Social Media

Instagram, Social Media and the Opt-Out Economy

If you follow any kind of tech or social media news, you’ll know about the announcement from mobile photo app Instagram and its new Terms of Service that come into play on January 16.

If you haven’t seen any of the stories, the main gist of it is this:

Instagram’s owners, Facebook, will have the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes.
Ads may or may not be disclosed to the user.
A business may take your uploaded photo, use it in an ad, and not have to compensate you.
If you continue to upload images after January 16 and then decide to delete your account, your images can still be sold by Facebook as their property.

While there are some questionable inclusions on these new terms – I’d love to hear what the FTC has to say about non-disclosure of ads, which completely contradicts their edicts – it’s the last one that is the most concerning, since it enforces my view that we’re now part of the opt-out economy.

Whatever Happened to Permission Marketing?

In 1999, author and marketer Seth Godin published the seminal Permission Marketing. While the ideas in the book weren’t completely new, it was a wake-up call to marketers and businesses everywhere.

Instead of spamming people with crappy marketing messages they didn’t want, and invading email inboxes with newsletters they weren’t subscribed to, a new best practice emerged – let the people choose what they subscribe to, and what messages they received.

Since then, various laws have come into place to protect consumers – the CAN-SPAM Act covers all commercial messages, while the U.K. introduced the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) in 2003, requiring opt-in for all email marketing campaigns.

So far so good, right? Except in today’s digital landscape, where it seems?we’re moving more towards the opt-out economy versus the opt-in one we fought so hard to create and support.

Social Scoring and Signing In Before You Can Leave

For most social networks – Facebook, Twitter, etc., – you still use the opt-in process. So, I need to physically sign up to use Twitter’s platform if I want to tweet. For the most part, this is how social platforms work. Then social scoring arrived and opt-out seemed to be the new opt-in.

The most well-known of the social scoring platforms, Klout, created a profile for you whether you liked it or not. If you had a public Twitter account, you had a Klout account.

If you didn’t want to partake in Klout’s promotion of you to their advertising partners, you actually had to create an account with Klout just to delete it, completely going against the idea of permission marketing and consumer wishes.

Klout’s reasoning is that they’re only accessing information that is publicly available, and that’s true. The main problem is your Klout score can impact how you’re perceived by companies and other online users – and you have no say in that, unless you sign up to try and play that system.

However, the bigger picture here is the question of opt-out versus opt-in, and Klout’s successes (millions of users and supporters and thousands of partners) seems to indicate opt-out can be a workable process.

The Instagram Question

Which brings us back to Instagram’s recent policy announcement. While it could be argued that unless you pay for the product you are the product, Instagram’s wording goes way beyond that. Consider this:

When you share photographs on Instagram that include other people, and that photo is then sold or used by an Instagram partner in a promotional campaign that goes against the beliefs of your friend in the picture (she supports PETA and Instagram use your image in a fur coat promotion), your friend can’t do anything about it because it’s your photo.
If Instagram has the right to access your friends’ details on Facebook during the sign-in process, you’ve essentially sold their details to Instagram’s partners and they may never know that until they start getting bombarded with partner ads.

These are just two areas that the new policy could potentially be used. Not only can you not opt-out of this happening if you stick around after January 16, your friends (who may not even be on Instagram) have even less of a chance to opt-out of their likeness being used for promotional gain.

Here’s another angle to take:

I get a picture taken with you. I work for a brand, and I use Instagram. I tell Instagram all pictures are my property and all people in them agree to be shared. Then I, as the brand employee, put that picture up with a promo for Westboro Baptist Church (let’s say they’re a client), with the caption “We support the ban on gays” next to a book entitled “Why The Real Family is a Man and Wife Family”.

By definition, and your inclusion in that picture, you now endorse both Westboro Baptist Church and are anti-gay. Would you be happy with that possibility?

Understanding this, and seeing what could potentially happen, is the reason Facebook posts and news article comments are alight with concern from current Instagram users, many of who have said they will be deleting their accounts.

You could argue that we give up the right to any true privacy when we open up an account with these apps and, for the most part, you’d be right. When you use something for free that costs money to maintain, there needs to be some revenue option that kicks in.

The problem with the Instagram change, though, is that Facebook are essentially saying “You’re our new freelance photographer but we’re not paying you” as well as curtailing your basic right to hold on to your property when you leave a platform.

And it’s that last point that could well be the straw that breaks the Instagram camel’s back. Time will tell.

Update: December 18, 5.00pm EST – Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has updated the corporate blog with an explanation (though it doesn’t address the FTC/non-disclosed ad concerns).

Update: December 23 – A class action lawsuit has been brought against Instagram for breach of contract.

image: Casey Neistat

TrendSpottr and the Potential for Predictive Influence

I recently had the good fortune to sit down and chat with Mark Zohar, founder of Toronto-based viral search and predictive analytics service TrendSpottr. And I was literally blown away by what they’re doing and how they’re looking to change social business.

Taken from their website, the core solutions TrendSpottr provides is from a future trend model:

TrendSpottr analyzes real-time data streams and spots emerging trends at their earliest acceleration point — hours or days before they have become “popular” and reached mainstream awareness.

In a nutshell, TrendSpottr helps businesses and organizations of all shapes, sizes and industries to get a jump on the competition by identifying what’s about to go from average visibility to viral buzz, before it happens, which makes he potential for multi-channel use huge.

What TrendSpottr Means for Brands

One of the examples Mark shared when we chatted was TrendSpottr’s ability to predict the virality of a YouTube video.

For example, let’s say a new video about kittens and babies playing only has 500 views. With TrendSpottr monitoring the real-time activity around that particular video, it can spot when it will explode into hundreds of thousands (or millions) of views, and when.

Armed with that data, an advertiser or brand can then buy ad space on the video at a much lower cost, yet still be in front of the extra eyeballs that the viral version of the video offers. The cost saving is tremendous and the potential return on that ad spend huge.

TrendSpottr plans on launching this predictive ad optimization product in early 2013, specifically targeted at advertisers and brands.

Other ways for brands to benefit from TrendSpottr include content optimization and engineering to take early mover advantage of a breaking story that’s about to go very big.

Let’s say your brand is in the business of car tires, and you provide tires to many well-known car manufacturers. While analyzing various conversations around tires, TrendSpottr picks up on an impending safety concern around a particular kind of rubber molding used in a competing manufacturer’s tire.

Using that data, your content team can take a series of actions to get you front and centre when the proverbial hits the fan:

You create a series of short blog posts spread around your properties and those of your partners, highlighting the safety aspect of your tires.
You put together a series of creatives and buy ad space on properties and destinations that your competitor’s audience frequents.
You optimize tweets and social updates, to drive people to your product and Frequently Asked Questions section, where you have all the information about safety a visitor could want.
You create a pro-active email campaign to assure your customers and partners that your product doesn’t use that type of molding and have over X amount of years producing safe products.
You can create specific topic widgets and embed multiple streams into your website, to turn it into an online respository for information from across the web (see the end of this post for an example).

These are just some of the ways brands can be pro-active at tackling a problem head-on and before any negativity hits, whether it involves them directly or not. By doing that, you’re now offering solutions in the consciousness of the public you’re trying to attract, while your competitors are in damage control mode.

For any brand, that’s a pretty powerful tool-set.

What TrendSpottr Means for Influence

One of the biggest criticisms social influence receives is that the gamification of the model hurts true influence and knowledge. From gaming the +K system on Klout when it was first announced, to the recent LinkedIn Endorsements and how they can be played, influence and authority has never been harder to gauge properly.

Whereas before, marketers would actually analyze raw data and build personas of influential people that were right for their brands, now they have to wade through scores, endorsements, social stock prices and more that may or may not be true and relevant.

This is where TrendSpottr can help filter these people.

Let’s say your passion is global warming. You blog about the environment and your company provides green products – but you can’t compete with the guys that have thousands of subscribers and whose company has millions in ad spend.

With TrendSpottr, you can set up an alert for the industry and selective terms that are relevant to you, and see which ones are on the cusp of exploding into life, both virally and from a market standpoint.

By being able to continuously put out content that’s ahead of the game, your authority rises. People now start to look to you for answers versus the more established players. A perfect example of this reversal in authority is Nate Silver and how he first turned baseball and then political punditry on their heads.

Brands can use TrendSpottr along with other blogger outreach platforms and really connect with those that have the eyes and ears of the industry via the TrendSpottr dashboard.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpZppQyQ33g[/youtube]

Now, you could argue that non-experts could game this solution too, to appear authoritative – but if you don’t know what you’re talking about and are just copy-pasting soundbites, trust me, that becomes obvious pretty damn quick.

The Beginning of the End of Influence As We Know It

Up until now, the majority of social influence has been determined by a score and perceived authority. Additionally, many early players in the space have sold benefits based on amplification, not context and purchase decisions.

This has, for better or worse, led to an industry that many use but just as many question the validity of. It makes brands nervous to play in, because they need to know the message is reaching the kind of people that can make things happen, versus the amount of people that make things noisy.

The good news is, the next generation of platforms and technology are here. Companies like TrendSpottr, Appinions, Tellagence and others like them are leading the charge to recognize true influence and relevance.

We’re on the cusp of something very cool, and it’s something that has the potential to truly change business intelligence forever.

Influence Marketing – This is Where the Fun Begins

As part of the run up to the launch of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing, Sam and I have decided to do things a little differently.

We want to have some fun and really involve you.

To that end, we have something for everyone (hopefully) based on where you are.

Facebook

If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t apart from Tipper Gore, probably), you can catch us on the official Influence Marketing Facebook page. Here we’ll be asking your opinion via polls as well as discussions on the latest influence solutions and technologies, and sneak peeks at some of the interviews we’ve carried out. There may also be fine cigars.

Google+

How the heck I got dragged back onto G+ I’ll never know. Oh, wait – it was the very cool Communities addition which allows for a much more cohesive experience. If you’re on Google+, join the Influence marketing community and take part in Hangouts, access Sam and myself as we brainstorm the book’s topics and direction in daily Hangout snippets, and generally join in a vibrant discussion on all things influence, current and future.

Some Pre-Order Fun

Normally, pre-order offers include “Buy so many books and we’ll do this” and, while we will definitely have bulk specials on the way, in the meantime we want to thank folks who pre-order now on their own. I can’t say what it is, but it’s definitely very personal to you, the buyer.

Want to find out what it is? Hit up the link in the special box below this post, pre-order the book, then email a copy of your receipt to info@influencemarketingbook.com (or just click this link here).

You can also find us over at our soon-to-be-launched website, as well as Twitter (this will just be a curated feed), and we’re going to be popping up in some other unexpected places too, so stay tuned.

We look forward to welcoming you at your favourite online watering hole. 🙂

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgkSKFsptKY[/youtube]

Fact Checking Facebook: How to Do it and Why You Should

This is a guest post by Jennifer Dunn.

It?s back. Last week grandma posted the old, ?With this status I hereby declare that all my Facebook content belongs to me and only me…” and all of a sudden the mythical Berner convention is gunking up your Facebook feed again.

First off, this is a hoax. All major media outlets have now reported it as a hoax. You can?t copyright your Facebook content with a status, but luckily you don?t have to ? you already own it. Don?t worry.

Lately I?ve taken it upon myself to, politely, call out people who have posted bad information on a public forum like Facebook. Yes, I?m that person. But being argumentative isn?t in my nature.

Wouldn?t it be better if everybody was armed with the tools to fact check Facebook themselves? Couldn?t they save themselves from posting a picture of a baby with a horrible tumor and promising us all that Bill Gates has offered a dollar for every ?like??

Here are some of the erroneous posts I?ve recently ran across and how I fact checked them. I hope you?ll share your favorite fact checking methods in the comments.

(Because politics and general worldview are two of the more frequent hobgoblins of misinformation on Facebook, this post will deal with both, but I promise to pick on reds and blues equally.)

Example #1: The Inflammatory Picture

The other day a friend posted this picture of dark-skinned youth in camouflage holding guns with the caption, ?Obama just graduated a class of 40 ?Department of Homeland Security Youth.?? The post went on to compare this alleged fighting force to Hitler?s Brownshirts and warned us all to be very afraid for our guns and women.

Immediate clues that something was amiss:

a.)?? The ?youth? looked very, very young.

b.)? ?Department of Homeland Security Youth? doesn?t sound like any U.S. government department I?ve ever heard of

c.)?? Hitler made an appearance. Any mention of that guy should raise a red flag when it comes to the veracity of a Facebook post.

How to fact check? I downloaded the photo and submitted it to trusty TinEye.com. It turned out the ?youth? are Explorers, a group affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America. The picture was taken after a training exercise simulating a Border Patrol exercise. In 2009.

Example #2: The Inflammatory Video

Back around the time of the U.S. political conventions, I very nearly shared a video on my Facebook page showing a group of delegates at the Republican National Convention shouting ?USA! USA!? over the Puerto Rican delegate as she tried to speak.

We all have our own areas of sensitivity, and racism is one of mine. ?Wow, look at these racists!? I almost posted. Except I mentioned it to a colleague who quickly told me there was more to the story.

How to fact check? Look at the context. Get the whole story. If I had bothered to check before marveling to my colleague, I would have seen that the chanting had to do with seating arrangements.

While this one has been in hot dispute, an article in the well-respected Harper?s magazine sets the record straight that the delegates were not trying to shout the Latina delegate down.

The Sniff Test

The moral of this story? Before you go sharing something on Facebook, ask yourself a few questions to make sure you?re not just perpetuating another rumor or hoax.

1.)? Is the source trustworthy? Does it say, come from a Facebook group called ?Kill all the Pandas?? This is an easy way to find clues about the veracity of a source.

2.)? Does this jibe way too firmly with my worldview? You might hate Paris Hilton but chances are she wasn?t caught on camera actually consuming an adorable puppy. You might want to check the provenance of that doctored image before you share it.

3.)? Is it on Snopes? Or can you Google it and quickly see that it?s been debunked by reputable sources? (I.e. the Facebook copyright notice.)

4.)? Is it accredited to a famous person? Abraham Lincoln was a quotable guy, sure, but the 16^th president didn?t say this. Or lots of other things you?ve probably seen attributed to him on Facebook.

5.)? Was Hitler mentioned? Seriously, Godwin?s Law should always end the discussion. Think before you hit ?share.?

If it passes all these tests, it just might be real and ready to share.? Remember:

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. – Mark Twain.

Or did he?

The next time you see someone post something about copyrighting their Facebook statuses or terrorizing your feed with images of Boy Scouts, maybe instead of being ?that person? you can just link them to this post.

Or just make like this guy and give up.

About the author: Jennifer Dunn is owner of Social Street Media, helping businesses connect with their customers through social media strategies and education. You can find her small business writing at Outright and WePay. Follow her on Twitter at @JennEscalona.