For alcohol brands, social media a stiff cocktail

Namely, the Corning, N.Y.-based tourism group's account on the location-sharing social-media site was doing something funny: It was triggering friend requests. That's not supposed to happen with a Foursquare account that's set up as a brand or business page--users should be able to automatically follow the brand or company, rather than having to wait to have their requests approved individually, as would be the case with a regular personal profile. The switch seemed to indicate that Finger Lakes Wine Country's brand page had been, in effect, demoted.

"My office manager, who handles all of our general e-mail inquiries, said, 'Has there been a change to our Foursquare page? All of a sudden I'm getting all these friend requests'," related Morgen McLaughlin, the president of the tourism group. "Then we received an e-mail from Foursquare that they had suspended the account because of the alcohol content."

When some of the trendiest destinations for digital brand marketing and advertising are small social networks with limited resources, brands in restricted sectors like the alcohol industry--and those that might be on the periphery of it--start to run into these kinds of problems. Foursquare built a name for itself as a way for nightlife-happy 20-somethings to "check in" to bars in cities and let their friends know where they were throwing back brews. But because Foursquare does not at present have technology in place to effectively verify users' ages, alcohol-related brands are currently barred from participating in its brand pages program.

Twitter, too, has been hesitant to permit the promotion or inclusion of alcohol in its Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends ad program, excluding them from it at first and now cautiously allowing a few very large companies. (It should be noted that Promoted Products are still restricted overall to a few hundred brands. None of the alcohol brands that have been permitted access have bought Twitter ads yet, according to a company spokesman.)

Finger Lakes Wine Country managed to contact Foursquare to resolve the problem, and after explaining that it was a tourist group rather than an organization that actually sells wine, its brand page was reinstated. McLaughlin says she can see where Foursquare was coming from. "It absolutely makes sense, especially when you're talking about specific businesses that sell and market alcohol. So, yeah, a winery should have its page restricted. Thirteen-year-olds or 15-year-olds probably shouldn't be thinking about wineries and breweries," she told CNET. "We're not a wine marketing company, per se, we're a destination, and so for some people, especially in legal, that becomes a very hard point of definition."

Social-media companies like Foursquare do, of course, ask for users' ages and can theoretically use that to gauge which users are of legal drinking age. But it's not that easy, explains Ted Zeller, an attorney with law firm Norris McLaughlin and Marcus, P.A. who specializes in alcohol beverage law. "If you're an alcohol brand, I know of no federal Internet law restrictions as far as advertisements go--the same would be applicable to TV advertisements," Zeller said. "The problems that you run into are more state-based regulations."

A few states, like Utah and Pennsylvania--where Zeller, who has represented the Yuengling brewing company in court, is based--have extremely stringent regulations that extend all the way up the alcohol industry's chain of command from wholesalers to consumer marketing. Foursquare's hurdle here would be that it would either need to abide by different laws for different states, or put in place overarching age verification and advertising regulations that adhere to even the strictest state laws. "That's the difficulty," Zeller said. "It's a tremendous hurdle from a legal perspective."

The irony is that social media, given the vast amount of personal information that users are prone to entering into profiles, ought to make things easier for an industry that needs to carefully target its advertising and marketing based on legal restrictions. But that information can be so vast and unverifiable, and a social-networking site's reach so global, that it can instead get even more complex. Geolocation services like Foursquare, where an essential part of the experience is moving from place to place, crossing state or even international boundaries in the process, brings a whole new piece to the puzzle. In comparison, traditional advertisements--TV ads distributed based on a static television market, ensuring that billboard ads are kept the required distance from churches or schools based on state laws--seem far simpler.

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Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos