Social Media Gone Bad!

16-year old Alison Chang (pictured left) from Dallas, Texas, went to Australia for Christian camp this past April. Her youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, posted this photo on Flickr. Virgin Mobile Australia cut and cropped this photo and used it in their advertising campaign, "Are You With Us or What?" without consent! You can see here how she found out. Her Flickr account name is aleeviation.

According to BusinessWeek, last month the Chang family filed a lawsuit against Virgin Mobile USA LLC, its Australian counterpart, and Creative Commons Corp., the nonprofit that licenses sharing of Flickr photos. Creative Commons does allow others to reuse photos but only if they credit the photographer and say where the photo was taken. The Virgin Mobile ad failed to credit Wong by name. And more importantly, because of the derogatory implications, "The experience damaged Alison's reputation and exposed her to ridicule from her peers and scrutiny from people who can now Google her, the family charged in the lawsuit."

I am apalled that Virgin Mobile would be so cheap and invasive and use Flickr photos for their campaign. And according to this article, this was not the first time.

On a positive note in regards to social media, I have discovered a new tool through this case. Mahalo.com is the world's first human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.

With Mahalo, you can enter a simple search term and instantly get an organized page of results that only includes great links.

I found useful information including news articles, blogs and commentaries through this Mahalo page all in one place!

College ladies like Facebook

I already made my two posts, but I thought some of you may like to read this article about social-networking sites and gender. The rest of the article is interesting, too. It's about a recent survey of what college students like: Apple, "Grey's Anatomy," Coke and Facebook!

social network readings for 10/9

Just in time for our next class on social networking, the NYT published an article about the explosion of Facebook apps. Read it & please be ready to discuss before class on Tuesday.

"SecondLife" on SVU

I am trying a little live blogging here.
My roomate just came in, and knowing my newfound involvement with social media, informed me that the current episode of Law and Order: SVU surrounded a girl kidnapped because of her life in an online world.

I just started watching about ten minutes into the show, but apparently a 20-year-old woman was kidnapped who had quite a different lifestyle in Alternate Youniverse, a SecondLife-type program. Her avatar is a 14-year-old girl who owns and runs a prostitution ring/strip club and has had problems with a stalker.

The images of the "game" (although we social media buffs know technically it isn't a game since there is no end goal) look strikingly similar to what we saw in Dr. Shamp's lecture.

The story is unresolved right now, but it is interesting how the online universe is becoming more publicized in popular nighttime television shows like these!

support for UGA Connect

Today in class (no class-cast for this session - sorry!) we brainstormed ways to support the upcoming social media conference at Grady, UGA Connect. We talked about a common Flickr tag, a blog with podcasts & videos plus a wiki! We didn't mention Twitter ... but that is an option too.

Pre-conference ideas

• short podcast-like "on the street" interviews about social media (do you use it? how?)
• short podcast-like interviews with attendees of the Friday/Saturday night dinners
• tagged Flickr group coverage of Friday/Saturday dinners
• blog Friday dinner speech summary & open thread post
• blog post of Connect Campaigns Team survey results
  

Registration table & info

• collect everyone's URLs at the registration desk upon arrive
• take quick photos of each guest for the blog (if needed)
• create materials for the registration packet (info on SM projects, Flickr tagging info, etc.)

Conference main event coverage

• live blogging
• summary blog post of each session (including lunch & break out sessions)
• open thread post for each session
  
• podcast-like interviews with attendees
• tagged Flickr coverage throughout day
• short videos/interviews throughout day
• podcast entire audio for each session
• recap listing of sites named by panelists (panelist faves) for each session
• host wiki where attendees can collaborate on session summaries
  

We took a lot of inspiration from Josh Hallett at the weekend's BlogOrlando event and previous advice on what makes for good conference blogging.

Knowing that timing is everything, we would have the text posts uploaded by the end of the following session (at the latest). Dinner pictures & multimedia would be uploaded by 9 a.m. the following day (at the latest). We'll probably need a little more production time for the audio & video content, but will work to get it up as quickly as possible. The point here is to actually connect the content produced by all the attendees (pulling in their common tagged Flickr pics, Twitter tweets, etc.) & be a timely resource for those who couldn't make it to the conference.

Are we missing anything? Is this overkill? Feedback welcome!

PS - registration for the conference is open for another few days, so sign up before Monday!