Can someone from the Marketo product team explain the language included with the social button disclaimer text?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Some of us have opted for the social boost add-on in our subscription.  Due to the fact that there has been no innovation or new features added for years, we're probably going to cancel this when our contract is up for renewal in August.  One of the other turn-offs of this is the disclaimer window that pops up when someone wants to share content/landing page.  As a user, I would not allow a company to update my profile or follow new users on my behalf.  In fact, I question if Marketo can even do this.  And if so, why is it even included among the language in the disclaimer:

Can someone from the Marketo product team please chime in here?  I'd really like to see this page modified that doesn't scare the pants of our users.

I understand the reasoning behind having some sort of disclaimer (so that enhanced tracking capabilities can be included in Marketo).  But IMO, this is too excessive and probably why there's so few customers that actually use the social boost add-on.  Only one person I talked to at Summit uses it - and that's Grégoire Michel

[Grégoire_Miche2]

In fact, we made a very long trial of the feature on our blog, and the results are not good: 0.02% of share rate!!

The sharing rate as dropped to almost 0 since we use it, and when we interrogate the customers, this is mostly because of the disclaimer. Someone who navigates on our blog does not necessarily know who Marketo is and would certainly not agree to share his private data with Marketo, not knowing what they would do with it.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

In terms of the Marketo branding on the disclaimer page, Marketo does offer - for a fee - the ability to create a custom, branded page with your logo, company name, etc.  But even for well-known brands, I, as a user, would never allow someone to updated my social profile or follow new people.  That's something that is done be me.  I'd like to know the use-case of this that requires Marketo to even include this language here.  Here's an idea I submitted to get it removed:

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Voted

[Grégoire_Miche2]

In fact, this seem to be a message from Twitter, not from Marketo...

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Right, but it's based on the type of access Marketo has requested Twitter to provide to Marketo.  I've seen much tamer requests in other scenarios - such as "This application will be able to read tweets from your timeline and post tweets for you".  And that's it.

[Justin_Cooperm2 · Accepted solution]

I can explain this very easily:

Twitter only allows developers to declare one of three access levels for a 3rd party app:

• Read Only
• Read & Write
• Read & Write + Access DMs

You'll see that Marketo Social requests access to Read & Write, so that sharing can be done. There is no way for a 3rd party app to specify more granular permissions in Twitter.

In fact, read this post from Twitter dev forums from someone with very similar concerns, then see Twitter's official response in the thread:

More granular permission model - Fabric - Twitter Developers

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hey Justin - thanks for clarifying this. That's helpful.  Just out of curiosity, why doesn't the basic social toolbar require this disclaimer?  Is it because it's just posting to the users' account and not doing the enhanced tracking?  But even that toolbar is writing tweets to the users' account. What other "writing" is Marketo doing with the social boost toolbar?

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Yeah, the basic social bar just uses the "Twitter for Websites" API. It doesn't require OAuth authentication because Marketo isn't involved in any part of that flow other than pre-filling the textbox. Some of the other toolbars will show if you've already shared content on a landing page, that's not possible without being authenticated. Similarly, some of the social components (like sweepstakes and referral offer) may require tracking the individuals who actually interacted with that button (for example tracking progress on referral offers). This is why sometimes we need more capabilities than just basic posting.