PR 101

I recently joined foursquare. I thought it would be a good way to find out new places to go in Milwaukee. In the last decade, the Beer City has become a real foodie town. The restaurant offerings range from German to Japanese to Turkish to Ethiopian. There are so many restaurants opening foursquare seemed like a logical way to keep up with new places.

After all, one of social media strength’s is peer review. I like to see what other people say about a restaurant my wife and I haven’t yet checked out. I like to know what’s good, what’s bad and how well the servers handle things.

Foursquare also gives me a chance to tell others about places I like. Jody and I have pretty eclectic tastes in food, so we hit a lot of different places. As my future son-in-law has noted, I am Milwaukee’s unofficial ambassador.

Something odd has been happening on foursquare. I am getting requests to friend people from places including the Netherlands; New Zealand; India; and Germany. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to friending people who live in other countries. It is one of the things I like about social media. I have Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter contacts around the globe.

But I wonder why someone in India wants to know about the nightlife in Milwaukee? Are they planning a trip here? That would be nice. Milwaukee is a great city to visit. We have a lot to offer.

Still, I cannot help but wonder if I am being friended by people who really have no intention of ever coming to Wisconsin. Instead, are these people just trying to build up huge friend lists? It is some kind of high school thing where the person who has the most friends wins?

Before I go any further, I should note I have more than 8,000 Twitter followers, more than 7,000 LinkedIn connections and I just crossed the 1,000 mark on Facebook. However, most of that is for professional reasons. I follow people who have similar interests. Plus, I use my lists for as outreach for my clients.  I have to note having more 16,000 social media contacts is an incentive for people to hire me.

I don’t follow just anybody. As I have said, the minute you tell me what you had for breakfast, what cute thing your dog did, or you are going to have your nails done, I will unfollow you. I will also not follow anyone who promises to make me rich or plays games. I don’t believe the former and I think the later is silly.

The people I follow are marketers, flacks, and social media people like myself. I learn from them and I hope they learn from me. I will not follow people who do not meet my criteria. For me it is a matter of quality versus quantity.

I make somewhat of an exception for Facebook because I have family members and friends who I stay in touch with through the platform.

I have not amassed a large numbers of followers because I think it makes me cool. That is not the purpose of social media.

Yet, I think there are a lot of people out there who build lists indiscriminately. Why I am not sure. As I have said time and time again, the one with the most friends does not win.

I am a soccer fan. I grew up the playing and watching the game. I only quit playing because I dislocated my right shoulder for the second time.  I was glued to my television during the entire World Cup, watching every game I could.

So, I was really happy to find out how active FIFA and ESPN were in their use of social media to push the beautiful game in the United States. I think it definitely increased interest in the entire tournament. It was an impressive effort that paid off.

For you non-fans, FIFA is an acronym that stands for The International Federation of Association Football in English. In French it stands for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, hence FIFA. The word soccer comes from the word Association. The English shortened “Association” to soccer. Don’t ask me why, I’m Irish by descent.

ESPN stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Enough with the language lesson.

Overall, viewership was up 41 percent from the English-language World Cup telecasts four years ago, according to the WorldCast website. Coverage on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 averaged a 2.1 rating, 2.3 million households and 3.2 million viewers for the 64 World Cup games. The rating was up 31 percent from the 1.6 posted four years ago, while households increased 32 percent from 1.7 million and viewers rose from 2.3 million, the site said.

“Viewership in the U.S. was at its highest when the home team was playing in the tournament,” WorldCast said. “Through the first 50 games, the rating was up 48 percent, households increased 54 percent and viewers increased 60 percent.”

I should note that attracting viewers in the rest of the world is not an issue. According to ABC News 700 million people watched the championship game between Spain and the Netherlands. Show me any American television event that attracts even 25 percent of that kind of worldwide audience.

FIFA would like to make more inroads into the USA. We are, after all, the wealthiest country on Earth. Soccer is growing in popularity as a youth sport. We would seem to be a natural place for FIFA to focus.

FIFA and ESPN are run by very smart groups of marketing people. They knew if they encouraged the use of social media good things would happen. They apparently do not worry about things like trademark infringement. The results speak for themselves.

ESPN’s Facebook World Cup had over 600,000 people who “liked” the page. I know don’t where that ranks among Facebook sports fan pages, but it is impressive number. The Facebook soccer page has over two million fans. I didn’t count because who has that kind of time, but there has to be over a thousand pages of tweets with the hash tag “worldcup.”

Googling the term “world cup soccer blogs” produced 49 million hits. Now, as a blogger myself, I am willing to bet that there are not 49 million blogs about the World Cup. But, if there is even 10 percent of that number, that is impressive.

A quick YouTube search found just over 800,000 videos that somehow mention the World Cup.

You get the idea. As I said in a blog last week, FIFA knows what use to work won’t necessarily work anymore. So it moved on to a new method and it worked.

Although this wasn’t a rant, I do have one note. On Sunday, a friend and I rode our bikes to Port Washington, Wis. – 26 miles north of where I live. We stopped to enjoy that small city’s wonderful lakefront and marina.

Like any public area, there are posted rules of public conduct. What brought me up short was a sign that read: “Violations Will Be Enforced!”  So apparently rule breaking is required?

About 20 years ago, my wife and I saw a t-shirt vendor get busted in the parking lot of the old Milwaukee County Stadium. We were there to see Elton John perform. The vendor was arrested because he didn’t get permission to use Elton John’s face or logos. He violated Elton John’s trademarks and copyrights.

I think the Internet is heading the same way. In fact, it has already started. YouTube used to allow anyone to post anything – including copyrighted material. No one sued for the simple reason that YouTube had no money. When Google purchased YouTube, all of the copyrighted material was taken down. The reason for the reversal was simple. Google has lots of money. Pots of money as big Google has make litigators drool. Google knew the owners of those copyrights would come after them.

Companies and organizations work very hard to build and maintain their brands. Those organizations want to maintain as much control over what they created. They don’t want their messages distorted by an outsider, no matter well meaning that outsider might be.

Plus, those logos mean money. Why do you think an official league jersey costs so much? Everybody gets a cut.

Now I know the social media argument about companies having to be willing to give up some control of their image. I make those arguments and I understand their relevancy. It reflects the major change that is happening in marketing – companies no longer can rely on looking for customers, customers have to find them.

More and more businesses get that. They understand they have to provide the right offerings to attract their customers. However, more and more companies and organizations are also drawing lines about what the public can use.

Like any sports fan, I have joined Facebook pages of the teams I back. I looked at some of those pages. On a fan page for the Green Bay Packers, there is the Packers helmet. I cannot tell if the site is blessed by the Packers. I don’t know if the people who created the page realize this, but the Green Bay Packer “G” logo is trademarked.

This is nothing new, by the way. When George Halas founded the Chicago Bears right after World War I, he paid Carroll College in Waukesha, Wis. $100 to be allowed to use the now famous Bears’ “C.” It was Carroll’s logo first, they owned the rights, and Halas had to get permission to use it.

Now, I realize that much of the use of logos, trademarks and other such things is often perfectly innocent. Fans just want to show how much they love their team or their automobile. The law does not make that distinction though.

What has saved both groups, so far, is that the Internet has been the Wild West of the law. Meaning currently there is not a lot of law governing this kind of thing. But there will be. Eventually, national and international courts will establish guidelines on the use of logos and other proprietary material. Treaties will be negotiated and boundaries will be drawn.

Like the Wild West, eventually the Internet will be plowed, fenced and “civilized.” The free range will be taken away.