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Category: Social Media

Reaching Your Customers With Social Media: Monopoly Tokens Put To Facebook Vote

Pass Go and Collect $200 — Monopoly is as good as it gets when talking about childhood board games, and I’ve played them all. Board games are an integral part of life in my family, and now a piece of that memory is being put to the social media test.

Growing up with three brothers turns everything into a competition. The biggest battle in Monopoly wasn’t who would win: it was which piece you got to play as. And let’s be real, with four young boys playing a board game, we never actually finished a match. Either the board got flipped or the power came back on before we finished. The boot, the dog, the top hat, the battleship: each had their own mystique and appeal. The real battle, the important battle, was which token you could barter, beg, or arm-wrestle for. Well, that could all change — and relatively soon for a game that hasn’t changed much in 75 years.

Monopoly has announced that they will be switching out one of the game tokens for a replacement that’s “that’s more representative of today’s Monopoly players,” according to Eric Nyman, senior vice president for Hasbro Gaming.

Everyone now has a chance to vote to save their favorite token, and you can even vote to select the next Monopoly piece. For a game that is available in 111 countries and 43 languages, it makes sense to do the voting where everyone already is: Facebook.

Here, Hasbro is providing an excellent example of using social media to engage their wide base of fans and make them part of the creative process. Additionally, it’s a revitalized presence for the Depression-era property in a new fast-paced media landscape. Board games have suffered a significant drop in sales in recent years as consumers turn to their smartphones and tablets for entertainment, and this vote is tailor-made to draw customers’ attention and keep it. There are two factors at work here: the instinctual impulse to defend your favorite piece, and the lingering psychological effect of the positive action, leading to increased brand awareness. Nearly everyone has fond memories of the game and its iconic pieces, and this is an excellent way to put the “outrage machine” of the Internet to work and churn up public interest to boot (if you’ll pardon the pun) in the game. Bravo to Hasbro!

So which piece will you be throwing your efforts behind? I wouldn’t want to sway your vote, but I would hate to see the battleship go… and I have to admit, that robot looks pretty sweet.

So go vote! Save your token! As Hasbro says, “don’t leave this one to Chance.”

January 15, 2013
12 Worst Social Media Mistakes of 2012 (And How to Avoid Them)

2012 was truly a year of phenomenal social campaigns by many national companies. However, with the good came plenty of bad. Here are some of the year’s worst campaigns, and how you can avoid these gaffes in your own businesses’ online marketing.

12. Kansas City Chiefs
A disappointed fan tweeted at the Kansas City Chiefs in September, calling the owner greedy and unethical. Unfortunately for the Chiefs, the fan took a screenshot of the offensive direct message he received back and posted the message to Reddit, where it went viral within hours.

The main takeaway from this blunder? The customer (or fan) is always right, and you are never speaking for yourself when representing a brand on social media.

11. Progressive Auto Insurance
The auto insurance company faced a huge Twitter backlash this year after a popular blogger released a post titled “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer in Court”. Instead of responding to their detractors, the company replied to every tweet with the same robotic response. This, of course, attracted even more negative attention on the social media network.

Our lesson: if you’re going to respond to negative comments or tweets, take the time to personalize the replies.

10. Southwest Airlines
Southwest accidentally overcharged thousands of customers in August. While they acknowledged that their site had experienced some “technical difficulties,” they failed to note that many customers were going to have multiple charges on their credit card statement. Angry patrons took to their Facebook page, where many left displeased comments after being unable to get through to the company via phone. Southwest did not address any of these complaints, and then updated their brand cover photo, which many viewed as insensitive in the midst of an unanswered crisis.

Be proactive: You should remove any regularly “scheduled” posts during a crisis — angry consumers don’t want to see that you have time to update your status when you haven’t fixed their problem.

9. American Apparel
Although they weren’t the only brand to send insensitive messages in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, they are the only one who failed to apologize for their hurricane puns. They sent out a nationwide sale email that included the phrase, “In case you’re bored during the storm,” and was only available in affected states.

What more can we say? It’s never a good idea to make light of a national disaster in order to move product.

8. Chick-Fil-A
The chicken company came under fire in early 2012 for its anti-gay campaign donations. Protesters took to their Facebook page, where thousands left angry comments and disappointed messages for the company. Instead of responding to the comments with their brand page, they allegedly created a fake Facebook account to comment on each attacker’s post. This technique was outed pretty quickly, and viewed with scorn by many.

How can you avoid this? Don’t make fake profiles! It is far too easy to be tempted by this scheme in today’s digital society, but it is generally quite easy to spot a fake Facebook account.

7. KitchenAid
A common theme in Twitter gaffes this year involved accidental tweets. KitchenAid profusely apologized for its tweet making light of President Obama’s grandmother’s death, but the damage was done. A better question is why anyone would hire someone to manage their brand’s online identity who abbreviates the word “before”.

Learn from their mistakes: Keep politics off your company’s account, and make sure you are hiring competent, careful employees to manage your social media channels.

6. National Rifle Association
The NRA’s social media strategy seems to have been updated to going dark recently, but earlier this year they faced plenty of criticism. The gun advocates tweeted “Morning Shooters – Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” the morning after the Aurora, CO theater shooting. The tweet drew tons of ire from the press, and may have lead to their silence following the Newtown, CT shooting earlier this month.

Protect yourself from controversy: Make sure your social media team is aware of national happenings and in touch with local news.

5. Hitman’s Disastrous Foray Into Social Gaming
Square Enix’s hyper-violent, edgy Hitman game series has been a huge money-maker for the gaming giant, but their attempts at capitalizing on Facebook gaming proved to be a complete failure on every level of content QA. The Hitman social media game included a variety of motivations for placing a “virtual hit” on your friend, with crass and juvenile reasons such as “her muffin top,” “her small tits,” or “his tiny penis.” Apparently blasting your friend in the face with a sniper rifle just isn’t enough of an insult.

Our (obvious) takeaway? Including blatant misogyny and insulting content in your endeavors doesn’t make you look “edgy” — it just makes you look like a jerk.

4. Olympic Games
The Olympic committee applied Rule 40 to every aspect of athlete’s lives this year, including Twitter. Athletes stirred up a huge controversy on the social networking site using the hashtag #WeDemandChange2012 over their right to represent brands during the Olympic Games. They argued that they received no compensation for participating in the games, while the organizers got rich off official endorsements. It raised great debate about censorship, and athletes’ right to use social media as they pleased.

Learn from the Olympics: it’s impossible to censor your opponents on social media channels.

3. Toyota Camry
The car giant kicked off the year with a Super Bowl campaign intended to get users to tweet with the hashtag #camryeffect. Unfortunately, their campaign centered around sending spammy tweets back at anyone who used the hashtag, encouraging them to enter a contest to win a free Camry. Their accounts eventually got suspended by Twitter, which drew even more attention since they had already been verified on the social network.

Our lesson? Even legitimate contests can easily look like spam and offend users. Don’t use organic interaction on your channels as a way to push sales.

2. Celeb Boutique
The online clothing retailer tweeted a promotional bit this year using the hashtag #Aurora, which they mistakenly thought had to do with their clothing line. Unfortunately for them, it instead referred to the tragic shooting in a Colorado theater.

Don’t tweet blindly: This could’ve been easily avoided if their team had simply researched the hashtag before using it.

1. McDonald’s
This year’s worst social media campaign came from the fast food giant, whose #McDStories hashtag was described by Forbes as being a “bashtag”. The twitterverse jumped at the chance to use the branded hashtag, but not to promote the company, but rather to ridicule its food and company principles. Tweets such as “Dude, I used to work at McDonald’s. The #McDStories I could tell would raise your hair” were everywhere on the social media network, and the hashtag is still being used negatively almost a year later.

Know your brand’s reputation: Encouraging consumers to share stories involving a company that already gets a lot of negative press is probably not the best idea. Stick with campaigns that inspire positive interaction, rather than open-ended tweet requests.

There you have it, the 12 worst social media gaffes of 2012. Fortunately, there are ways to bounce back even after the worst mistakes. See any that we missed? Let us know in the comments!

January 9, 2013
Taking the Twit Out of Twitter: How To Bounce Back From A Gaffe With Grace

We’ve touched on the importance of having a good Twitter handle, but just as important is the content of your tweets. While in the past you could expect to be chastised for a misspelling or typo in the classroom, social media platforms like Twitter now make your mistakes public in a way that they weren’t before — and people of the Internet are far less forgiving.

Twitter blunders can range from comical misspellings on your personal account…

to accidentally tweeting from an employer’s account.

Or it could include the posting of insensitive and/or offensive material.

By the time you realize the mistake (or, as is usually the case, the mistake is pointed out to you), it’s often too late. In a day where followers are aplenty, you often can’t simply remove the gaffe and pretend it never happened. It’s already been viewed and possibly shared by any number of people.

The best way to avoid these mistakes is obviously by proofreading your tweets, especially if you are acting on behalf of a business. One missed letter could change the entire meaning of a tweet (or even prompt followers to click on an unintended link). Whether you’re representing yourself or a brand, it’s important to put your best foot forward, and it all starts with attention to detail.

However, if you do find yourself the object of Internet ridicule, there are a few things you can do to smooth over the situation. First, know when to own it. A simple misspelling might not be worth drawing more attention to, but if you accidentally share a bad link or were unintentionally (or intentionally, for that matter) offensive, then you might owe your followers an apology. Feel free to keep it short and sweet: like anything involving Twitter, brevity is key. If offensive material is in the mix, make sure to explicitly detail what you’re doing to remedy the problem and provide a sincere apology (and for Pete’s sake, not a “sorry you were offended” style one).

Finally, keep up your sense of humor. Whether you accidentally tweeted that you love the smell of your boyfriend’s colon or you simply never learned the difference between you and you’re, have a laugh about it. Besides, it’s likely that you’ll be able to return the favor to the follower who pointed out your blunder at some point in the future anyway.

January 7, 2013
Advanced Facebook Ads: How to Beat Disapproval
While some may view the right-hand side of their Facebook stalking experience as an uninteresting blob of text, Facebook was once the world’s largest display advertising network, pulling in over $2.2 billion in annual revenues. Even now, Facebook ads are an invaluable tool for any social media campaign. Industry standard click-through rates, the percentage of the time an impression leads to a user clicking on an ad, hover around .05%, but we’ve recently seen CTRs as high as 1.5% for well-targeted sponsored stories and over 7% for post like ads!

But this glowing opportunity can be hard to grasp if you work in less family-friendly fields. The reader can easily imagine business models that may be be considered prima facie inconsistent “with the overall user experience” of Facebook. For those businesses, it’s important to understand the value of “black hat” advanced Facebook PPC: bending editorial guidelines to best advertise your product.

Some folks may cringe at the term “black hat.” While hacking for links is loathsome, most spam is only annoying to the end user: the act of creatively interpreting best practice guidelines is hardly the cold-hearted evil that fits into the wide swath of questionable techniques available to an advanced marketer. In this post, we’re focusing on the last (and probably least applicable) definition of “black hat:” bending poorly-policed rules to make sure we do our best for our clients.

To boot, Facebook actively goads advanced advertisers to bend their rules. Regardless of your page’s subject matter, Facebook still beseeches marketers to “See Your Ad Here,” often showing a recent post. For a page that is already posting inappropriate content, this enticement throws down the gauntlet to get the ad to pass content review. Sometimes, it’s easier than you think.

Despite the challenge, all ads are subject to review under the guidelines, even if they’ll show in the preview. The rules themselves are reasonable, protecting users from malicious software and malicious badthink such as hate, prurience, and tobacco. These rules are not dissimilar from other networks like Google’s, but advertisers must more intimately understand the review process to best handle the occasional ad review oddity.

Skirting the Line & Errors of Commission

Facebook prohibits directly asking users about demographic information, preferring to have ads show the value to the demographic. From a marketing perspective, this makes sense: you’re targeting interests already, so why ask if you’re hitting your target? However, it’s clear that this guideline is inconsistently applied.

The approved ad (right) directly asks “Have you been Fired, Laid Off, or Quit?” There’s no guideline prohibiting asking about employment status, skirting the spirit of the rule while both the message and visuals remain striking. In contrast, the disapproved ad (left) does not “assert or imply… a user’s personal characteristics” and offers a more subtle image. In this case, Facebook’s reviewers didn’t miss a minor error, but seemed to fabricate or transfer an error.

As this is bound to happen with the scores of ads these reviewers must see, this problem is easy to fix: just resubmit the ad. If there isn’t a real underlying problem, it’ll be reviewed and approved. Two different reviewers will be unlikely to make the same mistake, but if you’re hard-pressed to find something wrong with your ad, contact support at your direct email or here — this won’t necessarily get it approved, but will likely give an answer as to what triggered the disapproval.

Errors of Omission & Retroactive Disapproval

Even with safeguards, sometimes ads get through that shouldn’t have. We serve a variety of niches that often trigger violations of image guidelines, yet are always surprised at what is allowed to be approved. Below is a collection of test ads we ran to see what did and didn’t get approved. These ads were intentionally at least borderline, skirting the edges of the ad guidelines.

Often, it’s not the image or ad copy, but the content of the Facebook page that causes ad approvers to hit the reject button. In these cases, a marketer has two options. The first is to use a white-labeled Facebook page for the landing tab, guiding users to a Like button on the tab that likes the actual page. This introduces blackhat Facebook tactics by offering a possible dark pattern by not telling what the user is actually liking. We didn’t test this to maintain the strength of the brand we advertised, but the temptation was there. Facebook again tempts the darker side of advertisers.

How to Beat the Approval Process: Don’t Connect to Facebook!

The second trick that we found much more effective is to use the full URL of the landing tab instead of “Advertising a Page” in Facebook’s ad editor. Due to the lack of an API hookup, this does not pull in the content of the Facebook page, thus letting an advertiser send traffic to a page that would otherwise be speedily disapproved. This also works with individual posts, letting an advertiser run ersatz sponsored stories to their post. Using an acceptable image and what could be questionable text, the ad would have landed users on a image post that was undoubtedly obscene. Surprisingly, the ad was approved shortly after creating it.

This approved ad linked to a pornographic picture hosted on Facebook.
By simply pasting the URL, the advertiser is now heading to a landing page that only just happens to be on Facebook; thus, the content reviewers can only look at what’s on that web page, as opposed to the edges created and shared on the page. Furthermore, the rampant use of iframes and javascript on Facebook may not allow the approval team to see what’s actually on the landing page, as they may be unable to follow the labyrinth of code to the questionable content.

This might mean that much of the approval process is automated, but running at a lower level than Google spiders are. Unlike Googlebot, which is likely running a headless browser, Facebook is running something similar to older versions of Googlebot. This means quite a bit for advertisers who are used to the review process of AdWords, which often looks at landing pages. In all likelihood, medical images that may show nudity and other useful but “not family-safe” imagery will be permitted on Facebook landing tabs. This opens the door for a variety of verticals that otherwise wouldn’t be able to best show their competitive advantage.

You Can… But Should You?

Regardless of what tricks are used and what CTRs are produced, Facebook isn’t lying when it says that users prefer not to have certain subjects in their faces when they check Facebook at work to find out what their daughter is up to. Often, users will hide ads they’d rather not see, prompting a set of reasons for blocking the ad. If enough users hide your ad because of inappropriate content, Facebook will disapprove your ad retroactively.

This causes a familiar sight to seasoned Facebook advertisers: disapproved ads with qualified traffic. There are two options for a marketer, much like with accidentally disapproved ads: resubmit or leave it and create new ads.

In most cases, a resubmitted ad will have similar performance, but still eventually be disapproved; thus, it’s probably best for even experienced Facebook advertisers to bite the bullet and leave any retroactive disapprovals on the table. While frustrating, these ads are disapproved based on the feelings of your targeted group, who may not like what you’re using as copy. If your target isn’t connecting with your ad content, it might be time to change tactics, lest your brand be damaged by backlash and social media outcry.

A Game Plan for Being (Only a Little) Evil

The lesson in these examples isn’t that Facebook’s unfair and inconsistent: it’s that the rules are fluid and hard to pin down exactly. Similar to regular Facebook content, ad reviewers are only human, and inundated with split-second decisions. For a savvy fedora-sporting Facebook advertiser, there are three steps to solving a disapproval:
1. Simply resubmit the ad
  - Test different times of day for submitting ads. Some people feel certain hours take advantage of the human element and are therefore best for borderline ads.
2. Test the landing page
  - Try sending the ad to the URL of the landing tab or to your homepage. This should eliminate ad copy problems.
3. Make small, incremental changes to the ad content
  - Make sure to keep an eye on what does and doesn’t work to sneak by the reviewers next time without issue.
With these three steps, most advertisers will be able to handle even the most controversial of Facebook clients and successfully get traffic on one of the biggest display ad networks.
December 31, 2012
Think Before You Post: Facebook, Chris Owens, and My Grandma

Chris Owens: from burlesque to the NFL.

I had an unexpected conversation with my Grandma on Christmas Day. You see, a while back my parents got her an iPad, and she uses it to get on Facebook pretty much every day. This has been a really great development for her, as it allows her to instantly see pictures of my cousins in Texas and keep up with family friends across the US.

My Grandma figured out how to declare that the Bee Gees are her favorite band on her Facebook page pretty quickly, but what I just discovered is that Facebook is a primarily innocent place for her. She hasn’t watched the site go from pokes to likes to pictures to drunken pictures to sarcasm to the Notorious IPO to one giant platform for ads like the rest of us have.

It made me realize how much fun Facebook was way back in 2007 when I first encountered it. This was back in a time when nobody could link Twitter to their status, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t care which movies you like to watch, and people were pretty much on point with their status updates — even though they all started with the dreaded “is.”

But above all that, I realized that when you are producing content for any online source, you have no idea who is going to read it and how they might react.

Would the Real Chris Owens Please Stand Up

Now, to understand the nature of my Grandma’s Facebook status misadventure, you first need a lesson in French Quarter Royalty. For as long as anyone can remember, a local singer, dancer, burlesque performer, and all around entertainer named Chris Owens has had a strong presence on Bourbon Street.

Every Easter, Owens leads what can only be described as the most sensational and fabulous Easter parade on the planet. She also holds court regularly in her eponymous club on the corner of Bourbon and St. Louis Streets. The woman is a living legend. She is also older than my grandmother, but that doesn’t seem to slow Chris Owens down one bit.

Now, imagine my surprise as I was watching an otherwise disappointing New Orleans Saints game versus the Atlanta Falcons when the name “Chris Owens” was suddenly all over the screen. It turns out the Falcons have a 26 year old cornerback named Chris Owens. He happened to have a very good game against the Saints that day (which I still hold against him), so the announcers kept saying the name “Chris Owens” again and again.

My initial thought was “My God, is there anything that woman can’t do?” and I posted as such on my Facebook wall. Little did I know the effects that would follow.

Sarcastic Facebook Status Updates

My friends and I tend to alternately vent our frustrations and shout our exultations about our beloved yet downtrodden New Orleans Saints during every game. This season started off with complaints about the replacement refs and ended in a mixed chorus of “next year” and “I hate Roger Goodell.” In the midst of all of this, I posted my status alluding to how amazing it is that a burlesque performer who got her start in the 1960s is also an NFL player, intentionally blurring the lines between the two very different people.

Now, when my Grandma read that, she didn’t take it that way. She agreed with me that Chris Owens the performer is amazing, and went on to say that she has been performing since my Grandma was a little girl. I thought that was a great comment, so I liked it.

Then my friend Christian came along and pulled a “Leave Britney Alone!” defense of Chris Owens. My grandmother, not accustomed to the level of cynical sarcasm, snark, and pop culture references that permeate Facebook status updates, thought she had offended my friend and was quite distressed. So on Christmas Day, I had to explain to my grandmother that no one was offended, and how no one means exactly what they say on Facebook. But how do we draw that line?

Watch What You Say

This brings me back to my central point. What started off as a small bit of humor to fill the void of a crappy Saints season ended up with my grandma scared that she had offended a friend of mine by talking about an octogenarian burlesque performer. (You want to move to New Orleans now, don’t you? This is normal here.)

It reminded me that no matter what your intention, and no matter what you say, you will probably offend someone somewhere. When writing online content for absolutely any outlet, your prime concern as an online content producer should be to sound as neutral as possible while still reaching your client’s intended audience.

This is not as easy as it sounds, and Facebook status update fails are only the tip of the iceberg — so be careful what you say and how you say it. A simple joke can end up being offensive, and that’s usually not what the client is looking for. While my incident didn’t make waves, a personal Facebook update can tarnish your professional reputation, and it’s even more important to watch out when you’re writing in the voice of a client. This isn’t to say that you can’t embrace divisive topics and provoke discussion, but as with most things, absolute clarity is the primary goal.

What is your favorite Facebook status misfire?

December 27, 2012
Google+ Communities Storm Into the Social Media Scene
Google Plus communities, the newest section of the social networking site (often referred to as G+ for short) are meant to bring people of similar interests, work experience, or hobbies into one place. These communities can be created by anyone with a G+ account, opening up a whole new vista of networking and sharing potential for users.

The communities are designed for users to have a forum to share similar ideas, thoughts and beliefs and promote discussions amongst peers. The pages themselves can be made open to the public, restricted to certain users or undiscoverable by anyone not personally invited. They are also controlled by a moderator. Community types vary: users have the ability to create general communities such as “People Who Love Food” to more specific versions like “Vegans Rule.” They can also be industry- or location-specific, like “Lawyers’ Association” or “Lawyers of Southeast Louisiana.”

According to Social Media Today, there are several beneficial aspects to a G+ community:
- No Edgerank: updates reach 100% of users
  - Companies don’t have to pay to promote posts in G+ stream
- The content posted in the communities can be picked up by search engines
  - Facebook does not have public search engine and the content posted is not searchable
- Google provides authorship to G+ users
- Businesses engaging on Google+ may potentially rank higher
Sounds enticing. But don’t be so quick to dump your Facebook social media campaign yet. G+ Communities could be very beneficial to a company that wants to reach 100% of their followers without having to pay to do so. But, how many followers do companies actually have on G+ compared to Facebook, and if they are on G+, how many are actively using it? Google+ has 500 million users and only 235 million active users compared to Facebook’s 900 million, but how much time do they have to spend to be considered active? According to a study by comScore, the average G+ user only spends 3 minutes a month on the social network compared to the average Facebook user, who spends around 7 hours a month.

Facebook is still the king of social media and remains the place users spend the most of their Internet leisure time — but it’s not a bad idea for companies to expand their social media strategies to G+ and create a community for consumers to interact with their brand. While it’s disappointing to see Google, the innovation giant, reinventing the wheel, there are a few advantages to Google Plus communities that make them worth your attention. Let’s just hope that the social network’s next move will be something that we haven’t seen before.
December 21, 2012
Facebook Nearby Updates and How Local Businesses Can React
Facebook Nearby Gets a Facelift
Last Monday, Facebook released updates to its check-in feature “Nearby” in an effort to bring some competition to social sites like Yelp and Foursquare. Each month millions of Facebook users check in with the service, reporting their whereabouts to their friends. Now, Facebook is using that information to show you places you will most likely be interested in.

How does it do it? With the update, Facebook will consider your proximity to a place with the amount of check-ins, Likes, star ratings and recommendations made by your friends and other users. The update also allows users to search through 7 other categories, which include Restaurants, Coffee, Night Life, Outdoors, Arts, Hotels and Shopping. From each category, there are subcategories to further help narrow to your desired results.

Updated Nearby results are shown on a split screen of map and list of businesses with relevant rating information. Each business listed appears with the business name, profile picture, address, distance from you, star rating and friends that have Liked it.

Although Facebook Nearby has been dabbling in the check-in game for awhile, this update could be the inspiration needed to help it become more of an authority.

What Does This Mean for Local Businesses?
Well, in short, it is another arena you will need to monitor and encourage interaction. Because this algorithm takes into account check-ins, Likes and recommendations, the more interaction between your business Facebook page and consumers, the higher it will appear on the Nearby list. Leading to the question of how to get consumers to visit, check-in, rate, Like or review a business.

Tips to Gain Facebook Interaction:
- Make it easy. If you haven’t done it already, go create your business’s Facebook place page. Without it, consumers will be left to either create their own or not have the capability to check-in. This can cause issues from naming conventions to potential customers now knowing you exist.
- Offer deals. Deals give an incentive for users to enter your business and try your products. Check-in deals or incentives to encourage consumers to rate or leave reviews on Facebook can increase interaction.
- Stay active. Thank users for commenting or reviewing your business, and encourage interaction on your main page. Saying thank you can go a long way for many consumers, both current and potential.
- Be interesting. Add photos and relevant information to your place page. For example, if you are a restaurant, add images of your menu, food and location.
- Be helpful. Clearly list your operating hours and contact information.
Only time will tell whether the Facebook update to the Nearby application will become more popular with users and beneficial to business owners; in the meantime, optimizing your page for its potential benefits is just smart.
December 20, 2012
Quick! Delete Your Instagram Account! (Or Don’t.)

Instagram, the popular photo sharing app recently acquired by Facebook, will be changing its Terms of Service next year. This change in terms, slated to take effect January 16th, provoked a massive storm of criticism because of ambiguous language that some interpreted as allowing the company to sell the licensing to photos posted on the site to various advertisers.

CUE INTERNET MOB WITH PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES

The language in question states that in using Instagram, “you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

This didn’t sit well with the app’s user base, who instantly began posting screenshots of the new terms as photo shares on the service and started up boycott initiatives. Even someone claiming affiliation with the hacker collective Anonymous called on its followers to ditch the service. A contingency of users has even urged others to switch to the Yahoo-owned photo sharing service, Flickr. (Long before this kerfluffle, Flickr wrote an official blog post saying the company “feel(s) very strongly that sharing online shouldn’t mean giving up rights to your photos.”)

What does all of this mean? Is a photo of your child going to become the new flagship image for the Gerber campaign? Probably not: in face of the uproar, the company produced clarifications within hours. Co-founder Kevin Systrom put out an official statement from the company apologizing for the confusion over the new terms, saying “it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.” Systrom also stressed that Instagram’s users are the owners of their own content, and that the company had no intent to use its users’ content in advertisement. The offending text from the new terms has been removed.

Instagram claims it never intended to use your photos in advertisements and they weren’t claiming ownership to license them out to major ad campaigns either. While I don’t think the language used in the new terms was as vague as some claims make it out to be, I don’t think Instagram had the ominous intent to freely sell your photos to advertisers. Instagram was merely trying to set up the legal grounds for promoted/sponsored posts in your photo feed. What’s really remarkable about this whole story, however, is the speed with which the whole thing took place. The terms were released, outrage spread across the web and social media sphere, and within hours, the head of the company was personally issuing a statement. This rapidity is becoming typical for doing business on the social web: the Hitman social media game that included misogynistic and crude content was pulled in just an hour, and in the infamous Susan G. Komen debacle, the company was forced to reverse its position just days after announcing their deeply unpopular decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood in the face of a massive online uproar. The fact that Instagram was so willing to clarify its position in plain language actually speaks to a greater transparency and user responsiveness in online business: the mistakes that provoke these bad PR storms are inevitable, so let’s hope the trend of immediate address continues.

December 19, 2012
Hold Off on the Half-Baked Google+ Local Merge
This weekend while shopping for Christmas presents, I found this ad at one of the booths. The flyer advertises a seminar that will teach business owners how to claim their Google Place Page and Google+ Business pages. While we do encourage small businesses to claim these pages, we recommend holding off on attempting to merge the pages into a Google+ Local page.

Google+ Local Pages were released with the intention of replacing Google Places as an accessible enhanced business listing to be used across search, Maps, mobile, and Google+. Unfortunately, the transition has been anything but smooth. Months after the release, Google Places for Business has lost its functionality, Google+ Local is riddled with bugs, and the only advice we’ve received from Google is to “Sit tight!”

Patience, however, is not a virtue on the Internet, so rather than sitting tight, bloggers are nudging Google towards action by adding to the list of problems with Google+ Local. Businesses who have attempted the merge have experienced issues such as:
- Lost reviews
- Inoperable PINs
- Pages getting stuck as “In Progress” for more than a week after inputting the verification PIN
- Limited business types
When Google ran its beta testing for merges in July, Search Influence successfully merged our own place page with our Google+ local page by way of the manual verification request. While we were able to merge a few of our clients’ place pages and Google+ local pages using PIN verification, we have also experienced our share of problems.

Upon merging the pages of one of our clients, the address number was removed. When we reported this issue to Google, a rep responded, “After investigating your problem, we’ve found that it is being caused by a technical issue and we are pursuing a resolution. At this time, we cannot say when the issue will be resolved and when you will see your reported problem fixed.” This incredibly vague “technical issue” and ever more vague resolution date epitomizes Google’s response to most of the ongoing Google+ Local problems.

In August, we attempted to merge the Google+ Local with Google Places for a plastic surgeon in Orange County using Mike Blumenthal’s step by step guide. We took all of the steps necessary and input the PIN on November 8 — and the merge simply has not taken place. The page no longer says “”Unverified” or “In Progress,” and the link at the bottom of the postcard delivers the following message: “You have no businesses pending verification.”

With no insights from Google on when the Google Local “veritable trainwreck for business listing management” will be resolved, Mike Blumenthal recommends that businesses refrain from attempting to merge their pages at all. While we appreciate Googler Jade’s recommendations for some of the more common merging issues, we have also grown accustomed to Google’s ability to provide us with answers. The fault lies in not only rolling out a product chock full of bugs, but in refusing to provide any guidance on how to prevent or resolve the issues. If Google expects page-holders to willingly convert and use Google+ Local, they need to hammer out the kinks, make it more user friendly, and keep businesses informed about their future plans.
December 13, 2012
Facebook User Vote Ends, Facebook Eliminates Voting

Last week, Facebook gave its users the ability to vote on a proposed set of changes to the site’s governance and privacy policy. The proposed changes specifically dealt with the sharing of your data with affiliates (specifically Instagram), how and what users can message you on the site, privacy and deletion concerns with photos, and last, the ability of users to vote on Facebook changes at all.

While this vote had the highest turnout of any prior ones, Facebook required a remarkably high turnout (30% of users or 300 million) of voters for the vote to even count. In the end, 619,000 users voted on the proposed changes, with 87% of them voting to keep the current privacy policy. Because of Facebook’s near-unattainable 30% participation threshold, however, the participating users’ overwhelming opposition will only be held in consideration (read: ignored) while Facebook moves forward with its policy changes, which have drawn fire from online privacy organizations such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy. In short, the entire exercise was an unapologetic charade.

What do these changes likely mean for the user? They mean that Facebook can share users’ gender, age, work history, etc. with its affiliates. This data will most likely be used to feed ads into Facebook’s recent acquisition, Instagram. The changes to Facebook’s privacy policy also mean that users will not be able to block people they do not know from contacting them, which means a whole lot more unsolicited spam in your inbox.

This entire bread and circus act has the potential to seriously backfire on the ‘book as its policy flailing grows increasingly erratic. Are we seeing the beginning of a Myspace-esque fall from grace, or will the advertising revenue make up for users’ vocal opposition?

December 10, 2012