The Friday Wrap is a curated rundown of news, reports and posts from the past week that, while they didn’t go viral or attract much attention, are still interesting and useful for communications professionals. I select Wrap items from my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.
News
NLRB ruling could end another common workplace policy—A U.S. National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge found Boeing violated labor law by videotaping union protests at its facilities two years ago while also prohibiting employees from using their own cameras at work unless they had a special permit. The two activities taken together interfere with employees’ right to organize and improve working conditions, the judge ruled. It’s not the first time the NLRB has dealt with employee cameras in the workplace, earlier agreeing in one case that an employee who photographed other employees to prove a point was protected by law while in another upholding a ban at a medical center designed to protect patient privacy. “More disputes will likely land before the NLRB as employers add photography policies to workplace handbooks as video and still camera-equipped smart phones become standard.” Read more
LinkedIn adds profile ranking feature—Appealing to users’ competitive nature, LinkedIn has announced an expansion of its feature that informs you who has viewed your profile with a ranking that compares you to others from inside your company as well as those with whom you’re connected. The ranking is determined by total profile views during the last 30 days. Read more
Lithium lays out plans for Klout integration—Plenty of eyebrows raised when Lithium Technologies acquired the maligned social influence ranking site Klout. At its annual LINC user conference this week, Lithium unveiled Klout for Products, a scoring system based on reviews and ratings within a brand’s community. Users will also be able to include their Klout scores in their community profiles. Advocacy Pop-Up Communities let marketers create short-term communities based on a single campaign, product launch, promotion, or special event, with Klout perks built in to incentive consumers or reward loyalty. Read more
Trends
Remember all that whining from marketers about Facebook? It’s not stopping them from using it more than any other social media platform. According to Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, nearly every professional responding to the survey uses Facebook for business-to-consumer marketing, and nearly 90% use it for B2B marketing—all despite the fact that 57% either don’t think their activity on Facebook matters or they’re unsure. Twitter took second place, with 83% of marketers using the service, with LinkedIn taking third place. Read more
Is Instagram the new crisis PR tool of choice?—For celebrities, maybe, which means there’s potential for others facing crises. New York magazine’s fashion blogger Maureen O’Connor touted Instagram’s utility for crisis, pointing out that celebrities in crisis eschew traditional media and turn instead to Instagram “to let the public know they’re ON IT and they GET IT.” O’Connor says Instagram is more intimate and more credible “because it allows public personalities to acknowledge their own foibles while feeling more genuine than a press release.” Read more
Unbundling of apps for mobile leading to “unholy alliances”—Edelman Chief Content Officer Steve Rubel sees the unbundling of services to accommodate consumer behaviors on mobile devices as the catalyst for alliances among media owners. For example, “The New York Times and the Financial times have both decoupled their content from their own apps by allowing Flipboard owners to authenticate and consume it there.” Rubel says these examples are just examples of syndication and that more dramatic alliances are in store, such as “the recent collaboration between Deseret News and The Atlantic. The two teamed up to collaborate on a special series on the changing role of fatherhood—a pairing The New York Times called ‘an odd couple.” Rubel concludes we need more of this kind of thinking “in an environment where supply of content options is infinite yet time is finite. Some of these pairings may even be ‘unholy’ in nature because they will be with the competition.” Read more
Simon & Schuster is second publisher to make books available for rent—For a while, it seemed the music rental concept would never take off as even the most die-hard nerds insisted they needed to own their CDs. But Spotify, RDIO, Google Play Music, XBox Music and others are taking off. The same skepticism aimed at music-as-a-service is now being targeted at books, but Simon & Schuster last week became the second major publisher (Harper Collins was first) to make a significant number of titles—10,000—available to Oyster and Scribd, the early big players in the books-as-a-service field. Read more
Facebook as a whistle blower’s last resort—The cousin of a Filipino maid employed in Saudi Arabia posted photos to Facebook of burns she allegedly suffered at the hands of her employer’s mother. “I didn’t know what else to do,” the cousin said, “but after people started sharing the pictures, some told us what we can do to help her.” Read more
Research
Social media has become a standard marketing tool—The 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report finds that 92% of marketers believe social media is important for their business, a 6-point rise from the previous year. The study, conducted by Social Media Examiner with more than 2,800 marketers, also found 58% of respondents pegging original written content as the most important form of content. Nearly 70% plan to pump more effort into blogging. Facebook and LinkedIn are their most important social networks, and 64% plan to bolster their LinkedIn activities. Only 6% of marketers are podcasting, but 21% say they’ll increase their podcasting activities. Read more
The public says you can go ahead and punish your employees for reputation-damaging tweets—A YouGov Omnibus survey found that many Americans think it’s okay for companies to discipline employees for inappropriate social media content. Forty-one percent of respondents feel companies should be able to discipline staff, according to the study. Read more
Native advertising? No big deal, says the public—74% of the public at large trusts content from businesses that aim to educate readers about a particular topic, according to a study from CMS software company Kentico. In other words, even though most of the public doesn’t know what “native advertising” is, they have accepted it—with some conditions. Trust declines 46% when a reader can’t corroborate content in a native ad with third-party sources (49% seek outside corroboration while 57% say verification from named third party sources adds credibility to native advertising). Seventeen percent of consumers don’t trust content that limits its reporting to a single perspective. Fifteen percent of people ignore native advertising when they can’t figure out what company sponsored it, and 12% dislike content that talks down to them. Read more
Female leaders seen as most effective—Ketchum’s Leadership Communication Monitor found that female leaders were seen as better leaders than men in five of seven metrics for effective leadership. The top four—“leading by example,” “communicating in an open and transparent way,” “admitting mistakes,” and “bringing out the best in others”—were performed better by women than men according to more than half the respondents. “Macho is out, transparent communication is in,” according to a Forbes report on the survey. Read more
Our newspaper-reading habits have changed—Well, umm, obviously, right? The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has concluded that “In today’s media landscape, readers are changing the way(s) they access and interact with newspaper media content.” What makes this data interesting is the details. In an infographic, the NAA shares study results like the fact that the average adult uses four different devices or technologies to access news in a given week. In January, online newspaper content has reached more than 145 million unique
visitors, while last year the Washington Post and The New York Times alone drove more than 260,000 tweets of content weekly. Read more
Mobile
Samsung will announce Galaxy VR headset—Samsung has announced it is developing a virtual reality headset that will become part of the Galaxy line of mobile products, though it will only work with Galaxy products that are still in development. The move is most likely a response to Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift; both headsets are meant primarily for use with games, but if VR headsets take off, communicators and marketers should be thinking about potential applications. Read more
19% of global audience uses WhatsApp—All that amazement over Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp is giving way to understanding as new data reveals WhatsApp is now the third biggest social app, with nearly 1 out of 5 adults worldwide using it, a 30% increase from six months ago. (The data available xclusdes China and Japan.) The numbers are markedly lower in the U.S., where only 3% of adults use it, but worldwide, it’s bigger even than Facebook Messenger. Read more
Ideas
Sneak peek of new TV series debuts on Tumblr—If you’re looking for a compelling and different way to introduce something new, you might take a lesson from the TV network AMC, which debuted its new series “Halt and Catch Fire” on Tumblr two weeks before it was due to launch on TV. Read more
Marriott Rewards members earn points through social activity—There’s a new way to earn Marriott Rewards points without spending nights in a hotel. In a new program called PlusPoints, members can earn up to 2,000 points for advocating on Marriott’s behalf through likes, tweets, posts, and check-ins. “PlusPoints pushes the brand to be active beyond the travel experience and continues the conversation outside of hotel booking.” Read more
UK launches innovation competition—Three-hundred years ago, the UK offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could develop a solution to one of the age’s most perplexing problems—the ability to accurately pinpoint a ship’s position at sea. A watchmaker won the prize by inventing the sextant. Now known as the Longitude Prize, it’s coming again with a considerably larger prize and five years to solve it. The British public will vote from among six of today’s biggest scientific challenges, after which anyone can seek a solution in pursuit of the 10 million pound prize. Read more about the Longitude Prize. The Longitude Prize is the first to spur innovation. Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a prize offered by a New York hotel owner, and Mojave Aerospace Ventures pocketed $10 million to win the Ansari XPRIZE for manned space flight (even though winning cost $100 million in research and development). Competitions “offer credibility and ‘air cover’ for entrepreneurs, innovators and inventors who want to pursue a path that would otherwise be considered too risky,” according to Peter H. Diamandis, who launched the XPRIZE. Read more about innovation competitions