Posts Tagged “social media”

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.

If you’ve been following Tangyslice’s desperate quest for social media coolness, you know that he’s going on a social media bender, trying to join 100 social sites in 30 days. Back in art school, I worried about the people who seemed to be more interested in cameras and lenses than in the photos they produced. Content is king, I say. If you’ve got nothing to say, you’ve got nothing to tweet, nothing to blog, nothing to shout, and ultimately, nobody to friend.  [I suppose it's possible that in social media terms you can reverse that last bit to "if you've got no friends, it doesn't matter what you have to say." See my recent attempt to explain Twitter for more mulling on that.]

That said, I took up Tangy’s gauntlet and took stock of my social media memberships, and then joined a few more to see what’s what.  After all, his misguided Spurlockian stunt comes in part from my declaration that I’ll join almost anything just to secure the limeduck name against poachers. (Yes, I flatter myself to imagine that they might exist. Allow me some self-indulgence here, it’s my blog after all.)

It turns out that I have accounts on at least 29 social media and networking sites: (and even as I type this, I realize there are a few more…)

Social networks I actually use. There is original and timely content or information here because I log in frequently and maintain information.

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter

Marginal social networks. I log into these once in a while because they’re very specific or because I have a few important contacts unique to them.

• Technorati
• Plaxo
• Flickr

Insurance social networks. I maintain membership here because I believe its important to have updated information there just in case, or because I know some people search there or have contacts there.

• Spock
• Myspace
• Gather

Vertical social networks. These are very specific, maybe too specific, but I joined them to check them out and they seem to have some useful effect in keeping connected with topics of interest.

• Cork’d
• 9 Neighbors
• Foodbuzz
• Tripadvisor
• Stylefeeder

Social bookmarking sites. I just don’t use them much except occasionally to try and promote my site or a friend’s site.

• Digg
• Newsvine
• Stumbleupon
• Reddit

Repeater and aggergator sites. These are places where I have a profile that does nothing other than repeat or consolidate the RSS feed(s) from some of the sites I actually use and from limeduck.com. I’m here just in case one of these gets big and to protect the limeduck brand.

• Friendfeed
• HelloTXT
• Utterz
• Tumblr
• Pownce

OK, I admit it, I have no idea what these sites are for. I just joined them to try and stay ahead of Tangyslice.

• Plurk
• Humble Voice
• Trig
• Bebo
• Xanga
• Virb

Do I feel 29 times better?  Do I  have 29 times more to say?  Does this get me 29 times more traffic and search awareness?  Hardly.  Are there useful sites I haven’t discovered?  Almost certainly.  I’ll be disappointed if there are no comments alerting me to sites I’ve cruelly omitted.

Watch this space for updates.  Or any of the other 29 spaces.

I met up with some good folks I used to work with for our quasi-monthly “fest.” We chose Minado, an all-you-can-eat sushi and buffet joint in Natick across the street from the shiny new mall that’s too cool to call itself a mall, the Natick Collection. I’m told it’s breathtaking.

Clockwise from lower left: edamame and spicy seaweed salad, tuna tataki, spicy tuna roll, red rice veggie roll, salmon skin roll, tuna roll with scallions, octopus, stuffed mushroom, crab noodle cake. This was my first plate.

The sushi at Minado isn’t really all that grand, but it is reliably ok and individual types can be really good. And there’s a full hot buffet as well. For $40 each, we enjoyed all we could eat plus a drink, tax and tip. I suppose for the same money, you could have a single truffle hamachi maki with a drink, tax and tip at Oishii Boston, but you’d still be pretty hungry. But anyway, I was there for the company.

The conversation turned, as it often does, to social media stuff, as the assembled crowd had for a brief moment in history all worked together in the same marketing team. We compared Facebook notes (L is pretty into it for work, R finds old summer camp buddies there, H and J seem to be staying on the sidelines) and then everybody turned to (on?) me and asked, what’s the deal with Twitter?

I’ve tried to explain Twitter before and I generally fall back on “you just have to try it.” Like the matrix, no one can be told what it is. But I think I’m getting better at my answer now that after many moons of twitter-skepticism, I’m a heavy user and mildly bullish on the whole twitterverse. Here’s my new take:

If you just join Twitter and just start tweeting what’s on your mind, you’ll get bored quick unless you’re extremely self-absorbed. But if you find a micro-community of like-minded, or at least interesting and interested, micro-bloggers, and follow them and get followed — you’ll find yourself in a conversation of sorts. People tweet what they’re doing right now, but that’s not as interesting as when somebody tweets a question or breaks some news or reports on an event in progress, and people comment, reply, opine, and commiserate. And that can be interesting.

It could still be a giant load of hooey, of course. Constant partial attention, too many channels for too little information, tweetspam, the works. So far one of my dining companions has tweeted up and followed me. I hope I haven’t led her too far astray. At least I didn’t try to turn her on to Plurk.

One more social media note before we get back to the food. During the discussion I reeled off a list of social networking, social bookmarking, and other random web 2.0 type sites that I’ve joined recently. The overwhelming response was, good grief, why? Why indeed would I sign up for Gather, for example, when I already have LinkedIn and Facebook? For me, the answer is simple - invest a little energy in signing up and exploring because you don’t know what’s going to get big next, and you don’t want your favorite handle poached. A small investment of time for future brand security. (Speaking of personal branding, let me tell you - and google - that DougH means Doug Haslam - get a hundred more like that and you’re golden)

Now, dessert!

Green tea ice cream, chocolate cake, green jell-o. Why jell-o? It makes me laugh. That ice-cube-sized portion is about all the jell-o I’ll eat in a sitting. I boycotted the crepe station for its lack of nutella, but I’m told it was quite nice.

We’d been talking good trash about how many kappa maki we could eat (I think L’s record at a prior outing was 42) but the downside of such great company and conversation is that we talked more than we ate and were more or less thrown out of the place at closing time.

This reminded me of a great lesson via the excellent Presentation Zen blog. (really, it’s excellent, I even bought the book) Hara Hachi Bu means “eat until 80% full” and is a maxim that keeps Okinawans trim and long-lived. Garr links this idea to presentations, and by extension to business meetings and conferences, which are as chronically overstuffed as typical Americans at buffets and in front of televisions. Maybe this restraint will eventually save us from the flood of wannabe social media sites all doing the same thing or the deluge of pointless Facebook apps. We can dream, right?

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Update: as of this writing, I’m in a game of Facebook Scrabulous with three of my four dining companions. It’s R’s turn, what’s taking him so long??

Perhaps you’ve been following Tangyslice’s series on Selecting a Web 2.0 PR Agency. Part one is here. [update: part III just published!] Upon return from a recent trip to London, Tangy brought me a gag gift, a 147-page, glossy, perfect bound guide to Facebook. The absurdity of a paper book printed to teach you about Facebook* reminded me of something that happened during the Web 2.0 PR search.

The ultimate success of PR firms in our search was inversely proportional to the amount of paper they brought to the pitch. Those with plastic comb-bound presentations were at an immediate disadvantage. I felt bad waiting until they left the office to zip out the plastic combs and recycle the presentations. I wonder if the plastic covers are recyclable too?

Similarly, I mocked Tangy for putting on dress slacks for the pitch meetings while I made sure I was wearing jeans and a black shirt, and shined up my web 2.0 haircut**. None of the candidate agencies matched my ‘do, but one did match my outfit. It’s easy (and fun) to make fun of these things, but when your RFP says more or less, “we want to rule the world via social media” you are looking for a certain measure of out-of-the-boxiness, aren’t you?

Thirdly, and at least for now, finally, I have to point out that given the opportunity, only a couple of our pitching firms seized the marker and went to the whiteboard to illustrate their ideas. Visual thinking, especially on the fly, is a definite turn-on to firms seeking innovative PR.

Tune in next time when I reveal at least one thing that really annoys PR firms when you invite them in to pitch.

Oh, and in case you’re out there googling yourselves, the consideration set was:

• PerkettPR
• KEL and Partners
• Topaz
• Version 2 Communications
• Waggener Edstrom

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* I don’t mean to say, by the way, that Facebook is so dead simple that it needs no documentation. I mean that if you aren’t ready to jump in and learn from the online help and by experimenting, you’re not going to do well with Facebook. That said, the book does at least attempt to answer some important questions about Facebook, notably, “Why Facebook?” (page 6) and “Why did the UK fall in love with Facebook?” (page 11, by “internet psychologist Graham Jones.”)

** I hereby claim to be the originator of the term, “web 2.0 haircut” to mean a shaved head and a goatee or vandyke (soul patch does not qualify), usually in company of heavy-framed glasses. In the event that it should catch on, you read it here first. If not, somebody else thought of it.