June, 2009

Image via CrunchBase

Posterous is my new favorite social media tool. While it will never replace Twitter as my platform of choice for communicating and networking,  it has made it super simple to post content to various social media outposts. To do so, I send an email to a Posterous email address, and, to paraphrase the site, they “take care of the rest.” Typically, I tend not to post the same thing to the same places — my Twitter updates are different from my FaceBook updates and my blog posts are typically unrelated to either of those things. However, when I’m out and about I do like to snap mobile shots and send them to my blog, or to Flickr, or occasionally to TwitPic.

When we took our road trip through the American South in April, I posted frequently to Twitter and Flickr and my fun blog. It was a fairly laborious process as I would have to access three different apps from my hand held to place my content on these various outlets. Needless to say, I didn’t post as much as I could have to multiple sites, opting instead for one, usually Twitter. Had I had Posterous, I could have posted all of my shots, and observations from the road to three, or more places, all at once. When I talk to my clients about social media strategies and tactics I always mention Posterous when I notice them calculating the time it will take to update their various outposts.

To get started, set up a Posterous account at posterous.com. Associate your various social media accounts with this account. Start emailing Posterous and watch your content magically appear across your social media outposts. It is truly that easy. The hardest part about set-up is remembering your log-ins for your various social sites. If you don’t want to take the blanket approach, then you can email one specific community (facebook at posterous dot com, say) and your post will appear only there — because, let’s face it not everything you post needs to go on each site, and in some cases should not, depending on your audience.

Your Posterous site is fully RSS enabled, and you can subscribe to others sites and see who subscribes to yours. There are analytics included so you can see views, visits and favorites, and all posts are comment-able. The layout is clean. Multiple image attachments on an email appear neatly above the image and permit easy navigation through the photo string. The Posterous API is open so there is no telling where the user base will take it.

Posterous is clean and nimble, simple to use and a great tool in any organization’s social media toolkit. It’s a great way to extend a client’s footprint online and increase links to their site as well as their social media sites. Posterous’s use of email, the grand-daddy of Internet communication technologies, makes it an ideal tool for the social media skeptic, and it can help to maximize the time a client, or their staff spends on day-to-day social media efforts.

Please check out my Postersous site, if you have a moment, and open your own while you’re there.*

*I’m not paid by Posterous, just a big, big fan who really does recommend it to my clients.

A revolutionary symbol

Tonight marks nearly a week of serious unrest in the Islamic Republic of Iran in the wake of a presidential election that by most any standards was rigged in favor of the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For the first time in 30 years — since the Khomeinist revolution that birthed the current  republic — the streets of Iranian cities are thronged by young protesters clamoring for freedom. Things seem to be going badly for the ruling elite. They obviously mismanaged the election rigging. Shutting down the cell phone text messaging system on the day of the election, and declaring a winner within 3 hours of poll closings when more people voted last week than any time in the history of the country were ham-handed to say the least.

Planning ahead, the regime did block ports to Facebook and other social sites, but, apparently they’d not heard about Twitter. Twitter became, very quickly, the de facto pipeline of information about the events unfolding inside Iran, and reaction to the uprising outside of the country. The regime very quickly lost control of the situation; and, the freedom movement, symbolized by the use of green, has grown and gained momentum, helped in no small part by Twitter. The two items in the title of this post, #iran and #iranelection are trending topics on Twitter Search, and have been near the top of all discussion topics all week. Green avatars are all over the site, and links and info are flying within the Twitter community. Many non-Iranian users have changed their time zone and their location to Tehran in an effort to thwart the Iranian Government’s efforts to track and persecute the dissident Twitterers within their population based on location and time zone searches.

It’s been an awesome spectacle to behold the courage of the Iranian people and a great privilege to do even a small bit to try and help them. Support for the Iranian’s efforts to win their freedom within the Twitterverse seems to transcend political, ethnic and geographical divisions. This is grass roots political action at its finest. The regime has done everything wrong in terms of a managing its PR but it has zero experience in the realm of openness, transparency and square dealings. Continuous muscle flexing and brutal repression of its population have left the leadership unable to respond in a way that is necessary in today’s global, 24/7 agora — in which it has never participated and openly scorned for years.

This week I tweeted the following:

Ruminations on Iran and the Green Revolution

Twenty years ago the brave students in Tiananmen did not have the internet, and certainly not Twitter. All coverage came from broadcast media channels and the world largely watched. The Iranians protesters have the power of technology on their side, a highly literate and young population (70% of Iranians are 30 years of age or younger, I believe), the overwhelming support of people around the world and two-way communication with them. This two-way communication could very well tip the scales against a brutal dictatorship and usher in a whole new way of life for a long-suffering country. A communication medium that many have called “revolutionary” is finally proving to be so in a literal, positive and powerful fashion with ramifications beyond customer service and engagement.

When people get together

I had lunch this week with John Haydon (@johnhaydon) whom I follow on Twitter. We’ve chatted back and forth over the months about music social media and other things and we realized sometime this spring that we live fairly close to one another. We set up our meeting completely via Twitter, never sending a single email nor calling on the phone. I think that neither of us had any real notion of what to expect from the meeting, though, as I mentioned to John during the lunch, I approach all such opportunities with the attitude “who knows what happens when you put two intelligent folks together to talk.” We swapped stories about our social media adventures, shared tips and tricks and generally just talked about things relating to starting a business, fatherhood and the like.

I think that we both learned something from talking and laid a solid foundation from which to explore possibilities down the road. Also, importantly the meeting drove home the very real, and very awesome fact that behind the avatars and handles are people — actual, identifiable, physical people — not just demographic and psychographic distillations of types. Technically, I may not use twitter correctly (I’ve blogged about the “rules” of usage in the past) but I use it in a way that suits me. I’m not just an entrepreneur. I’m not just a family man. I’m not just an art history guy. I’m a lot of things and I follow many people. Some may help my business. Some I may help. Some I follow just because I want to see different perspectives from people of different nationalities, genders, politics, interests, ethnicities and regions. I frequently start chatting if something that someone says piques my interest. Often, I listen. I view Twitter as a line directly into the universal brain to which I hopefully contribute and from which I learn a tremendous amount. Back in December 2008 as I was pulling myself together and starting this company Twitter helped me feel a part of something bigger by looping me into  the idle chatter, the keen insights, the silliness, the mundane-ness and beauty of many people talking to one another.

It is this concentration of people that make social media the “It” channel in the minds of marketers, right now, but I think that too often the reality of the people who make up these communities gets lost. Marketers of all stripes count people as “eyeballs,” “traffic,” visitors,” “followers,” “leads,” “acquisitions,” “conversions,” “potential revenue/income/sales” and “friends.”Perhaps, CMOs and social media directors and CSMOs need to come off of their perches and interact with folks. Perhaps, a bigger part of their job should be real-world interactions with people who are passionate enough about their company and product to follow and interact with them in various channels. Social media is a start, but there’s no replacement for siting down to a pizza and a Greek salad and some good old fashioned conversation. It bears repeating: it’s amazing what happens when people get together and talk.

Please read John Haydon’s take on our meeting: The most effective social media tool in the universe

Andy Warhol

Recently, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal that documented the gyrations that some families go through to balance their work and their family lives. Through some network connections we were a featured family in this article — the first mentioned in the story and the only family with a photo spread. (Yes, that’s me in my slippers — I work at home, aren’t you jealous? ) It was an interesting experience, to be sure, and one that left us with some ambivalence about having agreed to participate.

One of the most interesting things about participating in the article was the reaction of the Journal-reading web audience whose comments were cutting and highly negative (friends were very supportive). In all honesty we weren’t completely prepared for that sort of reaction, though in this day and age everybody has an opinion to which they feel entitled to vent, and we should have anticipated some backlash.

In light of our personal experience, I now have a better understanding of how to deal with negative comments that I can use to more effectively guide clients. I always make sure my clients understand that when they put themselves out on the web people are free to sound off, and will. As a result, social media participants need a response plan to deal with both the good and the bad. Being  involved with various social media channels is already one very positive step to demonstrating engagement with your customers. I did engage in the comments section of the article, but only to a point. Since the story and the comments were personal we eventually opted to ignore them.

Ignoring the negative in a business situation is not an option, or at least not the first option. In a business context you can and should engage the unhappy customer but not to the detriment of your other customers. There comes a time when you must realize, as we did, that you can’t please everybody, and folks are free to say what they want. Deal with the squeaky wheel as best as you can in an honest and forthright fashion — don’t hide, don’t let the negativity fester, don’t ignore the unhappy customer and say “you’re a nobody,” but also have an exit strategy.

Another outcome of our participation in this article was that when a Today Show producer, who had seen the article, contacted us to do a TV segment, we declined.