I guess I should start out by saying I was never really a Twitter addict; I was never one of those individuals that had to tweet every little thing or just take a peek at the Twitter stream every five minutes (though for a short time there my girlfriend might beg to differ). I was and continue to be fascinated by Twitter, but I’ve noticed that in the last several months that fascination is waning.
It has slowly begun to dawn on me that many of the folks I have, for some reason or other chosen to follow, are really just spewing useless crap that a) I care nothing about whatsoever, or b) has no bearing on my life or interests, or c) simply don’t understand because I really have no context. This has slowly led to an increased disinterest in even checking in on Twitter, and it’s got me to thinking about why I even use Twitter in the first place.
Twitter seems like the Michael Jackson of social media sometimes. Everyone likes it, but secretly harbors some doubts about its inherent goodness. It’s the thing that everyone in the know does, but no one seems to know why really.
Perhaps I’ve missed the boat, or I’m simply not smart enough to get it, but it seems that Twitter has become clogged with an incessant stream of marketing blurbs, product plugs, and self-serving conversations between a constantly shifting set of people one could call the ‘twitterati’. The alleged ‘in crowd’ of Twitter, the super-users, those that sit slightly above us mere mortals who can inspire interest in a random subject or product with just a few timely words. Social media noise. If Twitter were email, we’d call it spam.
But I’ve been asking myself lately: Why? Why are we listening to these people? Why do we care what they say, seemingly hanging on every word? Do they have their fingers so unerringly on the pulse of technology that they have elevated themselves to the status of today’s oracles? I don’t know, I really don’t.
I’m not mentioning any names here, and I’m not going to paste any tweets I feel might be relevant to my little rant, mainly because I have nothing personal against the individuals I have in mind, and hell, I even enjoy some of their social media antics at times, but I seem to have come to a point in my life that surely we must all come to in our increasingly digital culture: that is, how much of this massive fire hose of information is actual useful, or even truly interesting and beneficial to my life?
Alright, I will point to one example that perfectly demonstrates my point. Apparently, singer/songwriter(and I use that term loosely) John Mayer recently caused a stir by saying Twitter was dead.
OMG! NO!
Yes, it’s true. But my immediate question, regardless of my opinion of his ‘work’, is why should we care what he thinks? And does it bother anybody else that he went on to throw his hat into the ring for a different social media platform, Tumblr? Kanye West also just decided to join Twitter after disparaging it in one of his many useless . Again, who cares?
I don’t. And I don’t care about your new widget, or your new fool-proof method of making widgets which will subsequently make me rich beyond my wildest dreams, or how I can attract thousands of followers to my blog in 48 hours using your simple eight step method. Maybe I’ve just made some bad decisions on who to follow…
How did I come to follow some of these people anyway? Was it because I read somewhere that I should be following them? Were they supposed to be ‘gurus’? I’ll permanently pull the plug on my internet connection the day John Mayer becomes a guru of anything, much less social media. I’ve tried to the follow the pack in the past, but it’s usually left me stumbling along side the road racing to catch up, wondering where I went wrong. I guess this time, as the dust settles about me, I’m wondering why I’m running in the first place.
If you’re a business that’s just starting out then chances are you’re not going to have a particularly large budget for your marketing and public relations efforts. A dedicated PR team and advertising campaigns for TV, radio and print are more than likely going to be outside of your reach.
Thanks to the wonders of Web 2.0, though, a small budget is no longer a barrier to promoting your business worldwide, if you know how to harness the power of online marketing and social media.
There are a number of benefits to using an online marketing campaign, and chief among these is lower costs – for starters, it’ll cost you absolutely nothing to set up an account with Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/Bebo and start communicating directly with consumers.
For Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns you can set a nominal budget each month, say $10, and then review the results at the end of each month and dedicate more or less money to different search engines and keywords, depending on which ones are bringing you the best click-through rates.
Furthermore, with social media you can get directly to your target market. With a traditional advertising campaign you’re basically throwing your money and message into the air in the hope that it will land on the heads of a few interested parties. With social media, though, you can narrow your efforts down to the specific group of people who are interested in your product and then speak directly to them, one-on-one, which humanises your brand, engenders a sense of trust and community between the brand and the consumers, and provides you with direct feedback from the people who know best – your customers.
A common misconception is that a social media marketing campaign is only going to reach a narrow demographic of tech-savvy Gen X and Gen Y web geeks – yet nothing could be further from the truth. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of web users aged 40 and above who use social media is growing constantly, and research backs this up – a 2009 survey by Insidefacebook.com shows that 22% of registered users of Facebook were aged between 35 and 65, with the fastest growing demographic being women over 55.
It’s important, though, to make sure you’re targeting the right social media, especially when it comes to international campaigns. If you’re interested in reaching consumers in Japan, for instance, then it’s no good concentrating your efforts on Facebook because 80% of Japanese social media users are signed up with Mixi.jp, just as Xanga rules the roost in Hong Kong and Orkut in Brazil.
‘Crowdsourcing’ is another great development of Web 2.0 that can be used to commercial advantage. The concept basically does what it says on the tin – for those not in the know, it means to put out an open call to the lumpen mass of internet users to come together and assist with the completion of a project; think of Wikipedia as an archetypal crowdsourcing project. Crowdsourcing can be an extremely effective way to achieve a business goal or to increase your brand awareness – not to mention being cheap – and it’s a great way to get consumers directly involved with your brand.
For instance, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – the world’s largest open-access arts festival – recently ran a crowdsourcing project via Twitter to design their 2010 programme cover. Fans were encouraged to tweet their suggestions for illustrations to adorn the cover and selected suggestions were then drawn by a professional illustrator, whose work was streamed live online. The project was a great success in terms of both building hype about the 2010 Fringe and for strengthening the sense of community and crowd participation that is an essential ingredient of the Fringe’s success.
Lost in Translation?
In another example, Facebook crowdsourced the translation of their localized sites – over 300,000 users helped to translate content into 70 languages using the Facebook translation applications. However, crowdsourcing for technical work such as translation can have its pitfalls – by relying on anonymous internet users to provide and compile data, there is no quality assurance, and languages are particularly tricky beasts; they change constantly, evolving and morphing between regions and dialects, and the potential for error is great.
Getting the amorphous masses to translate your content for a web page or campaign may seem like a cheap and easy way to step over the language-hurdle, but how will you know precisely what your translated text is really saying? You don’t want to end up like Pepsi, whose Taiwanese translation of ‘Come alive with the Pepsi Generation’ came back as ‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead’, or chicken entrepreneur Frank Purdue, whose slogan ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’ turned up on Mexican billboards in translated into Spanish as ‘It takes a tough man to make a chicken aroused.’ Probably best to get a professional translator to either do your translation work from the start, or look over it before it goes out to the world, then.
For the savvy entrepreneur, the online realm has a wealth of ways to get your brand out there and to start connecting with the punters for minimal expense, and when used in combination with more traditional public relations strategies – such as press releases targeted at media sources – your company will be impossible to stop.
The Olympic television viewing activity, recorded by Nielsen, finds people are online while global events are broadcasted. Marketers may find it lucrative to engage their user base on social media networks during event broadcasts. I engaged communities prior and during the Super Bowl with a client microsite and had fantastic results.
You could see Neal interview some of the brightest minds on cyberspace including thought-leaders in social media marketing and search engine optimization on nealrodriguez.com where he offers his own social media and blog training program.
Building one’s network is no easy task. I cannot stress this enough: you must love what you do in order to make that work. If you don’t, you really should have someone doing it for you. There are different ways of networking: some prefer pure online interactions, others like to meet in person at events, small group/one-on-one meetings – really a mix of all of these should get you the furthest toward your goals.
Something I don’t like about networking meetings in particular is the superficiality of it all. Your goal in life isn’t just to accumulate business cards – business cards are crap.
It takes a while to really get to know your connections well. And after a while, it is difficult to keep up with too many people simultaneously. The famed Dunbar Number holds that a typical person cannot hold together over 150 connections. So, it is inevitable while you are making connections, you are losing some as well. Pretty self-defeating, isn’t it? Fear not, dear reader, for I have a solution for you. (more…)
Internet radio has been around for some time now–at least since the mid nineties actually (earlier, if you count it’s infancy)–and it has most certainly evolved from those early days of streaming into the smooth and ubiquitous service that we take for granted today. Odds are you have used, or use, streaming audio and/or video and haven’t really given it a second thought. That’s good, and once again we have social media to thank for changing the nature of the game even here. Enter social music. Internet radio with a healthy social networking aspect thrown in. A great way to listen to a giant, 64 oz. variety gulp of music and share it with your friends, and family, or the world. All this and no commercials to boot, what more can you ask for?
Lack of choice never seems to be an issue with the internet and this is no exception if you’re looking to get your music fix online. We’re going to talk about an exemplar in the field and try to give you a rundown of the features, functions, and what there is to like or dislike about them. So, without further delay, let’s take a close look at Last.fm, one of the more popular social music sites out there and quite possibly the only social music source you’ll ever need.
I love Last.fm! However, one of the primary complaints about the site’s homepage is it’s busyness. This may be my only issue with the site, but wow, there’s is definitely an excess of information to digest here. Sure, this may be because there’s so much available music to listen to—which is in no way a bad thing—but there’s a screaming background that users are force-fed as well. You can’t miss it, trust me; it’s a vert for one of those reality cooking shows. It gets on my nerves. Perhaps I’m just sensitive and my distaste for reality shows is getting in the way. Who knows?
Social music sites like Last.fm allow you listen to ‘radio stations’ based on your favorite artists. Search for an artist, song, or album and Last.fm will create a station for you which will only feature music by, or similar, to the artist you were interested in. It’s a great way to expand your music vocabulary by finding music that matches your listening preferences. If you hear something you really love, you can favorite it and it will automatically be sent to your own personal music library; one which you can return to again and again. Tagging is also supported, which is helpful for locating a particular type of sound or music. Tagging also sends items to your library.
Last.fm seems to have quite an extensive music catalog and bio’s are available for many of the artists. I found the bio sections on a few of my favorite bands to be chock-full of information. There’s plenty more information to be had as well, on practically any artist you can think of. Last.fm sports a similar artists list which, as you can surmise, provides you with a list of artists that are in some way similar to whatever artist you were checking out to begin with; another way, aside from just sitting back and listening, to find music you’re sure to like.
You can even create playlists of your favorite songs (assuming the tracks are available in full length of course, and not every track is). While playing around—bad pun intended—I created a very short playlist of songs from a handful of my favorite artists, all of which I’ve saved in my library. I can go back and fire up my playlist anytime I’m not in the mood for the more wide-ranging music selection of a standard artist station.
Now let’s talk about the social aspect of Last.fm. Create a station and you can share it with your friends by emailing directly to their inboxes, post it directly to Facebook or Twitter, bookmark it on Delicious, or you can Digg it. Can you dig it? (Zing!) You can easily tell all your friends about the great band you just discovered, and in turn they might be able to direct you to another that Last.fm just might have missed. There are also groups you can join where you can interact with other users who share your music tastes by joining in on discussions and checking out the group lists. This is, in particular, yet another way to find even more music you’ll love by tapping into the crowd. I love Guster and there’s an active discussion going on in the group right now that asks, ‘If you like Guster, you’ll like…‘. It’s word of mouth times a gabillion.
Another particularly nice feature, and one that’s incredibly easy to use on Last.fm, is the option to purchase very nearly any track you hear. This process is so easy it hurts. Hear a song you like, click the Buy Track dropdown and then choose where to buy the track from: Amazon MP3, 7Digital, or iTunes. Prices are around the 99 cent mark, which is about what we’ve come to expect from other music sources.
That pretty much covers the basics. But, fair warning, Last.fm can be addicting–the more you use it, the better able it is to recommend music to you. Couple this with the fact that you can take your music tastes with you anywhere you can access the internets and you might just grow a third ear for music (I kill me, I really do).
Ncomment is back with his second installment of his WAR series. Reddit has invaded the world of Digg and sent Diggers into hiding to plan a revolution against the alien and robotic army of Reddit invaders. With division of Diggers at an all time high, the Reddit army was able to invade the Digg city and bring it to its knees in a single day.
Ncomment has been able to perfectly capture the political and social issues surrounding social media in his comics since the time they were first introduced. Somehow, he’s hit the nail on the head each time. If you look carefully at his comics, some things are subtle and others not-so-much. Not only does he capture social media issues, he also includes avatars and logos of well-known publications and social media users.
From TechCrunch Candy Bars, BuzzEdition Beer, The Drill Down Bilboards, Nowsourcing street signage, and The Huffington Post Copy Center, Ncomment has been spot-on. WAR part 2 is packed with social media references and well known sites. Mixx.com has become a refugee camp where Lt. General Panda has begun work on his ultimate weapon (powered by bacon) while the Social Blend news van is parked out front. We even get a look at the Holy Grail itself — the Digg algorithm.
So how does he do it? Ncomment applies one of the best known rules of the Internet, #32, “Lurk Moar.” And boy does he lurk. Only by doing so has he been able to capture the essence of social media so perfectly — its users. He engages them, gets to know them and then folds them perfectly into his comics. He even takes a stab at Ashton Kutcher and his Twitpics. No one is safe.
WAR Part 2 hit the Digg Front Page and was met by rave reviews of Diggers and Redditors alike.
“Best thing I have seen on Digg all week! LMAO!” says Digger Sexualwasabi.
“I saw this headline and I honestly thought, ‘please God let this be ncomment’ – very well done!” says Jaybol.
WAR Part 2 has been eagerly awaited by social media enthusiasts, more so than the New Moon movie by teenage girls. Ncomment delivers, and we can’t wait for Part 3.
A friend of mine in Social Media was checking out a site with me the other day and discovered the site had a forum. “Wow! A Forum!” he exclaimed, “That’s so 1999.” His comment made me realize that some people share his same mentality but yet, totally miss the point.
In my dealings in Social Media, and in the internet in general, I’ve noticed that forums still play a huge part in the realm we know as the internet. A ton of internet memes have started in forums and continue to be to this day. So why do people have the idea that a forum is “So 1999?”
Everyone is getting lost in other forms of communication on the internet. Not that using these new methods is the wrong thing to do at all, it’s not. I do feel people should take a step back and look at the big picture. Forums and boards have been around for a long time yes, but they still play a huge part in content delivery; some of that content delivery kept us “In the know” during the Iran protests. Secret forums were set up by the group we all know as Anonymous during the Iran protests. These forums hosted Iranian Government Proxy information so protesters on the ground could Tweet, Stream, upload, and blog in real time about what was happening there. During that time we all saw the carnage, the resolve, and the martyrs of the Iran protests, thanks to a forum.
One really cool forum I came across this week is MyBlogGuest, a community of guest bloggers. Now, I have to say, I was kicking myself for not thinking of this first. I ran across this site as a result of a Twitter Stream from Ann Smarty. To me this seemed like a really good use for a forum, so I joined up and noticed a lot of high-end blogs are signing up.
So if forums are so 1999, it seems 1999 put out a really good tool that year, a tool that in my view, we will keep using.
Don’t forget about your friends. It’s supposed to be social after all.
For any of you that have me on a variety of IM programs, you have no doubt noticed that I typically keep it on the “do not disturb” setting. This is usually because I’m busy most of the day and really cannot stop to chat.
But wait a minute. Isn’t social media supposed to be social?
Yes. Yes it is. The problem with social for some of us is that it so easily blends with work and play that we find much of our day kept up online.
You have also no doubt seen some of the sore spots opened up by the Businessweek article about being careful of social media snake oil. I found a follow up post on it from the Harvard Business Review and saw that a few of my social media friends had retweeted it.
Susan aka @buzzedition had retweeted it and it occurred to me that we hadn’t chatted in ages.
What’s the world coming to that you need to get your friend’s attention by retweeting them? Note that this wasn’t her goal – it was just good content to review and retweet.
It almost makes you miss the days when you didn’t feel the need to keep up with every tweet and micro instance of everyone’s day. To keep sanity, I try to remind myself that Twitter and other such social media outlets are a stream that I can enter and exit when it best fits my time budget.
How do you keep up with your social friends these days? Or, are your relationships deteriorating before you know it? Let us know.
As a known Social Media enthusiast, I’m privy to a ton of information. I stand on the sidelines of various Social Media realms and watch as drama unfolds. I find that it’s usually the best thing to do when two opposing forces in Social Media go head to head. It’s not that I’m disloyal, don’t get me wrong, but rather that I prefer to not get involved. “Jay not get involved? Since when is Jay a pacifist? I thought Jay was a Marine!” Well, yeah, I choose which battles to fight, especially when it comes to elite Diggers throwing down on each other.
I refuse to name names, that wouldn’t be classy of me. I am, however, going to give a run down on how the battle has been fought; it’s actually been quite interesting.
It all started with Google. Yeah, you heard right, Google. Google has been posting Sesame Street / Google Logos all week to celebrate Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary. As anyone who is an internet junkie knows, Google tends to do this sort of thing to celebrate milestones or holidays.
One Digger, with a good ratio I might add, had been placing these images on his site, and submitting the new image each day to Digg from his site. Another Digger saw it but had also submitted the image directly from Google. The first Digger (Digger A) cried Dupe! In doing so he went after the other Digger (Digger B) and reported the image to Digg. Well, things got real nasty.
Name calling ensued in a chat and before you know it Digger A got Digger B banned. A fine line was crossed in the whole ordeal. Digger A was posting the images on his site, some people calling him out for “Blogspam,” but he considered the images a place holder as Google would change them everyday. Digger B, being an old school Digger, had linked to the original source. Digger A did not care, he was mad over the whole dupe ordeal. Things escalated sverely after that.
With the banning of Digger B, being an old school Digger, things did not look well for the upstart. I even shot a friendly warning to Digger A. “Hey man, he is old school, watch your step, his loyalties run deep.” I guess my warning fell on deaf ears. The name calling and threats continued. Digger A then lashed out at other people in the chat who were making lighthearted jokes about the situation. With a line in the sand already drawn, my advice would have been not to upset everyone else.
Elsewhere, other old-school Diggers heard of Digger B’s banning at the hands of Digger A. Things do not look well for Digger A. Yesterday his account was banned from Digg, his site is under DDOS attack, a satire blog has been erected to forever mock him and a lot of people in the Social Media Community are upset with him.
You guys still with me on the whole A/B thing?
Many mistakes were made during this dis-agreement.
1. If you do have an issue with someone’s submission, especially a dupe, approach the individual who duped you. If the individual will not take down his submission, make a friendly game out of. (Okay, first one to the FP wins, loser buys a beer at next meet up.)
2. Social Media or Social News Sites are just that, Social! Play well with others. Do not soil your name and give yourself a bad reputation.
3. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Sound familiar? It should. Same rules apply to any war if you expect to win. If you do have a rival, find out his mistakes and exploit them if need be, but it must be done in a way that keeps you squeaky clean. Name calling and bashing only makes you look bad.
4. KNOW YOUR ENEMY! Good Intel is always key to winning any war. Know who is loyal to them and their amount of influence. Crossing one person could mean crossing more people than you realize.You must also know the level of your rivals technical skill — there are a lot of good hackers out there. Do your homework!
5. Be prepared to defend yourself and your brand. A good defense is also a great offense.
6. Never, Never, Ever, write a check your butt can’t cash. If you have to resort to threats, make sure you can carry them out. Empty threats make you lose credibility.
Hopefully you should never have to deploy any of these tactics. Just like real life, most small conflicts can be settled using a good attitude, and a little respect.
In the grand scheme of things I am but a babe when it comes to social media. A rookie. A noob, if you will, though to spare my fragile feelings I’d just as soon you didn’t, really. Nope, no expert opinions here folks, just me stumbling along, trying to learn what I can. Like some great person of yore once said, “I’m just a worm crawling through the dirt of life.”(Actually that was me, I used it as a tag line on one of the many social media outlets I’ve tried, and may perhaps still use, I’m not really sure, but feel free to use it for your own purposes if you like.) But this is a good thing actually. In Zen Buddhism there is a concept known as beginner’s mind, and it means, basically, that the mind of someone who is new to something (a beginner), is free of the rigidity and ‘old-hat’ mentality of the expert who has seen and knows much. They are open to new things and new ways, and the ever-changing sea of social media is inherently new. Isn’t it?
The metaphor of the sea is particularly fitting because not only is social media, and with it the Internet, constantly changing and growing, it also implies a flow. A constant flow of information: emails, images, blurbs, and yes… tweets. We often find ourselves buried beneath a relentless tide of information. Will it ever stop, or do we even want it to really? More importantly, how do you handle it all?
If you’re anything like me, the Internet has reduced your attention span to that of a gnat; there’s just so much to look at. Sometimes I feel like a cat in a room full of laser pointers. No, really! Even when I sit down at the keyboard with a plan, fully intent of looking up one thing – just one thing! — if I’m not careful, I end up clicking 57 links, only snapping out of the trance once done digesting the Evolution of Toilets (via lovetoknow.com).
This isn’t a new idea though, is it? The Internet has been driving us mad with choice from day one. But now we have social media thrown into the mix; Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace just some of the names which come to mind. Naming all of them would be another post altogether (actually that would be another venture-funded web project and a lifetime of work—venture capitalists, feel free to email me, we’ll talk). It’s a wonder we get any work done today at all.
It can be done, and trust me, there are greater minds than this one working on it. David Allen, bestselling author of Getting Things Done, advises that one must be judicious in choosing who and what we interact with online, and even he acknowledges that it’s a slippery slope.
The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you’re doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It’s an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.
A while back over on Mashable, author, speaker, and Wall Street Journal columnist Alexandra Levit wrote a post on managing your time and your social media fix. It basically echoes Allen’s advice: draw up some boundaries, and mind your commitments. This is, of course, easier said than done.
Simplification and discipline are key here ( listen to me now, as if I know what I’m talking about all of the sudden), especially given the fact that more and more of us are packing smartphones with instant access to emails, tweets, instant messages, and the whole of the Internet. It’s a conundrum, and I’m afraid I don’t have any hard and fast advice; I’m still trying to manage my own habits, while I struggle to maintain some semblance of a regular blog posting schedule—and if you’ve seen my blog, you’ll see what a bang up job I’m doing there—keep up with news, and trends, and friends, and preventing the slow creep of insanity that comes with wanting, and inevitably failing to read every last blip, chirp, snort, buzz, squawk, squeak, and bleep that we can get our hands on.
And that, my friends, is the heart of the matter isn’t it? We can’t read it all, but something about these here interwebs makes us want to—that’s probably another post, we might come back to that. What is it? The interactivity, the instant gratification, the variety? Hell, I don’t know, but as a diminutive Jedi Master once said, ‘Control, control, you must learn control!’
I leave you with a small collection of the better suggestions I’ve found in one place that deal with this very thing. From Mashable again, a few suggestions on how to handle your voracious social media appetite and still get at least a few things accomplished. Now if you don’t mind, I’m really jonesin for some Twitter time…and I forgot to email that one dude, oh and I need to…nevermind, I’m done here!
Welcome to the new wisdom of crowds. Each member of Collective Thoughts is here because not only are they a known or rising star in their own field, but they also have a passion and unique understanding on social media. Together, we make up Collective Thoughts. More
[Credit]
[Credit]
