The use of social media for marketing and advertising purposes is one of the fastest growing areas for business and marketers. The advent of social media sites like Facebook provides the opportunity for authentic interaction and engagement with customers. Therefore, it is no surprise that it is being used as a marketing tool by companies large and small to help them achieve their strategic goals. But with every technological development and opportunity, new legal and business risks present themselves. Understanding and minimizing these risks will help you maximize the opportunities. A best practices approach to social media marketing involves having the company’s philosophy, methodology, and guidelines captured in a comprehensive written policy that is clearly and regularly communicated to the employees, and regularly updated to keep abreast of new developments, opportunities and evolving legal guidance. Attendees will learn how to identify the legal issues and develop policies and procedures to keep informed about the current technology, marketing strategies and regulatory compliance.
Everyone at AF Expo shares a belief that the Facebook experience represents a paradigm shift in the way that marketing professionals identify, engage and convert customers. In the past, marketers had to conduct research to locate customs and to determine their wants and needs. Once these were identified, you needed to convince your customers to value your brand, understand your product/service and ultimately purchase what you were selling.
Facebook changes all of these assumptions. It offers an interactive platform where customs are actively engaged in seeking out the brands they are interested in – whether individually or through trusted networks, tell brand owned what they do and do not like about their brand and tell marketers whether they are open to receiving more information. Interestingly, the platform allows marketers to continue the conversation even when the customer has nominally disengaged (through trusted networks).
Like everything else, with great power comes great risks. Facebook marketing that is thoughtful, respectful and legally compliant is extremely effective. [give examples] However, marketing efforts that fail to understand and account for the requirements to maintain legal compliance can be a fixated.
In the beginning one could poke, like and comment. But what happens when you can purchase? Facebook is rapidly becoming a platform to identify, locate, contact and transact business with consumers of goods and services, both physical and virtual, using currency that is both physical and virtual.
My presentation will identify and explain the risks for Facebook marketers, grouped into three risk categories, “The Three Cs” of Facebook marketing:
WordCluster Analytics Provide Rapid Visualization of Hot Topics
Kudos to Barry Ritholz and his Blog The Big Picture for turning us all on to a phenomenal new social media metrics tool: Tweet Topic Explorer. This Tool retrieves the most commonly used words in recent (no word on time period covered by “recent”) “tweets” for a specific user and displays these visually using bubble clusters. The area of the circle for a word is proportional to that word’s frequency. Words most often used together are grouped by color.
For example, using my Twitter handle, @adlerlaw, produces a cloud that shows the words “film,” “media,” “legal,” “social” and “Chicago” are among my most frequently used words. Looking at groupings, “Film” is used most commonly with words like “tax” and “indie.” The words “Law” and “Legal” appear most frequently with “social,” “media” “brand,” and “trademark.”
The potential for brand managers and social media marketing professionals is obvious. First, a brand manager can quickly and easily analyze what key words are being used and how they are being used for any given twitter handle. Note that if your handle is identical to a brand name, this is critical visual evidence of the words being used in connection with your brand! Second, if you area marketing professional, you can analyze individual handles to get feedback on words being used by social media influencers and other specific followers.
The value should be obvious by now. This tool creates an amazing feedback mechanism. The brand owner/marketing professional can easily see if the message they are trying to communicate is really coming through as well as they intend. For example, check out the word cloud for “Coca-Cola.” I was amazed to see that the most frequent word is “^GD.” I don’t know about you, but that’s not communicating anything about the brand. Whereas positive attribute words like “sharing” and “delicious” are much less prominent.
Also, the potential to uncover negative words will be displayed prominently. This gives brand managers insight into the areas, issues and users that they need to target.
I’m not saying its going to be easy. In order to get the most out of this tool, one is going to have to spend time analyzing users one by one. However, this is one of the best tools I’ve seen that breaks tweets down into a clear, visual, actionable matrix.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David M. Adler, Esq. is an attorney, author, educator, entrepreneur and founder of a boutique intellectual property law firm based in Chicago, Illinois. With over fourteen years of legal experience, Mr. Adler created the firm with a specific mission in mind: to provide businesses with a competitive advantage by enabling them to leverage their intangible assets and creative content in a way that drives innovation and increases the overall value of the business. Learn more about me HERE.
David M. Adler, Esq. Safeguarding Ideas, Relationships & Talent®
Here are five interesting articles to look at this weekend.
1. Copyright Fair Use Gets a Boost. Last Friday, the federal district court in Nevada held that the non-profit organization Center for Intercultural Organizing’s posting of a copyrighted news article was a non-infringing fair use. The well-reasoned opinion sets a powerful precedent for fair use and against copyright trolling. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/righthaven-v-cio-it-s-hard-out-here-troll
2. Proper Authentication of Social Media “Evidence” Used at Trial. The Maryland Court of Appeals in the case of Griffin v. State examined a relatively new social media legal issue: determining the appropriate way to authenticate at trial electronically stored information printed from a social networking site. http://www.marylandinjurylawyerblog.com/2011/04/the_maryland_court_of_appeals_2.html
3. Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011 Does Not Spell Do Not Track. Although the proposed law requires disclosure of “clear, concise and timely notice” of a company’s privacy policies and practices regarding the collection, use and distribution of personally identifiable information, the bill does not include specific authorization for a do-not-track mechanism. http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/bentley/senators-formally-introduce-online-privacy-bill/?cs=46477
4. Is Your Web Site Eligible For Trade Dress Protection? While Copyright law protects certain original expression from unauthorized copying, Trade dress law protects commercial use of certain distinct features in connection with a product or service. When consumers associate such “look & feel” features with a product or service, trade dress protection exists. Protection has been extended to the packaging of a product, the décor of restaurant, the design of magazine covers, and even kiosk displays.
In Conference Archives v. Sound Images, 2010 WL 1626072 (W.D. Pa. Mar. 31, 2010), a federal district judge in the Western District of Pennsylvania suggested that under the concept of “look and feel,” trade dress law can reach beyond static elements on a website, such as photos, colors, borders, or frames, to include interactive elements and/or the overall mood, style, or impression of the site since a graphical user interface promotes the intuitive use of the website.” Conference Archives, 2010 WL 1626072 at *15.
David M. Adler, Esq. is an attorney, author, educator, entrepreneur and founder of a boutique intellectual property law firm based in Chicago, Illinois. With over fourteen years of legal experience, Mr. Adler created the firm with a specific mission in mind: to provide businesses with a competitive advantage by enabling them to leverage their intangible assets and creative content in a way that drives innovation and increases the overall value of the business. Learn more about me HERE and HERE
David M. Adler, Esq. & Assoc.: Safeguarding Ideas, Relationships & Talent®
According to the National Labor Relations Board, the Thomson Reuters Corp. Social Media policy may be violating federal law. At issue is the company’s Twitter policy. The NLRB maintains that it improperly restricts an employee’s right to use Twitter to discuss working conditions with co-workers.
According to the Newspaper Guild, a labor union representing Reuters employees, Reuters publicly disciplined reporter Deborah Zabarenko for posting a Twitter message that said, “One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.” The NLRB is taking the position that Reuters policy impairs employees’ rights to discuss working conditions and that it applied the policy improperly.
This marks the second case initiated by the NLRB involving a company’s social media policy.
In the first case arising last October, American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc. allegedly violated labor law when it terminated an employee allegedly for criticizing her boss on Facebook.
The significance of these cases should be clear to any business. First, it is important to have a Social Media policy in place. More importantly, however, Social Media policies need to be written with legal and regulatory compliance in mind. An overly retractive Social Media policy or one that penalizes employees for expressing protected speech will result in legal liability.
The use of social media for marketing and advertising purposes is one of the fastest growing areas for publishers. The advent of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn provides the opportunity for authentic interaction and engagement with customers. Therefore, it is no surprise that these services and others are being used as marketing tools by companies large and small to help them achieve their strategic goals. But with every technological development and opportunity, new legal and business risks present themselves. Understanding and minimizing these risks will help you maximize the opportunities.
How does copyright law impact social media?
Copyright protects “original works of creative authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression
What this means:
any content whether (a) created by you, (b) by some one else at your request, or (c) by an independent third party IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT [Note limited exceptions (e.g. government works, public domain) and work-for hire]
GET PERMISSON FIRST if the content is not created by you or under a written work-for-hire agreement
Practical Applications
Can placing a hyperlink to a photo on a publicly-accessible Web constitute misappropriation of the photo?
Can an advertiser’s use of a photo from a publicaly-accesible photo-sharing web site constitute misappropriation? YES
David M. Adler, Esq. is an attorney, author, educator, entrepreneur and founder of a boutique intellectual property law firm based in Chicago, Illinois. With over fourteen years of legal experience, Mr. Adler created the firm with a specific mission in mind: to provide businesses with a competitive advantage by enabling them to leverage their intangible assets and creative content in a way that drives innovation and increases the overall value of the business. Learn more about me HERE and HERE
David M. Adler, Esq. & Assoc.: Safeguarding Ideas, Relationships & Talent®
The use of social media for marketing and advertising purposes is one of the fastest growing uses of the Internet. The advent of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn provides the opportunity for authentic interaction and engagement with customers. That’s why it comes as little surprise that these services are being used as marketing tools. But with every technological development and opportunity, new legal and business risks present themselves. Understanding and minimizing these risks will help you maximize the opportunities for your business.
At Socialize 2011, taking place March 31 – April 1, 2011 at The New Yorker Hotel in New York City, David M. Adler, Esq. will provide a presentation focused ontaking a “best practices” approach to social media marketing. Attendees will learn how to identify the legal issues and develop policies and procedures to keep informed about the current technology, marketing strategies and regulatory compliance. The presentation intends to cover the following issues:
Issue: Intellectual Property
Trademarks & Brands
Copyright & Content
Issue: Privacy & Publicity
Right of Publicity
Endorsements
Issue: User generated content
positive and negative comments
Copyright Infringement
Unmasking “anonymous” posts
Issue: Regulatory Compliance
FTC – Dot Com Disclosures: Information about Online Advertising
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