Open The Dialogue

• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online:  the great article that goes with the image above.  Rajesh Setty maps out how people pereceive and value content online.

• Sometimes focusing deeper on your customer base is much better than widening product offerings.

• Mediaite launched to bruising traffic and much debate.  A fresh new look at the media industry as a whole.

• John Cass on measurement strategies and social media goals.  Some good discussion surrounding the disconnect between value on the web and direct business results.

• Facebook unlocks the live streaming application that was made famous during CNN’s inaguration web coverage.

• Don’t have a blog?  Some great ways to be active online that don’t require a long-form base.

• The recent Morgan Stanley study on teenage social media use generated lots of feedback.  Mashable points to the importance of anecdotal vs. factual evidence whenver doing these kinds of reports (which is embedded there to read as well).

• David Finch on what social media is not.  Most importantly?  It’s not a short-term fix, a solid business culture commitment is required.

• Micah Baldwin on the lie of community.  Technology and modern marketing has shifted our perceptions of what a community is in the digital world.  Good lessons on getting back to basics.

According to the July 13 New York Times article, “Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor,” more and more mommybloggers are “cashing in” on the interest from PR agencies to promote products and services by charging to get a mention or product review.

Bloggers charging for products is different than working with traditional media. In traditional media, PR agencies do not pay journalists because it poses a conflict of interest and causes the journalist to be unbiased in their reporting. Now, bloggers are changing the game. There is a wide range of blogger requests. They want products to review – and to keep. They want to be paid for running giveaways. They want to be included on blogger events. They want loaner items. They want to be paid and compensated for their time, which they say is valuable.

Transparency, whether it’s a product review on a blog, a post on a forum or in a 140 character tweet, is key because bloggers want to share real, honest reviews and to be a source of trustworthy information. Another issue is whether or not there is a mix of reviews – paid and unpaid. Mommybloggers may review both products that they purchase and that were given to them, but they don’t always indicate which is which. The lack of transparency causes confusion and makes it difficult to know whether or not a product is something blogger discovered independently or something that was pitched. The new FTC guidelines that are in the works could potentially solve this. The guidelines would require bloggers to disclose when bloggers were paid or given a product for free. This will make the distinction between true opinion and PR clearer. It’s important for PR agencies and clients to insist on proper disclosure, a benefit to both the blogger and to the consumer.

Until the guidelines are established, we recommend that PR professionals and their clients develop their own individual guidelines for how to ethically compensate and work with bloggers, and also to choose the right relationships that will benefit the blogger, the client and the consumer. We work with bloggers in a way that is beneficial and ethical for everyone. It is our policy at MWW Group not to pay bloggers for writing a post, and we request that whenever a blogger talks about a produce or service received from a client in any sort of public forum, bloggers discloses that they received it from one of our clients through MWW Group. This clearly shows the reader that the blogger did receive something from a PR agency and they can make an educated evaluation of the review.

Last year Dave Carroll was traveling to Nebraska on United Airlines, and watched as his guitar was thrown around by  their baggage handlers.  The guitar was severely damaged, and after 9 months of trying to get compensated, he instead decided to get even.

In 4 days, more than 1.3 million people have watched the video, it has been reported about across the web and in mainstream news, and will probably cost United more than the $3,500 they could have paid to avoid all this.

This isn’t the first time that companies have been faced with dissatisfied customers or disgruntled employees who have taken their message to the Web, with serious consequences.  At the end of the day, it means companies are more accountable for their actions and have more incentive to provide stellar products and great service.

We’ve seen companies like Comcast and Dell learn and grow from major online brand attacks.  United has apologized, and listening and making it right is the first step.  We’ll see moving forward if this helps drive a bigger shift in their approach and communications.

MWW Group Launches D.Advocacy from Joe Becker on Vimeo.

Facebook announced Wednesday that it will streamline privacy features and enable users to open their profiles to anyone on the Internet. Along with demystifying the complex privacy settings by unifying them into one simple page, users will now be able to set restrictions on individual pieces of content using the Publisher tool. Regional networks, adopted by only half of Facebook users, will be eliminated as the focus shifts to open content sharing.

Facebook’s move to simplicity still leaves users with plenty of options. For each of its seven content areas, users can choose one of five access levels:

Everyone [open to all Internet users]

Friends & Networks [all friends and anyone in your affiliated networks]

Friends of Friends [all friends and friends of friends]

Friends [only friends]

Custom [specific users and lists of users can be allowed or denied access]

With an option to make content public, you may wonder if a particular item you post on Facebook is visible on the entire Web. The biggest concern for people may be the possibility of their personal information becoming indexed by major search engines such as Google and Bing. When you first try to publish content for the world to see, Facebook will notify you that everyone will see your post unless you change your settings. The newest version of the Publisher tool includes a nifty feature that allows you to change privacy settings for individual posts. In addition to the added security, you can still use Publisher to share notes, photos, video and other content.

If you have already weaved through several complicated pages trying to set your privacy levels, plan to go through the process again with greater ease. The new settings will be introduced to you through transition tools designed to make the process as painless as possible. These tools will be tested over the next three weeks as the company begins a slow roll-out of its new privacy settings. Tech Crunch offers examples of these transition tools with screenshots from the Facebook press conference.

Facebook’s shift from promoting private profiles to public content sharing comes as the popularity of Twitter’s open platform continues to rise. Facebook began as a private network of college students with its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, capitalizing on its lure of exclusivity. Its platform served as a private alternative to popular social networking site, MySpace, which had become increasingly overrun by spam. Facebook users will now be encouraged to open their status updates and basic information to all Web users, mimicking Twitter’s default settings.

Twitter is a fast-growing force in social media, but Facebook regularly rejuvenates itself and holds strong in the top position with a massive variety of content and over 200 million users.