The pioneering course aims to set new standards for moderation best practice and to help ensure that UGC moderators – both new and experienced – are equipped with the necessary skills needed for everyday moderation tasks.

eModeration has provided course information, content and testing for Moderation Gateway’s virtual training course in a bid to set a benchmark for the moderation industry. As well as best practice, the course covers must-know legislation for moderators, and is regularly updated to reflect any relevant changes in the law.

As Tamara Littleton, eModeration’s CEO, says in the launch announcement that went out today:

We urgently need to set a benchmark for moderation standards across the industry. Moderators have a really important role to play in keeping sites safe and appropriate. I passionately believe that only experienced, trained people should moderate online content, particularly where issues like child safety are involved.

Certification means that brands can be sure they’re getting high-quality, trained moderators working on their behalf. We have been involved in creating and refining the content of the training packages and we’re delighted to put our name to this new standard.”

The virtual certified training course is packed with practical content designed to prepare students with proven skills and confidence to help them become proficient and successful online UGC moderators.

It has five assessed modules – including video, audio, and an interactive moderation simulation tool – and students can learn at their own pace. Experienced moderators can also take the course to validate their skills and to gain a professional qualification. We’ll update you on what it’s like to go through the training in the near future, as some of our own moderators go through it.

As well as the training modules, there is an online glossary, relevant links for further reading, and a moderators’ forum for past and present students to post questions and answers. The idea is that this will grow to become a dedicated community and useful resource for trained moderators. This will also expand when the intermediate and advanced level training courses are launched.

The foundation level training course normally costs £125, but is currently available at an introductory price of £99. You can find out more about how the course works on the Moderation Gateway website.

Crisis management plans are vital, but without a simulation, they can’t prepare you for the reality of a real crisis playing out on social media.

Protect your brand from social media mobs

The speed with which people can organise a campaign, and the way issues can spread to multiple channels creating a kind of angry mob across social media, can create panic and cause the people charged with protecting your brand to respond in ways they (and you) wouldn’t usually expect.

This is where our simulator can help. By training in an environment that simulates a crisis breaking on social media, brands can experience managing a crisis, without any of the risk to their reputation.

Our team works with brands to develop a tailored crisis scenario which their in-house teams have to respond to. As the crisis develops, and spreads over news sites, social platforms, forums and blogs, the participants have to manage an increasingly irate public (mimicked by our own in-house team of community and crisis managers) and try to quell the crisis. The social media simulator offers brand teams a chance to practice how they would respond in a worst-case scenario, and reveals any weaknesses that need to be addressed before a real crisis hits.

We’ll be running a free, fully interactive demo from 08.30am to 12.30pm on Wednesday June 19 at The Benjamin Hotel. If you’d like to drop by and experience the simulator for yourself we’d love to see you! You can sign up for the event here.

The service exists primarily as a smartphone app.  The app, for iOS and Android, allows users to take photos from within the application and post them instantly.  Instagram is also known for its photo editing toolset, offering basic crop and rotate functionality and, infamously, a range of effects and filters.

Though it is possible to interact with Instagram from a web browser by official and unofficial means, photos can only be uploaded through the mobile app.  From this emphasis on smartphone usage, canny brands and businesses can deduce the following:

• Instagram users tend to be young adults
• Instagram users tend to be comfortable with technology
• Instagram users tend to be affluent, and in the market for luxury goods

The latest statistics from the Pew Research Center indicate that 13% of internet users use Instagram and that the service appeals primarily to adults between the ages of 18 and 29.  Of the Instagram users surveyed, 17% reported a household income above $75,000.

The Instagram app is available worldwide and has been translated into 25 languages.  Distimo’s analysis of iPhone app downloads in July last year, shortly after Instagram’s buyout, found that Instagram was downloaded more than any other social network app in countries including the US, UK, Canada, France, and Mexico.  Instagram also outperformed Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in Germany and Italy, beaten only by the WhatsApp instant messaging service.

Why should brands and businesses use Instagram?

Sixty-seven of Interbrand’s “Top 100 Brands” are on Instagram.  On the surface this compares unfavourably to the figure of 76 with a presence on Pinterest, a similarly visual platform.  Why dedicate time to Instagram as an alternative, or in addition to Pinterest?  The 76 brands on Pinterest have a collective audience of fewer than 500,000, while the 67 brands on Instagram have more than 7,000,000 followers.

Furthermore, maintaining a presence on Instagram doesn’t limit your reach to the app’s 100 million active users.  The app natively supports sharing content to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, expanding your potential audience into the billions.

Instagram’s ties with Facebook have greatly increased the flow of content from one platform to the other.  When a user “likes” a photo on Instagram, this activity can be automatically shared to their Facebook feed.  This, of course, isn’t limited to pictures of someone’s pet, or what they had for lunch.  If someone likes a piece of content posted by your brand, that user’s Facebook friends may also be exposed to your content through the Facebook feed.

It’s because of this that 98% of all content posted on Instagram by the Interbrand Top 100 also makes it to Facebook through sharing activity by users.

Perhaps the most important reason for a brand to maintain an active presence on Instagram is that there will be activity around popular brands regardless of whether they have an official presence.  If the Instagram community is sharing content related to your brand, wouldn’t you rather be the one to set the tone of the conversation?

A recent addition to Instagram’s feature set is the ability to tag a photo with the name of any Instagram account.  You might tag yourself, or your friends, or you might tag the account of the restaurant you were in, or the brand that made the shoes you were wearing.

This is a gift to brands.  When a user tags you in their photo you’ll receive a notification.  If you like the way the user’s photo represents your brand then you can choose to share it from your own account in a “Photos of You” section.  What a great way to collate and display user-generated content.  If there’s a downside, it’s that popular brands may find themselves having to put a lot of time into processing this list of notifications.  It might be the sort of task you’d like to outsource to an agency (wink, nudge).

Creative uses of Instagram

MTV has put a lot of work into Instagram, and the company has been rewarded with the second largest following on the platform (narrowly behind Nike).

All photos posted on Instagram can be accompanied with hashtags.  By monitoring six specific hashtags, orchestrated by MTV, it was able to use this functionality as a voting mechanism to decide the winner of a category at its annual Movie Awards.

On the night of the awards, MTV had a dedicated “Insta-razzi” photographer posting content from exclusive areas at the event.  Seventy-eight photos went up on MTV’s account that day, each averaging over 16,000 likes and comments.

 Fashion brand ASOS engages its followers by encouraging them to share their style through themed hashtags, and making examples of the best submissions.  Not only is this a good way to establish a two-way relationship between the brand and its followers; a savvy brand could use this technique to find out more about their customers’ interests.   A radio station might ask its followers to post the cover of their favourite album, giving insight on the genres and artists their listeners are interested in.

At the time of writing, Nike has posted on Instagram only 575 times but has amassed 1.5million followers.  That hardly seems fair.  How has the company done it?

Apps like Nike PHOTOiD haven’t hurt!  PHOTOiD is a web app that lets users choose one of their own Instagram photos to use as a colour palette to customise a pair of Nike shoes, which they can then buy or simply share with their friends.

Measuring your success

Surely the mark of a serious, established social network is its ability to spit out reams of numbers and charts.  Though Instagram itself offers little in the way of analytics, third parties have stepped in to fill the gap.

Some of Instagram’s biggest brands use Nitrogram, a paid tool with a monthly fee scaling based on your number of followers.  It starts at £89 per month for up to 50k followers, £249 per month for up to 200k followers, and all the way to if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it for its unlimited “Big Bang” package.

Nitrogram offers some good insights, including this nice heatmap of your followers’ locations, but you might prefer a free alternative like Webstagram or Statigram.

Both of these free services position themselves as web interfaces for Instagram, rather than purely as analytics tools.  They do, however, have some functionality for monitoring popular photos, tags, and users.  Statigram is perhaps the more fully-featured of the two, offering follower growth charts and information on when your posts get the most attention.

Should your brand be on Instagram?

If you have eye-catching visual content at your disposal, Instagram is a great place for it.  Here on the eModeration blog we’ve talked a lot about Pinterest, and it’s certainly a great platform, but it’s hard to argue with Instagram’s enormous brand following stats.  Instagram appears to be an environment where users are happy to engage with brands and participate in their campaigns, and the ease by which content can be shared to other platforms creates great potential for reach.  Time to put those iPhones to work!

Twitter has launched two-step authentication to much fanfare, but the jury is out on how effective it will be.

In April a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacked the Associated Press Twitter account. The subsequent spoof messages caused a stock market blip, giving pause for thought on just how easy it can be to take control of VIP social media profiles and a sudden panic about crisis planning if a company Twitter account is hacked. Twitter has now given users the option to sign up for two-step authentication when they log in.

There’s been no shortage of tech bloggers lambasting the new two-step process, largely because it wouldn’t have stopped the SEA from hacking the @AP account. It’s also been pointed out that the ‘security’ offered by Twitter’s two-step authentication just isn’t a sufficient trade-off for the loss of speed and agility required by news organisations and other power users. We take a closer look at the process to see whether it does all it needs to.

How does it work and is it really secure?

Basically you add a mobile number to your Twitter account. When you enter your username and password on Twitter a code is sent by SMS to your phone which you then enter on Twitter to complete the login. However, this offers limited protection against even basic attacks like email phishing scams, particularly given that they often use ‘man-in-the-middle attacks’.

So called ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks are still possible on Twitter. That’s where an intermediary impersonates Twitter to harvest login information. This can be done by sending users a malicious email containing a link, to what appears to be a Twitter login page. The spoof login page informs users that they have been logged out and need to log back in.

If the user falls for the trick, they enter their login details (which are passed on to Twitter by the man in the middle), Twitter then generates and sends the SMS code to the user and the user (thinking everything must be legitimate) enters the SMS code into the intermediary login field. This is promptly harvested by the man in the middle. And hey presto, someone else now controls your Twitter account, and you can’t get it back.

Will everyone start using Twitter’s two-step authentication?

Probably not. News agencies will still rely upon the kind of speed and responsiveness which two-step authentication suppresses. Agencies and large teams will find the need for a phone being passed between several people extremely cumbersome. What we should expect to see is increased training and education to help people recognise scams.

There are also a number of password managers and single sign-on solutions so users never need to know the actual password to the profile. Third party Twitter clients like Hootsuite, make it even easier to deploy access securely with a variety of permission levels and granular control baked in.

In a previous role, I was tasked with procuring and deploying a social media management tool for the Metropolitan Police Service and I found that Hootsuite’s secure access and team mapping really fit the bill. The ability to add and remove team members remotely, without the password ever being shared, gave a level of security that two-step authentication never will.

At eModeration I advise and support on the best choice of tool or solution for organisations looking to increase or improve security in their social media profiles. Get in touch, if you have a social media question or problem that needs solving.

What developments can we expect to see with better security?

Personally I think Twitter is missing a trick by not taking security more seriously, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a more powerful solution in the pipeline. The opportunities made possible with better security could really reap rewards. And since Twitter is increasingly focused on monetisation here is a look at where things are going.

Given Twitter’s appeal on devices and pioneering use of OAuth and OpenID, the leap from mobile app to mobile wallet looks highly likely. Indeed Twitter entered into a partnership with American Express in February whereby users who link their Twitter and Amex accounts can accept offers from merchants by tweeting a hastag and replying to a follow-up message.

With contactless payments coming to smart phones it shouldn’t be a great leap to integrate transactions with activity on Twitter. And the ubiquitous nature of RFID tags means pretty much any environment can be transformed into an interactive one. Yes, Minority Report, here we come.

But what about Twitter cards?

That’s why the introduction of Twitter Lead Generation cards is the next step in a bigger game to get retailers and customers forming relationships. Think of it as a ‘register your interest’ button. Clicking on the button shares the user’s name, email address and Twitter handle with the participating brand. The business then emails the prospective customer with essential follow-up information.

This allows businesses more opportunities to discover customers while shortening the length of time it takes to find an offer or pay online. This could work particularly well with pre-orders, offers and promotions. So if you think of your phone making contactless payments in the real world, virtual payments on Twitter and signing up with vendors too the e-wallet has already arrived!

Which leads to the speculation tormenting the UK recently that maybe, just maybe, without the catalyst of downloaded images fuelling the fantasies of child sex killers Mark Bridger and Stuart Hazell, they would not have been driven to commit their crimes.

As Jim Gamble, the founding head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), said in The Guardian last week:

One of the problems with the internet is that people who harbour a deviant sexual desire for children are secretive by nature and the internet allows them a good way to initially satisfy that desire by viewing images. But there is this spiral of abuse theory: they begin to want more, they want access not to still images but to video images, and then they want to get a more real experience.

But how can this spiral be prevented in the first place? How does this addiction to the viewing of child abuse images start?

The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a child protection charity dedicated to reducing the risk of children being sexually abused,  recently conducted qualitative research with men convicted of viewing indecent images of children into their motivations and actions:

Offenders commonly reported not having an initial desire to find sexual images of children, but rather first viewings were described as incidental to their consumption of adult legal pornography. Nine out of ten offenders said they did not intentionally seek child sexual abuse images, but found them via pop-ups and progressive links while looking at adult material.

Their research revealed that many offenders used progressive links on legal websites to access child sexual abuse images on their first occasion, and that viewing these images of children when already sexually aroused by adult pornography may have led to their subsequent urges to see more.

I’d like to imagine that sometime in the near future, these (relatively simple) steps will taken by the search giants in the fight against child sexual exploitation:

• Anyone searching with terms which are known to lead to child abuse sites will receive a warning which will grant them a chance to stop themselves as they start to cross the permeable line between adult consensual pornography and child abuse.
• Seekers of child abuse images will find their searches blocked by search engines.
• Naïvely entering a ‘risky’ search term will bring up an educational warning, to help counter the problem of stumbling across disturbing images by accident.

It doesn’t seem like a big ask, does it?

Thanks to Victor1558 on Flickr for the feature image

Marketers must now take into account responsive design for differing screen resolutions and limitations (i.e. mouse-overs which don’t work on mobile or touchscreen devices). Disclosures, for example, shouldn’t be conveyed via pop-ups, because they are often blocked.

Do take a look at our summary of the guide and also refer to the FTC guidance itself for fuller details on what is covered.

As always, it’s easier to understand when you can see the advice in practice. Here are some of the of dos and dont’s from the FTC report, which give a clear idea of future requirements.

Proximity and placement

Proximity increases the likelihood that consumers will see the disclosure and relate it to the relevant claim or product. Online ads, however, have the advantage – or disadvantage – of  hyperlinks that move the user in different depths of information. Screen restrictions on mobile devices may require significant vertical and horizontal scrolling to view all the information presented.

The “triggering claim” should, ideally, be placed in the same screen. When scrolling is unavoidable, text or visual cues should be used to encourage consumers to scroll in the right direction, i.e. “see below for important information on restocking fees” will work better than a simple “details below”.

Advertisers should consider how the page is displayed when viewed on different devices, as scroll bars, for example, are not displayed on every device.

This ad must disclose that the diamond weights are not exact and that a 3/4 carat diamond may weigh between .72 and .78 carats. Here, though, because of the blank space between the textual description of the product and the disclosure when viewed on a smartphone, even consumers who scroll down to the end of the text (see right-hand image) will probably think that there is no more information to view and are likely to miss the disclosure.

Hyperlinking to a disclosure

Hyperlinked digital disclosures may be particularly useful if the disclosure is lengthy or if it needs to be repeated. However, if a disclosure consists of a word or phrase that may be easily incorporated into the text, along with the claim, this option should be used. This is particularly true for cost information or health and safety disclosures.

If the details of the disclosure are too complex to describe adjacent to the claim, you can provide those details by using a hyperlink. The key considerations are labelling, consistency, placement and prominence; and handling of the disclosure on the click-through page or screen.

The hyperlink’s label (text or graphic) affects whether consumers actually click on it and see and read the disclosure, so they should be obvious, and convey the importance, nature, and relevance of the information.

Simply hyperlinking a single word or phrase in the text of an ad is not likely to be effective. Symbols and icons, for example, could confuse consumers as to where the related disclosure can be found, or “mouse-overs” may not work on mobile devices. Treating hyperlinks consistently within a site or application can increase the chances that consumers will click on them.

Example 1

In this example, the hyperlink “Important Health Information” leads to a disclosure, “Frost-a-tron may not keep perishable food items cold enough to prevent the growth of bacteria when the temperature is over 80ºF, such as in a hot car. Use in these conditions could lead to food-borne illness.”

The fact that the cooler might not keep food cold enough to prevent the growth of dangerous bacteria should not be hidden behind a hyperlink, even one labeled “Important Health Information.” This is especially true when the cooler is promoted for keeping perishable food cold on road trips. Moreover, any disclosure that is integral to the primary claim should be immediately adjacent to that claim.

Example 2

The hyperlink “Restocking fee applies to all returns.” leads to the disclosure, “If you return the Frost-a-tron within 30 days there is a restocking fee of $19.95. After 30 days and before 90 days, the restocking fee is $29.95. After 90 days, the restocking fee is $49.95. Shipping and handling fees are non-refundable. No COD on returns.” The details in this return policy are probably too complex to disclose next to the guarantee, so hyperlinking is OK. The label of the hyperlink adequately conveys the nature and relevance of the information to which it leads.

The idea is to “get consumers to the message quickly”, and constantly analyze click-through data to verify that a disclosure link is not missed. 
FTC .com Disclosures, 2013

Space restrictions

Space restrictions for ads are a major concern, as conspicuous and clear disclosures have to be included regardless of the limitations.

Most webpages viewable on desktop devices are also accessed using smartphones, but, as discussed earlier, consumers may miss disclosures on mobile devices because of the need to zoom in on text and to scroll horizontally as well as vertically.

Disclosures are more likely to be clear and conspicuous on websites that are optimized for mobile devices or created using responsive design, which automatically detects the kind of device the consumer is using to access the site and arranges the content on the site so it makes sense for that device.

Example 3

In this example, consumers might not expect a monthly service fee for cameras used to monitor their homes over the internet, so a disclosure is necessary to prevent the ad from being misleading. Placing the disclosure in a different column than the camera price it qualifies, rather than directly under the price information, as in this example, makes it less likely that consumers viewing this webpage on a desktop computer would notice the disclosure here. When the same ad is viewed on a mobile device that requires zooming, the disclosure is completely lost.

Example 4

This space-constrained message (a tweet) requires two disclosures: (1) that JuliStarz is a paid endorser for Fat-away; and (2) the amount of weight that consumers who use Fat-away can generally expect to lose in the depicted circumstances, which is much less than the 30 pounds Juli says she lost in 6 weeks. (See Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, 16 CFR Part 255.)

Even if the link in the message led directly to those disclosures on the Fat-away website, those disclosures would not be adequate if consumers could purchase Fat-away at a brick and mortar store or from a third-party online retailer (a retailer not affiliated with the advertiser). In either case, they might not click through to the Fat-away website, and thus would not see these disclosures.

Example 5

What now?

US brands and their agencies need to review these guidelines, ensure they understand them and be assured that compliance forms part of their approval processes.

It’s also worth mentioning that, under the FTC’s Guide for Testimonials and Endorsements, reasonable monitoring of disclosures is required: that is to say, endorsers should be advised of their responsibilities and their online behavior monitored by the advertiser to make sure it is in compliance.

Finding out more from the FTC

The FTC provides businesses with resources, insights, and access to closed investigations and actions at ftc.gov.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has recently published an updated Social Media Disclosure Guide

My thanks to my colleague César Struve, who co-wrote and researched this article.

This blog expresses the views of the authors only. It is not legal advice and is not intended to be relied upon. If you have a legal concern about any of the issues covered in this blog, we recommend you seek independent legal advice.

The “.Com Disclosures” report updates the report from 2000 and adds clarification to the FTC’s 2009 Guides to Endorsements and Testimonials. The new guidance takes into account the expanding use of smartphones with small screens and the rise of social media marketing, with mocked-up ads to illustrate the updated principles.

What has changed?

The general requirements for disclosures have not changed; however, the FTC has offered clearer guidance for the inclusion of disclosures in digital marketing channels, in particular social and mobile channels. The guide applies to advertisements that require a disclosure to avoid being perceived as deceptive or unfair, or otherwise violate a Commission rule, and when disclosures cannot be made clearly and conspicuously on a device or platform, then that device or platform should not be used.

What are the standouts for social and mobile marketers?

For marketers promoting or marketing in social and mobile channels, the changes are more pronounced.

The FTC also now requires that marketers take into account responsive design for various mobile and alternate device resolutions and limitations (i.e. mouse-overs that doesn’t work in mobile or touchscreen devices). Preferably, design advertisements so that “scrolling” is not necessary in order to find a disclosure.

The new guidance points out that space-constrained ads, such as on some social media platforms, must still provide disclosures necessary to prevent an ad from being deceptive, and it advises marketers to avoid conveying such disclosures through pop-ups, because they are often blocked.

What is covered in the guide?

While the document provides guidance on what is meant by ‘clear and conspicuous online disclosures’, it isn’t intended to provide a safe harbor from potential liability and nor does it address disclosures that may be required to comply with local laws (such as state sweepstake requirements), or other federal laws or regulations (for example, regulations issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the Food and Drug Administration).

Guides are “administrative interpretations of laws administered by the Commission.” Although they do not have the force and effect of law, if a person or company fails to comply with a guide, the Commission might bring an enforcement action alleging an unfair or deceptive practice in violation of the FTC Act. FTC .com Disclosures, 2013

Our guide to The Guide

Here is our interpretation of many of the most salient points.  Do read it for yourself though – this isn’t exhaustive!

When it comes to online ads, the basic principles of advertising law apply:

1. Advertising must be truthful and not misleading;
2. Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims (“substantiation”); and
3. Advertisements cannot be unfair.

Background on Disclosures

Advertisers must be sure that all express and implied claims of an ad are truthful and substantiated. For example:

• If an endorsement is not representative of the performance that consumers can generally expect to achieve with a product, advertisers must disclose the generally expected performance in the depicted circumstances.
• Any solicitation for the purchase of consumer products with a warranty must disclose the text of the warranty offer or how consumers can obtain it for free.
• Required energy disclosures must provide consumers with clear comparative information.

What makes a disclosure ‘clear and conspicuous’?

There is no litmus test for determining whether a disclosure is clear and conspicuous, and in some instances, there may be more than one method that seems reasonable. In such cases, the best practice would be to select the method more likely to effectively communicate the information in question.
FTC .com Disclosures, 2013

Whether a disclosure is “clear and conspicuous” is measured by an ad’s performance: how consumers actually perceive and understand the disclosure within the context of the entire ad, so the consumer takes truthful and substantiated information. A disclosure not seen or not understood may lead to a misleading impression.

Since in general, consumers don’t read an entire website or online screen (or every word on a printed page), disclosures should be placed as close as possible to the claim they qualify. Scrolling increases the risk that consumers will miss a disclosure. In addition, it is important for advertisers to draw attention to the disclosure, make it unavoidable, and not distract attention away from it by use of moving graphics elsewhere, for example.

Disclosures, according to the guidelines, are evaluated on:

• placement and the proximity to the claim they are qualifying;
• prominence – disclosures should be displayed in a way they are noticeable by consumers, including the use of adequate font size, color and graphics. Different display options on different devices should be tested.
• unavoidability – scrolling or hyperlinking doesn’t prevent the disclosure being seen or heard by the user, no matter what device it is viewed on;
• distracting factors – the guidelines not only apply to the disclosures but to the ad itself. It’s important that the text, graphics and other elements do not distract the user from the disclosure.
• repetition – disclosures should be repeated on lengthy sites as needed and they should be repeated when the underlying claims are also repeated;
• audio clarity or duration of disclosure – which must be sufficient for consumers to notice and understand.
• understandable language – disclosures must be written using clear language and syntax and avoid legal or technical jargon.
• format and language of the disclosure – must be understandable to the intended audience (i.e. audio disclosure for audio ads, Spanish disclosures for ads in Spanish).

Website operators can identify visitors who are using mobile devices to visit their websites and display a version of the site that has been designed or “optimized” to enable those consumers to view the site more easily.
FTC .com Disclosures, 2013

Advertisers should be aware of the following:

• short-form and abbreviated disclosures might or might not adequately inform consumers of the essence of a required disclosure. So, for example, although “Ad” and “Sponsored” at the start of a tweet are probably enough to inform the consumer, “#SPON” may not yet be widespread enough to be effective – empirical evidence of understanding may be needed.
• technological limitations such as browser types or pop up blockers may prevent disclosures from being seen: in which case the advertisement should be not be shown.
• While proximity to the claim is important, disclosures should also be included before the consumer is likely to make a decision to buy, e.g. before they “add to shopping cart.”
• When a product advertised online can be purchased elsewhere, disclosures should be made in the ad before consumers go to other outlets to make their purchase.

As always, it’s easier to understand when you can see examples. In a follow-up to this article we will be looking at some specific examples, and highlight what is clear and conspicuous – and what’s not. Update: see the examples here: http://www.emoderation.com/gettingit-right-digital-disclosures-ftc-examples

What now?

Brands and their agencies need to review these guidelines, understand them and be assured that compliance forms part of their approval processes.

It’s also worth mentioning that, under the FTC’s Guide for Testimonials and Endorsements, reasonable monitoring of disclosures is required: that is to say, endorsers should be advised of their responsibilities and their online behavior monitored by the advertiser to make sure it is in compliance.

Need more help from The FTC?

The FTC provides businesses with resources, insights, and access to closed investigations and actions at ftc.gov. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has also published a recently updated Social Media Disclosure Guide.

My thanks to my colleague César Struve, who co-wrote and researched this article.

This blog expresses the views of the authors only. It is not legal advice and is not intended to be relied upon. If you have a legal concern about any of the issues covered in this blog, we recommend you seek independent legal advice.

Which retail brands do it best?

We chose some of SocialBakers’ top performing retail brands in the UK sector and examined a recent crop of consumer interactions for BootsUK, NextOnline, Marks and Spencer and Tesco to see what they are doing – and what lessons could be applied to other brands. To see whether there is a difference in US versus UK approaches, we also added Best Buy to the mix, the only US retailer to appear in SocialBaker’s top US brands, and arguably the shining star of US retail social customer service.

SocialBakers Socially Devoted rankings

Note that SocialBakers measures both the speed and the quantity of the responses – obviously, it’s easier to respond when the volume is lower, which is what makes the Best Buy, Tesco and Next performances on very busy pages, particularly impressive.

Customer care on Facebook pages

Brands can help themselves a great deal in the information they give in the ‘About Us’ section, on tabs and in the set-up of their Facebook page.

• Hours of business – as far as we could see, no brands were responding to messages overnight although it’s likely that the pages were still being moderated and monitored for crisis issues during this period. SocialBakers’ response times are an average, definitely made longer by the overnight pauses. None of the brands published the period during which fans could expect a response to posts, and it’s worth considering doing this in order to set expectations. Note that Tesco and BestBuy’s Twitter accounts were very clear about their working hours.
• Other contact channels – can your customer reach you by phone? Email?  On your website?  Do you have a separate customer care Twitter account?  Marks and Spencer probably did the best job here: alongside Twitter, the phone and email links led to webforms with FAQs, so that customers had a good chance of helping themselves first. Tesco has a separate tab to its customer service: ‘Here to Help’ leads to phone lines and email contact forms which gather the necessary information to speed up the query resolution. Best Buy use ‘About Us’ to try to direct users with customer service queries to its forums at Best Buy Unboxed – but interestingly, don’t point to any of its excellent Twitter customer service accounts.
• Community rules – Best Buy, Boots and Tesco all publish their ‘house rules’ outlining the behaviour they expect on the page, and also the service which their customers can expect from them. We recommend this for all Facebook pages. Setting clear rules on conduct, languages responded to, and ownership of content can save a lot of trouble later on.

• Languages and regions  – do you have different Facebook accounts for different regions? If so, and if you’re not set up as a Global page, then it would be good to take a leaf out of Marks and Spencer’s book, and have an app directing customers to the correct page for their country. Will you respond to posts in other languages? You could make this clear in your guidelines.

•  Facebook ‘replies’   – eModeration has written a lot about the Facebook reply (or ‘thread comments’) feature in recent weeks, concluding that it’s great for engagement, but frankly, unless you’re set up with an enabled management tool, then it’s a challenge to moderate and manage. (Although it’s a lot easier if you’re using our simple guide!) Looking at customer service though, replies definitely make the service smoother, provided that no content is being missed.  Of the pages we looked at, they were split about 50/50 between those who had enabled replies and those who hadn’t.  On July 10 this year, replies will be enabled by default: make sure you’re prepared.

• Signed messages  – Best Buy, Tesco, M&S and Boots customer care staff sign their Facebook responses, Kiddicare and Next don’t.  There are arguments against doing so, but it’s undeniable that when an agent signs their message it personalises the service.  Sensing the person behind the message can deflate anger; it increases engagement and is always useful for the customer to know when they are ‘talking’ to the same or a different care agent.

Customer care on Twitter

Twitter is the place to go if you want a quick response from a brand. Forbes’ Managing Editor of Business News, Dan Bigman, learned the hard way:

“If you’re like me and you didn’t get the flowers you ordered for your wife on Valentine’s Day, and then you felt like a complete idiot for wasting a hunk of your day or so on the phone with no result, that’s because you are an idiot. If you want customer service these days, use Twitter. Period.”

The easy viral spread of tweets, use of hashtags and the fact that Twitter conversations are so easily searchable, makes Twitter arguably the loudest place to complain.

30% of the Interbrand top 100 brands already have a dedicated customer service feed on Twitter. Keeping customer service separate avoids the awkwardness of pushing out positive brand messages through the same door as apologies for poor performance and product issues.

So, how do our chosen retailers approach Twitter?

Boots

Of the brands we looked at, only Boots didn’t run a Twitter service at all, but @BootsUKOfficial instead redirected to email, phone or Facebook via autoresponses: could this possibly be a resource issue?

Best Buy

In contrast, Best Buy have three customer service channels, @BestBuySupport (retail support) and @Twelpforce /@geeksquad (technical support), which are clearly signposted.

As well as having agents sign the @BestBuySupport tweets with their initials, Best Buy goes one further in @Twelpforce and @Geeksquad – the agents on these accounts have their own Twitter profiles. John Bernier, who co-created the Twelpforce account, said in a 2010 interview with Fast Company, “Because the system was designed to tie each response to an individual employee, each Twelpforce rep could feel a personal sense of pride in their participation.”

Best Buy was an early adopter of social customer service, launching a presence on Twitter and Facebook in 2008 and starting up Best Buy Unboxed, the retailer’s online community.  Later in 2009, Best Buy enabled its BlueShirts  and Geek Squad Agents to join the conversation and tweet through the single @Twelpforce Twitter handle. 

Best Buy prides itself on involving so many of its 180,000+ employees in customer service.  The “Be smart. Be respectful. Be human” from the title of this article comes from Best Buy’s social media policy . Their community connectors must have a minimum of six months internal customer service experience first, and the core requirement is strong writing skills.

The agents receive 4 weeks consumer relations training on how to deal with questions and complaints in public (so very different from private email, phone or even face-to-face encounters). This is followed by intensive training on the technical attributes and social norms of the different platforms  and finally a period on ‘training wheels’, where all posts go through an approval process prior to posting. By and large, it shows. Once the overnight backlog is dealt with, Best Buy responses are speedy and helpful, with a good mix of efficiency and friendliness. Agents search for keywords on Twitter and respond in a flash:

Next

The UK-owned clothes retailer runs @NextOfficial as its brand marketing account, which directs through to @NextHelp for customer service issues, primarily tracking orders for NextOnline.  @NextHelp delivers a fast, friendly and efficient service, collecting customer details via private DM (PM in Facebook) and taking the occasional opportunity to reach out with off-script messages…

… even if sometimes it’s easy to misread a situation:

Tesco

Tesco runs Tesco Customer Care with @UKTesco, at the vanguard of Twitter care as it cheerily announces the opening hours each day …

… and responds to customers’ tweets with a human face …

… and even displayed humour at the peak of the horsemeat scandal:

Twitter is about speed, directness, personality, efficiency and humour. Twitter customer care is about catching the balls as they come flying past and making a save. 

Marks and Spencer

Marks and Spencer is really impressive: it strikes a great balance between being informal and disrespectful (pay attention, Cineworld!), is caring and thorough, and unafraid of going off-script, as with this consumer’s complaint about an errant M&S lorry:

Lessons to learn

Coping with an issue

Boots was recently hit by a targeted campaign from Let Toys Be Toys – For Girls and Boys, protesting against the brand’s segregation of toys into boy vs girl, (pink and blue, science vs dolls – you get the idea). Twenty-four hours into the protest, with outrage mounting exponentially on its page, Boots seemed to have difficulty in coping with the volume and finding a message which would placate its angry fans.

At the time we checked, most of the more recent messages hadn’t had responses at all, suggesting that the agents have simply given up trying to stem the tide. Boots really should have had a more constructive response – maybe even an action plan –  from the Toys & Games department by this stage.

Scalability and tools

It’s essential that your customer service teams have the scalability to cope with sudden peaks in volume and that they are linked to the departments from whom they need answers quickly.

Choosing an appropriate management tool will help.  Zendesk, for example, connects with Facebook and Twitter, and HootSuite is great for team organisation and message assignments.

Making the connections

Customers expect recognition – even across different social networks. Using a good tool keeps track of the interactions with a customer and  – as ZenDesk does – can link a contacts’ email, Google, Twitter, Facebook and phone number.

Social CRM is a whole topic in its own right, but also worth a mention here is Comufy, which can help companies integrate social data to CRM systems. This goes a long way to getting a single view of a customer across different channels – really helpful to your customer service team.

Moderation and management tools (such as Adobe Social or Conversocial) will let you manage and track customer conversations, as well as your responses, so you have a record for both marketing and legal purposes.

Being human

Social customer service offers more than efficient resolution – it allows for real human interaction between the agent and the customer, and that is its trump card (and occasional downfall).

You have to wonder though, whether the accessibility and responsiveness of social customer care means that, for some, reaching out to a social customer care agent just fills an empty minute or provides some company on a lonely day? Either way, it’s all part of effective relationship-building.

For more about the impact that social media is making on customer care, download our free white paper A guide to social media and customer service.

Contact us if you’d like to talk about social media consultancy,  community management or moderation services – or how we can provide out-of-hours cover to support your in-house teams.

Image courtesy of Striatic

Over a century later it’s hard to imagine a world more obsessed with checking how many likes, retweets or comments our latest social media status update has notched up. And now businesses are just as invested in their social media profiles as their individuals.

While the consumerisation of IT (a PC in every home you say Mr Gates?) has transformed the ability of consumers to communicate, social media has transformed how we communicate and the visibility of that communication.

But social media isn’t a whim for brands. The vast, living data that social media generates has become a crucial way to take a brand’s temperature. And, more importantly, a way to diagnose ills and administer the best medicine.

In a world where social media has become the new frontier for customer service and public relations, social listening is a must-have ingredient in a successful business model. And it’s not just customer service, but product feedback and brand engagement which are contributing to disruption in the brand/customer relationship.

78% of marketers plan to make greater use of social media data in 2013 according to an Infogroup survey of Forrester Research ebusiness conferences. And 53% plan on making greater use of real-time data in their campaigns. The same survey found that 68% of marketers plan to increase data spending in 2013 while 56% plan on hiring new employees for data positions.

What is social listening
So what is social listening exactly? In social media customers are sharing their thoughts publicly to an audience without invitation – and often without the brand being present at all.

Most often this audience is an intimate one; friends, colleagues and communities with shared interests. People who trust each other. Listening to these conversations and picking up on the questions, issues, advocacy and intent about your brand is invaluable. You can be prepared, you can act on information. Find issues as they happen, not when you see them on the news.

Take control of your messaging
You can also reward and encourage fans, help them to recruit new enthusiasts. Clarify uncertainty, give people your message and own that message so you’re not reacting to a third party. And identify customers who want to buy or want to quit so you’re not missing opportunities to grow or retain business.

It’s this unprompted, unstructured and highly candid sentiment which can provide the most revealing insights for brands. Brands still use customer surveys, focus groups, call centre conversations and formal letters to find out how customers feel about them.

But is this a canned response with all the pressures and prejudices of a controlled environment? Traditional research companies would disagree, but candour is key, and there’s nothing like a social setting in the customer’s channel of choice to encourage free and frank exchange.

I’m a bit of a geek at heart. So let me give you a geek example – Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – and don’t worry, you don’t need to know the finer points of quantum mechanics.

How do we measure anything with precision?
The Uncertainty Principle proposes that in an attempt to measure something we can never be truly precise because the act of measurement will change the object of our study. OK, this example relates to pointing an electron microscope at atoms and the power of the microscope disturbing the atoms but it’s relevant for social media too. Can you get a genuinely accurate reading from your customers when you whisk them away to a location, reward them, and bombard them with questions about your brand and how it makes them feel?

You can achieve accuracy with social channels. They produce a more authentic voice. As more businesses and consumers adopt social channels we’ll start to see how much pivoting on crowd-sourced feedback might change the nature of customer feedback. When consumers feel more empowered through social channels expectations and fulfilment need to keep up.

Social media is still going through a process of normalisation. As social listening becomes more powerful, like the metaphorical electron microscope, will those atoms be disrupted under the glare of measurement? Whatever happens, we will need to get smarter about listening and measuring.

Trends in the marketplace
There’s now a massive market for social monitoring tools, and the time is ripe for systems integration. Just as leading social platforms like Twitter and Facebook will acquire companies and fold them into their products there’s scope for combining technologies in social media tools.

Just looking at the offering that Adobe Social have put together and what Salesforce has done with its marketing cloud this trend will increase. That trend shows a pattern of consolidation which supports a distribution model favouring a small group of super vendors. Not unlike the powerhouses of the Hollywood studio system.

Adobe’s acquisition of Efficient Frontier (formerly Context Optional) and Omniture brings together the capability to build, manage, monitor and measure brand presence across the social web.
Salesforce has Radian6 and Buddy Media to unify social listening, engagement, advertising and measurement. Their pre-emptive purchase of the social.com URL for $2.6M shows the kind of commitment going into social advertising campaign management products.

So what’s next?
For me the next big leap forward will be in visually engaging interfaces that impart breadth of meaning and behavioural analysis beyond the bar charts and line graphs of yesterday. Needless to say they will be interactive, real-time, customisable and device agnostic. That complexity made convenient, powered by Data Science as a Service is one to watch for 2013.

Data will be the oil that fuels customer services, PR, marketing, product development, and a host of other commercial activity. But all this will depend on consumers continuing to speak out about the brands they care about and the service they receive, whether good, bad or indifferent – you need to make sure that people are talking about you.  After all, the worst punishment a customer can give to a brand is to say absolutely nothing.

According to a report on Mashable, a massive 80% of companies plan to use social media for customer service. But, as this recent interchange between the @Cineworld representative and a disgruntled customer revealed, if you don’t get it right, it’s a very public problem.

Maybe it was because it was late at night, maybe the @Cineworld incumbent had been on the end of just one too many pokes, but when the agent was accused of deleting tweets, enough was enough.

What followed was a lengthy skirmish between the two, during which @Cineworld revealed both a sense of humour and fallibility.  I don’t think the unhappy customer got the resolution he was seeking, but @Cineworld certainly gained a few fans, and raised the question of what is and is not appropriate when dealing with difficult customers.

Social customer service matters

Social customer service is increasingly under the spotlight, and acknowledged as a very important part of the relationship between brands and their consumers. More and more consumers – especially younger ones – are becoming frustrated with call centres, and with unanswered emails. Complaining via social media offers the chance to vent spleen in the hope that publicly calling out the brand will achieve swift resolution in their favour: as an added bonus, frustrated customers may get others on their side as well.

But it’s not a one-way street. The brand stands to benefit too. As e.Marketer.com puts it, the top reasons brands are using social media as a customer service medium are to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, to reduce customer support costs and to drive customer advocacy. Being seen to speedily resolve a problem, to deal sympathetically with consumers and acknowledge fault where it has occurred can result in not only a ‘complainant-turned-brand advocate’, but in heightened sentiment for the brand overall.

The pressures of social care

There’s an increasing amount of pressure on the channels though (as I’m sure @Cineworld will attest). Latest surveys reveal higher than ever levels of expectation – customers expect responses at least within the day on Facebook, and give it just 30 minutes on Twitter. To work properly, social customer service needs to be swift, channel-appropriate and – importantly – consistent: remember that consumers will be able to see how other people’s complaints are treated.

Brands are answering more questions, more quickly

Social Bakers has just released Q1 2013 of its Socially Devoted series, which measured the performance of response to questions posted on Facebook and Twitter pages. Its metrics attest to both the increase in size of social care and the improvement in brand responses: during Q1 2013, the volume of questions asked by fans increased by 30%. Also in this quarter, brands managed to answer almost 50% more questions than in Q4 2012. Since June 2012, the average industry response rate has increased from 30% to 60% in Q1 2013.

How are the best brands doing social customer care?

According to a 2012 study of ‘customer care sentiment’ for 40 top brands by Brandwatch, retail brands are by far the most likely to be well received.

In our next post, we will choose some of SocialBakers’ top performing retail brands in the UK and US and examine a recent crop of consumer interaction to see what they are doing right – and, in some cases, wrong.

For more about the impact that social media is making on customer care, download our free white paper A guide to social media and customer service.

Contact us if you’d like to talk about social media consultancy,  social media crisis management, community management or moderation services.