While many of us incorporate giving throughout the year, many businesses get in the giving spirit around holidays. It's awesome to visit clients who have donation boxes, angel trees, adopt-a-family boards, and other charitable programs for their employees to support. And who among us hasn't dropped donations in the red kettles as we're leaving the [...]
Live streaming has been around for a number of years. But until Meerkat and Periscope, and now Blab, we didn't have a very portable way to live stream video. There was Google Hangouts, which is a live streaming service, but the mobile app didn't really make it easy for mobile and active use. You could [...]
For the first time since they were first written in 2009 (and made public in 2010), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has updated its "What People Are Asking" page, which is a Q&A-type resource relating to the FTC Endorsement Guides and related online disclosure rules. The update provides further clarification related to how and why [...]
Trademark law is a complex web of federal laws dating back to 1870. Trademark law covers words, phrases, logos, sounds, colors, and other ways businesses want to set themselves apart from their competitors and others in the marketplace. With the expansion of the internet and the ability to do business much more easily on a [...]
Contests and sweepstakes are powerful marketing tools. Whether it's a blog, website, or social network there is no shortage of people or businesses wanting to give things away to their community. And why not, people like to win free stuff. When it comes to giving things away and asking people to enter in some way [...]
I think it's in high school when most of us had the concept of plagiarism shoved down our throat. It was all part of the lessons about citations and the MLA format or the Chicago Style Manual or whatever it was your teacher used to put the fear of getting an F in you. And, [...]
Update for Facebook Promotions Running your sweepstakes or contest on Facebook may look different come November 5, 2014. In announcing updates to the Graph API, Facebook Software Engineer Harshdeep Singh included the Platform Policy changes in a post on the Facebook Developer Blog on Thursday August 7, 2014. While this is a more technical change [...]
It's not uncommon to find a news article that misuses copyright and trademark, as if they are interchangeable. Sometimes, even lawyers misunderstand their differences. But you don't have to make their same mistakes. I'm here to help explain the difference between copyright and trademark and why knowing the differences is important for you as a [...]
You know in passing when you say to someone "We should do a G+ hangout!" and they say yes, that's how this happened. While I've written about Photo Copyright on several different sites, Peg Fitzpatrick instantly agreed to do a Google + hangout about online photo use because we both find it frustrating to see [...]
FTC Disclosure Regardless of the social network, hashtags (the # symbol for those who may not be sure what I'm talking about) are an important way to communicate additional information. Originally created so users can search topics, hashtags are now integral to marketing promotions on social networks. That means PR and brand professionals are thinking [...]
