Dull thoughts in a sharp world.

Here is an old video from Web 2.0 Expo in NY, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. Gary is a very insightful, cares about what he says, and a great presenter.

My favorite quotes include:

“You can lose just as much money being happy as hell… clap that up cuz it’s the real s&*t.”

“You collect smurfs? Smurf it up.”

“We’re building businesses here. This isn’t about parties.”

“Legacy is better than currency.”

Here is a pretty awesome animation from RealWire on social media and online outlets.

The Online Media from RealWire on Vimeo.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Congrats to Eric at Urbane for being such a stud twitter user.

Continuing the discussion with companies uses of social media, here is an interesting article by Mashable titled, “Do Brands Belong on Twitter?”:

Dr. Mark Drapeau is a biological scientist, government consultant, and regular contributor to Mashable.com and other venues.Behind every Twitter account is a person. But some of these people ‘hide’ behind organizational brands, obscuring their persona and therefore reducing authenticity and transparency.

While some brands do a decent job of engaging people on Twitter, many don’t, and one could further argue that brand names and logos, as opposed to full names and user images, are not in the spirit of the Twitterverse.

People Talk to People

Twitter is about people sharing information with other people. So how do one-dimensional organizational brands fit into this mix? When you really think about it, they don’t. As an analogy, when you call customer service, a human answers the phone (eventually) and tells you their name – and you’re not talking to “Sprint” or “Dell” but rather “Steve” or “Danny.”

So, does anyone really want to talk to @DunkinDonuts? Or would they rather talk to Bill Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin Donuts of Canton, MA, or perhaps the local franchise owner on Capitol Hill, or a disgruntled but funny summer employee punching in at 4am? People connect with people, and so I think the latter.

Twitter is still deciding how to monetize, and one possible approach would be to charge organizations a fee for using the service as a marketing tool. Most brands are not yet tweeting, but selling a premium service might increase Twitter’s profile and suddenly seem like an attractive strategy. I think this would be a mistake from the viewpoint of people who use Twitter.

Twitter may become little more than an enormous number of feeds, mainly full of nothing of interest to you. And while the system is built to be opt-in, the prospect of wading through 100 or 1000 times more junk when you do searches, companies hiring SEO consultants to put key words in front of your face, and seeing @AnimalCrackers at the top of the TwitterGrader list in my local area are unattractive byproducts of this business model. (Alternatively, brands just might not buy in at all.)

No Brands on Twitter

Thinking about what might be best for people, in my opinion Twitter should not only not charge brands for membership, but also ban them altogether. Not unlike Facebook and other sites, every account would represent a person using a real name, location, and picture.

People could still tout their businesses, hobbies, and anything else in their handle, bio, or feed, but in an environment of authenticity and therefore increased trust. Some people will game the system, to be sure; but they will often get found out through the wisdom of crowds, so what’s the point?

New users would find having only real, authentic people on Twitter more attractive. Let’s face it, not many people use Twitter yet, and a company with a trusted brand like IBM could develop a platform with a better GUI and a few more features that my parents would be far more likely to try out, perhaps initially bankrolled as a public service. Twitter is far from invulnerable.

Personalities Might Help Brands

I think that authentic and transparent personal Twitter accounts – being yourself in an uncontrived way – may indirectly and intimately influence (I3) organizational brands, because of the level of trust involved in sharing information with someone over the course of time. Many people have increased awareness of the government through talking to me and reading my Twitter feed. But I am not a public affairs professional, nor the official brand of the Department of Defense – just an informed, empowered, and hopefully interesting individual.

Having just one personal account would also streamline Twitter’s user base, structuring it in a slight but possibly meaningful way. Why try to gain ambient awareness via TwitterFeed, when each person associated with an organization is a word-of-mouth advertising device?

In a followup post about misuses of social media, Forrester announced a variety of stats about how many customers trust a company blog. It stated that:

Only 16% of customers trust a company blog.

Why is that? We I think it stems for a misunderstand of what social media and a blog is used for. A couple weeks ago, I commented on a press release from the Atlanta-based social media consultants, Vitrue, stating the “ForRent.com Dominates Social Media”.

Here is my comment:

Interesting string of comments. In my ongoing battle to digest advertisers (ILS’s and property management) value prop to social media users, I find it difficult to see the significant impact in consumer behavior resulting from ForRent’s social media efforts.
I think measuring should be about the depth of the engagement with the consumer. Just because you have 500 followers on Twitter or 500 friends on fb does not mean any of those 500 people matter or care. Are they customers getting value from the engagement or just competitors in the space?

I am guessing ForRent has done a terrific job having a presence on all the social media sites. I applaud their efforts and am excited to see the industry start to accept these mediums as viable distribution channels. But I agree with everyone else, I think that ForRent’s efforts may be more of a positioning strategy to the industry, than an effort to engagement the renter communities on these social media sites.

The most successful social media campaigns are not utilizing YouTube or Facebook, but creating their own community around the information, shared interests, and activities of the consumer. Nike created a very successful Nike Plus site, and LEGO’s has done a great job in reaching out to their evangelists. Though this may seem so apparent, I think the real value in social media is in the sharing of information, ideas, and connections amongst peers, and not self-promotion.

- Eric Wu

Their response was:

Eric Wu,
Your notion “sharing of information, ideas, and connections amongst peers, and not self-promotion” is great in the general sense of social media. I think what’s missing from your notion is the brand participation. Brands should encourage the behaviors and participate with their customers. Also, if you are inferring that brands like Nike prove that successful social media campaigns don’t happen on Facebook, YouTube, etc. I’d tend to disagree. 45+ Million users congregate on Facebook, almost 70 million on YouTube. Brands who want to embrace the conversational power of social media will participate where their customers are, and only encourage them to leave for functionality that can be better served outside that network (Nike+ is a good example). There’s plenty of examples, similar to Nike, who fare very well engaging on the social networks. Home Depot, Comcast, Starbucks and many others on Twitter. Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, Dell, and Nike on Facebook. For Rent, Pepsi, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola on YouTube. It’s important to go to the crowds as it’s always harder to ask them to move to your site, especially just to talk to you.

Aside from Facebook having over 120 million users, I am still not convinced by their argument. In fact, of the fortune 500 companies who did a Facebook app, I’ve read that upwards of 80% of them were deemed failures…. with a small percentage spending upwards of $1 million on the campaigns. Sure, there are a few expections, but for the majority of companies, creating a Facebook application has been unsuccessful. Why have they been unsuccessful? I think it again stems from a misunderstanding that social media is not about advertising. Branding is a by-product of providing relevant, creative, new, interesting, fun content or connecting people around comment interests for discussion. I actually commend ForRent.com for jumping into social media. I follow their blog, read their tweets, and even watch the occasional video and I admire that they are taking that risk. They have done a excellent job in attempting to use all the mediums, but I think they can improve their strategy. But back to the topic… correct uses of social media. Don’t take my word for it, here is some advice from social media guru Jeremiah Owyang:

Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog?

1. Writing style:
How you write indicates how real you can truly be

Great: Blog is written in a human voice
Bad: Content looks vetted by corp comm
Horrible: Rehashed press release

2. Topics:
What does the blog talk about? does it matter to marketing –or customers?

Great: Discusses the lifestyle (or workstyle) of actual customers
Good: Discusses the wider industry topics
Horrible: The corporate blog exclusively talks about the company

3. Humility:
Perhaps one of the most important attributes, how human and real is this blog, or is it giving lip service?

Great: Admits when wrong and discusses in open the short comings of the company and product and demonstrates in public how it will be improved
Good: Admits shortcomings but combats and defends the criticism, also known as spin
Bad: Only discusses the company in the best possible light, and may link, but not take on critics
Horrible: Never discuss the short comings of the company on the blog

4. Linking Behavior:
Links are the currency of the blogosphere, it indicates you respect someone else’s opinion so much that you’re willing to send them away from you.

Great: Links out to other sources, even competitors or critics as well as the next listed +1
Good: Links out to other sources, where other discussions are occurring
Bad: Primarily links to corporate created content 25% of the time
Horrible: Primarily links to corporate created content over 50% of the time

5. Customer Inclusion:
Do corporate blogs allow their customers to partake? or are they only second class citizens

Good: Allows for customers to guest blog, or includes snippets of their experiences
Bad: Content is only published by employees

6. Dialog:
Allowing for feedback can instill more trust

Great: Comments enabled and published instantly
Good: Comments enabled but reviewed causing time delay
Bad: Trackbacks only
Horrible: No comments allowed

7. Comment Moderation:
Blogs that allow for disagreeing comments are more real –and interesting.

Great: Comments (other than spam or off topic) are allowed, including direct disagreements
Bad: Negative comments are censored or altered
Horrible: No negative comments allowed

8. Frequency:
While more isn’t always better, having a steady rhythm of content is important

Good: A steady publication rate of posts appropriate to the speed of that market
Bad: Posts appear at a random rate, often starting off with apologies for not posting
Horrible: Posts appear to either promote the company during an announcement –or to combat a competitor

In short, blog about topics, ideas, issues, and news that your customers would want to hear about, not about how great your company is.

I’m not a huge Twitter user… I try to post a useful link once a day and read other useful links.  I would like to use Twitter a lot more, interact with other users to share ideas, and definitely gather and consumer the latest and greater info… a bit too busy right now.  I understand that most people think that Twitter is a way express “what you are currently doing”, but come’on people, it’s not really used for that.  I really do not care if you are walking down the street, wearing your new blue jacket on, and running into a tree on Twitter.  I used to Twitter what I was doing exactly until I realized that NO ONE CARES.  Twitter is used for spreading of information, ideas, news, and thoughts.  Discussions about relevant topics, brainstorming, etc.  I feel like people are competing to see who can tweet the most.  Here are some examples of tweets I follow today:

“Coming up with new content to post! Enjoying a little down time before it picks up again!” – Thank you for informing me of your next tweet.

“Can’t believe how quickly the day has gone by! Already time for lunch!” – I can tell time.

“I am seriously bored” – We all are.

Hundreds of these.  I realize that I can just block or unfollow these people, but some of them are my competitors and I want to read the 1 out of 50 tweets that are relevant.  Not sure if it just a misunderstanding of social media or what.  So if you are in the same boat as me, here is a reblog from Mashable! on tools to filter through all the noise.

So what do you do when you want to quiet the Twitter noise but don’t want to de-friend people? You currently have a few options:

1. Instead of listening to all of the noise, you can focus in on certain signals
2. You can use a platform to group your favorite tweeples and focus only on them
3. You can mute the tweeps that you don’t want to receive tweets from

Focus on the signal rather than the noise

Just Signal
Just Signal is an early-stage site that promises to stream in the tweets and FriendFeeds that you are interested in. The way they facilitate this is through a “filter” text box. In the text box, you input all of the keywords that you would like to filter in from Twitter, and they will feed “almost in real time.”

Tweetbeep
Tweetbeep is a great site that is very similar to Google Alerts. Using Tweetbeep, you can track any keywords that you want on Twitter and instantly get emailed when your keyword has been tweeted. This platform is much better than Just Signal because you don’t have to sit idly waiting for your keywords to stream in. With Tweetbeep, you just set your keywords and let them come into your email box.

Twilert
Another great alternative is Twilert. Like Tweetbeep, Twilert lets you create keywords that are tracked on Twitter and sent to you via email. Put simply, it’s Google Alerts for Twitter.

Isolate your favorite tweeple from the rest

To be perfectly honest, I’m a twhirl fan, but Tweetdeck has a killer function called Tweetdeck Groups that allows you to isolate your favorite tweeple from the rest of the noise. Just choose who you want to stand out, and Tweetdeck will create a column specifically for this user’s feed.

This is especially useful when you’re following over 300 people. So instead of sifting through all of the noise, just go to your favorite group and read the tweets that matter most to you.

You can view a comparison of Tweetdeck and twhirl here.

I just want to MUTE the noise

Twalala promises to mute certain people on Twitter without actually de-friending them. Why on earth would you want to actually mute someone?

• If you don’t want to see someone’s rant about their bad day at the office, you can mute them for the day.

• If you missed the season finale of Dancing with the Stars and don’t want to find out who won, you can mute any tweets with the keywords “Dancing with the Stars.”

Twalala feels that people would rather mute than de-friend because de-friending can be seen as offensive. Also, many people wouldn’t want others to know that they have just de-friended them, especially with sites like Qwitter out there.

Now, I am probably over-reacting and maybe I’m not the one who uses Twitter correctly, but I use my chat to let me friends know that I am bored, not broadcast it to millions of professionals, social media gurus, early-apaters, technologists, and businesses.