There could be complications ahead for sharing photos online. Source: offbeathome.com

Where we left off, Facebook-owned Instagram suffered a backlash last December when they introduced a new Terms of Service agreement whose wording led many users to believe that Instagram would now “own” their photos and as such could sell them to advertisers. That wasn’t true, but in response to the fury Instagram changed the wording again — and this time, it gave advertisers even more leeway with user photos.

Instagram was able to put the controversy behind them, but the incident underscored the growing debate over ownership rights for individuals who share photos online. And now, that debate is getting even more complicated.

Britain has just recently passed new legislation which revises the nation’s copyright law. The Act would be a snoozer of a news items except for one thing: it could change how photos are used online, both in the UK and around the world.

The UK’s “Instagram Act”

The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act is meant to address the problem of unattributed works across the internet. These “orphaned” works can come from anywhere — from websites to search engines to social networks like Facebook. Up until now, any orphaned works were protected under copyright law from being used at all, which is a real problem for researchers, historians, curators, and other content collectors and generators.

The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act — dubbed the “Instagram Act” in a nod to last December’s kerfuffle — is meant to enable those people to use unattributed works, provided they have conducted a “reasonably diligent” search for the works’ creators.

Sounds reasonable so far, huh?

Where it starts to get troubling, however, is the copy-and-paste nature of the Internet. It’s very, very easy to take a photo and reuse it somewhere else — just ask any one of thousands of artists who have spent considerable time and effort trying to remove their works from websites that did not have permission to post them.

Things get even more hairy when it comes to photos shared on social networks such as Facebook , Twitter, and Instagram. Since these photos are stripped of their metadata, they could in a sense be considered “orphans,” leading some in the UK to fear that the personal photos they share online could be claimed for use by anyone, even sublicensed and sold for profit.

Because photos posted on social networks are linked to accounts, it would be difficult for thieves to legally claim they couldn’t reach the creator for permission. For that reason, the average social media user would likely remain unaffected by the new legislation. But professional photographers, who often already have their work copied widely across the Internet without proper credit, could be facing a new and ever-growing mountain of intellectual property headaches.

It’s difficult to know just yet the full impact of the Instagram Act. At best, previously unclaimed but valuable works such as historic photos could now be used in publications and exhibits. At worst, a ruthless new content-scraping industry could grow and feed itself on the web, forcing creators to either pull their photos offline or invest the time and money to officially register each one.

A model for the future?

Some believe that the Instagram Act marks a shift in power away from citizens and towards corporations, which brings us back around to Instagram’s Terms of Service debacle. It’s an encapsulation of the wider intellectual property question on a smaller scale: who really owns the photos posted on a social sharing service? Is it the user who took the photos, or is it the company that runs the service?

Most would say the user owns his or her own content, and I’d tend to agree. But then again, most photo-sharing apps are completely free to download and use. If users don’t pay for the service, then the service has to find other ways to make money.

And so here comes the flood of Sponsored Stories and promotions.

The new reality

This is the new reality of apps: build a rabid fan base around a free service like Instagram, and then turn around and sell that engagement to advertisers.

The new reality of social users, however, is to understand that companies need to make money to survive, and that at some point in their usage of a free service they’re going to either have to give up a portion of their control (i.e; be advertised to) or agree to pay to play.

The golden age of unpaid, advertising-free social sharing services has drawn to a close. And advertisers, knowing that most people are savvy enough to ignore more traditional display advertising, want to use your content to better reach you.

Where will the line between user-generated content and paid promotion be drawn? And will it be drawn at all?

Where do we go from here?

Companies have a responsibility to behave ethically, and act transparently. Users have a responsibility to know that their stuff isn’t always exclusively “theirs” — especially on a free platform.

Instagram and other social networks will surely continue to push perceived intellectual property boundaries. But will it ever be enough to stop anyone from actually using the services?

Only time will tell.

Would you be willing to start paying for apps you previously used for free in order to keep it ad-free? Or could you care less about advertising in your feeds, even advertising that uses your own content? Let me know in the comments below.

Instagram and your photos. Source: designspiration.net

Since Facebook announced its intentions to acquire Instagram a little over a year ago, everyone’s been on pins and needles to see what — if anything — would change.

We got our first big hint last December when Instagram released its new Terms of Service, scheduled to go into effect the following month on January 19.

What happened then? Well, in short: absolute bedlam.

The big backlash

Within hours Instagram’s new Terms of Service went viral, with people taking to social media to complain about the changes. Most folks were seeing red over one key section in particular, which in its original wording read:

“Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.“

What did this mean? Well, one thing it didn’t mean was that your photos now belonged to Instagram. It was simply a small change to Instagram’s permissions regarding user photos in ads – permission that Instagram has had always had, even before Facebook took ownership, from the very first day the service was launched.

Ever seen a Sponsored Story in your Facebook newsfeed? You know, a post that announces one of your friends has “liked” a company’s page or advanced to a new level of a game app? That’s essentially what Instagram was talking about. Unfortunately, that’s not what many people believed, and the fallout was fierce.

The very next day Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, posted a measured explanation on the company blog thanking users for their feedback and promising that the terms would be revised for clarity. Sure enough, by the time the new Terms of Service took effect early this year, the wording had changed drastically. The bummer was that it had actually changed for the worse:

“Some of the Service is supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions, and you hereby agree that Instagram may place such advertising and promotions on the Service or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.”

The difference here is small, but potentially powerful: the words “on, about, or in conjunction with your Content” actually opens up future advertising possibilities for Instagram instead of limiting them.

It didn’t get better

The previous language stipulated that advertisers could only pay Instagram to display your photos in conjunction with sponsored content. For example, if you uploaded a picture of the beach from your vacation in the Bahamas, a travel booking agency could pay to place an ad on Instagram featuring a collection of their “favorite” Instagram pictures of the Bahamas with yours included.

Now, however, with the inclusion of “on, about, or in conjunction with” in the Terms of Service, an advertiser could potentially crop, place their logo, or otherwise modify your photo.

Nevertheless, it seems like even a change for the worse was enough to placate users. Over the last few months, even the people who had threatened to leave Instagram for other photo-sharing apps like Flickr seem have drifted back into the Instagram fold. After reportedly taking a dip, user numbers have stabilized — Instagram claims they’ve even risen — and everything seems to have returned to the status quo.

But the debate about use and ownership of user photos on social networks is far from over. In the next post, I’ll talk about how new copyright legislation in the UK could have future global repercussions.

All hail the hashtag!

You may have heard: hashtags aren’t just for Twitter anymore.

And you, like me, may have noticed their proliferation over the past several months — Instagram recognizes them, as does Pinterest and Google+. Flickr, in fact, has recently added hashtag functionality. They appear on everything from billboards, to television commercials, to news articles, to cola bottle labels — it truly seems that I can’t go anywhere, online and off, without seeing them anymore.

Their gaining traction across a variety of platforms proves that at some point, hashtags ceased being a way for people to aggregate and organize content on Twitter, and became a standardized way for people to aggregate and organize almost anything — at least on the Internet.

But there’s one place where hashtags haven’t been adopted, and it perhaps has the biggest reach of all. I’m talking about Facebook, of course.

But that may change, soon. Recent rumblings in the tech world have indicated that Facebook is currently working on incorporating them into its platform. Some analyses I’ve read online are setting it up as an epic battle pitting Facebook against Twitter. After all, they say, this isn’t the first time Facebook has adopted Twitter’s features — they’ve already added subscriber lists and “@” user tagging functionality.

But while it’s true that Twitter is increasingly a serious competitor for mobile and online advertising — and that hashtags are a key element of Twitter’s advertisers’ integrated marketing campaigns — I don’t buy that hashtags are the way for Facebook to effectively take Twitter down at the knees. For that to happen, hashtags would have to be a core proprietary element unique to Twitter, and an exclusive feature for Twitter users.

It’s not. Hashtags may have been “born” on Twitter, but Twitter didn’t invent the hashtag — its users did. And other platforms adopted it because their users wanted that functionality, not the other way around. After all, #CatsofInstagram wouldn’t exist if Instagrammers didn’t create and continue to use it alongside their cat photos.

What I’m saying is that no one would close their Twitter account just because Facebook finally trotted out the hashtags.

Still, even if incorporating hashtags doesn’t necessarily equate with Facebook stomping all over Twitter’s turf, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it. There are many benefits to Facebook diving into the world of hashtags, such as:

Discovering better-tailored content.

The framework is already there in Graph Search. Being able to search hashtags would prove a meaningful way to track conversations, interests, and trends. This functionality would really round out the data set with a whole new dimension.

Monitoring conversations.

No, not in a big-brother way, of course. But right now, it’s not easy for brands to get a handle on public opinion on Facebook. It’s one thing if a user posts a comment on the brand’s Facebook page, of course, but more often conversations about brands and individual products will happen on the user’s own Facebook page, among that user’s friends — a space that’s (rightfully) difficult to monitor. But using hashtags could change this; opening up a view that would allow brands to better track user sentiment — and keep tighter tabs on the competition, too.

Connecting with the right groups.

Hashtags would make it easier for Facebook users to seek out others with similar interests, it’s true. But using specific hashtags, like #SocialMediaMarketing, would enable users to more quickly find the groups and sub-groups they’re looking for, and participate in them.

Joining chats.

Right now chats can occur on a particular user or fan page, but being able to organize chats around certain hashtags would open up the options more — and allow the chats to be viewed later, by others.

Will Facebook actually incorporate hashtags? I’m pretty sure it will happen, it’s just a matter of when. I’ll go ahead and predict later this year — we’ll see if I’m right.

What’s your take on hashtags? Do you use them?

If you’ve never heard the term before, don’t worry: it’s only recently been widely adopted by the advertising community. But get ready to hear a lot more about it, because native advertising will define the next phase of our collective user experience online.

What exactly is it? Well, SolveMedia has put together a beautifully-designed infographic that answers just that. In a nutshell, native advertising is everything typical advertising is not: annoying, flashy, disruptive. Banner ads, sidebar ads, pre rolls (ads that play before the video you want to watch does), and pop-ups — all of these are versions of ads that desperately try to force you to give them attention.

Native advertising, on the other hand, takes a quieter, gentler approach. “Native advertising refers to a specific mode of monetization that aims to augment user experience by providing value through relevant content delivered mid-stream,” the infographic explains. In other words, it’s advertising that quietly appears in your feeds tucked between normal posts, shares, or tweets from your friends. It’s advertising that doesn’t look like advertising — it looks like all the other content.

Some of the best-known examples of native advertising currently in practice are:

• Sponsored Stories (Facebook)
• Promoted Tweets (Twitter)
• Paid Discovery (StumbleUpon)

Why the shift? More typical forms of advertising simply aren’t working anymore. The numbers don’t lie: In 2000, when the internet was still fairly young, banner advertising click-through rates were 9%. But by 2012, they were just 0.2%.

For me, one of the biggest challenges native advertising will face is user trust. There are a lot of folks who don’t like the idea of ads infiltrating what they perceive to be the “private” space of their feeds. To circumvent this, SolveMedia points out that brands should avoid disguising their ads — this will prevent consumers from feeling that they’re being tricked.

Read on! There’s lots of food for thought here.

But what I didn’t fully understand until recently was how limiting of a name “Street View” actually is. Over several years and with the help of countless volunteers who have contributed 360-degree “photo spheres,” Google has amassed a litany of panoramas that go way beyond just street-level. And they’re all available for the whole world to see.

One of the coolest ways to check out these views is through an interactive experience called “The Secret Door“ (warning: music is set to autoplay, so if you’re at work turn down those speakers). Built by Safestyle UK using the Google Maps API, the experience opens with a view of an ornate door. Click on the door, and it opens randomly into one of 90 vistas selected from Street View. Pan left and right to explore. Then click “Take Me Somewhere Else” and the tool happily complies, whisking you off to another place in the world.

During my time inside The Secret Door, my “travels” included sea life at Heron Island in Queensland, Australia; a stunning autumn landscape in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan; a haunting view of trees in the mist at Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Grave, Midi-Pyrénées; the North Pole, where the flags were so blurred you could almost feel the frigid wind whipping about your face; opening kickoff of a football game in a crowded UK stadium; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Grand Canyon, Jackson’s Meat & Deli in Vancouver, BC; a brush fire in progress in South Africa; a candlelit restaurant in an old tunnel in London where citizens likely once hid from air raids; and a bath house in Japan.

Time suck alert: to borrow from Pringles’s long-running slogan, once you click, you can’t stop.

My only beef with the experience is that some locations had descriptions, and some didn’t — meaning you couldn’t always tell where you were.

The surprise twist? The Secret Door is actually a marketing campaign from Safestyle, a manufacturer of windows and doors for homes in the UK. Since its launch in February the microsite has gone viral, with over 10,000 tweets and 47,000 “likes.” I’d say that qualifies as a genuine success.

Whether it resulted in big sales of windows and doors is anyone’s guess, but major kudos to them for finding a way to drum up buzz and chatter around what would normally be seen as a “boring” product. Bonus points for making it so social-media-marketing and share-friendly.

In all, The Secret Door is a brilliant marriage of concept and brand; easily executed to boot — the ideal social media marketing campaign.

What did you think of The Secret Door?

New Pinterest analytics track a variety of metrics, including pins, repins, impressions, and clicks.

Pinterest recently added new functionality in the realm of analytics.

Available for business accounts, Pinterest’s web analytics will measure pins, repins, impressions, and clicks over time. Now brand owners can more accurately measure and track numbers such as how many people are pinning from their websites, how many people are seeing their pins, and how many people are clicking their content.

Perhaps more importantly, however, brand owners can measure what pinners like in terms of popular content: what’s been pinned most recently, what’s been repinned, what content has collected the most clicks, and what else people are pinning alongside their pins.

The most key aspect of having access to analytics isn’t the numbers, it’s the trends. Businesses that are paying attention can glean insight into what makes their chief demographic tick. By deftly tailoring their content as tastes change accordingly, brands can stay in tune with what clients and prospects like — and potentially reach even more people.

It’s important to note that, although the data they collect is significant, the analytics Pinterest is now offering are on the basic side. Third-party analytics platforms like Curalate and Piquora provide deeper, broader data analysis and won’t be threatened by the new native analytics. Still, the tool adds inherent value for brands and positions Pinterest to better serve businesses — not to mention sets the social bookmarking network up for monetization opportunities down the line.

For now, however, the new analytics features remain free. Businesses simply need to have verified their websites and need to have switched to the new Pinterest layout in order for analytics to work.

Does your business have a Pinterest account? Are you planning on using the native analytics tracking? Let me know in the comments below.

It feels like you can’t open a marketing email anymore without seeing buttons urging you to share the email content across social media channels. Sharing buttons seem so ubiquitous, one starts to wonder if they’re even effective. Have they simply become visual noise that people have learned to ignore on their screen, like display or text ads?

GetResponse set out to answer that question in infographic form. They surveyed over 2,200 million emails sent by over 200,000 of their users worldwide — 9,000 of those were US-based accounts. And what they found might be a little surprising:

• Social sharing isn’t quite as prevalent as I previously thought. Only 18.3% of email marketers included social sharing.
• Of that 18.3% of email marketers who included sharing, over 90% of them included links to Facebook. Only 8.5% of marketers included links to LinkedIn.
• Despite the fact that LinkedIn’s inclusion numbers were so small, LinkedIn had far and away the most successful email click-through rate at 9.6%, with Facebook coming in at 5.4%.
• The click through-rates for emails with social sharing were 115% higher than for those without social sharing links.

Read on for the full infographic — and if you don’t have sharing links in your emails, what are you waiting for?

Cute, right? But there’s more to it than just your “like.”

I was scrolling through my Facebook feed the other morning when I spotted a photo of a man stopping traffic on a road to let a duck and her babies cross. The caption read, “Hats off to this man….How many likes for this man?!!!”

Well, awww. How could anyone not like a heartwarming photo of a human helping animals? One of my friends had, and she wasn’t alone — this particular photo already had almost 200,000 likes, as well as over 5,500 comments and 11,500 shares.

In a cold world where it sometimes seems as if most of the news is bad, it’s nice to collectively celebrate a feel-good moment with others.  After all, “liking” something is an easy way to agree, and to show you care.

But unfortunately, your “like” doesn’t always end there.

Many posts like this one fall into a category of Facebook spam that can have repercussions far beyond your quick clicks — and they’re only getting more popular.

Some of them simply seek your approval, while others tug hard at the old heartstrings. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

“My friend Devon doesn’t think he’s beautiful. ‘Like’ to show him he’s beautiful.”

“My Dad said he’d stop smoking if this gets 10,000 shares.”

“Like if you think this guy’s a hero. Ignore if you don’t.”

“Like if you hate cancer!”

“Like if you love your kids!”

“Please help! If this 18-month-old girl gets 10000 shares her heart transplant is free.”

It’s not just liking and sharing, either. Other posts beg you to participate in different ways:

“Name a city without an ‘R’ in it. It’s harder than it looks!”

“Leave a comment and something amazing will happen! You have to see it to believe!”

What’s wrong with posts like these? Well, for starters, too many are blatantly untrue. The heart transplant one has appeared on Facebook in many iterations, and has been disproven by Snopes.com. Moreover, many of the photos used in posts like these are unknowingly stolen from their original sources — in one instance, a woman found that a personal photo of her disabled daughter was being used in a viral Facebook wall post to garner sympathy likes. Disgusting, right?

So why would anyone want to do something like this? What’s the point of making up a story to collect something as frivolous as likes, shares, or comments?

It’s called “like farming,” only the practice is not nearly as bucolic as the name would suggest.

What happens is this:

1. A person or group of people create a Facebook page or website with an appeal to “like” something, and shares it among their networks.
2. The people in the creators’ networks like and share the page with their own networks, who in turn like and share it. In this way, the post continues to spread.
3. Facebook’s automated algorithms notice a lot of activity on the post, so they work even harder to make sure its seen.
4. The more people see it, the more people like it, and the more people like it, the more people see it. And just like that, the post goes viral, briskly boomeranging in popularity by the sheer force of its own momentum.
5. The creators sell the Facebook page to a business or advertiser for a hefty sum, and now the new owner can send commercial messages to any user who has “liked” it.
6. Alternatively, if the post is linked to a website, the creators collect ad revenue based off of all the traffic — the biggest websites can generate millions of unique visits per month.

Like farms are not exactly a brand new concept, but they’ve gained traction since Facebook introduced its Open Graph API, which allows users to like and share across a variety of platforms.

In order to help combat all this spam, Facebook’s algorithms need to evolve. Right now it can’t tell the difference between “good” content and “bad” — so both get promoted equally. This means, for now at least, that spammers have absolute free reign.

What can you do about it in the meantime besides ignore it? Help spread awareness about like farming — tell your network to think before they “like!” After all, the less your friends click on like scams, the fewer like scams you’ll have to see in your feed, and the fewer dollars will go into the pockets of spammers.

Good luck out there!

And let me tell you, success starts with careful, precise planning. After all, in order to achieve your goals you must establish them first. But being that inbound marketing is a results-focused process, it seems like many businesses just want to skip right to the results without, you know, working for them.

I get it. Planning is challenging and unglamorous. But you have to start somewhere, and strategy is where it’s at. Figure out:

• Who you want to target — who is your ideal customer?
• Where you can find customers — or rather, how they will find your business?
• What exactly you would like those customers to do — sign up for a newsletter? Visit a landing page? Fill out a contact form? Buy your product? All of the above?
• How much you can invest in your marketing plan?
• How much of a return your investment might be able to generate — your goal numbers?

Once you get your plans together, a hearty congratulations is in order! But don’t celebrate too much just yet — our work has only begun.

To help illustrate the rest I’ll turn to a nifty infographic from Impact I found via HubSpot. It describes the six steps of the inbound marketing process. Step one — the objectives — we’ve already covered. Some highlights from the content:

• A professional, clear, flexible, easily-navigable website is absolutely crucial, as it is the hub of all your online marketing and lead generation.
• A blog sends websites over 50% more traffic than websites without blogs.
• Businesses see a 63% increase in marketing effectiveness when using social media networks
• Since almost half of all daily searches are for information on products or services, using effective keywords on your site will help draw new leads in
• The most important metrics to measure are:
  • Traffic to leads
  • Leads to customers
  • Cost per lead
  • Cost per customer

Read on for all the details! And remember, it takes time and upkeep to earn your marketing successes.

Your clicks online are generating CO2 emissions.

We all know the impact that cars, factories, and even our own bodies have on the environment.

But have you ever stopped to think about the environmental impact of the internet?

It’s true: every time you load a page, send a tweet, share a post, or “like” something online, you’re emitting carbon dioxide — CO₂. A small amount, sure, but consider how many people the world over are loading, sending, sharing, and liking, too.

It seems crazy to think that something as intangible as the internet could have a carbon footprint, but it does. And I never realized the full environmental consequences of our actions online until I came across the humorously-named TweetFarts.com, which serves to generate awareness about CO₂ emissions from social media, particularly Twitter.

From their website:

TWEETS GENERATE CO₂

The energy it takes to send a tweet generates .02 grams of CO₂. With 500 million tweets sent daily, a total of 10 metric tons of CO₂ are emitted per day.

How is this possible? Well, all information online is transmitted through large data centers which contain thousands of servers and require an enormous amount of electricity to run. It’s the act of powering these servers with electricity that produces the CO₂.

TweetFarts has a search function that enables visitors to track the CO₂ emissions of various hashtags. Since at the time of this writing the college basketball playoffs have recently begun, I decided to track #MarchMadness. I found that in just one day, 1,334.56g of CO₂ had been emitted from 66,728 tweets. In the past seven days, 4,411.36g of CO₂ from 220,568 tweets. And over all time of #MarchMadness’s existence, 8,115.72g of CO₂ had been generated from 405,786 tweets. That’s like driving nearly 20 miles by car!

What can be done about this? Finding alternative ways to power data centers is one way to help. To that end Facebook has been among the companies leading the charge — in 2011 Facebook opened a LEED® Gold-certified data center in Oregon powered in part by solar energy, and it has plans to build a data center in Sweden that will run almost exclusively on preexisting hydropower. Another way to help is simply in the way websites are coded — using leaner, more compact languages and scripts can help reduce CPU usage, which in turn uses less energy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to shut the computer down for a bit — all this CO₂ production is making me feel guilty!

Were you as surprised as I was to learn about carbon dioxide emissions from the internet? Do you or your company have plans to alter your energy consumption because of it? Let me know in the comments below.