From Oscars Flub to Fake News: What We’re Reading Now

By Jackie Sofia

‘Envelopegate’ and the Power of Public Memory
The PR nightmare continues for PwC in the wake of this year’s Academy Awards, during which the accounting giant somehow mixed up the envelopes announcing the coveted “Best Picture” award winner. Jaws were left visibly hanging after Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway handed the golden man to the wrong man.

After the debacle, PwC was spotted on Twitter trying to bury their shame amongst unrelated news content about the firm. The distraction was not very effective; CBS News reports that the two individual accountants involved will never work the Oscars again, and the relationship of the entire firm is “under review.” While PwC’s reputation is now tarnished, they may have inadvertently buffed up the image of several other accounting firms just in time for tax season. One man’s loss is another man’s win.

An Instagram How-To: Multiple Image Posts
Instagram continues to advance its offerings for users. A new feature allows users to post multiple photos at once with a slideshow effect. The digital flip book allows you to post up to 10 photos simultaneously and already has been implemented widely by advertisers on the platform.

Marketers can use this feature to relay more extensive messages to their audience, or get creative and compile step-by-step guides for their products and services. Speaking of step-by-step guides, here’s a tutorial explaining how to use the new feature.

What the CIA is Saying About the New Wikileaks Document (Vault7) 
Wikileaks released its latest batch of CIA documents, a series titled “Vault7.” It’s a cool name, but the contents may be more sobering. The information released this past week includes thousands of documents that describe software tools and techniques for breaking into people’s phones, televisions and other electronic devices.

CIA spokesman, Dean Boyd, said of the surprise release, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”  Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director, tried to further soften the blow by assuring viewers on CBS’ The Late Show that these purported tools would not be used inside the U.S. unless a domestic agency received court permission. The jury is still out on whether these leaked documents will be followed up with additional details, and whether the agency will have to come up with a more pointed public response on the matter.

Facebook Launches ‘Fake News’ Flag
Facebook has finally taken steps towards identifying “fake news” on its platform. The company launched the beta version of a two-pronged initiative back in December, which allows users to “dispute” an article if they think it’s fake. The reported dispute is then passed on to third-party fact checkers who determine whether the article receives the label permanently.

Granted, Facebook isn’t known for its transparency, so it’s unclear whether this will be a truly crowdsourced initiative, or whether a select few will have their say on the back end.

Meanwhile, be prepared for disputes over whether a news source should be marked as disputed.

Battle Alternative Facts with a Customized, Fact-Based Infographic
If you still have reservations as to whether Facebook is doing enough to combat the spread of fake news, take your own initiative and fight the good fight with a sharp infographic. People process visual content 600,000 times faster than text, and retain 80 percent of what they can see, compared to only 20 percent of what they read.

This is reason enough to ensure that your visual content doesn’t get buried among all the alternative facts. We’re digging this step-by-step hack for uploading custom-sized graphics along with your Facebook posts.

What Instagram’s Newest Change Means for Communicators

By Sarah Larson

Instagram this week announced a major change that expands its video capabilities and marks another milestone in the continuing shift toward visual communication.

On March 29, the social network said that it would expand the allowed length of videos posted to the site to 60 seconds. That quadruples the time from the app’s current cap of 15 seconds.

The new video capabilities are being tested with small groups of users (New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski was one of them) and are expected to be rolled out to all users “in the coming months,” according to Instagram.

The move is driven by one simple factor: popularity.

“In the last six months, the time people spent watching video increased by more than 40 percent,” Instagram said in its announcement.

What does this change mean for professional communicators? Several things.

First, of course, it means more time to tell your story. Whether you’re promoting a fundraising event, sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses of your company at work, or announcing a new initiative, having more time gives you more opportunity to shine.

Just because your videos can be longer, however, doesn’t mean they should be. Strong editing will remain key to success. Though digital marketers still love to debate the “ideal” average length for online video, nearly all agree that viewership and engagement decrease as running times increase.

It also doesn’t mean that writing is irrelevant. In fact, powerful writing is vital to the creation of a powerful video. Tight voiceover scripts that choose just the right word and thoughtful onscreen text that reinforces key messages are just as important as the wide shots and graphics. (Some argue that writing is actually the most important skill for broadcast.)

If it weren’t already clear to organizations that their communications strategies should include video, this move by the world’s most popular platform for sharing still photography should erase any remaining doubts.

How are you incorporating visual storytelling elements into your marketing and public relations plans? Share your experience in the comments.

5 Reasons Your Business Should (Still) Be on Twitter

By Sarah Larson

If you follow financial or tech news, you know that Twitter has had a rough go of it lately.

In the two years since its Nov. 7, 2013 IPO, Twitter’s stock price has fallen and it recently announced it would cut more than 300 jobs as it struggles to find a way to make money. Meanwhile, other younger, prettier social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Instagram) have gained ground on Twitter and the two other best-known networks, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Those may be good reasons for you to examine your tech stock portfolio, but it does not mean that your business’ social media strategy should boot the birdie out the door. At least not yet.

If your organization is investing in content marketing, Twitter still should be part of that mix. Here are five reasons why.

Twitter is public. That means anyone who goes to the Twitter app or site can see the photos, status updates, and links that have been shared. Not so on Facebook, where users must create their own profiles before they can see the profiles of others, or LinkedIn, where access to profiles and newsfeeds is very limited if you don’t have an account.

Twitter shows your content to all of your followers. Businesses that use Facebook to connect with customers often are frustrated by the filtering algorithm Facebook uses to decide which posts those customers see. They may have 5,000 “likes,” but they are ecstatic if even 1 out of 10 of those people ever see a given photo, video, or status update. That does not happen on Twitter. Unlike Facebook and some other social media platforms, Twitter does not filter your content in any way. Anyone who is using Twitter and has elected to make your content part of their feed will receive all of your content.

Twitter is easily searchable. The use of hashtags to categorize content ensures that people looking for that type of information will be able to find it. A Twitter user may not follow you directly, but if you’ve posted about #finance or #leadership, #healthcare or #IP, people looking for information related to that topic will be able to find it with a simple hashtag search or follow stream. (For a real-time demonstration of how this works, try following the hashtag of any major sports team’s name during one of its games.)

Twitter is a favorite of journalists. If you are looking to get to know journalists who cover your industry, Twitter can be a powerful research vehicle. Journalists interact there, they look for sources there, and they monitor and contribute to developments in real-time there. Watch for the stories they tweet. Check out their interests. See what hashtags they are using and, if you have relevant observations or content to share, reply to them and use the same hashtag.

Twitter is great for repeated sharing of content. There are 347,222 tweets sent every minute of every hour. That’s 500 million tweets a day. That means that users’ news feeds move quickly and continuously. That enables you to share the same content repeatedly over time, increasing the number of views on each piece of content in your content marketing initiative. Just be sure to space the shares out over time. Scheduling apps and services can help you plan accordingly.

While social media continues to evolve, its use in content marketing changes as well, and PR and marketing professionals need to be prepared to change strategy. For now, though, keeping Twitter in your marketing mix still makes good sense.

Using Technology to Enjoy a Little More Sunshine This Summer

By Kim Tarasiewicz

As we move into summer, everyone wants more free time to enjoy the wonderful weather and outdoors. And believe it or not, technology can help with that. While technology can keep us connected when we might wish to be off the grid, it also allows us time to work when we are able and not miss important calls, meetings or emails.

At Furia Rubel, we savor our vacation time as much as the next person and we have found some tech tools to save time and be more efficient – and in my case, provide more of my beloved beach time.

Here are some favorites:

IFTTT is an app that lets you combine all of your favorite online technologies. The acronym means “If this, then that” and it allows you to create your own recipes such as “If I post a picture to Instagram, then add it to my Dropbox.” Imagine the time you can save not having to log into each separate application. Even better, you can sign up for a free account and connect your services.

Workflow (for iPhones) and Llama (for Androids) both allow you to connect applications and then combine actions to create automatic tasks. For example, you can set your phone to automatically be on silent when your calendar has you scheduled in a meeting. Or on a personal level, every time you order pizza with an app, it automatically sets a reminder time to pick it up.

Gmail labs are special settings that add helpful features to your Gmail. By going into the “settings” icon at the top right of your Gmail and clicking on "labs," you can manage your email more efficiently. As Gmail states in the disclaimer at the top, these tweaks aren’t permanent, but they are fun to experiment with. "Canned responses" is a great tool for all those times you use the same wording in an email. You can create several and use when needed. And of course the “unsend” feature recently was introduced into the Gmail mix, so when you accidentally hit the send button before attaching your document, you don’t have to send another email with the apology and a big “Oops.”

Carrot is a task application that rewards you when you complete items on your list, but will chastise you when they are not finished on time. As Carrot says, “Greetings lazy human. Slackers make me upset.” It is a fun way to get things done during the day. And if you like an app that interacts with you, it has an alarm, fitness, weather and calorie counter version too.

So get out and enjoy summer this year and experiment with some new technologies and applications. You may find a few that can increase your productivity, making everyone happy. In what other ways do you save time and work and live more efficiently?

Twitter Does Not Give you Carte Blanche to Threaten Rape

A New York Post article detailed the harassment of Gabby Schilling.

By Kim Tarasiewicz

When baseball great Curt Schilling tweeted congratulations to his daughter, Gabby, on being accepted to play softball at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island, he likely didn't expect that the response from some men on Twitter would be to threaten to rape her with a baseball bat. Or their fists. They weren't particularly picky.

He was upset and appalled – and rightly so. Now he is pursuing legal means to press charges. I, for one, am pleased to see someone making it clear that threatening and demeaning online statements are acceptable. Not just the bullying, which everyone agrees is wrong, but the idea of online anonymity and the breakdown of common courtesy and respect. Many of the offenders in this case were not teens, but were young adults who should have known better.

Working in online marketing and media, I wasn't surprised to learn how easy it was for Schilling to track down and uncover the real-life identities of the offenders. We've written about social media “privacy” before on the PR Lawyer, but it’s amazing how many people who use social media do so without truly understanding that nothing is anonymous.

“It was easier than anyone might think,” wrote the New York Post. “Schilling, 48, began Googling their Twitter handles, their online friends, tracking down their Facebook and Instagram pages, following all the little cyber bread crumbs we unknowingly leave behind each day.”

How did these men think they wouldn't be found? But more importantly, how did they think this was acceptable behavior in the first place?

After two of the men were identified, they faced consequences of their own. One, a Yankees employee, was fired from his job, and the other, a New Jersey community college student, was suspended and “will be scheduled for a conduct hearing where further disciplinary action will be taken,” according to a statement the college posted on its Facebook page on March 2.

The public relations fallout for both the men and the organizations to which they are tied is very real. The college had to do damage control by suspending the student, dealing with the police and putting out a statement of apology. Now every time someone runs a search for that college, this will show up in the newsfeed - probably not helping recruiting and, I’m certain, causing long-term public relations issues for the college.

From the liability aspect, the legal rules and precedents of social media are just beginning to be formed, and my guess is much development and change still is to come. Social media is a new focus for law firms and attorneys have begun to caution their clients to refrain from using social media when they are a defendant in a case. Social media statements are also starting to be admitted as evidence in some court cases.

While the full legal ramifications of the Schilling case have yet to be seen, the public reaction has been clear. The general population is fed up with online haters, and it’s time for things to change. My hope is that the courts agree and rule in favor of civility and respect.

Social Network Sites: How do they Work for you Personally?

By Rose Strong

What started out in 2004 as a small network at Harvard has grown into something much, much bigger than just a group of students using “the facebook” to connect with one another on a Massachusetts campus. Besides giving us the ability to keep up with friends and family, social networking sites became the go-to space by which business connected with their audiences / clients / customers.

In PR and marketing we know what it’s used for: pushing out product information, connecting with customers, seeking new business leads and the like. But, how do you make use of sites such as Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook for your personal connections that have nothing to do with business?

How do you use social media personally?

A few weeks ago, my wife had a medical emergency just after we had eaten dinner. After heading to the emergency room and sitting there for hours on end amidst a sea of flu-stricken adults and toddlers, I kept my friends and family updated through Facebook’s Messenger app. When texts wouldn’t go through, the Messenger app, posting directly on Facebook or sending a picture through Instagram worked!

The best thing about using social networking sites during an emergency like we experienced was that my friends, several of which are insomniacs or in different time zones, were there and supported me through a very long and intense night.

This is just one example of how these sites also have given us ways to get information out en masse to those we wanted informed.

How’d we do it back then?

In the olden days – she said very sarcastically – I would have had to wait until I returned home to make many phone calls to family and friends. It would have been exhausting. By the time things were stabilized at the hospital and I was able to go home at 6:45 a.m., I only had to make a few personal calls and take a much-needed nap.

According to a survey done by PewInternet.org, Facebook remains the most popular social networking site today, although its growth has slowed somewhat. Other popular sites, meanwhile, are making headway and seeing growth.

From the highlights of PewInternet.org survey, I found the following pretty fascinating:

• Social networking sites are increasingly used to keep up with close social ties
• The average user of a social networking site has more close ties and is half as likely to be socially isolated as the average American
• Facebook users are more trusting than others
• Facebook users have more close relationships
• Internet users get more support from their social ties and Facebook users get the most support

I know it may sound strange, but I’ll admit that I have friends online whom I’ve never met but who still mean a lot to me. I belong to several closed Facebook special interest groups. The people in these groups share my interests and we often speak beyond our interests either online in the group or through email or instant messaging, becoming distant participants in each other’s lives simply through social networking.

We share our lives with each other. And only what we want to share. Several people have lost husbands or wives, some long-time members have passed on, family members of the group associates have become sick, graduated school, seen the births of their first grandbabies, and lost pets or adopted new ones, been in car accidents, won awards, traveled around the world, been laid off, fired or found new jobs. In each instance, members of the group rally, be it with tears, kind words, encouragement or congrats.

Without these folks from all over my social network sites, I don’t know what I’d have done to get through such a long and arduous night in the emergency department. I found it a godsend to be able to keep my friends and family updated and gain their support back as I needed it.

'Free' Does Not Mean Free-For-All

By Sarah Larson

One of the world’s largest clearinghouses of visual content announced earlier this month that it would license millions of its images to the public for free. That allows me to show you this amazing photo of the aurora borealis over the mountains of Norway, my ancestral home. For free.

Free, however, does not mean free-for-all.

Many people were shocked when Getty Images announced on March 5 that it would allow millions of its photos and other visual content to be shared online, free, for non-commercial use.

“Getty Images is leading the way in creating a more visual world,” the company said in announcing the move. “Our new embed feature makes it easy, legal, and free for anybody to share our images on websites, blogs, and social media platforms.”

The new initiative hinges on an embedded player similar to that of YouTube. Simply visit Getty Images’ library, search for a photo, look for the </> symbol to identify embeddable photos, then copy the code to the HTML of your own site. Getty sends the image in an embedded player, including the photo’s full copyright information and a link back to the licensing page on Getty’s website.

Some hailed Getty's move as a the first step in a plan that must eventually include monetization. Others, as a death blow to a creative industry in which it is increasingly difficult for photographers to make a living at their craft.

While I reserve judgement on the economic implications of the move, Getty’s idea - which seemed ludicrous at first - now doesn’t seem quite so crazy.

Many people pull images from a Google search when they need a photo for their website,  newsletter, or blog, not realizing - or not caring - that the image belongs to someone else. Indeed, as we explained in a recent post on The PR Lawyer, the average blog author has little clue about the legal requirements of copyright.

At the same time, communication continues to become more visual, and from Snapchat to Instagram and beyond, photographs are an essential part of everyday life in today's world.

“Images are the communication medium of today and imagery has become the world’s most spoken language,” said Getty Images co-founder and CEO Jonathan Klein in the British Journal of Photography. “Whether via a blog, a website or social media, everyone is a publisher and increasingly visually literate.”

As Neiman Journalism Lab points out, Getty’s move is an attempt to make that rampant online sharing work in its favor:

"Getty’s not doing this out of the good of its heart. It recognizes that images on the Internet are treated as de facto public domain by many people on social networks, blogs, and the scummier parts of the content web. It knows it’s highly unlikely to ever get significant money out of any of those people. Even you and I, upstanding Internet citizens, are unlikely to license a photo to tweet it to our followers.

So if it can (a) get some people to use an embed instead of stealing while (b) making the experience just clunky enough that paying customers won’t want to use it, Getty could eke out a net win. (More on that second point below.)

What does Getty get from the embed? Better branding, for one — the Getty name all over the web. Better sharing, for another — if you click the Twitter or Tumblr buttons under the photos, the link goes to Getty, not to the publisher’s site."

The Neiman story further points out that Getty may collect data from those who use the embed feature and, most notably, “reserves the right to place advertisements in the Embedded Viewer or otherwise monetize its use without any compensation to you.”

So what does Getty’s move mean for those who would like to use the newly free photographs? What if, say, I wanted to illustrate a blog post about the Busojaras festival in Mohacs, Hungary, where I lived for two years?

If you want to take advantage of the sudden boost in the quality of your photographic resources, here are some points to remember:

• The images are low-resolution, meant for online sharing, and are not print quality.
• Getty’s images still are copyright-protected. What’s “free” is not the photo content itself, but rather a license to use it in certain contexts. Getty retains all intellectual property rights.
• Free images may be used only for non-commercial purposes - but defining what is commercial and what is not historically has been tricky. 

Getty officials have said using a photograph in an ad to sell a product clearly is commercial use. But using a stock Getty image to illustrate this blog post - even though the blog is not for a nonprofit entity - probably would be allowable. In fact, even websites that make money from Google ads still would be allowed to use the free embedded images, according to an interview with Craig Peters, senior vice president of business development, content and marketing at Getty Images.

“We would not consider this commercial use,” Peters told the British Journal of Photography. “The fact today that a website is generating revenue would not limit the use of the embed. What would limit that use is if they used our imagery to promote a service, a product or their business." To use Getty photos in such advertising, he said, companies would need to get a license.

The full implications of Getty’s move will need time to play out. Meanwhile, though, it is clear that small bloggers and website publishers now have an additional safe, legal source to tap for powerful images to illustrate their messages.

Beyond Facebook and Twitter: Using the Conversation Prism to Guide Your Social Strategy

By Sarah Larson

You've launched a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and you've got a few hundred followers on each. Maybe you even monitor and update them regularly.

All the firm's principals are on LinkedIn and properly connected to the firm's page. (You have created a LinkedIn page for your firm, right?)

Congratulations: that's a good start.

Traditional social media now is entering its second decade, as measured from the launch of the seminal social site, MySpace, in August 2003. In early years, social media was seen as the Internet's crowded community promenade, safely sequestered away from the "serious" business and media websites that once defined the Internet's popular profile.

Today, social media has grown up. Instead of being a place your kids hang out, social has evolved to become the default mechanism for public interaction between any two - or more - parties online.

Whether the conversation is between a store and its customers, a TV anchor and her upset viewers, or a firm and its (prospective) clients, social is virtually always the medium.

As you might have guessed from this post's title, that medium has grown well beyond the marquee names of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Those forums remain incredibly important, to be sure, but it's not enough to plant your firm's flag there and call it a strategy.

If you're not really sure what your next social step entails, The Conversation Prism, released this summer by Washington, D.C.-based design firm JESS3 in collaboration with digital analyst Brian Solis, might help you get your bearings.

The Conversation Prism organizes the social Web based on types of services, encompassing everything from social marketplaces like Etsy and LivingSocial, to location-based apps such as Foursquare, review sites such as Yelp, livecasting services such as Livestream, photo sites such as Instagram and 500px, and curation sites such as paper.li and Pinterest.

It's true that many of the platforms shown on this infographic predate and challenge what we've come to think of in the past few years as "social media," and that's the point.

The graphic demonstrates, in a powerfully visual way, how social media is no longer something we do, it is the way we live. It is not a fad, it is not going away, and its influence is transforming the way we do business.

First released in 2008, the Conversation Prism has changed over the years, reflecting the evolution of the social Web it monitors. In the latest version of the graphic, 122 social media services have been removed, and 111 new ones added.

One aspect remains constant, though. At the center of the prism is "you," the person or business looking to make their latest social move and choosing platforms to meet their goals. 

Whether that goal is listening, learning or adapting social for your company's use, the Conversation Prism can help guide a social media strategy, reinforce a strategy already in place, or inspire management teams to think about social in a new way.

What social media platforms does your company use? Have you identified any new platforms you would like to use? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Note: Click on the graphic to enlarge it for easier viewing.

Social Media: The Best Times to Post and Why

By Liz Jenei

Social Media has become an everyday norm. With platforms being flooded with millions of people live tweeting through their favorite TV shows, and posting pictures of what they had for lunch, it is critical to time your business content sharing for maximum views and engagement.

Almost a half of the country lives in the EST Time Zone, with the next largest group of people living on Central time. It is important to keep this in mind when applying these suggested times written throughout the post.

Twitter

MediaBistro published a study that indicates the best time to post on Twitter as 1 p.m.

According to by Dan Zarrella, the author of “The Social Media Marketing Book,” surrounding social media behavior data, Twitter has the highest level of re-tweets from 2-5 p.m., and more people use Twitter towards the end of the week than on a Monday. Surprisingly, more people read their Twitter feeds on the weekends than they do on a Monday or a Thursday. Want to post something on a Friday?  Posting before 3 p.m. is crucial because after that, Twitter traffic dips very low.

By using a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite you can compose and schedule tweets to be sent out over time. This allows you to tweet over the weekend without having to work on the weekend. But if you’re going to schedule your tweets, be sure to monitor in real time. You also want to ensure that what you have scheduled to post is innocuous – especially in the event of major breaking news that could taint the perception of others as to why you posted such a thing at that moment. There have been many faux pas posts that were scheduled and then posted at inopportune moments.

LinkedIn

The Houston Chronicle states the best time to post on LinkedIn is in the evening.

“Early evening, starting between 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. is another great time of the day to publish content to LinkedIn, because you are catching users at the end of their work day.”

Zarrella says the best days to post are Tuesday through Thursday. Saturdays and Sundays are often high traffic days for LinkedIn, but not as popular as mid-week posts. 

Facebook

The problem with Facebook is that if you flood your friends’ or followers’ feeds too much, they will delete or unfollow you. It is easier to flood friends’ feeds on Facebook than it is on Twitter. Keeping this in mind, it is best to share Facebook links and posts every other day as opposed to daily. 

According to a blog post written by Mashable regarding the best time to post on Facebook:

“Links sent between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. get the most traction, with Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. being the best time to post on Facebook all week.”

Email

5-7 a.m. seems to be the time for the most open rates for emails sent and once a month corporate email frequency gets the highest click-thru-rates, says Zarrella.

People pay the most attention to emails sent on the weekends, but people are also inclined to unsubscribe more on a Saturday or Sunday than a weekday. 

Blog Posts and Google+

Blog posts and Google+ seem to have their highest traffic at 10 a.m. with the optimal time for engagement being between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.  Men are reported to read blogs in the evening and experts warn that Google+ engagement drops significantly between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Comments spike on Saturdays and Sundays (probably because people have more time to comment) but blog views take an overall dip on Saturdays.

Pinterest and Instagram

A study conducted in 2012 and published by MediaBistro indicates that the best time to post on Pinterest is 11 p.m.

Statigram gives us the ability to determine the times and days that our Instragram photos get the most likes. The rates of usage appear to change depending on the audience targeted. Keep in mind, however, that Instagram is less of a corporate business tool than a photo social media sharing tool.

Many marketers use Instagram as an easy way to cross promote images on Facebook, Twitter and other social sharing sites – since it can serve as a one-stop shop.

When it comes to social media, every platform is slightly different as are the audiences who use those platforms and those that you target.  By making the most of user engagement statistics, you can enhance your social networking presence and engage more strategically.