 percent more traffic. Kagan explains why this is in a blog post called “12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know.” Savitz summarizes it by saying, “the more you blog, the more pages Google has to index, and the more inbound links you’re likely to have.”

As web use continues to shift over to smart phones, people will be even less likely to see what search results lay beyond the first page. SEO ought to be one of the main focuses of every marketer. It is a relatively new field, and so I am excited to see what innovations lie in the future.

Collaborative and distance communication

Before today, my only experience with Second Life was this clip from The Office:

So you can imagine my shock when I came across this website. That's right, there is an online newspaper devoted to the goings on of the virtual world of Second Life. I found this site after performing a Google search for "Second Life," and it took me about 10 minutes to realize what I was looking at.

After browsing the site for a few minutes, I found a link to an article in the New York Times written by Amy Harmon in January of 2004. Apparently, The Alphaville Herald started out as an online newspaper about an internet game called The Sims Online. Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor, founded the newspaper as the unofficial paper for the fictional town of Alphaville. When he started to publish stories about seedy happenings in Alphaville (scams, cyber-prostitution, cyber-violence, etc.), EA Sports, the makers of The Sims Online, "killed" his character. This incident made international headlines. Shortly thereafter, Ludlow rebranded the website as the Second Life Herald and began focusing on the virtual world of Second Life.

In the aforementioned New York Times article, Ms. Harmon highlights several concerns for these types of online alternate reality games. "The currency of several online games can now be regularly purchased for real dollars on Internet auction sites, allowing people to buy their way into a higher level much as they might pay to get a child into a better nursery school." She quotes Mr. Ludlow about the dangers of the virtual money of The Sims Online gaining real market value. He said that this makes the notion of selling sex online more worrisome.

The alternate-reality gaming world amazes me. The fact that there are people who can devote so much of there time to something so trivial is actually a sign of collective economic prosperity. If you were to spend as much time playing Second Life in the 1700s as you do now (ignoring the obvious technological issues), you would starve to death. I just hope that the world economy continues to prosper so that I can enjoy a better standard of living in the future - but I don't see that happening if everyone eschews the real world in favor of the virtual one.

Viral Videos

Weezer made a music video about viral videos, and the music video went viral. Try saying that three times fast.

In 2008, Weezer released a single called Pork and Beans. In a move that reflected the band’s embrace of social media, they premiered the music video for the song on YouTube, four days before the televised debut on MTV. The video, which featured dozens of Internet phenomena, was an instant hit, amassing over 3.5 million views in its first week.

The first time I watched the video, I could feel my brain start to bleed as I tried to keep up with all of the memes. “Oh, there’s Miss Teen South Carolina! There’s the Afro Ninja guy! Wait, what is the deal with the guy with all of the tee shirts?” The video is a great way for people to test their viral video recognition skills. If you have seen all of the videos referred to in the music video, you have probably spent too much time on YouTube.

Matthew Cullen, who directed the video, sat down with Jenna Wortham of Wired.com to discuss the meaning of the video:

“(Pork and Beans) is this amazing song about being happy with who you are. That’s exactly where it came from. There’s never been a time like now, thanks to YouTube, where people can put themselves out there. So I embraced that concept.”

As Cullen explains, there is an actual person behind each of the people who have unintentionally become celebrities. Mark Hicks, the Afro Ninja, is a professional Hollywood stuntman who “made one mistake at a casting session that is etched in (millions) of people’s memories.” Cullen said that this video is a way for Hicks to show the world that he has embraced what happened and that he his happy with who he is.

Cullen and Weezer aren’t the only ones who understand the public’s deep appreciation for viral videos. Enter Daniel Tosh. The comedian has become one of TV’s brightest new stars as a result of his hit show, Tosh.0. The show focuses on online video clips with Tosh providing sarcastic commentary.

At one point in the show, he usually does a “web redemption,” where he meets with a person or group from a particularly well-known viral video. By doing this, he allows viewers to see the actual people in a setting other than the ones they were immortalized online in.

The show, which premiered on June 4, 2009, launched with an initial order of 10 episodes. It averaged over 1 million viewers per episode, and did particularly well with the coveted 18-24 and 18-34 demographics. It is now in its third season, averaging 2.2 million viewers per episode, beating out The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report to become Comedy Central’s highest rated non-animated show.

There is no doubt that Tosh’s biting humor is a big reason for the show’s success. But it has also succeeded because society is obsessed with viral videos. We enjoy watching them and are always excited to see what else is out there. On top of that, many of us are curious about the behind-the-scenes aspects of viral videos. Who are these people? Why did they act the way they did in the video? How have their lives changed since attaining web celebrity status? These are all questions that were being asked by hundreds of thousands of people, and Tosh.0 has effectively reached that market.

Location Based Programs

America’s Finest News Source (aka “The Onion”) may have mocked glowing media reports about Foursquare’s entrance into the social media world, but it looks like the tone of those media reports was justified.

This past summer, the number of Foursquare users reached 10 million, a 100 percent increase from December. Shortly after, the privately held company raised $50 in funding at a $600 million value.

Foursquare has established itself as a formidable player in the social media realm, worthy of being mentioned alongside Facebook and Twitter. But, as a June USA Today article reports, success of that magnitude comes with challenges.

Foursquare is a location-based service (LBS) that lets users win virtual prizes by using their smartphones to “check in” to the places they visit. Many people are weary about having their movements tracked and broadcasted online, and privacy concerns remain a major hindrance to further growth. In response to these concerns, Foursquare lets users decide for themselves whether or not they want to share their locations with a broader audience on Facebook and Twitter. If they want, users can have their locations shared with a small group of trusted friends.

This article brought up some interesting points about Foursquare’s utility. For example, a New York restaurant near Foursquare’s office has used the service to “break down its customer base by gender, age group and check-in time. Knowing when customers visit lets the restaurant plan operations when things are busy and offer specials when business is slow.”

Facebook, having already been on the winning side of creative destruction once before (see: Myspace), couldn’t just sit around and watch Foursquare get all the accolades. Consequently, it launched “Facebook Places” in August of 2010.

After a year of less-than-impressive results, reports surfaced that Facebook was killing off its “Places” feature. But, as Steve McClellan reported, Facebook wasn’t conceding the LBS marketing battle to Foursquare: “Agencies say that what Facebook is actually doing…may scale their location-based marketing capability in a way that could motivate a majority of their 500 million global members to add location data when using the site.”

Basically, Facebook just made it possible for users to tag status updates with their locations. They can do this on laptops, phones or any other portable device. Michael Nicholas, chief strategy officer at Aegis Group’s Isobar, described the move as an “embedded tag strategy that's about getting more people to put more location data into Facebook.”

The value of putting “more location data into Facebook” is that it makes the product more attractive to marketers. Marketers are constantly trying to dig up information on potential customers, and finding out what locations they visit and at what time of day gives them valuable consumer insight.

A rapidly increasing number of people are participating in location-based services, making it easier than ever before for businesses to learn about consumers’ daily behavior. It is obvious that consumers value the services provided by Foursquare and the like, but what will ultimately determine LBS’s success is how useful they are to businesses. Foursquare works with hundreds of thousands of merchants to develop incentives for people to check in at their locations, and if these merchants don’t see results, they will find other methods to bring in customers.

Traditional Views

The Women’s World Cup final between Japan and the United States this past summer got an 8.6 overnight TV rating, but that was not the statistic everyone was talking about. The thrilling finish to the game drew 7,196 tweets per second, dwarfing previous spikes such as Osama bin Laden’s death (5,106 per second) and Super Bowl XLV (4,064).

This reflects a continuing trend of social media playing a large role in big TV events. James Poniewozik wrote an article for TIME about this phenomenon in March of 2010. He noted that old media has not traditionally fared well against new media: “New technologies are born – radio, TV, the Internet – and either kill what came before or render it less relevant.” But his hypothesis is that social media (i.e. “new media”) has actually helped TV (“old media”) with its big events. Record TV audiences still tune in for the Super Bowl, Olympics and Academy Awards ceremonies.

As Poniewozik says, people like to talk about big events. We throw parties for occasions like the Super Bowl and American Idol finales so we can share the experience with as many people as possible. We are eager to go to work/school the next day to hear from everyone who could not make it to the party. Well, now we do not have to wait until the next day. Twitter and Facebook allow us to instantly hear from hundreds or even thousands of other people. I can immediately find out what Bill thinks about the Steelers pass defense or what Jenna thinks about both teams wearing the same color of pants.

If Poniewozik is correct, old media folks should not look at social media as a problem. It can compliment TV programs and can be a great benefit with a good strategy.

With a good strategy. Much easier said than done. Social media is still a relatively new field and most of us are still trying to figure out what works and what does not. I found an article discussing a few ways traditional media is going social. Whether these tactics have been effective is beside the point for the purposes of this blog post – the mere fact that they are doing something shows that they are not looking at social media as a problem.

My favorite example from the article had to do with the efforts of John A. Byrne, the editor-in-chief of the business magazine BusinessWeek. He is using social media to get story ideas from consumers of his magazine. Readers submit pitches to Byrne, and he and a community editor review each of them and assign at least one per week to a BusinessWeek journalist.

The Women’s World Cup final broke the Twitter record not because women’s soccer passed up football in popularity. It did so because Twitter has gotten increasingly popular, and that trend has showed no signs of stopping. The growing popularity of social media has been discussed ad nauseum, and old media will not do itself any favors by ignoring it. There are examples of social media complimenting old media, and the segments that find other ways to utilize social media will gain a crucial competitive advantage.

Blogging

In May of 2005, Businessweek featured a cover story titled, “Blogs Will Change Your Business” by Stephen Baker and Heather Green. This was right as blogs were starting to reach a large audience, but before big social networks like Facebook and Twitter had any sizable market presence. Nevertheless, the online version of the story continued to receive so much attention for such a long period of time that Businessweek updated the story in February of 2008 to fix and update more than 20 notes. But even after an extensive revision of the story, the overall message stayed the same: businesses that figure out blogging acquire a competitive advantage over those that choose to ignore the phenomenon.

One thing is unquestionably true about blogs – they exist, and the number of them is growing every day. As of Sept. 21, 2011, there are 171,637,335 identified blogs on the internet, and 95,702 new blogs popped up in the last 24 hours (stats taken from BlogPulse.com). How many of those blogs are potential customers? How many of them are talking about your business, positively or negatively? Of those that are talking about your business, how many people do they reach, and how effective are they at communicating their message?

Businesses that fail to monitor the online discussion of what they are doing are at risk of missing out on opportunities to correct misinformation or respond to consumers’ concerns. They will also miss out on learning what consumers care about. “Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking.” Advertisers can track responses to their ad campaigns, and film studios can see which movies are generating buzz, for example.

Businesses aren’t the only ones that can benefit from understanding blogs. A growing number of people from an unlikely source are turning to blogs to get their careers of the ground – academics. Sarah-Louise Quinnell is a PhD graduate and managing editor of the blog PhD2Published. She wrote an online article recently for The Guardian titled, “Don’t doubt the value of blogging in academic publishing”. She says that many of her colleagues have dismissed blogging even though it “encourages wider participation and generates instant debate.” She argues that the academic community should embrace it, especially researchers early in their careers.

Academic journals are invaluable for publishing well written and analytically rigorous research papers, but getting a paper into a journal requires an extensive editing process and can take up to two years, according to Dr. Quinnell. Conversely, blogs “allow for immediate engagement and debate of current issues.” If it really can take up to two years to get published, imagine how much could have changed in that time frame.

Dr. Quinnell’s article and the Businessweek story both argue that blogs shouldn’t be regarded as unimportant. All businesses and researchers don’t need to maintain their own professionally written blogs, but they need to be aware of what blogs can do. This will lead them to monitor what is being said and what is important in the minds of the people they are trying to serve. In an increasingly competitive world, squandering any competitive advantage could be the difference between success and failure.

Organizational uses of social media

I’m a sucker for strongly worded critiques. If an author says things like, “The food at the restaurant was abysmal to the point that I intentionally threw up in my mouth to get rid of the bad taste”, sign me up.

So when I came across an article on Forbes.com titled “Skittles’ Stupid Social Media Trick”, it took me all of a nanosecond to click on the link. And I have to say, reading Laura Burkitt shred the marketing tactics of my favorite candy brand was sweeter than the figurative “taste of the rainbow” that Skittles claims its product delivers.

Skittles didn’t want to lag behind the rest of the industry with its social media efforts, so its marketers got rid of the traditional home web page and put in its place “a collage of content from social networking sites.” Their main error was including a live, unedited Twitter feed. It didn’t take long before anonymous, attention-seeking Twitter followers began directing “scalding” comments to its feed containing profanity. Because Skittles didn’t use a social media aggregator that would allow them to moderate comments before they were posted, the offensive language was displayed on their website for everyone to read.

Burkitt doesn’t fault Skittles for experimenting with Twitter on its website. She criticizes them for not using a social media aggregator, such as FriendFeed or Plaxo, to “view comments and moderate them before they are posted.” Companies now have the liberty of doing this thanks in large part to PepsiCo. FriendFeed never had this feature until Pepsi requested that they make the service available only to Pepsi, but they added the option for all companies.

Now I want to shift from a company that didn’t get social media to one that excels at it: the NBA. I briefly mentioned this in last week’s post, but their social media aptitude deserves a more in-depth discussion.

In April of this year, Maria Burns Ortiz wrote an article for ESPN.com titled, “The NBA’s social media explosion”. She mentions several facts and figures illustrating the NBA’s dominance over its competitors in the social media realm: “The NBA has positioned itself as the top sports league in social media – No. 1 on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in terms of respective followers, likes and views.” At the time this article was written, the NBA had 10.5 million users who like and follow its official Facebook and Twitter page; the NFL, which is easily the most popular sports league in the United States, had yet to crack 5 million.

What has this done for the NBA? It has engaged fans in an unprecedented way. They can get to know their favorite stars on a much more personal level than ever before (approximately half of the NBA’s players are on Twitter). League and team officials can also monitor relevant trends and see what the fans are talking about. This allows them to gain valuable consumer information for marketing and public relations purposes.

I am baffled as to why the other professional sports leagues haven’t followed the NBA’s lead on this. Perhaps the NFL doesn’t view the NBA as a viable competitor (indeed, revenue for the NFL dwarfs that of the NBA). But didn’t we just spend a summer listening to NFL owners say they weren’t making enough money? Instead of trying to convince us that you aren’t getting your fair share of revenue, please spend more time getting to know your consumers and delivering us what we want.

Social Media: The Big 7

I can point to a specific date as to when I started to realize how much social media was changing the structure of news: June 17, 2009. On what was otherwise a slow news day in the sports world, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love took to Twitter to announce that his coach, Kevin McHale, wouldn’t return next season.

In this instance, an athlete completely eliminated the middleperson and broke major news directly to thousands of fans. I had grown accustomed to seeing this type of news appear as “breaking news” on the bottom line of ESPN and attributed to a sports journalist like Marc Stein or Ric Bucher. But now, there was a platform where an athlete could easily make the announcement immediately after finding out and many people would learn the news shortly thereafter.

The content of Love’s tweet reveals one more characteristic about how social media has changed news delivery: “Today is a sad day … Kevin McHale will NOT be back as head coach next season.” Instead of finding out about McHale’s forced departure in a story filled with manufactured quotes, I was reading someone close to the situation explain the news in a much more personal manner. He was also reacting at the moment he found out, before he could consult with a PR specialist to craft out every word. This is in striking contrast to the types of statements usually released to journalists who break these types of stories. For example, when ESPN.com ran a story about McHale’s firing a few days later when it became official, it included this quote from Timberwolves’ owner Glen Taylor:

"I will be forever grateful for the work Kevin did in returning to his home state and assembling a team that made eight straight playoff appearances. Kevin brought an enormous amount of basketball talent and passion to our organization and I wish him nothing but the best."

Taylor probably means every word of that statement. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Taylor didn’t say these words right after the decision was made.

Twitter isn’t the only social media website that has changed my relationship with professional athletes. In 2006, ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons wrote a story titled “The YouTube Hall of Fame.” One of the videos that made the list was a montage of highlights by former baseball and football star Bo Jackson.

Simmons pointed out that one of the reasons he loves YouTube is because it’s “the only place where forgotten superstars like (former NBA star) Shawn Kemp and Bo Jackson live on.” I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, and I believe that it’s not just the “forgotten” superstars who have benefitted from YouTube. I wasn’t born early enough to experience the Magic Johnson and Larry Bird era, but as a lifelong NBA fan I have been told repeatedly how great they were. Every once in a while, I would catch of clip of some of their best plays, but I had to work hard to get visual evidence of their magnificence. Now I can go to YouTube and instantly watch videos like this and this and see with my own eyes the work Magic and Larry did on the basketball court.

This all makes me wonder why Major League Baseball (MLB) continues to stick by their absurd YouTube policy. They regularly remove baseball videos from video sharing websites like YouTube because of copyright infringement. But the MLB values its place in American history more than any other league. How does providing fans with visual evidence of historic moments in baseball history hurt the MLB's brand? Wouldn’t it be good for the league to allow people like me to watch highlights of Roger Clemens’s 20-strikeout game against the Seattle Mariners in 1986? I don’t understand what the MLB has to lose by doing this. It might even make people think baseball is an exciting sport to watch.