Mediaboss Marketing

ATLANTA, GA--(Marketwire -03/02/12)- Vitrue (www.vitrue.com), the leading social marketing platform, today announced that the company is giving brands the ability to screen or "gate" potential Twitter followers, before authorizing them to follow their stream. This new feature is designed to allow alcohol brands to restrict followers that are underage and ensure promotions, interactions and engagements are with age-appropriate audiences. At the same time, the functionality can also be extended to other tactics and campaigns.

Vitrue will be rolling out this feature with several spirits clients within the next 10 to 20 days.

This latest enhancement to Vitrue's Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform offers brands a solution to authorize access for Twitter stream followers through a seamless and instant screening capability. Vitrue clients that deploy this solution are able to request potential followers to provide additional information before continuing as a follower. The experience is completely customizable but could include specific questions like "what is your date of birth?" as a method of validating age-appropriate followers before allowing users to subscribe to their stream. The feature was initially designed for wine, beer and spirits brands that embrace a socially responsible digital presence but can be expanded for additional functionalities. This age validation feature is on par with other age validation features such as those found on brands' websites.

"Our new Twitter functionality was designed for our clients who want to take a measure towards ensuring their activity online is occurring with the appropriate audience, as social responsibility matters to our clients," said Reggie Bradford, CEO & Founder of Vitrue. "As social continues to evolve and becomes more ingrained in the mainstream, technology like ours will allow brands to more easily and seamlessly adapt with the ever-changing social landscape."

"The social Web has never been one-dimensional and with this rollout, we see the potential for additional opportunities for brands to interact with audiences via Twitter and we're looking forward to offering brands new functionality to build the most engagement with their followers," said Bradford.

The new Twitter feature is integrated within the Vitrue SRM Platform, giving brands the tools to publish, monitor, identify and engage with key influencers in Twitter streams. Vitrue has been providing Twitter publishing capabilities since 2009 and currently manages almost 1,000 Twitter streams for its stable of global brands and agencies.

About Vitrue Vitrue (www.vitrue.com) is the leading social marketing platform, offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to help brands and agencies harness the marketing potential of social and manage their expanding and sophisticated social communities on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and emerging platforms. The industry-leading Vitrue Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform is collectively managing its clients' more than one billion social relationships in more than 100 countries across more than 4,500 Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts.

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Vitrue Offers Brands New Twitter "Gate" Feature to Screen Followers; Allows Alcohol Brands to Validate Consumers' Age ...

Web censors got their signals crossed in China and Denmark this week.

Users at an Internet cafe in Beijing last May. (LIU JIN - AFP/GETTY IMAGES) A supposed glitch in Chinas Great Firewall on Tuesday allowed Internet users in the country to access Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google+ for a brief time until the sites were blocked again, Reuters reported. Chinese netizens flooded President Obama'sGoogle+ page with comments, many asking the president to fight for human rights in China.

In Denmark, however, Internet freedom went in the other direction. Danish police said a human errorcaused thousands of Web sites to be blocked in the country on Thursday, including Google and Facebook, reported file-sharing news site Torrentfreak. Users who tried to access those sites got a message saying Denmarks High Tech Crime Unit had blocked the page because the user had offered child pornography. The problem was reportedly fixed several hours later.

Web censorship, a hot topic around the world, is becoming harder for governments to enforce.

In India, Internet companies recently refused a government request to screen and remove what it deemed offensive contentrelated to political leaders and religious figures.

During Irans partial Internet blackout last month, Iranians used proxy servers10 times more than they had in 2010.

And when China suffered a major train crash last July, government censors forced the media to stopreporting online about what had gone wrong but users on Weibo, Chinas Twitter, soon filled the news gap.

According to Googles Transparency Report for the first half of 2011, democracies and authoritarian governments alike made repeated requests to Google to remove certain online content from its services. Sometimes, the government believed the content was a threat to national security. Other times, the reason given was defamation or government criticism.

Related reading:

Web censorship moves to democracies

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In China, Denmark, glitches in Web censorship confuse users

Pyongyang, March 2 (KCNA) -- The KBS Media Persons' Association of south Korea on March 2 entered into an indefinite boycott of program production in protest against the puppet authorities' moves to put media under their control, CBS of south Korea reported.

It deplored that fair reporting has been put into a serious crisis since Lee Myung Bak appointed conservative Kim In Gyu as chairman of the KBS.

The organization made it clear that it launched an action demanding a stop to the unfair reporting aimed at misleading public opinion and the resignation of the chairman.

The KBS Trade Union is also going to launch an overall general strike on March 6.

Unionists of the media organizations of south Korea are persisting in their actions against the desperate moves of the puppet regime to put media under its control and its suppression of media.

Actions of reporters and anchor persons belonging to the Reporters Association and the Video Cameramen's Association of the MBC to totally boycott program production and the MBC Trade Union's general strike demanding the resignation of Kim Jae Chol, the wicked chairman of the MBC, are going on. They are positively joined by trade unions of various media organizations.

South Korean progressive media persons are intensifying their actions day by day, saying that they can no longer tolerate the moves of the Lee Myung Bak group of traitors to put the broadcasting service under its control and allow the government to supervise its activities in a bid to stay in power.

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KBS Enters into Indefinite Boycott of Program Production

During the post-Soviet era, the port city has acquired a reputation throughout Russia as a bastion of the underground economy. Darkin himself laid the foundation for his rise to power with a company that officials at the Interior Ministry in Moscow characterized as a "hornets' nest of organized crime." At the time, his current wife was married to Igor "The Carp" Karpov, an underworld figure well known in the city. When snipers shot and killed "The Carp" in broad daylight, Belobrova agreed to marry the governor.

"What is happening in the Russian Far East is, in a grotesque way, characteristic of all of Russia," says Vitaly Nomokonov, a law professor at the University of Vladivostok and the author of a textbook on organized crime in the Far East. "The most criminal area of all here is big business, which really ought to be clean, given its close ties to politics."

For this reason, says Nomokonov, there is absolutely no doubt that the top brass in Moscow know perfectly well what is going on in Vladivostok, though they continue to support Darkin. Because of his past, he is susceptible to blackmail and is easily manipulated. He guarantees the "otkat," or commission for high-ranking officials.

During the Putin era, the total amount of bribes being paid in Russia has increased from $33 billion to $400 billion. "Even President Medvedev has admitted there has been no progress," says Professor Nomokonov. "Why is this the case? Because the people in power lack the political will."

Setting The Stage

Even if a vice-governor or a customs director is occasionally arrested on corruption charges, the pickings are still abundant for gold-diggers in Vladivostok. The APEC summit of Asia-Pacific nations will be held in September 2012 on Russky Island, off the coast of Vladivostok. For this reason alone, 15 billion will have been spent on bridges, new construction and infrastructure by then.

When Governor Darkin looks down from his office in Vladivostok's "White House," he doesn't just see a city that is cleaning itself up for the big event in the best of Potemkin traditions with a few improved streets along the route to the airport, or fresh paint on buildings that line the streets.

He also sees heavily loaded ferries breaking through the ice near the half-finished bridge across the Zolotoy Rog Bay. On the island across the bay, which barely had enough drinking water for its residents until recently, some 15,000 construction workers from around the world are working furiously to complete the set for the summit, which is intended to win the respect of U.S. President Barack Obama, Chinese President Hu Jintao and other world leaders.

A project that is deeply Russian in its mixture of energy and pomposity is taking shape on the island. While the champagne glasses for the Obamas are already standing on the dining table in the presidential suite, only a few kilometers away Gennady Paskotin, a retired army officer, is complaining about what was sold to him as a "townhouse." He was forced to leave his former apartment due to the construction. Now he is checking the new 57-square-meter (613-square-foot) dwelling, with its plasterboard interior walls, for crooked alignment. The developer billed the government 150,000 for this drafty alternative housing. "A joke," says Paskotin, who makes ends meet on a small officer's pension.

"Our entire system is so unbelievably corrupt," says an official with United Russia in Vladivostok, "that the only way to save it would be to shoot officials, as they do in China."

Originally posted here:
Shadow Economy And Media Control - Russian's Fed Up With Putin's Manipulations

Popular Facebook game maker Zynga is scaling up and branching out from the clutches of the worlds biggest social networking site with the launch its own Zynga.com website and gaming platform.

The shift means users will soon be able to play Zyngas popular social games including CityVille, Words with Friends, CastleVille, Zynga Poker and Hidden Chronicle outside of the Facebook ecosystem.

The Zynga Platform is designed with two simple goals: more access to the best social games and more people to play with, said Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus. Were excited to offer new features like the live Social Stream which will enable you to play in real time with your friends and find new ones. Player profiles will let you check your friends helpfulness score to see whos most likely to help you back. And youll be able to chat and play live with your friends and a community of players interested in the same games as you.

Third party game developers will also be able to publish their games on Zynga.com, the beta version of which will launch in early March. Initial Zynga platform partners will include developers MobScience, Row Sham Bow and Sava.

Zynga made it clear that it is not (yet) cutting its ties with Facebook. Users will still pay for virtual goods using Facebook Credits but will now be able to interact with other gamers outside of Facebooks own social network. In its IPO filing earlier this year Facebook revealed that Zynga accounted for 12% of its 2011 revenue.

http://zynga.com/

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Facebook game maker Zynga launches its own social games platform, Zynga.com