Collective Thoughts

Social Media Without “The Man”

This post is inspired by Dave Gorman the UK comedian who is known in the UK for looking for other Dave Gormans amongst others and in America as the stats guy who occasionally appears on the Daily Show. Dave Gorman was recently featured in a TV show where he traveled across America only to make it far more fun he choose to travel without giving any money to “The Man”. “The Man” is the large faceless corporations that seem to be pandemic across the western world from Starbucks to Wal-Mart to IBM “The Man” is everywhere. If you haven’t seen the film or read the book go do so now!

So can you market a site without “The Man”?

Dave was on Radio 2 the other day (yes I am an old fart) promoting his book and he got me thinking with Tad’s ranting on Google doubled with people’s general dislike of corporations is it possible today to market your site without the aid of these large groups.
Well, let’s find out!

Domain names and websites

It’s actual impossible to create and market a website without giving to the man. Since the domain registration system is run by a large corporation and while ICANN the global governing body is a non-profit corporation in the US nearly every national registrar is a faceless corporation. However all is not lost and with a quick tweaking of the rules finding a mom and pop registrar which is reselling a big boy is possible. Hosting its still possible to find small hosting centres just remember to avoid the big boys 1&1, Pipex, etc.
Obviously the site itself can be hosted on good Linux systems and open source software, just remember to avoid Fedora (RedHat) and SUSE (Novell) one thing you might have not thought about your Feedburner, and Google Analytics will have to be put to one side.

Search Engines

Sorry these are all out, at least the big 3 indeed to be truthful to the goal we probably need to block them totally so out with your robots.txt file.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Disallow: /

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Without search engine traffic we will have to rely on other forms of advertising the obvious answer is social media!

No StumbleUpon

Sacrilege I know but life without the man includes life without StumbleUpon which of course is owned by Ebay it also means life with out PayPal again an Ebay company. Interestingly a quick search for ways to stop people sending traffic from StumbleUpon returned virtually no results but fear not we can use HTACCESS to send this unwanted traffic away.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (stumbleupon.com) [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.stumbleupon.com  [R,L,NC]

Ok that’s sorted the StumbleUpon traffic it’s now being sent back to StumbleUpon of course thinking with our marketing head we perhaps would want to send it to a page explaining the idea of not getting traffic from “The Man” and with a link for them to find their way back!

Digg

Tricky one this is Digg owned by the man? I think not so it’s safe to market their maybe an article on how to block the evil corporations and “The Man” would go down well just a thought.

Propeller

No chance with it’s Netscape, AOL, Time Warner, Google owners this is clearly the sort of corporation we are looking to avoid so no Propeller traffic once again we will want to redirect users. Normally we would have to come up with some complex strategy to still gain benefits from these links to help our search engine strategy but for once this is not an issue as we blocked them at the start.

Myspace/FaceBook

Sorry News corp but you are the sort of people we want to avoid as for Facebook with a turnover of $15 billion according to Wall Street Journal and with investments from Microsoft and at least 3 major Venture Capital groups looks like your out to.
Looks like the man is pretty widespread but let’s not despair all is not lost we live in the age of web 2 where every kid and his programmer have an idea and the number of start-ups are immense it is still pretty easy to drive some traffic without going to the big corporations.

But why do it?

We are creatures of habit it is worth looking at other sources simply to have a backup strategy it’s also good to support new ideas what is new today may well be the norm tomorrow so it’s better to be in on the ground floor.
But the spirit of independent entrepreneur is being eroded once it was about coming up with a great idea marketing it and amazing people. Now its come up with a concept, get large venture capital company to fund your lunches with Google’s reps.

The next step

First off all I am not advocating giving up traffic sources, or blocking Google on your sites but I am passionate about supporting the little guys who are just like me. So I do plan on setting up a “Man” free site with the whole purpose of finding new traffic methods and ideas.

If you got any ideas or if you think that I was being lenient by claiming Digg was not “The Man” why don’t you let me know below!

p.s Dave Gorman book and DVD is available from his site and Good retailers as is his GoogleWhack stage show DVD (Not suitable for children) if you take nothing from this post go read the books and watch the DVDs!

Posted in Rants, social media | 10 Comments »

Can You Take a Vacation From Social Media?

Why haven’t you frontpaged yet? I want to go for a swim already.

The short answer: no.

The longer answer:
So I’ve been out for most of the week on vacation. Which got me to thinking - can you really take a vacation from social media?
I mean, how can you expose yourself to risking all those great tech/news nuggets like Wordpress 2.5 Release Candidate?
Once you have social media in your system, it’s hard to step away from all those RSS feeds and social sites.

Especially when most hotels have free wifi (in the USA anyway, thanks for pointing this out, Tim). They’re in on it too. A hotel employee actually asked me if I had wireless, which was pretty amusing. In any case, it’s important to break away from social media from time to time.

Perhaps we take ourselves too seriously in social media. We blog, podcast, Twitter, lifestream, RSS, aggregate, rant, and vote. Does the “outside world” think we are nuts? Probably.

Are we the news source? We break the news. Sometimes we even make the news. Trying to separate the signal from of the noise isn’t easy, and this is what we are tasked to do.  So I ask you again, are we the bloggers, the real news source?

All told, it’s good to be back… even though I never really left

Posted in Rants, social media | 5 Comments »

Top 12 Reasons to Distrust Google

Do you use Google? Do you think they are nice and friendly? Do you assume that what is good for Google is good for humanity as a whole? I don’t. Here is why: The top 12 reasons to distrust Google.

1. Google supports and implements censorship measures in nondemocratic countries like China
2. Google search is almost a monopoly in some countries, it already is one in others (in Germany more than 90% market share)
3. Google records and collects all your personal and private data about you and your interests, you might think twice what you search for in future
4. Google earns huge money off splogs (Spam blogs) and MFA (made for Adsense) sites with no real content
5. Google employs students to manually clean up the search results, they will kick out sites they might deem spammy even if they’re not
6. Google is literally a black box company and accountable to nobody, we simply don’t know how exactly they manage our most precious asset: the knowledge of humanity
7. Google does not communicate it’s most controversial policy officially but via the private blog of a cat lover
8. Google owns one of the biggest US SEO companies, now isn’t that a conflict of interest?
9. Google will disclose your private data or IP to identify you even to authorities of non-democratic countries or in cases where people are guilty of free speech
10. Google is one of the biggest multinational corporations along with the likes of WalMart and Exxon, it’s owners are two of the richest capitalist on earth
11. Google discontinues services like Google Answers or the Google API without prior notice to it’s employees who are then laid off
12. Google uses the same rhetoric as the Bush administration: We’re not evil, (the other are)

Now think twice if you as a netizen and/or webmaster want to rely solely on Google products and traffic. Why not instead look out for some alternatives? People, let’s unite for a more social and democratic media. Don’t trust robots, trust humans.

I am Tad Chef and I will enable you to venture beyond Google on my SEO 2.0 blog.

Posted in Rants | 24 Comments »

Justice Reigns: Stumble Troll BANNED by SU

Today aimClear contacted the FBI regarding StumbleUpon cyber-harassment incidents, as they deal with Internet harassment. Justice Rules. We got one of the worst StumbleTrolls BANNED by complaining to SU.

Over the last few weeks, there’s been quite a sequence of exchanges between Internet Marketing types and StumbleTrolls.

A StumbleTroll is a social media dreg that follows authentic people around with death slogans and pseudo neo-Nazi meanderings of hate, evil, and terrible poetry. (more…)

Posted in Rants | 45 Comments »

Gilded Crown of the Hypocritical Social Media Czar

<rant> The sheer propensity of mainstream humans to congregate in targetable, virulent, and roaming electronic social packs has resulted in spawning a beautiful new breed of working class public relations heroes: “The Social Media Czars.”

A social media Czar is a true, brilliant, and presumably selfless influencer whose authority was born out of peoples’ revolt, acute intuition, and holistic intent. Nobody questions him or her. Nobody would dare question them. The problem is that some (not all) social media power brokers are mob-bred mercenaries who are at least partially full of shit. (more…)

Posted in Rants, social media | 12 Comments »