Purchasing Twitter and Facebook Followers
By Isabel Eva Bohrer
When conducting marketing for sites such as holidayapartments.net, I hand-select websites and blogs to place advertisements. In this manual selection process, several factors are taken into account, including the site’s Google page rank, the number of backlinks, meaning the number of incoming links from other websites, as well as its number of Facebook and Twitter followers. To advertise on a site, for example, it has to have a Page Rank of 3/10 or more, or at least 500 Facebook and/or Twitter followers.
We all know that Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only social media portals out there – just look at the recent spike in Pinterest users. But Facebook and Twitter continue to be the main networks that determine a person or a brand’s social media influence. Websites such as Search Engine Journal even provide entire articles on “Facebook Fan Acquisition Strategies.” In fact, many companies have already taken these strategies to heart, providing discounts exclusively for Facebook users, as well as an “incentivized like,” where Facebook users can access specific content only when they “like” the Facebook page in question. “Get Fans. Get Revenue,” reads the slogan of the Search Engine Journal article by Brian Carter.
It appears that social media is gaining increasing popularity and power; after all, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, according to socialnomics.net. Advertisers in particular have come to rely on the number of followers to determine where to situate their commercials.
But what if the number of followers has been manipulated? What if they are being bought and sold, just like any other product on the market?
Read more…
Essay | The Ethics of Online Scoring Systems for Art
By John D. Thomas
Is there such a thing as a perfect work of art? You could argue that Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Picasso’s “Guernica” come close, but perfection is an abstract concept and not really something that is ever attainable.
Conversely, are there works of art that are entirely without worth? The big screen oeuvre of Rob Schneider and the entire genre of hair metal come to mind, but again it’s impossible to argue that something is utterly and completely devoid of merit.
That being said, there are more and more websites that are trying to turn critical appraisal into mathematical precision, often giving creative works either perfect scores of 100 or scores of absolute zero. I have taught a class on reviewing the arts for several years now, and while I encourage my students to use sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic to find reviews to read and study, I caution them about those sites’ overall scoring systems.
Essay | Link me up for $$$: The ethics behind online advertising
By Isabel Eva Bohrer
There has always been a fine line in being ethical when advertising. In the quest to sell and beat the competition, it is easy for advertisers to pass from telling the truth to making exaggerated, or even entirely false claims. Further unethical behaviors, such as bait-and-switch offers, have existed since the advent of advertising. Even in the traditional (by that I mean “paper”) media, the difference between advertising and actual, non-endorsed content has become obscured.
Jessica Gottlieb describes herself as “an empowered consumer and a mom blogger in Los Angeles.” She recalls that “when the LA Times sold its front cover to NBC with an ad that was easy to mistake for news, [she and her husband] started thinking about cancelling [their] subscription.” To demonstrate her discontent, she even made a video that documented the scandal for the world to see.
Essay | Corrections and Online News
By John D. Thomas
I recently was on the receiving end of a rather humorous correction to one of my articles when it appeared online. An Op/Ed feature I wrote for the Chicago Tribune went through copy edit, and the word “their” was changed to “tits” when they actually meant to change it to “its.” I laughed when I saw the silly mistake, sent an email to my editor about it and the change was quickly made. No muss, no fuss.
Changes and corrections in the world of journalism are not always so funny, though. Newspapers don’t like to make them, but most do so diligently. Print and digital are very different in this regard, though. If a change is made to an article that originally appears online and did not come from the print edition, if that change is not called out prominently then the reader assumes the mistake or error never occurred in the first place.
That dynamic got me thinking about how journalism corrections are handled in the digital age, and so I investigated how some major news sites handle the process.
Essay | Blogging, Quotes, and Sources
By: Karen Dybis
If there is one thing that should matter to reporters – online or elsewhere – it is the sacredness of the quote.
The quotation marks and what falls between them are the blood and guts of any article. They set the tone of the story and give life to what could otherwise be a plain statement of facts. A good quote means you found the right source, you know how to ask the right questions and you are a competent note-taker. And it’s no exaggeration to say where quotes are placed and how they move the narrative along can be the difference between the Pulitzer Prize and what lines the bottom of a bird cage.
@digethics
- How do you know who is blogging? Karen Dybis digs into the subject of online identities: http://t.co/CoFdITYG
- Call for papers The center for Digital Ethics & Policy at Loyola University Chicago (http://t.co/EyG4DECe) will be... http://t.co/4tg6HHgP
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