April 2008 Archives
Good coverage of new UK legislation that cracks down on word of mouth
marketing being done sans transparency.
U.K. Cracks Down on Word-of-Mouth With Tough Restrictions Coming Legislation Makes It a Criminal Offense for Brands to Falsely Represent Themselves as Consumers (By Emma Hall)
The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.
This is just the start of many conversations that will take place around identity and reputation online.
This is a good move and will help bring to light snake oil marketing and black-op operations done under the guise of marketing.
In the mid 90s when I was working with artists and music online, one artist management team thought it a good idea to go over to other peoples' bulletin boards and post about their band as fans.
I warned them at the time that nine year olds can see clearly through these type of marketing charades.
It turns out one noticed right away and said, "if you and the band you love so much are so cool, then what are you doing on my bulletin board telling me so?"
A long way to say that operating without transparency and weighing in with alleged authority on something requires reputation which comes from a strong online identity and that is in turn based on being clear with who you are. Transparency.
We have many accounts online we use to track assets around projects or accounts on social media sites to post around projects. All are clearly marked as such.
Legislation is always the last phase in something that meteorically rises and then morphs and grows though various phases until it needs to be roped back in.
If anyone in the legitimate digital agency business is even playing in such a sandbox it would be surprising as these were lessons learned long ago. But seeing such legislation in the UK makes you wonder why common-sense needs to be legislated. You would think ROI alone would have killed such behavior.
U.K. Cracks Down on Word-of-Mouth With Tough Restrictions Coming Legislation Makes It a Criminal Offense for Brands to Falsely Represent Themselves as Consumers (By Emma Hall)
The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.
This is just the start of many conversations that will take place around identity and reputation online.
This is a good move and will help bring to light snake oil marketing and black-op operations done under the guise of marketing.
In the mid 90s when I was working with artists and music online, one artist management team thought it a good idea to go over to other peoples' bulletin boards and post about their band as fans.
I warned them at the time that nine year olds can see clearly through these type of marketing charades.
It turns out one noticed right away and said, "if you and the band you love so much are so cool, then what are you doing on my bulletin board telling me so?"
A long way to say that operating without transparency and weighing in with alleged authority on something requires reputation which comes from a strong online identity and that is in turn based on being clear with who you are. Transparency.
We have many accounts online we use to track assets around projects or accounts on social media sites to post around projects. All are clearly marked as such.
Legislation is always the last phase in something that meteorically rises and then morphs and grows though various phases until it needs to be roped back in.
If anyone in the legitimate digital agency business is even playing in such a sandbox it would be surprising as these were lessons learned long ago. But seeing such legislation in the UK makes you wonder why common-sense needs to be legislated. You would think ROI alone would have killed such behavior.
Hits the shelves April 29th and should set entertainment sales records. Here is a look at Amazon sales of both the XBox and PS3 Titles. The title got a M rating which is equal to a MPAA R rating.
Facebook launched "Lexicon" today, if your logged into Facebook
you can find it here. http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/
"How are these numbers calculated? We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, "juno") across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications."
It is really nice to see companies put this data online this
way we would love to see more of it. It is exactly what we are feeling with
Trendrr the fun of identifying and tracking trends and buzz around content not
the individual, expect a lexicon plug-in for trendrr soon.
CWSM 2008 - Papers
A number of authors have started to put their papers and posters online from The international Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Check out...Exploring Social Media Scenarios for the Television.
Noor Ali-Hasaan
A Social Network Based Approach to Personalized Recommendation of Participatory Media Content
A. Seth and J. Zhang
On Monetizing
MySpace joining the music retail fray is the closest thing to contextually monetizing a social network. If you cannot sell music services and music related materials to a site built on music they you can forget all other 'traditional' monetization approaches to social networks.Related Reading
FT.com/MySpace Highlights Social Networking's StrugglesFox Interactive Media Restructuring: Memo From Peter Levinsohn: Optimizing Monetization
MySpace Announces Online Music Venture With Nation's Top Three Labels
Last Links..
More good social network reading - Social Media Research BlogRadiohead ning based social network surfaces - http://www.waste-central.com/
Syndication, Schema's and Digital Agencies
We published today a XML schema for syndicating graphs, Simple Graph Syndication - SGS as a part of Trendrr.We are publishing it under creative commons. It provides all the data necessary to reproduce the exported graph.
This a second in series of open releases we are producing as a digital agency.
There has been some recent chatter of what digital agency "2.0" websites and behavior looks like online.
I think one part this, more parts as they are realized.
