Pinterest remains a hot social media property, registering major growth in recent months. Business Insider said investors just gave it another $50 million at a $1.5-billion valuation, and employees are leaving other Silicon Valley firms to join.
A surprising outcome from a recent survey, that social media has an equalizing factor among men and women. They’ve got the same reaction to issues, for instance related to women.
The New York Civil Liberties Union is arming city residents and visitors with an app called Stop and Frisk Watch that records video, audio and GPS data.
Last year, some users saw on their Facebook walls enticing posts offering video of Osama bin Laden’s capture. Those that clicked on the link and followed the provided directions ended up giving hackers access to their Facebook accounts; they were victims of a social media scam.
The Future Of Social Is Moving From Mere Participation To Analysis & Strategic Initiatives
I had the opportunity to attend and participate in Converge 2012 run by the Institute for Social, Search & Mobile Marketing. The theme was mastering the Business of Social Media. The Conference had a great selection of speakers (yours truly included) and topics that really resonated with the audience. I hope to summarize here some of the take-aways I learned at this conference.
Business Is Now Social
The last few years have seen an unprecedented shift in the adoption of social platforms for businesses to reach and interact with customers. What started as a “dipping our toes into the water” excerise has now matured into jumping in with both feet. Not surprisingly, the first few presentations of the conference focused on the effect of so much participation: greater focus on ROI. The presentations covered a lot of ground, but here are the key take aways from Day 1:
Businesses that fail to integrate the social channels may not exist in five years
Analytics are maturing in terms of both measurement tools and metrics
Better analytics are driving innovation by putting companies ahead of emerging issues instead of simply reacting to them
Creating a Social Media culture must come from the top and flow down
The growth of mobile platforms Is blurring the line between online and in-store experiences because of anywhere/anytime andpersonalized access
Day 1 concluded with the panel presentation in which I participated “Social Media “Venture Heaven” Money is flooding into social media, It’s time to understand why.” Key take-aways from this panel include the followig Data about the growth in Mobile:
As of May, 2012, mobile comprises 10% of Internet traffic, up from just 4% less than a year and a half ago
Mobile = ~8% of ecommerce
Monetization growing rapidly 79% is Apps, 21% is from ads
There has been a rapid increase in time spent relative money spent on ads; TV is roughly at parity while Mobile ad spend is about 1/10 of that
Drivers of growth in Mobile:
Devices
Platforms
Improved user interfaces
Sharing
More emphasis on design aestheticS
In a world of ubiquitous fast Internet, mass blogging and micro-blogging, minute-by-minute status updates and customer complaints and recommendations, businesses need to focus on tailoring their product for their customers desires, rather that merely tolerating customer requests. Whatever device/platform customers use most will get the most attention from developers, accessory makers and potential new customers.
New technologies and services are enabling the growth in employee monitoring, but companies will need to closely manage their monitoring efforts for ethical and legal issues, Andrew Walls, research vice president at Gartner, wrote in the report.
Employers continue to look for guidance on issues related to the evolving use of social media by employees. Creating an appropriate policy remains difficult, but the authors offer some expert advice that may help.
The Virginia State Bar tracks ethical issues concerning how attorneys communicate by and glean evidence from social media, said James McCauley, ethics counsel for the state bar.
This year, law students will be challenged to address the question of “Under what standard should a court subject an employee’s non-business personal computing activities (eg, social media, documents stored on a personal computer, and/or personal email)?
Consider this a skeptic’s guide to the bull case for the social network. Facebook just had modern history’s worst IPO and it’s down again today by some percentage that will be quoted endlessly. Yet Facebook is still the world’s largest social media platform.
The Atlantic
(CNS) — The mass media have done the public a disservice by consistently referring to health reform law regulations so narrowly as the “contraceptive mandate,” because it leads people to think the regulations are a matter of interest only to Catholics.
The research and advisory organisation recently published a report into conducting digital surveillance ethically and legally, and found that 60 per cent of corporations will be monitoring social media channels for security breaches and incidents.
The majority of corporations are expected to monitor their employees’ social media interaction by 2015, suggests research by Gartner, published today. This practice could be increasingly adopted to prevent security breaches and incidents.
By John Bowker | MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian social network VKontakte says it won’t risk going ahead with its planned initial public offering fearing a repeat of the botched Facebook float which left US regulators red-faced.
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Government agencies looking to make greater use of social media and other collaboration tools face a raft of legal issues with the potential to sink efforts to better connect government and the public.
File-Sync-and-Share for Enterprises -bit.ly/KrIZmE
Should Active Directory Upgrade be Required in Exchange 15? bit.ly/Mkk4I9
Social Media Legal Best Practices: Problems and Solutions with Photo Uploading and Tagging …
They still resonates today, maintaining a perfect five-star rating among iTunes customers.
“I always thought it was a wrong-headed decision, one that really made hash of the First Amendment with respect to the broadcast media,” says Floyd Abrams, one of the foremost legal authorities on the First Amendment.
USA Network will additionally support the partnership via on-air, online, VOD, paid media (including a special insert in the July issue of Vanity Fair) and in-show integration and messaging. All will compliment USA’s massive multi-pronged marketing.
“People are creating a media (with blogs and other social media) they’re not getting from traditional media,” Nodland said. “Maybe it’s a little crude, hard-hitting … and traditional media fear it.”
App highlights: http://www.docstoc.com/apps/ Social Media for Business: This app will explain how can you leverage social media to get an edge. How to Get a Job Interview: This app is a complete blueprint for landing your dream job.
The original version of General Electric’s circular logo and trademark. The trademark application was filed on July 24, 1899, and registered on September 18, 1900 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sometimes the Adler Law Group, (“Firm”) is called upon to perform trademark searches or trademark application filings. However, it is vital to understand the limits inherent in the process and the ability to determine the availability of any given trademark. The Firm NEVER conducts a search to determine, or opine on, the availability of any given trademark unless specifically engaged to do so.
A Trademark Search should always be conducted well before one begins using a trademark. For example, if you are planning a marketing campaign around a name or phrase, you should make sure that the proposed mark is “clear”, i.e., no one else is using anything “confusingly similar” for the same or similar goods and services. Failure to clear a mark for use can lead to claims for damages for infringement and/or dilution, loss of goodwill and loss of the goods themselves, not to mention loss of the time and expense creating, developing and marketing the product or service.
Trademark Searches Have Limits.
Although the search process is intended to reduce the potential for infringement and dilution claims, the risk of challenge to an application, registration or mere use of a mark is never completely eliminated. Even an especially thorough search may not uncover every potentially conflicting mark.
Registration Is Not Required For Trademark Rights.
Registration with the Trademark Office is not a prerequisite to obtaining trademark rights in the U.S. Many valid trademarks exist at common law without ever appearing on the federal trademark register. Some appear in state trademark registrations (although these registrations do not always reflect actual use); others are not registered at all.
Misspelled And Slang Words & Phrases May Be Trademarks.
Trademarks are source identifiers. therefore, to the extent that a trademark is distinctive, identifiable and memorable it is more protectable. Brand names often incorporate deliberate misspellings, puns, slang, and other variations on otherwise common words. Although a search would attempt to retrieve corrupted spellings, word plays and colloquialisms, there is no guarantee that all such variations will be found. As an additional precaution one should consider a search for foreign language equivalents and other variants on a proposed mark.
Mere Use of a Trademark Confers Common Law Rights?
Although some effort should be made to conduct a “common law” search using Internet search engines and news databases, this is not always conclusive of common law use. Since these databases were not expressly designed for trademark searching, there is no guarantee that all common law uses, corrupted spellings, irregular spacing or punctuation, or other variations will be identified.
The Existence of a Live or Abandoned Application Is Not a Legal Opinion About The Right to Use a Trademark Registerability, Strength or Weakness.
Please note that filing an application to register a federal trademark is not a legal opinion about the registerability of any particular trademark, the right or absence of the right to use a trademark, the strength or weakness of any trademark registration or application, or the likelihood that any third party may, or may not, seek to register a similar mark, seek to oppose any application, or seek to cancel any registration.
(See “Protect Our Data! A Digital Consumer Bill of Rights” and “A Bill of Rights for Facebook Users” for related discussion.) The temptation to exploit user data in ways that erode privacy will always be present. Just by joining Facebook, …
In addition, in February the White House proposed a “bill of rights” to protect consumer privacy online, including an easy way for users to tell Internet companies with one click whether they want their online activity to be tracked.
Howard A. Schmidt is returning to the private life, but the White House is still pushing for some kind of legislation in the Consumer Prvacy Bill of Rights fashion. While the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act passed the House of …
Your decision to hold this hearing will help protect important privacy rights. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”) is a non-partisan public interest research organization established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging privacy …
See all stories on this topic »
The idea of context-specific privacy is gaining a lot of cachet, so much so that the Obama administration features it as a major aspect of a proposed new Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. “Consumers have a right to expect that companies will collect, store and use personal information in a manner consistent with the context within which it’s collected.
The White House recently recommended a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, and the European Union is days away from requiring companies to get consent from website visitors before storing advertising cookies on their devices.
San Francisco civil rights advocates who are concerned about what they call domestic spying on the city’s Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities are celebrating new legislation signed into law on May 9.
US Senator Al Franken’s letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder regarding the US Justice Department requests for GPS location data from phone companies appears to be based on a flawed understanding of the law.
They can look like harmless errors: A misspelled name. A transposed number. A paid debt listed as past due. Mistakes on credit reports can inflict widespread damage. And because there are insufficient rules on how credit-reporting agencies must correct them, Americans are left virtually powerless to erase the mistakes.
By Talya Minsberg A new Israeli law prohibits fashion media and advertising from using Photoshop or models who fall below the World Health Organization’s standard for malnutrition. When a 14-year-old girl delivered a 25,000-signature petition this week to Seventeen asking them to curb their use of Photoshop, the magazine issued a press statement that congratulated the girl on her ambition but was conspicuously silent on changing their editorial practices.
So, culturally and historically, the reason women care so much about fashion is that until very recently, we weren’t allowed professional, legal or vocal ways of expressing ourselves. Fashion was a way of articulating our feelings about ourselves.
Is it “misappropriation of a trade secrets” to contact each person who follows an ex-employer’s Social Media profile for purposes of promoting a competing business?
Early in my law school career, one phrase stuck with me right away: “tough cases make bad law.” This, of course, begs the question, what makes a “tough” case. Usually it’s a unique fact pattern that has limited applicability to a broader spectrum of cases. In the nascent and growing area of Social Media law, there is no shortage of quirky cases.
My hat is off to Eric Goldman who recently blogged about a social media case that is “tough” because of the way that the lawyers framed the issue. On its face, the case of Christou v. Betaport is an unfair competition case between a night club owner and one of his former partners. The case, being tried in a federal court in Denver, Colorado, involves trade secret theft and antitrust allegations and alleged misuse of MySpace “friends.” Essentially, the complaint alleges that Roulier, a principle of Beatport and former associate of Christou, used a MySpace account to promote his club at the expense of Christou.
Goldman gets to the heart of why this case is tough: “the plaintiffs allege that they “secured the profiles through web profile login and passwords.” This is a garbled allegation.” Put another way, the lawyers whose job it is to supply the facts that frame the issues, probably meant to say something else. According to Goldman the plaintiffs probably meant that the defendants accessed an account impermissibly and in so doing accessed information they did not have a right to access. In terms of a claim for trade secret misappropriation, the harm came when defendants used that information.
I like Goldman’s article because he takes the time to break down both the confused framing of the issue, but also the court’s apparent confusion with how to address it. It’s a short article and definitely worth the few minutes it takes to read.
From my perspective the key take-away is a perspective on the trade secret implications of Social Media accounts. Business and their lawyers are constantly trying to evaluate the legal risks of Social Media and provide guidance on how best to mitigate those risks.
Protecting a Social Media account as a trade secret seems a tricky proposition. Ostensibly, the primary “value” of an account is the list of “followers.” A list that is publicly available is, therefore, not a secret. A better approach is to treat the login credentials themselves as the trade secret since this control’s ones ability to access the account and to communicate with those followers.
Please feel free to comment and follow me here: @adlerlaw
This person will be responsible for closing your email addresses, social media profiles, and blogs after you are deceased. Sounds good, but legally it’s tricky territory.
SEAPA says the key trend is that governments are shifting focus from traditional broadcast and print media to social media and online news. SEAPA Executive Director Gayathry Venkiteswaran said online news sites have become the most frequent target.
CT: The growing usage of the internet and social media in Liberia is certainly a progressive trend. Having worked in Liberia, can you briefly tell us how the internet and social media are viewed by the cross sections of the Liberia population?
By MyCorporation CALABASAS, Calif., May 3, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — Calabasas-based company MyCorporation is releasing a new social media product to benefit small businesses, MyCorpSocial.
Hordes of angry hockey fans – presumably Boston Bruins fans — unleashed a barrage of racist rants on Twitter and other social-networking sites after the Washington Capitals beat the defending champion Bruins a week ago Wednesday on an overtime goal.
Some of the issues covered in depth in the paper include: Build up a positive online social media profile. “It is absolutely crucial to remember that anything you post online may stay there forever, in one form or another, so think carefully.
Canadian consumers are being encouraged to consider their online property, including social media accounts, when planning a will. A new report released earlier this week by the BMO Retirement Institute raises concerns.
SNOPA
Continued concern about employers asking applicants and employees for their passwords to social media sites has led to the introduction of a federal bill.
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