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January 28, 2008

boingboing sorts out Ford Mustang Club social media confusion

By Charlie Kondek

boingboing's Cory Doctorow has an insightful take on a recent kerfuffle between a Ford Mustang fan club, Ford Motor Company, and Cafe Press. In a nutshell: CafePress told the car club they could not use images of Mustangs in their fan materials. But then Ford let CafePress and the fan club know that this was, in fact, allowable, and a misunderstanding involving the legal wing of Ford. Doctorow's conclusion:

There's a couple of interesting lessons for Ford and CafePress to take away from this. For Ford (and companies like it), the lesson is surely to tighten the reins on your legal department. When they send stern letters to online service providers that threaten legal action, the natural outcome is that OSPs are going to get gun-shy — and they'll tell your fans that they can't do anything and blame it all on you. The usual overkill approach from corporate counsel will come back and bite you on the ass.

For CafePress, the lesson is to take your customers' side when the law is with them. Even if Ford did tell CafePress to kill the BMC calendar, they'd have been wrong. The BMC calendar is legal — even without Ford's blessing — and when you protect yourself from legal liability by shutting it down, you incur PR liability by seeming like a bunch of candy-asses who can be bullied into submission by a memo from some white-shoe legal goon from a Fortune 100. Word gets around.

Posted by Alicia Dorset at 11:00 AM
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January 25, 2008

Judging a MySpace page by its cover

By Nichole Woodcock

It seems like every client is working to create the next great application on Facebook or a page on MySpace. Let’s all welcome Harper Collins to the game. Recently, the publishing company launched their very own page on MySpace, MySpace/HarperTeen, in hopes to tap into the elusive teen demographic.

With blogs and chats by authors, book release information, videos, contests and polls, MySpace/HarperTeen is hoping to encourage young bookworms to interact and invite other teens to the site.

The MySpace/HarperTeen page is filled with featured authors and books, illustrated on a bulletin board filled with various sticky notes and news. I was personally a fan of the forums they host on the site. Teens have a chance to share their writings amongst their peers, and hopefully have Harper Collins add their reviews of the works.

To keep the fan base in the know, MySpace/HarperTeen distributes various updates for book recommendations and the latest releases, encouraging members to discuss books on message boards.

The latest push on MySpace/HarperTeen was to promote “Create and Share,” a creative writing contest where teens submitted original works of poems, songs and short stories. A panel of HarperTeen judges selected the finalists for the $5,000-grand-cash-prize. From there, the MySpace/HarperTeen community voted contestants on. However, the promotion didn’t receive a lot of mainstream coverage and the number of entries is unclear.

Regardless, Harper Collins is making an effort in the educational direction. But, after spending time on the site, I found that underneath the message of supporting teens to read and write, the corporate shadow looms, pointing teens to read books they publish. It’s probably only a matter of time before competing publishers jump on board these types of social networking initiatives, too.

Posted by Alicia Dorset at 11:44 AM
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January 24, 2008

Mark your calendars and delete your MySpace?

By Alicia Dorset

You’ve got just one week to say goodbye to all 800 of your MySpace friends if you’re planning on participating in International Delete Your MySpace Account Day on Jan. 30.

Constant band friend requests, spam comments and inappropriate inbox messages have driven blogger Simon Owens to present the reasons why he hates the still-No.1 social networking site. Check out his post for all 10, but my favorite has to be No. 3:

“You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the middle east.”

I’ve definitely had my fair share of date offers, but I don’t think I’d delete four years of my social networking life because of it. I agree with Mark Hopkins on his take on the idea:

“Personally, even though I experience most of the same things that Simon says he goes through with MySpace, many of the folks in my less tech savvy circles of friends use MySpace exclusively. For me to nuke that account would be the same as deleting my contact database. I don’t know that I could personally join Simon in his campaign to end his MySpace involvement, but I can definitely see the motivation.”

Owens disgust with MySpace reflects a growing trend from many users on the site. People are tired of the spam, obnoxious layouts and numerous 18-year-old girls named “Theresa” asking to be their friends. But while Owens’ wish to delete his account is representative of many MySpacers’ feelings, it’s in no way the majority.

Yesterday’s post from eMarketer reports that MySpace is still the No. 1 social networking site, taking 72% of all social networking visits in 2007, according to Hitwise. And while Facebook continues to constantly gain traffic and members, the site received only 16% of all social networking visits last year.

So if you plan on deleting your MySpace account next week, or in the big picture, advising your clients not to get involved with the site, remember this- for every hot(t) spring break ’05 picture “Theresa” wants you to look at, there are two people out there who genuinely want to be your friend or hear your message.

Posted by Alicia Dorset at 02:39 PM
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January 22, 2008

Go red with this community

Campbell's has teamed up with the American Heart Association to help spread the word about Go Red for Women, an annual campaign aimed at promoting heart disease awareness for women.

The Red Dress Community allows users to create their own red dress, complete with accessories, and share the things they love most in life while providing a statement on why they love their own heart and how they keep it healthy. I made my own dress, seen above.

I really enjoy the site and the ability to make a dress, but I think Campbell's missed the boat on the full social networking benefits this idea could have provided. With more than 1,110 dresses to look at , the search function is a little clunky, and there are no options to embed the dress you make on your own blog, Flickr account, Facebook profile, etc. We all saw the viral benefits of the Simpsons avatars from last summer, and with a little more thought, Campbell's could have had a winner just like that, too.

Posted by Alicia Dorset at 04:32 PM
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January 18, 2008

Scrabble, You're Making A Mistake

By Charlie Kondek

A year and a half ago, two entrepreneurs from India made an online version of Scrabble called Scrabulous. It's become a wildly popular Facebook application, and toymakers Hasbro and Mattel, who own the game, are now demanding that the game be removed from the internet. In my opinion that's a mistake, particularly on Facebook, where Scrabulous lives and breathes to the tune of half a million users per day.

I learned about Scrabulous recently from a client who plays five games at a time with friends on Facebook. I became eager to join in but soon learned the Scrabulous application was the subject of a cease and desist action. I also learned soon after of the Facebook-based effort to Save Scrabulous, currently at 30,000 members and climbing. There's also a fan group for Scrabulous, which has more than 36,000 members.

The makers of Scrabble should come to some kind of agreement that keeps the Scrabulous train rolling, for several reasons. In the first place, you can't buy the kind of publicity Scrabulous has gotten on Facebook. Well, you can, but it would be really expensive.

The point is, Hasbro and Mattel haven't had to spend a dime to make Scrabulous as popular as it is. Certainly, you can also argue that the developers of Scrabulous haven’t spent a dime developing the awesome game they’re now profiting from, so they should be willing to deal.

In an age when marketers are working to engage online audiences on a grassroots level, you have to recognize when it happens all by itself and cultivate it, not squash it. I'm sure there are commercial entities that would kill for 500,000 opt-ins on Facebook. Along with the coveted new media buzz, Google juice and all that goes with it, Hasbro should realize that Scrabulous is introducing an entire new generation of people to the game of Scrabble. To prove this point, some Facebook members have created a group themed I Got into Scrabble BECAUSE of Scrabulous, (currently at 43 members, but it's a start).

What this all adds up to is free advertising for Scrabble you can't get anywhere else. People get to actually play the game, enjoy it, and are more likely to want to play it OFF line. That's got to convert to some kind of cash flow for the makers of tabletop Scrabble. At a time when Hasbro has updated numerous games to keep them relevant, this online extension of classic Scrabble seems too good to be crushed by the legal department.

Perhaps Scrabulous can cut the makers of Scrabble a piece of the online ad revenue in exchange for some kind of brand-license agreement. Perhaps that's what Hasbro and Mattel have had in mind all along. Regardless, there is an opportunity here, and in Scrabble that's an 18-point word.

Posted by Alicia Dorset at 11:13 AM
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January 17, 2008

I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who…

...nevermind

By Daniel DeMoss

I’m an avid Facebook user and I’ve grown to really appreciate their “groups” feature. I’m not one of those people that have 127 groups on his page. I have only 28, but I appreciate them, nonetheless.

There are all kinds of Facebook groups, ranging from the “Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment” group, which has almost 4 million members, to the “Brian is The Scariest Guy I Ever Met” group, which currently has 13 members. These groups seem to do a good job of bringing people with common interests or goals together and their subject matter and number of members vary widely.

Lately, I’ve noticed an interesting, and some might say disturbing, phenomenon with the naming of new groups. It seems like everyday I read in the news feed about another group whose name contains the number 1 million in it. A few examples of these are 1,000,000 Bears Fans, I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who want FacebookIM, and I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who hate cancer, just to name a few. This would be fine, except for the fact that none of these groups has 1 million people in it. In fact, these groups don’t even have 100,000 members.

In my opinion, if you create a group with the number 1 million in it, or any number larger than 10,000 for that matter, you can count on not getting enough members for it to live up to the lofty title. Why? Some people won’t join because they don’t see the point, others may not join just to spite you. Or, simply, people won’t join just because it seems impersonal to be lost in a group among 999,999 other members.

Of course, regardless of why people don’t join, having five people in a group with 1 million in the name is just so ironic that it’s bound to happen.

So what’s my recommendation? Don’t put numbers in the name of your group. It’s much less embarrassing to have 63,573 members in a group named Bears Fans. The exception to this rule of course is the wildly popular 1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert, which currently has 1,455,477 members. This is one of the few groups that I’ve come across that has met or exceeded the goal given in its title.

Bravo, creators of the Stephen Colbert group. To the rest of you, next time, leave the numbers out.

Posted by Alicia Dorset at 01:59 PM
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