Sports, Social Media and IP

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Reporters do it. Shaq does it. The guy sipping on the $9 beer in the upper deck does it.

These people all attend sporting events, and they report on the game through social media. They Tweet, they take pictures, and they chat and txt in personal and professional capacities.

It seems inevitable, doesn't it? Technology has become so mobile that people are constantly pushing information, whether they're on a bus or their wife is in labor. When it comes to sports, though, it gets a bit trickier. Imagery and even some aspects of the reporting are intellectual property (IP), and the owners of that IP have a legal obligation to protect it, or else they risk losing whatever rights they've got in the IP.

The NBA is reportedly clamping down its players when it comes to Tweeting, and the NFL did something similar last month. Of course, the NFL (the league where the players wear helmets and they better not show too much personality unless they legally change their name) extended the guidelines to media members, too.

Media members may not, according to the NFL, use Twitter or any other medium to give play-by-play. That seems pretty obvious and fair. But what about the guy with the $9 beer in the upper deck? Can the NFL hope to stop him? Should their IP rights be threatened if they cannot?

It appeared, for a short time, that the Southeastern Conference (SEC) hoped to. After a big negative reaction last month, the SEC explained its new policies, which were primarily aimed at video feeds during games, rather than a Tweet about Tim Tebow's throwing motion in the third quarter.

Are these social media guidelines reactionary overreaching? Or are they a first step towards institutional limitations on what is commonly seen as a self-evident right to Tweet?

author// Ed Ouellette on Sep 29, 2009

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Are you gathering competitive intelligence ethically?

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Here is the text of my article published in MARKETING earlier this month (in case you missed it in the print version).

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I’ve been fascinated by Starbucks’ recent experiment in unbranded, “local” stores. One minute I think it’s a brilliant idea and a return to the company’s “third place” promise. The next minute I think the day they consider their brand a liability is the day they’re done. So I’ll be watching this one with a lot of interest. That said, one of the interesting sub-plots included in all the press coverage concerned how Starbucks went about observing their competition. Essentially, local coffee shops complained about not-so-covert Starbucks employees idling in their cafes with folders marked conspicuously with the word “Observation.” Another purveyor noted that he had to ask large groups of Starbucks employees to leave his store when their sheer numbers overwhelmed the space. Of course, these local coffee shops know Starbucks as a competitor, and who wouldn’t be at least a little uncomfortable with your rival spending so much time in your space? But here’s where you can’t fault Starbucks: competitive auditing is a basic component of strategic hygiene. As marketing professionals, we have to know what’s happening in the competitive landscape. Purposeful differentiation is not possible without that knowledge.

But what's the line between gathering competitive intelligence and industrial espionage? How can you keep tabs on your competitors in a responsible manner?

A decade ago, I was tasked with photographing construction signage as part of a project for a general contractor. I was rightfully chased from a competitor’s site because I was trespassing. My activities were thrilling, but not legal. So I’m not going to address bribery, hacking, B&E, and other crimes clearly on the no-no list. Instead, here are three “nevers” I think should guide the ethics of gathering competitive intelligence:

Never Create an Excessive Expense for Your Competitors
An ethical audit never costs a competitor critical time, money or talent. That is, an audit should not cause economic harm, either in the expenditure of resources or the loss of opportunity. Of course, the term “excessive” is open to interpretation, but the guiding principle is important. For example, I think it’s okay to request corporate overview literature, but definitely not okay to request a proposal or other customized document. The former is existing collateral that likely exists in large quantities and will cost a few minutes and some postage to secure. The latter is essentially hijacking a human resource under the pretenses of an opportunity that does not exist. Another example: it’s okay to visit a competing restaurant chain so long as you order enough food to be consistent with a typical customer, and your presence doesn’t preclude ordinary customers from their patronage.

Never Allow an Insider to Compromise Their Ethics
You have a friend who happens to work for an organization you’re tasked with auditing. It would seem reasonable to have them secure materials and just skip the request for information forms on the Web site. Whether or not their willing to do this, you’ve now allowed them to compromise their ethical responsibilities. The person or mail house sending you corporate collateral doesn’t know what you’re really doing, and that’s a good kind of ignorance. A friend or acquaintance does know your agenda, so their compliance definitely violates their obligations as an employee. Worse, if they hand over materials it could, technically, even be considered theft. That also means you’d be in possession of stolen materials. Yikes. Steer clear of involving insiders.

Never Misrepresent Who You Are Unless You Absolutely Have No Other Option
One of the advantages of an increasingly networked and transparent world is the ready availability of all sorts of Web-based information. And modern retail environments are “brand destinations.” So peeping on the competition requires a lot less sneaking around than it did just a few years ago. An online sleuth and keen observer can secure most competitive intelligence. In B2B scenarios, some information can be harder to come by than in consumer categories. Even there, however, all-out deception to gather marketing materials is typically unnecessary and certainly to be avoided if at all possible. You’re a marketer, not a spy.

What do you think? Send your thoughts and guiding principles on the subject to devinl@pbdh.com and I’ll post them to a follow-up blog. Or, perhaps I’ll just claim them as my own.

author// Devin Liddell on Sep 21, 2009

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UX v. SEO: Content v. Form

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Imagine a hypothetical Web site that is ready to launch. It looks great, test users love it, the client loves it, and everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except the SEO expert.

The SEO expert is, after all, responsible for guiding and delivering search engine optimization (SEO). SEO experts provide methods to drive a site up the Google results page, and because what they do often can be quantified quite easily as success or failure, SEO experts can be very specific about what changes are necessary to ensure that the site shows up when people want to find it.

Or, rather, they help ensure that the site shows up when people search for certain things. We’ll get to that why that difference matters in a moment.

An SEO expert might want the page titles changed. No biggie, right? They might want keywords integrated into site copy and image alt tags. Again: that’s cool. So far the great-looking, user-approved, client-adored site is intact, and the “under the hood” SEO adjustments don’t mean any concessions.

But what if the results aren’t good enough? What is the SEO expert to do?

Answer: they want more keywords. They want more and more keywords. They want links and other adjustments to the site that often not only spoil the aesthetic nor the way the client views the site, but the way that users experience it.

The stage has been set, then, for the classic SEO v. UX battle.

User experience (UX) encompasses how the users navigate a site, how they feel about a site, and how key features and messages are delivered. Good UX adds value and, when coupled with content users want, helps define the value of a site.

An argument for compromising UX in the name of SEO is relatively easy to make: if users cannot find the site, they cannot enjoy the experience. By giving a little on the experience front, the thinking goes, traffic will be generated and the site will be better off for being … worse.

In order to challenge this position, I think it’s necessary, first and foremost, to examine what SEO is at its most basic level. It is the manipulation of the difference between the value of a site and what search engines perceive to be the value.

Let’s deconstruct that quickly before we move on. A perfect search engine would know what the user wanted to find and give them the best possible value given that request. It would not be fooled by fake Web sites and it would be able to account for minor user error to point them in the right direction. No search engine is perfect, though, and because of the algorithms and logic used by the software of Google and Microsoft and others, inefficiencies exist: gaps between what the user wants and what the search site delivers. SEO manipulates that inefficiency by knowing (or guessing) at what search sites look for and “gaming the system” for positive results. If that perspective is too cynical for you, gentle reader/conscientious SEO expert, another way of looking at it might be that SEO strives to accurately convey the true value of a site given the search engine’s inability to correctly judge what the user wants when she searches.

SEO, then, is a cosmetic cover-up for the acne-riddled face of search sites.

The early days of search sites saw directories dominate. Microsoft and Yahoo employed teams of worker bees to review sites and classify and rate them, allowing users to have a virtual yellow pages. This didn’t scale, of course, as the number of Web pages exploded. Early attempt at user-updated directories were prone to severe levels of cheating and it was nearly impossible to trust ratings and/or believe that the directory was anything near complete.

The next step was the use of software to supplant directories with search engines. Bots would read pages and see what terms showed up and then spit out results for users on the search pages. Proto-SEO actors would game the system, search sites would adjust, and search engines evolved into what we have today: a reasonably fleshed-out coverage of many parts of the World Wide Web.

The good news is that as technology has improved the gap between search site perception of value and actual value has decreased. The bad news is that the gap is still relatively wide in many cases.

It is in this environment that the hypothetical Web site we’ve created finds itself. Search site placement can be very important, but sacrificing value to users in order to gather users can result in an inferior Web site.

Fortunately, the future might allow the best possible sites to exist with the most possible users. The future might have a superior search approach: one that combines technology with communal eyeballs and collective-approved expert opinion.

Earlier efforts at this sort of thing (by sites like Wikia) have fallen short, but hope is not lost. Zakta seeks to augment its search results by letting users edit, save and share the results for their search terms. A standard Google search for “best HDTVs” might have two pages of questionable or even unusable results—either because of SEO or because of the passage of time and weakness of the search algorithm. On Zakta, the same search may point to a user who has taken the time to build a top 10 list of HDTV review sites and five of his favorite online retailers. Eventually, the same search might result in a half-dozen similar lists, with the searcher able to differentiate between the quality of the lists and/or quality of the list-maker as rated by other users of the search site.

Zakta might not be the next step, but the next step is coming. It’s Wikipedia meets Digg meets Google. It encourages value over gaming and substance over style. And it might signal the end of SEO as we know it.

author// Ed Ouellette on Sep 16, 2009

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Seattle Has Retro Crests... Lots of 'em.

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I'm often accused of seeing patterns in things that other people think are insignificant. I'm a collector and an organizer, I guess my brain just groups things. So naturally, I'm a little timid in presenting another pattern, but I think this time you might agree that there is something going on here. Maybe this is a national trend, or maybe just local to Seattle... I'm seeing an awful lot of retro-ish crests out there - specifically hexagons even. I'm not criticizing - just observing - for whatever it's worth.

All of these businesses are in the greater Seattle Area, the farthest away being Custom Garage Interiors, which is just outside Issaquah. Two of them are within a block of each other in Ballard. Two are within a block of each other on Capitol Hill, two of them have "Garage" in the name, and two of them are just about gosh-dang nearly identical to each other. That's OK. I doubt any of these people are claiming to have invented the hexagon. And I actually like the aesthetic quite a bit. Please don't misunderstand. That old-fashioned made-in-America, brass-plate-bolted-to-a-cast-iron-stamping-machine-or-whatever look is pretty cool. Strong. Classic. Timeless. Great. But maybe could we just spread 'em out a little bit?

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author// Dave Cole on Sep 14, 2009

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