The FTC: Paying for a Tweet? It needs fine print.

Just over a week ago now, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US ruled that ads in Twitter (or paid for/sponsored Tweets) need to follow the same basic requirements as the rest of the advertising world, eg: they need some fine print.

To prevent consumers being misled by their favourite celebrity, for example, sponsored social media must now be sure to include an explanation of sorts that explains that the content in question is paid for.

There are two kinds of responsesÂ to this ruling:

Response 1 Â (the dumb response):

“Oh my God?! Are you guys NUTS?! SMALL PRINT?! ON A TWEET?! WHAT? Does the FTC have any ideas as to what they’re talking about?! We’ve only got 140 characters to work with here! COME. ON!”

The FTC clearly state ‘Disclosures must be clear enough that they aren’t “misleading a significant minority of reasonable consumers.Â If a company can’t find a way to make its disclosure fit the constraints of social or mobile ad, it needs to change the ad copy so that it doesn’t require a disclosure.’

So we move on –

Response 2 (the smart response):Â

“Oh, you mean sticking ‘#ad’ on the end of paid-for content? Yeah, sure. We can do that. In fact it makes sense and hell, it’s only three characters; that actually helps us!”

What’s great about this ruling is that they’ve been very clear about what does and what does not constitute ‘full disclosure’ and – to my mind at least – settles a long-standing argument over what is the best way to signal a Tweet is an ad.

Here in the UK both #spon and #ad are accepted or ‘recommended’ ways to indicate that the social media content you’re consuming is paid for. It’s something that I personally disagree with; #spon is too esoteric and doesn’t actually mean anything to the every day Twitter user. #Ad not only makes it clear what it is you’re looking at but it also uses less characters too. The FTC are in agreement:

‘Consumers might not understand that â€œ#sponâ€ means that the message was sponsored by an advertiser. If a significant proportion of reasonable viewers would not, then the ad would be deceptive.’

In short, when paying for tweets: #ad good, #spon bad.Â

The full PDF from the FTC is available to download and, aside from being essential reading to everyÂ US-based social mediaÂ practitioner, isÂ actually a really insightful read and well recommended for anyone looking for a basic understanding of what is and what is not possible when it comes to the world of paid-for social media content.

I would especially recommend taking a look at ‘Example 17’ in the appendix to firmly understand the nuances involved when dealing with celebrity endorsements.

Five key takeaways from Social Media World Forum 2013 #SMWF

Looking for ways to get social media traction at your place of work? Read on –

This past week, the 2013 European Social Media World Forum (#SMWF) conference took place in London and yours truly was lucky enough to not only attend, but also appear on one of the panels.

More on that last part shortly but first, my remit for the eventÂ was simple:

Plan for #SMWF: only tweet/share the new and the insightful. Wish me luck.

â€” James Whatley (@Whatleydude) March 18, 2013

How did I get on? That remains to be seen, but here are five key takeaways that are definitely worth paying attention to.

1. Zero budget does not mean zero spend.

‘We got our social media up running internally withÂ zero budget!’
‘Social media was a cost-free way to get our message out!’
‘We had no extra budget from our stakeholders, yet we still managed to get it launched!’Â

These statements are all fundamentallyÂ not true.

All meaningful efforts in social media need that most valuable of any company asset: hours. Without time, none of it would happen and without effort, none of it would happen properly. This seems like an obvious statement but you’d be surprised how many times it is said, heard, andÂ believed within corporate circles. Next time someone tells you social media is cheap and easy, tell them: you’re wrong!

2. ‘If it doesn’t work on mobile, go home!’

The above statement was said by Dominic Burch (pictured above), head of social media for UK supermarket chain, Asda (part of the Wal-Mart group). This is huge. Why is this huge? Asda’s target market is Mums.

Back in 2010, Google Chief Exec Eric Schmidt took to the stage at Mobile World Congress and said his new motto was ‘mobile first‘.Â Â Three years later and big corporations are catching on. Not only to this future-proofing concept, but also to the fact that their audiences have moved. Mums are mobile first, which means you have to be too.

Also: 56 RTs and counting.

3. Pirate Ships work.

Many of the speakers at #SMWF spoke today about ‘working outside of the rules’ and ‘circumnavigating process’; this is typical pirate ship behaviour. What am I talking about? Let me explain.

Back in days of old, pirates were able to out-manoeuvre large naval ships by being low in number, agile in their approach, and surprisingly daring in their gold-gaining strategies. Many social media teams started out in the exact same way. The lead social media head spots the opportunity to make revenue, breaks away from the pack, shoots, scores; and then – and this is key – begins to recruit more pirates to his/her cause (additional takeaway: if you can’t find another pirate internally, ‘network your face off’ within the business – Nissan’s head of social did this for years until he had the support he needed to launch the dept. formally).

From global finance companies, through to every day supermarkets – the pirate ship methodologyÂ works. If they can do it, you can too.

4. Know what you are, but also know what you’re not.

Cordell Lawrence from Jack Daniel’s gave a superb presentation in their ‘Telling, not Selling‘ session on what and how authenticity drives their social media output. All of their efforts stem from a clear brand ethos and strategy that informs everything they do both above the line and below the line, throughout social media.

The key take out (for me at least) was the ‘What Jack is’ and ‘What Jack is not’ slide. This is textbook brand strategy; strong brands know what they are, but stronger brands know what they are not. e.g.:

Jack is traditional.
Jack is not trendy.
Jack is whiskey as a craft.
Jack is not whiskey as a product.
Jack is friendly.
Jack is not silly or cute.

I’m from a branding background and seeing this kind of strategy warms the cockles of my heart. On top of that, and coming from an experienced community management perspective, these kind of guidelines are essential for delivering an on brand and on target social media tone of voice.

5. Help others to help yourself.

This last one really does read like some kind of meaningless platitude that wouldn’t go a miss out of a nursery book at bedtime. HOWEVER. When it comes to selling social media usage upwards in the chain of command, this could never be more true.

To provide context, and please forgive me – this really isn’t rocket science, the question and answer ran as follows:

Q: ‘How do I convince my manager that we need to use social media?’

A: ‘Simple. Find out what their objectives are; find out what their KPIs are; find out exactly what that person needs to do to do in order to attain their bonus at the end of the year and then show them how social media can help them achieve those goals.’

You’d be amazed at what making your boss look good in front of his boss will do for your efforts in social.

Facebook Hashtags. Wait, what?

That’s right: According to sources, Hashtags are coming to Facebook.

YEAH?

AND?

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?Â

I’ll tell you –

1. Ownership
Let’s get one thing clear: Hashtags are notÂ owned by Twitter. They’re used heavily throughout the platform, of course they are, they help track conversation topics. In fact, Twitter is so entrenched in the hashtag that they’ve now taken to describing themselves as ‘The shortest distance between you and what interests you’.

The ‘you’ in that equation is the @name. The ‘what interests you’ part of it? The hashtag. Hashtags really are great for connecting users to the information that they’re looking (on Twitter at least). You know what else they’re good for?Â Â Ad sales. But we’ll come back to that one…

Hashtags are used across other (mostly lesser known) social networks but when your average consumer sees them today, it’s fair to say they immediately associate them with Twitter.

Not for much longer.

Ps. Y’know where else Hashtags are used? Instagram. And you rememberÂ who owns Instagram, right? Right.Â

2. Graph Search
With the advent of Facebook Graph Search, Facebook really needs to start to getting to grips with meaningful conversation data. What do I mean by that? On a panel recently about Facebook’s latest search product, one of the issues that we discussed was the potentially huge disparity between the two elements of data that will be mined via Graph Search; behavioural and surrendered.

I might Like something, but that might just be to gain access to an app or a game or whatever. That’s behavioural and that’s sketchy at best. Surrendered is even worse; Facebook is trusting its users to enter their personal information fully and honestly – this simply does not happen. Â These two issues combined do not an accurate search engine make.

However.

Using hashtags to badge up Facebook posts suddenly creates anchors within user conversations. First, these anchors are searchable and second, you can sell ads against them.

‘Oh hey Twitter, nice ad model you got there. We’ll take it. ‘

You get the idea.

3. Discovery Â
Last month, Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships at Facebook, made it very clear that television and the second screen was definitely an area that Facebook was going to move in to. Perhaps not immediately, but soon.

Being able to tag your Facebook post against say, the TV show that you’re watching? That’ll be one major step towards that paradigm.

Earlier this week I wrote about what Twitter’s new Ad API meant for social media ad-planning. With Facebook now introducing (their own version of?) the hashtag, this same model applies: choose your TV show, pick your audience, choose your time slot, go buy ads…

OK, so obviously this won’t happen overnight; Facebook has a billion users and it needs to shepherd them in slowly, v-e-r-y Â s-l-o-w-l-y…

But with theÂ new News FeedÂ inbound, Facebook hashtags (and their ads) could soon be just but a click away…

Targeting Twitter’s audience by the TV that they watch

The future, I sees it –

Back in September last year, I put together a few ideas about what evolutions we might see in the social media industry during 2013. Snappily entitled ‘2013 Social Media Predictions‘, one of the areas focused on was how Social TV and advertising would need to work closer together if they planned to meaningfully speak to their audiences across multiple different platforms.

Quote:

“…Soon smart media-planners will force Twitter to allowÂ time-sensitiveÂ promoted tweets, withÂ time-focused twitter ads designed to populate at specific times â€“ down to the very minute. Whereas the traditional consumer used to put the kettle on, todayâ€™s viewers are now turning to Twitter (andÂ awayÂ from the ads), the industry wonâ€™t put up with this for long.”

Makes sense, right? Of course it does. So it came as no surprise at all to read that, thanks to the advent of Twitter’s new Ad API, the smart folk at TBG Digital have done just that.

Introducing Calendar Live, a new platform that Â allows buyers to purchase Promoted Tweets in sync with television programmes. It’s that simple. While it’s true that marketers could kind of do this already, this new system makes it supremely easierÂ and brings in additional features such as trend monitoring and more granular time-targeting.

Bonus simplicity: it looks just like your TV guide –Â

While this isn’t the kind of ad-based scheduling I was initially talking about, itÂ is a step towards a more connected approach to social media ad-planning. Good work Twitter, and well done TBG. We’ve been looking at a number of solutions to manage our approach to social media and TV of late, and Calendar Live looks like it might actually have something useful to both brands and agencies alike.

Three final points:

With similar fantastic work taking placeÂ right now in the form of Three’sÂ #DancePonyDance, this kind of integration really is the at the forefront of where social media, and thus social TV, is headed during 2013.
Â –
SXSW is on right now which, to me at least, means big news like this gets swept away under the mess of it all. Rule one: don’t launch during SXSW.
Â –
I love it whenÂ I’m right.
-Â

5 things brands can learn from the Bieber debacle

Come on, you all knew this was coming.

It has not been a good few days for the global superstar. Where do we begin?

The #BieberBacklash (yes, that’s actually a hashtag) began when he had the ‘worst birthday‘ after being ejected from a London club for allegedly smuggling underage fans/guestsÂ through the door.

It’s a tough life, right?Â #BieberProblems.

Then, over the weekend, a seeminglyÂ innocuousÂ tweet kicked off a fracas after Beiber RT’d a (SHOCK HORROR) a non-fan for saying she liked his new album.

The Â Drum reports:

‘A succession of embittered fans jealous that their idol had deigned to retweet someone other than themselves who wasnâ€™t a â€˜realâ€™ fan duly emerged with a series of hate filled tweets; including @julietesqueda who wrote: â€˜Not really a fan of Justin Bieber but his acoustic album is really good!â€™’

Finally, last night, the Biebs was not one but two hours late arriving on stage on the opening night of his four day stint at the O2 . On a schoool night too? Never.Â Never say never.Â

But OK, let’s look at this properly – what can brands learn from this?

1. Think before you Tweet
A few years ago, an agency head got into trouble after being somewhat unkind about the city where his main client was based. A silly error and, looking back through the mist of social media evolution, it seems like it’s a mistake of days gone by. But still, the lesson stands true: think before you tweet and never, ever tweet angry.

2. Reward existing fans, as well as new ones
Advocacy is everything. And, as innocent as it is to celebrate the acquisition of a new fan, treating all others in the same way will reap the benefits in the long term. In short: existing customers matter. Many service providers have got into the habit of offering their latest and best promotions (or at least deals of equal value) to both sets of customers. In future, Bieber might do too.

Sidenote: see also the death of ‘Our 2000th follower wins X!’ competitions. If you see this in action, call it out! Â Why would anyone want to reward this brand new person when the 1999 have been supporting your growth along the way? It doesn’t make sense.

3. Know your audience
Whenever you kick off ANY kind of social media activity it is essential you understake a number of listening exercises to not only understand the current landscape of the market you’re working in but to also understand your audience. If Bieber had any insight – or had done any research – he would’ve known the following:

Monday night is a school night yo!
Travelling in (and out of) London late at night isn’t a fantastic experience (especially for young kids)
If he didn’t hear the boos from his dressing room then he certainly should/could have read about their disappointment online

4. Under-promise, over-deliver
Keeping your brand promises my seem like an easy and obvious one but it’s amazing how often many different brands forget this (at the expense of their fans and consumers). If you’re going to promise an AMAZING concert to all of your LOVING fans at a specific time, then you better make sure it happens.

And if you don’t – if you over-promise and under-deliver -well, then you really need to –

5. Invest in a Crisis Comms plan
Plan for the worst. Know what to do when things go wrong. At the time of writing, the Biebmeister is still yet to address the wealth of disappointed fans that had to leave the O2 early last night. A good crisis comms plan would know what to do in this situation: be that have the man(?) himself apologise on stage or even consider refund the ticket money – there are many different ways he could make this situation better. 12hrs later: none are yet to appear.

Irrespective of your opinion on Bieber-mania, there are a many, many unhappy fans sitting down at school today who feel let down by their beloved idol.

Read over the above again and just think: could it happen to you?

Â Image via Adam Sundana on Flickr

Panda Style!

So, this happened –

The chaps at work are looking after the Cheng Du Pambassador programme and well, when you leave a panda outfit laying around the office, mad things are bound to happen.

Love. Love. Love.

Moreso because I both know a fair few peeps in the video as well I know exactly what bits were left on the cutting room floor (perhaps they’ll get leaked a tt later date) .

For now, go Tweet and Share the hell out of this video – the WORLD needs to see it!

—

Yeah yeah, two panda posts in one week. It’s not like I’m influenced by anyone who loves pandas or anything…

5 things on Friday #7

This week I am running horrifically behind; the notes I’m writing up have been in my Moleskine for well over a week (today’s the 27th of Feb and I’m backdating this post to the 17th!) and I have two batches to write up.

Right then, shall we?

Chronicle
I have a much bigger post to come about this film at a later date [read: when I get a chance]. In the meantime, seek it out. It’s worth it.
.
SMW4x4
Last week was Social Media Week and Monday saw four case studies given by four different agencies at the HMS President upon the river Thames. Hosted by This Little Lady Went To London and sponsored by Cloud nine Recruitment, 1000heads and BDMDigital, the event was not only about raising awareness around four (well, three) great pieces of work but there was a charitable angle too, with all ticket proceeds going to CRISIS. There may be some bias (I chaired the event in question) but it was by far and away the best night I had throughout Social Media Week: Samsung, Nokia and Brewdog all being well represented by their respective agencies.
Good job.
.
The Other Cinema
Brief Encounter @ The Troxy. Feb 14th. Date night. Bliss.
.
social@Ogilvy
The launch of social@Ogilvy meant a fancy get-together across five pods on the London Eye. No more 360 Digital Influence, now there’s just social@Ogilvy. Champagne. Sushi. Awesome.
.
Google+
The second social media week event I managed to get along to was the afternoon hosted by Google+. With a programme of speakers that included Professor Robin Dunbar (yes, he of Dunbar’s Number fame) and demo after demo of how awesome Google+ can be, I must say I’m fairly sold [I event wrote my first Storify about the event]. All it needs now is users, in volume.
I’m on Google +, circle me there.

Bonuses: Matt finding this awesome shirt, being interviewed for ‘Behind the Headlines‘ and rediscovering my love for all things Cat Stevens.Â

5 things on Friday #4

Five things of note from this week

This Shangri-La Hotel ad: ‘It’s in our nature‘ – it’s gorgeous
.
New job. New job. New job. Even managed to get my first speaking gig by day three! Amazing.
Great work, inspiring people. This is my mantra, remind me to revisit this one day and I’ll explain where it comes from. Or just ask me when you see me next.
.
DRIVE. I loved it (as you might know) and on 8pm on January 30th, it’ll be #DriveTime – it’s a hashtag. Get involved. I am, and as such, I’ve got a [free] copy of DRIVE on Blu-ray – Yes!
.
Speaking of DRIVE, it gets a special mention in this Like Minds talk that I gave back in October. The video went live this week (hence the link love), it’s only 20mins long and well, you should check it out.
.
My ~~ex-client~~ friend!! Carla was over from Dubai this week and, alongside picking me up a bottle of one of my favourite whiskies, she also placed a bet with me on how long RIM will last in 2012. She thinks by June, I say September or later. The Blackberry makers aren’t going through very good times at the moment and well, as a keen observer said to me recently – ‘they’re not for this world’.Â

Bonus: I lost my pen – #sadtmes.

Something beginning with O

Next Friday, January 13th 2012, will be my last day at 1000heads.

1000h

100heads Mo’bros, 2011 ^

We’ve achieved a lot together over the past 27mths – from AR phone launches, to movie tie-ins, to ending the year with our biggest ever award haul – the journey with 1000heads has been awesome.

With 2011 disappearing into the distance, the ‘heads go into 2012 with great clients, fantastic accolades and a future brimming with possibility.

However, after two [and a bit] years of working on the best projects, travelling to the best cities and building awesome community experiences with the best people, it’s time for me to take the next step.

On January 23rd I’ll be doing just that, by joining Ogilvy PR as Senior Associate Director, 360Â° Digital Influence.

I am very, very excited about joining a super-talented team that is not only going through a period of fantastic growth but also choc full of industry-dominating ambition.

The potential to do even more great work in 2012 is huge and I can’t wait to dig in and get my hands dirty. Until then…

Bring. It. On.

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