It seems that the powers that be at Facebook and their archenemies over at the record labels need to hurry up and reach agreement on what is Fair Use when it comes to posting videos online. I received yet another lovely notice from Facebook today about “possible infringement” not “actual” but “possible.” Read on -

Notification of Alleged Copyright Infringement
We have removed your video entitled “Cut Copy, party at Dave’s, Nemo puts up the posters” uploaded at 2:23pm April 29th, 2008. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio. If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

The Facebook Team
copyright@facebook.com

So lets refer to the video from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that spells out our rights under the DMCA rules.

Here’s the story behind the video that was taken down. The Australian band, Cut Copy, and their manager Neil are friends of mine. I invited the band to dinner at my house in Portland prior to their show in town. We had a good time, we shot video, I edited it and posted it. Seemed harmless enough but clearly not. I have filed a counter claim with Facebook so we’ll see how that goes. And someone should let Universal Music know that I fed Cut Copy dinner that night too….I’ll send Universal a bill… Watch another video from the same night here.

Related Post: How YouTube Could Make Some Money with Viacom

This is serious news when it comes to business networking and social media, I see a serious win-win here for both parties. There has been some debate recently about Facebook and how seriously it can be taken when it comes to businesses using the Facebook network to extend their social media ambitions as well as advertise across it. I would argue that the LinkedIn/NYT partnership steps up the ante for both Facebook and MySpace; the NYT, one of the world’s great media institutions that has seriously embraced the internet to further its business, may be on a path to shaking off its “Grey Lady” image and LinkedIn, which, although having only 25 million registered users making it small by social network standards, is by far the doyen of social sites for serious business users. We’ll see how this one unfolds.

Kudos, once again to Marshall Kirkpatrick for breaking the story.

The view from the cabin

It’s been a while since I’ve been completely cut off from all means of electronic communication. Two and half hours from Portland and you hit the western edge of Central Oregon, the mobile phone drops off the grid, the AT&T wireless card hunts aimlessly for a signal - nothing but digital silence.

Five adults, two teenagers and two younger ones walked and biked the river trails and cooked, conversed and read books and magazines. We socialized. My iPod wired to an old boombox and my Canon G9 were the only reminders of my digital life.

The Metolius River

I read an article in Newsweek about Facebook being responsible for the drop off in college reunions [an aside: being English I never quite grasped the concept of reconnecting every 10 years with ex-college mates, I must admit.] The premise, as recounted by one youthful member of the digerati, is that Facebook now fulfills this need; everything one needs to know about your former college friends is laid out for all to see online. I’d argue that this is not true. The premise requires that everyone’s Facebook profile be a true and honest reflection of their true “selves.” Unfortunately that defies reason; people’s Facebook personas are not true reflections of their “selves,” in fact they are another “self” altogether. Photos are cropped and edited to provide satisfaction to the poster not the viewer, and details of marriages, relationships and whether the person has children or not are often left vague.

There’s a reason for this. Originally Facebook was a solution for college kids to remain firmly in touch, but as that audience has broadened far and wide demographically, it has become a safe haven for people to explore their “second lives.” The only way to discover if your ex-sweetheart, dorm mate or college team buddy has actually remained a perfect, toned 150 lbs of lean muscle with no obvious receding hairline is to go to that 10 year college reunion. This is also why marketers will have a hard time reaching social network users.

Social Media is no longer viewed as just a hobby or a passing fad. According to Adweek, a handful of advertising and PR agencies are seeing the potential of web-based client promotion and have recently launched Social Media divisions in addition to their more traditional offerings.

As more advertising dollars continue to make their way to the internet, Brain Sells notes that “more than just ad dollars following a trend or digital hype, the growth is being driven due to real changes in behavior: (the) rising number of people online, the introduction of cheap laptops and the growing popularity of TV shows on the Internet.”

Furthermore, ChasNote shows us the migration of U.S. ad dollars in which the amount of money spent online in 2007 swelled to $21 billion, an increase of almost 26% from the previous year:

The social media teams at various agencies are becoming savvy enough to realize that buying up ad space on large networking sites like Myspace and Facebook is not necessarily the answer. Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company states that “the jury’s still out on MySpace’s ability to monetize” and “we don’t have much conviction in the long-term ability to grow this business based on what we’ve seen lately.”

Instead, the future is pointing towards more focused ad campaigns targeted at niche blogs that have highly faithful followings. As Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo Design says, “Companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. (On other social media sites) the brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.”

The bottom line: there is no quick way to propel a company to the top through social networking; it takes time and the earning of users’ trust. The competition is constantly growing and social media users are becoming increasingly savvy. Patrick Garrett, Outrider’s U.S. managing director is right when he proclaims that “social media is a long-term investment.”

A shadowy social network group.

Facebook is getting an assist from Visa Inc.’s marketing machine in its struggle to lure more advertisers. To date, Facebook has not had as much success as was expected in garnering revenues from advertising. The plan with Visa appears to be aimed at small businesses who are using Facebook to look for new customers.

Michael Liedtke reports:
Visa’s service is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook also will be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Internet search leader Google Inc. is providing some of the features on Visa’s business network, including maps, calendars, word processing and a new template for creating expense sheets and business cards. And The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine will contribute articles addressing questions posed by businesses that belong to Visa’s Facebook network.

Facebook’s struggle to produce revenue from its site sounds similar to the problems that MySpace has been having. Facebook has 80 million users who play games, share photos, rate music and track their friends’ activities - the idea that they can be bothered to click through on an advertisement that is not relevant to them, and one that just randomly appears on their home page or profile, is a marketing stretch.

As Michael Liedtke writes:
…while the array of applications have helped make Facebook even more popular, few programs are producing revenue for the site, and Facebook still hasn’t proven that its social playground is an effective advertising forum. Finding the right advertising approach also has been a challenge for other social hangouts like News Corp.’s MySpace. Even Google, which runs the Internet’s most lucrative ad system, has had trouble marketing on social networks.

Advertisers and marketers are labouring under the assumption that the information that Facebook has gathered about its users makes it easy to target different groups of them. This is a dubious notion at best. They are a moving target.

As Liedtke points out: …..some advertisers fret that Facebook’s audience will resent commercials amid all the site’s frivolity. Others are leery about their brands showing up on Web pages featuring racy or unsavory content.

Stay tuned.

I use my Facebook page to stay in touch with hundreds of people every day and during the course of those days I post a lot of interesting content that is not available for search by all the usual suspects - Yahoo! Google etc. Not to mention that our Nemo Design Facebook Group can’t be searched either. All because Facebook is a hold out in endorsing the OpenSocial initiative.
Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace.com announced in March that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites. Google has focused efforts on creating code, such as the open source OpenSocial APIs and the Social Graph API, to make social data more portable and accessible to applications. Just in case you were worried that all those heavy hitters might have too much control OpenSocial is now managed by an independent organization.
OpenSocial is basically a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

“As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation,” a statement from the company read. “The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience.”

So Yahoo! and Google’s search engines are shut out which is a drag.