You are Hungry or Tired and Now Everyone Knows It

I've heard that Facebook founder Mark ("The Dick") Zuckerberg boasts that Facebook is like a country, what with its millions of users and all. To me, it's more like a sleazy city full of pimps and crack whores. Or attention whores. I don't know. But pimps, for sure.


I just took the quiz, "What Kind of Facebook Hater Are You?" and my result was "Asshole Malcontent Who is Anti-Social and Hates When People Announce Mundane Shit." Take the Quiz!

The Boys of the Credenza Learn The Cruel Truth

Super Grande

How to Use Social Media: Another Blogger Weighs In

Much has already been written on better blogs (and spoken about at numerous conventions) on the subject of social media and the marketer's place within them. My turn. Nothing said here will be anything that brighter minds haven't already thought about; I'm just giving my take as a marketer.
Let's start with: What the Hell is Twitter?

I was skeptical even to adopt it as a user. I've always fed my latest blog posts to it, but to actually "tweet" seemed silly. I used it as a one-way news feed: "Go here and read my blog." But as more people started to follow me, I started to follow more people. I've quickly un-followed the people who are using Twitter as a blatant marketing tool. The people I follow tweet the oddest things. Some are hilarious, some mundane, some informative and others as random as possible. It eventually occurred to me that this group of people, from Dave Matthews to Bad Banana to Daryl Ohrt, were on Twitter to be friends, to have contact, to share information and to just basically hang out. It's not unlike early Internet chatrooms. Daryl also uses it to communicate with colleagues and to occasionally plug his brand, Plaid. In the case of someone like Matthews, Twitter is a tool for maintaining contact with his customer/fan base; the Dave Matthews freaks who trade bootlegs of live shows or love hearing about snow in the Virginia mountains at Christmas via Dave's tweets.

The few I follow, (some 40-odd) will on occasion mention a product or a company. It might be a good mention and it might be bad, and it can even be neutral. "I just used Acme Instant Hole and it sucks," or "Anyone looking for a good instant hole, Acme is awesome," or "I'm looking for a good instant hole. Anyone know one?"

Here's the only place, as far as I can tell, where a marketer has any business being on Twitter. If you subscribe to any sort of Twitter alert, you can easily find out when Acme Instant Hole is being tweeted. And you can jump in when it is mentioned. But will anyone ever actually follow Acme Instant Hole? Very unlikely.

And here's where marketers fail: They don't see the revenue stream. And here's what they don't want to hear: There is no revenue stream. Corporate blogs failed for the same reason. No one wants to write a company blog (and even fewer want to read it) that amounts to nothing more than spider food, especially when you have the comments feature disabled. This is about customer service, brand management and the "taking care of the little things" that no one wants to do. You want revenue? You want sales? Good customer service breeds sales. It's foundational. Everyone knows that. Treat me right and I'm likely to be loyal to you.

In preparing this post (which is a painstaking process involving sitting out on the back porch with a glass of wine and thinking about this post) I was trying to think of a product or service to which I'm loyal. The first one that came to mind was Formula One Firestone. It's a garage just down the road where we take the cars if they need help beyond the routine oil change. They have never been unable to fix a problem, their walls are lined with certifications and they are straight with me. I'm sure I can find cheaper car service somewhere, but this crew has proven itself. Craig, Al and Pete lead the show down there. I'm not good with names, but I know their names, and I see them maybe once every five months on average between our two aging cars.

I saw a couple of tweets from Bill Green, a social media advocate if ever there was one, where he scathingly and humorously rips United Airlines three or four new ones for screwing up his flight plans and failing to help him resolve them. All within the allotted 140 characters. Now if I'm United, my TweetBeep goes off and I go find this guy. I reply: "Hey, Sorry to hear about your experience. Hit me back by DM and I'll give you my email addy. See if we can't fix this.(Yeah, I work for UA)" That was 140 characters exactly. Bill invited that discussion by dissing my brand and I responded. You can call that "engaging the consumer" at your next conference speaking engagement.

If you're Bill in the above scenario, you're freaking out that a giant, uncaring corporation just found you badmouthing them and is now trying to fix your problem. On Twitter no less. You are definitely DMing me and getting my email addy. Chances are better now that Bill might fly United again, even if I can't fix his problem to his utmost satisfaction. I was there. I showed him I'm listening. What does that cost United? Hell, I'll do it for you, United, as your highly-paid social media consultant. But the money I save you in salvaged customers might well offset the salary and perks (free flights for life, first-class) that you pay me. Will Bill now follow United on Twitter? Who cares? Numbers of followers is not the point, unless you're tweeting stuff like, "First five people to reply get free round trip tickets to anywhere in the continental US."

Twitter is the latest social media application that marketers will fast ruin. Look back a year or two. What happened to MySpace? It got overrun with tools and shills, getting in your face or spamming you. Where did everyone go? Facebook. And they'll be leaving that soon, too. Anyone use AIM anymore? Yeah, I didn't think so. All those "buddies" you kept getting who were really companies? Skype? Had its day. We run from the marketers - because they're always marketing; always looking for a way to slap us in the face with a banner or yell at us with some unsolicited blurb. Or worse, they pretend to be our "friends."

They'll find a way to find you. (We always do.) But until the marketer stops using social media to sneak up and pounce on the target, the target will continue to find new places to hang out, running from them.

You want to use social media? Look at them this way: social media are places where you can strengthen the ties you have, repair the ones that are severing and maybe in the process (but only by luck) build a few new ones.

And Twitter, you don't really have much hope of becoming a money-making operation in the traditional sense of selling ads. Most Twitter users don't even see the Twitter.com site; they're using mobile devices or second-party widgets embedded in their iGoogle homepages. You're going to have to "think outside the box" since you already blew your shot at making serious money when you turned down Facebook's $500 million offer. Whatever you do as you explore how to make money from this fast-growing application du jour, take a lesson from those who've blown it in front of you: Stay out of the users' faces.

Even as marketers, what do we always think of the marketer who is trying to force his way in? We think, "Get out of my face!" Here's an opportunity for us to do just that.

Be Sure Your Spam Will Find You Out

I don't remember signing up to follow Bobbi-Jo Frazier on Twitter, but I'll be sure to remove her now.

Attention, Bobbi-Jo: You're doing it wrong. You're going to kill Twitter with this type of tweet. If you get ANY business from this method of soliciting your "friends," I will write a blog post on your success as a Twitter marketer.

I don't expect to have to write that blog post.

The Internet Makes People Think They're More Important Than They Are

It gets bigger

Title and accompanying pop-up inspired by zoneviii's Twitter feed.

Another Reason I'm Not "Tweeting"

Guess what, gang? PLCTLDPX1J is following me on Twitter!!!

As if PLCTLDPX1J's user name wasn't clue enough that he/she is full of shit and just a scam artist looking to scam someone, here's PLCTLDPX1J's latest tweet:


With apologies to my friends in the "social media space" who truly believe that Twitter is the wave of the future, it's not. It's the new haven of spammers and scammers.

I'll keep using it to alert you to new blog posts, but I'm not tweeting.

And I hate that term..."tweeting."

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.

Bossman Speaking The Text Again

...and that's never pretty.

Clickalicious

Now I Understand The Beauty of Linked-In

Received in my Linked-in mail this week:

I'm sure you don't remember me, but you gave me my first German beer. Our fathers were battalion commanders together in Giessen.

And there you have the power of social media and networking sites. Reminding you that one upon a time in junior high, you were passing out German beers to other kids.

Central Florida Doesn't Understand Social Media

A local police officer calls himself a "Super-Trained Killer Ninja Fighter of the Night" on his MySpace page and gets suspended.

After some MySpace trash-talking, local cheerleader mean girls lure a rival to a house and beat the crap out of her. They videotape the half-hour pummeling and post it on YouTube. Now they're in big trouble.


I'm Tom. I have 3,456,789,567,453,223,456 friends.

Face It: There are Too Many Social Options

Got this auto IM this morning from Facebook. I was apparently invited to join by a colleague.

I'm on MySpace in two places. I'm on LinkedIn. I've got Skype. I signed up for Twitter, but in order to put it on this blog I'd have to change my template, which would be a pain given all the mods I made to this template. I'm on AdGabber, a service of Ning. I've got 4 separate screennames on AIM. I get email on Google, Yahoo!, my local provider at home and two different work accounts. I also have dormant accounts at LiveJournal, GarageBand, PureVolume and a few more. I'm signed on to a few forums and stay updated on too many blogs. I just don't want to keep track of one more social media hotspot. I don't care what you're doing 24/7. Nor should you care what I'm doing.

Can we leave some places for the high school & college kids? Must we invade every place and turn it into another noisy midway of carnival barkers, driving the kids elsewhere again? Aren't you guys connected enough? I think some of you would die if you unplugged.

(And I will never play in Second Life. My first life is busy enough.)

Drinking The Kool-Aid - But Not Catching a Buzz

On Friday, Copyranter did me the kindness of linking to a story here at Where’s My Jetpack? (Good for a huge spike in traffic, with that link being the leading source of traffic over the weekend – and likely through this week.) In the comments section of that post, I thanked him, as did Mr. William Green of Make the Logo Bigger. Bill pointed out that Copyranter “ranks higher than me on every blog ranking list he doesn’t want to be on.”

Copyranter has no labels, no Technorati tags, no digg icons and he doesn’t Twitter. He’s not asking you to Stumble Upon him or mark him as del.icio.us. There’s no way for you to email his stories to your friends from his site. He steadfastly refuses to keep a blog roll, even though he’s known to make the rounds as a commenter here and there. The most he offers his visitors is a Feedburner link.

So what makes Copyranter’s blog have a Technorati ranking of 14,117 and an Authority of 297? (Those numbers, for those of us who watch them, are mockingly higher than many blogs with every social media icon known to man cluttering up the end of every post.)

Say it with me, class…CONTENT.

That’s not to diminish the value of all those social media tags and widgets, and if Copyranter were to employ them, he could probably write a book, sell it online, and retire in wealth and peace, free to toss the Plastic Flatball™ with his girlfriend in the park. But any book he wrote would only be a bestseller because of its content.

Content is still king. For all the attempts by some to make their blogs rack up huge traffic numbers and links from other blogs, it’s surprising how many of them have so few comments under the posts. Why? Likely nobody cares about what was written.

I’ve had the opportunity to help clients set up blogs, and I know many of you are engaging in the same practice. But I honestly fear for the livelihood of those blogs. Few are participating in them at best. And no one’s reading them at worst. Maybe it’s a lack of transparency. Maybe it’s already a backlash on the part of the audience, small though it is. It is easy to distrust a corporate blog, unless that corporate blog is in some way compelling by its content.

You hired a new employee? Woo-hoo! You’re speaking at a conference? Yay you! You landed a new piece of business? Awesome. You'd be better off to save that news for your Sunday afternoon call to your mom, so you can hear her say, "We're so proud of you." Or issue a press release no one is going to read.

I want you to tell me something new, something refreshing, something newsworthy or something funny. I want you to be an authority. I want you to have an opinion. I want to see you push the bounds of corporate communications and tell me how you, as the high-powered and well-known CEO of Acme, Inc., think the San Diego Chargers made a HUGE mistake in firing Marty Schottenheimer. (You do have a personal life. Your customers and prospects can benefit from seeing your humanity.) I want you to throw open the curtain and say, “People are complaining about our new rollout, Product X. Some have outright called it 'a piece of shit.' We’re working to resolve some of the obvious problems, but I invite those people who are dissatisfied to please comment here on my blog and see if together we can resolve your issues.”

Another problem with corporate blogs is frequency. If you’re posting once a week or less, just quit now. You need to keep it up. And get out there and comment on other blogs if you ever hope to see a visitor who didn’t just find you by accident. And by all means, do not engage in fake conversations with yourself, commenting anonymously on your own blog just so you can have some comments.

The Age of Conversation is very real, and I’ve made virtual friends (even met one) out here within this Series of Tubes. I’ve found voices and opinions I love to listen to and converse with in the year this blog has been active. The blog is a powerful and fun tool. (I’m not talking about MySpace, Facebook or Second Life yet. That’s a whole different post.)

Blogging isn’t going anywhere, but it has yet to be tapped effectively by those who seek to make it a means of “engaging the consumer.”

I Heart Huckabee

I'm wondering how much it costs to become a "cool new person" on MySpace, because the third slot is reserved for presidential candidates. Something doesn't sit well with me on this. Maybe MySpace is doing it as a public service for all candidates on a rotating basis? (Just hit "refresh" and they change.)

How effective can this be as far as gaining support? So if I'm a friend of Jenny and I see that Jenny has Tommy Thompson as a friend, am I now swayed to get on the Tommy Thompson bandwagon? Will Jenny and I begin discussing the merits of the Tommy Thompson tax reform proposal? I don't think that's how it works, and I don't think the candidates are gong to be successful in turning social networking sites into the "national conversation" they all want to have with us. (Oh, to sit down for a cup of coffee with Hillary and just chat.)

One campaign staffer in one desperate campaign said, "We should be on MySpace!" and then they all followed suit, lest they look "out of touch." Perhaps it's just about "impressions" and the candidates hoping for a little more name recognition. I don't know. It's probably just me, but I'd feel pretty stupid having Dennis Kucinich or Rudy Gulliani as a friend of mine on MySpace.

And as long as we're talking about the the marketing of candidates, I have some advice for all of you with silly names: Get out now. The electorate is shallow. They won't stand for a president named Tommy Thompson. That sounds like the name of some bully on the playground in a third grade reader. How old are you now, Tommy? Maybe we can switch to plain old "Tom?" Also Mike Huckabee; just way too easy to make fun of. Can't you hear the kids taunting, "Huckabee, Suckabee, F..." It's like when you're choosing a name for your child, you want to be very careful and imagine it on an office door 30 years in the future. Ladies and Gentleman, President Bambi-Jo Backwater. See? Not good.