We had a great turnout at the Social Media Breakfast East Bay, with about 75 participants convening on a diner in Oakland to hear Robert Scoble and Shel Israel talk about the Age of Context, the theme of their excellent (and highly recommended) new book. As one of the event co-organizers, I was chuffed (as my British podcast co-host would say) at the turnout. You should check to see if there’s a Social Media Breakfast in your town! In the meantime, here’s this week’s review of stories that caught my attention during the past week. I collect the ones I might use for the Wrap (and the podcast) at LinksFromShel.tumblr.com.

Above the fold

Communicating for engagement takes on new importance

Earlier this year, we saw Gallup’s global numbers on engaged employees. It turned out that most were not engaged, many were actively disengaged, and alarmingly few were engaged in their jobs. Now, according to research from career advisory firm Right Management, 83% of North American workers say they will “actively seek a new position” in 2014. A mere 5% said they planned to stay put and 12% weren’t sure. When four out of five of the people working in your firm intend to look for a new job somewhere else, that’s a wake-up call for top management, according to Right management’s employee engagement leader, Scott Ahlstrand. “Employers must act now to engage top talent and prevent them from leaving for the competition.” Besides, how great can things be at the competitor’s shop, since four out of five of their employees plan to look for other jobs, too? The mandate these numbers present is for focusing on engagement. Despite most engagement recommendations falling squarely in Human Resources’ jurisdiction, there’s an enormous amount that communicators can do. According to Ahlstrand—quoted in The Los Angeles Times—“Successful companies cultivate and retain top talent by building loyalty through engagement that connects employees’ work contributions to concrete business outcomes.”

Companies set a fast spending pace for sponsored content

Most communicators I talk to are still unaware of the whole native advertising field, ignoring it perhaps because it’s “advertising,” which is someone else’s job. While native advertising (aka “sponsored content”) may involve buying the space using unfamiliar processes, the content is pure PR: storytelling, not selling. As Richard Edelman noted in his keynote address at the IABC World Conference in June, time is short for PR to take ownership of native advertising, lest it fall into disrepute. The opportunity is upon us to make sure native advertising is used ethically and strategically, especially as eMarketer reports spending on sponsored content is growing faster than initially believed, reports Michael Sebastian in an AdAge piece. “The new forecast predicts that marketers will spend $1.9 billion on sponsored content this year, a 24% hike from last year, and devote $3.32 billion to the tactic by 2017.” That compares to June estimates of $1.88 billion in spending this year and $3.08 billion by 2017. eMarketer analyst Clark Fredricksen says the upward trend “reflects publishers’ attempts to create more bespoke advertising products for brands.”

BP accused of hiring trolls to attack critics

Here’s another cautionary tale that one hopes will make companies think twice before taking the low road in the world of social media. Inevitably, you’ll get caught and shamed. That’s what’s happening now to BP, which is accused of “hiring internet ‘trolls’ to purposefully attack, harass, and sometimes threaten people who have been critical of how the oil giant has handled its disaster in the Gulf of Mexico,” according to Al Jazeera. The trolls operated mostly on the BP Facebook page, which was run by BP’s PR agency, Ogilvy & Mather, and based on BP’s response to the emerging controversy, the company is ready to throw the agency under the bus,

Below the fold

Most people are okay getting targeted ads and content—Mostly when you hear about targeted ads and other content personalized for a customer, it’s privacy concerns or the creepiness factor that bubbles to the top of the conversation. But research from ResearchNow, conducted for Sociomantic Labs, finds that 70% of respondents said they’re okay getting ads and content crafted specifically for them. The story is in Bulldog Reporter’s Daily ‘Dog.

Odds are, you’ve never heard of the social network driving 20% of all social commerce—Polyvore channels Pinterest in its approach, but it is limited to products you might want to buy. Even with less social reach than its competitors, “it drives disproportionate amounts of social revenue.” The average order value from Polyvore is amost $200, compared to $60 for Twitter and $90 for Facebook. Read more

What are you doing that drives reporters nuts?—Brian Morrissey, Digiday’s editor-in-chief—has a list of 25 PR habits that get in the way of building a strong, mutually-beneficial relationship. Topping the list are the overuse of the word “thrilled,” infographic exclusives, a dial-in conference number (“There was a time when two people could have a conversation without three other people silently listening in), the call to follow up on emails, and re-sending emails that got no response. Read the other 20.

Pinterest introduces Place Pins—These new tools let users explore and share things around them, according to the company’s CEO, Ben Silbermann. “Pinterest users…can begin planning trips by creating a new board based on location, and then adding pins with locations to those boards,” according to TechCrunch. “The tool adds a map, images, and relevant information to the pins, and allows pinners to view the places they’d like to visit both online and on mobile.”

LinkedIn expands content focus with product pages—LinkedIn has launched a feature that lets brands create pages for individual products. Called “showcase pages,” early entries include a Microsoft Office page, one for Adobe Marketing Cloud, another for HP Big Data, and one more for Cisco Security. “Marketers can promote the content that gets published to those pages as sponsored updates that appear in users’ news feeds,” according to AdAge.

ASA warns agencies, bloggers to disclose commercial relationships—The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has issued a warning to companies that pay bloggers to talk up their companies and products that both they and the bloggers they hire must disclose their relationship. An article published on the ASA website made it clear: failure to disclose is illegal. “A blogger who is given money to promote a product or service has to ensure readers are aware they’re being advertised to,” according to the ASA. The story is in Marketing Magazine. Marketers outside the UK would be wise to follow the same guidelines.

B2B buyers use Google to find short content—Nearly three-fourths of buyers (72%) looking to make a business purchase start with research on Google, and 70% of them get back online up to three more times to do more research. A study by Pardot also notes that B2B buyers want different content for each stage of their research process, suggesting that marketers need to produce content to accommodate the various parts of the marketing funnel. Only 2% prefer content longer than five pages; 70% want it to be shorter than that, according to MarketingProfs.

Pearltrees evolves beyond curation into social organization tool—When it was launched, Pearltrees was another free curation tool that used a different approach—orbiting content—to help people collect and share links. Then, last year, the company introduced photo uploading and a utility to let users save their notes. This week, another pgrade makes it possible to upload and share any kind of file from Pearltrees servers. CEO Patrice Lamothe told Techcrunch that the service is getting closer to its vision to “organize everything in a social way.”

A couple more…

• Emerson transformed an intranet blog into a platform for customer engagement
• Now you can book your Loews hotel room with a tweet
• Hardcore users are upset, but comments change makes YouTube safer for brands

Everybody’s talking about: Wikipedia

The Wikimedia Foundation had as much of PR-Wiki as it could take. The PR agency that specializes in helping companies manage their Wikipedia presence has been blocked from the site after the agency was accused of multiple violations of the online encyclopedia’s terms of service. Wiki-PR has received a cease-and-desist order from Wikipedia’s lawyers, accompanied by the threat of a lawsuit. Wikipedia has also changed its rules, which once suggested that nobody with a conflict of interest should edit a page; it’s now an explicit restriction. So much for any hope that ethical PR practitioners and Wikipedians could get along. Ultimately, good PR practices would elevate the accuracy of Wikipedia, not turn it into a platform for unethical practitioners to promote their clients. Read about the kerfuffle in PRWeek, Ars Technica, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Mashable, among dozens of other sources.