11,000 Reasons to Listen to the FTC

Hannah is an attorney at Hollingsworth & Zivitz, PC where she focuses her practice on business law and entrepreneurial services. Hannah is one of the few attorneys in Indiana to offer experienced legal guidance on promotional law, including advertising, sweepstakes, contests, consumer privacy, and e-commerce related issues.

Have you ever used your blog to review a product you received for free?  Have you ever offered a fellow blogger a deal where you review his product or service if he reviews yours?  Did you disclose that deal to your readers?  If not, it is time to start.

This week, the FTC announced new rules aimed at increasing transparency used in social media advertising.  Starting December 1, 2009, bloggers and other users of social media such as Twitter and Facebook must disclose if they have received any type of payment in exchange for promotion, advertising or endorsement.  This seems to include in-kind exchanges, free product or good old fashioned money.

Almost every business has a blog these days.  It is a free, easy way to reach existing and potential customers.  And there is a lot of trade going on out there in the blogosphere.  Bloggers commonly receive gratis products or services in exchange for a positive write up.  Companies who send out free stuff have nothing to lose, because if a blogger doesn’t like their product or service, the blog simply doesn’t review or promote it.

In many communities there is a spider web of connections among successful social media sites.  But the era of “you scratch my back and I will scratch yours is over.”  Bloggers who promote one another for pay, free goods, free services or simply shared promotion now face significant penalties from the Federal Trade Commission, up to $11,000 per violation!

What does this mean for your business?  Well some common social media practices that may be affected include anything from writing a positive comment on Facebook in exchange for a free hat to writing a recommendation for a CPA on LinkedIn for a discount on your taxes.  You may think that the blogosphere is so vast and there is too many infractions out there for the FTC to catch you, but don’t forget about Naptster.  The federal government cracked down on anyone and everyone, including teenagers living in their parent’s homes, simply for downloading a few songs.  The FTC is primed to make an example of any business violating these new rules.  Don’t subject your business to an $11,000 fine.  If you are promoting another company’s product or service on a social media site, and you have ANY kind of relationship with that company, be sure to disclose it.

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2 Steps to Starting Social Media

We all have to start somewhere right?

1. Start A Blog About Something You Love and Be Authentic

I know the concept of authentic content has been thrown around here and there between social media experts. It is a common practice to write about the concept of authentic content and communication. Many people ask the same question when debating on starting a blog: “What should I write about?” Write about something you enjoy! Write about something you do on a daily routine. Do you enjoy collecting stamps? Do you enjoy watching soccer and following sports?

I write about social media because I love it. It is easier for me to write because of the joy I find in learning about all things social media.

Write about something you love and find other people who are writing about the same thing. Utilize google alerts to find the people who share the same interest.

2. Start Small. Join a Regional Social Network and Dive In.

We have talked about regional (geographically based) social networks before in earlier posts. I am a member of a regional social media community called Smaller Indiana. I have found that my visibility as a business owner and social advocate has greatly increased because of my use of Smaller Indiana. If you are trying to build a personal brand identity through using social media a local social network will give you amazing exposure to local people.

It is getting harder and harder to make a name for yourself on the Internet when you are competing on a global scale with millions of individuals. If you focus on a niche geographic community you will find that it is slightly easier to be recognized. In order to get the most out of a geographic community don’t leave your relationships on the web, go out and meet the individuals you are collaborating with. A cup of coffee will go a long way at facilitating the building of a personal brand between two individuals.

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Diamond Marketing and Selling the Experience

This morning I was listening to a local radio station when a diamond store’s advertisement played across the speakers… I sat there at the stoplight listening to the words…

“We are the ONLY diamond store that buys direct from the manufacturer… cutting out middleman pricing… best quality diamonds… friendly service…”

Truthfully… the ad was lame. There was no story telling… there was no emotional buy. There was nothing that invited me to continue the conversation. I decided to look into the other diamond sellers and manufacturers in the city. You guessed it… they were all the same. They all said the exact same thing.

Frankly, I do not care that you had to fly to Hong Kong to buy your diamonds. I don’t care that you are cutting out the middleman pricing. I care that you treat me the right way when I walk in the door. I care about the experience of the purchase not the purchase itself.

When we are selling a professional product or service it is important to DIFFERENTIATE. It is a lost art. How do you differentiate in a world where everything is starting to sound similar… sound bland?   It is essential that you gain the trust of the individual before they buy. It is essential to encourage your customers to tell the story.

You can buy as many radio, yellow pages, or newspaper ads as your budget allows… it only breaks the surface. The experience sells the product. How are you using your website, social media, traditional marketing, and networking to tell your story.

Do not bore the world with details… tell them the story!

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Quantify and then Qualify Your Social Media Relationships

Corvida has an awesome post on Chris Brogan’s blog called Decreasing Our Connections While Increasing Our Networks. The basic rundown of the post (which you should go read) is her exasperation over the amount of “friends” she has over various networks and the lack of a deeper and real connection. This conversation surfaces quite a bit when I am speaking to groups of people about social media. Where do you draw the line on relationship building in the social media environment?

From the post:

Maybe growth on some of these networks isn’t the best thing in the world. Should there be self-imposed limits on how many people you befriend? No because in the end, while your network growth may increase, your connection with your network still increases. However, the rate at which the connection can increase actually decreases. Did that make sense? Unless your friends are constantly questioning you or keeping tabs on you, it’s going to take a lot longer to make deeper connections the more your network grows.

We have been talking a lot about creating deeper relationships through social media. When you are adding hundreds of people on networks like Twitter, Facebook, and other networks it is hard to make the same connection as before! I wrote recently about turning friends, followers, and subscribers into a deeper connection. After all the purpose of sharing in a community driven environment should be relationship building whether for business or personal use.

The question has been presented: How do you take the massive amount of users on social networks and par them down to create meaningful relationships online? Quantify and Qualify.

Quantifying Your Social Media Experience

There are some networks where a huge following is necessary to gain the full experience of the site. Some would argue that Twitter is the site to use for a massive follower base. I am still torn over the notion of having a huge amount of followers on any site. I tend to use Facebook and Twitter to quantify my follower based. I want people to experience my personal side . Quantifying in a social media world basically means I gain an increased quality of experience based on the quantity of the people I am following.

Qualifying Your Social Media Experience

I qualify my niche networks in social media. I have found that I have an increase in quality without necessary having a huge quantity of followers on my geographically direct communities. Smaller Indiana and LinkedIN have been my niche quality sites for my social media experience. Smaller Indiana is a geographically located social network for people in Indiana. And for LinkedIN? I only tend to add people I have met in an offline environment on LinkedIN. My niche networks tend to be the place where there is a direct form of quality conversations.

How do you manage your networks? Do you find you get more or less quality based on the quantity of your friends or subscribers?

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Do Tight Corporate Social Media Policies Help or Hinder?

Linda Skrocki is the Senior Engineering Program Manager/Owner for Sun’s primary, external-facing community sites (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.). In addition to being a corporate social networking evangelist, she has managed many of Sun Microsystems highest profile web programs over the last 9 years.

What is your risk & transparency tolerance?

That’s a question every company must ask before embarking on their officially branded new media journey, but let’s be honest, tightly controlled content is nothing more than traditional website content and/or press releases. If that’s the most risk your culture/policy allows when it comes to marketplace conversations via social media platforms, don’t waste time and money implementing an external-facing officially branded collaboration site — it simply won’t be an environment conducive to meaningful, authentic marketplace conversations and certainly won’t foster healthy business relationship building that ultimately affects your bottom line.

If a tightly controlled or no approach is the chosen path, it’s important to note that conversations about your company, good and bad, won’t cease to exist. They’ll just have to happen elsewhere — most likely in places far less findable by you; thereby, giving you less opportunity to:

• amplify positive company & product feedback from the marketplace
• strengthen your company & products by listening and acting upon negative feedback
• rally interest and extend awareness by being able to easily participate in the conversations

(Re)evaluation of our fears

Still reading? Thinking your company’s social media policy might need a laxative? Not sure how to get started? Try this: Each overly rigid policy term is based on fear of a specific situation. Examine each term & it’s fear-based situation & ask:

1. Aren’t these legal bases already covered in our company’s employment terms and/or site Terms of Use?
2. Why are we trying to control conversations employees & the marketplace may have on social sites any differently than conversations they have at a bus stop, dinner party, etc.? Don’t we want them to drive awareness of our company and products?
3. Why are we scaring our employees to a degree that they don’t want to engage in cool and interesting marketplace conversations about the company and our products?
4. In the statistically* unlikely event that an employee goes hostile and says bad things about us,
   a) do we really think policy will stop them?
   b) wouldn’t we want the likely inaccurate rant to happen in our own backyard where it’s more easy to find and respond to?
5. Is it really worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands of fruitful conversations because we’re afraid of a possible nasty conversation?
6. What if the nasty conversation happens? Why can’t we just counter by publicly correcting the inaccurate points with facts and own-up to the accurate points by making our product stronger and gaining bonus points for driving this awareness?

Relax, Trust & See Goodness Unfold

I’m not saying let go entirely. Employees appreciate guidelines. They want to remain gainfully employed and don’t want to get themselves or the company in trouble. They may not clearly be aware of the company’s stance on topics to avoid if they are buried in pages of legalese. To augment existing employment terms, a set of brief, comprehensive social media guidelines will not only stand a better chance of actually being read by your employees, but will set everyone’s minds at ease by knowing how to effectively engage in the social media space.

If you need a solid example of an effective set of guidelines, Sun’s Guidelines on Public Discourse has stood the test of time and has proven to be amazingly effective not only for Sun but for other companies who have used it as a model.

* Example: http://blogs.sun.com, along with the Guidelines on Public Discourse, deployed in 2004. No approval is required prior to employees blogging. The original tag line “This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything” remains in place. As of this post, there are more than 140,000 blog posts and only a handful of possible policy violations have been raised.

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REMAX Loves Social Media and I Love Them

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Indiana RE/MAX sales rally yesterday and it was AWESOME! I loved debating, questioning, and teaching about social media and the use of the tools in the real estate industry.

I always try to post videos of the attendees screaming for social media. You will find the videos below. (sorry for being shaky)

Session 1

Session 2

If you attended the rally and are interested in the information shared. You can either click the REMAX button on the right side of this page or CLICK HERE.

Again, thank you for all who attended! It was encouraging to see such enthusiasm for social media!

25 Reasons Why Your Company is Boring

(This was sparked from a Seth Godin post called You’re Boring. It was brilliant. I had to write about it.)

You know you a boring business if..

1. You have a tri-fold brochure with little business cards that you hand out to everyone you see… and I do mean EVERYONE.

2. You designed the tri-fold in Publisher.

3. You are using a type-font called Arial, Times New Roman, or Courier for your logo… and you made the logo in Microsoft Word.

4. You decide not to blog because “I just don’t have the time.” Your potential customers don’t have the time to read it anyway.

5. You use your initials for your company name. (This is a give or take depending on your initials)

6. Yellow Pages is the only marketing for your business because you have been doing it for a decade. Why change a good thing? (ha)

7. You attend networking events and take as many business cards as possible but never help another business professional.

8. If your website says “Copyright 2002″ or anytime before 2007.

9. All your collateral material looks different… different colors… old logos… better yet… no logo.

10. You refuse to think outside the box and go out on a limb (marketing or anything else).

11. You get up after 9am.

12. If you photo-copy a flier and hand it out. Spend the extra money and get full color. Better yet, don’t use a flier. Doesn’t everyone?

13. You have an individual answering your phone that sounds like they just woke up from a nap or smoked a bowl.

14. YOU USE AN EMAIL THAT Ends with a phone or cable company: AOL, SBCGLOBAL, or the like.

15. You refuse to act on ideas until they are safe or your competitor does it. Ready, Fire, Aim. Fail.

16. You do not attend networking events because you have “better ways to spend your time.” You will be spending your time closing your business account at the bank.

17. You never have a new idea. You just copy others.

18. Social Media is scary to you. So you do the next best thing… you ignore it.

19. You hard sell EVERYONE. Nobody cares. Put away your product or service. Can I get to know you first? I don’t give a crap if you can save me 20%.

20. You have goals. Wait. Well, you HAD goals but you didn’t write them down so…

21. You look down your nose at everyone who is younger or less experienced. You never pay them but want to share services.

22. You actually cut your marketing budget because sales are down.

23. Your Twitter account has no interaction… just a broadcast message.

24. You send an Auto-DM on Twitter. Period.

25. You cut your business cards yourself and left the tattered edges.

The best things about having a boring business is that you can change. You can turn into the vibrant and growing company that will be the pride and joy of your life. Well, other than your children or significant other.