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Lieberman-Collins Cyber Security Act was defeated in the senate today by a vote of 52-46 — four senators shy of its requirement to move forward.

The senate bill was a response to the House’s Cyber Intelligence Security Protection Act (CISPA), which sought to give American companies more legal breathing room when collecting and sharing consumer/user data in the scope of Internet security threats. The Republican-led House passed CISPA back in April, despite lots of backlash from Internet users, special interest groups, and even rumblings of a presidential veto. Critics said CISPA sacrificed a person’s privacy rights, and had the potential to censor free speech without public knowledge — among other things.

The Cyber Security Act, by contrast, wanted to address all of these problems through various amendments, in part by requiring authorities to obtain a warrant for personal online data when charging them with a crime. There were more than 200 amendments filed to change the bill, which invited lots of debate on both sides of the aisle.

The senate bill, which was led by senate democrats, also put much more emphasis on protecting the country’s financial system and electric grid from malicious activity by hackers, and included amendments to other privacy laws that are vague regarding online activity. Republicans said the bill raised too many questions to gain approval.

The failed vote means congress won’t address the issue of cybersecurity until at least 2013, according to The Hill.

Photo via Frank Jr /Shutterstock

Filed under: media, security

Have you thought of using social media contests and sweepstakes to build and engage your audience?

Previously I wrote How to Run a Successful Social Media Contest outlining some important foundational steps: be clear on your marketing objectives, know your audience, understand different promotion types and plan ahead!

If you’re looking to gain even more traction with social promotions, here are eight additional tips to enhance your next social media campaign.

Ensure Your Promotion Doesn’t Get You In Hot Water

It’s difficult to run a successful campaign if your promotion is blocked, removed or challenged in a court of law. So before we get to the fun part of marketing, there are a few logistical tips to keep in mind.

#1: Running a Facebook Promotion Requires an App

Much has been written about the Facebook Promotional Guidelines and how to run a compliant promotion. The guidelines have evolved, but the most important requirement remains the same: any promotion (i.e., something where a consumer enters for a chance to win a prize) on Facebook must be handled through an app.

If you know what you’re doing, you could develop your own Facebook app, but you might prefer to personalize an “off-the-shelf” app by a variety of companies such as North Social, Wildfire or Strutta.

Some are inexpensive and no-frills, while others provide a more robust set of features and options to connect you with your customers and personalize the experience.

If you choose a third-party app provider, choose a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer so you can feel confident you’re in compliance with Facebook’s platform policies.

Look for developers and platforms that display this badge with the Apps qualification.

#2: Twitter Promotions Must Provide Rules Disclosure

Any contest or sweepstakes must provide participants with terms and conditions of entry and Twitter is no exception. With only 140 characters to work with, this becomes one of the bigger challenges of running a Twitter-based promotion.

The easiest way to address this is to host the rules on a separate web page and include a short link when tweeting about the contest. Alternatively you can host a landing page with all of the contest details and requirements and direct traffic to that page, rather than having the interaction take place within the Twitter stream.

For larger-scale promotions, you may wish to utilize a third-party service such as CMP.LY to ensure compliance.

In this example, the CMP.LY service is used to provide a short URL linking to the terms of the promotion whenever it is shared on Twitter.

#3: Beware of the Lottery

No, I’m not worried about you blowing your paycheck on Powerball. But lotteries are the domain of the government and you want to ensure your promotion isn’t deemed an illegal lottery.

Any promotion that contains the following three elements is considered a lottery: prize, element of chance in winner selection and consideration (cash payment, purchase requirement or extensive effort required to enter).

Since you wouldn’t have much of a promotion without a prize, you must eliminate either chance or consideration (or best of all, both) to steer clear of potential legal concerns.

Tips to Build Buzz

Once you’ve dotted your I’s and crossed your T’s on the legal and policy side, it’s time to think about how to drive traffic and build momentum for your promotion.

#4: Make it Easy for Users to Share

This is the most important tip when it comes to marketing. Much of the value in a social promotion comes from the increased ease for participants to share your promotion through their social graph.

One of the reasons contests such as “Retweet to Win” are so popular is the nearly frictionless sharing. If you’re using an app on Facebook to encourage viral sharing, ensure that the sharing options are easy and intuitive.

However, it’s also important to be aware that over-sharing can lead to the perception of spam, so it’s important to strike the right balance.

Note: It’s against Facebook policy to directly reward a user for sharing. You may use Facebook apps to reward referrals, but be careful not to directly incentivize sharing.

Integrated share tools make it easy for contest participants to share if they want to.

#5: Regularly Promote Your Contest

Contest organizers will often schedule a bunch of communications when a promotion launches, then fail to maintain communication throughout the campaign.

Be sure to share key milestones and events (e.g., contest round ending, finalists being selected, just reached 100 or 10,000 entries).

If you’re running a user-generated content promotion, it’s also a great opportunity to share content (e.g., popular or unique entries) that will drive greater engagement.

When posting about your promotion on Facebook, be sure to utilize the pinned post feature to keep the post visible at the top of the timeline.

And don’t forget to utilize all of your social channels—it’s OK to promote your Facebook contest on Twitter and Google+.

In this example, a compelling image is used to draw attention and a direct link to the contest app is provided.

#6: Amplify Your Message Through Partners

Tap into the power of partner marketing by including sponsors and providing them with exposure in exchange for cross-promotion.

Also be sure to identify influencers (journalists, bloggers, etc.) whom you can reach out to and share news about your promotion.

If you’re running a contest with a judging component to evaluate entries, you may want to invite influencers to be a part of the judging panel. Attaching their name to your contest adds credibility and gives them a good reason to talk about it!

PR firm Affect tapped influential people in the PR and marketing world to serve as judges and help them find the ultimate summer intern.

Tips for Contests Featuring User-Generated Content

I am a big believer in the power of user-generated content promotions, but having been involved with many over the past five years, there are a couple of key lessons I’ve learned.

#7: Prime the Pump

Any time you’re asking users to submit content into a promotion, it’s a good idea to seed the contest with a few submissions.

These can be sample entries that you create which are not eligible to win or submissions from participants who have been encouraged to enter early.

In this contest run by Social Media Examiner's own Mike Stelzner, Mike provided his own sample entry to help inspire participants.

The key is to have some entries right away to break the ice and provide others with inspiration for their own submission.

#8: Think Twice Before Relying Solely on the Court of Public Opinion

Contests featuring user-generated content often incorporate a component of public voting. This is something I would encourage because it drives greater virality, with participants naturally incentivized to share their entries and voters taking an active role in the outcome.

However, if your contest is decided 100% by public voting, you need to be prepared to relinquish control of the outcome to those individuals with the largest social networks and/or those using vote-swapping and other tricks to try to game the system.

The most popular contest model among our clients uses a round of voting to narrow the field of entries down to a predetermined number of finalists, and a panel of judges then decides the winner.

By employing a set of predefined judging criteria, the client is able to retain some discretion over who is named the winner(s) while still generating a lot of voting and sharing activity up front.

Another option is to use judging criteria to select finalists and then open it to voting. Regardless of your preferred contest model, ensure that your platform of choice is well-equipped to handle voting and the potential challenges that come along with it.

A Success Story

Recently Mari Smith launched her very first contest. Mari wanted to do something fun and rewarding for her fans, and to introduce a new webinar she was hosting. She was consistently enthusiastic about delivering a great experience for her community and utilized many of the tips outlined above.

Mari did a great job of promoting the contest and keeping fans engaged by profiling interesting segments along the way.

Mari invited everyone to submit their Facebook cover photo for a chance to win a Facebook Makeover valued at $1,000. In just three weeks, the promotion received nearly 400 entries, which in turn generated 1,500 shares and more than 3,000 click-throughs.

An additional 2,000 people subsequently participated as entrants or voters as a direct result of another entrant sharing the promotion with them.

The contest received more than 25,000 visits in just three weeks, providing great exposure for Mari and generating a significant number of signups to her webinar.

I’ve seen companies of all sizes use promotions in a similar fashion to inexpensively acquire and engage fans, build awareness for a new product and ultimately drive conversions to sales.

What do you think? What would you like a social promotion to do for you? Please join in the discussion below.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a message from Google’s John Mueller that offering an incentive to link to your site in exchange for unlocking features is most likely against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

A site owner asked if it would be acceptable to give his users of his site an “upgraded listings” in exchange for linking from their web sites to their profile on his site.

In short, you link to us, we give you more features for free. It is free, but we want a link in exchange for the feature we are giving you.

Google’s John Mueller said this is a bad idea. He said he would “strongly recommend not making PageRank-passing links to your site a requirement for any kind of interaction on your website.”

Back in 2007, we talked about ethical link building incentives and in 2009, we asked if incentives are paid links. Back then SEOs were split, some saying yes, it is like a paid link and some saying no.

Google clearly here is saying, these types of incentives are a form of trade and payment and make for an unnatural link for the purpose of manipulating PageRank and potentially rankings and thus is against their guidelines.

Here is John’s full response:

I’d strongly recommend not making PageRank-passing links to your site a requirement for any kind of interaction on your website. Links placed like that are generally not natural links, not the kind of links that our algorithms want to find. Past that, not all businesses or people have real websites, it seems like it would be a bit unfair to block them from being able to use your site to its fullest (and in turn, if they end up loving it, recommending it to their friends & business partners). By all means, make it easy for users to recommend and to link to your site, but don’t use that as a requirement.

What do you think?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Image credit to BigStockPhoto for carrot and stick

In the corporate world, it’s called brainstorming. In sports, it’s called teamwork. In the music industry, it’s called collaboration.  On the web, it’s called crowd-sourcing.

Crowd-sourcing for the layman is basically to ask participants to give their two cents on an issue or to solve a problem. It lets you leverage the “talents of the crowd”.

It could be anything like web design, article writing services, logo creation or even some help with administrative services.

Ultimately, the solution to the problem comes from the crowd of contributors –thus the term, crowd sourcing.

Here is a list of some of the best crowdsourcing sites you can find around the web:
1. Odesk – Employers post their job requirement and members apply for the job. It’s just like your typical matchmaking service without the mixed signals and the requirement for dinner and flowers.

2. Pickydomains – It’s not easy to think of a domain name that embodies your business to a T in 8 characters or less. Business owners post their requirements and contributors get to create a name for that business. It’s a name game, except you don’t sing “bananapana”. You can if you wanted to, though.

3. CloudCrowd – Members also apply for projects but with a referral program that makes it twice more fun. Here you can make more money when your referral completes a task. Sounds like something people do out on the streets, right? Only, this is done in the comfort of your home.

4. Poptent – Use this for advertising requirements. This is where you will find the next James Cameron. Ok, maybe not. But, you will find a lot of talent here.

5. Amazon Mechanical Turk – It is here because the list is not complete without it. Emblazoned on the banner are the words “Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work”. There you go! Many have been said about this site, both positive and negative. You be the judge.

If you feel like crowd-sourcing might work for you and your business, visit these sites. There are a lot more that are just as awesome (or even more so) as these sites.

Which ones have you tried? I’d love to know about your crowd-sourcing experiences in the comments below.

Image credit: http://iwatchedthemfall.tumblr.com/

Awesome Crowdsourcing Websites Around the Web is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.

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Nexage, a mobile ad exchange using real-time bidding, has raised $10 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by SingTel Innov8, the venture arm of Asian telecom company SingTel. Nexage CEO Ernie Cormier says Singtel is approaching this like any other venture investment, and that “there’s no requirement int the funding that we do X, Y, and Z for SingTel.” At the same time, there are likely to be some partnership opportunities, especially given Cormier’s stated “desire to expand our footprint into Asia.”

The company claims that last year, bid volume in the exchange grew more than 70 percent each month. New publishers include Dictionary.com and Cut the Rope-developer Zepto Lab.

In addition to global expansion, Cormier says the funding should also help with further product development. He won’t get into details until the new products launch, but on a high level, he says Nexage will be expanding to include “other pieces of the ad stack,” with the goals of making it easier for publishers to monetize inventory, of helping advertisers target their campaigns, and of  increasing liquidity in the mobile ad marketplace

Nexage has now raised a total of $14.5 million. Previous investors Relay Ventures and GrandBanks Capital also participated in the round.

Having an Android device is no longer a requirement for Asus device owners that want access to the vast library of Android apps thanks to a new partnership between Asus and Bluestacks announced today.

Bluestacks is an incredibly cool company that’s developing technology allowing people to use Android apps on Windows machines. It’s essentially doing for Windows what Parallels does for Mac owners that want to run Windows programs. However, Bluestacks’ strategy is focused on blurring the lines between mobile and desktop apps.

Per terms of the partnership, Bluestacks is integrating this technology within Asus Vibe, an entertainment platform that comes preloaded on all Asus desktops, notebooks, Eee PCs, and other devices made by the company. The Vibe platform will launch with the new Android player ability at this year’s Computex event, and provide users will access to

“Our strong portfolio of apps from top developers, combined with our unique monetization engine makes this a revenue-generating opportunity for PC OEMs,” said Bluestacks President and CEO said Rosen Sharma in a statement.

Check out a demo video of Asus’ Vibe platform below, courtesy of Bluestacks. It starts by showing off the ability to run visual notation app Skitch — traditionally used by only mobile and Apple users — on a Windows machine.

Founded in 2009, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has offices in India, Taiwan and Japan. The company raised $10.6 million in funding back in September 2011.

Filed under: media, mobile

Applications complying with Apple’s sandboxing rules for OS X have begun to appear on the Mac App Store, with Pixelmator being among the first major offerings to meet the forthcoming requirement.

In this week’s Five for Friday, we take a look at social media from the perspectives of a member of traditional media’s old guard, a B2B marketer, a media futurist, and a media buyer. Plus we look at an interesting take on why companies should focus less on what’s next and do a better job of handling what’s now. Put it all together, and you’ve got “marketing through the looking glass” — everything looks kinda familiar but nothing is quite what it seems.

Here are our some of our favorite reads and interesting ideas for the week ending April 27th, 2012.

Inside the AP’s Social Strategy
Great look into how a veteran of traditional media has moved into social. They’re not just present on Facebook and Twitter (with more than 20 accounts); they actually have a micro-targeted strategy for each to clearly govern their respective uses. They’re not using social to simply push out information to readers — depending on the account and platform, they also gather resources and engage their audience. But perhaps most importantly, they view social media as a deadly serious requirement of the new media world, and staff those accounts accordingly. The AP’s guidelines for social include Facebook for engagement, Twitter for breaking news, neither platform gets the story first — it still hits the wires before social, a rule the AP calls “sacrosanct.” Obviously even in a digital and social world, traditional has it’s place — and the AP has well-defined rules for how the pieces fit together.

How B2B Marketers Are Succeeding With Social Media Marketing
If this headline surprises you, start worrying. Social Media Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report gives a good overview of how social media is being used by marketers, but more interestingly it points to how business-to-business marketers — often thought to be lagging consumer brands — are actually beating out B2C marketers in terms of social media success. B2B marketers are seeing across-the-board 10% lifts over their B2C counterparts in generating new business partnerships, achieving improved search rankings, and gathering marketplace insights as a direct result of social media use. If your’re a B2C marketer, maybe you can learn some social media lessons from your vendors. And if you’re a B2B marketing who hasn’t yet begun using social as a serious business tool,  maybe you need to start yesterday.

Five Ways To Weaponize Your Brand Storytelling
So you have fans and followers. So what? Top-flight media futurist Mike Walsh says the real business value lies not in the numbers but in your ability to get those fans and followers to talk about the stories you’ve curated around your brand. Get people interested enough in a story and they’ll share it with all of their friends and followers. Here’s how: Track and understand which stories get the most attention, and whether that attention translates to new customers. Deeply research your customers’ lives and the types of stories they’re already telling–then you’ll know how your brand fits into their social storytelling. Leverage new platforms (like Pinterest) if you can do it in a way that makes sense for your brand and the social lives of your customers. And if you’re going to reach for the world’s attention, be prepared to know what matters to your customers locally (even if “local” is halfway across the globe from where you sit).

Why Digital Ad Forecasts Are Irrelevant: The Future Is Not Display Ads
If you work in the business, you’ve seen plenty of those studies that project just how big the digital display ad spend will grow over the coming 3, 4, or even 5 years. This article suggests that those numbers are totally irrelevant. Not because predicting the future is turning into something of a fool’s errand, but because the future of advertising has little to do with display ads as we know them today. People are spending huge amounts of time on social sites that eschew standard IAB display units in favor of “native formats” (Facebook Sponsored Stories, Tumblr posts, Twitter’s promoted tweets and trends, branded content, etc.) What does this mean for marketers? Simple: say goodbye to one-size-fits-all advertising. It’s now a requirement to appeal to your customers by acting like them–participating in social spheres of influence, building an audience and creating content (see “Five Ways to Weaponize Your Brand Storytelling” above), and presenting that content through paid media placements and earned media opportunities that integrate seamlessly into each social site’s network experience. And be prepared to change course at a moment’s notice. So what’s the future of digital advertising?

The Hidden Power of Mundane Ideas
This one would be a big idea, if only it weren’t so obvious. Oh — but being obvious in this instance is actually a very good thing. When most of us set out to innovate, we are so concerned with hitting on a proverbial A HA! moment. But in doing so, we just might be missing out on the regular, simple stuff (on the mundane and the obvious stuff) that really matters. Just because your customers are giving you direct feedback about new wants they hadn’t even realized they had and endorsing innovative features they’d love to have in theory, that doesn’t mean your brand should ignore the obvious patterns about what they currently do and like right now.  Here’s the catch. If you’re missing the obvious little things, chances are so is everyone else.  And that means there’s an unaddressed (or at least under-served) need waiting to be satisfied. Sometimes the best way to truly innovate (not merely invent the new, but create real value for your customers) is to focus on the near-in easy asks and answer them better than anyone else.