HC+T Update: July 4, 2014

From: "HC+T Update" <shel@holtz.com>

Subject: HC+T Update: July 4, 2014

Date: July 4th 2014

July 4, 2014
Want to unsubscribe from this newsletter? Click here.

To all my fellow Americans, a very happy Fourth of July. To all my friends and colleagues from around the world, happy Friday! The Friday Wrap (which is what you're reading) is a curated rundown of news, reports and posts from the past week that, while they didn't go viral or attract much attention, are still interesting and useful for communications professionals. I select Wrap items from my link blog, which you're welcome to follow.

News

Consequences of "right to be forgotten" start to emerge -- The European Court ruled on May 13 that Google must honor requests from Europeans who want links to content that hurt their reputations. The requests have been coming in fast and furious, and the kinds of links Google is removing are raising alarms. Near the top of the list are links to a post by BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston about former Merrill CEO Stan O'Neal guiding a company that behaved like a risk-taker instead of an agent or broker. Google would not tell Peston who had requested the link be removed. Under the Court's unappealable ruling, Google must remove links that are "inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive." The original content remains on the BBC website. Meanwhile, six articles published in the Guardian newspaper have been removed from search results, three related to a retired Scottish premier League referee who was found to have liked about why he granted a penalty in a ma tch that led to his resignation. The others address French office workers making Post-It art, a solicitor facing a fraud trial, and an index of a week's worth of pieces by Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade. Neither the BBC nor the Guardian can appeal, under the European Court ruling. Read more here and here.

Vine introduces new metric: loop counts -- Until this past Tuesday, Vine allowed you to track only likes and comments. Now, you can count "loops," the number of times a user has watched a Vine video. Vine videos, like animated GIFs, run in a continuous loop, so the metric counts the number of times you have sat through the six-second video. "Tracking loops will show advertisers as well as the public that a Vine's virality has value." Read more

Morgan Stanley brokers are allowed to tweet -- In another move enabling the financial services industry to participate more in the social media space, Morgan Stanley is letting its brokers tweet their own original messages. Before this, brokers were confined to tweets the company had prepared. Now, after participating in a 20-minute online training course, and assuming they have at least 15 Twitter followers, they will be able to send out original messages with a supervisor's approval. The approval process is designed to ensure compliance with Financial Industry Regulatory Authority rules requiring companies maintain records of all social media communications. Read more

Google closes Orkut -- At one time, Orkut was the most popular social network in Brazil; some 70% of posts to Orkut were in Portuguese. Launched by Google a decade ago, Orkut was also popular in India. But with Google moving anything remotely social under the Google+ umbrella, there's no place for Orkut, which will close its doors on September 30, joining other social efforts like Buzz, Wave and Friend Connect. Read more

CEO tries crowdsourcing a change to the law -- The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court against Aereo all but shuts the company down; it has already stopped providing the streaming TV service and refunding customers their last month of fees. But CEO Chet Kanojia isn't giving up. He has turned to his customer base asking them to send a letter to their legislators seeking legislation action to "protect your right to use the antenna of your choice to access live free-to-air broadcasts." It'll be interesting to see if the outreach bears fruit. Read more

Second Life gets a reboot -- Linden Labs plans to re-introduce Second Life next years with help from Oculus Rift, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company. Not that Second Life has gone away; in fact, it's still thriving even if the marketing and advertising world has shrugged it off since its heyday around 2005. But with VR going mainstream, CEO Ebbe Altberg is planning to rebuild the service from the ground up. The news has produced no excitement from the PR and marketing worlds. Read more

Trends

Professionals are moving to social professional networks -- While Facebook is the behemoth social network where most activity takes place in the social media world, there are signs of emerging professional networks. LinkedIn is the obvious one, but significant funding has found its way to networks dedicated to specific professions. Doximity has raised $50 million; it's a network that serves as a social-media home for 40% of all U.S. doctors. Former military personnel are gathering on RallyPoint, which raised $5.3 million. While a dedicated network may not be coming for every line of work, "vertical professional networks" are likely to attract highly skilled knowledge workers. Such networks exist for software engineers, mechanical engineers, data scientists, and academics, for example. Read more

Language analysis gains favor among marketers and advertisers -- Microsoft and Ogilvy are among the early customers of Relative Insight, a UK-based company that conducts language analysis to compare how a client's use of language in its own materials compares to competitors and customers. "One supermarket used it to see how its customers talked about summer to ensure that its advertising related well to the target market," according to one report. In that case, Relative Insight collected a million words from parenting forums; one one people talked about activities, while on the other they talked about children and family and the cost of raising a family. "This can inform campaigns -- target a Netmums audience requires a different language to Mumsnet." Read more

Bots could take over rote writing tasks -- The Associated Press has announced a "robot content production deal" with Automation Insights that will have standard earnings items produced by bots. Some speculate the same technology could be applied to press releases. Read more

Outbrain bans native ads -- In a move that demonstrates native advertising isn't going as well as hoped, Outbrain -- which produces recommended links from clients that appear at the end of articles in online publications -- has banned advertisements masquerading as real stories. In the industry, these are native ads or sponsored content. Read more

Mobile

Facebook introduces technology that could propel deep-linking -- Deep-linking is the term applied to launching a mobile app from a link without having to start at the welcome screen. Facebook has introduced a technology that lets developers send users from a mobile ad to a "deep link" in an app. Currently only 22% of the top 200 mobile apps enable deep linking, a number that drops to 8% if you include apps that have deep links in both iOS and Android versions. Read more

Research

Your boss uses social media at work more than you do -- That's true, at least, if you live in Norway, where researchers found managers and corporate executives may dislike social media because they're worried about productivity issues among their workers, but in fact they're more likely than their subordinates to use the Internet and social media while they're at work. According to one of the researchers, the finding could indicate that these higher-level staff are less worried that they could lose their jobs over their at-work social media use. They could also be more interested in using social media to advance their own careers. Read more

Chief communication officers expand use of social and digital channels -- PR agency Weber Shandwick and global executive search firm Spencer Stuart have released a study that found chief communication officers (CCOs) from around the world are adding social and digital media to their department oversight and responsibilities. They're hiring more digital and social media experts and developing more relationships with social media influencers. Ninety-one percent of CCOs expect social media to grow more important than other communication responsibilities, a finding consistent across all key geographies. Read more

English may not be your best choice -- We often choose English for a marketing or communication effort because we know the audience speaks it, even if it's not their native language. After all, translation remains one of the most problematic tasks in the communication field. However, 32% of millennial consumers in English-speaking countries prefer a language other than English, and 46% are more likely to buy if information is offered in the language they prefer. According to an SDL study, language is directly tied to purchasing behavior, but not always to geography. Read more

The hysteria over Facebook's A/B test is misplaced -- Facebook's suppression of updates from a sample of users' news feeds to determine the impact on mood was communicated in a remarkably tone-deaf manner, but the research itself didn't violate ethical or legal requirements. Read more

A summary of academic posts on the Facebook kerfuffle -- To back up the post to my blog on the Facebook mood experiment, I summarized in a LinkedIn post some critical thinking published by a host of academics who truly understand the research issues in play. Read more

The window is closing on the opportunity to get native advertising right -- As noted in a news brief above, Outbrain has banned native ads from the links it will share as "related content." The ban is a recognition that most native advertising is terrible and designed to deceive, exactly the opposite of what sponsored content could be. If this trend continues, it won't be long before the opportunity to build a strong channel through native ads evaporates. Read more

This week on FIR

On FIR #762, Neville and I discuss the truth about Facebook's organic reach for brands, how PR Hacker pitches using direct-mail-like tactics, whether an attention-focused metric can replace pageviews and monthly uniques, an impending court decision on reselling ebooks, GE's expansion of its online content presence, how to view your website the way Google does, how to set up Twitter Cards for a WordPress blog, and Google's deletion of thumbnail images and Circle counts as part of the authorship tag. We also have our usual reports from Dan York and Michael Netzley, and a lot more. Listen
Ron Shewchuck talks with corporate video empresario Drew Keller about storytelling and other dimensions of video production episode 5 of TV @ Work. Listen
Glenn Gaudet interviews the former head of Ford Motor Company's social media team, Scott Monty, about gaining customers' trust, in episode 28 of AMP UP Your Social Media. Listen
On episode 8 of All Things IC with Rachel Miller, Rachel shares highlights from The Big Yak unconference, attended by some 150 communicators. Listen
Lydia Sugarman, founder and CEO of Personal Health Cloud, joins Mitchell and Michael on episode 29 of Thought Leadership to talk about marketing automation. Listen

I return to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in August for three days of teaching at the national communications association, ABERJE.
In October, I'll head to Warsaw, Poland to speak at an internal communication conference.
I'll also be conducting two workshops in October for Intrateam, the Denmark-based intranet organization.
In October, I'll speak at the Global Intranet Forum in New York.

Online training modules done right

I have developed interactive, multimedia training modules that produce measurable results for a fraction of the price charged by others. For a demonstration and to talk about how online training can benefit your organization, give me a call.