Oh dear.

Been testing out the Beeb’s iPlayer BETA for a few weeks now and finally decided to hook up my Facebook and Twitter accounts to enable the BBC’s new ‘recommend’ feature.

I then receive the following email:

and the offending avatar…?

“If you choose to add a Public Profile picture, it will appear on your Public Profile page, and in other places around the BBC website, for example in places where you’ve made a recommendation or a comment that is attributed to you. We moderate all Public Profile pictures before they are published for other people to see, so please keep to these rules:

• do upload a picture of yourself, not someone else
• don’t upload pictures of anyone under 16 years old or anyone other than yourself without their permission
• don’t upload pictures that show nudity, or are offensive
• don’t upload pictures that are defamatory, unlawful, or breach copyright
• don’t upload pictures that contain text, URLs, personal information, or contact details
• don’t upload pictures that promote a commercial product, service, or charity (i.e. no logos)
• do abide by the Terms of Use

If you connect your BBC iD to Facebook or Twitter, you can use your picture from that site as your BBC Public Profile picture. If you decide you want to use your Facebook or Twitter picture on the BBC, we will take a copy of your current Facebook or Twitter picture, and pass it to the BBC’s moderators for approval. Your original image from Facebook or Twitter is not affected by this. As we have to moderate your picture, we will not automatically update your BBC profile picture when you change your picture on Facebook and Twitter.

Remember, any picture you select for use at the BBC (by uploading one, or by choosing to use your Facebook or Twitter picture) will be moderated before other BBC users can see it. You will be notified by email if your Profile picture has not been approved by the moderators.”

The official “policy” can be read in full here: https://id.bbc.co.uk/users/help/profile#profile.addprofilepic

As I said… Oh dear.

This afternoon I visited the offices of Tempero - Europe’s largest supplier of social media moderation and management services.

The team I met with do a great job in providing 24/7 specialist moderation for message boards, blogs, commenting, social networking sites and user generated content (UGC) projects.

One of the things I like about Tempero is that they stay ahead of the game in knowing what the legal requirements are when it comes to engaging with your audiences online. The whole area is a potential legal minefield – often with serious repercussions – particularly when dealing with minors.

Tempero is a member of the Home office Task Force for Child Protection on the Internet and every member of their team is police checked and fully trained to be up to speed with new legal guidelines and best practices.

Here is a report that they have made available for anybody looking to clarify where they stand legally when engaging with user generated content as part of a campaign or ongoing communications strategy. It#s actually really insightful and provides a good primer for practitioners within the industry.

User-generated content and the law

Dominic Sparkes, MD of Tempero thinks that more brands need to be aware of their responsibilities when going online:

“For some brands it’s a case of cutting corners, but most are simply struggling to understand their responsibilities and requirements under confusing and outdated laws.  This guide aims to break down some barriers and distil the wealth of available information into one easy to comprehend suite of usefulness!”

I had a really interesting meeting this morning with a fairly senior figure from the UK PR industry. Our conversation steered towards cool consumer campaigns and how much social media can enhance and shape brand reputation. The train of thought evolved naturally to the B2B sectors and the consensus was that there is still a lot of relatively untapped potential in social media that B2B brands could dip into and use to their advantage.

But far too often, the comms industry tends to reserve new platforms to showcase consumer campaigns leaving B2B to fester in the realms of trade events and specialist press.

So imagine my delight when this little bugger crept its way into my RSS reader today:

Food for thought, indeed.  Kudos to the Earnest Agency for putting this together. To find out more about Earnest please visit www.earnest-agency.com

[Merci beaucoup Emilie Ogez]

This 10-platform, 42-page Social Media Playbook was created as a veritable “how-to” guide for Eloqua‘s staff to follow on the social web.

It’s a pretty neat guide about social media, distilled into one awesomely designed document (by the chaps at JESS3).

Now you can have it. For free.

Eloqua Social Media Playbook

Google’s long history of acquisition, innovation, experimentation, successes and failures is dotted with household names (YouTube) and forgotten brands (Jaiku anyone?).

The following Infographic from Mashable puts Google’s Social Media history into the contect of a timeline. I for one, refuse to get excited by the prospect of Google launching it’s Facebook competitor Google Me particularly as I’ve often thrown the full weight of my enthusiasm behind the likes of Orkut, GoogleWave, SideWiki and Aardvark only to be bitterly disappointed.

Anyhooooo….

The Real Life  Social Networks is a presentation that I discovered via Twitter (thanks @nero) and I’ve decide it to share it all with you as it is one of the best slide shows that I have come across which attempts to debate the usefulness of the ‘friend’ culture currently being fuelled by platforms like Facebook.

The deck is the work of Paul Adams (@padday), Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. As the research lead for sociability, Paul works with teams building products and features for the social web.  His studies into how we all define our friend networks led to producing this impressive presentation which covers no less than 216 slides. Don’t let that put you off – because with every click you’ll find yourself nodding frantically at the conclusions that are drawn by Paul and his team at Google.

If you’re looking to map influencers, do not even attempt to do anything until you’ve taken a look at this slideshow:

Every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens. Imagine if there was a way to collect all of these perspectives, to aggregate and mould them into the cohesive story of a single day on earth.

That’s what YouTube wants to do as it launches “Life in a Day,” an ambitious but incredibly compelling project which sets to out to document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world.

On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of your life on camera. You can film the ordinary – a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighbourhood footie match, or the extraordinary – a baby’s first steps, your reaction to the passing of a loved one, or even a marriage.

(if you cannot view the embedded clip above, click here to go directly to YouTube)

Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of films such as The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void and One Day in September, will then edit the most compelling footage into a feature documentary film, to be executive produced by Ridley Scott, the director behind films like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Thelma & Louise, Blade Runner and Robin Hood.  LG Electronics is supporting “Life in a Day” as a key part of its long-standing Life’s Good campaign and to support the creation of quality online content that can be shared and enjoyed by all.

The film will premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and if your footage makes it into the final cut, you’ll be credited as a co-director and may be one of 20 contributors selected to attend the premiere.

Want to take part? Here’s what to do:

1. Visit the “Life in a Day” channel and learn more about the project. Be sure to read through the steps you need to take to participate and the guidelines for creating your video(s). Also check out some of the sample videos for inspirational ideas.

2. On July 24, capture your day on camera.

3. Upload your footage to the “Life in a Day” channel any time before July 31.

Regardless of whether your footage makes it into the final film, your video(s) will live on on the “Life in a Day” channel as a time capsule that will tell future generations what it was like to be alive on July 24, 2010.

Making my way back home from work tonight, I was playing around on FourSquare and scanned Liverpool Street area for nearby tips. Sometimes you can find a real nugget of treasure… where to buy the best coffee, cheap gym membership, money off vouchers… but today, it was the following screenshot that caught my eye…

Upon closer inspection…

The best thing is… I bet the bigwigs at UBS are too square for FourSquare and are too busy scoffing sushi and knocking back their Pernod-Ricard Perrier-Jouet to even know that this piece of invisible graffiti is looming above their place of work…

Nothing left to say, really…

Kudos to Richard C… whoever you are! Brilliant!

Clay Shirky looks at “cognitive surplus” — the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we’re busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we’re building a better, more cooperative world.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works. He talks a lot about the difference between doing anything and doing nothing. Social science is looking at how much value is derived from our intrinsic motivations to create and share, according to Shirky.

Fascinating stuff as always from TED.com.

Clay Shirky’s work focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.” His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC.

Ever wondered how Google works?

Infographic by PPC Blog