Sweet Tweets

A Roger's Sportsnet newscaster was fired recently for tweeting his views on gay marriage. He was ultimately fired as their on-air host.

It was called a new employment phenomenon, career suicide by social media. It's not new though, last year a woman's firing was made news after she had a bad day at work and shared it with her "friends" on Facebook. Trouble was, she'd also "friended" her boss. She was told (via Facebook), that she didn't need to show up for work in future.

It's a warning to us all that the Internet is not the safe haven of anonymity that we would believe.

Judges are generally willing to order Internet Providers to disclose the identity of people using pseudonyms to criticize others.

In some cases, even having a link to a site that defames someone can be construed as publication under Canadian Libel Laws, leaving you as in as much trouble as the person that posted the comment in the first place.

Michael Smith, of Borden Ladner Gervais, offers the following tips for companies to avoid cyber-libel.

- create clear guidelines and policies for the use of social media in the workplace. These should be built into contracts and include the use of laptops, cellphones and smart phones.

- educate employees about the policies for using social media at work and while using company property.

- if you use Twitter, Facebook for your own business, make sure a team of reviewers checks outbound comments before being posted and are moderated.

- you should implement a "sober second thought" policy. Have a colleague read any negative email or message before sending it. (this is good policy for any of us)

It is likely best, another lawyer advises, if you don't host an interactive website at all.

- if you do host a website with comments enabled, take down any negative or potentially defamatory comments immediately when notified. (better yet, moderate first)

Source: The Toronto Star

Facebook and Twitter

Twitter is a micro blog, or mini blog. You can only use 140 characters in a single post. It is simple to set up, very public is a one to many platform. One post can go viral. This is done by a Tweet being re-tweeted. When you re-tweet you can have 160 characters to allow for the new address.

How do you get followers? The best way is to mention your account to people on your website, in person and on all your advertising or paperwork. And write interesting posts and they will tell others. You can also follow other Tweets and your name will show up as a follower.

What should you write? The rule of thumb for a business Twitter account is a third sales and marketing, a third general company info ie. General information what you do, how you can help people, about your staff, promoting other clients etc. And finally a third industry news. New and exciting advancements in your particular business, laws that affect your business and re-tweets by followers.

You should have things like free items for followers, valuable knowledge to pass on, calls to action (if they do something in a particular time, they get a bargain)

Another aspect to Twitter that larger firms are using is searching what has been twitted about themselves. It is good to keep your finger on the pulse of how your company is being perceived out in the world. Many large companies are now using Twitter for their customer service.

Facebook

Facebook is different in that you aren’t limited to only a few characters. You can have links, images and movies. It’s almost like a website in itself. It is more structured and has rules. There are distinct pages for businesses called “pages”. Here, your followers are called “fans” rather than “friends”. Pages must be linked to a personal account, so you have to decide who in your company you can rely on to hand it over should they leave the company and who wants it linked to their own account.

Once you set up a Page, you will want to choose an image that best reflects your company, and that is usually your logo.

How often to post to your “wall”?

It’s a good idea to have a plan of things that you will post, so you don’t spend unnecessary time looking for ideas of what to post to your page. Like the Twitter advice, it is important to make it interesting enough so that fans who have signed up want to continue getting your updates and even share it with their friends. If you are a retail store, it could be information about an exciting new product that you are introducing, a restaurant could have a new menu being announced. Non-profits would have information about someone they’ve recently helped or details of an upcoming fundraiser.

How often to post depends on your business and how much time to have to devote to Facebook. You don’t want to post so often that you turn off people, but if you leave it too long they may just forget about you! Likely once a week or bi-weekly for a small business, and a couple of times a week for a big company with lots of news. But it is completely up to your own business.

How to build a following?

Announce your new page through email marketing. You can use an existing database of email contacts to start yourself off. Put it in your email signature so that everyone you email to, gets the news. Put up physical notices in your place of business. Link to it on your website. And tell all of your friends in your Facebook world and your real world that you now have a business presence too.

You can also follow other companies through your page, and they can do the same with you, creating other avenues for creating new customers.

Here is a timely article about customer service and Social Media.

More on Crowdsourcing

Isn't it the way that you just mention something and you hear that term or subject a lot in the next few days. You never know if it is because you just became aware of it or a cosmic co-incidence.

After writing on Crowdsourcing, there was a news article today that Coca-cola will team up with the band Maroon 5 to engage with thousands of fans as they crowdsource a song for charity. At the event, the band will write and record a brand new song in just 24hrs, inviting fans from across the world to inspire them throughout the process.

More and more companies are searching twitter and blog posts to see what their customers are saying about them, and changing the way they do business as a result!

Spring is here. My cat killed her first mouse today, oh, and I saw a Robin. Whoo hoo to the Robin. He's faster than my cat.

What is Crowdsourcing

Crowd sourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call. The term "crowdsourcing" is a combination of "crowd" and "outsourcing," first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing".

Photography is a good example. The advent of the digital camera, easy to use photo editing software and of course the internet have seen a surge in the availability of stock photography at a reasonable price. So the quality of photographs created by individuals started to get on par with professionals and you have a larger pool of people to choose from when you are looking for photographs for yourself of your company.

Crowdsourcing can be for design work such as 99designs.com clients can ask for submissions for designs for anything from business cards to logo design. You state what kind of design you'd like, how much you will pay, and then interested designers will start submitting designs. You choose from the designs submitted and agree to pay what they have asked for (it may be more than you offered, but the perfect logo, so you are willing to pay the higher price).

A t-shirt company, threadless, asks for submissions on t-shirt designs and the most popular (voted on by the crowd) are offered for sale in their store. If your design is chosen you get money as well as money towards buying other t-shirts and further cash rewards should it be so popular that they re-print it!

Some crowdsourcing is for the benefit of better knowledge. Wikipedia was an early example of crowdsourcing. Linux or Open Office are also examples where the user is also a contributor to making a product or application better.

Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Gooseberry Patch, has been using crowd-sourcing to create their community-style cookbooks since 1992.

Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today perform tasks they aren't suited for. Such as choosing a favourite between three photos. You sign up for the work and get paid a fee for doing it.

Of course there are benefits and casualties to crowdsourcing.

Advantages:
1. Numerous ideas from numerous people. Gets more ideas which means that you are more likely to get the best idea
2. Cheap. It cuts costs as you are employing a person, just using them for a limited time. Plus the competition that results.
3. Fast. It takes less time to get a job done as it is more likely that the right person is available now.

Disadvantages

1. Quality could be questionable. Ideas and designs are submitted now just by professionals but amateurs as well. So while they may, for example, have created a great logo, they have no idea how to make it into the format you may need. And as you don't have a relationship with the particular designer, you may not be able to find them in the future for any changes or issues.
2. It is unreliable. You may not get too many people interested and are getting ideas from a less talented pool of people.
3. Confidentiality. You are on the net for everyone to see what you are asking for, so with large corporations as an example, everyone will see you are thinking of changing your branding before you are ready to launch the idea.

Of course, for designers, photographers, crowdsourcing has been very difficult as not only do they have to compete with one another, but they have to compete with anyone who owns a computer.


Sources:

Wired.com
Crowdsourcing
Mechanical Turk
CMS Wire

Stop the Meter on your Internet Usage

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are about to impose usage-based billing on YOU.

This means we're looking at a future where ISPs will charge per byte, the way they do with smart phones. If we allow this to happen Canadians will have no choice but to pay MUCH more for less Internet. Big Telecom companies are obviously trying to gouge consumers, control the Internet market, and ensure that consumers continue to subscribe to their television services.

If you would like your voice to be heard, sign the petition at Open Media. This petition will go to Industry Minister Tony Clement, and the leaders of the Block Quebecois, and Green Party. The NDP and Liberals are already opposing this bill.

Let your voice be heard!

What is Net Neutrality and how does it affect you?

Essentially, net neutrality is the idea that no group should be able to discriminate against applications or content found on the Internet. That means no blocking access to web content, and no speeding up or slowing down of specific online services. It means the Internet should be a level playing field for ideas and innovation.

An interesting book by Barbara van Schewick explains how the Internet was originally constructed in “Internet Architecture and Innovation”. She explains that many technologies have an architecture to them that makes them easy or difficult to add other uses to. The Internet was constructed in such an open way in the beginning as the men who designed it had no idea what it would be used for in the future, if at all. They only knew what they wanted to use it for. In fact they thought the idea of people searching for something on the Internet was laughable. But, because they didn’t make any assumptions about what it may be used for, they designed it in a general way that could be easily added to.

This was very important for innovation, because the beauty of the Internet was that as long as you followed the few rules that it had when it was constructed, you could design programs that would work with it. This was important because if it had been constructed differently and you had to convince the architects of the original Internet to change something in their original platform every time to you wanted to design something for it, you would have to convince them that it was worth the effort. And in the history of the Internet, we hear over and over that when an idea was first conceived, people didn’t usually think it would ever work. In 1995 a fellow called Pierre Omidyar thought it would be a neat idea to sell items by auction online. He told his friends about it and they thought he was crazy, but he went ahead and spent a long weekend in his San Jose living room writing the code for this and put it on the web. He just was able to put it out there without having to convince anyone that it was worth it, just to see what would happen. And eBay was born.

Deep Packet Inspection
In the early days of the internet, you could use it without anyone knowing what you were doing on it. Your internet provider (or IP) didn’t know whether you were sending emails, uploading websites or downloading music. However, now your IPs employ something called “deep packet inspection”. When data has to be transmitted, it is broken down into similar structures of data, which are reassembled to the original data chunk once they reach their destination. This is how anything you do over the internet is sent. Deep Packet Inspection came about when viruses started to appear and caused more and more problems for internet users. A packet is made up of different information such as the source IP address, the destination IP address, the sequence number of the packets, the type of service, flags and other information. By reading these packets, IPs are able to filter out the viruses before they reached their own network and your computer. However now they are using this inspection for totally different purposes and that is what Net Neutrality is all about.
The argument about Net Neutrality is this: Internet providers think they should control what goes over their networks to keep its operation fair to all. However others feel they are stifling innovation by trying to control information that detracts from their own business interests. The eBay story is important to the idea of innovation over the internet. Because the internet was so open, this fellow was able to just write up some code, put it on line and see if anyone would find it as good an idea that he did. He didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to put the site up, didn’t need any start up funds from anyone, he was just a smart guy who saw the potential of something and went ahead and did it. Google has a video program called Google video. It hoped to be something like YouTube. Likely though, you’ve never heard of it. Because YouTube was a better product and easier to use, people just voted with their clicks. This is what people are afraid of losing if the internet loses what Barbara van Schewick calls being Internet Agnostic. The internet providers claim they need to control what is happening on their networks so certain programs and people don’t hog all the bandwidth, but there are already tools to solve those problems without distorting the level playing field among their competition and classes of applications.

Some examples of how this inspection has not been agnostic:

• In 2005, Telus blocked access to hundreds of websites during a dispute with its labour union (sites and blogs about the dispute),


• Shaw attempted to levy surcharges for Internet telephony services


• Rogers quietly limited bandwidth for legitimate peer-to-peer software application (because it competed with their own VoIP offerings)
  


• and Videotron mused publicly about establishing a new Internet transmission tariff that would require content creators to pay millions for the privilege of transmitting their content.
  

In Europe, most mobile providers won't allow their customers to use Skype over the network because it competes with their own products.

Throughout the history of the internet, the low cost innovators have been the ones that created the most important applications that we use today, eBay, Flicker, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter. If we had lived in a world where you had to have investment, none or few of these innovations would exist today.

Now, you may ask, why shouldn’t the network providers be able to regulate their own networks? After all, they set them up? Well that is true, but they also get a lot of public money to help them. And like a car company can build their cars whatever way they like, they still have to adhere to regulations that make things fair and safe for the users. And the internet is even more important because it is one of the central infrastructures of our time. We communicate, study, work and generally stay in touch over it. And we can’t allow them to shape the future of the internet for their own commercial interests and not the interest of the public that uses it and now relies on it.

In the end, we don’t want network providers to be able to stifle the innovation that the internet is famous for. And we would like to continue to have the freedom to decide for ourselves what the better applications are. Let’s hope that Net Neutrality can continue.

Sources:

"Internet Architecture and Innovation". by Barbara van Schewick - Spark Interview with by Barbara van Schewick – CBC, Spark

Michael Geist - his blog at www.michaelgeist.ca