“Calling a Tail a Leg Doesn’t Make it So” – A Lesson in Roles and Responsibilities from Abraham Lincoln

by Matthew Lees

One of my favorite collections of anecdotes is called “That Brings to Mind.” Full of humorous and poignant quips, most a page or less in length, the book was compiled by R.L. Marquard way back in 1975. Many of the tales are likely apocryphal, but they are timeless. It contains a wealth of fodder, then, for presentations, speeches, toasts…and blog posts.

Here’s one that was brought to my mind based on recent briefings and conversations with companies I cover as an online community and social media analyst.

The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was asked by a congressman why he hadn’t freed the slaves earlier in his term of office.

Lincoln replied that the time had not been right; he wouldn’t have been able to enforce the proclamation.  The congressman was puzzles and didn’t understand what the president meant.

Lincoln explained with a question, “How many legs will a sheep have, if you call the tail a leg?”

“Five,” responded the congressman.

“Not so,” said Lincoln wisely.  “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so.”

From Project Manager to Client Success Manager
Several vendors on my watch list have employees with the job title “Client Success Manager.” It has a hipper ring to it than “Account Manager,” and probably makes clients feel all warm and fuzzy, knowing that someone on the vendor side is looking out for their interests.

Most of these technology and service providers train their CSMs to be effective at their core responsibility, which is to make sure that their clients’ communities meet with success (which means, therefore, from a purely business perspective, that the clients will continue to engage the services and systems provided by the vendor).

One company I follow, though, recently created the title and bestowed it upon two community project managers, without any supplemental training, access to relevant materials, or substantive change to their schedules and other commitments.

These two individuals are definitely good at what they do, but their experience has really been in getting to launch, not in what happens afterwards. They know their technology platforms inside and out (good tech chops), they know how to work with both clients and colleagues (good people and communication skills), and they know how to identify potential roadblocks and how to keep things on schedule (good organizational skills).

But they don’t have much understanding of the community arc; how things should ideally function after the community goes live. They know what the key metrics are, but only in theory, not in practice. They don’t really know how to advise clients if, say, the registration rate of a new community starts to drop, or if important influencers drop off the radar.

Without some training or resources to help them help their clients, it’s going to be a rough road ahead, particularly in the crucial first six months after new communities launch. Because they’re sharp cookies, they’ll eventually become solid CSMs. (They also work well together, so they’ll help each other learn the ropes.)

What Client Success Managers Need to Be Successful
They’re in for some challenges, though, largely because the company gave them new titles without giving them two other essential ingredients:

1. Understanding of community best practices, particularly around moderating and managing communities, the social dynamics within communities (super users, reputation systems), organizational issues such as internal communication, how to connect community success to business success, and more.
2. Time to be proactive. Built into CSM’s job descriptions and schedules should be the regular assessment of client communities they’re responsible for. They can’t just wait for their client contact to raise issues. They should be reading reports, watching the metrics, and keeping an eye on things, ready to provide guidance when it’s needed.

Their company could suffer as a consequence, because if the community doesn’t gain traction, the chances for a license renewal (or further professional services) are unlikely.

Takeaways
If you’re a technology or service provider, make sure you do more than give someone a new title. If you’re committed to the success of your clients, make sure your CSMs have the training, tools, and time they’ll need to do great work…for your clients and for you.

And if you’re evaluating technology vendors, consulting groups, or agencies to help with your online community, ask about the people who will be working with you to ensure the project’s success. They should have not only good technology, communication, and project management skills, but also experience in helping you successfully navigate the development, launch, and growth of the community.

To paraphrase Lincoln, calling a project manager a client success manager doesn’t make it so.

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The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media

The economy is tough, but social media keeps growing. Impact Interactions is growing this year and once again is adding staff. We’re also trying to help those impacted by the economy and those coming right out of school to understand what working in social media is really like.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike

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Disney, Microsoft, Viacom & Others Common Sense Approach to Copyright Violations

In several of our speaking engagements, we’ve heard the same question repeated:

“Following our lawyers’ interpretation of the DMCA, we don’t remove any content until the copyright holder contacts us. You say that is a weak defense against copyright lawsuits. Why?”

And our answers always come back the same:

“Do you make any money from ads or other offers on your site which are visible from the page showing the copyrighted materials uploaded by your members? If so, you may have a problem.”

And then we’d go round and round with each other, citing specific examples and whether they violate the act or not. The stance we’ve always taken is to be pro-active and remove it if you are making money from that page. We recommend that you remove it before someone asks because over time, you become a great target for a lawsuit.

Well, now many of the larger copyright holders are telling the world the same thing. On Thursday, October 18th a consortium including Disney, Microsoft, Fox, NBC Universal, CBS, and Viacom entered into a pact which sends a strong message to all of us who host sites that allow user generated content. In essence, this group is moving forward with clarifying the rules of engagement in the WWW war over copyrighted materials. Here is the statement from the Wall Street Journal’s article on the announcement that stands out:

” The copyright holders in the group have agreed not to pursue Internet companies for infringement claims if their sites adhere to certain principles. Those principles include eliminating copyright-infringing content uploaded by users to Web sites, and blocking any infringing material before it is publicly accessible.”

This group is promoting the idea that site owners have some responsibility to review what their users are uploading. The group is looking for firms to simply make their best efforts to remove the copyrighted material in a prompt manner. And from our view of the world, that make sense if you want to avoid getting tied up in court and spending a bucketload of money to defend your site…See our blog entry on the costs of getting served papers for this type of lawsuit.

But of course, we are biased. We help firms moderate their user generated content and firmly believe that the DMCA is so full of ambiguous wording that the best defense in this area is a good moderation strategy. Want to discuss this further? Post a comment or contact us.

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The Watchers… Copyright Police

For those of you waiting for the Google/YouTube vs. Viacom et al case to settle out before pro-actively searching your site for copyright violations added by members, here’s a name to remember: BayTSP Inc.

While many of us who work in the online community industry have known about BayTSP, a great article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal “YouTube Magic: Now You See It, Now You Don’t” gives a fabulous peak into the world of the copyright police. A couple of really interesting points in the article:

• BayTSP charges clients between $100,000 and $500,000 per month to help them protect their copyrighted materials
• Employees are paid minimal wages to do this ($11.00/hour or so)
• They don’t reveal their clients in their publicity or on their website

Doing a quick Google on BayTSP reveals that their clients include Viacom, Fox, Paramount, Columbia Pictures (Sony), and many other of the major entertainment companies.

While the article makes it appear that BayTSP is concentrating on the big major websites such as Google’s YouTube, the search shows that they go after both big and small web sites. After all, a violation is a violation. There are many posts in the communities for Peer-to-peer (file sharing) networks about members getting the cease and desist letters from BayTSP on behalf of their clients. Some of those who received the letters are only downloading or uploading music and movies to the networks. Seems that Limewire is a favorite target….

So what is the business upshot to all this? Simple. If you are going to allow users to upload content to your site whether its pictures, videos, or even news articles you need to be proactive in reviewing it and deleting it before a company like BayTSP finds it. Why? Because with the fees that they are charging, BayTSP and others are not a free moderation service. Multiple violations and letters will surely bring a lawsuit to your office. How much will it cost your organization if there is a lawsuit? Let’s take a shot at figuring it out:

1. Cost of BayTSP service over the course of a year for a media company to find violations on your site and send letters to you: $50,000/month (only a portion of the total fees to BayTSP) for a total of $600,000
2. Legal Fees: $100,000 for attorney review, paperwork costs and time, as well as filing costs
3. Lost royalties: Tricky, but figure that if you have 100 clips that violate copyrights each month and on the copyright holder’s site, those clips generate $1,000 in ad revenue (PPI) per month on the media company’s site, then you have a lost royalties amount of $1,200,000.
4. Your organization’s legal costs: Internal General Counsel – 100 hours of time at $125/hour or $12,500. Outside Legal Counsel – 100 hours of time at $300/hour or $30,000. (And this is just to respond to the initial lawsuit and answer the initial complaint, not perform discovery or file any counter suits.)

On a combined basis, you might be looking at an amount of $1,900,000 plus before damages for a single copyright holder (media company). Perhaps you’ll be able to settle for $1,000,000 and enter into an consent agreement to remove copyrighted materials on your own in the future. But what of the other media companies that learn of your violations? Because you know that your members are not going to only put Comedy Central clips on your site, they are also going to use copyrighted songs for their own videos, news clips from CNN and others, as well as photos and articles from major newspapers. Over time, the failure to manage and moderate these contributions gets very expensive…

Put these costs against the costs of hiring a moderation firm to pro-actively remove copyrighted material in advance of anyone reporting it to you through a cease and desist letter and it really shows the risk/reward of not being proactive is off the charts.

Good moderation can range from $60,000 for small sites to over $1,000,000 for large sites annually. When you put the costs of moderation against the possible costs of a lawsuit (and the corresponding negative publicity for your brand and your career), what would you choose?

Do you want to learn more about this topic? Contact us. With over seven years in moderating user generated content for large organizations, we are well versed in protecting your company from these types of issues while providing an excellent online experience for your site’s customers, members, and visitors. Impact Interactions can review all the user generated content placed on your site by members, whether it’s blog entries, comments, message board posts, photos, or videos.

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Online Community: Just what is a copyright violation? Viacom vs. Google

In case you missed it, there is a great explanation of the two views of the world of online copyright being fought over right now by Viacom and Google. At the All Things Digital Conference held a couple of weeks ago, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman gave his outline of what is covered and not covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) regarding copyright and how he views Google’s YouTube violations of that Act. Giving equal time, there is also an interview with Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, the founders of Google’s YouTube.

Summing it up, Viacom believes that YouTube is violating the DMCA because YouTube is a media company that has knowledge of the copyright violations. The DMCA is written to protect companies involved in the building blocks of the internet such as routing, ISPs, etc. not media companies such as Google and YouTube. Mr. Dauman also states that his company, Viacom was spending large sums of money on a team that was manually going through YouTube (and probably other sites as well) looking for Viacom content which was posted/uploaded to the site by users in violation of the copyright. Those costs in addition to the money that YouTube was making on the ads shown on the site are real money that is coming out of the revenue stream of Viacom.

Google and YouTube on the other hand argue that the DMCA applies to them and that they complied with the law because when notified by copyright holders, they removed the copyrighted materials. Eric Schmidt goes so far as to state that the dispute is about “whether there is a shared responsibility around the take down provision or not.”

The folks at Google understand and clearly state that this is about money… but they want to make the money at someone else’s expense. The DMCA is going to be tested here and hopefully through case law, clarified as to exactly what constitutes a hosted site allowed to store copyrighted materials and what is a media site. Common sense would say that if a site is making money from unlicensed copyrighted content, they should have to pay for it or remove it themselves. In our opinion, it does not make sense to allow sites and companies to earn revenue on copyrighted content for which they don’t own or license the right to show.

Your local cable access station cannot let you sign up for free air time and then show an episode of the Colbert Report you recorded at home, why should the internet be any different? As companies such as Apple and Microsoft work to bring television to the web and help define the industry, sites allowing video uploads should be held to the same standards as local cable access television stations. The principles are the same. It will be very interesting to see how the courts rule. Of course, given the money involved, there will most likely be a deal announced in the next couple of months between Viacom and Google so the law will not be examined as it should.

In terms of the uncertainty right now over the DMCA and online user generated content, we advise our clients to scan their site and remove blatant copyrighted materials uploaded as they find them. For example, message board posts that contain images from Warner Brothers or Disney cartoons are edited. Videos and photos from television shows or movies are edited or removed. When community managers make a “best effort” to remove copyrighted materials, the firm has a defense against the inevitable lawsuit. With copyright confusion, the best defense is a good offense.

Want to learn more about protecting your company and keeping your members happy? Contact us, we’d be happy to discuss the successful best practices we’ve developed in this area.

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