We’ve written about Righthaven a couple times. This is a company with a business model based on suing publishers and bloggers on behalf of newspaper clients like the Las Vegas Review-Journal, bringing lots of fair use questions into the forefront.
PaidContent legal, regulatory, and privacy reporter Joe Mullin revisits the topic, suggesting that depending on how the litigation process goes, we may soon see 100% copying become "legally justified" in many cases.
He says this could happen if one of two things happens: a judge could rule that newspapers gave "implied license" to copy their content (through things like share buttons) or a judge could rule that even full copies of newspaper articles are often "fair use."
The New York Times did a little undercover work in the world of search and discovered that JCPenney was benefiting enormously from paid links. They ranked number one or close to it for some very prominent search queries including “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture", “tablecloths” and many other highly searched for terms.
(Note: Tweets regarding this from Google’s Matt Cutts can be viewed below.)
The JCPenney links take consumers directly to the appropriate sections of their site. This lasted for month including the Christmas holidays according to the article.
A spokeswoman for JCPenney, Darcie Brossart, told the New York Times, “JCPenney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.” Apparently the actual blackhat SEO work was done by the company’s SEO consultant firm SearchDex which it has since terminated.
The New York Times secretly contacted Google with their information about JCPenney and also arranged an interview with none other than Google’s Matt Cutts who is famous in the search world and well known to the readers of WebProNews. Cutts told them, “I can confirm that this violates our guidelines". He added, "Am I happy this happened? Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”
WebProNewsOnce caught by Google, JCPenney moved from an average search position of 1.3 to a rather low 52. What are your thoughts?30 minutes ago5 likesComment
According to the article JCPenney dropped from an average search result position of 1.3 on Feb. 1 to an average postion of 52 on Feb. 10. Unlike what happened to BMW.de a while back, Google did not remove them from their search index but with an average search result position of 52 they might as well have.
Update: Since this article was published, Matt Cutts posted some tweets as seen below:
@arrington left a comment: I really wish that our algorithms or other processes had caught this much faster–I’m definitely not celebrating.less than a minute ago via webMatt Cutts
mattcutts
@arrington the newer/most recent spate of links happened in the last 3-4 months; not over a year. JCP still ranking on [dresses] on eg Bing.less than a minute ago via webMatt Cutts
mattcutts
One of Bing’s Facebook fans brings up a good point about the search market. Google is simply ingrained in so many people’s online habits, Bing’s biggest challenge is to simply keep Google users from being sucked back into the Google way.
Have you tried to use other search engines besides Google, only to find yourself coming back? Was it for the quality of results or just out of habit? Let us know.
Daniel WillisHow can I adjust to bing? I like the search engine just I am in the grip of google :/ I always end up using google again.18 hours agoLike1 comment
Bing reminded everyone this week that it is still behind in some aspects of search, when it announced personalized search results based on location and history.Google has been personalizing search results based on these factors for quite some time. The announcement doe show that Bing is improving, however.
Meanwhile, as Google’s search quality is repeatedly called into question, one of the biggest things it has going for it is probably the fact that it is indeed a habit for so many people, because it has simply dominated the search market for so long.
Bing has a new weapon in this battle, however. Last year, Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7. Initital sales of the devices that run this platform weren’t too mindblowing. Now, as you may have read, Microsoft has entered a strategic partnership with Nokia, which will see its phone OS being used across Nokia devices. And guess what – Bing will also be used across these devices as the default search.
Habits are a lot easier to break when the default is the alternative. Of course, it remains to be see just how well this partnership will pay off for Microsoft. They are, after all, competing with the likes of iOS and Android, not to mention BlackBerry and webOS.
Apple is entering a new phase for the iPad … competition. On the heels of HP announcing the HP Touchpad today, Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber speculated that Apple could release an iPad 3 about the same time as HP releases the HP Touchpad:
"Summer feels like a long time away. If my theory is right, they’re not only going to be months behind the iPad 2, but if they slip until late summer, they might bump up against the release of the iPad 3."
Gruber is known for blogging correct Apple speculation and news. Time will tell if he is correct here.
In another blog post this evening Gruber added more tantalizing details to his predictions:
"So, here’s my guess at Apple’s iPad plans for 2011: An iPad 2, fairly soon. Say, a March announcement, shipping in the first week of April. Faster, more RAM, maybe more storage, thinner and lighter, a front-facing camera. Running iOS 4.3. iOS 5, announced at a developer event in March, shipping in June. iPad 3, shipping in September, announced at the annual iPod event. Running iOS 5.1, same as the next=generation iPod Touch." Read more on Guber’s blog.
Social media is maturing as are the people embracing its most engaging tools and networks. Perhaps most notably, is the maturation of relationships and how we are expanding our horizons when it comes to connecting to one another. What started as the social graph, the network of people we knew and connected to in social networks, is now spawning new branches that resemble how we interact in real life.
This is the era of the interest graph – the expansion and contraction of social networks around common interests and events. Interest graphs represent a potential goldmine for brands seeking insight and inspiration to design more meaningful products and services as well as new marketing campaigns that better target potential stakeholders.
While many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors, many are simply documenting activity and mentions as a reporting function and in some cases, as part of conversational workflow. However, there’s more to Twitter intelligence than tracking conversations.
We’re now looking beyond the social graph as we move into focused networks that share more than just a relationship.
Bringing the Interest Graph to Life
To demonstrate the value of interest graphs, I worked with the team at ReSearch.ly, a unique Twitter search platform that has indexed the last three years of Tweets to instantly provide a real-time and historical analysis of activity around keywords and also the people that Tweet them.
ReSearch.ly visualizes the interest graph, and also provides the ability to search within the search to sort activity by demographics and psychographics, sentiment, bio data, profession, and the list goes on. Essentially, it’s a product that anyone can use to learn about what’s really taking place on Twitter to better understand behavior and earn greater relevance by making more informed decisions.
As an example of audience profiling or competitive intelligence, we used ReSearch.ly to review the followers of @Starbucks, one of the most celebrated brands actively using Twitter today. We started by extracting 1 million follower profiles, sorted by follower count. The results were then further filtered to include only those who published a complete profile. ReSearch.ly provides the option to then organize the resulting information any number of ways, which in this case, we sorted the accounts by bio, location, and gender.
The Interest Graph
While we are what we say in our Tweets, our bios also reveal a telling side of who we really are. In this study we reviewed the complete bios of 50,000 of the top @Starbucks followers to learn a bit more about how they present their life story as well as their interests, opinions, and preferences.
Using the ReSearch.ly Twitter index, we created a word cloud to amplify the most common words used in each of the bios of these connected social consumers. Followers tended to use expressive words that suggest sentiment runs rich in the Starbucks interest graph. Top words include:
1. Love
2. Life
3. Friends
4. Music
5. World
We can also learn a bit more about Starbucks influencers by analyzing what interests them. Looking a bit deeper into the cloud, we can see that not only do emotions rise to the top; other revealing themes also surface:
1. Family
2. People
3. Mom
4. Wife
5. Husband
This is just the beginning. The words associated with the brands demonstrate the emotional and personal connections Starbucks holds with these tastemakers. Campaigns are a direct beneficiary of such data. As we submerge ourselves one level deeper into the study, we find that this information becomes paramount when we link it to individuals through demographics and psychographics. An import footnote is that the word coffee is among the least used words in the bio, but used nonetheless.
Studying Bio’graphy
With a 50,000-person sample in a traditional research survey, it may be difficult to organize individual responses. Here, we further reviewed each of the bios to find the commonalities in how each person presents who they are in a few precious characters.
Of those, we found that…
– 42 percent expressed strong ties to family, religion, and love
– 29 percent boast special interests, which is further discernible
– 22 percent are professionals who state their current place of employment and position
– 7 percent are students
Additionally, we can extract the attributes of @Starbucks followers further to better symbolize their digital persona. Further review highlights that followers…
– Identify themselves as enthusiasts, geeks, addicts, junkies, creatives
– Define the most popular areas of interest as Music, Food, Coffee, and Fashion
– Potentially favor dogs to cats (2 – 1 as per their mentions)
– Work in either Social Media and Marketing (Note: If we were to change the scale of followers, we would open up the sample to a much broader set of professions)
– Also are still studying. Despite the lower percentage, students account for more than any single professional field
Geo Location: Where in the World is @Waldo?
Brands are more than aware that no one marketing strategy reaches and moves everyone in the same way. Beyond demographic marketing, brands must also focus on driving traffic regionally. Having access to location data isn’t new, but using Twitter as a collective stream of intelligence to identify higher and underperforming locales and associative word clouds allow teams to surface the 3 W’s of real-time geo loco marketing:
Where is negative/positive activity taking place?
Why is it leaning in that direction? And,
What can we do about it?
To give us an idea of where the top @Starbucks followers are Tweeting, we zoomed in to their point of reference. We found that top users tend to Tweet from…
1. California
2. New York
3. Texas
4. Florida
5. Washington
Combining London and UK, we find that The United Kingdom would actually join the ranks of the most often cited cities.
Grouping locations provides a holistic view that provides regional marketing metrics and also areas in need of attention.
Here we can see that the top Tweeps are located in…
– US East, 30 percent
– Non US, 27 percent
– US West, 22 percent
– US Midwest, 21 percent
Tweeting from the Gender Lines
Over the years, I’ve studied the gender makeup of social networks and have consistently found that women outnumber men in some of the most popular networks including Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter, women represent the majority share with 57 percent.
Working with the team here at PeopleBrowsr and ReSearch.ly in conjunction with Klout earlier in 2010, we uncovered en masse, women are more influential than men on Twitter. In fact, the average Klout score within the general Twitter population 34 to 31 in favor of women.
Reviewing Starbucks top followers in ReSearch.ly, it comes as no surprise to see that the women are the predominant source of Tweets, 63 percent women vs. 37 percent men.
The Tweets Have It!: Introducing the Starbucks Brand Graph
The interest graph is defined by connections, but it is brought to life through self-expression. When we combine brand-centric relationships and conversations, the interest graph eventually evolves into what is essentially a brand graph. Within each brand-related graph is a group of highly connected individuals that serve as a company’s network of influence. The ReSearch.ly team extracted 50,000 of the most recent Tweets that included a mention of Starbucks. We then analyzed the connections between people and identified the top 100 individuals and the number of their followers who also mention Starbucks within the 50,000 mentions. We can then bring to light Starbucks influencers as a representation of its brand graph and influential hubs. As we can see, the difference between monitoring and gathering intelligence allows Starbucks to now identify relevant networks and introduce personalized campaigns to further spur advocacy and loyalty.
Here are the top 100 most connected people within the group mentioning Starbucks and the number of their followers also discussing Starbucks:
Accordingly, we can visualize the interest graph as connections, showing how influencers are not only interconnected, but also capable of disseminating relevant information and influencing behavior to varying degrees beyond the traditional reach of Starbucks. Social consumers and their place within the social consumer hierarchy determine reach and ultimately outcomes. Everything begins however, with recognizing who they are and what inspires or motivates them.
Conclusion
The era of analysis paralysis is officially over. Instead of just listening, companies can now study people and their interests based on what they say and do and also how they color their profiles. This goldmine of insight gives brands the potential to improve marketing, promotional and advertising campaigns to start. What we’re talking about here is the ability to personalize experiences that go beyond demographics and start to employ psychographics and behaviorgraphics – the ability to connect with groups of people by interest and how they interact.
As this practice develops, brands can also gather the intelligence necessary, and widely available, to improve products, services, and spark new waves of tweets gushing with positive sentiment. Doing so over time helps to build the social, and more relevant, business of the future while improving relationships to convert followers into stakeholders.
I pay attention to emerging technology and trends on a daily basis. While I track many networks, tools, and services, I take the time to share those that appear to gain traction or offer interesting prospects for tomorrow’s business, today.
Two such services are quickly becoming the darlings of the blogosphere and brands alike, Instagram and Quora. Not a day passes us by where someone isn’t analyzing Instagram’s rise to imaging stardom or Quora’s domination of social engagement around questions and answers. Did the world need another imaging application? Probably not. Do consumers need another question and answer site? Hardly. Instagram and Quora, however, appear to have executed a “thin edge of the wedge” strategy, which is akin to the “tip of the spear” strategy where the services attack a small problem first and then expand once traction and momentum are underway.
Instagram wasn’t the first service to help you share pictures from your mobile device to your social graph. Services such as Twitpic and yfrog connected pictures to the Twitter stream. With Facebook’s mobile app, users could simply upload pictures to their Wall. Instagram however, solved two small challenges with an all-in-one app. It became the focal point of visual sharing. Rather than take a picture and then upload socially through a separate service, Instagram became the dashboard for capturing, editing, and sharing the image without leaving the app. And, Instagram served as an integrated distribution network connecting users to their respective egosystem including, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, Facebook, and Foursquare. The answer to what’s next lies in the company’s business plan, most likely described as the wedge strategy. Or, the answer could already exist in Quora, the social Q&A network.
Quora seems to baffle the sharpest of the pundits. Essentially it is a question and answer network, not unlike Yahoo Answers or Mahalo Answers. But, the fledgling service solved a couple of problems very well that existing solutions and budding entrepreneurs neglected to see. Much in the same way Foursquare applied game mechanics into geolocation and Facebook introduced the social effect into the News Feed, Quora is designed to engage, challenge, educate and reward its users. But that’s not all. The foundation for the questions and answers are driven by a hierarchy and social ranking, much like Twitter and blogs. The number of followers, following and total mentions is prominent for all to see and judge.
Quora evokes the essence of social capitalism and in the process, introduced a new category of content creators. The system was initially closed, and through a strategic round of private beta invitations, the early rounds of users such as digerati, silicon valley elite, bloggers, celebrities, et al, set the stage for exclusivity as well as focus. Those on the outside wanted in and those on the inside desired recognition. I am not name dropping, but I am making a point. I was introduced to Quora by Ashton Kutcher. And, when I sat down recently to discuss Quora with uber blogger Robert Scoble, his response was as telling as it was validating, Quora is hot because, “all of the cool kids are using it.”
The thin wedge of Quora’s strategy may already have traveled further from the left to the right than Instagram. As new users are invited into Quora, the game mechanics seem to only grow in prominence. People are investing in asking and more so, answering questions to boost social capital in an uncharted and unconquered network where the reward is distinction and stature.
Are Businesses Using Instagram and Quora to #Engage?
If it’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years of studying social media, business, and the pursuit of influence, it’s that we are competing for the moment in order to earn and maintain a semblance of relevance. For businesses struggling to gain traction through Likes, RT’s, comments, clicks, friend and follower counts, the moment for which we compete, never really comes. It is perpetual.
The reality is this, Quora and Instagram are inviting participation among brands as they experiment in earning relevance.
#Quora
While brands are currently not invited to the Quora party, listening and monitoring are important within Quora if it is indeed where your community is asking and answering questions. Like Yahoo Answers and Mahalo Answers, answers to brand related questions are already populating the top of search results in Google.
Brands, if possible, can follow topics related not only to their company, but also their markets. For example, there are hundreds of questions related to Apple in Quora right now, 335 of which are open. If we take a subset of Apple’s business and follow the topic around “tablets,” we would see that our time (defined by any number of tablet manufactures) would yield a great deal of insight.
But why Quora? Robert Scoble eluded to the value of the network earlier. The community as it exists today is rich with influencers. Their perspective is worthy of attention. If for nothing else, insight into the perception and experiences of noteworthy individuals can help inspire future experiences through adaptation.
By the way, if you want to continue the conversation on this topic, it should come as no surprise, that a question already exists…and it’s awaiting your response.
#Instagram
On the other hand, Instagram is already attracting brands into the popular mobile imaging network to help visualize their stories. In November of 2010, National Geographic was amongst the first to demonstrate how a brand’s image could quite literally tie to images within a mobile photo sharing network bound by imagery.
Since then, CNN, Grammys, NPR, NBC News, Playboy, and Pepsi signed up for Instagram. When Starbucks introduced its new logo recently, the company did not wish to repeat the Gap’s social backlash. Instead, Starbucks shared the logo across the social Web, Instagram included, to seek feedback.
NPR uses Instagram to not only extend the reach of its stories, but also tell stories through modern form of photojournalism. In fact, media certainly has a play here and in any other active imaging network.
To learn more about brands using Instragram, you might want to watch this thread as it unfolds on, you guessed it, Quora.
We’re early on both fronts, but these trends are inciting notable activity on both sides of the brand equation. It’s not just businesses that gain from the intelligence and community within each network, media organizations can also keep their fingers on the pulse of not just new, but also emerging networks that can modernize and reinvigorate news distribution networks.
The networks that gain greatest prominence in these times are those that people choose to support. As such, it is up to businesses and organizations with a story to tell and those with true intentions of community to survey the horizons for the next opportunity to earn relevance.
I’ve received a series of inbound requests for comments based on a report from Gartner, an IT analyst firm, that estimates as many as 70-percent of social media campaigns will fail in 2011. There are a series of discussions hitting the blogosphere and the Twitterverse exploring this very topic, some elementary and others on the right path. I contacted Gartner earlier this week and the problem is, that this data isn’t new at all. In fact, these discussions are fueled by information originally published in 2008 and in early 2010. Yet another example of the importance of fact-checking in the era of real-time reporting yes, but, when I paused for a moment, I appreciated the timelessness of this discussion.
Are many of the social media programs in play yielding tangible results?
No…
Are they designed to impact the bottom line or are they tied to meaningful business outcomes?
No…
The truth is that you can’t fail in anything if success is never defined.
eMarketer recently published a report, “Social Media in the Marketing Mix: Budgeting for 2011,” that documents the increase in social media spend we knew was imminent. However, in addition to showing us that companies are actively investing in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms and campaigns, eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson says that businesses are spending more money for all the wrong reasons.
Indeed, business are moving from experimentation or ready, aim, fire approaches to deeper phases of implementation.
Williamson shares a perspective long cautioned against here and in Engage, “many companies are expanding budgets for social media marketing not because they have been successful at it, but because they are relying on gut instinct—the feeling that ‘this is something important so I’m going to do it even if I don’t know why.’ Or worse, they have watched their competitors earn accolades in the press for their work in social media, and they are afraid of losing any more ground.”
#FAIL
Failing to plan is planning to fail and this is a lesson that strategists and practitioners will learn as they progress. If transparency and authenticity were prevailing maxims over the last several years, accountability, metrics, and outcomes serve as the foundation for social media success in the immediate years ahead. An effective social media plan must address business dynamics and it takes much more than a Facebook and Twitter presence. To keep things simple, social media are transformative…but essentially they’re channels, services, and networks used for intelligence, communication, and visibility. If we introduced email to the organization today, would it focus solely on marketing or customer service? Of course not. Email is not owned by any one department. It extends the reach, voice, and capabilities of every person from the inside out and the outside in.
Viewed this way, we see that a social media strategy must gain attention from the very top of the organization and see its integration across relevant business teams. Activating processes and engagement in business units is not tied to one switch either. It takes time to learn, to visualize new processes and systems, to open doors between departments. But, doing so sets the foundation for the social business, for an adaptive business. Switches will get introduced as their needs are defined and the electricity is tied to each one in order to perform specific actions.
The lens in which businesses must view social media is that through an integration aperture. Social extends and empowers every business facet that is affected by online activity. That includes marketing, communications, sales, CRM/sCRM, product development/R&D, HR, finance, legal, et al.
According to eMarketer’s report, integration is strongest in marketing and weakest in critical business functions. To envision the future of social media, we would see each of the grey bars slide from left to right, initially led by an internal team or business strategist to help with a change in culture, process, and overall goaling.
#WIN
Everything starts with defining the mission and purpose at the top so that respective business units can perform according to goals and tasks. By focusing only on one or two aspects of social media, we narrow an important view of the 3F’s (friends, fans and followers) and what the real needs and opportunities are the lie before us. The answers you seek are not limited to catch blog posts that promise “The Top 10 Ways to Master Social Media.” Your answers require research…not just listening.
Approach the search box of social networks or monitoring and research tools such as ReSearch.ly, Radian6, Spiral16, etc. as a blank slate. Fill in the blanks to enliven the 5W’s +H.E.
Who
What
When
Where
Why
How
To what extent
Then categorize the information you discover to make the case for each of the affected groups within your company. Success here requires more than one community manager or one team leading the social effort. It’s not an easy process. But then whoever said social media was easy…is wrong. Unearthing the intelligence that exists when we read between the lines, we become the experts in which we initially sought guidance and we open up individual career paths beyond the social media “help desk.”
We are not simply competing for the moment, we are competing for relevance now and in the future. The future of business is indeed social, but more importantly, it’s adaptive.
The last post in the “Best of 2010? series is an experience that won’t soon be forgotten. In 2010 I launched (R)evolution, a new video series that spotlights the people who are exploring and defining the future of business, culture, and media. In Episodes 11-13, I had the opportunity to sit down with one of my idols, Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of the CBS EVENING NEWS WITH KATIE COURIC and correspondent for 60 MINUTES.
Katie Couric is every bit enchanting and welcoming as she is wise and thoughtful. Watching this series reveals a rare side of the person we see on TV. This is someone who is learning about the importance of new media and who isn’t afraid or above exploring the future of relevance. She is the first to say that we are all facing new media together…and together, we have much to learn. A master of traditional journalism, a mother of two daughters, a human being, Katie is looking at Social Media as nothing less than transformative to who she is professionally and personally.
To be honest, I was intimidated at first. As you watch each of the three episodes, you’ll notice a gradual shift from a formal interview to a conversation between two peers.
Take a moment to watch all three. It’s a very candid, sincere, and refreshing conversation. And if you’re like me, you’ll find that she really is America’s Sweetheart.
Part One: Social Media and Real-Time Journalism
Part Two: Privacy and Personal Branding
Part Three: Fact-First Journalism and Digital Identity
Social media and marketing have become synonymous over the years. At the same time, social media is placing the customer back in customer service. Each movement represents important and overdue (r)evolutions within business, but this is just the beginning. With every step toward progress we make in social media, we uncover what’s necessary to make real headway in the progress of progress.
The future of business is social and as such, every aspect of business affected by outside activity will require a social extension. Businesses must shift from reacting to the outside in, bottom up groundswell to also leading a top down, inside out program to earn relevance, community, and authority. In order to do so, the social business will take a human touch…and internal transformation.
At the moment, it is the champion who ignites change from within. They understand how social affects business dynamics and builds support among key players to engage. Typically marketing and/or customer service run pilot programs to prove the merit of new media. From there, trials graduate to ongoing initiatives dedicated to social marketing, service or both. It starts with listening and monitoring and evolves to reactive engagement. Through strategy and creative processes, social programs eventually mature into proactive participation over time.
Everything starts with defining the voice and the persona of the brand as well as its mission and purpose for engagement. While intention counts, it is our actions and words that define outcomes. In the last mile of engagement, consumers must see beyond the personal brand tied to the representative to see the brand the individual represents. The elements of traditional branding still apply, they’re just humanized now.
When we shift from monitoring to hearing what people are saying and the context of their conversations, we discover that reactive and proactive engagement spans across the entire business. And even in the cases where participation isn’t required, there is still much opportunity to adapt products and processes based on insights gleaned from concentrations of meaningful dialogue.
Many of the social media cases that I review today and even those that I have worked on in the past, reach one audience…an audience of existing and potential customers. So, when we run a creative campaign or a personalized social customer program, we quickly realize that our audience is actually an audience with audiences who also have audiences. And, within each, are subsets of people with distinctive needs and also those who represent real world opportunities.
We are on the right path. We just have much to learn. In 2011 and for the next several years, social businesses will transform the organization from within. For those ready to lead tomorrow’s businesses today, we are indeed talking about organizational transformation and change management. Starting with the philosophy, culture, and reverberating throughout systems, processes, workflow, business units and the people at every step of the way, the business of business will evolve…it already is.
Originally published at BrianSolis.com. See Brian’s 2010 Series on the Social Business here.
One of the wonderful things about the web is that most of the world’s information is accessible online. Better still, a large portion of the world has access to all of that information. Search engines play a huge role in making it easy to sift through that information and find the stuff you are looking for. Problems arise, however, when people who are less scrupulous decide to publish content and decide that the best way to do that is to steal it. Unfortunately, the web makes stealing of your content quite easy, and enforcement of your rights somewhat difficult.
Assessing the Consequences
One of the first things you need to is to assess the level of damages to you. Getting your stolen content removed from someone else’s web site requires a fair amount of work, and you should only pursue it if you are likely to be impacted at some level.
In general, the search engines are pretty good at recognizing the original author of a piece of content. However, the search engines can make mistakes. For example, if you just launched a new blog that has little visibility on the web, and your article it stolen by the New York Times. However, this is pretty unlikely to occur. And, if a prominent site steals your content it is usually quite easy to address, as we will explain below.
The first thing I would do when worrying about content theft is take several different unique strings from the content and search on it within double quotes. For example, if your content included the phrase: “The slow gray fox tripped over the startled dog”, you can search on “slow gray fox tripped over” (including the quotes) in Google and Bing. If your article comes up first, that is a good sign that the search engines know that you are the authoritative source for that content.
Try this with several phrases to make sure that you are OK. One key tip – avoid picking phrases that include punctuation, such as commas, hyphens, and quote characters. These seem to work less well for these types of searches. Once your testing is done, if you show up first for everything you need to consider whether you are suffering any damages.
Another component to consider is whether or not the stolen article contains links back to your site. If it does, the search engines are pretty good at unravelling this type of theft, and knowing that you are the original author. Chances are that you passed the quoted strings test above if this is the case.
Making Content Harder to Steal
There are some things that you can do to make your content harder to effectively steal, or to lower the consequences of the damage if it is stolen. The two major ways to do that are:
Use relative links for images. I.e. something that looks like “/images/yourimage.gif”, instead of “http://www.yourdomain.com/images/yourimage.gif”. The reason for doing this is that it will force the thief to copy all of the images in your content over to their web servers, or to modify the links to absolute links.
For the same reasons, use relative links when referring to your CSS files, or any Javascript you have on the site. Note that if you use third party tools such as Google Analytics, you will need to use absolute links to refer to that. Just make sure you use relative links for any Javascript you have developed for the site and which is hosted on your web server.
Use absolute links when linking to other pages on your site. I.e., “http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html” instead of “/page1.html”. The reason for doing this is that it ensures that you get links back to your site, unless the thief goes through all the content and modifies those links to make them relative links.
For fun, you can also create a custom piece of Javascript that recgonizes what domain it is on, and if it runs and finds it is not on your web servers, it publishes a big bold image that says “STOLEN CONTENT” on the stolen pages.
The general idea here is to make your content more work to steal than someone else’s content. Few publishers will take all the steps outlined above, and therefore those other people will represent easier targets for thieves than you.
Taking Action
Of course, there are times when it is worth taking action. I recommend a three step process when doing this:
Contact the site owner. Use whatever means they provide for doing so, tell them where the offending content is, and tell them they need to take it down, or you will take action. Even though you are angry, there is no need to be nasty about it. Focus on your goal, which is to get it taken down. However, do be very clear that you intend to pursue this further.
If that does not work, the next step is to contact the hosting company for the web site. You can often get this information from their WhoIs records at the registrar, but if it is not there, try using a third party service such as Who is Hosting This. The reason for contacting the hosting company is that they can be held liability for the content theft if you have notified them and they do not act on it. They may be more motivated to avoid the liability than your thief.
The third step is to file a DMCA request with the search engines. Here is the Google DMCA form and the Bing DMCA instructions. The beauty of this is that the search engines also have an obligation to respond. Do not do this lightly! Do it only if you are in fact the original author. If you used a contractor to write that article, do some due diligence to make sure that they did give you original content.
This three step process should address most issues. Since it will take a lot of time and effort, do make sure you evaluate whether or not it is worth it. If there are no real damages to you, then it probably is not taking action, unless someone is copying your whole site, or otherwise extensively stealing from you.
It’s no longer a matter of answering the micro riddle, “to tweet or not to tweet.” Twitter helps you simply Tweet everything that moves you. While this capability has existed through third-party services over the years, Twitter is rolling out a dedicated function to harness the power of the “interest graphs” that you weave.
Not only can you share links with those who follow you, Twitter is extending its “Suggestions for You” feature to assist in the curation of your social nicheworks. After a link is shared, relevant individuals who share your affinity for topics and themes will appear. This allows you to expand your social graph and slowly shape it into a series of interest-related graphs or contextual nicheworks.
For content publishers, from casual bloggers to influencers to the media elite, Twitter only requires the installation of a few lines of code to set the stage for broader distribution within an ecosystyem where the appetite for “what’s happening” is insatiable.
Here, I’ve used the TweetMeme to provide sharing functionality. TweetMeme is partnering with Twitter to ensure that this functionality run seamlessly. The company is also expanding its services to fine tune the social web and shape the future of content curation.
DataSift provides developers with the capacity to to build precise streams of data from 60+ million tweets sent every day.
– Tune tweets through a graphical interface or our bespoke programming language
– Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP
– Comment upon and rank streams created by the community
– Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams
This week BP successfully recapped its ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. Test results are favorable and show that oil and gas are, for the time being, confined. This news inspires cautious optimism in the hearts of residents and spectators alike. Online, however, the social effect continues to flow across social networks and social graphs, echoing anger, hope, and the demand for resolution and prevention from BP and the Obama administration.
If we were to look back and examine the extent of these online conversations and the associated sentiment related to this catastrophic event, we realize just how pervasive social networking is becoming to society. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr served as primary media hubs for sharing pictures, videos, and information. And, studying this activity could yield an ocean of insight.
If one social community represented a repository of collective consciousness for study today, there is no need to look beyond Twitter.
Twitter as a Human Seismograph
Twitter recently reported 105 million registered users with 190 million monthly page views. Whatever the actual user count is and how many of those users actually Tweet vs. solely consume content, it’s clear that the public stream and the oceans of conversations it feeds is the Web’s most important database of collective consciousness.
Our voices and our thoughts form much more than trends and trending topics, when assembled, they reveal raw human sentiment, perception and also indicate the responses and actions that materialize as a result. What was once purely a human seismograph for measuring events and reactions has now evolved into a vibrant society where the united intelligence that’s available to us both historically and in real-time is greater than the sum of its conversational parts. If Twitter were the United Nations, its representatives would span the globe and rank 11th in terms of overall population, just behind Mexico and just ahead of the Philippines. Needless to say, the communication and connections that power the Twitterverse are indeed representative of a universal culture.
Study: Evolving Sentiment Towards Obama and BP
Working with PeopleBrowsr, we focused our research on the U.S. Gulf oil crisis, one of the most important stories dominating the news, our hearts and minds, and now history books. While emotions, opinions, and hope run deep, this report will focus on the state of human sentiment as defined by public conversations on Twitter.
The goal of this report was to surface and spotlight views and feelings as they evolved over time. Concurrently, we set out to demonstrate perception vs. actuality by separating the developing attitudes that defined the state of Obama and BP over the course of several months.
To align our calendars, the BP oil spill was first reported on April 20th, 2010 as a result of Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion that killed 11 platform workers and injured 17 others.
This study examines sentiment dating back to March 2010 and continues into June 2010.
It’s important to consider in this analysis that we viewed all conversations related to the White House and Obama as a whole and not isolated by the oil spill specifically. We did so to demonstrate the Gulf’s impact on White House sentiment as it became clear that the explosion was much more than an unfortunate incident. Also, the following sentiment data is the result of human sorted tweets that were randomly sampled over time.
Sentiment: Obama
Using Twitter as a micro approval indicator, the BP oil spill does not appear to be “Obama’s Katrina.” Based on the data reviewed thus far, Obama’s public approval doesn’t seem to indicate the intense backlash shortly following Katrina.
Between March and June 2010 (98 days), Obama and the White House was the subject of over 2.5 million tweets. Of that, an estimated 213,000 were specifically related to the BP oil spill. And over the course over those three-plus months, sentiment averaged 64.55% neutral, 28.5% negative and 7% positive.
Sentiment: BP
Applying the same lens to BP, total conversations tied to BP and the oil spill between March and June 2010 (98 days) skyrocketed to an approximated 1.1 million tweets. Of those conversations, 59.06% were deemed negative with an additional 8.98% categorized as very negative. 28.20% of those tweets remained neutral and believe it or not, 3.14% were viewed as positive.
Sentiment: Comparing BP and Obama Over Three Months
Positive: Starting with positive sentiment, the nosedive for both is grave. Doubts for resolution and swift response caused the lack of public support for both Obama and BP and ultimately shifted towards sharp criticism and deafening cries for action and resolution.
Prior to the oil spill, BP was perched at its apex of positive sentiment. As the attempts to cap the gushing well failed, sentiment plunged 61.5% over three months. Obama also fell 63.3% from its high in March to a three month low.
Neutral: When either negative or positive conversations increase, it’s usually at the expense of indifferent banter. As expected, BP conversations hurtled by 53.39% between March and May. On the other hand, Tweets related to Obama and the White House actually increased over the course of 90 days by 24.9%.
Negative: When reviewing negative sentiment related to BP, there’s a reason the term hockey stick is used when referring to graphs. In March, BP was already the subject of negative commentary; however, after the explosion, critical conversations skyrocketed 107.05%, representing a devastating vertical spike in antipathetic public opinion.
On the contrary however, unfavorable Tweets related to Obama practically remained constant, declining a bit by 1.29%.
The average sentiment comparing BP and Obama eerily aligned, indicating that from a public perception standpoint, proactive leadership and resolution is critical.
March
April
May/June
Hashtags
Hashtags were originally introduced into the Twitter stream by Chris Messina as a way of categorizing conversations by topic and theme. Over time however, the role of hashtags expanded beyond classification to now also convey emotion or observation. For example, conversations related to the oil spill include hashtags as sentiment or for conveying implicit messages such as “I can’t believe the BP oil well is still gushing #IhateBP!” and “The BP oil spill represents why offshore drilling should be banned #helpsavethegulf.”
Tweets populated with references and messages conveyed through hashtags were overflowing and for the purpose of this report, we focused on spotlighting only those densely tied to the event as well as President Obama.
To demonstrate the extent of these particular hashtag references, we visualized them through an overlay graph dating back to the beginning of the year and running through the end of June.
The number of Tweets including the following hashtags between April 20th and June 30th demonstrate only a sample of all oil spill related conversations, but offer a glimpse of the role hashtags play in this unique forum.
Total Hashtag References: April 20 – June 30, 2010
#oilspill = 438,926
#gulf = 35,225
#obama = 92,430
#bp = 225,365
Gallup: President Obama Job Approval
Reviewing President Obama’s Job Approval at Gallup, we can visualize a steady decline in approval and rise in disapproval with 47% and 46% respectively.
For Obama advisors as well as those on his communications team, a month-by-month comparison of the erosion of BP and White House sentiment screams for decisive action.
The Supreme Court has ruled 9-1 that texts of government employees can be looked at by government managers. Specifically, the Court ruled that a California Police Department was within its rights to view pager texts of a Patrol Officer. Whether this ruling extends to cell phone texts on company issued phones or instant messages on corporate computers remains to be seen.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy doesn’t seem to think so stating, "The opinion was a narrow one that didn’t make any sweeping pronouncements about the privacy expectations workers should have in a rapidly changing digital age".
DigiTimes is reporting indications that Apple is in current production of iPhones that are compatible for use by Verizon. According to DigiTimes, "Pegatron will also start shipping a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 to Apple in the fourth quarter".
Music publishers have sued Limewire for copyright infringement and are asking for payment of $150,000 per song. This comes on the heals of a winning Federal court judgment last month against Limewire by recond companies. Many publishers were not part of that lawsuit.
The Huffington Post acquired a company that currently helps it manage over 100,000 comments on its site per day. The two person company, Adaptive Semantics is the first acquisition by the Huffington Post according to Techcrunch.
A Toy Story 3 Twitter link is the first Twitter Trending Topic ad. The ad is only seen by people logged into their Twitter web page and is located at the bottom of the trending topics list. The ad simply says, "Toy Story 3" with the word "Promoted" next to it and links directly to a Toy Stories 3 Twitter account. It is intended to generate viral buzz rather than a visit to a website like your typical Internet ad. Everything is on the line for Twitter with this attempt to monitize via advertising. If it generate significant movie ticket sales for Disney expect Twitter to add many more promoted links.
Quora seems to baffle the sharpest of the pundits. Essentially it is a question and answer network, not unlike 
