Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

That's a Phone, Watson?

Attribute it to preoccupation with other things — summer, life, jobs, the general hustle of starting your own business. I ignored Twitter, this blog, my Posterous account and some new developments in social media through late July and into early August. I was awash in a sea of informational ennui brought on by a general lack of interest in the perceived-dross that was washing over the transom of my social media platforms. I broke out of it though by really focusing on the group I’d set up in Seesmic entitled “friends.” Some of these people are real friends, people I’ve know for years. Some are friends I’ve only ever interacted with on Twitter. Regardless, I call them friends because for whatever reason I caught a spark from my interactions with them that really opened up to me the possibility and promise of social media, when I first jumped in. These people say things that matter to me. They’re not selling me something. They’re not telling me how to act. They are sharing information, insight, links, pictures and asking for feedback. They are initiating conversation and interaction and sharing.

One Tweet in particular helped me snap out of it because it brought me to a wonderful, thought provoking post, Search as Research by Richard Reeve (@CCSeed) at his blog, Catskill Cottage Seed. Writing about the vast oceans of personal information that folks share, and how it can and will be used down the road — by not only marketers (of course) but also by sociologists, anthropologists, historians and psychologists — Richard ends by asking “who will effectively learn to read” this sea of information? The post sparked a tremendous discussion, and sharing of ideas that helped to snap me out of my social media torpor. I stopped watching the data stream by in my various interfaces and instead engaged, and remembered that it is engagement that draws me to this space and this business.

In the world of social media (really in any world) it’s all about engagement: with people, their ideas, their points of view, opinions, photos, work, trials and triumphs. Marketers have been striving for decades to engage customers to sell clients’ stuff. The name of the game hasn’t really changed; but, the tools have, and the communication channels have proliferated and how and where and when we consume information and connect certainly have (Imagine A.G. Bell looking at a Blackberry or an iPhone: “you mean that’s a phone, without a wire and you hardly talk on it because you’re too busy using it to type messages and read articles and take and send pictures…?). But, for now, tonight, I’m not concerned with how marketers use social media — that’s covered, ad nauseam day in, and day out, c.f. Twitter. Richard’s thought provoking post (and he’s always thought provoking) rekindled the joy that comes from engaging with people in conversation about things — and I mean things, stuff, the weather, whatever. For all of the technology, and systems and interfaces this is really a tremendously humanistic time. Never before have we had such ability to interact with other human beings. On the most basic level people are talking. As Richard mentioned in a comment:

So again, it comes down to
people interacting in the digital marketplace regardless of the
platform, but here with sense being that of the Athenian agora

Some are selling and promoting and others are offering me free access to hot singles in my area . . . but most of us are just talking. Engaging. I’m not sure why I forgot that — chalk it up to Sirius, maybe — but once I remembered what was important, the engagement with real people, social media and it potential came back to me. What one does with that engagement, is up to the individual and their own personal needs, wants and desires. For me, I’m going to talk.

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.

Image via Wikipedia

I finally joined FaceBook. More on that later, though it’s already provided me with fodder for this blog. A friend posted a comment about the number of Influenza A H1N1 “Swine Flu” outbreaks world wide — about 958 — and is it really something to be that freaked out about? I share his skepticism partly because I’m a skeptic, partly because I’m awash in various, independent web-based news streams.

One of the most interesting things to me has been the reaction to the “pandemic” as defined by the WHO on places like Twitter: skepticism, lack of concern, some outright mockery. Meanwhile, compare this to some of the reaction in the print and broadcast media where it seems it’s time to stock the water, rice and beans and line up for the Tamiflu vaccination. As is frequently cited, more than thirty thousand people die each year from good old fashioned influenza, yet that neither stops travel to Mexico nor compels countries to impose travel bans.

There is much information available on the web and other sources and rather than stoking fears of horrid flu-death, the freewheeling and self-governing social networks are behaving responsibly and forwarding info deemed useful, questioning alarmist information and avoiding panic. This current event recalls the ancient Y2K issue for me. In the late 90s, social networks like today’s were but a fantasy, and the ones that did exist tended to be list-serves and billboards. The panic and hyperbole around the devastation to our way of life as a result of computers’ inability to handle the double-aught was infectious — no pun intended — and all over the media. Mobilization to ward off the end of Western Civilization as we knew it seems to have paid off, but was it really as bad as everyone thought it would be? Did Y2K warrant the anxiety stoked by the general media — unchallenged, at that time, by social media?

Maybe, we in the skeptical camp are all whistling past the graveyard, but the measured reaction of the citizenry — at least the social media citizenry — to the H1N1 outbreak stands in stark contrast to the groundswell of anxiety in the traditional media. I bet that it would be interesting to compare attitudes towards H1N1 of folks who are active social media participants/web news consumers to those who only get their news from traditional media outlets.  I bet the latter are “more concerned” than the former. Though, on the other hand, I’d not be surprised if no one was freaked out about H1N1 because everyone is sick of the traditional news media. . .

I think that anxiety we see and hear in the traditional media derives from the fact that fewer people are listening to them, and that even with a possible “pandemic” they can’t attract the eyeballs that net the advertising dollars. The basic premise of news, for a while anyway, is that stories of death mayhem and destruction attract attention. However, in the case of H1N1 it strikes me that there is a big “who cares?” afoot and that’s a pandemic for traditional media.

Image via Wikipedia

Last week a Twitter friend of mine, @hennartonline, wrote a nice blog piece about feeling constricted by all of the rules that folks are trying to impose on social media and how, frankly, it was making social media not that much fun. I’ve been thinking about her post for a week and it has reminded me of some work I did in my distant past. As a graduate student, studying art history, I wrote my thesis on Marcel Duchamp. An artist often thought to be outside the sphere of cultural and societal influence, his oeuvre is certainly singular. I didn’t accept the premise that he was completely beyond the sway of contemporary currents and argued that I saw echoes  of Bergsonian metaphysics and utopian anarchism in his work.

In my thesis I posited that much of his creative output was a response to the rejection of his painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1911) from the 1912 Salon des Independants. At that time he’d been working in the Cubist style, consorting with other Cubists and had created what he thought was a Cubist painting. The arbiters of Cubist rectitude however felt differently and rejected “Nude” as outside of their definition of Cubism.

So, where am I going with this — a friend’s post, Duchamp and Cubism . . . ? @hennartonline experienced something akin to what Duchamp experienced — a conflict between arbiters (often self-appointed) and individuals. Social media, like Cubism was in its day, is disruptive. It is avant garde (though with 100s of millions of users SM’s avant gardism is waning) and undefined. It is this disruptiveness, and lack of definition that make it such a powerful tool. Users, both individual and corporate, work each day to define social media; and, as with all movements, there are the self-appointed rules-makers. Most of the rules are great, common sensical, and based in simple good manners. Others, though, are about how to blog, how to tweet, what’s acceptable, and what’s not. These rules go beyond the insistence of social etiquette and seek to define how people should “do social media” in order to be considered part of social media — just like there was a way to “do Cubism,” and it didn’t involve moving nude figures.

In an undefined space such as social media individuals and companies need to find their own way and interact with the medium and its participants in ways that meet their business and personal needs. How JetBlue uses social media and how @hennartonline uses it are wildly different and their needs and uses are different than those of the self appointed SM-guru or the stock trader looking to demonstrate his prowess. Through trial and error (hopefully not too many errors, but there will be some, we’re human) all participants in this movement should be able to find their audience, and generate positive outcomes for themselves and their network of followers, friends, contacts, and even the occasional nemesis, in the most open, imaginative, and personal style possible.

You can follow @hennartonline on Twitter.

Last weekend my family and I were on Cape Cod. We were getting together with friends and awaiting their arrival Friday evening when I set out for pizza and beer. The plan was to place the pizza order then head to the package store (for non-native Bostonians, package store, or packy, is a colloquialism for the place where you can buy beer, wine and spirits ) while the pizzas cooked to grab a six pack. The pizza joint was closed.

I sent a quick Tweet about off-season on Cape Cod:

As if I didn't know April was off-season.

I asked the guys in the package store where they got their pizza and they told me. I also received the following Tweet from The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce:

Now that's customer service!

Granted, this got to me the next morning, but it’s still a great example of customer service and a great example of using social media to reach your customers. I love the language. They acknowledge that they are late, but offer two ways to connect — Twitter and the toll-free number — for future questions. The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce is on top of their game, in my opinion, and using Twitter to great effect.  They show that they are open and available to help me and I commend them. Plenty of companies are doing this but when it’s a local chamber of commerce, in the off season, you know that this channel has reached a critical mass and is here to stay.

Tweeting

The past week has been a busy one at exUrban Inc. As a result I blew last week’s deadline for publishing to this blog. One thing that took a bunch of time was my effort to overcome my own social media anxiety. Now, I probably shouldn’t admit this in public, and certainly not to people who might be reading this blog in the interest of working with exUrban Inc. Yet, honesty is one of the traits on which I pride myself, and to be completely honest, social media can be mildly anxiety producing — though beyond the glow of my monitor, I’m not at all socially anxious.

For one, in the social media space, you are putting yourself out there on a daily basis, and let’s face it, we want people to like us and to like what we say, or write. Second, social media blurs the line between the personal and the professional in ways that are really remarkable. The personal becomes public, and the public is personal. Since I got onto Twitter before I started this company my tweets tend to be truly of the micro-blogging variety — observations about the world, weather, running, and some mention of my business when appropriate. I’m not one to put out constant tweets about my company because we’re still in start-up mode and though it’s possible to be a shameless self promoter on Twitter, and other social communities, that’s not my, or our, style (I’m exUrban Inc’s Twitterer, though I’m working on Nancy).

My general approach to social media is to be myself, to demonstrate a variety of interests, and over time expose enough of myself to the world (but not too much, I still do value privacy and will not put pictures of my kids into the public, for a totally personal example) that people will come to trust me and perhaps recommend me and/or look to work with me. I haven’t proven yet that this works, though I have recently met with a Twitter acquaintance in the real world and hope to meet with more in the future. 

Such meetings don’t need to be for my profit or theirs though connections initiated in the virtual space of a social media community yield interesting opportunities. It’s what happens when humans come together. One major thing to keep in mind is that what you are doing on places like Twitter is creating real relationships that require nurturing over time. Just as in the real world, you can’t have a relationship with everybody you know, but pick out some interesting folks with whom you are connected and work on building rapport. Be yourself. Be honest. Be polite and respectful of others (just like in the physical world). Put your picture on your accounts, let people know there is a person back there. Finally, remember that these things cannot be rushed and require effort. Be patient. Define what you want from the medium and work to achieve these goals by focusing on communication, sharing and openness.

Thanks to the folks I follow on Twitter for imparting these lessons to me.

The above image comes from an exchange that I saw on Twitter on last night (2/17/09). Francois Gossieaux, @fgossieaux, is a very smart guy that I started following a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit that I was more than a little surprised to see what he re-Tweeted from @pbrannigan, who took umbrage at a perceived slight directed towards her ill pet, and fired off the above. Her account is now locked so we, who are not among her followers, can no longer see her Tweets, and her Blogspot blog for her company is no longer in her profile. Obviously she’s gone to ground in the wake of her outburst which shows bad form and a certain, unattractive, xenophobic, intemperance.

As a self-professed social media expert @pbrannigan should have known that the first rule of social media (as I intuit them from participating in it) is to be social — interact, share, comment. The second rule, maybe even rule 1a), is to be polite. As in other parts of our lives, both social and professional (and Twitter blurs that line) sometimes it’s best to just walk away, or bite ones tongue. Don’t write something that you will regret later because the quote never really goes away, it lives on, cached forever, or propagated for all time in perfect digital fidelity (see above). One final thought about this little incident is that by and large most of the exchanges I see on Twitter are really positive, upbeat and helpful. It’s great to participate in such an atmosphere, and that’s the power of the social space. People work and play in it in order to help and learn and communicate. There is a tremendous civility in communities like Twitter — even if, occasionally, some fire-ants invade the picnic — and that’s refreshing, because civility seems to be increasingly uncommon in our culture.