It can be difficult for brick-and-mortar businesses to generate a loyal online social media following, but that is no excuse for transforming the social act of “friending” someone into a purely monetized, commercial relationship.
Informed observers should regard pronouncement of social media law as tentative. The traditional rules applicable to social interactions may apply, or may apply differently, in the context of social media. In other respects, social media may upend traditional notions of legal status and privacy.
Pat Oliphant’s editorial cartoon today captures the disconnect between global geopolitics and the people-powered “almost revolution” going on in Iran these days.
Of course “social media is documenting the Iranian revolution — not leading it.” But that still requires media exposure, coordination and communication, all of which Twitter supplies in spades.
If Twitter and other social media networks had been available in China in 1990, Shanghai might already be free, more than economically.
As devotees understand viscerally, the Internet’s current social networking phenomenon is radically changing communications modes on the Net. Not only is email on the way out, but now the very existence of “static” Web sites is being questioned.
Here are my six rules of engagement for social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc.– all of which can be summed up in the phrase “if you are going to do it, do it right.”
Facebook was possibly wrong (although correct from a customer relationship standpoint) to argue that it needed a license from one user to display his/her content on the “Wall” of another user, even when the first person had affirmatively decided to share that UGC by posting it within Facebook.
The official trade rag of the legal industry — a notorious technology backwater for decades — is publicizing the wonders of the Internet social networking phenomenon Twitter.
So if Howard Dean and MoveOn.org mastered online contributions and bogs, Barack Obama has shown that he doesn’t get social networking, announcing his VP selection not via email, text or social networks.