Author Archives: Anastasia Clarkson
![gavel[1]](http://experiencematters.criticalmass.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/gavel11.jpg "gavel[1]")
In Jan 2009, the FTC released proposed guidelines for marketing in social media. The FTC understands the role and influential impact of social media marketing and wanted to update its 29-year old guidelines to reflect this understanding. WOMMA worked directly with its members and the FTC to submit feedback and shape these guidelines which were released, in the form of a 100 page document, on Monday, October 5. They will go into effect on December 1, 2009.
These guides can be used by any law enforcement agency or consumer class action cases. Because other legal avenues can use these guides, no party is too small to be caught and fined.
Highlights
• Any sponsored communication is subject to regulation.
• Any relationship between blogger and advertiser must be disclosed i.e. a blogger must identify when he is speaking on behalf of an advertiser. The FTC equates an influencer who has been given consideration to a paid review or review by an employee
• Any kind of consideration that goes from an advertiser to the blogger must be disclosed. This includes cash payment, gifted product or service, and likelihood of future receipts of compensation or products/services.
• Celebrities must disclose their relationships with advertisers when endorsing products outside of traditional advertising, including blogs and twitter feeds. Other examples include talk show and other public appearances.
• Performance claims must represent typical results and have supporting evidence. Safe-harbor disclaimers like “results may vary” will no longer satisfy these guidelines.
Fixoutlook.org is an orchestrated effort by the Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor and Newism to help the user community send a unified message to Microsoft.
The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.
Proactive, Focused
ESP works with MSFT and during beta testing of Outlook 2010 they were seeing the same poor standards support as 2007. This was bad -there had been no improvements to the Word rendering engine and MSFT plans on keeping it that way. Faced with a challenging client situation, ESP plead their case but didn’t ask the client to take their words on the matter, they’re leveraging the volume of the user community. ESP is saying to MSFT “we know your users better than you do, just listen.”
Transparent, Live, Uncontrolled
ESP laid out their story and asked users to give their opinion in an open-ended way. They’re not leading with questions, not confining answers to limited options of a poll, they’re asking for any and all thoughts on the matter.
Aggregated, Organized
They’ve chosen twitter as the medium and given directions to include the site name as a tag for categorization. It appears the common use of link shorteners has stunted this effort; nonetheless, “Outlook 2010″ is trending third on twitter behind #iranelection and Transformers2 (as of 11am CST).
The initial response to ESP’s effort is significant, but why didn’t Microsoft engage its community in the first place? I see a lost opportunity for the Evil Empire to narrow the disconnect between its company and user community.
With the emergence and expansion of social media, consumers can talk to each other and share information on a scale exponentially greater than during any other time in history. Three years ago, The Economist called the new era of participatory media revolutionary and likened the magnitude of impact to that of Gutenberg’s printing press.
The emergence of social media has caused a fundamental shift in the relationship between consumers and corporations. Namely, the brand identity ‘ball’ has bounced into consumers’ court. Where the goal used to be for brands to start the conversation, the new opportunity is to join the conversation.
This changes things for marketers and the way they do research. No longer is there need to gather consumers and ask for a response. Conversation is aplenty; all the brand needs to do to find out what consumers think is to listen.
Shifting lexicon:
| traditional | social |
| target | reach |
| demographic | psychographic |
| exposure, impressions | share of voice, engagement |
| approval rating | sentiment, promoter score |
| focus group | social monitoring |
On Friday Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) reached one million twitter followers. And we all care .
If there are 5 million people on twitter that means 20% of twitterers are following @aplusk. Twenty percent of everyone is a lot.
Having direct broadcast to 1mm people who’ve pledged to listen is a great deal of power. I urge @aplusk to follow Spidey’s credo “with great power comes great responsibility”. In other words, “Dude, don’t punk us”.
