Posts Tagged “social media”

It’s rare that I know something about social media that C.C. Chapman doesn’t, but earlier this evening I left the third WBUR social media get-together and saw this tweet.

So, for C.C. and others, let me set the context.  WBUR’s social media guy, Ken George, called the third WBUR tweet-up, the usual informal social media gabfest with the added lure of a tour of the station.  I was lucky enough to be in on the first such event, but missed the second. I hope C.C. can join us for one in the future.

The discussion was pretty free-flowing, and I’m sure it flowed even freeer when the crew decamped to the bar, but I’ll try to mention some of the interesting people and themes I noticed.

David Boeri, host of WBUR’s Radio Boston, kicked things off with a discussion of using twitter and other social media to source stories or find trends and ideas as they bubble up.  He came with an attitude of “beginners mind” and probably left with a headache.  The crowd was eager to help, but I’m not sure if even those of us swimming in new media fully understand what it is we’re in the midst of.  As one said, “I have over 800 followers [on twitter] and I have no idea why.”

A soft-spoken woman named Angie mentioned an event called Courteous Mass, a reaction to the sometimes controversial Critical Mass, but specifically committed to obeying traffic laws (in contrast to the “corking” through red lights common to Critical Mass) and being nice to both pedestrians and drivers while celebrating urban bike-riding. Bravo, I say.  As a pedestrian and a driver, I find the behavior of many cyclists unnerving and reckless while wishing that more people could safely ride bikes in the city.

Manifest Magazine is a twice-monthly free magazine about “ordinary people with extraordinary experiences” delivered, oddly to my mind, in PDF via a blog.  The creator of the magazine spoke of his use of “most favorited” searches to find interesting and up-and-coming authors and interview subjects.  Worth a look, as I’m sure will be whatever this gentleman does next.

On the way home, I walked over the BU bridge and watched the moon peek in and out of the clouds.

Do you know how many emails you’ve sent? How about how many instant messages? Probably not. I sure have no idea. But I do know that I just sent my 1,000th Twitter update. Or rather, that twitterfeed did on my behalf. People on Twitter observe milestone (millstone?) numbers like their 100th or 1,000th update or follower as if they were birthdays. I’m not one to be terribly orthodox about observing birthdays, so I was reluctant to make a fuss over achieving a kilotwit, but it’s a slow blog day, so here’s what I’ve learned on Twitter:

Use (abuse?) Twitter customer service while you can. Twitter is still small by the standards of the internet, and the smallish number of companies that are staking out a presence there are eager to make a good impression. If a company is on Twitter, you can often get very good customer service or at least a live response faster than you can with regular email, chat or phone. The economics of this situation are transitory, so get it while it’s hot. Try @comcastcares or @wholefoods for two.

When asking the Twitterverse for advice, you get what you pay for. For the reasons cited above, you can sometimes get some really good inside dope from people and companies on Twitter, such as discount codes, beta invites, weather and transport alerts, etc. I’ve asked for and dished out random advice, usually about food and wine, and gotten (and probably given) mixed results. Caveat twittor, and expect the neighborhood to get less neighborly as it grows.

You can do a lot - but not everything - in 140 characters. There are a lot of people who tweet haiku (I’m one of them) and a few who tweet exclusively in haiku. At least one person, @gracepiper, tweets recipes. So far as I know, nobody tweets haiku recipes, but it’s probably only a matter of time. Constraints are the mother of innovation, and the exercise of precision can really help sharpen your message. If you have one. On the other hand, longer discussions of meatier subjects really need to be taken elsewhere.

Maybe in my next thousand tweets I’ll figure out if this thing is really good for anything and maybe the Twitter people will figure out how to make money doing it. Either way, it’ll be an entertaining ride. Follow me @limeduck for the play-by-play.

If you haven’t been following Tangyslice’s inane quest for social media greatness, I don’t know what social media rock you haven’t been living under. I’ve been following along with morbid fascination as an otherwise reasonable guy tries to join 100 social media or social networking sites in just 30 days. At first I rode along as a training buddy, but as the month draws to a close and Tangy looks like he’s just going to make it, I’m happy to take second place and retain just a bit more social media dignity. So here, for the last time, are a baker’s baker’s dozen more social media sites in the limeduck library, bringing the total to sixty-something.

1. All Consuming - Twitter asks, “what are you doing right now?”, All Consuming asks, “what are you consuming right now?” Bonus points for a top-level navigation item called “gestalt.”
2. Beautiful Society - A site where you can tell the world about your favorite stuff. Wow.
3. Blinklist - Sort of social bookmarking. You can make lists. Online. W00t.
4. Book Crossing - Prof. P turned me on to this years ago and I still check it once in a while. You leave your unwanted books around and use this site to alert people to their location. Watch as your books wander the world.
5. Dopplr - Tell people where you’re going and when. So you can meet up with them. So other people can rob your house. At least they use openID for login.
6. Free Government - An experiment in democracy. They want to elect a representative who will vote according to the polls taken on this site. A politician who follows polls, that’s new.
7. Friendster - The original social stalking site.
8. Kirtsy - “the place to find and/or link to anything and everything on the Web that you’d like to share.” See blinklist.
9. Lijit - “What if your readers could search you and everything you’ve created for answers they’d trust?” Maybe they’d use goojle.
10. Lime.com - “Healthy living with a twist.” Maybe I should have joined as just “duck.” I look forward to picking up this domain name at the bankruptcy auction.
11. limewire - I have absolutely no idea what this site is all about. See comment from Cintatdo
12. Ma.gnolia - “Discover, share and discuss the best of the web.” Pretty, but bo.ring.
13. Mashable - If you believe you are more than the sum of your microdrivel, this site could prove you wrong. YAA(wn)
14. Meetup - See also going.com and getafirstlife. Go out and meet some actual people. Could actually be useful if you’re willing to leave the house.
15. Mixx - “your link to the web content that really matters.” Funny, if you just move your hands a bit over on the keyboard, it spells, Digg.
16. Skyrock - “Free people network.” Might be French.
17. Zeer - Since you are what you eat, Zeer tells you what other people on Zeer think you are. Personal message from site hostess is a bonus. A far cry from All Consuming, and not just in the alphabet.

Congratulations to Tangyslice, I concede this winner’s curse.

At the end of his Podcamp Boston presentation on distributed microblogging this Sunday, Joe Cascio declared, “that’s where I ran out of Schlitz.” The phrase caught on and was swiftly tweeted and favorited, and I wonder if it’s not a good summation of the weekend’s events and maybe even of the state of social media.

Don’t get me wrong. Podcamp was a fantastic weekend. Excellent networking, fun people, a great, open collaborative and supportive atmosphere, free parking, free wifi, quality presentations and presenters. Kudos to the organizers and sponsors and attendees. I am seriously looking forward to future podcamps. But…

The Schlitz was good. The Schlitz was cheap, sometimes even free. We drank a lot of it and caught a pretty good buzz. We made lots of cool new friends under its lubricating influence. But now what?

There’s growing evidence that we have a social media bubble. Heck, it made the cover of the MIT Tech review. When your cool online New Way To Be gets called bubbly by the Tech Review - in print, no less - it’s time to ask yourself the tough questions. People are building businesses around Twitter, but Twitter doesn’t have its own revenue model yet.

I’m no retrograder here, I don’t question that most examples of most forms of marketing have been sucking the fumes from their empty Schlitz cans for ages. Even the cuddly darlings of search marketing are overbid to absurdity. So my point is not to hide and hate and fear the social media revolution and try to return to simpler times, but to ask, is there really any there there? And if not, how can we make some?

If I could answer that, I wouldn’t be blogging from a Starbucks, I’ll tell you that. So instead of answers, here are five more questions and issues prodded by podcamp and the discussions I had there.

1. Personal branding, privacy and publicity

During CC Chapman’s packed session, “building your brand through passion and community,” the discussion quickly turned to online privacy, widely described as illusory. A wise audience member piped up, “Most of us are here to get known, not to get unknown.” Amen, brother. As long as you have some idea of what you’re getting into, you can make smart choices. For most folks, being stalked is not that likely because they’re just not that famous.

Another podcamper was a little too quick to confide in me that the #1 google result for her name was about her “boobies.” I don’t think she helped her case by removing the photo, which was apparently not nearly as scandalous as the text left behind suggested. If you clicked that link, you deserve to be Rickrolled, but that’s the best I could do. If you want to work in online PR, you’ve got to be able to use the online chatter about your bits to your advantage. Don’t apologize if you haven’t actually done anything wrong, it makes you look twice as guilty.

The conference was packed with digital recording devices and people wearing nametags. Not a recipe for stealth if you told your spouse that you were somewhere else that weekend. Some photographers asked permission and some didn’t. Lots of good questions there about who owns those images and sounds. If you took my picture - probably because you thought my shirt was the coolest or dumbest one you saw all day - please tag it “limeduck” that’s all my personal brand asks.

2. Pecha Kucha vs Battledecks

These two items were on the agenda a couple of times, but I never managed to catch up with them. I’m not even really sure they happened at all. But they make an instructive pair.

Pecha Kucha is a poetry-slam style event where you bring a 20-slide presentation which is advanced every 20 seconds automatically. You present to it and get rated by the crowd.

Battledecks is PPT-backed improv. You go on stage and present a set of slides you’ve never seen before.

Hyper-prepared presentation, or surrealist improvisation - which would you rather do, and which should be a required part of business education?

3. What’s up with Moo cards?

Heck, what’s up with business cards of any kind in this digital age? I’ll rant later about what I think of Moo minicards. More broadly, what goes on a business card and what doesn’t? Website, blog, facebook, myspace, email address, twitter handle, skype name, phone number, latitude and longitude, t-shirt size, maybe even something about what you do? I just wrote @limeduck on some nice cardstock or Japanese paper.

4. Two takes on TangySlice

Speaking of social media overload, I told some people about my friend TangySlice and his “quest for social media greatness” wherein he intends to sign up for 100 social sites in 30 days. He’s almost there, and I think he will achieve his goal, but check out this gamut of reactions:

• [blink] [blink] Why?
• Well, if he wants to waste his time, better him than me.
• A hundred sites? Bah, I have at least 150 already!

Which type are you? Which type was more common at podcamp? Discuss. Then donate to TangySlice’s fundraising page. You can donate a dollar per site in your social media portfolio. It’s for a good cause.

5. Fuck the skeptics

There’s a real risk of groupthink at these events. Where were the doubters and curmudgeons? The people who showed a slide titled “what the f**k is social media” didn’t go too far enough, and when I asked them about the doubters, they said “fuck the skeptics!” To be fair, they were kidding, but I still want more and better dissent. It keeps us thinking. It keeps us honest.

Quack you later.

I’m on the verge of being halfway through Tangyslice’s insane quest for social media greatness. I scraped together a few more sites that I was already signed up for and added a few here and there, and my total appears to stand at 49. I’m getting into the long tail, or in some cases, the stuff that drops out from under the long tail. It’s always hard to know what’s going to catch on, but half these sites appear to add absolutely no value. Here are twenty more social media type sites waiting for the bubble to burst.

1. friendfeed - As Tangyslice would say, YAA (Yet Another Aggregator); I would call it YANVAA (Yet Another No-Value-Added Aggregator)
2. Get Satisfaction - “People Powered Customer Service for Absolutely Everything” - watch this one, there could be something here. I like power to the people.
3. going.com - People I might run into and places I might go. Mash this up with something geocoded and mobile and maybe we’ll talk.
4. grono.net - “one of the biggest web communities in Poland” - the English version is incompletely translated so I ended up saying I was in Białystok. Go figure.
5. HelloTxt - One of several sites (see also Ping.FM and their oh-so-exclusive beta) that exist only to push your drivel into deeper crevices of the internet.
6. hi5 -Maybe wants to be facebook when it grows up, but happy to sell ads till then. *yawn*
7. identi.ca -I have to go to Canada and declare all my microdrivel under creative commons? Why?
8. istockphoto - If a stock photo site wants to become a social media site, don’t you think they should let you upload your own avatar picture and resize it for you?
9. Kiva - Another really good site that’s adding social media for no particular reason. The important connection here is between lenders and borrowers, isn’t it?
10. kwippy - Why? Why??
11. Last.FM - Maybe if it were Last.DK I would be as excited by this as Tangy is. Give me my geek-fan podcasts any day.
12. MyBlogLog - YAA. Probably YANVAA, but I can’t figure out all the bells and whistles.
13. Netvibes - OK, it’s nicer than my google hompage. But my google homepage is my google homepage.
14. newsvine - Oddly, I’ve been a member of this site for a long time. I don’t remember signing up, or why.
15. Profilactic - YAA supporting 186 sites. One Hundred and Eighty Six.
16. Socialthing! - YANVAA! But at least the little mascot critter has cute googly eyes, not a bone where its head should be.
17. soup.io - YANVAA.io
18. trig -”A community for creative people with images, blogs, music, trends, etc. Yeah, we could say all that. But what we really imagine is a place where people like their music loud, their opinions edgy and their life brave.” Keep imagining. The loud edgy people are on myspace.
19. wis.dm - The site that asks, “can you live without Starbucks?” I’m not sure but I bet I can live without wis.dm.
20. YouTube - You can tune into the limeduck channel. Don’t you feel special?

See the first 29 networks in my catalog here.