Protestors against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) went on an all-out internet strike last week to show senate and congress how much they oppose the bills.

Many large and small websites, including popular online destinations like Reddit and Wikipedia (check out these Tweets from angry students who couldn’t do their homework), shut down for 24 hours to protest SOPA and PIPA.

Instead of removing pirated, unauthorized content from the internet, SOPA and PIPA legislations focused on punishing the platforms hosting the content. This would allow the government to go after foreign-based sites that distribute unauthorized content and force U.S.-based sites to cut ties with websites even remotely connected to online piracy (ex. if someone had reposted a link on Reddit).

A passionate anti-SOPA post from BoingBoing, a blog that also shut down on January 18, gives an interesting take on why their website “could never co-exist with a SOPA world.”

The battle between content providers who argue that internet piracy prevents the creation of new jobs in the industry, and internet companies who say that these bills threaten the freedom of the internet and may damage the internet-based economy, was not over after the protests were done.

When the government put SOPA/PIPA on hold, the OPEN Act has been introduced. This less crazy version of SOPA and PIPA will only concern websites that openly promote the violation of copyright laws. The act is completely open to the public, and everyone can make revisions and suggestions to the bill (ironically, it works very similarly to Wikipedia).

For a little while it seemed like the storm ceased and the SOPA/PIPA legislations have left forever. That, unfortunately, did not last long. The next day the government shut down MegaUpload, the best-known file-sharing site on the Internet. Several big recording artists collaborated to create a “MegaUpload Mega Song” in support of the site.

Also in retaliation for MegaUpload, the hacker group Anonymous took down websites of Department of Justice, Motion Picture Association of America and Universal Music Group.

And then, just a few days ago, Christopher Dodd of the MPAA, made a few comments concerning the SOPA and PIPA acts that made his opponents, including the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, sign a petition to investigate Dodd on bribery charges.

This shows that the “SOPA/PIPA Against The Internet” saga is far from over and the entertainment industry will keep making attempts to curb technology.

Do you run an online business? How would SOPA/PIPA affect it?

Traditional TV as we know it has ceased its existence. It is still possible to catch a traditional sitcom every once in a while, but most sports programs, reality shows and commercials are filled with social media icons, QR codes and are becoming more and more interactive every day.

Our habits of watching TV are changing as well. Now that we have hi-tech gadgets like smartphones, tablets and laptops surrounding us 24/7, we are more used to technological multitasking (in other words, using multiple gadgets at once). In fact, according to Nielsen’s Consumer Usage Report, 70% of women and 60% of men are distracted multi-taskers, checking their email or surfing the Web while they watch TV.

Shazam, an iPhone app that has been around for a while, is now tapping into a market beyond just mobile and going after interactive TV. Now, Shazam is not only able to name a tune, but also recognize audio for a TV ad and direct you to a website with more interactive content.

If you watched 2010’s Super Bowl (who didn’t?), then maybe you remember the Dockers ad that used Shazam. It was the first commercial to use the app in conjunction with the advertising content – not many companies were comfortable with betting their multimillion SuperBowl spot on an interactive test like that. Apparently the strategy proved to be worth it, and in the upcoming SuperBowl, 1/3 of all the ads will be using Shazam.

MySpace also didn’t waste time and is now jumping on the social advertising bandwagon. It’s launching MySpaceTV in the hope of finding new audiences of its dying platform. The consumers would be able to turn TV-watching into a social sharing experience through real-time online chatting about a sports game or inviting their online friends to watch a show with them. Right now, all these cool multitasking features will only be available with the purchase of a Panasonic Viera TV set.

These recent TV-related innovations may be the sign that many people are not satisfied with just watching TV anymore. As they are not satisfied with just doing one thing. New on the go technologies helped us get used to multitasking and sharing everything we do. We enjoy broadcasting our actions to the world, as if all of our friends, followers and fans want to know exactly what we are doing every single hour.

No matter what you think of this trend, this is the type of a bandwagon your business should get on. Start creating content that is accessible from any platform and make it easy for your visitors to share it with each other (make sure you always create something worth sharing). Acknowledge your audience’s need for multitasking and sharing – give them what they are looking for and they will keep coming back to you.

How is your online content interactive and share-friendly?

How much digital music did you download in 2011? How many songs did you stream on Pandora, Spotify or Rdio this past year? Do you remember the last time you bought a CD?

If your answer to the last question was “no,” you are not the only one.

In fact, the majority of the world bought digital music in 2011, making it the first year when digital music sales surpassed traditional physical sales. We bought a total of 1.27 billion digital tracks, which accounted for 50.3% of all music sales, according to The Nielsen Company and Billboard’s 2011 Music Industry Report.

Consumers have been buying single digital tracks for a while. Last year, however, the amount of purchased digital music albums increased to 31%. Also, for the first time, more than 100 digital songs exceeded the 1 million sales mark for the year and eight different artists broke the 10 million digital track sales mark.

If you work in the music industry, what does it mean for you and your business?

More and more people like streaming music, making digital music purchases with one click of a button and taking it with them everywhere they go.

Growing popularity of streaming music services such as Spotify, Pandora and Rdio makes it easier to legally listen to favorite songs without having to pay for each track.

The most downloaded as well as the most streamed songs of 2011 were the ones played (and overplayed) on many radio stations across the nation – Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” for downloaded and Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” for streamed.

It looks like people are using iTunes and streaming music services to buy songs they already know and love vs. exploring and finding new artists.

At the same time, Facebook, with the help of Spotify and Rdio, turned listening to music into a social experience, where every user’s music preferences are broadcasted.

So, how do you get your music out there? Radio is great, but don’t forget about the importance of a social listening aspect. Promote your hits on social media, grant your fans a “first listen” privilege and empower them to share your music with their friends. And hopefully your song will get to the top of The Most Downloaded of 2012 list.

Facebook is currently testing out a new feature for brand pages. This feature will allow page admins to receive private messages from users. Any Facebook user will be able to send a private message to a fan page.

Facebook has just begun introducing this feature, making it only available in Asia for the time being.

If the feature proves its value, Facebook will hopefully make this new communication option available in other countries.

This feature will not be a way for brands to flood their fans with spammy communication. In fact, the social network has recently revoked admins’ ability to message their brand page fans. The new private messaging option will be an opportunity for fans to reach out directly to page administrators – only they will be able to initiate a private conversation with a brand.

Even if Facebook users have not “liked” a particular page, they will still have the ability to message the admins directly.

This new option will definitely benefit customer-centric brands, such as telecom companies, that have to respond to a lot of customer service questions and requests. Private messaging will help make those pages less cluttered. And brands will be able to deal with negative feedback outside of public space.

On the other hand, the new feature might cause the growth of brand pages might decrease, because customer-brand communication will no longer appear on public timeline and the Ticker. The organic reach of the brand page will decrease, driving less traffic of new visitors.

Another drawback of private messaging might be its availability to everyone. A lot of people (fans and non-fans) could start using it as the primary way of communication with a brand. Pages with thousands of followers might get flooded with messages from frustrated or angry clients and will have to answer each one of them individually.

While private messaging does provide a better customer service for clients, it might get overwhelming for fan page administrators and might require some extra help.

The private messaging feature will be completely optional, and if page administrators will decide not to use it, the will be able to easily opt out of it.

Recently, many social networks became more brand-focused in the last month – Google+ introduced brand pages back in November and Twitter launched a new look for company pages in the beginning of December.

Now Facebook is up to speed with everyone else. The only question is – does it care more about improving brands’ customer service or proving to Google+ and Twitter that it’s unbeatable?

iPhone’s Siri, which was named Google Killer when it first came out, might have to face fierce competition from Google soon.

The rumors started after Google acquired Clever Sense, the maker of Alfred, a restaurant recommendation app.

Some say that Alfred, if made more sophisticated (in other words, similar to Siri), may have a larger impact on search. Others dismiss Google’s shenanigans as nothing more than a slight attempt at building its own version of Siri.

Right now, Alfred is just a restaurant recommendation app (a very intelligent one), designed to “connect the online world with the offline world by delivering recommendations to the users in context, taking into account time, place and intent.”

In its similarity to Siri, Alfred usus artificial intelligence techniques to provide the most relevant recommendations, relies on natural language and learns user’s preferences over time, which could be a competitive advantage if Google decides to take these features to the next level.

Right now, Alfred is only useful when it comes to food and drink recommendations. Siri, on the other hand, besides restaurant recommendations, can tell you the weather, give you directions or help you hide a body.

However, Alfred has another advantage: when the app makes suggestions, besides accounting for time and your location, it also provides you the recommendations based on intent. This could be the key to Google’s domination.

Search professionals have already been talking about how interest- and intent-based targeting can be the future of search.

If Google will be able to engineer Alfred or other application to predict users’ desires and recommend new discoveries based on previous searches, it might even overshadow Siri’s glory on the digital market.

New Facebook profile, the Timeline, is now available for all of Facebook’s 800 million users. In the next few weeks, Facebook will completely switch to Timeline.

This new Facebook redesign was the most major update since the launch of the social platform. Every user’s Facebook profile will now show a reversed chronological order of all Facebook activity, up to the day of birth. New design combined with new Facebook features (and more privacy concerns) provides a creepy nice look at the whole life of any Facebook user.

Even though Facebook is not redesigning Fan Pages (yet?), the switch to Timeline will cause the users to interact with brands on Facebook in a different way.

1. Increased activity. In the next few weeks more and more people will start using Timeline, designing and editing their profile. The rate of daily activity will most likely go up, so this might be a good time to start updating your brand’s page “status” more often. Just don’t broadcast and shout. Instead, introduce promotions (in time for the holidays!) and ask questions. Engage your fans into conversations about the Timeline, see what they like and don’t like about it – some of that information might give you a few creative suggestions on how to use the Timeline for your brand’s advantage.

2. Sponsored stories. Old Facebook profiles featured as many as six sponsored stories on users’ pages. With Timeline, the amount of sponsored stories went down to just two. This may either be a Timeline bug or a conscious decision of Facebook developers – we’ll see whether or not Facebook will be putting more sponsored stories on Timeline profiles in the next few weeks. On the bright side, it looks like the ads will now stay on the page during scrolling, instead of disappearing with the rest of the scrollable content, which will increase ad impressions.

3. New creative ways to reach out to fans. Facebook might surprise us with redesigned brand pages in the next few months. But brands are already thinking of new ways to reach out to their fans who have the Timeline. Mountain Dew is on top of the creative challenge, offering their Facebook fans custom Timeline cover pictures.

There are more things you can be doing right now for your brand to be seen and heard in the cluster arrangement of the new Facebook. What is the biggest advantage from Timeline do you see for your business?

Many companies are often afraid of getting into social media because it seems uncontrollable.

Social media gives your business an opportunity to increase interaction and be closer to your every-day consumer, but those conversations can be tough to control sometimes. The big challenge is crisis management: responding to negative feedback quickly and turn your customers into brand advocates.

Many people like to share their positive experience with a brand online. They tell their friends how wonderful the customer service is at company A or how great the discounts are at company B. Unfortunately, a lot more people are likely to share their negative experiences online. Social media makes it easier for an angry customer to bash your brand online and be heard (or even supported) within minutes by hundreds of people.

At the same time, social media, if done right, can be a great crisis management tool – it can help you address the issue and quickly deal with negative feedback.

Don’t be afraid of someone bad-mouthing your brand. Like I said before, the fact that people are talking about your brand (even if it’s not good) means that they care. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have spent time telling you about their bad experience and would have been off doing business with your competitors.

Today, more and more people realize that they have the power to affect how business is done. Most of them don’t publish negative feedback online just because, they usually have a purpose – to be heard.

If you spend enough time listening to what people say about your brand online, you can learn a lot about what is working and what’s not. Listening is a big part of successful crisis management. Are the buyers praising the special discounts you have just announced, or maybe a lot of them are unhappy with your customer service?

Make sure you address the complaints in a short period of time. The longer you wait, the more frustrated and angry your customers may become. Especially if the same issue has been brought up several times.

And again, don’t be afraid that someone might say bad things about your company. It happens to everyone. What will differentiate your business from others is how you handle the issue.

Have you had a situation when you had to deal with negative feedback online? How did you handle it?

Great communities inspire great conversations. Online communities are no different.

Fred Wilson once said in his blog, “modern [online] community building isn’t easy, but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredibly powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately very valuable work.”

One of the definitions of the word “community” is “body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a large society.”

The Internet allows people with common interests, be it Mac enthusiasts or IT people, come together even if they are “scattered through a large society.” People always want to belong to some kind of community where they can share their thoughts, opinions and interests with others.

Every business has the opportunity to take advantage of this phenomenon and unite their customers and fans in an online community with a common interest – their brand.

Many brands build online communities hoping that it would be an easier way to talk to their customers. They keep creating and pushing content out to their fans, failing to realize that many of them join an online community not because they want to listen to brands, but rather talk and share their experiences with each other.

Online communities can generate valuable content for your brand if you would just let your fans talk. Their opinions might not always be positive, but the fact that your fans talk about you already means they are interested in your business. And even negative feedback can be turned into a learning experience. Just make sure to address those comments in a timely manner (watch for a blog post on crisis management soon).

Sephora’s “Beauty Talk” online community on the website had exactly that result: “we realized that…clients were not only trying to talk with us – they were trying to talk with each other. And they were actually engaging in ways we had no idea they would,” said the VP of interactive media at Sephora.

A strong online community, where people have the freedom to express their opinions and know they are being heard, nurtures community leaders that can become brand advocates both online and offline.

Facebook is a great platform for your business to start building online communities. It is important to give your customers a voice, even though it might be uncomfortable at first. Ask questions, encourage conversations, monitor and listen. Your fans have a lot to say about your brand, don’t limit their ability to interact with each other and with you.

Twitter rolled out new platform redesign that lets you discover, connect and share more easily. Twitter is now “yours to discover” and is a “faster, simpler way to stay close to everything you care about,” according to the website.

The timing for the new redesign seems right, especially with the buzz about Google+ brand pages and the updated Facebook subscriptions feature. It looks like Twitter’s new interface and features will be stirring many discussions in the next few weeks.

Redesigned Twitter app for iPhone and Android was available since yesterday, and the new website is now live.

The iPhone app interface looks a lot cleaner and does not feel as crowded, and it is easier to navigate in many ways.

Content discovery on Twitter is a big part of the new redesign, and even the beloved user-created hashtag got a new name – the “discover” tool.

Twitter tried to make the experience with the Discover button as customized as possible – the tool will show you the information based on your interests, location, the users and hashtags you follow and what is currently happening (and trending) in the world.

Unfortunately, the saved searches are now gone from the mobile app, but Twitter’s new ability to guess what hashtags and stories will interest you eliminates the need for those. According to the website, “as you use Twitter more, Discover gets even better at serving up more content just for you.” I wonder if it will rise privacy concerns later on…

Just like a relatively new activity feature on the Twitter website, the Connect button on the mobile app allows you to see all the interactions you have on Twitter in one place – new mentions, followers and retweets. Another neat redesign feature is the ability to see the whole conversation of replies before and after the tweet where you were mentioned.

Along with the new features, Twitter also rolled out new brand pages, according to Advertising Age. Brands will now have an opportunity to post large header images and decide to keep a particular tweet on the top of their page. Right now, Twitter is launching brand pages with only 21 marketers, including Coca-Cola, and hopefully the feature will soon be available to everyone.

How will new Twitter brand page help your business?

This is that time of year when we begin to stress out about getting our holiday shopping done. Because our family, friends, coworkers, extended family, and bosses all have different preferences and tastes, and it always takes a while to find that perfect gift for each one.

Thankfully, the age of technology, when much of our private information is widely available for the world to see (thanks, Facebook), makes it easier for us to do holiday shopping.

Some companies made a huge push this year to make their customers’ shopping process easier and a lot less stressful.

Etsy decided to redesign their Gift Ideas for Your Friends service, connecting it with Facebook and allowing the visitors to see which gifts would better suit their family and friends based on their interests and likes on Facebook. And it does so without violating anyone’s privacy.

Once you log in, Etsy pulls up all of your Facebook friends and four gift suggestions for each, based on their interests and likes. Many are very accurate, and some I would actually consider buying. Etsy even wrote the behind the scenes post about how they made this service work. It would be interesting to see the results of this initiative and if it will increase the website’s traffic and revenue for this holiday season.

Another interesting gift shopping resource was launched by Walmart. They introduced a Facebook app called Shopycat (so, it’s like a shopping copycat? hm…), the main point of which is very similar to Etsy’s, but the gift recommendations come mainly from Walmart’s Books and Electronics departments.

Good luck with keeping your gift shopping activities in secret though, because (thanks again to Facebook privacy settings) a Shopycat-related notification to your friends will appear on the Ticker right away.

Are there any other apps that help you do your Christmas shopping?

Share on Facebook ]]> http://lockerpartner.com/2011/12/social-commerce-taking-holiday-shopping-to-another-level/feed/ 0