A special note on this week’s wrap photo. That adorable newborn wrapped up in a hospital blanket? That’s my granddaughter, Madeleine Ann Holtz, born yesterday. Now, on to business: The Friday Wrap is a review of news, posts, reports, and other items appearing in the last week that will help you stay on top of the forces shaping communication in this fast-paced, ever-changing environment. These are stories that may have been lost in the flood of headline news stories. I collect all of the items from which I choose the Wrap stories in my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

You know that social media policy you rolled out? It could be illegal—A National Labor Relations administrative law panel found that a car dealer’s social media policy violated the National Labor Relations Act by requiring employees to identify themselves when posting online comments about their employer. Sound familiar? Nearly every social media policy has this requirement. Most also prohibit employees from using the company’s trademarks, another practice the panel found to violate the NLRA. More than likely it’s time to update your policy. Read more

Facebook Instant Articles are here and the critics hate it—The New York Times and Buzzfeed are both participants in a trial of Instant Articles, which features full stories pushed into your Facebook News Feed without having to click a link to visit the originating news site. While the publishers and many of the reporters working for them are hailing this as the evolution of news, critics are horrified. One called it “the nail in the coffin for the idea of an open, browser-based mobile web.” Another said it was the media equivalent of becoming Vichy France. (Note, I’m talking about this with CustomScoop CEO Chip Griffin on today’s episode of Media Bullseye Roundtable. You can hear our conversation by visiting the Roundtable page at the FIR Podcast Network site.) The trial is accessible only on iOS devices. Read more

But the Instant Article experience is pretty fabulous—What Instant Articles means to an open web and the future of news is one thing. The execution is another, and early reviewers are impressed. Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff called them “more than just a faster way to read news stories” and relates a seamless experience. Read more

Brace yourselves for the storm of political advertising—The next U.S. presidential election is more than 16 months away, and the primaries don’t begin for eight months, but campaigns are gearing up by buying as much of the available ad inventory as possible. In fact, websites are selling out of their 2016 inventory, thanks largely to Republicans and their PACs and other supporters. (The Democratic field is considerably smaller and most pundits see Hillary Clinton’s nomination as inevitable, leading to much smaller ad buys.) If your company planned to do some website advertising, don’t waste another minute. Read more

Millennials are now the largest generation in the workplace—More than a third of today’s workers are Millennials, passing Gen X to become the biggest generational group in the workforce. Millennials lapped Gen Xers in the first quarter, with 53.5 million of them toiling at jobs. They passed Baby Boomers in 2014. Has your company made any changes in its workforce efforts based on Millennials’ characteristics? Read more

Are you sure you want to send that tweet?—When a tweet gets a company into trouble, we often hear that it was sent inadvertently. The sender meant to use a personal account and used the company account by mistake. TweetDeck hopes to help companies avoid that particular problem by adding a confirmation step before a tweet can be sent. The user has to click a check box labeled, “Ready to Tweet?” One wonders why people can’t take that step without a prompt, but then again, how many documents have been saved because a prompt asks if you’re sure you want to close without saving. Read more

Mobile and Wearables

An early example of how retail will use VR—North Face customers are adventurers. Virtual Reality will make visiting the store an adventure. Using a VR headset, customers at the retailer’s Manhattan location can feel what it’s like to base jump 420 feet from a cliff overlooking a canyon in Moab, Utah. It’s part of a test similar to those undertaken by a growing number of retailers to see if VR can drive sales. Read more

Snapchat is beating the odds—Snapchat’s early days were fraught with controversy. Seen primarily as an enabler of teen sexting, commentators warned marketers against using it. Today, it’s the epitome of the “unicorn,” startups that earn a $ billion or higher valuation based on the money invested in it. Since launching in 2011, it has attracted 100 million users based on its ability to mirror real life better than its competitors, which is why its competitors are adopting its core feature: ephemerality. Read more

Millennials are searching for how-to videos on YouTube via mobile—More than 100 million hours of how-to content has been consumed on YouTube so far this year, representing a 70% growth over last year. Millennials are the largest group watching this content, and 91% of smartphone users are looking for these videos when performing a task. Among those Millennials, according to Google, 30% report buying a product after watching a how-to video. Read more

Odds are, you used a smartphone to watch a Twitter video—As if you needed a new study to confirm what you already knew. Research Now did the study for Twitter anyway, finding that 90% of videos seen on Twitter are viewed on a smartphone or tablet. What’s more, 70% watch videos they find in their feed, making Twitter a platform for new video discovery. Read more

Trends

Facebook in-app search puts burden on brands—Facebook’s test of an in-app keyword search engine (currently running on the devices of a small group of iOS users) will put pressure on brands to create the kind of compelling content that will rank high in the results. Here’s how it’ll work: A user who wants to share a piece of content on a friend’s wall will see an “add a link” option. Entering keywords, the user will find related articles to share on their friend’s wall. Some believe Google should worry, but brands already facing reduced organic reach will have to up their game, even if they’re already paying to promote posts. Read more

The cloud is the most important new technology in decades—So proclaims TIME magazine, which notes that the consumer cloud market (“anything you used to keep on your hard drive that now you draw from a far-flung server”) has helped propel the cloud into the realm of crucial technologies. IT leaders who rejected it as too risky are also on-board (Forrester projects enterprise software will spend $87 billion on software as a service in 2015) and the cost of cloud services has plummeted. A Cisco Systems survey found more than 75% of the workflows historically addressed with corporate computers “will be processed by cloud data centers by 2018.” Read more

People really want to be forgotten—A year into the absurd “right to be forgotten,” a fabrication of the European Court of Justice, Google says it has received 250,000 requests from Europeans who want 920,258 links deleted from search engine results. Changing history has never been so easy. Read more

Too bad for Twitter there aren’t more world leaders—Twitter is struggling to add new users; its failure to do so is a big reason investors are backing away. Twitter no doubt wishes there were more than 196 countries in the world. The more world leaders, the better, since Twitter has emerged as their social media channel of choice. According to Burson-Marsteller’s latest Twiplomacy study, governments ramping up their Twitter efforts and adding more images and videos to their tweets. Eight-six percent of all 193 UN governments have Twitter accounts, and 172 heads of state maintain personal accounts. Only 27 countries (mostly in Africa and Asia-Pacific) have no Twitter presence. Read more

Tap Emoji to donate—It’s important to keep on top of the surging use of Emojis. Scoff if you must, but if you’re a communicator, you’ll be using them sooner than you’ll be comfortable with. Case in point: The World Wildlife Fund will accept a donation when you use one of 17 endangered animal emojis created by ad agency Weiden + Kennedy. To sign up for the campaign, a user would retweet the WWF’s original tweet, agreeing to donate 10 euros (about $11 cents) every time they use one of the 17 emjois. It’s just one of what Adweek calls “the gajillion ejomi campaigns out there right now.” Read more

Internet of Things will drive innovation—The last 10-15 years have been “pretty dismal” for investment and innovation, but that’s about to change. Harvard economist Michael Porter says the Internet of Things will deliver “tremendous” efficiency gains, drive waste out of the economy, and unleash a wave of innovation. Here’s hoping communicators won’t be among the last to figure it out. Read more

Research

92% of companies can’t fix their reputations—If you buy the old saying that you can’t fix what you can’t measure, 92% of companies can’t fix their reputations because they’re not measuring the risk to their reputations. A law firm, Schillings, produced a study called Reputation Resilience and found only 4% of FTSE 100 companies define their appetite for risk, 8% measure reputation risk, 11% classify reputation risk as a distinct category of risk, and 23% say reputation is owned by the board. One has to wonder about the ability of their communicators to influence these organizations—or maybe they all would rather do crisis communication than reputation management. Read more

Gamification coming to a retailer near you—Retail customers want an experience and retailers aim to give it to them through gamification. It has been a while since I’ve seen gamification mentioned in a story crossing my feeds, but this study from Boston Retail Partners finds that the use of gamification as part of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) effort is exploding, with 87% of retailers planning to employ it as an engagement tactic in the next five years. Gamification isn’t the only engagement tactic retailers will use. Eighty-three percent plan to identify customers when they walk in the door and 46% plan a structured loyalty program. And it’s tough to ignore something 100% of respondents have in mind: Using analytics and a dashboard to better understand shopping behaviors. Read more

Consumers would rather watch videos about products than read about them—If you still need convincing about the importance of video in a communication effort, consider a study from video creation app Animoto that found four times as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than read about it. The study helps crystalize just how critical video is to a marketing effort, with 80% of respondents recalling video ads they’ve seen in the last week. Twenty-five percent of consumers lose interest in companies that don’t use video, while 56% say company website ought to include videos. Don’t stop here. Read the summary, which is chock-full of convincing data. Read more

And finally…

How much did William Zinsser influence you?—I have never included an obituary in the Wrap, but the passing of William Zinsser at the age of 92 is worth noting. Zinsser wrote one of the most influential books on writing, “On Writing Well: An informal guide to writing nonfiction.” I’m on my second copy, a well-worn third edition printed in the 1980s. That book, along with “Elements of Style,” had more impact on my writing than anything published. Rest in peace, Mr. Zinsser. Your legacy lives on in the quality of writing from the writers touched by your brilliance. Read more