ANA Marketing Maestros

Who Owns the Information on Your Facebook Page?

By Cara Brooke Schultz

Social media can be defined as "activities, practices, and behaviors among communities of people who gather online to share information, knowledge, and opinions using conversational media," according to The Social Media Bible. Just a few months ago you might have read about Facebook’s privacy transition. With the transition, Facebook users’ names, profile photos, gender, and hometown suddenly became publicly available information, when previously only your name and network were publicly available.

 

Now Canada has slapped Facebook with a class-action suit saying the transition violated Canadian privacy and consumer protection laws. The class-action suit claims that Facebook made money from its customers’ personal data by letting third parties use it for targeted online advertising campaigns.

How do you feel about these new privacy transitions? Do you feel like you own the information on your Facebook page, or does Facebook own that information?

Chime in with your thoughts!

Is Facebook Making You Frown? Social Media Marketing Is a Ton of Work!

By Cara Brooke Schultz

Social media burst onto the scene, but like any new medium, it has brought with it a slew of questions. Marketers are asking, “How do I deal with…

• Privacy issues in social networking?”
• Data safety—visitors can get hit by identify theft and frauds?”
• Negative or undesirable posts?” 

At last week’s Advertising Law & Public Policy Conference presented by Microsoft several of the speakers weighed in with their opinions. During the presentation by Douglas J. Wood, senior partner, Reed Smith LLP; Christopher Sloan, assistant vice president and senior corporate counsel, Liberty Mutual Group; Divya Narendra, chief executive officer and co-founder, Sumzero.com we learned that in order for a company to actively participate in social media the company must enable conversations, monitor conversations, influence conversations, react to conversations, and monetize conversations—which translates into saying, “no you cannot just set up a Facebook fan page and walk away.” 

Seems like a lot of work huh? Well it is, and it doesn’t just stop there—with your new social media sites your company needs to adopt a social media policy for internal and external communications. A key point to keep in mind as you dive into social media, “don’t ban what you can’t stop.” Social media is not ending anytime soon, in fact recent statistics state the sites are still growing at a rapid rate, “Two yeas ago, 20 percent of survey respondents were using social networks and social media, now that figure is 66 percent,” (Research Report: Harnessing the Power of Never Media Platforms for More Effective Marketing, 2nd Edition. ANA 2009). 

For more information about the conference, visit our Web site. 

The Great Intellectual Property Debate

By Will Waugh

"We can't control it, we must try to direct."

I have had the privilege of spending the last two days with advertising lawyers and business affairs types at our Advertising Law and Business Affairs Conference. The above quote was provided by a panelist during a discussion on the future of intellectual property and individual rights. As we all know, ads are getting mocked, morphed and commercialized without advertiser consent. More times than none, talent and musicians are also getting infringed. Two of the brands represented, Elizabeth Arden (with their Britney Spears' fragrances) and Limited Brands (with Victoria Secret) have been subjected to numerous consumer-generated interpretations.

Some of their advice in facing this new reality:

• You must have a policing policy in place, but you can only protect so much.
• Make sure it's not your people doing it (whether in-house or agency).
• Look at what the cost/benefit analysis is.
• The dilemma is that alot of brands needs to be in this space so what is the balance between protecting and engaging.

One also referenced the Monday New York Times article "Hollywood Asks YouTube: Friend or Foe" highlighting what they felt was the most telling statement, as quoted by Universal chair Mark Shmuger - "I think that the marketing side of our company and the copyright-protection side have contradictory impulses."

In researching this post, I found an interesting article on the use or non-use of the word 'intellectual property' on a site called P2P Foundation -- a site with a lengthy mission, it's first component being - "that technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens it."

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