What’s Next Now

I uncovered this article in Forbes by Mike Schaffner, a blogger and director of information technology for The Valve and Measurement Group of Cameron in Houston.  His article is entitled “The Death of Social Media.”  In it, he moans:

“Many of the people that I get as followers on Twitter seem to offer nothing more than a continual stream of advertisements. It seems that a growing number of “Internet marketers” are taking over Twitter, trying to get business in teaching people how to grow their follower counts and sell advertising.”

He is right, but only to a point. What he does not seem to grasp is that Social Media is “self-policing;” that is, there exist far more tools to kill spammers and other pests than there ever have been for email, which is far less spam-proof. But it takes a bit of diligence to keep one’s social media streams clear of unwanted spam.

I use Socialoomph.com one or two times a week to vet my Twitter followers. There I can “ignore” – not reciprocate follows of troublesome new followers. I can also block them so that they can’t see me and I can’t see them.  If the spammer is particularly bothersome, posting nothing but ads or links to “how to make money on Twitter” or “come see my pictures,” there’s button that reports them to Twitter as a spammer.  You can’t do that with email if some unscrupulous actor gets your email address and sells it to others causing a tidal wave of unwanted garbage.

If anyone with nothing useful to offer has multiple thousands of followers, I don’t want to be on their follower list either.  Except for users who are doing company branding or are celebrities in their own right, it just isn’t reasonable to expect that having 10 thousand or more followers or reciprocated friends might be useful in any sense.  I like the concept of “Dunbar’s Number,” first featured in the book The Tipping Point, that theorizes most people can only manage about 150 meaningful social relationships.  Back in 2007, Tobias Escher wrote a good piece on this social brain hypothesis.

Most social media tools, and especially the ones that are popular, offer options to help users eliminate just about any content they don’t want.  FaceBook’s recent change, broadening permissions to a default “everyone,” can easily be throttled back if only you take a couple minutes to dictate specifically what content you want to see and what content of yours that you want to share only among close friends.

So, Mike Schaffner has valid complaints, but he is just dead wrong about the ramifications of them.  As people become more proficient in managing their social media spaces, and as companies like FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others devise ways to make their user experiences less spam-susceptible, this issue is likely to become moot.

It makes no sense to conflate social media’s growing pains with mortal flaws.

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I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
-Rudyard Kipling

The lesson Kipling wrote of is one of the first things they teach you about writing if you attend a college of journalism (and I suppose any other college of writing discipline).  I remember going over the “Five W’s and H” in Journalism 101, or 1001, or whatever they called it back when the writing instrument in front of us was an IBM Selectric. What I wonder now is that when this was first presented to me, did I think to ask, or even ask myself, just why these six things are important to a news story? After all, these are taught as more than just important “rule of thumb” items; we were cautioned that without these six items our stories would be deemed incomplete. Today we might say they would “FAIL!” (more…)

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I was quite excited this morning to read an article in the Irish Times in which a British journalism professor almost completely “gets” what the notion of  ”social media” (i.e. people having conversations) actually means to the future of communication. I really have only one quibble, but it’s a big one because Professor Roy Greenslade makes the foundation of his argument upon a shaky interpretation of the history of how people have communicated:

News travelled slowly for centuries, going only as fast as human messengers could travel, whether by foot, horse or ship. It also tended to be specific – from individual to individual – and controlled. The people received only the news the authorities, church or monarch, deemed fit to release.

That changed in various European countries from the mid-17th century with the foundation of newspapers. Though they had a long struggle to secure the freedom to publish, they did impart “unauthorised” knowledge.

I think this may reveal one of the biggest disconnects that today’s “Old Media” professionals and purveyors have about people in general: when information is shared between two or more people it is seldom kept “specific;” rather, it immediately becomes nuanced byindividual biases, perceptions and interpretations. Information, as is transmitted from one person to another, is necessarily “seasoned” by the unique experience of each party in a conversation coupled with whatever historical or shared understandings the “transmitter” and the “receivers” might share.  When I think about the way people shared “news’ in the past, I’m reminded of this picture of my dad in a general store in 1909 (he’s the one on the stool).

How did these people share "news?"

Had Prof. Greenslade made his argument about the impact of “public illiteracy” on a ruling power’s ability to control the message and, thus, the masses, he’d have had a better point.

While it may be true that rulers, leaders, monarchs, priests and/or other “authorities” have always and will always seek to control how information is disseminated they cannot ever succeed completely in managing how it is received, or, more importantly, how people change it through social interaction and conversation.  This is something the “journalists” or “advertisers” or “marketers” or “PR Pros”of 2010 must come to terms with, and soon, or they will find themselves without a source of income in 2012 or surely by 2015.  In a sense, social media is freeing us to be more like the way we used to be… or perhaps it is just putting us back in touch with the way we are.

There are other parts of the article with which i disagree, but I don’t want to be too hard on Prof. Greenslade.  His Op Ed piece is important to read if you care about the future of the “business of communication,” particularly if you hold a reasonable distrust of people with power and the lengths they will go to keep it.

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One of my greatest frustrations today is that I can see most of the pieces that will become part of our business communication future;  I just can’t quite access them conveniently yet.  Knowing what I know makes me very impatient. But I’m also very hopeful, especially when I have the opportunity to see more clearly down the road a bit. There’s a good chance I’m about to be given such an opportunity. I’m waiting patiently to be sent my invitation to become a beta tester for Gist, a web application that looks very promising.

Before I get into that, and before you view the video below, I want to explain a few things about what I currently do to manage business relationships and stay informed about what is happening with my friends, prospects, and clients:

1.)  I have a Google Alert set up for each of my most important key contacts. Every day I get a summary e-mail for each alert that has shown activity that details what has been said or written in the news, blogs and social media sites. It’s helpful information, but it is a very inelegant solution. Also, it isn’t practical to have alerts set up for all of the 500+ people in my Outlook address books.

2.) On LinkedIn, I have several key word searches set up to scan for activity within the groups I follow and participate in.  It is a quick way for me to identify trends and learn new stuff without a lot of effort beyond setting it all up.

3.) I use Xobni,  my favorite Outlook add-in, to check all of my incoming e-mail, paying particular attention to new contacts, and matching it all up with both Facebook and LinkedIn.  It also helps me find hidden relationships that I don’t think I’d find any other way.

4.) I use TweetBeep to scan and report on the full Twitter stream, using keyword and phrase searches to identify contacts that I might be interested in following and establishing relationships.

As a result of my desire to be plugged in, my passion for finding the holy grail to fully-leverage social media for business, I have  so much information coming at me  that I routinely dial it back — killing or altering streams of information that are too rich — so that I don’t spend too much time with it.  I also end up deleting a lot of incoming information without ever reading it.

Why do I do all this? Well, I have known for a couple of years now that all of these things that I want to do, all of the things that I want to help others learn to do because I can help them bring business relationships to a new level, will soon be made routine… which brings me back to Gist.

Watch this video.  It is genuinely amazing.

Not to beg, or plead, or grovel… but I hope the folks at Gist see this and bump me higher in their beta testing queue.  I wrote this post while on my knees bowing in the direction of Seattle!

In closing I got to give a shout out to Robert Scoble for doing such a good job on this video.

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Today is my one-year anniversary on Twitter! Yay!

BT (before Twitter) I had been engaged in what has come to be known as “social media” through blogs and discussion groups for several years. I hand-coded my first blog (now defunct) in 2002, really before there was any server-side software for it – even before I was aware of the term “blog.”  Frequent posting of new content to a web index.htm page was a real challenge, but I enjoyed it a lot!

Since then, I’ve created and maintained several blogs at Blogger.com and using Wordpress (like this one). I’ve also helped  others create personal blogs.  Lately, I’ve been answering lots of questions and giving free advice to friends (and friends of friends) regarding what social media tools might work best for what they are trying to accomplish in business.  I’ve got 25 years experience in various PR, marketing and advocacy roles and I have some solid technical certifications, too.  I have a great mix of skills and experience to help folks with this stuff.

I had meant to go full-bore with developing this side of my business last summer, but Tropical Storm Fay got in the way.  Fortunately, most of that mess is past and I’m ready to offer my social media skills to clients.  Toward this end, I’m going to take on three demonstration projects at no cost to my customers.  I already have one commitment in hand, and I’m writing a plan for it.

I want to put two more demonstration projects under my belt before I’ll start formally soliciting business.  I see all the people out there using the “social media expert” banner who don’t have the track record to back it up.  That’s not the way I work.

This morning, I seized up an idea and as soon as I post this, I’m hitting the send button on an email to Madlibs‘ marketing department:

Hi [name of person who reads this],

You don’t know me from Adam, but I have a quickie idea for using social media to increase your sales.  I loved Mad Libs as a kid and think you have a real opportunity to become trendy for a new generation.

Here’s my idea in short form:

• Get a Twitter account (I don’t know if @madlibs is registered by you or not)
• Create an “official” Facebook Madlibs fan group (there are some, but none appear to be by your company)
• Create landing pages on your web site specific to Twitter and Facebook
• Use the Twitter and Facebook APIs on those pages to create interfaces to the services
• At those pages, allow visitors to fill in random blanks (just like Madlibs) and auto post their Madlib results
• Visitors can select a topic, but can’t see the results until after they have posted their results to Facebook or Twitter
• Every auto tweet should end in the hashtag #madlibs
• It seems like a no-brainer to me that you’ll get a ton of followers that you should follow back and connect with to build interest in your publications
• It seems to me that most social media users are in the age cohort that would be likely to engage with you (and develop/rekindle an affinity for Madlibs)
• I believe that if you [verb] this, Madlibs’ sales will [verb] [adverb] through the [noun]!

If you would like to discuss developing your social media presence, I’m available for calls – no charge.  I’m currently doing some demonstration projects for my services and would be happy have your product in my portfolio as proof of concept.

Thanks for taking the time to read this brief proposal.  I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Regards,

Bob Finch

Social media is in its infancy. Few have the depth of experience in this that I do.  I’ve built a successful business from my avocation before and regardless of the economic environment, I believe I can do it again!

Stay tuned.

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