Liveblogging the FTC Workshop on Native Advertising
This post offers a live blog of the FTC’s Workshop on native advertising, “Blurred Lines: Advertising or Content” held in Washington, DC on December 4.
ethics
Coping with the Klout Reality
Marketers and individuals will have to deal with social scoring in the form of Klout and its sister technologies.
As time progresses, technologies and alliances evolve. I haven’t written about Klout outside of general discussions on social scoring for a good long while.
There wasn’t much to say. I agreed in principal with many of my colleagues and their continuing coverage about the broken nature of influence metrics.
But I had a second reason: As a professional communicator, it’s become increasingly clear that we won’t escape Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.
The business marketplace cannot help itself. It will chase quick fixes to community building, recruitment and measuring individual online capabilities, making social scoring an obvious play. I have three reasons for coming to this conclusion.
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The Big Facebook Screw
Since Facebook’s mandatory Timeline conversion and IPO last spring, we’ve been screwed.
In what can only be described as the coup d’etat of strategy plays, Facebook got the world and businesses hooked on its network. Then the social network leveraged its monopoly power, and pulled the ultimate bait and switch in history. Facebook implemented its Timeline interface.
Timeline sabotaged traditional brand page performance, created a money generation vehicle, and sacrificed its users privacy for business purposes.
The PR Industry Can’t Help Itself
Of all the professional skill groups that can be included in the marketing toolkit, public relations is the most ridiculous (PR is also used for public affairs and other non-marketing activities). Filled with backwards unethical and untrained professionals that consistently spam people and promote attention metrics instead of actual outcomes, the PR profession can’t help its poor image.
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Is Big Data a Good Thing?
Image via thealphaquadrant.blogspot.com Big Data is a crazy reality that we have created with society’s many digital input devices, from street cameras to the common smartphone (sorry, Trekkies). There is so much data available that computing algorithms are needed to… Read More »Is Big Data a Good Thing?
The Unwritten Rule on Talking About Clients
Image by Hamed Saber The Burson Marstellar Facebook fiasco brings up an important issue: Talking about your clients publicly. Burson’s statement doesn’t cut the mustard for owning the issue, and seems to slough off responsibility on Facebook and the media… Read More »The Unwritten Rule on Talking About Clients
One Year Later: BP Still Hasn’t Learned Ethics
Communications from BP in recent weeks claim the oil company has reversed the damage from the Deep Horizon oil spill, both environmentally and economically. This communications effort flies in the face of factual reality of dead wildlife, decimated fishing careers,… Read More »One Year Later: BP Still Hasn’t Learned Ethics
The Ethics of Flash Mobs
Image by Anorak News In December of last year, Anonymous hackers teamed to hack U.S. sites and post angry messages of dissent against U.S. companies that withdrew support of Wikileaks. Last October, when ace photography blogger Scott Bourne posted on… Read More »The Ethics of Flash Mobs