Mediaboss Marketing

For large companies that can afford to hire Web technicians, social marketing can be a breeze. But for small businesses, just learning the lingo can be daunting, said entrepreneur Geoff Cramer.

We were getting beaten over the head with social media, Cramer recalls of his years managing a Brookline real estate company. That was when a light bulb went on.

In late 2009, he teamed up with David Black, who owns a mortgage company, and boot-strapped SocialMadeSimple, a Newton-based Web company that offers small businesses willing to pay a fee analytics-based guidance to simplify social marketing.

That year, only 24 percent of small businesses had a profile on a social network, Cramer said. Today, the percentage has more than doubled, he said, but fewer than 10 percent of them post daily.

Instead, most treat their Facebook and other social network accounts as Web pages, listing their address and phone number and little else, Cramer said.

But the reality is, if youre not regularly sharing information, he said, you will be invisible.

For a fee ranging from $19 a month to $500 a month, SocialMadeSimple helps its 6,000 users optimize their presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs, with plans to add Pinterest and Google Plus.

The lowest fee gets businesses access to an online tool that allows them to manage all of those from one place, with guidance and industry-specific Web articles they can share, Cramer said. The highest fee gets them someone who manages their online reputation and both posts daily on all of their accounts and responds to others posts.

Its word-of-mouth marketing online, he said. Well make sure theyre staying on the cutting edge.

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Company's social-ly challenged? They'll make it Simple

A Social Network Free of Ads

The dominant social networks cater too much to advertisers, says the man behind a Twitter-style network that users would pay for.

Social networking is too important to the future of the Web to be reliant on the advertising industry. That's the argument put forward by the founder of an effort to create an open, ad-free social network closely modeled on Twitter but supported by fees from users.

Dalton Caldwell, who founded one of the Web's earliest successful social networks, Imeem (see "IM-based Social Networking"), and sold it to MySpace in 2009, announced the project, App.net, last week to widespread interest from Web startups and developers. Caldwell has decided to divert the efforts of his current startup, Mixed Media Labs, to begin work on the project, and wants to raise $500,000 in donations to fund the rest. The project has already secured over $65,000 towards that goal. Donations have come from people paying the $50 annual member fee the service will charge, or larger amounts for the access that software developers need to build apps on the service. Mixed Media Labs received $5 million in investment funding in 2010 and originally worked on tools to help creators of mobile apps market them online.

Caldwell thinks the ad-supported business models adopted by Twitter and Facebook have encouraged those companies to create closed arenas that not only do a disservice to users but also choke online innovation. "Twitter created as fundamental a technical innovation as e-mail and HTML itself, and they totally blew it," says Caldwell. He draws an analogy with the early days of the Web, when Netscape got the medium started by releasing the first mass-market Web browser. "If Netscape had decided to build a proprietary ecosystem and become a media company supported by advertising, we wouldn't have the Web we do today," Caldwell says.

Caldwell's move was inspired by the positive response to a blog post he published this month lamenting recent moves by Twitter to restrict access by third-party apps and companies to its members' data. Many of Twitter's features and early traction came when the company adopted ideassuch as hashtags and retweetsthat originated with its users, and when it let outside software developers tap into the network, which yielded the first desktop and mobile clients for Twitter. But in 2011 the company announced that it intended to provide the main, if not only, ways of accessing the service, and has increasingly restricted what outside developers can do ever since.

That appears to be motivated by Twitter's need to establish its ad business, which relies on inserting paid-for messages into a user's update stream. That creates an incentive to build a closed network that keeps users locked in to the main Twitter site, and puts their needs second, says Caldwell. He says the dynamic also afflicts Facebook. "They're doing exactly the right thing for advertisers. If you're not an advertiser, they're not building it for you." Caldwell says that offering a service paid for by users creates a clear, uncompromised incentive to do what's best for them. He says the success of companies such as Dropbox and Evernote shows that people are willing to pay for online services. He also points out that more established communication networks such as the phone system have long gotten their revenue directly from their users.

The exact design and features of App.net will be shaped by feedback from supporters, but the basic form is intended to be similar to Twitter. Users can publish updates and subscribe to those of others to build a personalized real-time feed of content.

He acknowledges that he and many of those most excited by his project are "nerds," but he contends that many people outside the tech community are leery of the increasing efforts of Twitter and Facebook to position ads around their socializing.

However, some who agree with his analysis question Caldwell's solution.

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A Social Network Free of Ads

July 19, 2012 11:30

Trailer for the US remake of 'The Inbetweeners' prompts an angry response from fans of the original

The trailer for the US remake of The Inbetweeners has prompted an angry response from fans of the original British TV show.

MTV's remake of the hit E4 sitcom - which relocates the action from Rudge Park Comprehensive to a typical American high school - premieres in the US on August 20. Earlier this week (July 17), the first trailer for the show appeared on YouTube - click here to watch it.

The creators of the British original, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, serve as executive producers on the remake, but UK viewers were scathing of their efforts to rework the show for a US audience. Commenting on YouTube, one angry fan wrote: "another great English tv series being copied by the Americans and turned into a lump of shit! good work MTV knockers!"

As of this morning (July 19), the trailer has received just 295 "likes" on YouTube, compared to some 17,385 "dislikes". A torrent of abuse has been left underneath the video, with typical comments declaring the trailer "awful", "unbearable" and "shockingly shite".

One fan predicted that the US remake will miss the distinctive British vocabulary from the original, writing: "It just doesn't translate....twat...knob....clunge....div....shag....bollocks...all staple phrases of English humour, almost completely absent from the American vocabulary, which, let's face it, made the characters who they were! Total shite!"

The original British version of The Inbetweeners, starring Simon Bird, James Buckley, Blake Harrison and Joe Thomas, ran for three seasons as an E4 sitcom before spawning a spin-off film. Last month (June), it was reported that the show's creators are also producing an American teen film "inspired by" The Inbetweeners Movie.

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'The Inbetweeners' US remake trailer slated by fans of UK original

GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga.

A Gwinnett County artist said he is the victim of censorship after a library took down his exhibit featuring eight prominent televangelists.

The exhibit includes famous pastors Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen.

Lawrenceville artist Ralph Beach told Channel 2's Kerry Kavanaugh his work is an expression of his faith.

He said when the Grayson Public Library offered to display his pencil-sketched portraits, he jumped at the chance. Beach said the library was fully aware of what he would be hanging.

"I had emailed them several of the pictures," Beach said.

He said he hung the sketches on Saturday, July 7. Beach said they were to remain on display through Aug. 11, but in a matter of days he got a call telling him they needed to come down.

"You can do anything you want but you just can't say 'Jesus.' And in the Bible belt, that's ridiculous," he said.

Beach said the library told him a patron complained that they were offensive and non-inclusive. He said the collection had already been taken down when he went to retrieve them Saturday.

"Where does it stop? Where does censorship stop?" Beach said.

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Nixed televangelist exhibit upsets Gwinnett County artist

The upper house of the Russian Parliament passed a bill on Wednesday that the Russian IT industry believes has high potential to lead to Internet censorship.

The bill, including amendments to several laws, was adopted by the upper house of the Russian Parliament, the Federation Council of Russia. The adoption of the bill makes it easier to block sites that host child pornography, promote drugs and provide instructions about how to commit suicide, as well as other information that affects health and development, the Council said. In particular, the law includes the creation of mechanisms for the rapid removal of web pages that contain materials prohibited from circulation within Russia, the Council said.

IT companies in Russia however, have been warning that the law can have negative effects and lead to censorship because there is a risk that legal content can be blocked more easily too, mainly because it amends the law "On information, information technologies and information protection" to allow the blocking of websites through IP and DNS blockades.

It also looks as though Roskomnadzor, the Russian Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications, will gain the power to blacklist websites without a court's consent as of Nov. 1, Vladimir Medeyko, director of Wikimedia Russia, the organization that runs the local version of Wikipedia, said via instant message.

One of the amended laws leaves the opportunity to blacklist whole domains when only part of the hosted content is illegal. For instance 1.3 million blogs hosted on Blogger are blocked in Russia as a result of a court ruling that ordered the blocking of access to extremist blog posts, Google Russia said earlier this month. And in another lawsuit in 2010, a court ordered a local Internet provider to block the entire YouTube domain because the court deemed one of the hosted movies illegal, according to Google. The company said the new law is a threat for the Internet.

Presenting the bill to the Council, Senator Lyudmila Narusova said that the Internet community has certain worries, particularly regarding the risk of unjustified blacklisting of websites, and that it is necessary to constantly monitor enforcement of the amended law. However, she also pointed out that many European countries, including Germany and the U.K., and also the U.S. have certain mechanisms in place to block websites, adding that the fight against illegal information on Internet is strong in the world, a Council statement said.

Amendments to the law "On information, information technologies and information protection" should not have been made so hastily, said Vladimir Isaev, Manager of International Media Relations at Russian search engine Yandex, via email.

"Yandex is ready to accept official invitations to discuss the Bill or to commit our vision and opinion to government authorities," he said. The effects on the Russian online industry are hard to gauge at the moment, he said adding: "All of us are waiting for subordinate regulatory acts and regulation instructions."

The bill moved through the lower and upper house within a period of two weeks, giving the industry little time to protest the legislation. After Wikipedia became aware of the bill and its potential it decided to block access to its site for 24 hours. The English version of Wikipedia, along with websites including Reddit and Craigslist, conducted a similar protest against the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by blocking access to their sites last January. Other Russian online businesses including Yandex, social network VK.com and the Russian version of Live Journal posted banners or blog posts to protest the bill.

These protests were followed by changes to the proposed amendments to legislation. Among the changes the Russian security service FSB (successor to the KGB) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were excluded from the list of government bodies that would be allowed to blacklist sites, before the lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, approved the bill, Medeyko said last week. Wikimedia Russia was also allowed to partake in a working group overseeing the bill and its implementations.

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Russian Parliament's Upper House Approves Internet 'censorship' Bill