The story: recently the Federal Trade Commission updated their guidance on using social media as a promotional tool. Start-ups, entrepreneurs, non-profits, and small businesses all depend on social media for marketing, and we commonly ask our friends, partners, co-workers, volunteers, and advocates to engage on our behalf. Larger companies often ask their employees to participate […]

We have recently become a society in which it is normal to walk into a restaurant, sit down, and ask for the wifi password. For some people, it is just as normal to walk into someone’s home and ask the same question. In restaurants, the servers are normally quick to give up the password. A […]

In an earlier post, we talked about the concept of dark patterns. A dark pattern is a navigation or action path that leads a user to a choice that doesn’t really benefit him or her, but seems to benefit the site or app owner. Another recent example really illustrates this process. Recently EA released a […]

Aside from the horrifying depths of 4chan, one of the most toxic places online is actually pretty mainstream: the comments on YouTube. Many social media strategists, who generally advocate open engagement with an audience, will suggest turning comments off when YouTube is discussed. One of the odd consequences is that nobody reads YouTube comments. So […]

Today marks the end of Google Reader, a product that inspired a great deal of affection among its users. The Internet is so over-flowing with “stuff-you-need-to-read” that it’s hard to manage all that opportunity. Google Reader was a way of filtering, tracking, and presenting the most important stuff. Journalists, writers, researchers, and communications people of […]