Snap decision. The National Arbitration Forum has refused to transfer the domain name snapchatcheck.com to the company behind the popular messaging app Snapchat. The NAF panel decided that the respondent, Dreamhost, the company holding the domain name, was making "a legitimate noncommercial or fair use of" snapchatcheck.com by using it as the web address of a site that allows users to determine whether their data was leaked when Snapchat suffered a data breach. Dreamhost's web site at snapchatcheck.com is apparently one of several web sites that sprang up in response to the 2014 posting of millions of Snapchat users' usernames and phone numbers by anonymous hackers. After reviewing the snapchatcheck.com web site, the NAF panel also determined that Dreamhost was not trying to pass the site off as being owned and operated by Snapchat itself.
Contacts list confidentiality. A bill recently introduced in Connecticut would limit how often social media sites can ask a user to furnish access to his or her contact list in order to send those contacts unsolicited marketing messages. The first of its kind, the proposed law is being sponsored by Republican Rep. Mitch Bolinsky and has not yet been scheduled for a public hearing. The measure would reportedly employ a system similar to a "no call" or "no contact" list.
Leveraging LinkedIn. With 187 million unique visitors a month, LinkedIn is a social media powerhouse, but many people still think of it primarily as a networking tool. Actually, it's already gotten a significant foothold in the content arena. Ninety-six percent of the marketers who responded to a recent survey said they use LinkedIn for content marketing. That's more than any other social media site (only 89% of the respondents said they use Twitter for content marketing purposes). LinkedIn expert Lewis Howes told Fortune that marketers can make the most of LinkedIn's potential as a publishing platform by taking advantage of its decision to open up its Pulse newsfeed to more than just those people invited to be LinkedIn Influencers. Howes says that he has seen companies enjoy significant increases in their traffic and leads as a result publishing long-form content on Pulse, which exposes a content writer's work to more eyeballs than just the ones that belong to the people on his or her contact list. Another LinkedIn expert, Burt Verdonck, told Fortune that marketers would do well to take advantage of the site's Slideshare feature, which allows users to easily upload and share presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars. "Slideshare helps your profile become more visible not only by putting you higher in search rankings in the search engines and LinkedIn, but by providing engaging content your potential audience wants to see when they do reach your profile," he explained. "Talk about a win-win scenario."
Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.
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