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SAN MATEO, Calif., April 19, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ –
Crowd Factory, a Marketo company, today announced that they have been selected as an official member of the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer Program (PMD). The mission of the PMD is to help developers build products that make social marketing easier and more effective. Crowd Factory was awarded PMD status as a developer that has demonstrated value-added capabilities in the “Apps” category for “services and platforms for building socially enabled integrations.”
According to Facebook, the companies they have selected have clearly demonstrated “unique capabilities that help marketers scale and achieve efficiency, and extend measurably beyond the functionality of Facebook’s native tools.” Companies in the PMD program are reviewed periodically by Facebook, and must demonstrate an ongoing high-standard of excellence.
“This is a tremendous acknowledgement from Facebook. As social marketing evolves, we are thrilled to be at the forefront, working together with Facebook to offer the best API solutions to help companies of all sizes develop cutting edge social campaign strategies, and then enable them to execute and measure the results of their investments,” said Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of Crowd Factory, which was acquired by Marketo on April 18.
“As a member of the PMD program, we help brands leverage Facebook to maximum advantage. Our powerful platform of apps embeds all of the best practices, so brands don’t have to figure out social all by themselves,” said Alexander Mouldovan, chief product officer of Crowd Factory. “We’ll stay close to Facebook requirements to innovate and ensure smooth compliance for our customers with Facebook terms.”
Crowd Factory is a complete social campaign management platform that helps marketers accelerate social and word-of-mouth marketing, grow their marketing databases with unique social profiles and attract new customers. The platform allows marketers to add social applications and messages quickly to every channel – Facebook Pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, landing pages, websites, banner ads and emails. These applications facilitate social sharing, supercharging the results of every multi-channel marketing campaign. Then, Crowd Factory automatically tracks the reach and impact of this social sharing, providing direct feedback on the return on investment (ROI) of social marketing.
Companies of all sizes, including Molson Coors, Sony Music, Jive Software, Quickoffice and British Telecom, use Crowd Factory’s social marketing software to drive real business results every day.
About Marketo
Marketo is the fastest growing provider in Revenue Performance Management. Marketo’s powerful yet easy-to-use marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions transform how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work — and work together — to drive dramatically increased revenue performance and fuel business growth. The company’s proven technology, comprehensive services and expert guidance are helping more than 1,800 enterprise and mid-market companies around the world to turn marketing from a cost center to a business-building revenue driver. Marketo also offers Spark by Marketo(TM), a new brand of marketing automation tailored specifically for small businesses – the fastest-growing and largest segment of today’s economy. Marketo acquired Crowd Factory on April 18, 2012 to deliver the world’s first integrated solution for social marketing automation.
Marketo was recently named one of “America’s Most Promising Companies” by Forbes Magazine, the fastest-growing private company of 2011 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, and the “2011 CRM Market Leaders Awards Winner for Marketing Solutions” by CRM Magazine. For more information, visit
www.marketo.com , or subscribe to Marketo’s award-winning blogs at blog.marketo.com.
Marketo, Spark by Marketo and the respective logos are trademarks of Marketo, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.
SOURCE Marketo
Copyright (C) 2012 PR Newswire. All rights reserved
Article source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-selects-crowd-factory-a-marketo-company-as-a-preferred-marketing-developer-program-pmd-member-2012-04-19
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It’s looking more likely that Facebook employees will be glued to their monitors watching the Nasdaq stock market ticker around May 17, the day the social networking giant is targeting to go public.
Graphic by Christopher T. Fong / The Chronicle 2010
TechCrunch, quoting multiple unnamed sources, became the latest to report that Facebook’s IPO target date is the third Thursday in May, depending on whether the Securities and Exchange Commission approves all of Facebook’s paperwork.
The report tracks with an earlier reports by CNBC that Facebook wants to go public on May 17 or May 24, or at least before the investors head for the long Memorial Day weekend.
Facebook will reportedly debut on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “FB.”
The Facebook IPO drumbeat figures to get louder during the next month, especially when company execs go on their investor road show. There was no immediate comment available from Facebook, which is normal for a company in the midst of a mandatory pre-IPO quiet period.
Article source: http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/04/19/facebook-reportedly-aiming-ipo-for-may-17/
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Wall of Steve Jobs’s Patents
Rod Lamkey Jr./The Washington Times/Landov
Dozens of Apple’s Steve Job’s patents are on display in the atrium of the Madison Building at the United States Patent and Trademark Office Head Quarters Campus in Alexandria, VA, 2011.
Dozens of Apple’s Steve Job’s patents are on display in the atrium of the Madison Building at the United States Patent and Trademark Office Head Quarters Campus in Alexandria, VA, 2011. Photographer: Rod Lamkey Jr./The Washington Times/Landov
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Facebook Said to Have Bid for AOL Patents Before Microsoft’s Win
Scott Eells/Bloomberg
AOL Inc. (AOL), under shareholder pressure to make strategic changes as revenue declines, agreed to sell and license patents to Microsoft Corp.
AOL Inc. (AOL), under shareholder pressure to make strategic changes as revenue declines, agreed to sell and license patents to Microsoft Corp. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
Facebook Inc. (FB), the biggest social-
networking service, made an offer for AOL Inc. (AOL)’s patent
portfolio before losing out to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s $1.06 billion
bid, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
The proposal from Menlo Park, California-based Facebook was
too low, said the people, who asked not to be identified because
the discussions haven’t been disclosed. Facebook Chief Operating
Officer Sheryl Sandberg led the negotiations to acquire AOL’s
patents, one person said.
Microsoft intends to sell most of the newly acquired
portfolio because it doesn’t consider all of the 800 patents and
related applications essential to its intellectual property
arsenal, according to another person with knowledge of the
matter. The technology industry has been bulking up on patents
amid a surge in disputes over ownership of rights to key
breakthroughs in areas such as mobile communications.
Facebook said it’s buying the Instagram photo-sharing tool
for $1 billion the same day Microsoft unveiled the AOL deal.
Larry Yu, a spokesman for Facebook, declined to comment, as
did Kevin Kutz, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based
Microsoft and Caroline Campbell, a spokeswoman for New York-
based AOL.
Facebook has lined up $8 billion of available credit from
its IPO underwriters. Like more established technology
companies, such as Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google, it is buying
intellectual property to protect itself from patent-infringement
litigation.
Facebook’s Patent Appetite
Facebook, which is in the midst of a patent dispute with
Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO), acquired 750 patents from International Business
Machines Corp. (IBM), a person with knowledge of the matter said on
March 22. Yahoo sued Facebook on March 12, alleging that the
social network infringed patents covering such functions as
Internet advertising and information sharing.
“If an unfavorable outcome were to occur in this
litigation, the impact could be material to our business,
financial condition or results of operations,” Facebook said in
a March 27 filing.
To contact the reporters on this story:
Douglas Macmillan in New York at
dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net;
Serena Saitto in New York at
ssaitto@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Tom Giles at
tgiles5@bloomberg.net;
Jennifer Sondag at
jsondag@bloomberg.net
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Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-19/facebook-said-to-have-bid-for-aol-patents-before-microsoft-s-win.html
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Raise your hand (or your phone) if you’ve ever lost a particularly lovely Draw Something sketch — a pocket-sized pièce de résistance — to the digital void. Now put down those hands, then bring them together for a round of applause: The game’s creators just added several new long-awaited features, including one that finally lets you save your favorite finger-sketched roughs.
The update — for iOS with Android support to follow — lets players save drawings to their device’s photo libraries, comment on other players’ drawings, and upload pictures direct to Facebook and Twitter (so no, the kids haven’t hijacked your friend such-and-such’s timeline, it’s probably just someone trying to draw Elvis again).
Draw Something‘s last newsworthy event involved Zynga, the social network developer/publisher behind FarmVille and others, paying over $200 million for OMGPOP’s “social drawing and guessing game” (it’s essentially just a mobile Pictionary riff). In the game, you draw clues your opponent has to guess, the twist being that the drawings then animate in real-time.
Other welcome improvements to the game include an “undo” option that lets you back one stroke, though only one (still, no more fiddling with the eraser option to correct wayward scribbles). You can also now add brief notes of up to 100 characters to drawings. On iOS devices, “pull to refresh” is now supported for updating your game list. And the number of drawings you render in a session, previously capped at 99, has been boosted to 999.
In a related update, Zynga’s just added over two dozen new celebrity names to the game, including Kate Winslet of Titanic fame per the 100th anniversary of the doomed passenger liner going down.
Matt Peckham writes for TIME and PCWorld. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, and follow Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.
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Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/254087/draw_something_finally_gets_facebook_and_twitter_support_save_feature.html
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Lucas Jackson/ReutersSallie L. Krawcheck
Sallie L. Krawcheck may no longer work on Wall Street, but she is still in the finance fray — in 140 characters or less.
Ms. Krawcheck, who led Bank of America’s wealth management division until a management reshuffling in September, has been posting from a personal Twitter account and has amassed more than 2,000 followers in recent weeks.
She says this foray into social media is part of a larger effort to style herself as an industry analyst, a familiar role for the woman who once led the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein Company.
“I believe that my experiences can be of use to people,” said Ms. Krawcheck, who also was a chief financial officer of Citigroup. “If I can help investors, if I can help inform regulators, if I can help inform the industry — we’ll see which way it goes.”
Ms. Krawcheck, whose next steps have been a subject of speculation, would not comment on any possible plans, saying only that she wants to lend her Wall Street experience to the broader debate about the industry’s evolution.
“I’ve been spending a good bit of time with smaller businesses and with entrepreneurs in the financial services sector, trying to think through, and help them think through, what the next chapter is,” she said.
This mission has taken various forms. On Wednesday, Ms. Krawcheck was named to the advisory board of Gold Bullion International, a platform for investors to manage their gold holdings. In a Twitter message, she clarified that the move was “not a market call on gold, but on the power of asset diversification.”
In an opinion piece that appeared in Politico on Wednesday evening, Ms. Krawcheck makes a case for a robust Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that has been attacked by the financial industry and by Republicans in Congress. In February, she argued in The Wall Street Journal for additional oversight of money-market funds.
It’s unusual for such a prominent Wall Street figure to be active on Twitter. The big firms generally bar their employees from using social media, and although some companies, like Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, have allowed some financial advisers onto Twitter and LinkedIn, those employees are kept on a tight leash.
But Ms. Krawcheck, whose use of Twitter was praised recently by the Web site Business Insider, appears to have embraced the form, issuing several messages a day and peppering them with a wry sense of humor.
One recent Twitter message referred to her former high-ranking role at Merrill Lynch, part of Bank of America:
In another series of postings, she listed the various ways that a writer for Marie Claire described her departure from Bank of America: “taking the fall” and “latest blow” were just two.
Ms. Krawcheck pointed to two Twitter users as particularly insightful. She said she regularly checks the account of Daniel Alpert, managing partner of the investment bank Westwood Capital, and she looks to Ian Bremmer, the political scientist, for commentary on geopolitical risk.
But she emphasized that she was still developing her Twitter routine.
“I don’t even know how to direct-message,” Ms. Krawcheck said with a laugh. “I’m brand new.”
Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/on-twitter-krawcheck-finds-a-voice/
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Image via CrunchBase
As we near the start of the London Olympics, expect organizers to voraciously protect their brand. Those five rings cost billions of dollars, and it is probably the number one rule in the Olympic sponsorship game: Do Not Screw With The Brand.
Take for instance Usain Bolt, as one report posits. If he Tweets about how bad ass his Pumas are, LOCOG will be on him in a minute. Why? Because Adidas is the official footwear sponsor of the Olympic Games and tweeting about a competitor directly violates the International Olympic Committee’s social media policy by mentioning the wrong brand in connection with the games.
The brand, by the way, is estimated by Reuters to pull in about $3.2 billion from the London Olympics. And that’s plenty good reason for LOCOG to crack down.
Though some companies, like Nike and Virgin Airways, may have already found clever ways around the restrictions. Nike rolled out several ads featuring medal hopefuls while smoothly sidestepping direct references to the London Olympics.
“You’ve got to think Virgin’s doing something,” one marketing executive told TheStar.com. “It may not happen during the games but whatever that grace period is around it they’re going to find some way to interject their brand into the games.”
Above all, though, Twitter and Facebook will present the most unique problem for Olympic organizers preventing unauthorized advertising. During the games athletes must agree with the IOC’s social media policy that prohibits Twitter posts mentioning brands that aren’t Olympic sponsors. But not every Tweet and post can be policed.
“What are they going to do? It’s not like it’s a doping scandal,” the executive added. “They’re billing this as being the most social games ever but it’s also the most policed and locked-down games ever. And it hasn’t even started yet.”
But beware, the IOC will be watching.
“We don’t police but we’re working closely will all the platforms to make sure the trademark and (internet protocol) rights are respected and that we have a mechanism in place if case of infringement,” dryly warned Alex Huot, the IOC’s head of social media.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnclarke/2012/04/19/beware-the-olympic-twitter-cops/
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(CNN) — If reports Wednesday are to be believed, one of the tech industry’s biggest deals in recent history was hammered out almost exclusively by two 20-somethings over the course of what amounts to a long weekend.
On April 8, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg let the company’s board of directors know he was about to spend $1 billion on hot photo start-up Instagram — just hours before the deal was done, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The deal was nailed down, unnamed sources told the Journal, in only three days. Meetings between Zuckerberg, 27, and Instagram head Kevin Systrom, 28, that took place at Zuckerberg’s multi-million-dollar Palo Alto, California, home.
It’s a move that shows Zuckerberg displaying the hacker spirit that helped him launch a social-media juggernaut in his college dorm room. And that’s a spirit that doesn’t always jibe with the image of CEO of a corporation expected to be valued at up to $100 billion when it makes its first public stock offering in the next few weeks.
“On balance, I’m not sure it’s the best way to do business,” said Ali Velshi, CNN’s chief business correspondent. “But Mark Zuckerberg has defied all rules.”
The moxie suggested in the report comes at an interesting time for Facebook and Zuckerberg, who also reportedly whittled down Systrom’s initial asking price of $2 billion.
On the brink of offering up Facebook, with its hundreds of millions of users, to stockholders, even Zuckerberg’s controlling interest in the company (a 57% share of voting rights, according to reports) could soon need to be checked by the types of lawyers, bean-counters and other business types whose jobs involve looking out for a company’s bottom line.
“This paints a complex picture of its CEO as at once confident and bold, and also nervous and panicky — details that will be scrutinized come Facebook’s imminent IPO,” Kit Eaton wrote on Fast Company’s website.
Velshi, who over the course of his career covered the “tech bubble” of the late 1990s, said the whirlwind purchase may, in fact, be a last hurrah of sorts for Zuckerberg.
“It actually happens more than we think. And it’s not a bad thing, particularly in non-public companies, Velshi said. “But, in public companies, boards are important — they are supposed to protect shareholder interests, and they are supposed to bring perspective and experience that a kid CEO may not have.”
The Facebook board did vote to approve the deal, according to the Journal. But at that point, it was largely an endorsement more than a decision. The board, one source said, “was told, not consulted.”
In the fast-moving world of Web tech, being nimble is almost a prerequisite for survival. Fail to adapt and someone else will pass you by.
Instagram, a mobile app which lets users enhance their photos with a raft of pre-created filters, was reportedly on the verge of nailing down a new round of private investments worth $50 million. Could that have made Zuckerberg overpay for a company with 13 employees and no revenue to date?
Maybe, says Velshi.
“Creativity, innovation and deal-making are different strengths; rarely does one person possess all of them,” he said. “That Zuckerberg felt strongly that he wanted Instragram may not have made him the best person to do the deal — that’s why we have real estate agents, or talent agents.”
For what it’s worth, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was aware of the negotiations all along, although she didn’t personally take part. And, for Facebook, making a profit directly from Instagram may have been less important than locking up its user data and taking a rapidly growing competitor, now with more than 40 million users, off of the playing field.
Regardless of where the future takes Facebook — whether life as a publicly traded commodity is more about stuffy board meetings than spur-of-the moment handshake deals — Wednesday’s report provided at least one more glimpse at the hoodie-wearing, authority-flouting CEO whose origin story has literally become the stuff of Hollywood storytelling.
“What’s cooler than a billion dollars?” Matthew Braga of Ars Technica wrote, invoking the oft-paraphrased line from Facebook biopic “The Social Network.”
“A billion dollars without board approval.”
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Article source: http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/18/tech/social-media/zuckerberg-instagram-deal/index.html
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When Facebook bought the photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion, theories flew as to what it might mean. Was Mark Zuckerberg defensive, worried that his 850 million Facebook users might stop uploading 250 million photos a day? Or was he making a proactive move into mobile, where Instagram’s friendly interface makes Facebook look clunky on iPhones?
The real story is both—and one of splintering social networks that are breaking up the vast, open “social graphs” that give Facebook and others such power. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is a signal that smaller, closed networks are growing popular by giving audiences more control over what they share. The networking giants, such as Facebook and Google, will have to allow consumers new ways to build tighter social circles. And marketers will face new challenges in “going viral” among the masses.
For nearly a decade, marketers have been agog over the promise of social networks to provide free advertising, a cascade of word-of-mouth in which consumers act as advocates for a brand or product. The dream is based in part on Robert Metcalfe’s law—the concept by the inventor of the Ethernet that in any networked system, value grows exponentially as more users join. Like the old 1970s shampoo commercial, you tell a customer about your product, and she tells two friends, and so on, and so on, until the world is knocking on your hair-products door. Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends.
Trouble is, Metcalfe was wrong, at least with human networks. In a landmark 2006 column in IEEE Spectrum, researchers Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly showed mathematically that networks have a fundamental flaw if all nodes are not created equal. The authors pointed primarily to Zipf’s law, a concept by 1930s linguist George Zipf that in any system of resources, there exists declining value for each subsequent item. In the English language, we use the word “the” in 7 percent of all utterances, followed by “of” for 3.5 percent of words, with trailing usage of terms ending somewhere around the noun “floccinaucinihilipilification.” On Facebook, your connections work the same way from your spouse to best friend to boss to that old girlfriend who now lives in Iceland.
Human networks, like words in English, have long tails of diminishing usage. New, smaller social media tools are resonating because they recognize we have limits on what we share and whom we listen to. Here are a few:
• Path. This social network restricts you to 150 friends, the exact number that British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested was the upper limit on human relationships. While Path users can post images, videos, or locations to Facebook and Twitter, the core appeal is creating a closed circle of high-quality connections.
• Pinterest. This network is the darling of 2012, skyrocketing to No. 3 in usage behind Facebook and Twitter. Users tag, or “pin,” images of things they like and sort into online scrapbooks. While users can follow others and comment on their posts, about 90 percent of usage in my observations has been pins with zero social comments. Pinterest is all about what you like, not how you communicate with others.
• Google+ vs. Facebook vs. Twitter. Google (GOOG) finally got social networking right in 2011 when it gave up on Buzz and launched G+, a cleaner version of Facebook with strong privacy features. Google+’s “Circles” allow you to sort friends into groups, and then share different things with different circles of friends. Facebook rapidly copied the idea by making it easier to post updates to select groups of friends. And while Twitter is open to all, one of its popular features is “lists” that allow you to view updates of only handfuls of online contacts.
• Springpad. This innovative note-taking application allows users to save items they like, via Web or mobile, and appends useful information such as price comparisons or movie times. While you can share items with anyone, the default settings are private, and the app’s slogan is “share and discover with the people you trust.”
• Instagram. Yes, this is an open network that allows liking and commenting on photos. But Instagram is primarily a photo broadcasting tool, and its rapid growth to 40 million users is driven by how easy it is to make your mobile snaps look professional.
• Pair. In perhaps the ultimate narrow social network, Pair builds bonds between only two users. It acts as instant messaging on steroids, allowing photo and video sharing, joint sketching, and a recorded timeline of activity between a couple.
This growing interest in smaller, ego-boosting, privacy-controllable networks was inevitable, as social media reached mass scale. Two-thirds of Americans now use social platforms, according to Pew, and the majority say “staying in touch with current friends and family” is the main reason why. Only 9 percent of respondents told Pew, when asked, that “making new friends” was a motivation.
For marketers, of course, this is a challenge. Word-of-mouth messaging spreads more slowly if audiences are closing off digital circles. For this reason, only Facebook has succeeded among social networks in generating significant advertising revenue—$3.1 billion in 2011—because it has resorted to old-school ad formats. Facebook makes money on cost-per-click ads regardless of whether its users share the content with each other. Twitter, which has tried to embed marketing messages more organically in user streams, had only $139.5 million in ad sales last year, according to EMarketer—a paltry 72 cents per user annually.
The truth is, Dunbar was right: We humans need privacy and intimacy, and we have limits on how many people we want to share with. Marketers can certainly shoot for sporadic viral success, or the click here and there of Like buttons inside Facebook. But for sustained communications in a world of smaller social circles, they may have to try something more aggressive—say, paid advertising.
Article source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/facebook-google-must-adapt-as-users-embrace-unsocial-networks
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New York – Should students and teachers ever be friends on Facebook? School districts across the country, including the nation’s largest, are weighing that question as they seek to balance the risks of inappropriate contact with the academic benefits of social networking.
At least 40 school districts nationwide have approved social media policies. Schools in New York City and Florida have disciplined teachers for Facebook activity, and Missouri legislators recently acquiesced to teachers’ objections to a strict statewide policy.
In the New York cases, one teacher friended several female students and wrote comments including “this is sexy” under their photos, investigators said. A substitute teacher sent a message to a student saying that her boyfriend did not “deserve a beautiful girl like you.”
Such behavior clearly oversteps boundaries, but some teachers say social media – in particular Facebook – can be a vital educational resource if used appropriately, especially because it’s a primary means of communication for today’s youngsters.
“Email is becoming a dinosaur,” said David Roush, who teaches media communications and television production at a Bronx high school. “Letters home are becoming a dinosaur. The old methods of engaging our students and our parents are starting to die.”
New York Chancellor Dennis Walcott plans to release social media guidelines this month, saying recently that teachers “don’t want to be put in a situation that could either compromise them or be misinterpreted.”
‘I’d send out a massive message, and I would unfriend them.’
- Nkomo Morris, high-school English and journalism teacher
Roush does not accept students as friends on his personal Facebook page but has created a separate profile to communicate with them — something that runs afoul of Facebook rules restricting users to a single profile. He used the page to get the word out quickly about a summer internship on a cable-access show, and a student who learned about it from the Facebook post won it.
“If I would have emailed him, if I had tried calling him, he never would have got it,” Roush said.
Nkomo Morris, who teaches English and journalism at a high school in Brooklyn, said she has about 50 current and former students as Facebook friends. That could be a problem if the new rules instruct teachers not to friend students.
In that event, “I’d send out a massive message, and I would unfriend them,” Morris said.
In the meantime, Morris manages her privacy settings so neither current nor former students see her personal information but do see posts about current events. She also lets students know whether something on their Facebook pages raises a red flag, such as sexual content.
“They’re not always as savvy as I am,” Morris said. “They haven’t really grasped the level of formality out in the real world.”
Efforts like New York’s have been subject to legal wrangling and resistance from teachers and their advocates.
Missouri legislators last year passed a law that barred teachers from using websites that allow “exclusive access” with students 18 years old or younger. Teachers complained that they would be banned from Facebook and Twitter.
A judge granted an injunction, declaring that the law “would have a chilling effect” on free-speech rights. The legislature then repealed the restrictions and passed a new law directing school districts to develop their own policies.
Some districts adopted a model policy by the Missouri School Boards Association, decreeing that staff members must use district-approved devices when communicating electronically with students. The guidelines are intended to make it easier for supervisors to monitor teacher-student interactions.
The Missouri State Teachers Association believes some of the local policies are too restrictive. Spokesman Todd Fuller said the association will support its members if they are disciplined under those new rules.
“We’re prepared to deal with the first issue where a teacher’s rights are being infringed,” he said.
In New York City, a United Federation of Teachers spokesman said the union would not comment without seeing the district’s new guidelines.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she hopes the new policy considers First Amendment rights as well as “the enormous potential for benefiting students’ education that is represented by technology.”
Musical theater teacher Charles Willis was suspended in 2010 from Braden River High School in Florida for friending more than 100 students on Facebook and for allegedly posting sexually suggestive images and acronyms for profane words. He is now in a non-classroom job at another school, said John Bowen, a school board attorney.
The district still does not have a formal policy on social media use by teachers but is working on one, a district spokeswoman said.
Willis’ lawyer did not return a call from The Associated Press, but in comments to the Bradenton Herald in March, he noted that students aren’t innocents.
“For anyone who says that a teacher shouldn’t curse in front of students, I say they haven’t been on a football field or in the dugout in a baseball game,” he told the newspaper. “If you could go incognito in those settings and somehow gather audio, you might be surprised at what is said.”
Doctoral research at the University of Southern California found 41 districts nationwide that have approved social media policies.
Under a policy approved by the school board in Muscogee County, Ga., in November, school employees are “strongly discouraged” from allowing students access to personal websites. Districts in Tampa, Fla., and Norton, Mass., also have wrestled with the issue.
Nancy Willard, author of “Cyber Savvy: Embracing Digital Safety and Civility,” believes school districts should set up their own online environments and use tools like Gaggle.net and ePals.com, which have been designed for educational purposes. There is also Edmodo, a Facebook-like network for teachers and students.
The problem with Facebook, she said, is that it was set up for socializing.
“On Facebook, flirting is encouraged,” she said. “You are encouraged to post your relationship status and your relationship interests. That’s not appropriate for a relationship between teachers and students.”
James Giordano, a guidance counselor at a Bronx high school, said that he makes a habit of waiting about four years after a student has graduated to friend one and that he’s glad the district is discussing the issue.
“I hope that they distinguish between personal Facebook pages and pages that are professional,” he said. “It would be a shame if Facebook altogether was banned from use by educators, because it’s a valuable resource.”
Article source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/19/should-teachers-and-students-be-facebook-friends/
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• Click here for a Game 4 photo gallery or look under “More on this story” that appears on this web page.
VANCOUVER — Daniel Sedin proved to be the missing ingredient for the Vancouver Canucks offence, at least in Game 4 Wednesday with their season on the line.
Out of the lineup since March 21 with a concussion, Daniel registered an assist on twin brother Henrik’s third period goal that put the Canucks up 3-1. It was the second power play marker of the night for Vancouver, which was previously 0-for-14 in the series.
The Canucks won Game 4 by a score of 3-1, staving off a first-round sweep at the hands of the L.A. Kings, and have breathed new life into Canuck Nation.
Here’s what people in the Twitter world were saying after Wednesday’s win:
“To the rest of America outside LA: You’re welcome. #canucks #kings,â€� wrote @lawheadhunter, mocking the tweet from the Kings official Twitter account last week.
“And so the Luongo era has ended. Just like that,� wrote @keithbaldrey, the Twitter account of Global TV political reporter Keith Baldrey.
“Glad the #Canucks won, especially because now we might get to 7000 followers before the end of the postseason. #SelfishMotives,� wrote @passittobulis, writers for the popular Vancouver Sun hockey blog, Pass It To Bulis.
“Yeah!!! #Canucks can breathe again!! All 3 stars are the Gingers… Yeah I said it. Lol sory Schneids!!! Ok one game at a time boys!!!â€� wrote @BCBerrie.
“Ok Vancouver don’t go celebrating. Let’s win one at a time! Stay focused,â€� wrote @geroysimon, the Twitter account of B.C. Lions slotback and fan-favourite Geroy Simon.
Simon’s teammate and quarterback Travis Lulay also chimed in on the Twitter conversation, on his account @TravisLulay.
“There ya go Canucks, showed there’s some fight left. One at a time…â€� wrote Lulay.
“So, who gets the start in Game 5?� wrote @imacVanSun, Twitter account of Vancouver Sun sports columnist Iain MacIntyre, referring to Cory Schneider’s 43-save victory in Game 4, a start he was given over Roberto Luongo.
“Spectacular Sedinery tonight. I guess the Canucks missed Daniel after all,� wrote @imacVanSun, again.
“Is it just me, or does it feel like a great day to start the best comeback in #Canucks history? #reversesweep,� wrote @canucksgame.
“If anyone is looking for the Canucks bandwagoners, they’re all partying on Scott Road right now,â€� wrote @ChaoticAppeal, referring to a celebration on the Surrey-Delta border.
“The Canucks one win makes me want to party. Yea I said it,� wrote @kylarose8.
ctucker@vancouversun.com
On Twitter: Twitter.com/CamTuckerSun
vancouversun.com
Article source: http://www.canada.com/technology/Canucks+Twitter+rest+America+outside+welcome/6481836/story.html
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