Facebook’s Like button ruled illegal in one part of Germany

Germany has a long tradition of using laws to protect its citizen’s privacy. Home owners, for example, can ask Google to pixelate their houses in Street View (maybe so that their garden gnomes can stay incognito?). Facebook’s facial recognition feature has also come under fire in recent weeks. The latest target of Germany’s privacy advocates is Facebook’s ‘like’ button („Gefällt mir,“ in German). Thilo Weichert, the head of the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, argues that Internet sites based in his state that use the ‘like’ button are illegally sending this data to Facebook, which in turn uses it to illegally create a profile of its users web habits.

Updated: German websites based in the state of Schleswig-Holstein have until the end of September to remove Facebook‘s ‘like’ button or face a fine of up to 50,000 Euro.

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Four things Facebook should tell every CMO – a provocative article

Engagement on the Facebook walls of leading brands is down 22%. Brands aren't playing for the long term. Engagement is the crown jewel of a community marketer. It's always talked about and drives the relevance and power of the platform. We reviewed public engagement data for 300 of the top brands on Facebook over a one-year period starting in July 2010. The results show a clear decline in average engagement.

Many are likely to blame Facebook, but it's more likely that marketers themselves have led to this decline. Dissing audiences with bad content, coupons, polls, contests, and boring filler is the way to blow off engagement in the long run, even if it makes a few campaign results shine in the short term.

Not all 300 brands saw a decline. Some brands were rock stars and beat the Street. The winners included brands like Deutsch, Renault, Hermes, Lowe's, and Chanel. These brands didn't have the most fans, but day in and day out, they are performing magic in keeping their fan base engaged.

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Google+: 10 things it does better

Google+, Google's new social networking service, might cautiously be called a hit. With 25 million visitors at last count, Google+ may well be the fastest-growing social network to launch thus far.


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How To Post Your Google+ Feed To Facebook And Twitter

One of the questions that we see a great deal of on our Search Engine Land Facebook Page and LinkedIn Group is “How can we get our Google+ feed to post in Facebook and Twitter?” The correct answer to that question is that no official way exists to have the networks play nice. However, with the use of extensions & add-ons, this feat can be accomplished.


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Bing Webmaster Tools Integrates Yahoo Traffic Data

Bing Webmaster Tools now has fully integrated in Yahoo’s traffic numbers as well. So if you have seen a spike in your Bing Webmaster Tools traffic charts, this is the reason why. 

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Google Retires The Googlebot-News Bot

Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag.


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