The cast of “The Game.”

The Hollywood Reporter got an exclusive this week: BET is being sued by a fan of one of its shows, The Game, over a Facebook fan page.

Stacey Mattocks was an avid viewer of the hit show The Game back in the days when it was on The CW. It has since been cancelled by that network and picked up by BET.

In 2008, Mattocks created a Facebook fan page that went on to reach 750,000 “likes” by the time BET decided to bring the show back to life. With Mattocks building buzz for the program in the lead up to its January 2011 re-debut, The Game premiered on BET with 7.7 million viewers, the second highest number in the network’s history. The Facebook page, at one point, was gaining 100,000 “likes” per week.

“Therefore, on December 15, 2010, BET submitted a proposed contract to Mattocks that would have paid her a maximum of $85,000.00 over a one year period,” the lawsuit claims. “Mattocks declined this offer because it was unreasonably low, would have stripped her of all rights to the FB Page, and, moreover, could have been terminated at any point by BET, with or without cause.”

After maintaining it for years, Mattocks’ Facebook page for The Game had 3.3 million fans.

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In case you never watched Dudley Do-Right as a kid, we’ll let you in on a little secret: things are different in Canada. For instance, McDonald’s Ontario recently added the McLobster to its menu. Let that one sink in for a minute.

Why do we mention our great white neighbor to the north? Because Canada has given us Jim Carrey, Rick Moranis, at least one member of Arcade Fire, and this week’s best case study in proactive social media PR!

This isn’t just social media community managers tweeting “We’re sorry for your experience, customer X. Please email us at LikeWeCare@yahoo.com for more info!” McDC promises to answer any consumer’s question—as long as he or she connects on Twitter or Facebook first. Crafty!

So how does this project work?

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Facebook vowed to crack down on offensive content on its site back in May after multiple advertisers — including auto giant Nissan — pulled their ads from the social networking site. At the time, Facebook was facing protests from social activist groups — especially those associated with gender equality — due to the company’s failure to remove pages dedicated to gender-based hate speech and misogynistic content.

In May, Facebook said of the issue,”…it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want.  In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria.”

The company promised that it would take steps to improve, like reviewing and updating guidelines, updating training for its review teams, increasing accountability for creators of harmful content, and establishing more formal and direct lines of communication between itself and rights groups.

Now, Facebook is taking it a step further; the company has declared that, beginning this week, it will remove ads on pages that contain “any violent, graphic or sexual content.” In other words, even though certain pages may not technically violate Facebook’s community standards policies — and therefore cannot be forcibly taken down — the social network will remove advertising from pages that it deems offensive or controversial. Read more

Facebook has vowed to take action after feminist activists — upset about Facebook’s failure to ban and/or remove misogynous content from its site — sent more than 5,000 e-mails to Facebook’s advertisers and garnered more than 60,000 posts on Twitter, prompting advertisers like Nissan to say that they would withdraw advertising from the site.

Although women’s groups have complained to Facebook about misogynous content in the past, the issue heated up least week when a collective led by Women, Action and the Media; Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project; and Soraya Chemaly, a writer and activist, published an open letter asking Facebook executives to “ban gender-based hate speech on your site.” The letter cited Facebook pages with names like “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs”, “Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich,” and other pages that featured graphic descriptions and imagery of women being abused.

In what could prove an industry-wide reminder of the power of advertisers (which actually demonstrates the power of consumers), over a dozen of the companies contacted by the activists — including automotive giant Nissan — agreed to pull their ads from Facebook until appropriate action was taken to rectify the situation. David Reuter, a spokesman for Nissan, said on Tuesday that his company has stopped all Nissan advertising on Facebook until it can be sure its ads will not appear on pages with offensive content.

“We thought that advertisers would be the most effective way of getting Facebook’s attention,” said Jaclyn Friedman, the executive director of Women, Action and the Media. “We had no idea that it would blow up this big. I think people have been frustrated with this issue for so long and feeling like that had no way for Facebook to pay attention to them. As consumers we do have a lot of power.”

In response to the upheaval, Facebook published a blog post on Tuesday, admitting its own shortcomings and laying out a plan for improvement. The post read in part:

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At some point, back-peddling is no longer a viable damage control option. We’d say that point comes somewhere between screaming obscenities in all caps at critics via Facebook, and hurling vague threats while claiming to be a superhero backed by God himself.

Yeah, that happened.

After Gordon Ramsay of reality show “Kitchen Nightmares” declared Arizona restaurant Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro so horrible that even he couldn’t help the owners rescue their establishment, those owners, Amy and Sammy, took to social media to bite back at critics. Here are a few of the most…um…interesting Facebook posts (if you’re offended by the F word, you should probably stop reading):

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Every brand on Earth is chomping at the bit to place official ads on the rapidly growing Instagram, but parent company Facebook continues to proceed with extreme caution.

While Mark Zuckerberg says he is very encouraged by the expansion of the image-sharing network, he clearly does not plan to open the commercial floodgates until he’s good and ready. In his own words, Instagram must first focus on “build[ing] community” before determining how best to use its considerable potential as an ad/marketing forum. We can see why Zuckerberg prefers to take low-risk baby steps, no matter how impatient advertisers may be.

In the meantime, brands and their social media teams should be quite happy to learn that they do have more promotional options on Instagram thanks to the newly introduced function “photos of you,” which allows users to tag any other existing account—be it a friend, a celebrity, a local business, or a big-name brand—in their own pics. Amateur lensmen and brand managers alike will receive notifications when others tag them, and they can then choose whether to display these images on their own public feeds.

Can you say “pre-approved user generated content?”

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Ever feel like you’re living in The Truman Show and every ad you see is geared directly at you? While we know that this is becoming more and more true with targeted online ads, it still never fails to freak me out when I am merrily going about my business, and suddenly the promoted tweet at the top of my feed is for something I desperately need at that very moment.

As a lifelong migraine-sufferer, a recent tweet from Excedrin had me looking over my shoulder for the candid camera.

Knowing I had a headache coming on, I decided to get all of my computer-related work out of the way. When I logged into Twitter, the first thing I saw was this:

Vote for “Who Deserves Excedrin the Most?” Sweepstakes on Facebook and enter to win great prizes. Rules apply. #WDETM on.fb.me/YkP8hD

— Excedrin® (@Excedrin) April 17, 2013

“Me,” I thought, “done deal.” But then, in my migraine-induced half-conscious brain fog, I began to over-analyze Excedrin’s question. Why vote for who is most deserving? Sweet merciful heaven, is there a shortage and this is their way of rationing? Or, even worse, is this some sort of Joker-style social experiment to expose the dark underbelly of our society that would label certain people undeserving of pain relief? Fortunately, it was at this point that the rational, as-of-yet-unaffected-by-migraine part of my brain told me it was time to go to bed. 

Once I had emerged from my twelve-hour headache hibernation, I decided to check out (with a clear mind) how migraines could be made into a sweepstakes. Read more

Calm down, everyone: Facebook will not provide you with a shiny blue smartphone. What it will do is take over the phone you’d planned to buy next month. Today’s Zuckerberg press conference served as the launch of the new “Facebook Home”, a sort of app cluster that will dominate a specially designed HTC Android phone. Facebook doesn’t want to create your mobile phone — it wants to become your mobile phone. Zuck called Home “the best version of Facebook there is”, and the company debuted this promo spot:

Looks…cool. But what does it mean?

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A while ago we posted on how Facebook‘s newfangled “graph search” setup could help PR pros and marketers more effectively push their clients’ content to the general public and conduct market research. But here’s something we never thought about: what if graph search could double as a media contact database?

We recently spoke to Peter Axtman of Sunshine Sachs to learn how he used graph search to score a big PR win for a client with a very specific target audience.

Axtman was working to promote a client called Playground Sessions, an instructional app-maker that is “like Rosetta Stone for piano”. Axtman told us that, though the client had received some “mainstream tech coverage“, he “wanted to talk to niche piano publications” that might appeal more explicitly to the client’s target audience — people interested in learning to play piano or improve their form without in-person training.

So he turned to graph search with surprising (and encouraging) results.

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Today in Classic PR Infighting news: we’ve all heard of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg‘s book Lean In, which is all about how women need to assert themselves more aggressively in the workplace.

Of course Sandberg’s been making the media rounds to promote the book. This week Kate Losse, an early Facebook employee who once wrote speeches for Mark Zuckerberg and published a memoir about her experience there, posted a critical review of the book in Dissent magazine.

Here’s how current Sandberg rep and former Facebook PR chief/Losse coworker Brandee Barker responded:

Wow. twitter.com/fake_train/sta…

— kate losse (@fake_train) March 27, 2013

Alright then!

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