Protecting your privacy and intellectual property in a digital world

Tech Talk for Entrepreneurs
Social Media Networks are not always our friends:
Protecting your privacy and intellectual property in a digital world

By Ken Mays

If you’re online frequently posting your opinions, ideas and brainstorms in the blogosphere or on the major social networks, make sure you read the privacy policies and terms of service of the sites on which you opine, whine and pontificate.  That great idea of yours may become theirs after you post it.  Remember those contests of the last century where all entries became the property of the company holding the contest.  Well, similar schemes are now happening online.  A few months ago,  Facebook decided to claim perpetual ownership of all photos, posts and other material uploaded by users.  Facebook, of course, did not announce this in screaming headlines on their homepage for all to see.  They just changed the wording in their terms of service buried on a secondary page of their website.  It probably won’t surprise anyone that “terms of service” agreements don’t get a lot of page views.  Unfortunately for Facebook, some folks do read the “terms of service” on websites and the blogosphere was soon ablaze with posts railing against Facebook’s latest invasion of user privacy.  That’s right, this isn’t the first time Facebook has tried to pull a fast one on its users.  Like it has on earlier occasions, once outed by angry users, Facebook immediately backed off its new policy and reverted back to the old one.  Will it happen again?  Maybe not.  Mark Zuckerman, Facebook’s new CEO, says the site will now seek “user input” before it makes any major changes.  The “how to” of seeking this user input is still uncertain.  However, Zuckerman’s philosophy is a refreshing change.  Kudos (at least temporarily) to Facebook.

Just what does this all mean in the ultimate scheme of things to the struggling entrepreneur trying to sell and protect his original ideas while marketing them on the wild, wild web (where 87 percent of people now go first to seek information about everything)?   It means that we all need to work diligently to protect our intellectual property rights online.  Having experienced firsthand the often confusing and counter-intuitive rules of  the United States Patent and Trademark Office, I can say with a degree of certainty that they are still in the dark ages when it comes to protecting intellectual property rights in a dominantly digital world.  My best advice is to find an attorney or law firm with real experience in trademark and patent law as it relates to the online branding and marketing of your products and services.  Seek their counsel and listen to it.

Tech Bytes and Bits
Will the real journalists please stand up?  In wrestling with the issue of a journalist’s right to keep his or her sources confidential, the U. S. Congress may exclude bloggers, freelancers, independents and nonprofit journalists from this basic fourth estate protection.  The “citizen journalists” plying their trade online may not be given the same protection as those employed by The Washington Post and The New York Times, giving the government the right to demand the identity of whistleblowers.  And that’s very bad news for online news organizations like The Huffington Post.

Twitter just isn’t for the birds anymore.  Posting fresh content every day is still the best way to get your message out over the Internet.  Search engines like Google gobble it up and give you props every time it caches something new and relevant on your website.  However, social networks like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter also get the word out and can drive major traffic to your site.   In fact, Twitter now ranks near the top of the leader board for driving traffic to business websites.  That’s great news.  However,  its difficult enough for a small business to find the time to write a weekly blog.  Who’s got time to twitter every day?

Blogs aren’t press releases, they’re emotional releases.  A lot of companies ask their PR firms to write blog entries for them and post them on major industry blog sites.  Then they get disappointed when the folks going to those blog sites don’t break down their door trying to buy their products and services.  These companies fail to understand the essence of the blogging experience.  It is all about personal observation and interacting with other bloggers.  Instead of pushing your product or service, push your personal viewpoint about the issues under discussion on the blog site.  If you get accepted as an active and engaged member of the blogging community, they will eventually follow you to your website. And they will buy from you and recommend you because of  the positive blogging relationship they’ve established with you.  When blogging, just remember to put your sales pitch and elevator speech in your back pocket.  And then opine passionately about the things that interest you.