Social Media | In The Know

Can teens click away their internet identities to advertisers without parental concent?

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Have you wondered how an opt-in or opt-out contract works on the Internet when the person consenting is not an adult?

Most contract law requires a person to be of legal age, typically 18, to enter into a legally enforceable agreement. Minors can enter into a contract but it is voidable until they are 18 years of age. 87566035

One should consider parental consent a good first step for a child to give away their rights, in this case their internet identity to advertisers to mine, market and advertise.

This will be brought before a judge in a class action lawsuit filed in California against Facebook for the use of the “like” button.

California law requires parental consent in order to obtain a minor’s consent for using their name or likeness for an advertisement.

Facebook doesn’t do that according to the lawsuit, which you can read more about here.

Lawsuits like this one could result in anyone under 18 having to get their parents’ permission to sign up for Facebook for which a system like Integrity is very effective in ensuring that the parent is indeed in control of their child’s digital identity.

Michael Bolcerek
Senior Vice President of Business Development for Integrity

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Peanuts and Cracker Jacks to Captain Morgan and Coke

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Major League Baseball was never immune to commercial appeal, but the all-American game is now venturing into uncharted territory that could tarnish the brand of baseball if it continues in this direction.

I recently received an e-mail from Major League Baseball (MLB) promoting Captain Morgan Rum. It invites me to “Follow the Captain” as he throws out the first pitch and join them on Facebook. 3 requested logos.cdr

This concerns me as I have never been properly age verified to receive the adult-oriented promotion, and secondly, it relies on Facebook to ensure that kids do not access additional content.

In the first instance, the actual advertisement prior to verification of age is a bit concerning if I was brand manager for Major League Baseball. Promotion of alcohol to minors should be a very restricted advertisement activity, and simply requiring that someone enter an age greater than 21 seems to be a very feeble approach to controlling this marketing.

Secondly, the ad relies on Facebook to restrict viewing. But the social network often fails to verify individual age and identity. I have friends with dogs who have Facebook profiles, or their 7-year kids are listed as 18, so I am certain there is no check to accurately verify identity and the corresponding date of birth.

Therefore this is truly ineffective and improperly-named age verification, as there is no verification even performed. I would hope for more from our national pastime.

Michael Bolcerek
Senior Vice President of Business Development

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Baseball History Through a New Media Lens

Friday, August 20th, 2010

I trust you’ve heard about the sad passing of famed New York Giant Bobby Thomson. If not, you can read some good coverage here. His famous home run, the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” helped the Giants win the National League pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951.

As I read through Wednesday’s sports pages and watched the various television interviews, I wanted to see the event myself. So I turned to YouTube, and enjoyed the footage below:

Now this seems fairly normal these days. But it’s still amazing how our interactions and media consumption habits have advanced in just a decade or so.

Anecdotally, I have friends who read their news via Twitter, prefer to message with Facebook instead of email, etc. And they aren’t alone.

Seventy-five percent of online news readers said they received their news through email or a post on a social networking site, according to the Pew Internet & American Life project.

And the trend isn’t likely to change in the near future, as “digital natives” are expected to make social networking a lifelong habit.

Colin Burke
Marketing Manager

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Website Best Practices – Part I

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Images

Maintaining a website can be a little overwhelming, if you have never done something like this before. However, with a little help and a few tricks of the trade, it can be quite simple and not as time-consuming as you might imagine.

We will be covering different topics and tips each month that will help you with your Web management. The first item on the agenda is images.

As a rule of thumb, JPG files are best for photographs or art with gradient tints. GIF images work best for line art, text rendered as an image and art with flat color.
Images should be saved to the exact size you want them to be viewed on the Web. Do not resize images using size attributes (height and width) in your HTML code. Taking a large image and having it display at a smaller size not only slows down loading times but may also distort the image.
Final Web images should be saved as the same size (72 pixels per inch resolution).
It is a good idea to add an ALT tag to each image, because most search engines index these tags.
Image Example:<img src=”/images/imagefile.gif” alt=”Picture Description (for tag)” width=”100″ height=”200″ /></li>

TIP:
You shouldn’t change the size of your image using the size attributes, but you should specify the actual size attributes of each image. The page is layed out to its final structure before all the images are loaded, so without size attributes, text and other pictures can get bounced around as room is made for each image that is still loading.

Brandi Travis

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Keeping Your Website Content Fresh

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Keeping Your Website Content Fresh

We all know that the best way to keep traffic coming back to a website is to kee the content fresh and interesting. But the challenge is, how to do that with limited time and resources?

One of our favorite ways to accomplish this goal is by incorporating widgets into our clients’ website content. There are a ton of politically minded widgets available, and many of them don’t cost anything.

A few examples:

WidgetBox has a free app that will let you create your own widget from any blog, RSS feed, flickr account, and a host of other sources. I created one for our blog (posted below).

OpenCongress has a Bill Tracker widget that will post the most recent status of any bill in Congress.

Need some additional ideas about how to keep your web content fresh? Give us a call!

Amy Meli
Director, Grassroots Services

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Public Affairs Council – Grassroots Conference

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

by Kate O’Donnell

While grassroots was certainly the name of the game at last week’s Public Affairs Council Conference in Orlando, a Saturday morning session focused on a different perspective – grasstops! Your organization’s grasstops advocates are those who have personal relationships with key decision-makers or elected officials. Leveraging these relationships can mean the difference between success and failure in your advocacy efforts!

Ilona Piaskowy from the Association of Public Television Stations and Robert Sommer from Rock Entertainment Management presented great strategies and best practices for identifying, engaging, and utilizing your grasstops advocates.

1. Maintain regular communication: Ilona discussed the monthly conference calls she has with her grasstops advocates, and the importance of follow-up if you think a member’s interest is waning.
2. Planning and strategy: Robert reminded the audience that grasstops advocates are usually very busy people, so it’s best to be strategic with your requests and not overwhelm them. Think about what each advocates is best suited for, and what tasks they are most likely to follow though on.
3. Preparation and training: Both presenters discussed the importance of properly training and preparing your grasstops advocates so they feel comfortable talking to legislators and elected officials about your goal.

This was a very interesting session, because both Ilona and Robert provided case studies on cultivating grasstops at their respective organizations. It was a great way to wrap up the conference!

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You know that everyone can see that, right?

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

people around computer The problem with being fascinated by a communication medium is that it can cause communicators to lose focus on what is really important in communications – crafting the message.

It appears that some are fascinated with Twitter to the point that they seem to believe it offers them a magical, protected space in which to communicate. Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts included a list of recent Twitter related happenings in their Washington Post column, The Reliable Source, which illustrates this notion:

Jim Larranaga, Head Coach of the George Mason men’s basketball posted a tweet poking fun at NCAA regulations that limit snacks that coaches can offer players. Commentators picked it up and it got out of control. Larranaga had to do some public damage control and on August 23rd he announced his retirement from Twitter…via a tweet.
Alice Hoffman, best-selling novelist, posted her displeasure with Boston Globe book reviewer Roberta Silman as a “moron” and “snarky critic” in two respective tweets. Hoffman has since apologized and shut down her Twitter account.
Rock star Courtney Love invited a libel law suit from a designer whom she allegedly tweeted was a drug addict and a “nasty lying hosebag thief.”
NBA player Michael Beasley of the Miami Heat tweeted a link to a photograph of his new tattoo; in the background of the picture were, regrettably, some baggies that looked suspicious. He announced, soon after, that he was entering rehab.
Dallas Mavericks NBA team owner Mark Cuban criticized referees on Twitter. He was fined $25,000 by the league.
Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich) tweeted out his travel status – “Just landed in Baghdad”. The problem being, however, that he was on a supposed-to-be-secret congressional trip.

Fascination with Twitter did not cause these communications. Many from this list have expressed themselves similarly, and with similar result, on other mediums before. Larranaga and Hoffman, however, have both left Twitter altogether…wisely, one might say.

It that seems they recognized Twitter is now a mass communications medium, with all of the same pros and cons as any other. And, they seem to have accepted that they, personally, do not have the message discipline to use it to further their goals, rather than detract from them.

- Scott Castleman

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The White House Takes It to the Grassroots

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Following up on what Ezra Klein and I were saying about the grassroots politics of the health care debate, it looks like the Obama administration is organizing the millions of people who do want to see health care reform come to pass. From the Washington Post:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see” online testimonials, blog posts, Twitter messages, YouTube videos by Cabinet secretaries and “countless other vehicles that can help make the case for reform in a proactive fashion,” Phil Singer, Democratic communications specialist, said.

The White House is gearing up to do what it did so well during the election — using a mix of new media strategies and old-school grassroots activism to push its message and rally support.

The White House has launched a blog and video titled Facts are Stubborn Things, hoping to mobilize Obama’s millions of activists who supported him during the campaign.

Jeff Jarvis, director of interactive journalism program at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, said the White House video on YouTube that rebuts inaccuracies is important and effective.

Performing a “fact-check” role “adds value,” he said. But he called the Obama video, which has the president describing his daily ritual of reading 10 letters from average Americans each day, “overproduced.”

During the campaign, the Obama team “did these more intimate, personal videos, and they’ve kind of stopped,” Jarvis said.

(If you were to know more about those videos and lessons to learn from them, I wrote about it here.)

So can Obama recreate his campaign magic? Will his supporters prove an effective counter protest to the so-called “tea bag” protesters? We’ll find out in September when Congress reconvenes from recess.

– Francoise Galleto

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Twitter in Plain English

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Starbucks, Comcast, Dell = Tweet, Tweet, Tweet.

Starbucks is using Twitter, Comcast is using Twitter, and Dell is using Twitter. Many corporations are using Twitter as part of their promotion, brand recognition, brand perception repair, customer service, polling and other core business communications uses. Missing from this list of uses, notably, are those related to grassroots advocacy and other political involvement communications. Why is this?

January 2009 numbers from Nielsen for Twitter were 7 million unique visitors and a year-over-year growth rate of 1382%! With these numbers, it seems to be maturing nicely, though I am still not in the camp that says if you are not on Twitter, you are crippling your ability to be successful.

If you have (or your boss has) interest in Twitter but no time to teach yourself a whole new medium, I found a light-hearted You Tube video that I would recommend, called Twitter in Plain English:

Within twenty seconds, you will learn:

“Of course we have email, blogs and phones to keep us connected. But you wouldn’t send an email to a friend to tell them you have are having coffee. Your friend doesn’t NEED to know that.”

There it is — two general differences between a tweet and an email. 1. A tweet (just like this blog you are reading right now) is created and made accessible on the Web for those who want to see it; emails, however, are created and actively sent to the audience, whether they wanted it or not. 2. Email is accepted as a mainstream method of delivering information that people need to know; Twitter, is a way to share information with people that might want to know.

After watching the video, come back and click to see what communications Starbucks, Comcast, and Dell have access to on their Twitter pages, just to get your strategic juices flowing! Can you think of any Twitter uses for your political involvement programs, your advocates or organizations?

– Scott Castleman

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July’s SMC-DC Happy Hour

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

I had another great time at the July Social Media Club happy hour last week. This time, we met at Bar Louie in Chinatown, and caught up over beers and tatziki. It was great to see old friends and meet new people — and share some hilarious first date stories with @blairgoldberg (he collects them).

– Francoise Galleto