For those of us who work in social media and are asked to come up with these BIG ideas and these GRAND campaigns…we usually hit the same roadblock at about the same time of the planning process. You have this big idea and grand campaign, and it’s fabulous. It is planned to engage your existing customers, bring on new ones, and truly provide a unique and fun experience – pretty much what social media is meant to do!

Then…you run it by your PR and Legal team for approval. And you hear phrases like this:

• “You have to make sure that the link to the Terms & Conditions is only one click away from the message promoting the contest, so you need two links in your Tweet.”

• “You have to remove that photo from your Facebook Wall because we didn’t get written permission from the individual in the background to show them on Facebook.”

• “Once you select a winner you can not ask for their mailing information via email as that’s exchanging personal information and is illegal. You have to get their phone number and call them.”

• And so on, and so on.

Yes, these processes are tedious, and they can be extremely frustrating. However, they are there for a reason. Yes there are times I myself want to pull my hair out by making sure that this amazing contest has the appropriate Rules written to accompany them. It definitely seems to take the ‘fun’ out of social at times.

However, when you work for a company, for a brand, or for any professional entity, your business or even yourself have the potential to get sued for what is said on social media platforms. It has happened. And if it happens to you, you may not speak so quickly when bashing PR and Legal.

For example, if you post an image from Google Images on your company’s Facebook Page, that photographer can sue you for not paying them for the photo credit, for not giving them credit for the photo, or by misrepresenting the photo itself. And that’s just one little photo. For specific examples of social media cases that provided quite a bit of notoriety in the law, check out Glenn B. Manishin’s blog post on the 2010′s top four law cases in social media. A more recent case you may have heard about is the case of Ryan Giggs suing Twitter for breach of injunction.

The issue of legal issues within the realm of social media is quite timely to the point that GSMI just last week hosted a conference in Boston on social media risks and strategies. For latest updates from GSMI, check out their Twitter handle. One of their posts from last Friday may not surprise some of us:

Social media is a new industry meaning that everyone’s catching up to it including the industries that are using it and those who are fighting to protect themselves and others from it. So before you start bad-mouthing Legal and PR during your next campaign, think about what may happen if you received the court notice because you didn’t have them in the beginning.

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media

If you don’t Tweet you may be unfamiliar with the concept of URL shortening.  Messages created in Twitter (and certain other social  networking services) are, of course, limited in length.  In Twitter’s case it’s the famous 140 characters.  That’s enough for a pithy observation or a short joke but it makes including lengthier pieces of information difficult.  Netspeak abbreviations like OMG, LOL, BRB, AFAIK, etc. evolved to facilitate quick, brief exchanges but what do you do when the information you need to cram in to your message is incredibly specific, like a URL?

Because something like this:

just isn’t Tweetable.

URL shortening services (the most well known are probably TinyURL and bit.ly) work by accepting a URL, creating a new (usually random) short URL (the example above might become something like http://tinyurl.com/7T93Hj) and then creating a redirect on their webserver that sends requests from one to the other.

The problem with shortened URLs is that you can’t intuitively tell where they’ll lead you to.  It could be someplace you don’t want to go, like a malware site.  There are ways to view an expanded URL without actually following it: sites like URLsniffer and browser plug-ins like Chrome URL Expander and Long URL Please (for Firefox) make it easier to look before you leap.  Buuuut, what if the shortened URL you’re clicking on redirects you, not to a legitimate site but to another shortened URL?  And what if this URL was generated by a spammer?  According to security company Symantec this practice is on the rise (read their report here).  This double layer of obfuscation is enough to trick most people AND security filters.

The best defense is to be deeply suspicious of any shortened link that points to another shortened link and, as always, be aware of where the links you’re clicking on are coming from.  These days “Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails” is as basic as “Don’t talk to strangers.”

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Tom Hickey Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, General, Social Media, Web

Something smelled a little off during our staff meeting the other day…

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun

It’s happened twice now: I’ve sent someone a zip file, and they say they have problems using or viewing the contents.  One time it was a test build of an iPhone app, and another it was some HTML files.  After some questions and some headscratching, still stuck, I start a screensharing session with the person, and in each case they double click the zip file and attempt to directly access a file within it.

The problem here is that Windows presents a preview of a zip file’s contents as if it were like any other folder.  But that’s not the case.  If you have files inside the zip that depend on each other, they are never going to work correctly until you properly unzip them.  This is done by right clicking the zip file, and then clicking Extract All.

So I hope this message reaches Windows users who may not realize this quirk about zip files.  I also hope it reaches those who send zip files to Windows users, so that they can ask first whether they were actually unzipped first when problems come up.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology

Yesterday kicked off National Small Business Week! What does that mean? It means that during this week, it’s all about the ‘little guy’. Then again, sometimes that little guy grows up very quickly to become a strong presence and maybe even a role model for the business world (i.e. Groupon). Astek is now seven employees strong, and we definitely want to share in the shout-out to our small biz brethren. And what better way to shout out than through social media?! Considering that in the beginning, social media was used mostly by the small business owner as an inexpensive (and sometimes free) marketing tool. So now let’s see what they’re saying (and what’s being said) through those same channels.

One of the first actions I took when hearing about National Small Business Week was to send out a tweet asking for a hashtag. The @SBAgov Twitter handle responded quickly with #SBW2011. A new column on my Seesmic Desktop later, and I quickly learned about the planned #SBWChat today at 1pm Eastern Time!

Fast forward a mere five minutes later, and my boss sent me the following link to a blog post from Duct Tape Marketing announcing an iPad giveaway each day during National Small Business Week! It’s set up in a sort of ‘guess-the-blogger’ format, which I think is extremely interesting and creative, plus kudos to him for what will lead to some amazing analytics results!

National Small Business Week 2011 will be highlighted with two-and-a-half days of events in Washington, D.C., where 100+ business owners from across the country will be recognized. They also have a website where you can check out the schedule, the speakers, those being honored, and even live webcasts!

So as we tip our hats to the small businesses, here is a quote from President Barack Obama’s statement to kick off the week with some inspiration and a well-earned pat on the back.

“Small businesses embody the promise of America: that if you have a good idea and are willing to work hard enough, you can succeed in our country.  This week, we honor and celebrate the individuals whose inspiration and efforts keep America strong.”

Thank you fellow small businesses for all of your service and hard work. Perhaps we will have the honor of tweeting with you soon!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Social Media

After recently attending SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX, and the CoreNet Global Midwest Summit in Chicago, I was struck by the major distinctions between the trade show floors and technology usage.

Leave it to a corporate real estate association (CoreNet) to know how to make incredibly inviting spaces that made me want to sit down and stay awhile, and even get a bit of work done. Placing lunch tables behind the trade show floor created multiple motivations to move through the space and discover new companies.

Leave is to the ultimate geek conference (#SXSWi) to treat the trade show floor in the most traditional, and in my opinion unappealing, format — rows upon rows of standard booths, with only a couple of premium players creating spacial environments. But even these were typically focused around a stage of some sort rather than a space inviting people to stay awhile.

On the technology side, I’ve never seen such focused and practical usage of cutting-edge technologies like Twitter and Foursquare as I did at SXSW. In this environment, it seemed strange not to look at a piece of technology regularly, whether at lunch or in a session. At CoreNet, a more traditional environment, I was the odd man out to have my phone visible during a session.

Next time I’ll get pictures!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, General, How To, Marketing, Technology

What would you do if your office cut you off of coffee? We at Astek didn’t react very well…

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun

For me one word comes to mind when thinking about the iPad:  WANT!  I am craving this beautiful piece of technology so much it is a little ridiculous.  I’ve started saving my pennies so that someday (hopefully soon) I can make it mine.  But I have to tell you, this was not love at first sight.  In fact, it was a long romance at best.

When the iPad first came out, my initial thought was “Big whoop- my iPhone does all those things, too.”  Which might have been true before the app developers started doing their thing, but now it’s a ludicrous statement.  As a former doubter of the iPad I feel compelled to share the four things I saw an iPad do (that my iPhone cannot do) which have won over my heart.

1.  Active Books: Before I came to work at Astek, my former boss got an iPad.  She was a long time Apple user and it was no surprise when she showed up one day with a shiny new iPad which she had pre-ordered from the online store.  She showed off all the games that her grandkids loved- the whole time I thought “Big whoop- every handheld electronic device has games now”.  But then she opened up an e-copy of Alice and Wonderland.  This was not just any eBook, it was an interactive eBook.  As you turn the pages, each page had different illustrations and each illustration had some kind of loose, gravity-based action.  For example, on one page there was a giant pocket watch (belonging to the white rabbit of course) which was hung on a long chain like a pendulum, this pocket watch would swing back and forth as the iPad moved.  Then of course there’s the marvelous scene where tiny Alice rides in a milk bottle across the sea-  the waves shift and Alice floats where the iPad tilts.  It was undoubtedly one of the coolest things I have seen technology do!  Not only that, but this book was a real work of art. I can’t wait to see which books they illustrate next.   iPad: 1 –  Sara: 0

2. Portable Documents w/Editing Ability: Then this past winter I was in a show  (In addition to being Astek’s Office Manager I am also an actor), and this particular show was an original adaptation.  For those of you unfamiliar with how that is different from a regular play, the biggest difference is that the script is often changing up until opening night.  The writer decides to change wording, rearrange scenes, or cut certain passages almost nightly.  ANYWAY, my cast-mate Erin had just received an iPad as a bonus from her company and had been toting it around showing off the RSS reader and talking about reading the newspaper on it.  Well one night at the end of a run-through the director gathered us to give out notes as well as some script changes.  When the director started talking about script changes Erin opens up the script on her iPad and proceeds to make those changes directly in the script! By contrast the rest of us were scrambling to scratch out old lines and write new ones in, what a pain!   “That is so convenient” said my doubter-brain.   iPad: 2 – Sara: 0

3.  A Notebook: Astek’s Marketing/Social Media Director has an iPad, too.  At her first staff meeting here I sat down for the meeting with my pad of paper and a pen and Rachel brought her iPad.  She opened up a new note, labeled it, and started typing away her notes and memos from the meeting.  She doesn’t even need to buy notebooks anymore.  HOLY COW!  As a left-handed writer, I always have a stained left hand and it bugs me constantly, to think!  If I could carry around all my notes with me and not have to worry about whether or not my pen has enough ink left- how awesome would that be???  iPad: 3 – Sara: 0

4.  iWork: Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate hate HATE the Microsoft Office Suite (there are many reasons, best saved for another blog post) so I always use iWork when I can.  If you haven’t used it before, the iWork Suite is made up of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, which are basically Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office, Power Point and Excel.  They are so easy to use and are devoid of all the complicated drama Office always seems to throw at me.  They also have great templates.  I’ve used their templates for everything from printing addressed envelopes to re-writing my whole resume and have gotten lots of compliments on the resulting documents.  Well, folks, the nail in the coffin (and the whole in my wallet) is that iWork is now available for the iPad.  So now, if I owned an iPad, and if I’ve got my resume on it and am in a hurry and can’t get back home to update and print my resume before an audition, I can open it up on my iPad, make the changes and print it from anywhere.  JOY!  iPad:4 – Sara: 0 (much like my career in sports).

So in conclusion:

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Sara Gorsky Categories: General

OK, so I’m being deliberately alarmist in that title.  I’ve seen a few other references to “Macpocalypse” and thought it was funny.  It refers to the idea that almost no one runs extra security software on their Macs, since they are perceived as secure out of the box, and simply ignored by malware authors who prefer the better odds of attacking the larger and more easily targeted Windows market.  So if and when nefarious elements turn their attention more to the Mac market, they’ll have an open playing field.  Some argue that specific elements of Apple’s OS X make it next to impossible for traditional viruses to spread over Mac systems.  But no system is completely foolproof, and at some point it all comes down to human judgement, which as we all know can often be flawed.

One recent threat to emerge in the Mac world is a “scareware” application called MAC Defender.  Getting this program running requires several errors in judgement on the part of the user.  They have to click on a link in a popup browser window about a virus being detected, and then a zip file will download the software.  You then have to run the software yourself, or if you have Safari set to open files after downloading, it will run itself.  You will still need to enter your password to complete the install.  And then the software will attempt to scare you into entering your credit card info for increased (fake) protection, hence the name “scareware”.  No savvy user should ever get anywhere near this far with such an app.  But many more novice computer users are converting to the Mac platform all the time, and malware authors are apparently getting hip to that trend.

Another development is the news that a “crimekit” cryptically called Weyland-Yutani BOT is being sold expressly for creating Mac-targeted malware.  This is a sort of wizard application (that actually runs on Windows), which lets cybercriminals without programming skills whip up their own personalized programs to gather credit card numbers or other sensitive information.  There’s no word on anything produced with this crimekit being observed “in the wild”, but it’s eyebrow-raising nonetheless.

So, do we all need anti-virus/anti-malware applications on our Macs?  Maybe.  In my case I’m evaluating some software and keeping an eye on the issue.  But the broken record message worth repeating in this context is that you should always install your Apple security updates, perform regular backups, and never install or click on anything you’re not completely sure about.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology, Web