A lot of journalists have been adding sensationalist – yet tenuous – links to social networking sites within criminal stories for a long time. Whether this is fair or not, the Ashleigh Hall murder case (by a man she met on Facebook), has again raised questions of the site’s child protection levels. Is it high time that the social network took action and listened to the calls from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre to implement an abuse reporting button?

The internet is constantly subjected to criticism over safety regulations by the media and as a result, some organisations have worked very hard to provide tools or guidelines to create a better environment for children to use. The CEOP button is one of these initiatives. Once implemented, it appears on every page or profile and connects the user to the CEOP’s website. By accessing this, the user can either view information about staying safe online or report abuse directly. Of the main social media sites used in the UK, only Bebo and MSN Live Messenger include the CEOP reporting button so far – which isn’t good enough.

Facebook’s press team is once again being forced to employ some serious crisis management, but it’s curious that the company isn’t taking a more proactive approach to the issue. The site obviously takes the safety of its users seriously, but this is not being communicated to the public. Adding the CEOP button seems to be a very simple way to help heal its public image, and more importantly help children – and their parents – feel happier about using the site.

Charlotte is resident social media expert at Reputation Online’s sister publication, new media age. Image via Child Safety Glasses.

Search is also important, as even the most loyal customer is often lazy in terms of heading straight to the first result on Google. Then, there’s the URL issue, though brands with short names will be pleased to know the latter issue may soon become far easier to deal with.

National registry for .uk domain names, Nominet, has announced plans to review its rules on the registration of one character or two letter domain names.

The problem for many is that registration of shorter names is not currently possible in the UK due to the rules governing the .uk domain space. However, thanks to today’s announcement, brands such as mobile network 3 and BA will be able to stake a claim to a more appropriate URL.

Nominet is now running a consultation until 8 June , formally inviting feedback from all internet stakeholder groups and those who are interested in registering short domains.

Lesley Cowley, chief executive at Nominet said: “We are committed to ensuring that the release of these short domains is conducted in an appropriate, responsible and fair manner. We therefore urge all Internet stakeholders including consumers, industry and Government to submit their feedback during the next three months.”

Spoke Digital was launched yesterday, set up as an independent digital training and consultancy agency specialising in social media, community engagement and content. The agency is headed up by Ilana Fox, who left her role as social media manager at ASOS at the end of February 2010: ‘The industry is maturing at an astonishing rate. We’ve found that lots of companies want to recruit people with social media skills to ensure the conversation about their brand is appropriate, transparent, and doesn’t damage their business. However, a lot of people who work for ‘conversation agencies’ don’t have real-time experience of managing situations like these – and this is a potential nightmare for both them and the companies involved.”

Thanks to a maturing sector and the overhwelming influence of self-publishing, education is more important than ever. “People are starting to ask for proof of return on investment, efficiency in processes and best practice models. Digital media is growing up and organisations need guidance,” said Holly Seddon, partner at Spoke.

Shel Holtz and Thomas Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt discussed the benefits of guidelines versus policy on both of their blogs at the beginning of the year, with the latter saying that policy was uneccessary as more rules only make a company more bureaucratic.

Shel agreed that rules might be a bad idea for employees, but that guidelines are helpful to employees in giving them a baseline of what to do and what not to do in social media. But as John Cass points out, guidelines can help everyone in the company, even practiced communicators, but they have to be accompanied by an effective training program.

Once upon a time, software-based sentiment analysis was the new kid on the block for online monitoring companies, which for a while separated a few agencies from the pack. Whether this was a good thing or not is a different story altogether, as people quickly worked out that no technology could accurately tell the difference between the intricate nuances of the human language.

This new concept from Fisheye – which provides both monitoring and brand analysis – takes sentiment, editorial credibility of the source, overlap of media audiences and repeated mentions in a single source on the same day into consideration.

Founded around research from the INSEAD business school in 2008, its clients include the World Economic Forum, Axa Insurance and Nikon (who all add a level of credibility to the company’s work). However, the scope of its coverage seems exhaustive, with online, traditional, print and television media all included. For the most part, companies that proclaim to provide this breadth of monitoring are either terribly expensive – or tend to miss things.

Cynicism aside, as part of the push for the new service, Fisheye carried out some analysis around the value of various Olympic athletes. The company calculated the amount of online news and social media coverage received by all the gold medal winners between February 12th and March 1st 2010, then quantified this  in terms of its average daily online reach (based on unique views for over 20,000 news sources). As well as the total marketing value of that audience, calculated using a proprietary algorithm that looks at online advertising rates, sentiment of the article and credibility of the source.

Unsurprisingly, American skier Lindsey Vonn is by far the most valuable brand online generating nearly $65 million of online coverage during Vancouver 2010 according to this method. Her image as a sex symbol, for example, has helped boost coverage of her online. 13.5% of mentions during this period referenced either her sex appeal or her appearance on Sport’s Illustrated’s Olympic preview cover (pictured left) and annual swimsuit edition, both published just before the Vancouver games.

It’s a far more comprehensive method of assigning value to online coverage, and if you had to, this is probably a good formula to use. However, of the 20,000 new sources that Fisheye tracks – what if you’re best customers are reading something else? Articles may appear in media that don’t reach a client’s target audience or which, while generally positive, may not contain the client’s key messages. As such, they do not contribute to achieving a client’s objectives. Conversely, articles that are negative may not necessarily be strategically significant.

Monitoring is definitely evolving, and this new formula from Fisheye shouldn’t be sniffed at – but it’s not the be all and end all. It’s too easy to rely on a service like this to provide a nice big figure at the end of a campaign and be done with it, but there has to be more to it – a link to sales objectives, traffic to a brand’s site or even an improvement of customer service.

Quoted in the Telegraph, Lord Clement-Jones, the Liberal Democrat peer who proposed the amendment, said the it would protect content creators who are not being rewarded for the work they put in.

“I believe this is going to send a powerful message to our creative industries that we value what they do, that we want to protect what they do, that we do not believe in censoring the internet, but we are responding to genuine concerns,” he said.

It’s another example of the not-so-softly-softly approach the Digital Economy Bill seems to be taking towards copyright infringement online.

While the Bill’s patron Lord Mandleson seems to have backed down from his previous “three-strikes and you’re out” policy for file-sharers, throughout the Bill’s lifetime politicians seem to have had nothing but contempt for any file-sharing or copyright infringement online.

That’s not a justification – not in the slightest – more that it just shows how out-of-touch Whitehall continues to be with the web. It’s great that the UK is theoretically heading into its first ‘digital election’, but it sometimes seems MPs are jumping onto a bandwagon they don’t quite understand; although that’s perhaps nothing new.

The basics are this: the brilliance of the web in 2010 is that it’s been built on the principles of sharing. While the first few years surfing the web meant you did just that – finding websites yourself – these days its much more about sharing content with your friends and peers. Often, however, it’s sharing content that you perhaps shouldn’t.

But sites like YouTube and Facebook – another site that’s previously been criticised for hosting copyrighted material – do their utmost to prohibit unauthorised content from being hosted within them.

For all the thousands of copyright-infringing videos currently on YouTube, there are probably a thousand-times more that never made it up due to parent company Google’s policing.

However, all we see is politicians constantly pointing the finger at web companies saying that they’re hurting honest content creators; this does nothing but damage the reputation of the YouTube’s and Facebook’s which do actively look to take down illegal material.

So, rather than threatening these sites, why can’t Parliament look to aid them in their fight? The web is social – that can’t be stopped.

Will is News Editor for Reputation Online’s sister publication, new media age

Image via Kevin Branchett

Part 2: AVE

AVE or “advertising value equivalent” is a way of attempting to turn different forms of activity into a common set of units so that decisions about allocation of financial resources can more easily be made.

The question inherent in AVE is an easy one to ask – “what would it have cost to buy the equivalent coverage in advertising?” – but a hard one to answer. A mention in a front page newspaper story, for example, could be compared with the cost of an advert. But is the mention worth less because it’s only one sentence in a 30 sentence story? Or worth more because it is in a story (and therefore has the newspaper’s stamp of approval) rather than an advert? But is the story a negative story? And so on and on.

As a result, the PR industry had a rough rule of thumb: if the coverage appears in editorial rather than advertising, multiple its value by three (or so: different traditions, different numbers) and that is its AVE.

Even amongst traditional PR, AVE has long had its critics and is often not used. That applies all the more so for social media where the list of questions about how you attach a financial value just gets longer.

For some very specific areas of social media activity, AVE can be pressed in to service, but most of the time the assumptions, estimates and numbers out of thin air required make AVE calculations less than useful.

Mark is Associate Director, Digital at Mandate Communications and you can follow him on Twitter via @markpack or on his blog.

Reports of spying and espionage are two of the main reasons given for holding media (The Epoch Times talks about Maziar Bahari, who was held captive for 118 days in Iran), and the CPJ states that this is a sign of ‘things to come’. Bahari’s case is particularly relevant to this point, as Iran’s government restricts the flow of news to its citizens, and to those outside of the country to global media.

Bahari’s was a high profile case, but he was a Newsweek reporter (owned by The Washington Post Company). It was on the front page, people were talking about it, and the backing of both organisations helped to keep him safe. The CPJ states that independent writers are at a greater risk as they don’t have this resource behind them. Quite often they’ll be writing for a niche publications, or for themselves.

Politics is obviously an emotive and delicate subject, especially for a foreign journalist arriving in a country to report on the nuances of a place they don’t live in – or understand. It’s not surprising that of the 52 journalists killed last year, 75% were linked to political motivation. Just last week, unidentified gunmen in Honduras killed a reporter and seriously wounded a colleague, according to local reports. An outspoken and controversial journalist, Karol Cabrera is known for her support of the coup that ousted former president Manuel Zelaya in June 2009, and her video reports are all over YouTube.

As the reach and distribution of online content becomes easier and more prolific, the risk for writers and bloggers who cover controversial topics increases. The opportunity to speak freely is a wonderful thing, but when a brand starts to engage with bloggers, should it also take responsibility for what they write? If a pharmaceutical company works with a pro-choice blogger to promote a morning after pill, and that person is attacked, should the company step up to support them?

There’s no need to take this out of context. as the examples above are worst case scenarios and unfortunately the majority of people getting arrested are full-time writers – talking about extremely evocative topics. Even still, political and news organisations are aware of the issues, so shouldn’t brands think about the repercussions as well?

Image via Ethan Ham

The Good

It’s been a good week for business as email marketing giant ExactTarget acquired CoTweet, a US start-up that allows multiple editors to contribute to a single corporate feed via a smart dashboard.

The tool includes features that allows users to track conversations, assign roles and create follow-up tasks with brands like Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Ford, Dell and Pepsi already on board.

“What we’re seeing in the market is organisations are moving quickly to try to capture the potential of social, but are discovering that it’s siloed and not integrated effectively with other forms of digital communications,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget co-founder and chief executive officer.  “By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet, we can provide businesses a complete solution to tie together all forms of interactive communications and drive deeper customer engagement online.”

The Bad

As reported on PC World this week, a pirate copy of the new submarine simulation game – Silent Hunter 5 – that is said to bypass the new ‘always online’ requirement of Ubisoft’s games may have made its way onto file sharing sites.

Much to the games world’s distress, Ubisoft recently stated that its future PC games would include a mandatory ‘always connected’ rule, which means that if you don’t have internet access continuously, games will disconnect play after a user attempts to save a game.

An official response states that the piracy copy is a fake, though user comments on release sites suggest that the copy works fine. The game-maker seems safe for now, but the bigger issue is that ongoing effects of this new rule are yet to fully play out – and will inevitably have an effect on the reputation of the company.

The Ugly

The BBC has received more than 2,500 complaints from the public about controversial plans to reduce the scope of its operation by cutting well-loved services with a cult following including 6 Music.

According to The Guardian, the BBC  is expected to officially announce the full details of its proposed package of cuts tomorrow, has received a total of 2,398 complaints about the possible closure of various radio stations.

The campaign to save 6 Music, which includes a Facebook group, has been around since last year when rumours that it might be cut back first emerged. This took on a mind of its over the weekend however, after details apparently confirming the closure emerged on Friday.

The proposed cuts sparked a furious reaction, with #savebbc6music one of the most popular messages on Twitter and more than 70,000 people signing up to the Facebook page to rescue the digital radio station.

The US show embraced its online fans towards the beginning on the season, pushing out individual profiles for each of its 24 finalists. The only explanation for the switch has been a message posted in some iteration on all of the networks in question. The tweet for instance read; “Thanks so much for following me! All my updates from now on will be on our Official Ai9 Twitter Page, please follow me there @AI9Contestants.”

As reported by Mashable, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today are both speculating that the presence of separate profiles allowed early favourites to be highlighted, making the playing ground unfair for those with less fans or followers. This would also fuel media headlines, and add some transparency to the otherwise secretive voting process.

In some ways, Idol is right. Popular profiles or people often benefit from the snowball effect and there’s a risk that people would back those that appear to be most popular, instead of those they really like. This, combined with the ‘who is my friend following?’ aspect could seriously sway the public vote.

It’s a shame that an evolution of the programme – which may have even enhanced its success – has been stopped so suddenly in its tracks. All things must change (as shown by Simon Fuller’s move to become executive producer at CKX Inc, the company that owns his own 19 Entertainment), and it’s not always a bad thing.

We’re sitting on the fence on this one, as there’s both a positive and a negative outcome for these actions. Time will tell.

The environmental activist group – known for aggressively targeting Japanese whalers and government figures – seems to be using Facebook as a catch-all IT supplier. In it’s own words: “How the internet is powered is an issue not just for Facebook but for the entire IT industry”.

True enough. But is this campaign fair? Nowhere on the flyer or group could I find details of Facebook’s carbon emissions, footprint, or strategy. The group itself purely calls for people to join (and 60k have) but doesn’t provide any more information or insight into how else to help. It certainly doesn’t feature a reply from Facebook.

The first question that came to mind when I saw the campaign was: “How bad is Facebook in the grand scheme of things?” I’m sure there are worse offenders in the IT space. And many of them don’t allow groups of people to meet and discuss climate change.

Has Greenpeace just attacked its biggest source of support?