Social Media

There’s a lot of news about disclosure online at the minute.

I’ve written about it a ton of times (and spoke about it over at Joe Hackman’s radio show), and smart bloggers like Lorelle are giving some great tips on how bloggers (and other online network users) should go about disclosing their affiliate or professional relationships (thanks to Christina Kingston for the heads-up on Lorelle’s post).

It’s becoming even more important as the U.K. joins the U.S. in cracking down on non-disclosed social updates, whether it’s on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else.

Simply put, if you’re using your platform to promote a service or product on behalf of someone else, you need to state that relationship clearly. Unfortunately, many bloggers and social network users are failing to do this – and the blame’s not entirely theirs.

Instead, it’s the affiliate vendors who are letting their affiliate marketers down.

Yes, You Do Have a Responsibility

I once asked a vendor about their approach to disclosure. The vendor in question makes a product, and a lot of people sell it as part of an affiliate scheme. The product’s very popular, so the vendor has probably made a nice amount of income from it.

I’d seen a lot of tweets and blog posts about this product, where it was clear the affiliate link was being used but not disclosed. I asked the vendor if they were aware, and why they weren’t being more vocal in ensuring affiliate links were disclosed. The vendor’s response?

“Of course, we’d prefer all links to be disclosed. But it’s not our job to police all our affiliates to make sure they’re adhering to the guidelines.”

I disagree and call BS on that.

The minute you make someone a salesperson for your company – which is exactly what an affiliate seller is – you have a responsibility to make sure they’re representing your company properly, and that they’re not breaking any laws in the process of that representation.

It’s your responsibility to make sure that they’re aware of any online regulations, especially in the wake of the FTC and ASA rulings in their respective countries. Saying you have it covered in your Terms and Conditions is an easy out, as we all know how often people read the small print (hint – not a lot).

If you’re not making it clear to your sellers what they need to be aware of, you’re setting them up for legal action or, at the very least, a need to take down their promotion of your products.

But there’s another reason why you, the vendor behind the affiliate program, needs to make sure your bloggers, tweeters or whatever, are disclosing their affiliation to you. The FTC doesn’t really care about the bloggers.

Instead, the FTC will be coming after you.

Bloggers 1, Vendors 0

In the most recent update to their guidelines, the FTC makes it clear who’ll suffer for non-disclosure. “We’re not monitoring bloggers and we have no plans to. If law enforcement becomes necessary, our focus will be advertisers, not endorsers – just as it’s always been.”

Of course, this shouldn’t be taken that bloggers no longer have to disclose – that’s still a given, as it is with Twitter, Facebook and other social network updates. However, it does mean that vendors can no longer claim to have no responsibility to “police affiliates”, because it won’t be the affiliates who get taken to court for non-disclosure – it’ll be the vendors themselves.

The funny thing is, the vendors can make it easier on themselves with just a simple, big bold piece of copy that all new affiliates see when they sign up to an affiliate program:

“Due to regulations regarding the disclosure of beneficial partnerships, we must ask you to make sure you disclose any affiliate links when talking about our product, regardless of where you are.”

This covers everyone – even if they live in a country that doesn’t require disclosure at the minute – and the affiliate can’t say they weren’t aware of the regulations, because they’ve agreed to them before being allowed to become part of the affiliate program.

PR and marketing programs could also adopt this approach, so any bloggers or Twitter users, etc, that are part of a promotional program know they have to make sure they’re not misleading anyone with their promotional updates.

Heck, it’d even offer those vendors moaning about policing their affiliates a fix, since they’ve made it clear and simple to understand what’s required from their affiliates, as opposed to being hidden in some small print.

I don’t know – seems kinda simple to me. How about you?

image: poropitia outside the box

You?ve become lazy. You?re no longer smart. You?re a shadow of the clever person you really could be. Don?t feel bad ? I am too. We all are. We used to be questioning; now we just ask questions.

Blame social media. Actually, don?t ? blame social media?and crowdsourcing. Penned by Jeff Howe in a 2006?Wired Magazine article, crowdsourcing does exactly what it says on the tin ? allows us to source a crowd for an answer.

Want to know where the best steakhouse in Waco is? Ask Twitter. Need to find a kid-friendly bar for your next day out? Update your Facebook status. Want to find out if G.I. Joe blows? Start a conversation on Quora.

Useful? Yes. Informative? Yes. Necessary? Not always. Encourages laziness? Most definitely.

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned research? Taking the time to satisfy our curiosity by looking up information ourselves? Have we really got to the stage where we?re so dependent on others that we?re collectively wasting our intelligence?

At school, we?re given textbooks to help us learn what we need to know. We can also access libraries, Google (man how I wish I had?that available when I was at school!) and numerous other resources. A world of knowledge is at our fingertips.

Yet increasingly we?re asking for others to use their fingertips instead. Who does this benefit?

Do we really learn more by asking someone else to find out something for us? Does our memory retain facts and information if it?s fed to us, or if we hold the spoon ourselves?

There?s no denying that crowdsourcing can offer a valuable and beneficial option for gathering information or opinions on any given topic. Yet just because something is there doesn?t mean it needs to always be used.

Instead of crowdsourcing your next question, try this:

• Google it. There?s a reason why Google is the number one search engine ? people use it to?search for things. Try it ? it?s fun.

• Use an online encyclopedia. The website?Encyclopedia.com gathers information from 49 encyclopedias and 73 dictionaries and thesauruses. There?s not a lot that won?t be there.

• Try a relevant resource. If it?s a sports question, try a sports trivia site. If it?s an entertainment question, try an entertainment site. And so on?

Don?t get me wrong – I crowdsource just like anyone else does. But it?s usually for opinion as opposed to information, or for information that I?ve searched for and just can?t find anywhere (yes, even Google isn?t all-powerful).

Human beings are pretty clever by nature. Can we work on keeping it that way?

image: wstera2

Ancient philosophers believed life could be broken down into six different directions:

1. Above, or Heaven – this reflects your dreams and hopes.
2. Below, or Earth – this is your grounding and where you are now.
3. Forward – where you want to be in your life.
4. Backward – what you’ve overcome and left behind.
5. Left – those who give you inspiration.
6. Right – the people you trust most (both right and left are interchangeable; they’re basically your “armies”).

Whether you’re religious, philosophical or not, they’re pretty straightforward and common-sense beliefs that stand tall today. You can use these directions in so many ways.

So how would they fit into social media?

Above

Okay, so there’s no Heaven in social media (unless you count a night on Gary Vaynerchuk’s wine recommendations!), but there are ways to connect the Hope factor.

What do you hope to get out of social media? The connections to new people, or a more business-led scenario? Are you hoping to increase awareness of you or your business/brand, or simply hoping to find out useful information?

Make a list of your hopes and what you want from them. This will help you choose the tools you need when it comes to your Forward direction.

Below

If you’re a new arrival to social media, it can be difficult to find that piece of social media earth to steady yourself on.

How do you become more stable? Be comfortable with yourself. Know what makes you tick and you?ll find the best earth to walk on.

Community-minded? Try Ning. Conversationalist? Try Twitter. Business savvy? Try LinkedIn. Visual person? Try Viddler. Sharing a message? Try BlogTalk Radio. Picture lover? Try Flickr. Avid reader? Try Alltop.

These are just some of the tools that can help you find your own personal comfort zone. Find the one(s) for your needs and build from there. This will help you with your Left and Right direction.

Forward

This is a little more clear-cut if you’ve already covered the Above direction. Knowing your hopes make it easier to know how you’re going to get there.

Do you want to be recognized as someone to go to for information? Do you want to build a presence primarily on social networks and move away from a more traditional web presence, as Skittles did?

Know what your goal is, and use the tools from your Below direction to help you get there. To make this Forward momentum even more effective, make sure you jettison everything that is behind you and don?t look back.

Backward

We all make mistakes. We want to play with everything in the toy shop and taste all the goodies in the candy store. But sooner or later, we get bored with all these toys and sick from all the candy.

When this happens, it often leads to you moving Backward as opposed to the opposite.

Jumping into social media, you probably set up accounts on almost every network. The problem with this is that it spreads you too far, and makes it difficult to cover all the ground Below you.

Don?t worry – we all do this at the start. The trick is to recognize that your time and resources are being stretched and analyze which ones are actually working for you. Choose from the pack, make them the solid ground Below you, and start to move Forward toward your end goal with your Left and Right sides.

Left

When you move in any direction, it’s usually because an idea has formed in your head and you want to act on it. Inspiration comes from many places, and the best inspiration often comes from the most Left field ideas.

There are plenty of people in social media that offer thinking, knowledge and inspiration from the Left. Listen to them and use their knowledge and build on it for your own ideas. Use your blog comments – your readers are the greatest source of inspiration in your own community. Simply put, don’t always go with the flow – genius is never the norm.

Right

The saying “right hand man” is reserved for the most trusted advisor(s). These are the people that you listen to and respect implicitly. They’re the generals that can help you conquer new worlds.

As well as trusted people, your Right hand can also be the tools from the Below direction. Use them together (along with the Left) and you can really reach your Forward destination quicker.

Establish solid relationships with the people that you trust. Be the information guide for them as much as they are for you. This will help you grow the community and together you can reach the plateau that’s currently Above you.

Use tools that have proven their trustworthiness. If you need to be in the know about your name or business, for example, you can’t go far wrong with Google Alerts, Monitter and Social Mention from BrandMentions.

Or you want to know who’s in your neighbourhood that you can connect with and exchange views and ideas – MeetUp and Loaded Web are a couple of good resources for this.

These, and more like them, will help you connect to the future Left and Right directors.

Where You Are and Where You’re Going

While these six directions are tailored toward the social media community user, there’s no reason why you can’t transfer them to your offline community as well. All six can help you online and offline, personally and professionally.

So where are you on the path at the minute? Are you looking for direction, or can you help direct us as well? Where can you point us?

The comments are yours.

image: garymccafferty
image: faeks

Over at Bonsai Interactive Marketing, we’re currently putting together our next ebook to join the likes of From Stats to Strats and others. And we’d like you to star in it.

We’ve all seen the great success stories in social media that are Dell, Zappos, JetBlue, etc. And that’s great, as success stories always are.

But they’re also the ones most used, and there needs to be new shining lights, from businesses of all sizes. So here’s the deal.

We’re using examples of some of the smaller clients we’ve helped, and how they’re using social media to both raise awareness of their business, and create lead generation and sales.

We’ll also be highlighting other small businesses that have jumped online and found success (often in the least likely of places and industries). We want to show that it’s not just big businesses with bigger budgets that can make social media work.

So let us know what you’re doing. How you’ve used social media to keep up with (and surpass) what your bigger competitors are doing. What challenges you faced, and how you overcame them. And how you see social media impacting your particular industry in the next 12 months.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business or a consultant/agency helping a small business navigate social media – we’d love to hear from you!

The ebook will be out in mid-February and we’re looking to make it a mix of highlighting some great small businesses, as well as using them as a case study in smart business practices.

As well as sharing the finished ebook on this blog, we’ll also be promoting and sharing through the Bonsai network and mailing lists, so you could potentially be in front of more than more than 60,000 people – a great way of letting people find out about you.

To tell us your story, just use the form below – you can either write it in the message box, or upload a Word document – whatever works best for you.

We’re really looking forward to hearing from you, and if you know of someone that’s doing great things with social media from a small business angle, feel free to send them this way to tell us all about themselves too.

Cheers!

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image: knowyourmeme

First off, I make no apology for the image used for this post. It’s taken from the website Child Sex Tourism, which aims to combat the child sex slave trade and, while this post is slightly different in approach, I think it reflects the importance of it well.

My friend Doug Haslam wrote a great post the other day on what it means to be a dad in the social media space. Doug’s a communications guy at Voce Communications, so knows the ins-and-outs of how social media and social networking work as well as the next guy.

In his post, Doug tells of his son turning thirteen, and why Doug and his wife won’t let him have a Facebook account any time soon, even though (legally) Doug’s son is now old enough to do so.

The post and subsequent comments are excellent, and open up a very important topic – what privacy do you give your kids, and what do you make open to the public gaze?

It’s a topic that DJ Waldow covered recently as well, when he blogged about his decision to make his baby’s social media accounts and blog private. Since DJ’s daughter’s birth, both he and his wife have been using social tools to share updates and growth spurts about DJ’s daughter. No more.

And it’s something we all need to take time out and think about if we’re parents.

Who Are Your Friends?

The beauty of social media and social networking is that it’s allowed us to connect with people we would never have known about otherwise. These online relationships can then turn to business colleagues, clients, blog readers or, best of all, friends.

It doesn’t matter about location – a single tweet or Facebook status update can cover thousands of miles in an instant. Because of this, conversations are easy and friendships and connectivity can become as easy as simply putting your fingers to a keyboard.

And there’s the problem.

Because we strike up friendships, we often don’t take enough time to really think about the person behind the persona. We take them at face and tweet value, and only worry about them breaking that connection through a poor choice of words or actions.

We don’t think what they could really be like. And we could be opening up our children to anyone if we share them too easily with our online friends. According to stats from parental control company Sentry PC:

• One in five U.S. teenagers who regularly log on to the web have received unwanted sexual advances.
• 75% of children are willing to share private information about themselves in exchange for goods or services.
• 25% of children have been exposed to unwanted pornographic material online.

There are more stats like that for other countries, but it gives you an idea of how children are vulnerable online. But that’s for kids that are online. Let’s take that part away just for a moment, and think about the reason this post is being written.

Friends or Fiends?

Let’s say you share a picture of your newborn on Facebook. It’s a common theme and one that a lot of proud parents do. Or you upload a Twitpic, or set up a Flickr group to share your child’s growth from baby to child to teenager and beyond.

Seems harmless, and it’s a great way to share a visual history with friends and family, right? Now think about this.

That same, harmless photograph you uploaded is downloaded by one of your online friends, who’s also a pedophile or child sex predator. He or she (women are just as guilty of child sex offences as men are) download that picture to their hard drive. Then they turn to photoshop.

That innocent picture of your baby is now a not-so-innocent picture of your baby dressed in sexual attire, and that online friend of yours is using it for their own pleasure, as well as passing it onto their little circle of perverts.

You don’t know about it (obviously) and yet you continue to happily share pictures with that friend, because they’re so nice and genuine. Scary, huh? And you can bet it’s happening somewhere even as I’m typing this.

So what can you do?

Take Control of Your Friends

There are a few options available for you. Some might be right for you, some may not – the important thing is that you are aware of the choices and the potential consequences for non-action.

• Follow DJ Waldow and Doug Haslam’s example and either make it completely private or no profile/account at all.
• Restrict the share and visibility to close family only – no friends.
• If you do need to share a picture, try and have your child covered or sandwiched between parents to lessen photo manipulation.
• Research, research, research. Google for advice and parental tips on protecting your kids from sexual predators.

These are just some ideas and, to be fair, come from someone who’s not specifically experienced in this space when it comes to predators and protection. I’m also aware that a lot of child abuse comes from within the family, sadly, and we all need to be vigilant for this.

Online, however, it’s harder to gauge so, as a parent, I know what I would share – which is nothing to very little. Sometimes your personal life is just that, or at least some parts of it are. Yet I also know other parents are keen to take a ton of pictures of their children and want to share.

Again, nothing wrong with that. Just ask yourself who you’re really sharing with, especially when child pornography and sexual images are key factors in the step up to sex trafficking and child prostitution.

It’s the least you can do for your kids, no?