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Social Media Best Practices (and some other good ones, too)

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Poster with a womans cleavage and a padlock holding her shirt closed and the caption says NSFW modeThe ASACP just released their Social Media Best Practices to help guide those of us in adult entertainment to make sure that children are not accessing unsuitable material. It is not just children we are protecting.  If someone accesses inappropriate material at work, they could get fired.

A friend of mine once bought a DVD boxed set of B movies from the 60’s and 70’s.  During holiday celebrations, he popped in the first disc to sit down and watch one with his entire family. His parents, brother and sister-in-law, nieces, nephews and daughter were all there.  When the movie came on, he realized that this was an old porn.  Whoops.

Social media is trying to help insure that you know what you are about to see, so you can make sure that you are in the right place at the right time, and not “accidentally” stumbling across anything inappropriate.

Listen to Joan Irvine talk about Social Media Best Practices in her blog radio interview on Sin 2.0.

Social Media Best Practices

  • Label all sexually explicit ‘social media content postings’, including but not limited to: text, video, audio, images or widgets enabling any software functionality.
  • All social media content postings should indicate “Age-Restricted” or “Sexually Explicit” based on the content.
  • When you direct people to age-restricted content or commerce on or from online social networks & mobile devices, ensure that all of your social media and mobile pages from blogs, ads and e-commerce tools to videos, fan pages, apps and widgets are labeled with the Restricted to Adults – RTA website label (http://rtalabel.org).

Additional Good Practices

  • label your tweets or posts with #nsfw (not safe for work)
  • Make sure that you have a landing page that is not explicit, that lets people know they are about to enter an explicit website.
  • Set an age limit of 18+ on your Facebook fan page
  • If you have a Facebook profile, create a group for your explicit postings and restrict all explicit talk and postings to the group. Make sure to make your group private.

Let us know if you have any other good practices to add to the list!

My what a sexy font you have…

Fonts are the voice of your website.  They reveal your personality, or the personality of your site.  Your font needs to match the topic, content and feel of your site. So what is your font personality? Sexy, playful, provocative? Mysterious, classic, cold or impersonal? Mature or immature?

Fonts are the stepchildren of web design. When you create a blogsite (which I recommend over a regular website) you primarily focus on graphic design. How does it look?  Do the colors go nicely together?  Do your sidebars look cool? Does your home page grab you?  Font is usually a secondary or tertiary consideration. Often it is not even a conscious decision; people will just accept whatever the default font is.  There are people in typography who feel that your choice of font is a representation of your personality.  I wouldn’t go that far, but your font does send a message.

“Typefaces are the clothes words wear, and just as we make judgments about people by the clothes they wear, so we make judgments about the information we’re reading by the typefaces,” typography analyst Caroline Arche

Size Matters

Size does matter when it comes to fonts.  A smaller font conveys power and authority. A large font indicates immaturity. So in general smaller is better, unless it is too small to read.

Font Type

The type of font you choose sends a message.  Professional but traditional? Use Times.  Professional but contemporary? Use Verdana. Courier New says cold and unfeeling. Times New Roman is a good compromise between traditional and modern and generates feelings of trustworthiness. If you want something flirty and fun, then pick something with big circular O’s and swooping lines.

“Courier is the sensible shoes of Fonts.”

Font Color

The color of your font is extremely important, especially in relation to your background.  How many times have you gone to a page and had trouble reading the writing because of the font color?  People may have difficulties reading what you write because of vision issues,migraines, or forms of color blindness.  But if someone is struggling with reading what you wrote because they cannot see it easily, they will not stay on your page.

  • Do not place small white text on black backgrounds. It is visually very difficult to read.  The letters blur together and become indistinguishable, or seemingly move around. (This is one time where larger font size is better).
  • Red text on a yellow background is like a seizure for the eyes. It actually creates a holographic effect.
  • Blue text on green background or green on blue background should be avoided.  Often the words will just melt into the background and some people won’t be able to see them at all.

a block of white text on a black background showing how white text is hard to read

A demonstration of how white text is hard to read

The best font to use is black text on a white, light gray, light cream or light tan background.  It is the easiest to read.  Ultimately it is most important to make sure people can read what you write, then consider what your font says about your web presence personality.

Hashtags: #fonts #typeface #blog