Social Media Is Serious – Honestly!

At The Funky Agency offices we do like to take a breeze through the ‘papers’, well hundreds of websites actually, on a daily basis.

And as we predicted, a number of stories are cropping up on a weekly basis (it will be daily soon) about large companies (Vodafone is one that has been mentioned this week) that are running into trouble with their Social Media campaigns (a member of staff put up a rude Tweet).

Today we see that lawyers are warning employers that they must take a more serious attitude towards Social Media as it is now such a powerful tool, the damage caused by unapproved activity that is directly linked to a company name, can be very serious.  The Tory party have twigged this and all prospective candidates in the forthcoming election must have SM messages approved by head office.

We urge all our clients to treat Social Media messages as though they were mini press releases, and tweeting etc must be carried out by approved personnel who are aware of the marketing and branding objectives of the company.

As the lawyers are warning, the consequences can be serious.

What a cock up by Facebook!

So Facebook’s recent changes to privacy settings are attracting lots of attention.  Unfortunately it’s of the wrong kind.  Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) along with nine other groups has filed a  complaint alleging that Facebook’s new privacy settings constitute an unfair and deceptive change in terms. The groups say that Facebook’s decision to institute the new controls violates users’ expectations and diminishes their privacy. The new settings classify a host of data as “publicly available information” — including users’ names, profile pictures, cities, networks, lists of friends and pages that people are fans of.

This complaint has led to the Federal Trade Commission taking an interest.  And to add insult to injury, ex-employees are coming out of the woodwork to say exactly what Facebook actually monitors – and it’s rather more than you might think.

Now wouldn’t you have thought, that an organization such as Facebook would have looked into the implications of change more carefully?

You can read all about it here

Eek! Twitter’s first murder!

And there was us thinking that Twitter was a great way to communicate with your clients, colleagues and friends.  Unfortunately it would appear that Jameg Blake and Kwame Dancy used Twitter to further a bitter personal feud which ended up in an alleged murder.  New York Police think that Twitter will be asked to supply all the messages that were exchanged between them, and that it will be first time that tweets will be used as evidence in a court of law.  You have been warned.

Actually it got us thinking whether tweets could be used as evidence in other legal ways.  We always maintain that companies should not allow numerous staff to tweet  – you tend to get a hideous mix of personal and (often ill-thought out) corporate messages getting sent out into the giant world of Twitter and internet beyond.   You wouldn’t let a bunch of people write a press release and talk to the press on the phone would you?  No, you would get your PR agency to do that, or in-house marketing staff. And everything would be approved and done properly.  Now obviously you can’t have every tweet going through a lengthy approval process, but you SHOULD have expert, qualified people doing the tweeting.

We think that what you do with Twitter is deadly serious stuff for your business.

But we didn’t think someone would up dead – read more about the murder story here

To pay or not to pay…

To pay or not to pay, that is the question.   There seems to be a ground swell of support for some kind of payment to be made for online content.  Rupert Murdoch  has come out as saying that quality content on  sites such as www.timesonline.co.uk cannot be free for evermore and that readers should be prepared to pay.  Readers strike back by saying that there is so much free content out there that if The Times start charging, they will simply go elsewhere.

The thing is, is Rupert Murdoch and his mighty News Corporation influential enough to make a significant change in how we use the internet, with a whole band of other players following suit?  Or will his suggestion be a flop.  An interesting article in The Sunday Times by none other than Jeremy Clarkson highlights some of the issues not least of which is a generation of young internet users who are not used to paying for anything.

Interesting times.  Which way will it go?  Who knows.  We watch and wait with interest.

BBC finally jumps on the SEO bandwagon

So, the BBC are catching up!  They are asking their journalists to make two headlines – one more detailed than the other to make them more search engine-friendly.

As The Guardian reports today,  the BBC get 29% of their traffic from search engines, which is quite surprising for an organisation of their size and profile.  Here at The Funky Agency we have always believed that good ‘organic’ SEO is at the heart of a good Social Media (SM) policy and that SEO and SM go hand-in-hand.  We are stunned at the number of clients who come to us for SM campaigns who have new, shiny (and expensive) websites, with absolutely no attention paid to SEO.

In fact, more seem keen to spend money on Google Adwords, before getting their SEO sorted out first.  Our stance is that good SEO is the foundation of all online activity and without it, anything else will be just be a quickfix.

So well done to the BBC for seeing the light!