How Not To Do Social Media

One of the most visited posts on this blog over the years has been the Land O' Lakes Butter box trick. It is also the most spammed post on this blog. Usually I delete them as soon as they come in, but I'll leave the most current one up, just as a lesson on how you shouldn't promote your business on blogs. Never mind the bad grammar, as I don't speak Spanish and am not one to make fun of anyone who can speak more than one language. But the form is the same in all of them, "Love your blog. Please keep it up. Now visit my site that has zero to do with anything being discussed here." Here is the current comment, verbatim:

Sure, it was probably automated. (Wait, it can't be since I have the word verification feature turned on. So someone is actually pasting this comment in along with their linked name and typing in the captcha.) So what has the site owner lost in terms of time or resources? Probably very little. But is a link buried in a mildly trafficked blog post comment thread really that valuable when you risk looking like a shameless spammer?

Parkrrr points out in the comments that it's all about Page Rank, which is all about links, and one time a long time ago BoingBoing linked to me, giving that post some rank. So it's a piggyback link game! Well, screw you, Costa Rican Land Pimps. Your comment goes away now.

They Do Advertising in South Dakota?

The Dakotas don't get much respect. For that matter, most of the Midwest, Upper Midwest, South and North don't get much respect. (Friend of the blog Alan Wolk has a great piece on the ad world's neglect of a huge segment of the country over at Ad Age.)

Some coastal dwellers (probably of the NYC and LA variety) long ago deemed the interior of the nation "flyover country." But until you've lived there, you don't know what you're talking about. The cost of living is waaaay cheaper and they get the same channels on their cable boxes that you get. The sushi is a little suspect, but that's offset by the ability to leave your front door unlocked.

So I was checking out my tanking ranking at Technorati to see who links here when I found that rare thing: an agency blog that doesn't suck. (There are a few over in the sidebar that fit that description.) It's from agency Henkin-Schultz of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

And since we're now living in the future, I can look up the agency's address and zoom in to their building in a creepy, stalker way. Looks like a cool building. Whaddayaknow? The cool ad agency building trend is happening in South Dakota. Something tells me their work would stand up to any created in Manhattan or Malibu.

I'll Be Your Jackass of New Media

Rick at Blog World & New Media Expo says I’m a “jackass” because I shat all over his just-finished blog conference back in July on this site. For those who don't know, Blog World Expo is "the world's largest blogging trade show and conference dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media." Rick also tells me, “Glad you didn't come. If you change your mind and decide to come next year, please think again and don't.” I assured him I will not be there.

I’m on the record, Rick, as thinking this whole blogging consultancy industry is a sack of crap. My opinion hasn’t changed.

click for big

I'm not saying blogging has no place in business. That would be stupid. But social media should be common sense and we needn't have silly new titles like Social Media Guru and New Media Maverick. We don't really need a conference to tell us how to blog. What's more, huge investments are being sunk into something that can show very little in return. All the tools you need are free.

Here are a bunch more opinions of mine on the subject. So maybe I am writing the book. Or hosting the conference. And maybe I'm just a shitty capitalist.

The Corporate Blog Challenge
Enrage The Consumer
Save The Money and Get a Kid to Do It
Cold Call Carl: Selling Twitter Consultation
The Podcast is Dead
Cold Call Carl: He Keeps on Dialing
Buy the Book - Attend the Seminar
There's a Comment Pending Approval
Your Company Blog Bites
Drinking the Kool-Aid - Not Catching a Buzz
Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out
Your Title Was Boring and I'm Busy
If You Can't Trust a Paid Blogger
Relevance - It's a Beautiful Thing

Your Title Was Boring - And I'm Busy

Most blog readers these days are perusing their RSS readers, quickly glancing through their subscriptions for something worthy of their precious time. It is helpful if your post title is engaging. If you're in advertising particularly, and you're blogging about advertising, why not practice your craft in your blog? Try to create headlines that grab your readers. Think of the RSS reader as a very crowded field where you are competing for attention - because it is and you are. If you're writing, "Jaguar's New Commercial," you've lost me right away. If you write, "Jag's New Spot Sucks Balls," or "Jag Smacks Me in The Face with Awesome Ad," I might venture further.

One blog that never fails to grab my attention through titles alone is Public School Intelligentsia, formerly known as "Hey Be Us." Here's a random sampling of recent PSI post titles:

• If regret had a face, it would be that tribal sun tattoo wrapped around a belly button.
• Lessons In Congeniality: “I don’t want to kill everyone…Just my enemies.”- Micheal Corleone
• Elements of Good Advertising: Simple. Pink. Sticky.
• On Nailing People’s Asses To The Wall: The 5 Staffers McCain Should Fire
• Take That, You Button-Nosed Shiksas! First Ever Jewish Girls Swimsuit Calendar

Sort of intriguing.

And here's another note on RSS readers that might help your blog: Give your readers the whole post in your feed. Don't shorten it as some tease that I'm supposed to chase to improve your blog stats. If your post is interesting enough, people will click the "show original item" link and comment on your blog. Cases in point: I subscribe to a couple of political blogs. One is "The Caucus" at The New York Times. the other is "The Daily Dish" at The Atlantic. "Caucus" gives me a one line tease that I very rarely click on. "Dish" gives me the whole post, and I appreciate that. "Caucus" may end up off my subscription list very soon.

How To Be an Internet Ass

I love to include photos in my posts, and I will often simply do a Google image search for what I'm looking for. If the image is really nice and clearly came from a photographer who is attempting to make a living from his or her photography, I will include a link to the photographer's site at the bottom of the post. This is the standard practice in blogging. If you steal it, at least give credit. It is the expected reciprocal kindness that creates traffic for the site where the picture was found. I frequently find some of my own creations on other sites, and I appreciate the traffic as the other sites include a link to where they found the image.

In this day of Flickr and images readily available to everyone, to expect that you can keep others from looking at or copying your images is to be living in the past, in the era of someone like, I don't know, John McCain, who can't get online without the assistance of his aides.

On a recent post, I searched for "rain" and found a black and white image that really struck me as beautiful. I included the words "picture stolen from" at the bottom of the post, with "from" linked to the photographer's site.

He quickly sent me this note:

Mr. Jetpack,

I noticed your photo on your 7/17/08 of [location deleted to prevent anyone from visiting this guy's site] in the rain looks a little familiar. It came from my website, [URL removed to keep anyone from visiting this guy's site].

I noticed you DID NOT give me any photo credits, failed to contact me for permission and basically hijacked my photo for use without any legal consent.

Please remove it immediately.

"Looks a little familiar." Nice snarky start. And I wonder how Mr. Photographer even knew I had posted his image. Could it be that someone actually visited his site from my site and his analytics told him so? And he went to this blog, saw his image, freaked out and failed to read the post to the bottom where I gave him credit? Hijacked? Legal consent? Give me a break, dude.

I alerted him to the link at the bottom of the post thusly:

[Name removed to keep anyone from visiting this guy's site],

You are mistaken. If you'll notice at the bottom of the original post I included a link to your site, as I generally do when I appreciate a good photo.

If you still don't want people going to your site from my site, I will take down the image and the link.

Let me know.

Thanks

I'm tired of waiting for his reply.

Dude, you've tested my patience. I could understand your incalcitrance intransigence had I been SELLING your photograph for profit, or if I even made money from this blog through advertising. As it was, I was simply providing you free traffic for your nice picture.

Your picture is gone along with the link to your site. I've replaced it with the photo above, shot in the backyard about five minutes ago. Your comments to my blog and their associated links have also been removed.

You have a lot to learn about the Internet.

The Happiest Place in the World?

That would be Denmark, according to some surveys. Denmark has also been considered the second most peaceful place in the world, behind Iceland. But as they say in Denmark, "Who the hell wants to live in fucking Iceland?"

Pretty pastoral and peaceful place.

And wouldn't you be peaceful and happy if you got the whole summer off? Here in the States, we've always heard rumors of those liberal European and Scandinavian countries where the people go "on holiday" for months on end, then return to their cushy jobs where they work six-hour days, three of which are spent at lunch where they drink many adult beverages. They retire at the age of 50 and enjoy free meals at all restaurants and free rail and air travel just by flashing their "retired" cards. Health care is free and everyone lives to be 100 just by eating yogurt and fish. No one is poor and the bus drivers sing jolly songs as they cheerily drop you right at your front door.

OK, maybe some of that isn't true, but a visit to the Advance blog (an agency in København - that's Copenhagen for us ugly Americans) has a post titled Closing Down for the Summer. Another post on the blog reveals some very peaceful and happy people on a seaside film shoot. Advance has one of the few agency blogs that doesn't try too hard and yet isn't ashamed of being an agency blog. More on that in another post - this is about Denmark, Land of the Free and Home of the Whole Damned Summer Off.

Here is an inside peek at Advance, where they have perfected the Cool Agency Interior Design Style of placing things at unconventional angles, opaque divider walls, weird chairs that few people sit in, natural wood floors, exposed ductwork, track lighting, a "library" and people who look blurry walking past windows letting in sunlight.

A Creative could get Creative in a space like this

I may have found a Heaven on Earth to replace my other dream ex-pat destination, Australia.

You're Doing it Wrong!

The other day I compared the two presidential candidate’s logos. The post got a bit of traction from Copyranter and Discourse.net. In my analysis of McCain's logo was this passage: Then, he adorns the star with what could be considered wings, reminding us that he was a pilot, a pilot who graduated fifth to last in his class at Annapolis, not usually a place from which the Navy selects its flight school candidates.

That's all the geniuses at AviationSchools needed.

"Ah-ha! Someone is talking about flight school! Time to paste a random, stupid comment on that blog and send them to my random, stupid link farm for aviation schools!"

The comment, if you can even call it that, left TWICE, reads: "Online Aviation Training Directory has one of the largest selections of flight schools and aviation training schools online. New flight schools and aviation resources added weekly."

The commenter, posting under the name "Flying Lessons," is also the proud owner of PlanetMace, your one stop shop for pepper-spray and stun-guns.

This is social media, friends. Or this is what it's becoming. This guy finds "flight school" in a post about John McCain's logo and assumes my readers want to visit his stupid link farm for aviation schools. Even if no one ever goes to that site through the comments of the original post, at the least his stupid link farm now has an inbound link from my site and countless others, surely, where he has pasted his URL in a very irrelevant way.

This is not a "conversation." This is SPAM. It's maddening and it's doomed to fail.

If you are going to use blogs as a place to get the word out about your business, it will require real thought— actual words from your head typed relevantly to the post— in relevant places.

Quit being carnival barkers and midway hawkers. You're ruining it for everyone else. You're also not helping your business.

I'm a Bad Blogger

Apologies to my blogging buds, whom I've neglected by not commenting on their blogs regularly as I used to. Reason is the Evil Corporate Masters, who prevent me from seeing anything with the suffix of .blogspot, .typepad or .wordpress. I can see you in my reader and always read your stuff, but that's it. Unless I get to you at home after work or on the weekends, I'm a negligent blogger.

Apologies to AdRants, AdScam, Agency Tart, American Copywriter, Catch Up Lady, Brand DNA, Chimp Media Monitoring, Copyranter, Every Sandwich, Hespos, Heybeus, Life in the Garden, Married to the Sea, Make The Logo Bigger, Mental Hygiene, MultiCult Classics, New York Punk, RayTube, Renegade Agency Confessional, Scamp, Texan in Hippieland, The AdHole, The Daily (Ad) Biz, The Assimilated Negro, Thinking in Vain, Toadstool, Why Advertising Sucks, Yes But No But Yes, Yonder Ponder.

Some of you have also been very negligent, not posting to your own blogs in months. Blogging is tough work, I know, but if you remain dormant, I've got to pull you from the "Linkers and Lurkers" list and replace you with something new. No offense, but if you've quit, I'm not keeping you around out of respect for your blog's memory. Not that I don't respect your blog's memory...but you know what I mean.

On the plus side, Evil Corporate Masters today announced a permanent switch from Business Casual to Totally Casual all the time, not just on Fridays. So maybe not so Evil after all.

God Uses This Sauce

Again, here's an unpaid, unsolicited endorsement of a product from this highly cynical blogger. Mae Ploy Sweet Chili Sauce from Thailand. Tonight at Casa de Jetpacks, as evidenced by this picture, we dined on barbecued shrimp (charcoal is the only way to go, gas is just a stove outdoors) doused in Mae Ploy, available by typing "Mae Ploy Sauce" in your favorite search engine. I recommend it to anyone and would bet that it is served in Heaven, regardless of your religious persuasion.

Read my fake Pay Per Post about Mae Ploy Sauce

Not What We Had In Mind

The Corporate Blog Challenge

Click for bigger, printable, stealable version.



Having assisted companies in setting up and administering blogs, I know it’s challenging to convince them of the need to be transparent, less stodgy and a little “uncorporate” if they want to (get ready) “maximize their presence in the social media space.” Most of the blogs I helped get established are miserable failures now because the companies either a) gave up on frequent posting or b) only wanted to be rah-rah vehicles, self-promoting and basically devoid of personality. The authors also weren’t going out to other blogs, boards and forums and making relevant comments that directed readers back to them.

I recently visited the corporate blog of a worldwide company. It is well-designed, has many expert authors and frequent postings. (One author has over 800 posts.) They’ve employed all the appropriate tag mechanisms and social media link widgets. They incorporate plenty of text links, images and the navigation is intuitive. But nothing is happening interactively. I am hard pressed to find a single comment on the entire blog. There is no “two-way” happening. The posts read more like little articles and they appear to have been sterilized. I’m starting to wonder if the blog is merely search engine fodder, because clearly, there’s no “conversation” going on. Comments are also monitored heavily, which is generally expected of a corporate blog, but I submitted an (somewhat) innocuous comment last Friday and it has yet to appear, perhaps because it was (somewhat) humorous and not in keeping with this corporation’s communications guidelines.

Corporate guidelines should be relaxed to a degree if you’re going to get any interaction from your company's blog. For legal reasons, you can’t have your authors going off on rants like a private blogger is free to do, but at the same time you should allow your authors (and commenters) the ability to speak with some candor.

The corporate blog I visited has a 150 word paragraph of fine print above the comment box. It's full of legalese, with phrases like “collect, process, use,” “personally identifiable information,” “worldwide in perpetuity,” and “without notice to you and without compensation.”

I mean, c’mon. I just want to comment. But this is one example of why corporate America is having a hard time getting a handle on “Web 2.0.” (Kill me if I ever use that term again.) In the interest of sales and marketing (and in the interest of covering their asses legally) they’ve pretty much killed the conversation.

Rockin' Rockstars Rockin' a Startup

I could lose my lunch over this if I'd eaten lunch yet. Everyone's favorite Social Media House of Bullshit, Pay Per Post, is showing Episode 10 of their little in-house series called "Rockstartup." It's probably old, as stupid ideas like this almost always end up in the "tried it for a time and gave up on it" pile. Go watch now.

Thrill to the trials of the site going down as the "Code Ninjas" work feverishly to fix it. Listen with awe as Ted, the founder, shows you what a cool guy he is because he doesn't have an office and "wants to get the pulse" of the operation by being "out on the floor with the team." I've never seen a company try so hard to be so cool. Rockstartup? Pardon me while I projectile vomit.

Read some of the hip, irreverent language on the website. Stuff like, "Do you eat, sleep, and breathe the Internet and social media? If so you may be the right person for a rewarding career with the most creative group of disrupters out there." Disrupters? Wrong. You've got a business model that rewards fake blog postings for companies that in all likelihood just plain suck. How do I know they suck? They went to you to get people to write fake blog postings about them!

Orlando-based Pay Per Post says "Get Paid to Blog About the Things You Love." That's a lie. You get paid to blog about things you've never heard of, to the tune of about $5. You are paid to create tags and "awareness" for something you've likely never used.

In that sense, yes, I guess Pay Per Post is a group of disrupters. They are making blogging a whore's domain. And they are the pimps.

Real, trustworthy blogging about products and services is unpaid. It happens when a consumer actually uses a thing and likes it or hates it. Then they write about it on their blog. For instance, Fred Leo recently got screwed by Panasonic and writes about it.

Here's another example. I use the Senseo coffee maker. Senseo is awesome. It makes a great cup of coffee. It is fast, efficient and unlike any coffee maker I have ever used. I bought one for my parents. I encourage everyone who enjoys coffee to get one. They are available everywhere. They are affordable and you will actually like your home made coffee again. Here is a picture of a cup of coffee brewed this morning with the Senseo. Look at that frothy goodness. It is wonderful. Get a Senseo now.
Nobody needs to hand me $5 to write that. It is a real testimonial (written in a fake Pay Per Post way) about something I use and enjoy. And Senseo will never have to use a service like Pay Per Post's because Senseo has a decent product that people like and talk about.

"Social Media" can't be "monetized" in this way. When you are paying people to create fake testimonials, you instantly lose any credibility for your company.

I really want to see all these social media parasites, gurus, hucksters, evangelists, snakes, sharks, weasels, rats, dogs and rockstars crushed in the coming crash.

Previously in "I Hate This Business Model."

If You Can't Trust a Paid Blogger...

Who can you trust, right? The following is a pretend Pay-Per-Post. I hate the concept of pay-per-post, because it invites flattering commentary of a less-than-honest variety. And I really hope all the venture capital thrown at that stupid idea dries up. But I still want to review this product (and this restaurant) because I like them. Everything I write here is true – only I will write it in that fake pay–per-post way. (With an updated opening suggested by Bill Green in the comments.)

Hey, Guys! I came across this really great product you should try! I love Mae Ploy, a sweet chili sauce from Thailand. It is used in many Asian dishes. It is an ideal dipping sauce with spring rolls, dim sums, or fish cakes. If you have ever ordered barbecued chicken from a street vendor in Thailand, it was most assuredly accompanied by Mae Ploy. It has a medium to hot taste. I will even dip tortilla chips in it. I use it on burgers in place of ketchup and mustard. I will also dip steak in it. And chicken. I put it on burritos and tacos and fajitas. I introduced it to my sister-in-law and she put it on a salad as dressing!! Is that crazy, or what? LOL!!!

I found out about Mae-Ploy at a local Tex-Mex restaurant called Tijuana Flats. I think they should call their cuisine Cal-Mex, because Tijuana is near California, but that's not important. The important thing is they are cool. You will know this when you go to their website, which is all done in Flash, with a guy with tattooed arms sweeping away the screen when you click on something new. It's like he's a busboy or something! Is that cool, or what? LOL!!!

Tijuana Flats is also cool because they have a “We don’t care, man - Just relax!” attitude but you can tell they really do care. They make their server girls dress in really low jeans with short shirts and all of the guys in the kitchen have emo glasses, earrings and are starting to learn to cultivate their various facial hair designs. Many of the employees even have tattoos! Tijuana Flats started in Central Florida but they are developing franchises everywhere, even as far north as Pittsburgh. If you go to their website, you can find out if there is a location near you. I hope there is. You can also tell they are cool because they play really loud hipster music on their website. When you eat there, though, the music mix is kind of messed up. You might hear the Bee Gees followed by Missy Elliot.

Anyway, I really like Mae Ploy, a sweet chili sauce from Thailand. You should buy some. I get mine at Tijuana Flats - and I always make sure to ask for the BIG bottle. LOL!!! You can find it in lots of places just by typing “Mae Ploy” in a search engine.

More in the Pay-Per-Post category at Where's My Jetpack?

Relevance: It's a Beautiful Thing

I know we can't control the idiots, but I'd encourage all bloggers to delete comments that have NOTHING to do with your post. These neo-spammers take the time to get past your word verification thingy, and yet they still give you their generic pasted bullshit like:

"Nice blog. I really like it. Please visit my blog."

I understand that one of the ways to drive traffic to your site is to comment on other blogs, but you can't treat other blogs as bulletin boards for your own blog or website. Say something that actually pertains to the post or contributes in some way to the conversation. Quit being stupid, please.