For now, until we come up with a better answer, the answer to that is “Yes”.

But the more interesting question is, why do zebras have black and white stripes at all?

Researchers from Hungary and Sweden claim to have solved the mystery. According to their report in the Journal of Experimental Biology (something I often find myself reading in my spare time), the black and white stripes were created to keep away blood-sucking flies.

They report that this pattern of narrow stripes makes zebras “unattractive” to the flies as the striped patterns reflect light.

You can read the full report in the Journal of Experimental Biology here and if that makes no sense, see what Aunty Beeb had to say about it here.

It should all be black and white now.

“When we started our agency, we had in mind precisely the kind of people we wanted with us. There were two requirements: You had to be talented and you had to be nice. If you were nice but without talent, we were very sorry, but you just wouldn’t do. We had to ‘make it.’ And only great talent would help us do that. If you were a great talent, but not a nice person, we had no hesitation in saying ‘No.’ Life is too short to sacrifice so much of it, to living with a bastard.”

Nice and good are the two criteria we’ll be sticking to when building the team at Black & White Zebra. Bill Bernbach defined these two criteria when defining the kind of people that he needed when starting DDB. They had to be nice, and they had to be good. He recognised that it’s people that make the difference in any organisation – with the right people, the business would be a success, and the journey along the way would be enjoyable. But with the wrong people, not only would you be doomed to fail, but the experience would be a painful one.

In a start-up, it can sometimes feel like a compromise; do you go for talent you can afford, knowing they’re not the best but they’ll make do for now? Or do you go for the best people, knowing that you can’t really afford them?

I would always go for the high risk option that you can’t financially afford! Because you’ll soon realise that you can’t afford to carry dead weight with people who aren’t amongst the best at what they do – jobs will take longer than they should and the quality will always be poor. You’ll end up in a vicious cycle of mediocrity. But by employing the best, you’ll quickly reap the rewards of people who can produce work quickly and surprise you with the quality of their work.

But whilst choosing good people is important. Probably even more so, is the need for them to be nice. Nice people like working with other nice people – it’ll help them produce the best work. And you’ve got to be able to enjoy spending time with the people that you’re going to be with when you’re working long hours. So while good people, or nearly good people, can become even better over time, the extent to which people become nicer over time is less likely to change.

Choose wisely.

Profanities: authentic or crude?

It’s a challenging question – should brands allow people to express themselves fully and in so doing potentially offend the sensibilities of someone else and damage their brand; Or should brands cherish authenticity, and freedom of expression, allowing people to use even the most colourful language – and just hope for the best?

Where do you draw the line of acceptability?

There are lots of factors which will influence this; the brand itself, the audience and the domain the conversation is taking place in.  Some of it may be impassioned, human and authentic, but more often than not, it’s not. It can be crude, offensive, and brands would simply rather not associate themselves with it. Brands value user generated content (UGC) but more often than not, rightly or wrongly, it’ll be on their own terms – it’ll need to be ‘clean’ to ensure that no one gets offended and kicks up a fuss.

It’s an interesting debate which we’ll cover off in more detail soon, but for now, we’re going to discuss how you can approach automated pre-moderation and swear filters.

Profanity and obscenity filters

So while there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to censorship, nor a one-size-fits-all solution (other than social media pre moderation), supposing your brand wants to play it safe,  one solution is to implement a profanity or swear filter to hide or rewrite obscenities. A simple blacklist won’t catch enough so to improve on this you can implement a fuzzy string search (also called approximate string matching) which looks at the stem of a word to ascertain whether or not it’s likely to be a profanity.

Download a swear list

So it’s all very well creating a fuzzy string search, but what should you search against? Well, being the sharing, caring types, we’ve pulled together a list from various sources of more than 2000 profanities so that you don’t have to! Obviously, whilst this list is extensive, it doesn’t guarantee that someone won’t find a new way to creatively express themselves in a linguistically ‘innovative’ way so unless you’re using a ‘fuzzy’ search as outlined above, you won’t be able to mitigate against the use and display of any word other than those defined in this list.

What have we missed?

I expect there may be a few words we missed – help us develop this resource to be even more useful by contributing below!

I was inspired watching ‘Failure Club‘, a documentary series following people pursuing their dreams in the full knowledge that by any common yardstick, they were doomed to fail. The Failure Club is all about embracing that failure and pursuing seemingly impossible goals regardless, for the journey’s sake. From the outset, failure is not only a highly probable outcome, it is the desired outcome. It’s all about recognising that actually failure isn’t all that bad. Only through embracing the reality of failure can its’ societal stigmas be stripped away and replaced with an inspirational alternative.

The Failure Club process reconstructs conventional ‘failure’ as acceptable and even fun and helps people realise that life’s limitations are arbitrary, self-imposed, and based on fear. And when we overcome that fear, we blow away our self-inflicted limits, and we will each achieve results that appear miraculous.

It’s interesting stuff and a great challenge to all of us – check it out on Yahoo Screen.

One important part of building authority, is paying attention to and influencing social metrics by building your website’s authority with social media. Here are a few tips from Search Engine Watch to help you along the way.

Know Your Audience

Seemingly simple, the task of figuring out your target demographic often isn’t easy. Conduct social listening research, send out customer surveys (try Survey Monkey for a great free option) and conduct additional research. Use this information to help you understand how to craft your messaging through social media for maximum impact.

Also use the information to help you find “niche” social sites, forums and blogs. Niche social networks often create more meaningful interaction as reported. So look for sites that cater to your demographic and engage with them appropriately.

Share and Share-alike

Use the notion of share and share alike. This growing trend creates the belief that information should be free, readily available, and users should have the ability to share it/use it however they choose.

How does this apply to you? Don’t keep all that industry trade information to yourself. Start developing content and sharing ideas through social channels that address industry insider knowledge, answer industry questions, provides research data, and anything that showcases you and your brand as experts.

Participation is Key

Just because you might tweet out a few posts, have your content shared on Facebook, and get a few +1’s doesn’t mean you’re automatically seen as an expert or building up authority. Developing your brand’s own authority on a specific social networking platform is mandatory. This often involves being recognized by other authoritative users on the platform, having a lot of followers/friends/circle-ers/etc., high engagement levels, and regular interactions.

Eric Enge’s recent Search Engine Watch post, “Social Signals & SEO: Focus on Authority,” discusses the importance of having an authoritative person in your space share your content and also the importance of building your own authority at the social network level.

Grow Your Network

Make an effort to network with others in your industry in an attempt to build your site authority. Interact with them through social media by retweeting their status messages, adding them to Twitter lists, engaging on their Facebook Pages, adding them to your circles on Google+, bookmarking some of their blog posts, and commenting on a few posts too.

It’s tit for tat; as you do it, you’ll slowly see them do the same for your content and messages.

Quality

It may seem tempting to send out 40 tweets in a day and 10 Facebook status updates a week, but quality over quantity is always best – think carefully about how your brand will be perceived when you’re tweeting tweet, post, write, comment or even Like on Facebook. Everything you do communicates.

Offer Your Help

Monitor all the areas where your brand can offer up help to people asking questions or seeking information. Track long tail search terms that are frequently asked questions in your industry – use Google Alerts, Twitter Search, and inboxq.com.

Have FAQs sent to a team e-mail address and respond to them as applicable. You’ll find that many online users will ask questions or ask for help through social media. Be there to help answer their questions and you’ll find that your perceived expertise and authority will only grow over time.

Conclusion

Building your website’s authority requires a well-rounded approach and having a feel for what you should do within the social realm is important. The above tips can help you realize the path you should head down in your journey to becoming an authority online.

Don’t forget the other areas required to build authority. All efforts together create a working model for how you can succeed in the authority building game.

Some of the rising social networks include Pinterest, Houzz, Tumblr, Instagram, GetGlue, IntoNow, and PlayUp. Each of these networks courts a different demographic and audience, and each offers unique ways to share content like photos, links, and comments.

But brands shouldn’t rush to create pages or advertise on every social network, even if the audience seems like a perfect fit. Having an outpost on myriad niche networks is great for SEO and making a web “land grab”, but to take full advantage of focused social networks, it pays to create specific engagement programs for each community.

Before taking the plunge on smaller social networks, brand marketers should ask five key questions.

1. Are members of at least one of our target audiences there?

Do a bit of research and make sure your target audiences are represented on the social network. When your goal is to engage with potential and current customers, the quality and focus of the social network’s members are critical.

2. How much time and resources will we direct toward this new community?

Think about how much time you’ll need to engage with a new community. Remember that connecting with a new community means building out your brand’s page/presence, as well as daily community management tasks.

Estimate that it’ll take between 10-12 hours to create new assets, craft messaging specific to the channel, and deploy the new presence. Ongoing community management will vary depending on how active you want to be on the new network.

3. How will we use this new channel?

Will you use your presence on a new social network to promote one aspect of your business? Maybe one product? Will the network be a place where you ask for product feedback or for consumers to take part in the product development cycle?

Instead, maybe you’ll use the new social channel to build your brand reach in a global way. With broad-based communities like Pinterest, brands are simply showcasing their brand voice through images and ideas – bringing users closer to the brand.

4. What does success look like for us in this channel?

Setting specific engagement goals for each social network is critical. By setting short-term, growth-related goals at the onset, you can more easily manage for success.

Remember, these are new communities and you likely won’t see huge brand or sales impact right away. As the community grows and matures, so should your metrics and goals. Map out specific goals for engagement, user actions, sharing metrics, etc.

5. Where will this channel be in two years?

There are plenty of social media futurists out there, but no one knows for sure if a social network will stick around in consumer’s hearts and minds for the long haul.

Take the time to map out which features you hope the channel will add in the next two years, such as new functionalities, enhancements to usability, and new marketing and advertising methods just for brands. The communities may never deliver these, but a “wish list” will help you assess whether the network is delivering the features that matter to your brand now and down the line.

Summary

The newest social networks always look shiny and new, but the real goal for brands is to participate in niche communities to reach specific, engaged audiences. By asking these few key questions before you engage with a new network, you can bring a little strategy and structure to your social marketing strategy.

1. Be social!

Many people make the mistake of treating LinkedIn simply as a static website where you can have a profile, but it’s so much more than that – it’s a social network! You have to treat it that way:

• Regardless of whether or not it’s directly relevant to your business, get involved with discussions and groups related to any topic that you’re generally interested in. Join 15-20 groups relevant to your business or of personal interest and track them. It won’t take much timer or effort, to join in the conversations from time to time. Where possible, share your expertise for free when people are looking for a some help on LinkedIn – it’s a great opportunity for you to demonstrate that you’re an expert in your field and can very often lead to them actually hiring you!
• If you have a Twitter account, it’s worthwhile linking your Twitter account with your LinkedIn page so that your tweets/posts are automatically made to both simultaneously.
• Send personal notes rather than the generic LinkedIn invitation messages. Don’t go mad adding contacts – quality matters more than quantity; it’s much better to have 50 contacts who you genuinely interact with than 300 with whom you don’t.

Get involved in discussions!

2. Think of your profile as a job application form

A really helpful idea for SMBs is to treat your LinkedIn profile as if it’s an application form for a job – your potential customers will be reading their LinkedIn profile in much the same way as they would read the application form of a potential new employee.

Often, when SMB owners create a business page on LinkedIn, they don’t include anything about their education or their employment history! You need to demonstrate why your career up to this point qualifies you to do the job you want people to hire you to do. Equally, your educational background will obviously boost your credentials, but can also help foster a connection between you and potential business partners (e.g.  you went to the same university, or lived in the same town when you were young) – this stuff can be really helpful in establishing a relationship. Listing your skills is very important, especially as this can help potential clients or customers search find you on LinkedIn. Even if some of your skills aren’t directly relevant to your business, it’s worth including them as they can help legitimise you and can lead to people finding you accidentally who might not have realised that a SMB with your exact set of skills is just what they need.

LinkedIn recently launched a new feature that allows users to list their voluntary activities as well, so that’s another opportunity to make yourself stand out from your competition.

Your CV might not be quite this impressive, but it's worth letting people know what you've done in the past

3. Get a vanity URL

When you create a LinkedIn profile, it automatically generates a direct URL, which will be something rather long, messy looking, and hard to remember. You can however customize the URL for your public profile to make it something much simpler e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourbusiness which will make you much easier to find.

4. Keep up with developments in your sector

Google+ is growing rapidly!

There’s still no word on exactly when Google+ business profiles will be available (all they’re saying is it’s “close”!), but it looks increasingly likely that  Google+ will play an important role in social media marketing. It is being reported that Google+ has reached 50 million users in less than 10% of the time it took other major social media platforms to do so. That means that since being opened to the general public (over age 18) last week, Google+ has been growing by at least 4% per day, meaning that around 2 million new users have been signing up each day.Once the business profiles are released, companies will be able to create pages and circles and have access to the newly announced feature that allows users to share their Google+ circles.

Is Google+ trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter?

I don’t think so, not directly anyway. As Google+ develops it seems increasingly clear that the emphasis is less on creating yet another social network and more about socially enhancing use of the web. Eventually everyone will need a Google+ account because it’s more or less impossible to use the internet without using Google owned sites, but what Google+ does is different to what Facebook and Twitter do.

The main distinction from Facebook is Google+ hangouts. Businesses will be able to host hangouts with fans / customers and then broadcast them via YouTube. Google+ also potentially offers businesses a safe place to test new ideas, trying them out on small circles of fans before pushing a new idea / product to their entire customer base.

The +1 button is going to be HUGE for businesses. If you own a brand page and use +1 buttons on other sites you own, you can create links between them to show that they are official and improve search rankings. +1 buttons will appear on all ads within the Google Display Network; +1ing them will count towards the final landing URL. Google ads will be more relevant than ever as they will be based on their friends’ +1s and ad clicks.

Through integration of +1, Circles,  and other Google+ functionality with their Chrome browser, Android phones and tablets, Gmail, Google Reader, Blogger, Google Photos, and other properties, Google will be giving over a billion web users repeated chances to sign up for and use the functionality of Google+.

Running competitions as a business or brand on Google+ will be pretty straightforward unless they are using them to try and gain +1s on their content (in order to improve search rankings), so campaigns will have to be a bit different to the all-too-common ‘like us on Facebook to win…’ style competitions! One thing brands will be able to do is use inclusion in Circles as a contest incentive.

Circles are now shareable

A few changes have been made to circles (a feature that allows users to split up their contacts into groups), allowing greater manipulation of those groups of contacts, most interestingly the option to share them.

You can find this new feature in the ‘Circles’ menu – click on the circle you want to share, select the “share this circle” option, then choose who you want to share it with. Circles can be shared with individuals, other circles, or publicly. Sharing circles will reveal who is in the circle, but the name of the circle is not shared (nor are any subsequent updates).

The feature will help users share topic-based circles, allowing friends and other contacts to benefit from the contact hunting and circle curation they’ve already done. Circles will be very helpful for businesses as it will enable them to segment their customers into different circles and push tailored messages to different groups through targeted sharing e.g. one circle for people who are only really interested in your customer service (i.e. they want to complain all the time!) and another circle for those who genuinely want to interact with your brand.

Below is a summary of a few of the key messages from the day:

• The only thing that will be constant with Facebook is change – it is always evolving.

• Facebook view themselves as complimenting traditional advertising rather than replacing it.
• Facebook adverts are not effective display advertising, nor are they supposed to be.  Rather, they’ve been designed with the intention of driving traffic to Facebook pages. Facebook ads should thus be understood not as experiences in and of themselves, but as invites to an experience.
• Brands should focus as much on using the social graph to push Facebook into their website as they do on pulling their website into Facebook, giving users a more contextual experience.
• The most effective Facebook campaigns are “social by design” (i.e. designed to be social right from the start, rather than adapted to social media later)

Perhaps the most important message of the day was this: Brands should not make the mistake of focusing only on their fans – they should also be thinking about the friends of their fans. For example, the Volkswagen UK Facebook page has over 47,000 fans, but those fans have nearly 9 million friends. As any marketer will tell you, word of mouth is one of the best kinds of marketing. Today however, conversations that used to happen offline now happen online. Billions of stories are shared on Facebook every day, many of which are about brands and businesses. These drive word of mouth and are extremely effective in engaging other potential customers. The most successful social media professionals will be those that help their clients create and amplify stories about their business / brand, through use of sponsored stories for example.

You can  find out more about the conference here and access some of the presentations here.