Investopedia | Adidas Brandishes New Marketing Weapon (NKE, LULU) Investopedia Adidas AG is turning to a new marketing weapon social media influencers. The Germany-based shoe company has assembled a team of 25 social media influencers to reach its target customers more effectively, Adidas board member Eric Liedtke told ... |
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Adidas Brandishes New Marketing Weapon (NKE, LULU) - Investopedia
Jeremy Harris Lipschultz
The growth of social media sites is happening at the same time trust for social institutions, such as the media business, continues to decline. From National Opinion Research Center (NORC) data over several decades to the more recent 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, its clear that we are in search of new paths for finding credible online information. It appears that global public trust in institutions government, business and mass media is at historical lows.
This notion of media being the Fourth Estate, weve come to believe, is eroding, Edelman Chicago Chief Operating Officer Kevin L. Cook told an Omaha campus group.
Were also in an age where technology allows us to completely manipulate our news feeds and tailor what we read to only want we want, only to what suits our sensibilities, Cook said. Peers, and people like you are the most trusted sources of information within an echo chamber. People trust friends, family members and colleagues more than a CEO, media organization or others in power. Its a horizontal world now Its peer-to-peer, Cook said.
Businesses now start inside with employees to promote positive messages. Edelman urges companies to focus on how they recruit and retain talent. The worlds largest public relations (PR) firm has added an engagement practice to address how companies use social media. Collaborator Dynamic Signal offers a mobile app that helps companies share positive news through employees influential social networks.
Employees can leverage their social networks within companies, and also outside, to help advocate through directed communication and channels. It takes a reset of employee culture and a clear collective understanding of company vision, mission and values. It also takes a leadership shift away from social media policies that tell employees what not to do, and toward guidelines promoting effective engagement. Facebook Workplace is among the new enterprise tools that help identify organization thought leaders.
Jeremy Harris Lipschultz
The need for employee engagement ranges from conditions during a business restructuring to the more mundane company celebration. Media storytelling, though, backed by social media measurement offers new opportunities for branding and marketing. It is clear that this new emphasis will demand that employers not only improve their PR efforts, but also hire professionals with skills to evaluate and apply consistent and credible social network analysis.
An ongoing challenge is that people now take the view that, I trust my media, and I trust my newsfeeds, but not content outside of the filter bubble. Academics are increasingly making the case that we need a rekindling of free expression on controversial issues.
Social media marketers, of course, use homogenous groups and like-mindedness to their economic advantage by targeting messages to those most receptive. Jim Sterne, author of Social Media Metrics and president of eMetrics, contends that traditional media and PR are being replaced by relationship building, customer reviews and branding based upon keeping promises.
Still, given the trust data, it may be an overstatement that PR and advertising no longer have important roles. Credibility remains important social capital that must be earned and retained in order to advance business goals and objectives. Thats why we feel so strongly that every company needs to be a media company, and (they) need to have a strong presence where people can go and get the facts, Cook said.
The convergence and integration of PR, advertising and social marketing will continue, even as skepticism remains high for those abusing power. Too often, companies offer lip service to customer engagement without building meaningful long-term relationships.
As we look to the future of social media trust, focus on the newest innovation wave artificial intelligence (AI). Jim Sterne is currently writing about how bots can scrape product review data and empower consumers through tools that help focus on precise needs and wants. There will be more about this in my next blog post.
Jeremy Harris Lipschultz is Isaacson Professor in the UNO Social Media Lab, University of Nebraska at Omaha School of Communication. He is author of Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law and Ethics, second edition.
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PR Trust and the Social Media Marketing 'Echo Chamber' - Huffington Post
Does Milo Yiannopoulos have a constitutional right to tweet?
Most Americans know they can speak their mind in the public square, thanks to the First Amendment. Speech on social media, however, can be censored because private companies own those cyber spaces.
But a recent Supreme Court oral argument suggests Twitter's practice of banning controversial right-wing pundits could be deemed illegal.
During a Feb. 27 hearing involving the constitutionality of a state social media law, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that Twitter and Facebook had become, and even surpassed, the public square as a place for discussion and debate.
"Their utility and the extent of their coverage are greater than the communication you could have ever had, even in the paradigm of public square," he said while hearing arguments in Packingham v. North Carolina.
A majority of justices agreed. "The president now uses Twitter everybody uses Twitter," observed Justice Elena Kagan. "All 50 governors, all 100 senators, every member of the House has a Twitter account. So this has become a crucially important channel of political communication."
Although justices' comments pertained to whether North Carolina may bar registered sex offenders from using social media, the case could herald a broader expansion of digital liberties by a court that's often mocked for being behind the times.
While there may be a free speech issue when a state government bans individuals from using social media, it would seem that there is no such issue when Twitter does the same because the First Amendment applies only to government actors.
However, the justices' shockingly forward-looking views open a potential game-changing loophole.
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Long ago, the high court established that state constitutions may provide more protection than the U.S. Constitution when it comes to free speech, including the extension of rights to privately-owned spaces.
In 1980, in Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a California Supreme Court decision recognizing that California's Constitution protected the right of high school students to gather signatures at a privately-owned shopping center for a petition objecting to a United Nations resolution that said Zionism was a form of racism.
Driving the California court's reasoning was a concern that traditional public squares the old "Main Street" were giving way to privately-owned businesses. Consequently, the speech rights that Californians enjoyed in these public Main Street spaces would greatly diminish if a town's center of gravity shifted to a mall and its owners were able to restrict speech because it's on private property.
In the 40 years since that landmark ruling, social media has become society's modern day public square. Think about it: If I were in the shoes of those California students today and wanted to maximize the number of signatures I got for such a petition, I'd first put it online, and then I'd tweet it to various pro-Israel politicians, celebrities and others with a large number of followers who could easily retweet it and thereby broadcast it to millions of people.
During the Supreme Court's recent hearing on North Carolina's law, justices acknowledged this shift.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said restricting social media access is dangerous because "these people are being cut off from a very large part of the marketplace of ideas. And the First Amendment includes not only the right to speak, but the right to receive information."
Kagan agreed. "Whether it's political community, whether it's religious community these sites have become embedded in our culture as ways to communicate and ways to exercise our constitutional rights," she said. "How many people under 30 do you think don't use these sites to get all their information? Under 35? I mean, increasingly, this is the way people get everything, all information."
Justice Samuel Alito added: "I know there are people who think that life is not possible without Twitter and Facebook."
To be clear, the justices' discussion concerned a very different issue than the one raised by Pruneyard. But their comments indicate a majority might be open to expanding the definition of what constitutes a public forum where people are free to speak their minds.
And, given that many of the most popular social networks are headquartered in and physically exist on server space located in California, it could be argued that the Pruneyard precedent should apply. If a shopping center, with its piddling 25,000 visitors per day can't restrict political speech, then Twitter and Facebook, with their hundreds of millions of daily visitors, shouldn't be able to either.
Like the mall's owner, social media companies surely won't stop infringing on their visitors' speech rights without a fight. But if Twitter continues down its censorious path, it might find itself in court and lose.
Mark Grabowski is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is an internet law professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.
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Twitter's censorship may be unconstitutional - Washington Examiner
BBC News | Beauty and the Beast: Disney rules out censoring gay scene for Malaysia BBC News On Monday, Disney said the release was being delayed in Malaysia for a "review" of its content, without giving further details. Malaysia's Film Censorship Board later said the film had been approved, after the scene was cut. It was given a P13 rating ... 'Gay moment' censorship sees Disney drop Malaysian release of 'Beauty & The Beast' Disney rejects Malaysia's Beauty and the Beast censorship 'Beauty And The Beast' In Malaysia: Disney Refuses Cuts, Pulls Film Update |
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Beauty and the Beast: Disney rules out censoring gay scene for Malaysia - BBC News
BY KATHRYN FOXHALL
President Trump has already labeled major press outlets the fake news media and the enemy of the people. His administration has blocked major news outlets from a briefing because it didnt like what they published.
With that in mind, the public should understand censorship by PIO at the federal level: For years, in many federal agencies, staff members have been prohibited from communicating with any journalist without notifying the authorities, usually the public information officers. And they often are unable to talk without PIO guards actively monitoring them.
Now, conversations will be approved or blocked by people appointed by the Trump administration, some of them political operatives.
The information about the administrative state that impacts our lives constantly is under these controls. They also cover much of the data through which we understand our world and our lives.
Some of us may feel less comfortable with Trump people controlling this information flow. But actually a surge in these controls has been building in the federal government and through the U.S. culture for two decades or more.
In many entities, public and private, federal, state, and local, those in power decree that no one will talk to journalists without notifying the PIO. Congressional offices even have the restrictions.
They are convenient for bosses. Under that oversight staff people are unlikely to talk about all the stuff thats always there, outside of the official story.
Beyond that, PIOs often monitor the conversations and tell staff people what they may or may not discuss. Frequently agencies and offices delay contacts or block them altogether. An article on the Association of Health Care Journalists website, advising journalists about dealing with the Department of Health and Human Services, says, Reporters rarely get to interview administration officials
Remember, those HHS people journalists cant talk to are at the hub of information flow on what works and doesnt with Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid. Or they know whether there are other perspectives on the numbers the agency publishes. Not to speak of the understanding about food and drugs, infectious disease, and medical and health policy research. Many of them could quickly stun us with the education they could give, if they were not gagged.
Another fact that gives pause is these restraints are just for journalists. There are no special rules or offices to stop staff people from having fluid communication with lobbyists, special interest groups, contractors, people with a lot of money, etc.
Fifty-three journalism and open government groups wrote to President Obama asking him to lift the mandate that PIOs be notified of contacts and the related restrictions in federal agencies. We met with people in the White House in 2015 to leave that message for the president.
We wonder how former Obama officials feel now about their medications, given that FDA officials cant talk without Trump controls.
Some journalists given our proclivity for believing we always get the story profess to not be concerned about the PIO controls, saying people on the inside will leak. But do we have any sense of how often that happens? Do we have a 75-percent perspective on an entire agency, or a 2-percent? Nobody leaked when EPA staff people knew that kids in Flint were drinking lead in water or when CDC had sloppy practices in handling bad bugs.
Meantime, we have much more to worry about than just the gagged feds. In surveys sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), over half of political and general assignment reporters around the country said their interviews must be approved at least most of the time. Seventy-eight percent said the public is not getting the information it needs because of barriers imposed on reporting and 73 percent said the controls are getting tighter.
Education and science reporters cited similar controls.
Perhaps most chillingly, 56 percent of police reporters said they can never or rarely interview police officers without involving a PIO.
Almost 80 percent of police PIOs said they felt it was necessary to supervise or otherwise monitor interviews with police officers. Asked why, some PIOs said things like: To ensure that the interviews stay within the parameters that we want.
However people in power characterize it, censorship is a moral monstrosity. It leaves people on the inside to control information with their own ideas and motivations. It debilitates all of us with a lack of understanding or, just as bad, skewed information. It takes away trust in our systems. It puts democracy itself in question.
Understandably in shock at President Trumps attacks on the press, some feel these PIO controls are not a primary priority. Actually, this era makes it clearer than ever why we dont need to leave these networks of controls to people in power.
Kathryn Foxhall, a freelance reporter, served 14 years as editor of the newspaper of the American Public Health Association. She is a member of the SPJs Freedom of Information Committee.
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The front line of public censorship - Charleston Post Courier