Bulletin board postings more likely slander than libel, says High Court | OUT-LAW.COM

Very, very useful to know.
(tho frankly not the most exciting news of the week

Managing discussion board content originally appeared on TheCustomer on August 8, 2008.

Commuterfeed is a blindingly simple, useful service.

Using twitter, commuters can send & receive updates about their daily commute

As I write, it’s early days, and updates are patchy in the UK, but here’s hoping it’ll catch on as it has done in other urban areas

Microblogging as a community service originally appeared on TheCustomer on February 28, 2008.

When folk talk about ‘marketing to social networks’ , you can be pretty sure (from their language) if they’re about to spam a community.  The wrong way to go about it is to think like a broadcast, analogue advertiser, and think what message can be put infront of the greatest number of eyeballs.

Making that message interactive is a just-about-acceptable half way house to…

Properly engaging folk
By giving them soemthing they can contribute to
That lets folk/customers change the company & its product/service, in even the most miniscule way.

There’s a conversation going on at the mo’ ’bout ‘social objects ‘(Gapingvoid is a great entry point, as are Jyri Engestrom’s slides on slideshare (who coined the term). And here’s a cracking example….

Howies make clothes; they’re a responsible company, in every way. <declaration: today I’m mostly wearing Howies jeans /declration>  So when they open their first store you’d expect a brand/web/shop social object. It’s described on Russell Davies’ blog  – and involves a heath robinson contraption to print photos from Howies’ flickr group. Looks like a thing of beauty – as a marketing concept and in store (must make a point of visiting.)

real, social marketing originally appeared on TheCustomer on January 22, 2008.

Seth nails it: there’s two ways to market online - burn permission with frequency (make money  now, rebuild your customer base later), or engage, and dig in for a longer haul, but with permission.

I’ve always been a fan of the latter – work the customer base, with their consent, to grow your network by engaging theirs. Rather than talking about ‘permission’ which has a kinda ‘yes/no, once & for all time’ feel to it, I think of this as ‘consent’ –  it has a softer feel to the relationship, & maybe there’s more of a 2 way sense to the relationship.

Two digital marketing strategies originally appeared on TheCustomer on December 22, 2007.

A nice piece by David Bowen that captures ‘where we’re up to’ on social networking

…and includes this gem
“The price is that it is important to give away really valuable
information, because only this will be picked up. “The first thing you
have to do is relinquish control,””

Yep.
Nailed it.
There’s no point in sharing information that everybody knows.
If you’re an expert, share stuff that only you know, that everybody else (who is interested) will find useful.

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social networking & business roundup article originally appeared on TheCustomer on October 5, 2007.

The FT reports that “BT Group
is attempting to create the world’s largest wi-fi network by persuading
millions of UK customers to turn their home wireless “hubs” into public
hotspots.”

What a smart idea – and it goes back to the idea that networked nodes’ power & value grows with the number of nodes on the network. If they can pull this off, BT’s share price will rocket (if the market understands what they’ve achieved).

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BT networks home wifi originally appeared on TheCustomer on October 5, 2007.

“Privacy laws have not kept up with the reality of the internet and
technology, where we have vast amounts of information and every time a
credit card is used online, the data on it can move across six or seven
countries in a matter of minutes,” Mr Fleischer told the Financial
Times ahead of his speech.

This is good.

It may be a partially-formed thought at the moment, but without Google’s participation, any initiative will struggle to become a standard. With Google’s involvement, online practice and laws have a chance of defending our privacy – but in ways that are practical for individuals and lawyers, and commercially sound for online businesses.

So for example A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web and has a lot more chance of becoming accepted if it’s adopted by Google – and Skype. It’ll be interesting to see how the two approaches compare.

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A stand on internet privacy from Google originally appeared on TheCustomer on September 14, 2007.