…if the media had taken one step further and investigated a little bit, not just gone on some blogger - probably sitting there in their parent’s basement, wearing their pajamas, blogging some kind of gossip or lie regarding, for instance, the discussion of who is Trig’s real mom…and that was in mainstream media, the question that was asked, instead of just coming to me and setting the record straight. And when I tried to correct that - that yeah, I’m truly Trig’s mother - to take days for everything to have been corrected…

Rumors are flying around that she is attacking and judging bloggers. While she does make a sweeping generalization about bloggers, one that we bloggers deal with daily, her point is to actually take the media to task for using blogs as a source of fact and fiction.

Traditional Media Using Blog Content

While traditional media sources are losing traction economically as well as visibly, many are turning to blogs for their stories. If not for the facts, then for the entertainment value.

Why didn’t the media investigate thoroughly before reporting on a log of the various myths, gossips, and rumors that flew around the entire US election campaign, covered by mainstream media 24/7? It would be so easy to check a birth certificate, check with family and friends, or even check the hospital staff to verify the facts behind her son’s birth. Sure, privacy issues might get in the way, but they didn’t verify immediately before reporting, and if they did verify the facts, they let the attention-getting rumors fly around to drum up much needed business long before they reported on the truth.

When the truth was reported, it was third page news reporting not front page. The truth is often so much more boring than made up crap.

Why didn’t they? Why did the mainstream media deliver gossip and rumors instead of facts?

It’s Easy to Avoid Facts

First, it was easy to ask the same questions that blogger’s and others were asking. It’s naturally to be suspicious of a woman Palin’s age, especially with much older kids, to wonder why she would knowingly risk having another child. It’s natural to be curious, too, about why a woman, fresh from pregnancy with a special needs child, would accept the nomination of vice president of a very busy and huge country at a time when her child and family needed her more than her job. With such overwhelming responsibilities, maybe we could conclude that her bonds with the child aren’t as tight as they should be if she really gave birth. That’s human nature to ask yourself these things. This aren’t evil questions. They are natural.

When natural questions come up in the media as stories rather than questions, they aren’t facts. They are entertainment. Big entertainment. Let’s all muse together and avoid the truth because it’s juicer!

Actually, it’s is a truer statement that truth is stranger than fiction, and often more entertaining. Why didn’t someone do a story on the struggles Palin must have gone through after finding out her child had Down’s Syndrome, trying to make plans for the future and her family dealing with the responsibilities, and then getting the invite to be a vice presidential candidate and having to struggle with the decision and impact on her life as well as the life of her child and family. That’s a better story. It’s got heart and spirit and courage. Instead, we all groaned when she didn’t know some geographical or political information about Africa.

If the media followed the daily struggle by Palin to deal with the impact of being thrown from anonymity into the spotlight of the world instead of whether or not the Republican Party funded her wardrobe, the election might have gone a different direction. So why didn’t they? Why did they revel in the fiction instead of the facts?

Probably because it was easy.

It’s Expensive to Find the Truth

Second, it’s expensive to send out people to research the facts. The old journalist days of spending days or weeks working up a story to ensure that all the proof is in before reporting, to keep the journal’s bias out of the story, having the truth mean more than assumptions - those days are gone. Newspapers, magazines, television, cable, they can’t afford to have reporters and investigators investigating. What they can’t get in a few minutes on Google or other Internet research, they won’t get because they rarely send someone out in the field. It’s just too costly.

So what are they left with? Bloggers? The new in-the-field reporters.

There are a lot of rights and wrongs that come with relying upon citizen reporters. Some bloggers do uncover the truth long before the media does. Some ask the hard questions and find the answers. Some ask the hard questions, and wait for others to come up with the answers. Some also sit around in basements wearing pajamas and just wonder loudly enough, and with enough certainty in their wondering to make people believe their legitimacy. Some of those who wonder also sit in well lit rooms in office buildings wearing modern office attire.

And some bloggers ask the hard questions hoping the media, the source for truth in news, to do the research and give the world the right answers.

When the wonder becomes a story, and that story is taken for legitimate fact, that’s when things break down in the system and people get hurt. More importantly, the sources can also get hurt.

Part of the loss of integrity and trust in the news media is self-imposed. Do you trust the media any more? After years of mistrust, is it any wonder that people are turning from mainstream media towards other sources?

When did we stop trusting the news? We should have never fully trusted the news, but we had confidence it if for many years. It was the nightly news with the trustworthy white man with the comforting and strong voice who led us through the confusion of the world around us and made us feel safe. Right? When did it start falling apart?

Some blame CNN, the first 24 hour news source. With 24 hours to fill, and only so many news stories worth reporting on, they had to find filler. As more challengers to CNN’s reign rose up, they, too, had to find more filler, and competition to the dry news. News around the world today is now more entertainment based rather than factual just to fill in all the time slots and keep viewers returning for more fun - not always the truth.

We have more sources for information and news than at any time in history, available instantly via the Internet. The next ten years are going to prove very interesting to see how these shifts and changes in the news media, online and off, will go.

Media Dictates Public Opinion

As Palin found out, the news media, hawking fact or fiction, does dictate public opinion.

In “Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now,” she describes modern television and cable news as enough to make us want to take anti-depressants:

Was watching the news the other day…when I was a kid, the news was on once a day. You either caught it or you missed it. Now, the news is on 24 hours a day. And that’s not enough. They got a guy talking, they have a crawl down there…you’re online, you’re putting in your opinion on the poll - I said NO! …and if you stop paying attention to the crawl, you go back to the guy for a minute, and you go back to the crawl, and you catch the end of something - about Madonna’s left foot - what about Madonna’s left foot - what happened! You’re waiting for it to come back around again and it goes to commercial. There should be one crawl that goes around over and over again that says “Things are getting worse.”

There are a lot of people saying and thinking that the economy around the world wouldn’t be so bad if we could wake up in the morning and hear the news telling us that things were looking up - instead of being greeted with non-stop interviews with horrible bad news, assumptions, estimates, and predictions that things are indeed going to get worse. Worse sells.

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Since the small controversy with WooThemes giving away a premium theme for free, much like Brian Gardner did with Revolution, I’ve been meaning to do an interview with Adii to get to know a little more on what he thinks about premium themes. So read on for a freshly pressed interview!

First of all, tell us a little about yourself?

Well, I’m a web designer and entrepreneur based in the beautiful city of Cape Town, South Africa. I’ve got a keen eye for all things pretty and because of that I’ve been attracted to design; even though I’m definitely not an artist by nature. I do however believe that my business studies has allowed me to bring a strategic approach to design and everything else I do online.

So this has lead me to establish both my own online, creative agency - {radiiate} - where I collaborate with the awesome members on my team; as well as WooThemes (which I set up with my partners - Magnus Jepson & Mark Forrester), where we sell commercial WordPress templates. Founding & running these businesses stimulates me immensely and this is probably more inline with what I see myself doing in future (i.e. investing more in the business-aspects of my future career).

I’ve always wondered, what’s with the “rockstar” thing these days? It seems designer loves to call themselves rockstars (or ninjas), but I doubt many play guitar better than I do!

I don’t know to be honest… Maybe it’s got something to do with our primeval need to be a rockstar with all the subsequent fame and superficial benefits that go along with it… :) But in all honesty, I never planned on using the term “rockstar” in my online branding - it just kinda happened when I decided to call myself a “WordPress Rockstar” in the latter parts of 2007. I do however think that I was at least one of the first bloggers / designers to do this (not taking credit for the term at all - since I first heard it from someone else) and it has just pretty much stuck from there.

Plus, I’m not too bad on Guitar Hero if that changes anything…

Rock Band maybe… Do you think designers use terms like rockstars or ninjas in their branding to make up for the fact that they aren’t as cool as, say, firefighters? Or is it just a novelty thing, something funny that stuck?
Guitar Hero is better than Rock Band… :)

I think the “rockstar” convention is probably a little bit of both… I don’t see designers & developers (especially the online kind) as the most sociable people ever and perhaps it is a case of giving themselves a bit of an ego boost via that naming convention.

But I also believe that it is just something that started somewhere and then loads of people jumped on the band wagon thereafter.

How is business for WooThemes, your premium WordPress theme marketplace?

This is not generally something that we (at WooThemes) like talking about, as we’re obviously not obliged to share financial details etc. since we’re a privately-held company. I can however confirm that the last 12 months (from the Premium News Theme days to the rebranding to WooThemes) has been a major journey (and adventure) and we’re still experiencing growth within the commercial themes market. So business is going well and we’re definitely satisfied with the fact that we’ve built an established and sustainable business.

I do however think that all 3 of the WooThemes partners would agree that we don’t measure the success or performance of the business based on profit or sales… I think all 3 of us are enjoying what we’re doing and because of that love we’re trying to move away from the expected. Just as an example - the recently finished WooThemes Design Contest & the WooThemes Survey that is currently running - are two projects that does not affect the financial performance of the business and we’re thus “investing” in these to try some new things, whilst diversifying our approach to doing business. So these are the things that currently excites us and based on this business is going extremely well.

You released a former premium theme for free a month ago. Do you think it is right to release themes that people have paid to use, for free after a period of time? Don’t you think that hurts the credibility of premium themes themselves?

Yes, maybe.

I’d like to think that I’m in the business of trying new things and exactly for that reason I’m not scared to venture out and release a year-old theme for free. I can admit that the release has been met with differing opinions, but by far the majority reaction has been a positive one. I also believe that our transparency in this regard (towards our users) helped immensely in navigating a potentially tricky situation.

That said, we’re still undecided on whether we’ll do it again. So I don’t think that a once-off thing (at this stage anyway) we did to celebrate our 1 year birthday should be representative of our policies in this regard.

Some claim that selling premium themes is against the WordPress license in particular, and not very open source-ish in general. What do you think about that?

They may just be right in saying that… Again, this is not something that I like to comment on, since there’s just to much subjectivity and bias going around the “community” to talk openly and objectively about the implication of these claims. So without rehashing the main points that I have made in various other discussions around the interwebs (with regards to commercial WP themes, the GPL licensing claims & open source in general), I’d like to point out the following:

• I don’t believe that Open Source in its current form is a sustainable business model. I come from a traditional business background (read: academically) and I believe that a hybrid of traditional business practices (i.e. those which have been successful for the past 100 years) and Open Source / Web 2.0-related models is the way to go in the future. I’m a firm believer in Open Source (in the way that it democratizes access to resources), but in the end someone needs to be paid for that, because the bread and milk from your local cafe will unfortunately never be available for free.
• Open Source (in the WordPress “community”) comes down to contributing back and improving the “community” as a whole. From this viewpoint, WooThemes probably does more than most other WP users / contributors, considering that about 50% of our users had never used WordPress as their CMS of choice prior to finding our website and themes.
• If our themes are GPL licensed, then every other WordPress design ever made is GPL licensed. So according to me this means that anyone can download the HTML & CSS from The Blog Herald’s source code, turn it into a WP theme again and do with that what I want (release it for free for example). I don’t seem to think that anyone with the “community” would like it when their great, unique designs starts to get ripped and released to the masses!?

So that said, I don’t believe that we’re in the wrong. Everyone has their own opinions in this regard and as long as these supposed “issues” aren’t resolved (and turned into black and white from their current grey area status), we’ll just be discussing these same things this time next year.

Well, I’m no lawyer, but the way I understand it GPL only applies when you offer something widely, but you can hack away and do what you want for yourself. So the Blog Herald design made by yours truly for Splashpress would fall under that. Do you think the unclear licensing terms is an issue today?

I’m no intellectual property lawyer either and neither is 99,9% of the people that has an opinion on this matter. So that just proves my points in this regard: we’re just part of this never-ending discussion of grey areas and complex issues.

BUT - this doesn’t have to be an issue at all in my opinion… Who really has an issue with this? I’ll be convinced that this is an issue when the majority of WordPress users worldwide votes to that extent.

Is premium themes the future for WordPress designers? What about premium plugins?

Not necessarily no… Personally I got into commercial WP themes, because it allowed me to generate a more passive income that was not linked to the amount of time that I have available in a day. I do however think that all designers will start focusing on generating a passive income of sorts via ebooks, paid tutorials, advertising models etc, as there’s only that much a designer can earn in a day / month / year from client work.

As for premium plugins - I don’t know whether there’s a market for it within the current situation, where there’s an incredible amount of top-notch plugins available for free. So a commercial plugin would need to offer something differently (with regards to anything related to that plugin) to the plugins currently available, for it to be a viable approach. As the WordPress market grows however, you’ll find that this might become the next big thing…

I’d like to thank Adii for taking the time and doing this interview. Check out his website, as well as WooThemes if you’re interested in premium themes.

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The nice part is that the ads are pop-up free and relatively easy on the eyes.

There are of course ethical issues that must be tackled when it comes to notifying your readers what these ‘InLinks’ are all about. Plus, you might awaken the mighty Google giant, and as someone who has been spanked by them before, I would do your homework before you sign up.

I will say that in this economic climate, this blogger, and many that I know, are looking for new revenue streams.

Here’s more info directly from the source.

(We) pay 10% of all revenue earned by publishers that you refer to us! This 10% of revenue earned from publishers you refer is good for a full two years after the publisher joins inLinks. We also offer you the ability to earn up to 15% of all revenue publishers you refer earn us, check out the tiered system below:

6. 15% if blogger refers over $5,000 per month of revenue.

If anyone gives this a whirl, let us know!

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• A TypePad Pro account for free. Usually costs $14,95/month.
• Enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program, to get the ad dollars rolling.
• An extra push on blogs.com.

They also offer support and whatnot, all for free. The only thing the journos need to do is send a link to their last piece for a newspaper or similar. And according to the post, there’s been an overwhelming interest in this, so they’re lagging a bit behind on setting the accounts up, but no word on closing the program.

You know what? This is brilliant!

My hat’s off to whoever on Six Apart that came up with this idea. It’s a great way to get journalists blogging, since most of them (or us, in some cases) just need an economic incentive and a set platform to get started. The pure notion that you’ve got everything set up, and ads rolling right away, well, that’s bound to attract a lot of people.

Me included, actually. I’m a bit curious to this, but since I haven’t been sacked from any of my writing gigs yet, I don’t think I can apply. Too bad.

Great work, Six Apart, and a great PR stunt as well!

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As always, if you want to see everything I am writing about nextMEDIA, please check out BrandingDavid.com where I’ve placed an index for all of the posts I am doing around the Splashpress Media network.

Only about 25% of people from last years nextMEDIA came to this years. The conversation has changed from definitions, to getting the big money through community models.

People want a $40CPM, does it exist and is it sustainable? Probably not, but they can be achieved through multiple revenue sources. Advertising, branded entertainment, e-commerce, pay per use, and licensing as a mix can earn more than direct ad sales or sponsorships alone.

Today we will hear more about engagement and reputation. There will be less about online video today, and more about immersive entertainment.

Immersive Branded Entertainment

As the introduction for day two ended, we were then introduced to Susan Bonds, CEO of 42 Entertainment. Who started by saying that there is a way to measure engagement, though not standardized, everyone keeps trying to push that there is engagement metrics.

“Let’s create entertainment that is native for today’s audience.” - Susan Bonds

You need to tell a good story to gain engagement, and using the tools and mediums we have today, people can increase engagement.

She also let us know how great it is that people enjoy creating content and contributing it to “your” stories or brands through a community and collaboration that ignores borders, and boundaries, creating a powerful hive mind.

Susan then went over ARG’s, alternate reality game, which is an interactive experience that immerses audiences in story via content platforms that intersect their daily lives.

The audience has a central role: collect, solve, and piece together the story, and thus they influence the direction of the story.

It brings us towards social entertainment, and gives players ownership over the experience.

She showed a bunch of clips regarding alternate realty gaming. Most of them are branded in such a way that they promote a concept, movie, software, or other brand.

“The idea is that you really bring a story to life.” - Susan Bonds

Viral videos are hit or miss, and don’t really work well for building brands or gaining attention for a brand and so ARG’s can have a stronger, longer connection with people.

She mistakenly focused in on Microsoft as a company that creates experiences that aren’t always branded, and show only that the company cares for the various potential customers by providing themselves with something entertaining.

I don’t think Microsoft, and especially not their promotion of Vista should have been mentioned today, but it looks like 42 Entertainment has worked with them on a few project including working on IloveBees for Halo 2 which had 2.5M unique participants.

She also said that the hive mind of the people involved are able to come up with really advanced ways of finding the next clue. She gave an example of how a spectrograph on a song gave a clue, and the audience found it using their “hive mind”.

They even held a secret concert for those able to follow the clues to their conclusion, which was part of the “Year Zero” album for Nine Inch Nails which was even broken up by a fake S.W.A.T. team so they could really live the experience they were involved in.

The whole experience made me think “people are sheep”, as hundreds of people fallow these ARG’s blindly in order to have some sort of fun or access to an experience or event. Will this be the future of interactive advertising, and if so, will it be annoying?

Should be interesting.

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Muhammad tells me they have been in public beta for a month and are already attracting 3k views a day to the site, with 24,000 tips from 1,800 members. In only 30 days they are healthily competing with other already estabilished social bookmarking sites.

Can they compete with Digg and Reddit? Good question, but the wrong one I think!

They are already competing with Digg and Reddit, because part of the reason for their site to exist is the particular niche they are playing in is under served by the big boys.

Niche is where it is at for the future of social bookmarking I believe. Just like inetnet marketing was spurned by the big social sites so Sphinn was created, finance topics have a home in Tip’d.

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A new personal-tech blog, Gadgetwise is currently organized around four product categories (digital photography, home entertainment, mobile technology and personal computing), each with a dedicated contributor.

If you want to know who’s writing, there’s an introduction to the five man team as well.

The New York Times already publish the technology blog Bits, which is frequently linked, and a good read really. In that sense, they are not new to the scene. In fact, their blog index is huge, although it looks better than it is.

I don’t doubt that Gadgetwise will find some readers, but compared to the likes of Engadget and Gizmodo, as well as a wealth of smaller gadget blogs, it looks a bit thin at the moment. That might and will probably change, and there’s the possibility of finding their own reader niche just by the fact that they are located at the New York Times, and the push it can get from there, but my guess is that Gadgetwise won’t be the official CES blog partner for years to come…

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With the advent of blogs, YouTube, podcasts, and online social media tools that allow anyone to publish anything they want within the law, everyone could become their own entertainment production company, putting the masses in charge of not only being the entertainment, but providing it.

With inexpensive video equipment and software, and an innate sense of comedy, drama, and style, Duke DesRochers has an intuitive way of bringing the “common man” into his audition video that I hope will gain the attention of the judges. It’s time to go back to the real people, rather than the exaggerated people, to find the humility and fun in entertainment. We need to get people thinking, “Hey, that’s me! I can do that!”

Another part of Duke DesRochers I want to celebrate with you is how he took two fairly diverse passions, and molded them into one specialty to totally redefine himself for this video audition for the Food Network: handyman in the kitchen.

As part of this ongoing series on Exploring Social Media, I want to talk a little more about the important points that Duke’s Food Network audition efforts brought up: getting personal and brand identity.

Social Media is About the Social

They key to social media is the personal. It’s about being personable, getting personal, and being a person - a real person.

Duke’s video could have been just like all the rest of the auditions for The Next Food Network Star. He could have dressed up pretty, made something pretty, been wacky and silly, exaggerated and dramatic. Instead, his video works because he is “every man” and we know him. He is our next door neighbor or relative.

And he’s a rule breaker without being a wacko. In the video, he uses common woodworking tools like the lathe and a drill to carve up vegetables into beautiful arrangements and dishes you can eat. He leaves the audience laughing but thinking, “I can do that!”

He’s accessible. He’s real.

As you establish your brand identity on the web through your blog and social media tools, it’s important that you remember to be real. To be accessible.

You want to attract people who are like you and think like you.

This doesn’t mean share your personal life. It means you have to be a real person, someone we can trust and feel like we know. The next version of the web and the economy is going to be the global village feel. We want to work with people we know and have a relationship with, not the stranger in another city.

The cute CB Radio handle name like “SEO Guru” or “Sexy Blogger Chick” doesn’t work any more. We want to know there is a real person behind the blog.

As mentioned in Exploring Social Media: It Starts With One, people want to talk to someone directly. They don’t want to talk to the “man behind the curtain.” They want direct access to those who can make things happen, people who listen and respond. People who are real. People who are just like them. People who understand.

Is your online identity in line with being a real person and not a brand? What are you hiding behind?

Exploring Social Media Series

• Define Social Media
• Exploring Social Media Series
• Exploring Social Media: Social Media Tools
• Exploring Social Media: It Starts With One
• Exploring Social Media: Start With the Basics
• Exploring Social Media: One Size Does Not Fit All
• Exploring Social Media: The Motrin Moment Impact of Social Media

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Bryan Segal from ComScore came out swinging with many stats, facts, graphs, and badly animated presentation slides. His information was absolutely startling, including the growth of the amount of weekly time spent alone was an interesting trend.

With almost twenty-four million Canadians aged two and up are online in any given month with each person spending upwards of 46 hours in that same period of time.

“We are seeing a shift in how people are using media” - Bryan Segal

The Internet is the third longest time spent regarding media today, though in those ages 18 to 24, it is number one.

The reach of the Internet is growing faster than the population growth of Canada. This means that eventually, access to the web could reach a saturation point of nearly one hundred percent. There was 66% growth in how many people have access to the Internet in Canada.

And as penetration grows, so does online video, social media, and blogging. The average Canadian looks at over 4,000 web pages in a single month.

There were three billion videos watched online in Canada in the last twelve months. The average 18-24 year old in canada watches 195 videos per month. While the 55-65 year olds watched around 95 videos per month.

“Canada is a Facebook and YouTube Nation” - Bryan Segal

The average woman spends an average of two hours more and goes through 211 more pages on social networking sites per month and is currently trending higher.

Seventy-nine percent of all searches in Canada are pushed through Google.

It is amazing at how Canada, as a country, leads the way in many things online, but we don’t have the fastest, nor cheapest broadband connections, or multimedia cellular phone connections. It is a testament, to me, on how things have evolved and our love of technology.

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After being trained in “the ways of the blog” by Six Apart, LiveJournal is now finally migrating off of its former parents servers and is setting up shop in the middle of Montanna.

(LiveJournal News) The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We’re moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. [...]

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we’re going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

LiveJournal was previously sold to SUP (a media company from Russia) last year, although for some reason they remained on Six Apart’s servers.

LiveJournal expects the migration to last approximately four hours, although it may take longer for most of their services to come back online.

It will be interesting to see whether this move improves LiveJournal outside of Russia (where it is extremly popular) in the face of international competiton from platform hosted services like Blogger, WordPress and TypePad (owned by Six Apart).

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A lot of people have the instinct of clamming up. They don’t want to share details of their lives. They want to remain super private. They want to hide. If that’s you, fine! But don’t try to be a big-time blogger.

That’s probably true if she planned on doing WifeOfDavidRisley.com, but what if it is a gadget blog with several writers? Do anyone care about Ryan Block? In fact, how many here even know who he is?

The thing is, blogging as a concept is too wide to have rules like this. You can be totally anonymous and blog anyway, and get a crowd. It might be harder, since there’ll be natural credibility issues and so on, but it is by all means possible. Think about those columnists in magazines who hide behind pseudonyms, or authors for that matter.

I say it is more a matter of what kind of site you’re publishing, rather than how much of you that gets poured into it. That doesn’t mean that it won’t be easier if you let the readers know a little something about you, at least if you’re an interesting fellow to start with, but if you do so without it really being something that is meriting the blog, then it just doesn’t matter.

What do you think? How important is it to be up front with who you are and share your personality? And how much does the actual blog/site you’re doing it on matter?

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The debacle is described best in the article Advertising Age, “How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign,” which explains how the Johnson & Johnson product offended mothers and fathers with an online and print ad for Motrin which claimed that some moms carry their babies around with baby body carriers as a “fashion statement” and summed it up with “Supposedly it’s a real bonding experience, but what about me?”

The outrage rocked the social media world. Twitter tweets on Motrin went berserk as people were outraged at this slam against parenthood and parent/child bonding. Within two days of mass online social outrage, the ad campaign was pulled and the Motrin’s website featured an apology saying:

With regard to the recent Motrin advertisement, we have heard you.

On behalf of McNeil Consumer Healthcare and all of us who work on the Mortin Brand, please accept our sincere apology.

We have heard your concerns about the ad that was featured on our website. We are parents ourselves and we take feedback from moms very seriously…

The Advertising Age article summarized it as:

The campaign has been online since Sept. 30 and has been circulating in several magazines for weeks, but it finally caught the attention — and ire — of some influential bloggers Friday night before blowing up into a full-fledged cause celebre on Twitter over the weekend.

The ultimate demise of the campaign demonstrates either how quickly social media can galvanize a groundswell of opinion or how much power over online discourse they can give a few vocal tastemakers with outsize weight.

The beginning of the end for the Motrin push probably came Friday night, when Los Angeles blogger Jessica Gottlieb said she was tipped off to the ads and started expressing her outrage over the campaign on Twitter, where she has 1,018 followers.

From blogger to blogger, then Twitter to Twitter, word spread proving, “Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks,” explained David Armano, VP at marketing firm Critical Mass, in the article.

Elisa Camahort Page of BlogHer was also quoted in the article:

We now have indisputable proof that online marketing, YouTube and Twitter and all that it encompasses is meaningful and has arrived,” said Gene Grabowsk, chair of the crisis and litigation practice at Levick Strategic Communications. “We are seeing real consequences to a mistake. If [social networks] didn’t matter, you wouldn’t see this type of reaction from J&J or consumers.

While you might not have known about Motrin before this weekend, the impact of the Motrin ad campaign on the online social media networks will be remembered for a long time to come. A Motrin Moment in the new social order.

Exploring Social Media Series

• Define Social Media
• Exploring Social Media Series
• Exploring Social Media: Social Media Tools
• Exploring Social Media: It Starts With One
• Exploring Social Media: Start With the Basics
• Exploring Social Media: One Size Does Not Fit All

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• Exploring Social Media: It Starts With One
• Exploring Social Media: Social Means Personal
• Exploring Social Media: One Size Does Not Fit All

Joseph Thornley quoted Jacob George, Manager, Corporate Marketing and Communications at The City of Calgary, recently on Twitter saying:

Social media must be part of a larger strategy to get the most value from it. It should not stand isolated on its own.

Just as one tool doesn’t do everything, not every tool is the right tool for the job. Ping.fm is a great service for broadcasting your news across many channels, but it isn’t the place to get personal and social. If you just want to send out a message, it’s great. When it comes to building a relationship, you have to dive into the specific social media tool that best serves your needs and the needs of your audience.

During Hawaii Geek Week, I was part of the Social Media Tools Workshop in Honolulu, and played a fascinating game with speaker Beth Kanter that she developed called the Social Media Game. I described how we played the “Hawaii” version of the game in Learning Blogging and Social Media in Hawaii, and in summary, we all learned that not every tool is the right social tool for the job.

Our group was to put together a social media plan for a surf competition by a local surf equipment rental shop on Waikiki. We went gungho into the planning stages, declaring this would have to be an international competition, inviting surfers from all over the world - totally out of touch with reality in the surfing world, but we were determined that our project would be the biggest event.

We planned to cover every social media tool, from Twitter to StumbleUpon to Digg. We wanted it all. We had great plans, until Beth came over and gave us points for doing one thing right, and took a point away for overwhelming our community manager.

Just as in the real world, the greatest plans are smacked in the face by reality. The reality was simple, and we didn’t see it. We defined our audience as the world. Sure, we were specific in targetting surf fans and surfers, but we choose a one-size-fits-all technique for reaching out through social media tools to our demographics.

Do surfers and surf fans hang out on Twitter? Maybe, maybe not. So we had to research that social media tool’s reach into our demographics. What about StumbleUpon? Digg? Blogs? LinkedIn? Facebook? YouTube? Probably. Once we narrowed it down to where we were to most likely reach our audience, our community manager could breath again and we were focused, and on track.

As Mark Boudreau commented in “Start With the Basics” in this series:

Despite what you describe as the decline of MySpace, if you are blogging or podcasting about music it is absolutely essential that you have a presence there.

From his experience and expertise, he’s probably right. That’s where his audience is, and possibly major music fans. My fans aren’t looking for me there. Are yours?

A WordPress Plugin author contacted me recently and asked for my mailing address. Nervous, I asked why. He told me that he wanted to do something different to announce his latest WordPress Plugin. He’d put together a snail mail campaign to attract greater attention. While it’s a nice idea, most of my mail is junk mail and I rarely pay attention to it. Unless it is bigger than a bread box, it will lay in a pile of “get around to it” mail until I get to bill paying time.

To contact a blogger, you need to reach me through the services I use and depend upon to communicate. That would be email, Twitter, and my blog comments. You might try Facebook or LinkedIn, too. Any other method may miss us bloggers as that is where we count on making our social connections.

If you aren’t playing social in your readers’ or clients’ social playground, you’re playing alone.

As we talk about the various social media tools, consider your audience. Which social media tools are they using? If you want your audience to use the social media tools you are using, then you have to educate them and bring them along with you. If you don’t, you better go where they are.

Exploring Social Media Series

• Define Social Media
• Exploring Social Media Series
• Exploring Social Media: Social Media Tools
• Exploring Social Media: It Starts With One
• Exploring Social Media: Start With the Basics

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• Exploring Social Media: It Starts With One

Speaking of our community, let’s see what folks have been up to this week:

Plugins

ToI Planning released several plugins last week. Their descriptions in the Plugins directory are lacking in details, but from ToI Planning’s website and trying the plugins myself, I think I’ve figured them out.

• Locator — Allows you to associate a location with just about anything: blog, user, or entry. It also makes it easy to show a Google Map for that location.
• Period — Use this plugin to set a timeframe for an entry. The entry will be published when the period starts, and revert back to a draft when the period ends.
• QuickRebuild — Adds a drop-down menu to the MT admin for rebuilding different types of templates. This makes it much simpler to just rebuild your index templates, for example.
• StyledFields — This plugin lets you style custom fields on the entry form using CSS. Handy for making certain fields stand out on the entry editing page.
• ScriptInjection — Similar to Styled Fields, this allows you to define custom JavaScript to run on the entry edit screen.
• FillInForm — A wrapper for the Perl module HTML::FillInForm, this plugin will populate forms with previously submitted data. For example, if a user submits a comment but doesn’t fill out all the required fields, this plugin makes sure they don’t lose what they’ve already filled out.
• Dumper — Primarily a tool for developers, Dumper will “dump” your entries to a text file in YAML and/or JSON format.
• CustomFieldsSearch — One important feature missing from the core Custom Fields is the ability to search on those fields. This plugin enables that feature, and allows you to choose which fields get searched.
• CustomDefaultFields — Allows you to rename the default entry fields. Handy for when you want a truly customized admin for your authors.
• CategorySearch — This plugin will enable searching the titles and descriptions of your categories.

Other new plugins this past week:

New User Management Prototype — I like this idea: Six Apart is working on a new user management interface, and they’ve released it as a plugin. Byrne Reese wrote about this plugin and 6A’s commitment to a customizable UI in a recent blog post. If you try it out, be sure to send them feedback.

Config Assistant — This one is for developers. Config Assistant will help you generate a config file for the settings page of your theme or plugin.

Also, Chad Everett released an update to MT-Approval, an anti-spam plugin that uses multiple techniques to stop comment spam.

Ok, enough with the plugins, let’s see what else has been going on:

Michael Hoskins gives an overview of some problems you might encounter when installing Movable Type on Windows Server 2003. I’ve never used Windows as a hosting platform, so I’ll ask you folks: Are these problems common when installing MT on IIS?

Finally, Jesse Gardner produced a screencast all about template sets. If you’re a designer looking to distribute your designs as MT themes, be sure to check this out.

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Even though the copyright element of the claim is questionable, especially considering that you can not copyright facts, including prices, it is clear that the holidays can introduce a new set of copyright hazards for bloggers and other Webmasters.

So, as we rapidly approach the holiday season, here are five of the biggest copyright hazards that you may need to watch out for as you celebrate the season online.

Songs

It is common during the holidays to use Christmas and other songs as part of videos or other presentations. However, much of the content in those songs is copyrighted.

Even if the composition is in the public domain, the modern recording likely is not. So, where there is nothing to stop you from singing and making your own recording of “Ode to Joy”, the performances of others may be protected still. Also, modern adaptations of classic songs, such as “Jingle Bell Rock” likely have elements that are copyright protected.

Though disputes over holiday music are relatively rare, especially when compared to ones over major artists, they can arise. Typically, it is better to be safe than sorry.

How to Avoid Issues: To avoid potential problems, find music that is properly licensed for the use you want to use and/or stick to your own versions of songs within the public domain. Also, you can consider severely limiting your use an trying to make a strong fair use argument for your copying.

Ads

As the sites listed above have found, many stores are very protective of their advertisements, especially before they are released.

Though copyright law does not protect against the repeating of facts or information (though it could be a breach of trade secret), it does protect against displaying the expression of that information. While you might be able to display information from the ad, scanning and reposting the advertisement, especially before it has been released to the public, is very dangerous.

No matter how crazy it seems to go after people that help distribute an advertisement to those who might not have seen it, do not forget that both TV commercials and music videos are routinely pulled of YouTube though they serve the same function.

Right or wrong, it is the company’s decision to determine how their advertisements are displayed.

How to Avoid Issues: Stick to retelling the facts from the advertisement and not using the ad itself if possible. Also, pay attention to how the companies react as many will likely tolerate the reprinting of their ads. Also, to be completely safe, do not republish anything from the ads before they are released to the public as it may, arguably, run afoul of trade secret law.

Images

As with virtually any other type of image, holiday images, including drawings of Santa Claus, etc. are likely protected by copyright. Though it may be tempting to line a holiday post with images from the season, most likely such images would be protected under copyright and subject to the same rules.

Though, as with most things common to the holidays, the basis of the image, including the scenes and characters, concepts are well into the public domain, the recent expressions of those ideas are still protected. Nothing could stop you from making your own drawing of Santa Claus, but by using someone else’s could, possibly, be a cause for action.

Fortunately, in this area, there is a wealth of material that is in the public domain (paintings, sculptures, etc.) that may work well.

How to Avoid Issues: With images in posts, you can likely limit your use and build a strong fair use case. Though that won’t protect you from a conflict, it can protect you from damages. The safer solution though is to use your own images or limit yourself to public domain or licensed works. You should be able to find either fairly trivially.

Parodies

The holidays seem to bring out more than the season of giving, but also the season of parodies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of parodies of most famous Christmas songs that range from the tame to the very adult.

Fortunately, parodies, in the United States, are a very well protected form of expression. So long as the parody attempts to poke fun at the original work or its subject and is not an attempt to replace it, parodies are generally acceptable. However, parody use is still run through the typical four factors for fair use analysis so it is important to think of it in those terms and some parodies, such as “The Cat is Not in the Hat” have been stifled on copyright claims.

For the most part, so long as your parody offers commentary or criticism on the same subject of the original work, in this case the season, it will likely have a good chance of surviving. However, fair use questions are always difficult to resolve and are notably unpredictable.

The safest route is to parody items that are in the public domain, which includes many of the most popular holiday works.

How to Avoid Issues: Make sure that your parodies are within the bounds of fair use or, if you want extra protection, limit your lampooning to works in the public domain. In truth, there are very few lawsuits over parodies for a variety of reasons, but they can and do happen.

Home Videos

The one thing that is almost universal this time of year is the use of personal video cameras to capture videos and record memories. It is a cherished family tradition and, in the age of YouTube, those memories can easily be shared with family members or the world.

However, it is not uncommon when shooting video to also grab copyrighted items, from a television playing the room to a song playing in the background. As the Lenz case proved, those uses, when combined with extremely sensitive filtering and detection tools, can lead to serious copyright conflicts.

Fortunately, also as the Lenz case showed, those incidental captures of copyrighted bits are, for the most part, protected under fair use. Since, most likely, the amount of content used will be extremely trivial and unlikely to damage the copyrighted work at all, such use is not likely to raise any serious copyright issue.

This remains a situation where it is more important to be aware of the fingerprinting and other tools that video sharing sites, as well as copyright holders, use to detect infringing works. These videos could be held for further review or be the subject of takedown notices. It is best to be prepared.

How to Avoid Issues: Be mindful of copyright issues as you shoot your videos and, if you have something you think may cause trouble, do not post that portion on the Web. Even if you are protected under fair use, fingerprinting technology may artificially flag you as infringing. Understand your rights under the DMCA (or other applicable laws) and be prepared for at least the remote possibility.

Conclusions

Though it is depressing to think of copyright and other intellectual property issues at this time of year, there is nothing more depressing or ruinous to the season than being hit with a takedown notice, a nastygram or even a lawsuit.

Fortunately though, serious copyright disputes surrounding the holidays are fairly rare. Not only is much of the material involved well into the public domain, but the spirit of the season seems to make even the staunchest of copyright holders a little bit more lenient.

Still, it is best not to rely on the generosity of the season. There are more than a few grinches that would love nothing more than to ruin the Christmas season for those that cross their copyrights.

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Years ago I was banned from Digg when I created a second account to praise my submissions. Not realizing that I was violating the TOS of the site, I was quickly ‘banned,’ my primary e-mail address unable to access Digg to this day.

Then came the Pay Per Post debacle. Sure I made some cash, but my blog tumbled from a Google PageRank of 5 to 1. And I don’t care what people say, it does make a difference. To date, I have yet to climb back to 5, even with traffic growth and good linkability.

The latest technology spanking came courtesy of Twitter. After underutilizing the service for quite some time, I went on a following blitz. Unbeknownst to me, there is a follow limit of 2,000 currently in place.

All of these situations could have been avoided had I done due diligence. Whether or not you agree with these policies, one thing is clear: I need to start reading the fine print!

I’m a big believer that early adopters of new technology get the worm, so I’m quick to pull the trigger. But I’m starting to think it makes more sense to do your research, have a plan to leverage the medium and let others act as guinea pigs.

What do you think?

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be in the corner with my dunce cap on.

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While the concept of social media and social media tools confuses many, the basic social tools are ones you probably already have and use. You might not think of these as social media tools, but they are crucial to today’s communication strategies.

You probably understand why you need these, but let’s review the reasons you should have these basics in place to start your blog, online persona, business, or media campaign.

Domain Name

You need to have a name for your website. This is usually your name or business name, or brand, or some combination of words that represents your intent and purpose.

This used to be the most important part of creating an online presence, with many highly recommending that you have your own personalized domain name like blogherald.com or fredsmith.com. Today, it can be lorelle.wordpress.com or ma.tt or some other combination, but it should be easy to remember and say. Domain names such as sexy46549.wordpress.com or anything98.blogspot.com are rarely taken seriously.

There is a lot of debate over whether or not your domain name should be example.com or a subdomain name such as example.wordpress.com. Honestly, there are two factors to consider: memorability and relationship by association.

What matters most is the memorability of the name, not the issue of whether or not it is a full domain or subdomain. If it is easy to pronounce, doesn’t require finicky spelling, and is easy to remember, it’s a great name.

Choosing a subdomain, such as one with WordPress.com or Blogger/Blogspot, may influence your reputation from the domain name. Currently, sites with wordpress.com are consider valid, healthy, and good sites. There are some top bloggers and websites using WordPress.com. By association, you are in good company. However, currently, Blogger/Blogspot doesn’t have such a shining reputation as that free blog hosting service is littered with spam blogs. MySpace is also now considered a “poor neighborhood” and people are flocking away from it as it seems to no longer serve them or they are judged by their presence on that service. Things may shift and change with trends and fads, but choose wisely, or do not choose to use a subdomain service.

Whether you choose a full domain or subdomain site, make your domain name serious and reflective of your purpose. Your domain name is part of your virtual business card, the spot where everyone should go to find and contact you.

Web Presence

You must have a web presence. It can be a static site, a blog, or a Facebook or MySpace account. A blog as a blog or CMS (Content Management System) is the best choice for most, though many rely upon their Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace account to be their window to the web.

Again, the web presence platform plays an important part in your online reputation, especially if you use a subdomain specific website service. MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are now replacing some static websites and blogs for an online presences. In the early days, Facebook was only for the young, but it has grown in reputation and functionality as a quality social forum and resume. MySpace’s reputation has dropped significantly and is frequently seen as a playground for children rather than a serious forum for content, but these wide paintbrush perceptions come and go with the ever changing tide of public opinion. Again, it’s a matter of reputation by association.

If you are hunting for a job or establishing yourself as an expert, a LinkedIn page is a must as an online version of your resume and network. LinkedIn relies upon who links to you and who you link to as part of building your online reputation evidence.

Choosing one or more of these options for your web presence helps to establish your virtual address on the web, but also connects with the other social services you choose and build over time.

The website choice you make must contain the following basic information:

1. About Page: Also known as your Profile Page, this is your story. It needs to tell the world a little about who you are, what you do, why you do it, and why we should care. For many, it is their chance to promote their resume, the history and examples of their expertise.
2. Contact: It’s important people have alternative methods of contacting you. Make it easy but offer more methods than a contact form if you want to be found.
3. Recent Information: What you did in the past is important, but we live in a “now” world and the site should offer information on where you are and what you are doing recently.
4. Location: While the web makes it easy to live and work anywhere, people still like to know where you are in the world. Neighbors want to work with neighbors, but people want to understand better where someone is coming from when they communicate with them, and location is part of your story.
5. Events: The web is about participation. People want to know what you are doing and where, and if they can be a part of it. If you are involved in any events or social activities, consider sharing them with others.
6. Feeds: All of today’s websites must have feeds, text-based versions of your blog content read with feed readers and used by aggregators to promote your blog content excerpts and titles. Feeds are today’s “subscriptions” which allow visitors to monitor your site’s activities with their feed reader or via email.
7. Images: People like to know what you look like, or at least see pictures of you doing something or with other people. They like the visual social aspect of your business and life. It makes you “real” to them. Whether or not you add a picture of you or a visual brand identity, at the least consider adding a gallery collection of images from conferences or meetings.
8. Clear Purpose and Focus: In order to be hired or contacted, you have to be known for something, and that “something” is usually your specialty. You might turn to a neighbor for recommendation on a doctor, but you might not turn to your neighbor for help with a lump in your breast unless that neighbor is a specialist or breast cancer survivor. We go to the experts. We want the experts. Your expertise needs to be clear, visible, and fairly focused to show the world you know what you are talking about.

Email and Contact Information

While Twitter might be replacing traditional communication methods, your email account is still a key to contacting you. Make sure you have an easy to remember and pronounce email address.

Part of the social is your email address and its reputation.

In addition to your email address, you need to provide information on how to be found. This can include Twitter, Skype, GTalk, AOL, IRC, and any number of other online communications resources.

Don’t forget that a snail mail address is also welcome by many and considered good business practice. And if it is important that you be physically found, especially if your online purpose requires people find your business or event, you need to have a map or a link to a map such as Google Maps ready at hand.

Your business card is a critical source of information about how to contact you, but make sure you have all of your contact information on the web, too.

The problem today with all the various methods people have for contacting you is that there are too many ways. It’s exhausting keeping track of all the open windows, tabs, feeds, and sites you need to monitor to be open to “the call” when the call comes in. Whoever consolidates all of these into one will be the next king of the web.

Until then, it’s important to keep all of your communication inputs in one central location. There are so many they don’t fit onto a small business card any more, and people aren’t asking for your business cards, either. They want your website or blog address. Put your contact information there.

Some add all their social media contact locations to the bottom of every blog post, while others just clutter up their blog sidebars with an icon bar with their Twitter, Delicious, GTalk, Skype, Phone, FriendFeed, and all the different social media communication sites listed.

Personally, I recommend that you put all that information on your Contact Page and make sure you spread the link to that page out everywhere. Make it a one-stop place to find all your contact information, and keep it current.

Avatar/Gravatar/Brand Identity

Today’s online presence comes with a visual identity. It is often called your “brand identity” which is actually the words and visual images that summarize your online identity. It can be a picture of you, a graphic, cartoon, logo, or artwork, whatever you want as long as it represents “you” whoever you want to be online.

It also must be flexible. It must resize from 16 pixels to 128 pixels or larger and still maintain it’s quality and integrity visually.

Called avatars, or more commonly gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) mostly in part due to the popularity of the Gravatar now owned by Automattic, parent company of WordPress, these are small icons which are used to “identify” you on various social media services, blog comments, forum posts, and even in Google’s Gmail contacts. Gravatars link to your email address, so when you interact on a site using Gravatars, it pulls in the image associated with that email address.

Most social service sites allow you to upgrade your own avatar to use throughout their service, but only within their service. Gravatars work across all WordPress blogs enabled to integrate with Gravatars via Plugins like the official Gravatar WordPress Plugin, WordPress Gravatar Plugin by Il Filosofo, or Easy Gravatars by Dougal Gunters, though the next version of WordPress should have Gravatars built in.

While there are other services for avatars, I recommend you sign up with Gravatar and upload an image to match the email address you mostly use online, then add the same image to all your social media tools which require avatars so you have the same visual identity, or brand, across all social services, including your blog.

Your Contact List

You and your business does not operate in a vacuum. It’s important to keep a contact list in various forms to communicate with, be it friends, family, or business associates. These contact lists can be traditional mailing, email, and phone lists, or any of the modern contact lists.

Modern contact lists reach out individually or collectively. They include:

• blogroll link lists
• LinkedIn contacts
• forum members
• Twitter follows and friends
• blog commenters<