First this week, a son sues his mom for harassment after she logs into his Facebook, changes his password, and posted slanderous things on his wall. (Link)

Now, a 12-year-old kid spends $1400 of his savings and his mom’s credit card bill on Farmville. (Link)

Parenting and Facebook. Epic Fail.

Parents (hopefully) pretty clearly understand the dangers of online predators (See LA Times article of a recent horror story: Link). It’s an extension of the age-old “don’t talk to strangers” mantra, and something parents can handle. It may be the subtleties of Farmville, and the capacity for absolute embarrassment, however, that are over parents’ heads.

Hopefully these two stories aren’t the norm, but there will always be extreme cases of poor parenting. These stories are evidence of social media’s movement into the everyday sphere, and into a new, and sometimes less than honorable, realm of our everyday lives. It won’t be long before “My mom dated my Facebook Friend” is an episode on Jerry Springer, and “Berenstain Bears: No More Farmville Spending” hits kids’ bookshelves.

It’s hard to stay on the very top of the every-changing social media game, but that’s what makes it fun. Parenting, and the online powerhouse category of “Mommy Blogger,” is actually huge on the Internet. Any one who doubts it, head over to Google and see how many hits you get with just those two words.

Sure, Facebook may make it easier for you to catch your kid misbehaving. But that doesn’t give you a right to hack it. And leaving your credit card out, or for that matter, giving your child access to his own savings account, without instilling teachings of responsible spending, is a pretty common sense “No,” too.

It’s the old rules, with a new twist. And with social media here to stay, parents, kids, and everyone else better catch on and learn how to use it responsibly.

Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque recently wrote a blog post arguing that relationships in social media are “thin relationships.” He writes,

“During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.”

The blogosphere tends to focus on the relationships that flourish on social media, so I appreciate that Haque chooses to focus on the flipside of the issue. I imagine he’s being purposely incendiary, and he’s right in some respects, but I think this line of thinking fundamentally misunderstands what social media is, and the role it plays in people’s lives. Social media’s greatest asset isn’t that it strengthens the core relationships in your life. It can, but it’s greatest contribution is that it makes it much, much easier to stay in contact with all those people/businesses/musicians/causes etc. in your life that you are interested in, but wouldn’t actively seek out on a frequent basis. More Information…

Local deal of the day websites are all the rage inside the social media bubble at the moment. Groupon, LivingSocial and BuyWithMe are the biggest players in the space, and having raised over $80 million in venture capital (between these three players alone) they are beginning to dominate the online marketing landscape. From endless Facebook ads, to SEM and online PR these deal of the day sites are turning (almost exclusively) to social media to seed their client base. In fact, this may be the first example of an multi-million dollar industry built exclusively on the backbone of social media.

Local Deal of the Day websites generally list one deal per city, per day. The deal is generally for a restaurant, spa, event or service. The offer is always somewhere between 40% to 90% off the retail price. So what’s in it for the players?

The consumer gets a great deal cause. The Deal of the Day site makes an incredible CPA. They take 50% of all revenues generated, on some deals this is as much as $75 a sale. The biggest sites like Groupon are averaging thousands of deals a day in each of their two dozen cities. So it’s pretty easy to deduce their is big money in running a popular Deal of the Day site. But what about the merchants who are doing these deals?
More Information…

The Washington Post printed (or today, more relevantly, posted) an article this week discussing what they presented as the shady world of online PR and marketing. On the heels of a class action lawsuit against Yelp, it addressed a problem many are seeing online: how to know whether that review was an honest, unbiased opinion, or penned directly by an agent of a crafty company’s PR team. (Read the article here).

The Post article and the recent hubbub make it seem like there is a dark, new phenomena: online PR people working as devious underground double-agents.

But what about traditional journalism and reviews? The internet is all a tizzy about freebies given to bloggers and covert company reviewers, but old-school journalists aren’t exactly innocent. Free swag and special journalist rates have been a part, albeit maybe not the most upstanding part, of reporting since the glory days of print. And unlike bloggers, it’s up to the journalist’s ethical discretion rather than federal mandate to disclose the friends-with-benefits relationship. (See article on FTC disclosure rule here ).
More Information…

I’m beginning to think that the only surefire way to get attention is to try to censor something. Which is why by now you’ve probably already heard about the drama surrounding last week’s virtual smackdown between Nestlé and Greenpeace.

A quick recap for those who missed it: In the red corner, we have Greenpeace (you know, that loveable group of environmentalists that can sometimes come in just under PETA on the crazy scale), who began the media flame war with this little “commercial” for Kit Kat.

WARNING: The following video is pretty graphic.

Have a break? from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

The whole idea was that because Nestlé is ultimately getting its palm oil from Sinar Mars, a large company that doesn’t impose strict sourcing regulations, the nutrition giant was directly contributing to deforestation and (somewhat more indirectly) the deaths of orangutans that lived in the once arboreal areas. In response, Nestlé – in the blue corner, if you’re keeping track – couldn’t stand for any of this and before Greenpeace even had the chance to say “deforestation,” Nestlé swooped in and forced them to take down the video.

More Information…

My friend Brendan Cooper ran a great article yesterday in which he discussed his frustrations attempting to navigate the web presence of major brands. In the post he briefly mentions two types of companies – those that have Advertising Influence with those that have Advocate Influence. I think this is a really good way to look at corporate marketing programs, so I’ll write about it today.

Companies with Advertising Influence push a message out to their customer relentlessly. They inundate the masses with billboards, radio ads, TV spots and online banners, all vying to hijack your attention, and ultimately influence you in their favor. Today I was at SM, the largest chain of malls in the Philippines. There are plenty of brands in SM with major Advertising Influence. But I came across one that really hit home – Whatchamacallit – a candy bar with peanuts and carmel. There was a small Whatchamacallit billboard advertisement in my elementary school. In first grade I walked past it everyday and slowly but surely I found myself really wanting to try a Whatchamacallit. This was my first conscious experience with Advertising Influence.

More Information…

We’re to a point where even, some may say especially, small, independent business have figured out that this whole social media thing is something that’s needed. Social media for business: but the great divide is how to unite the two.

In many cases, there are two camps here: those who know business, and those who know social media. But very few understand the relationship between the two.

Ask any current college student to pop open their Mac, and odds are, the homepage will be Facebook. The most infamous bane of the GPA nowadays isn’t parties, but Facebook. It’s midterm season right now, and with everyone “studying,” Facebook has never been busier.

So yeah, college students get social media. Most people under the age of 30 do. But knowing how to post your sweet mardis gras photos isn’t really a marketable skill.

More Information…

Over the past few months tons of innovative companies have been facing lawsuits and legal challenges: Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp.

The Yelp cases offers the clearest example of the Law vs. Innovation. Over the past few weeks Yelp has been sued twice. Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc. and D’ames Day Spa of San Diego County v. Yelp Inc. accuse Yelp of running an “extortion scheme,” that punishes businesses who do not pay Yelp’s $300/month advertising fees. Cats and Dogs accuses Yelp of offering to remove negative reviews of their business if they started paying $300 a month to advertise, while D’ames claims that Yelp removed 13 positive reviews that were posted about the business.

Both of these cases are fascinating examples of an antiquated legal system failing to understand innovation. I have managed dozens of our client’s Yelp presences. In some cases paying for advertising and in others using the free business owner tools the company makes available to everyone. To explain why both of these suits are misinformed let’s take them one at a time.

More Information…