The 435 Digital Crew is thrilled to annouce that both our panels at Social Media Week Chicago, How to Make Facebook Ads Work for Your Business and 435 Digital On Integrated Marketing, sold out in short order. But we’d be lying if we said we weren’t looking forward to checking out the multitude of other panels, parties, and networking events that will be put on by our industry colleagues and peers.

Of course, if you’re visiting Chicago for the first time, you also want to make sure to take in some of the sights and sounds of our fantastic city. 435 Digital members recommend taking the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s river cruse, taking a picture of your reflection in Cloud Gate (or, as locals affectionately call it, “The Bean,” hitting up Gino’s East for a slice of deep dish Chicago heaven, and heading up to Second City for some belly laughs. Of course, you can’t beat a stroll up the Magnificent Mile no matter what time of day (or year) you can fit it in.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the Social Media Week Chicago schedule,you can do so here. You should also make sure to follow the Social Media Week Chicago blog, which, in addition to insightful posts on the current state of social media in our world, is also interviewing and previewing many of the week’s speakers.

Registration for Social Media Week events is free, but you do have to register and reserve a seat for most events, so get to it! We hope to see you all next week.

The post 435 Digital Takes On Social Media Week Chicago appeared first on 435 Digital.

“The new Levi’s collection was designed with you in mind. And we would like you to represent it,” reads a photo uploaded by Levi’s to the site. “It could be you, it could be someone you know, it could be someone you’d like to know.”

The positive press plus all the great photos already uploaded makes the campaign is a win-win for Levi’s. The toughest thing the company will have to do is go through all the photos and make a decision.

View #IAMLEVIS Instagram photos through Web viewer Statigr.am/iamlevis.

The post Levi’s showcases Instagram’s focus on business appeared first on 435 Digital.

Follow the advice of  Johnny Mercer’s great song when it comes to working social media channels like Yelp.

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

Do a self-check. It’s hard to take criticism and it could be that the customer is being a pill that day, but still be mindful and aware of the feedback you are getting.  When you see a forlorn face at the  counter or the customer sends back his breakfast untouched, ask yourself whether this is a situation you can do something about proactively — right now.  Taking action with intention and humor could  prevent a bad Yelp review — in the future.

Don’t ignore negative reviews. Instead respond with an explanation and offer to make things right. Perhaps offer the disgruntled customer a free desert  or another perk next time they are in.

You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene

Invite customers  to spread the joy. Ask your repeat customers who like you to say something nice. Make a humble request: “If you like what we are doing and you feel so moved, please let others know on Yelp or the other social networks you use. ” Put a sign on your counter: “We love your feedback” and list  the social networks you are on. By the way, if you have a Facebook page, use it or really you will “lose it” and any benefits it could bring to your business.

The post Accentuate the positive on Yelp appeared first on 435 Digital.

In a nutshell, here’s how Ohanian says social on the Internet works, what he jokingly calls that “great big secret.”

• The Internet is a level playing field. All links are equal. To rise, you need to catch some attention. Attention is the new currency. Do something fun and cool.
• It costs very little to get  content online. Video, audio, writing, photography, your thought processes, whatever — all it costs is your effort, a little time and the willingness to explore to publish, produce and promote yourself.
• Put yourself out there. Distribution costs are little. What you need to do is win an audience. And when your  audience has  audiences, iteration is  cheap.
• Be genuine. Be honest. Be up front. This is the  hardest principle for some to swallow. We’re used to operating in a command and control mode.  Let it go, take yourself less seriously. Tell the truth. And have some fun!

One founding principle underlies all this: Messaging is not top down anymore. Its grassroots up and coming from all sides. It’s a good thing. It can keep us more on target. As Tech Soup, an NPO consultancy to nonprofits, said:  “We’re often very different people from our supporters. The most successful marketing campaign might not be our favorite.” In this case losing control worked.

As Ohanian says: “Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say, ‘Mister Splashy Pants.’  ”

I know I do.

The post Reddit: Smarty Pants? Meet Mister Splashy Pants! appeared first on 435 Digital.

So I’m less interested in how Google+ and its brand pages operate than in how they will affect the equilibrium of the social Web.

I’ve been thinking about  what Google+ brands could mean specifically for local business.

Standard wisdom is that Facebook is all about sharing, and Google is all about searching.  Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that general wisdom when he spoke with Charlie Rose Monday night . If I had a nickel for every time Zuckerberg  said “share”….

With its 800 million users, Facebook is increasingly seen as an extremely rich dataset for marketing and as its own search engine. With the addition of Google+ and brand pages, Google has now boldly pushed into the sharing business.

The equilibrium between sharing and searching could now shift and its impact could be felt keenly by neighborhoods and local businesses.

Why do I say this?

When I spoke with Brian Solis, he said the story of the customer for the local business is an easy story to tell, as I outlined in my post Wednesday.

The local business is already tapping into the traditional neighborhood customers, those who make their choices based on word of mouth.  The neighborhood business is already connecting with the digital search customers, those people who head to a search engine, most likely Google, to find a restaurant or a local shop. But the local business that wants to grow might logically look to win over the connected consumers, those experiential curators who share everything they do on various networks like Facebook, Yelp, Blogger, Twitter, Trip Advisor, YouTube, you name it.

Solis said and I mostly agree that all a local business really needs to plug into the connected consumers these days is a Facebook page. They don’t even need a web site. I’ve written about this before, as well.

But Solis and I spoke before Google brand pages were unveiled.

I see the Google brand pages as a powerful mechanism for converting digital consumers to connected consumers, the group already growing in numbers. Google is already a monolith, a hulk of a destination where any search begins.

I can see that in a year’s time, we’ll have grown used to and come to expect Google’s plus ones, Direct Connects and other enhancements as every day efficiencies and services. Google is going to look like a totally different search engine and it will be a place for sharing because we will like the seamless way it shares. And I am betting Facebook — more subject to human errors of omitting useful information— might have  lost much of its luster as a place for brands although moms and dads and old classmates will still gather there.

As an example, tonight I headed over to Facebook  to look up my gym and find the time for a certain class – it wasn’t listed there.  So I headed over to Google where I saw the schedule, Yelp reviews of the class, a list of competitors and everything else I could possibly want.  Why even bother with Facebook, I asked myself. And soon, I expect my gym will have a Google+ brand page and then it will be a double why bother as I see my favorite instructors post there as well as hear about special programing.

Searching and sharing will be so much more powerful when it loses a click or two the way it can be done on Google.

Take a look at the graphic of the small business social media ecosystem from Intuit and let me know you think it might change after Google brand pages have been around a year — I think significantly. But you tell tell me what you think.

The post Google brands a powerful search and share for local biz appeared first on 435 Digital.

Solis has been in technology public relations since 1991. He began working with message boards, communities and early blogs in the 90s and started his own firm, FutureWorks in 1999. In March 2011,  he joined Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm that says it offers “pragmatic strategies to help companies thrive with disruptive technologies.”

You can pop in on Solis blog, which includes a series discussing the concepts in his new book, The End of Business as Usual, or  catch his insightful TV series, Revolution, on YouTube.

Solis has written perhaps the best book on online marketing for beginners, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web.  The End of Business as Usual is targeted toward emerging leaders, those change agents who want to revitalize the culture of business around customer experience.

The End of Business discusses traditional consumers, digital consumers and connected consumers, those experiential curators who feel it is their work to share their experiences. I’d say I’m one of them.

Solis has 109,000 followers on Twitter and was among the first to announce Google+ brand pages. Check out the “Ripples” to below see how influencers shared his initial blog post, which in a way embodies his view of how the connected consumer influences others.

I talked with Solis about how his work has evolved from the marketing department to the C-Suite [CEO level] and what the rise of the “connected consumer” could mean to the future of business.

Q: How do you see the principles outlined in The End of Business as Usual spinning forward in the future?

A. From years of working with my own agency, I realized that if I kept working with marketers and kept innovation within the marketing department I was never going to make an impact within the business.  I had aspirations of reaching the C-suite to say “Look at what is taking place here.  If you could lead the entire organization in this direction, you would not have to spend so much time reacting to markets but you could lead them.”

This was after the second revision of Engage, which was my homage and farewell to all of my private resources going to the marketing department and the customer service dept.

Then I started writing “The End of Business as Usual’ and joined Altimeter so I could get right into the C-suite.

Q. What’s the thrust of the book?

A. The idea is to take the principles of everything that we are learning from social media — authenticity, transparency, engagement, peer-to-peer interaction — and develop organizational empathy. This the ability to take insights away from customer activity and behavior and not just measure sentiment, but instead feel empathy, and inform business direction in a way that would be actually meaningful and relevant.

That was the idea.

After spending time with my agency over 13 years, I realized was getting sucked into the technology aspects of it. And I realized that with every new technology and  every new network I was applying the same types of principles.

In the end, I realized that these principles are less about the technology and more about the sociology. I realized that what was taking place was a new kind of customer emerging,

It is clear that this connected consumer shares real world experience. This is actually an important  inflection point for me personally.

I didn’t even realize that I was that new type of customer.

Q. What are the three types of customers?

The book breaks customers into three segments.

There’s the traditional customer. They read newspapers and magazines, watch television and go to real world events.

Then there is the digital or online consumer, This is is the person who begins all their searches on Google. They are very comfortable shopping from CraigsList . They are fine with eBay and fine with getting information from websites.

Finally, there is this idea of the connected consumer. This is what the first half of my new book really centers on.

And, no, connected consumers are not just millennials. And, no, they are not just the young person with a cell phone. The connected consumer is a person who realizes the benefits of connecting to other people like themselves. Over time, I saw that how the connected consumer finds and shares information, how they make decisions, is fundamentally different from the other two categories of consumers. Very little is shared in terms of similarities among the three.

So, it’s not because of social media. It’s not because of Facebook and Twitter.  It’s because the connected consumer has created an egosystem.

The egosystem is the result of interacting in these networks. Connected consumers have created their own egosystems where they’re creating this online experience based on who they are, what they know and what they value.

The fuel to egosystems — the thing that keeps them vibrant — is shared  experience.  What this means, what’s really profound, what really struck me is that if I am planning travel or have another decision to make, as a connected consumer I am not going to go to Google first.

I am going to go to my social networks and see what people are saying. I am going to read social review sites and see what people are experiencing and see if I can make a better decision that way.

There’s an example in the book of researching an airline. If I were the connected consumer, I am going to search it in Twitter and Facebook.

In this case as an experiment, I took the search results feeds from Twitter and Facebook, and put it into Wordle, which creates a word cloud of the most commonly used terms. The word cloud that came back based on these shared experiences was incredible. It was full of swear words. It was pretty unbelievable.

So then I did a funny thing. I went to the website and set the company’s website URL into Wordle to see the word cloud and I compared the two side by side.  What I saw was this: Here is what the company says about themselves. And here is what the connected consumer is experiencing.  The disconnect between the two is the future of business.

Q. But what about sample error, maybe the folks who complain are unusual or not representative of the customer experience?

A. I love that question!

There’s a multiple that was used before the Internet. If somebody hates an experience bad enough that they write a complaint letter they represent an X multiple of people who feel the same thing but just don’t write the letter.

With social networks, if I am asking the question [about sample error] I might not be able to get to the right answer. The right answer is not about what the customer  represents and whether or not they are the mass customer experience. Instead the question is about how important they are to the business based on who they are connected to. To the extent these businesses touch people that is what is important.

The digital native and the traditional native are actually decreasing in number and the connected consumer is increasing in number. So the connected consumer touches more people, and the more people that they touch become people who touch even more people. I call this the concept of the audience of audiences with audiences.

Solis uses this photo by Mollie Sterling of her class at the Missouri School of Journalism to illustrate the audience of audiences with audiences.

But what’s important to takeaway is that I’m not saying that we have to disengage with the traditional and the online consumers. They are important.  I am saying that we have to engage with different kinds of consumers differently. We have to augment our approach.

So for example, ATT has to recognize that unhappy customers are shaping people’s impressions. They might not be so willing to go in with the ATT iPhone next year. Maybe they will consider Verizon and Sprint because they want a better experience.

It forces companies to be a little bit more transparent, a little bit more honest to maybe say things like, “We hear you,” and “We are working on it, because we want you to enjoy the experience. “

Saying, “What problem? What are you talking about?” “We are the number one rated network” doesn’t help the company.  Empathy, however, does help the company. And so does creating a culture within the organization that can encourage empathy and employee engagement and honesty and then innovation based on that honesty, once the customer sees the company has kept its word.

All of these principles tend to humanize a business and the connected consumer is not the only who is going to benefit from that, everyone is going to benefit from that.

Q. What’s to stop an organization from pasting over the impression that it is changing when it is not.

A. Now that I am on the business side of things, working in the C-suite, I spend a lot of time in change management. I help the organization rethink its approach to the culture, the philosophy, down to the mission and the vision. And I ask how do we bring teams together that will lead change because it is really bigger than any one person.

This is where the Occupy movement took off.

It’s not about Facebook and Twitter getting credit for bringing about revolutions, the Egyptian revolution, the Libyan revolution and now the Occupy Wall St.  movement. Really these networks are one of many catalysts for change. They are just tools.

At the heart of change is any number of  things: repression, oppression, depression. The zest for change — that’s at the heart of the revolution.

It’s that change is facilitated much more quickly and easily because of social networks. People will share and get together and do something about it.

At any moment. the Occupy movement could fall in anyone’s lap. Whether change takes ten years or whether it takes five years doesn’t matter.  Because what has to happen is change, or at least a semblance of change, because change is what people want.

People will vote with their dollars and with their decisions. That’s why I call it Digital Darwinism because anybody who is going to wait it out is going to fall victim to natural selection.

Q. Change takes time ….

A. It is sand through an hour glass.  It is a matter of timing. This is why I believe we are at a crossroads.

This book is not for the social media champion, that person within the organization who is going to champion Facebook and Twitter internally. They will lead some great campaigns. But this book is not for them.

This book is for the change agent. This book is for the person willing to rile things up. It gives them fuel to do so, teaches them how to align the right people in the organization and how to make the case, how to bring about change because it is the right thing to do.

The last half of the book is about and for the change agent.

Q. What specific advice do you have for these leaders, these change agents.

A. You are at a crossroads.

You are on one of two kinds of people. First, you are really interested in new media and how it impacts them. Then, you are a person who really wants to bring about change.

These leaders have the  strength, the passion and the tenacity to make it happen.

This is where you see the new Brian Solis emerging.

I spent many years inside organizations and I was not satisfied seeing really important evolutions and revolutions taking place in the business world or in real life and having these insights and recognitions stuck in the silo of marketing, marketing communications and public relations and, to a lesser extent, customer service.

I just said, “Enough! You don’t need me to tell you social media is important.”

For those who want to keep growing and keep going on the path and see this through, then let’s bring about real change in the organization.  Here’s your book.

If not you can stop with Engage, which is still the best book out there to help people do online marketing the right way.

Q: What does all this mean for the local business world in neighborhoods?

This is an easier story to tell. In your neighborhood you will find three different type of people to come to your restaurant.

One is the traditional – the word of mouth. Then you will have the digital customer. They will find you from a Google search in the neighborhood.

Then you will have the connected consumer and they will ask their friends in FourSquare or their geolocal network Yelp . They will rely on their social network to tell them where to go.

What happens next? Someone goes to your restaurant and they have a horrible experience. Then the online customer will find some traditional review sites and say: “Don’t go there.”

They you get the connected consumer – they will leave something on Yelp, they will blog about it, they might even say something on YouTube.

Whatever the networks they use, the connected consumer will leave eggs there because that’s what they do.

They feel almost like an experiential curator. They feel it is important and up to them to make sure that their social graf understands their experience. This is true for good experiences as well.

All these customers are important to your business and you cannot reach them all one way.

So the question is how are you reaching and engaging the connected segment.  In an example in the book, I talk about a chocolate shop that decided to take out print ads.

Oddly enough the print ad brought in 1 person and it cost $200. Foursquare brought in 24 customers in the first week.

The traditional and digital customer will find us the way they have always found us. But if we are trying to grow our business, we need to reach people where they are.

To be honest with you, Facebook is the homepage for a local busienss social web. Now it’s the place for the traditional and the digital customer. You can design Facebook to be your website.

That why I don’t drink the kool aid anymore. I get the why. Now show me the how.

The post Brian Solis: What the C-suite can learn from connected consumers appeared first on 435 Digital.

If you don’t get off Facebook much, you might want to meander around Kickstarter and see what’s playing front page. Your friends or your kids have probably sent you to this service that provides a great set of tools — from video to messaging to marketing advice — to help you fundraise for your project.  There’s one caveat. You have a deadline for raising your nut and if you don’t make it, you’re out.  A stroll around Kickstarter is always amazing , often moving and usually inspiring.  Seeing others creations might give you some ideas for your own.

This week, I stumbled upon a Kickstarter project: Good Ol’ Freda.  Freda Kelly was the secretary for The Beatles from the early days at the Cavern Club until 1970.  She’s still a secretary and until now has been mum about her life with the fab four. Now she’s opened up her scrapbooks to a filmmaker and they are looking to raise $50,000 by Nov. 12 for their film project.  Shes offering all kinds of goodies in exchange for your donation.

Another place to easily get lost in a wonderland is YouTube. And not just in the old music video section.  There’s real talent at work here making excellent niche TV shows that are better than the best of Hollywood, precisely because they are so deeply engaging with their audiences.  A fan girl friend recently pointed me toward Issa Rae’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which Rae creates and stars in.  The production values and acting are very good. But the writing is superb and funny.

Or if you are feeling geeky, you can head on over to the Twit netcast network, “Netcasts you love from people you trust.” Here you’ll  find some inspiration for that underused conference room, that yoga studio that’s empty during the day or the slow time at the café in the afternoon. Set up a stage and some talkative folks and you have a TV show. OK.  The folks on This Week in Google aren’t every day people — they are some of the  Internet’s most prominent thinkers —  but you never know what talent lives in your building or up the block.

I was bungling around on Facebook and found actor friend Don Bender  is involved in a new online theaterical production by Jamil Khoury, Silk Road Rising, which he says is engaging theater onstage and online around important issues.  His play, Mosque Alert, is about  ”Two suburban American families living in Naperville, IL -one Christian, the other Muslim- find their lives torn apart by a proposal to build a new mosque in their community.”

Khoury says:

In the hopes of generating deeper engagement around this issue, I have designed a ten-step, interactive, on-line, new play development process that will assist me in developing and writing my play “Mosque Alert.” Viewers are encouraged to both influence and assist me as I pen this new play.

My ten step artistic process allows each participant to act as co-creator throughout the entire development cycle. I like to think of it as a spiritual convening of the individual with the art.

Each of these is a narrowcast co-creation with a passionate audience. It’s the way the future of the Internet is rolling out. There are millions of  ideas blossoming. Yours could be one of them. If you know who your people are, you can find your idea. It can be as simple to execute [the writing wasn't simple] as a humorous tweetalogue  like Dan Sinker’s Mayor Emanuel, which started as an anonymous satire of then Chicago Mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel and ended up as a book. Or it can be as elaborate as a traveling global round robin musical like Playing for Change, which made its name with Stand by Me.  Take some time to stroll around and fire your imagination. Let us know what you find and most important what you and your colleagues dream up for yourselves.  We’d love to hear about it.

The post Narrowcasts showcase creativity on social Web appeared first on 435 Digital.

A few questions to ask yourself. Could your company be this radical? At this point in time, do you see value in these ideas? Or do these ideas sound crazy? Viewed on a spectrum of publicness from 1 through 5, where would your company place for each value?

The Radically Public Company would:

• Encourage all of its employees to use the tools of the public net to have direct and open relationships with customers – answering questions, hearing and implementing ideas, solving problems and improving products.
• Open up as much data as possible about its products and processes, including even design specifications, sales and repair data and customer feedback as well as provenance of the ingredients and parts it uses
• Become collaborative, opening up design, support, marketing, and even strategy, to its public, releasing plans and beta products in process.
• Possibly all but eliminate advertising, relying on customers to sell products for them.
• Reveal and explain everything it does with customer information, giving customers a simple means to opt in and out and to correct data.
• Make all customer data portable, letting us leave and take our information — emails, purchases, preferences, connections, creations, friends everything — elsewhere.
• Open its books, even its salaries, to public view.
• Operate under open standards. That way it could run more efficiently, using off the shelf parts and software, benefiting from others innovations.
• See itself as a member of an ecosystem more than as a conglomerate that wants to control all that it surveys.
• See itself as a platform or network, more than the owners of assets.
• Institute new kinds of governance. What if it had a constitution and a bill of rights that everyone — employees, customers, suppliers and executives— could rely on.
• Have a CEO who is the leader of something more than just a company: perhaps of a community, a movement, a mission?

Let me know what you think.

The post Public Parts: Rules for the Radically Public Company appeared first on 435 Digital.

With tools like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, a nonprofit  can update their sites with a few clicks. In my experience, I’ve found many nonprofit executives think their website and social media presence has to be expensive and complicated, and they don’t take advantage of the passion of their  fans to populate their YouTube,  Flickr and other channels. I suspect that the reason large size and budget is not necessarily an indicator of  effective use of social media has more to do with internal politics than anything else.  Internal politics is also likely the reason for relatively scant use of Twitter by  the surveyed nonprofits.

After looking through the results, I had additional questions, which Craig and  collaborator  Allyson Kapin of RAD Campaign answered for me.

Q. When you were doing this study, how were you measuring effectiveness?
A. We wanted to know if the top nonprofits, ranked by net income, were the ones actually being the most effective with social media. We looked at how active they were on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, how many followers they had, how often they engaged with “their people” on these social platforms and to some extent, where we could see the data, if their followers/likers were being engaged by “Liking” and commenting on their Facebook posts, and retweeting  them on Twitter.

Q. Give the simplicity of adding SM media, why are so many NPOs NOT using all the buttons? Is it because of the complexity of their website build outs?
A. Nonprofits are strapped for resources. Many don’t have the budget to have web developers and social media staff to manage their website and social media presence. However, in this day and age, it’s very important that nonprofits carve out some time and resources to address this.  This is where their supporters are and spend a chunk of their time.

Q. Did this research provide any insights into what the challenges are for NPOs in using social media?
A. While our data did not look this per say, we do feel that the biggest challenge here is staffing and resources, which I mentioned above.

Q. Did this research help you understand ways that would be cost-effective and easy for NPOs to improve their social media presence? And will you be sharing those understandings?
A. We recommend that nonprofits utilize 5 key strategies to improve their social media presence.
1.      Provide engaging and relevant content about some of the great work you are doing.
2.      Don’t be wonky. Social media is about being “social”.
3.      Foster conversations. Ask your followers/likers for their opinions.
4.      Be responsive. This is about building a community.
5.      Practice dipping in and out of social media in 10- to 15-minute increments.

Q. It seems that those NPOs — like the Red Cross — that have a critical mission seemed better able to develop a critical mass and a conversation in all channels. Did you get any feedback relevant to that?
A. The Red Cross has at least 2 social media staffers who do a great job engaging people on social networks. They understand the space and how to connect with people, particularly in natural disasters — as we all witnessed during the earthquake in Haiti.  They are also incredibly responsive to the community, which is so important.

Q. What about fundraising? Did you look at those tools and their effectiveness?
A. No this study did not look at that.

Q. This survey seemed like the first step in a deeper analysis, ie. it did not really draw any conclusions. Will there be a second round in this research?
A. The biggest take-away from the study was that income doesn’t necessarily increase a nonprofit’s interactions on social media. Some of the most engaged organizations on social media are not the one’s with the highest income on the list, yet they are doing a good job with their social media. Why? Because they are fostering engaging conversations and interactions.

We are releasing another infographic in early November that looks at nonprofit verticals ranging from Veterans to Environmental organizations and how they do social media.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Among the survey’s findings:

• 92% of the top 50 nonprofits have at least 1 social media presence on their homepage.
• The most followers that an organization has on Twitter is 840,653 (PBS).
• On the other hand, the organization following the most people is following 200,522 (The American Cancer Society)!
• The American Red Cross was the first organization on the list to create a Twitter account.
• Food for the Poor is the most talkative organization on Facebook, and has posted 220 posts over the course of 2 months.
• The organization with the highest net income, the YMCA, only posted 19 times to Facebook in 2 months, but has over 24,000 Fans.

The post Biggest nonprofits aren’t necessarily best at social media appeared first on 435 Digital.

Cmp.ly makes it easy for a brand to signal the presence of a material connection — payment of any sort— between itself, bloggers and other digital producers through a system called iconic compliance. Using Cmp.ly,  a brand sets up an iconic tag  at the beginning of a social media campaign and then invites its influencers to participate. All social media elements materially connected to the brand running that campaign — from Tweets to blogs — clearly signal the degree of their relationship — from promo to sponsorship — by using the appropriate icon. Consumers will see immediately whether a blog post, Tweet or video is materially connected.

Cmp.ly was created as a solution when the FTC updated  its guidelines related to testimonials and endorsements Oct. 5, 2009, extending them to the digital sphere.

Industry observers say the FTC update  was past due.

“The FTC has not done a terrific job of protecting consumers,” said Joe Cappo, who was a publisher for 20 years at Crain Communications, and who now consults and teaches at DePaul University, Chicago. “There are no rules to govern all this stuff. “

“When a media becomes as important as network television, I think someone needs to step in and set up the ground rules. “

“I believe that a lot of bad information creates the demand for good information,” Cappo said. “There are too many bloggers who don’t care, who are just doing it to make money or to make trouble. Can we regulate it? It would be very difficult.“

The FTC update caused an uproar among bloggers at the time. Some felt the Internet rules  stomped on their rights to free speech and they criticized the rules for being impossible to implement.

Internet marketer and social media guru Chris Brogan responded  to the FTC by calling out to bloggers to provide voluntary full disclosure.  Brogan’s marketing company specializes in developing social media marketing campaigns for brands. At the same time, a blog disclosurepolicy.org was launched to help bloggers  develop their own full disclosure rules – the site has not been updated recently.

“Traditionally journalists had certain ethical standards to abide by, while Joe Shmo on the street — did not necessarily,” said Daliah Saper, a Chicago-based attorney at a recent session on the FTC rules at Social Media Week Chicago. “The traditional definition of journalists does not exist necessarily any more and that is why the new media guidelines were added,” she added.

But brands, not blogs, are the focus of FTC scrutiny and the solutions developed by Cmp.ly meet FTC regulations exactly, said Ruth Wagner, VP Sales/Shareholder for the company who was also present at the Social Media Week session.

Wagner says cmp.ly is the only commercial solution available and that it is at the vanguard of a move toward transparency and full disclosure.

“The adaption of social media transparency and cmp.ly are identical. “ she said.

The FTC has indicated it will be increasing its watch for brands that are engaging in deceptive practices. In one recent case, Legacy Learning Systems was required to pay the FTC a $250,000 penalty and is subject to monthly audits for 20 years. Other cases include Reverb Communications.

On its website, Cmp.ly says it has three goals:

Simplify and standardize regulatory compliance and disclosures so businesses can contribute to an open, transparent marketplace and build trust with consumers

Enable companies of any size to meet regulatory and disclosure challenges in an efficient, cost-effective manner

Provide consumers with a simple way to recognize and understand business relationships, affiliations, and marketing practices

For brands, the first two goals ease operations under FTC guidelines.

From my perspective as an individual who uses the Internet to research products, the third is music to my ears. The lack of transparency on the Web has undermined the ethical fabric of all our transactions there. I simply don’t know who to trust and I’m not alone in that. Free blogging tools have been around for only ten years, but I shudder to think what the blogosphere will look like in another ten without some oversight.

Using the Cmp.ly solution are LinkedIn, EBay, Hewlett Packard, Infinity, Ford, JC Penny and Ugg Australia, among others, Wagner said. Cmp.ly is also developing solutions for the highly regulated financial and health industries.

While brands must pay to use Cmp.ly, individuals can use the cmp.ly system for free. In addition, Cmp.ly links provide appropriate social media analytics to measure the success of a campaign.

Although brands have found an exciting new marketing channel in social media, it’s time to slow down and refine  practices used in word of mouse marketing.

To my mind, tools like Cmp.ly could significantly quiet the marketing stream for consumers.

It’s getting very loud out there on the virtual continent that is the Internet. Some days I’d just as soon listen to a jackhammer as look at my email so clogged is it with email newsletters reciting the charms of something I don’t want. In its outermost public circle, Twitter is blatting out marketing messages that pollute my stream of must see information. Google+ is great for my more thoughtful friends – thankfully a little quieter than Facebook, where a feed now calls out at every tiny touch between entities – brands, friends, causes, colleagues and family. Give me some earplugs and a blindfold or better yet it’s time to turn off the Macbook and go outside.

This would be shortsighted, however, because the social web is here to stay. If we can all hold on, the next wave of disruption promises to offer some help for ordering this chattering assault into something resembling harmony.

I am on the lookout for tools that will help with this transition.  I think one such tool could be Cmp.ly.

If you know of others, please let me know.

The post Is squeaky clean for FTC next wave in social media branding? Hope so. appeared first on 435 Digital.