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Dear Madlibs: A Modest (free) Proposal

Bob Finch — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:27:08 +0000

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.

Twitter is Here to Stay

Bob Finch — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:02:09 +0000

Just a quick note today:

Steve Rubel, who is normally pretty savvy about these things, comes out today and says:

“So you heard it here first, folks. Twitter is peaking. Now I believe Twitter can get through “the dip” that stares them in the face, but it will need to adapt by: keeping its core users intact, remaining attractive to corporations and celebs and by becoming more organized. Search will help with the latter, but expect a battle as Facebook and Friendfeed both make a concerted push to become the place for all your social stuff.”

This is just nuts. First of all, I’ve been on Friendfeed for at least 18 months now and don’t find much use in it, except that it helps feed my other social media streams to Facebook. If it went away, I’d find and use other apps to do the same. Friendfeed has yet to break out beyond the more technically literate crowd. Considering what Facebook is doing with developing its core product, I don’t think Friendfeed has much of a place beyond its existing niche going forward.

Twitter, on the other hand, I predict, is going to be ubiquitous. Yes, it’s disorganized today, but it provides an information stream that can be sliced and diced in so many different ways that eventually everyone will be able to find an application of it that suits their needs.

The next big step, I think, is for Twitter, or some other programmer, to come up with an address book that allows people to categorize followers and followings by various relationship types. I think TweetDeck may be the farthest along toward this. But if the next generation MS Outlook includes the ability to add social media connections to its contacts data (and I believe it will), that may end up being the thing that locks Twitter into the same class as email as a permanent business and personal communication tool.

Communication 4.0: We Are All Journalists Now

Bob Finch — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 20:23:27 +0000

The sheepskin on the wall behind my computer monitor says I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Florida. What it didn’t say when it was printed in 1982 was that I majored in Public Relations and specialized in Magazine and Feature Writing. Today, I see my decision to switch from straight journalism to a sub-specialized path as a fortunate one.

Yes, Journalism As We Know It Is Dying

You’d have to have been living under a rock over the past few years to have been insulated from the stream of stories and much bemoaning about the fact that newspapers are folding and the ranks of employed professional journalists is shrinking. A crashing economy is only facilitating the inevitable.

I found an excellent blog post discussing the current situation in more depth than I’ll go into here:

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

When I read stuff like this, I do feel a bit glum because I know that many of my classmates went on to mainstream media jobs and are now facing and fearing very uncertain futures. Clearly, a profession that evolved from some 15th century innovations is dying. In fact, it probably is already dead but the flat-line has yet to register on the monitor. But beyond commiserating with my friends I feel incredibly invigorated because I sense that what is to come of this will be very good.

So, I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem more than a bit impatient: Can we please finish having this wake for Gutenberg’s descendants and get on with it?

Fear of What’s Happening Inside the Cocoon

The new communication truth that social media puts on the table is, to paraphrase an awful, recent Newsweek headline, “We Are All Journalists Now.” The fact of the matter is that humans still need news and many of us consume more of it today than ever before; I know I do. But I don’t read four or five newspapers a day any more to get it. In fact, I stopped subscribing to any newspaper when I moved to Tallahassee six years ago, ending a daily fact of my life that began when I was about six years old. I made the shift to using RSS news readers and Google Alerts to keep me informed and engaged. If anything, I read more news and a broader range of opinion now than I ever have. The demand remains, so I have no doubt that there will be careers for those with old-school journalism skills who are willing to adapt as new models are hashed out. The market for their skills isn’t disappearing, it is just morphing from caterpillar to butterfly very quickly and it’s hard to see inside the cocoon.

When I think about this stuff, I inevitably break the history of human communication down into phases: Communication 1.0 was the path from grunts and gestures to formal spoken language; the advent of written symbols, alphabets and words, usually shared among the elites of various cultures, was Communication 2.0; Gutenberg’s invention ushered in Communication 3.0 and it’s logo, the printing press. In this perspective, the original Internet, Version 1.0, wasn’t really much of an advance over the printing press or over the old overhead projector presentations we suffered when I was in school (for all you youngsters, it’s what we did before PowerPoint).

Fulfilling the Human Need for News

I find it interesting to note that the pathway from Communication 1.0 to Communication 3.0 led to less broad participation in defining and less dependence on interchange between people to create “the news.” The unfulfilled human need for broader interchange in reaching understandings, and I believe it is indeed a “need,” was somewhat ameliorated by the telephone, but as a tool phones offer mostly limited exchanges between two individuals. They generally lack the power to define “news.”

I contend that Communication 4.0, including “Web 2.0” and “Social Media,” is defined by mediums with more distributive freedom than what was offered by the two previous phases of human knowledge exchange; it re-interjects a key element that was made less vital to “news” by them: Conversations in the public square. And the public square is suddenly a heck of a lot larger than it was when tribes were painting on cave walls and carving “news” into rocks. The big idea that unites my Communication Versions model is that in each case an exciting innovation led to epistemological change ; that is, something radically altered the very nature and methods of human knowledge itself. Placed in this framework, social media becomes far more than faddish or trivial.

Ignore at Your Own Risk

So, go ahead and mock Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter if you like, but do not ignore them or think they’ll just go away. What they all are telling you, or, rather, what you should be getting from them so far, is one very important message that includes and goes beyond “news” and promises to be a rule for the future of communication for all organizations: Converse or die.

The old rules no longer apply.

Stumblers Upon, I Have a Social Media Challenge for You!

Bob Finch — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:12:58 +0000

About half this blog’s first week traffic has come from folks hitting me up from StumbleUpon. Thanks folks! Now, here’s my challenge for everyone, but particularly for you Stumblers.

What’s the Best Concise Way to Explain the Value of Social Media to My Audience?

One niche this blog is aimed at is very challenging. I really want to help people that I describe as “half-timers;“ that is, they have roughly half their careers behind them and half still lie ahead. I see people in this group that have good to great communications skills that have taken them very far… until now. But what got them where they are just isn’t going to get them where they expect to be 20 years from now. I am certain that at some point soon they must employ some of the new stuff at least as a complement to their old stuff. They’re going to have to make some half-time adjustments.

Am I making sense?

I’m starting to see more of these folks become curious about Social Media, but they’re afraid to do more than dip their toes in the water. I’m still getting the “I have an account, but I don’t see LinkedIn or FaceBook as anything but a waste of time” argument. I usually rely on a power of the crowd argument and a couple personal success stories to overcome that one, but the new kids on the block like Twitter and FriendFeed and SecondBrain and StumbleUpon are a bit harder talk through with them.

I’ve shared this site and it’s meager (so far) content with several people I had in mind when I came up with the idea and have gotten some encouraging email feedback, but so far only one friend has had the nerve to post a reply.

Thanks Jack!

Having been down the techno-evangelist road before, I know it will take persistence for me to get through to some of these folks. But I’ve noted through analyzing my traffic that I’m already getting some pretty savvy Web 2.0 aficionados stopping by. So, I’m going to try to leverage your expertise. After all, I’ve put this site out here as somewhat of a collaborative tone in hopes that the Chris Brogans and Coach Debs of the world will drop by from time to time and share their thoughts with some of my readers who might not be able to keep tempo with the tunes they are playing.

As I see it, the more diverse the perspectives that I get in reply to this, the more likely I we are to bring some of the half-timers up to speed. Is anybody out there game for taking this challenge on?

Communications Mode Shift: The Age of Permasation?

Bob Finch — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:26:43 +0000

Part of my job here is to convince you that we are at the start of a fundamental shift in the way we all communicate with each other. In launching this site, I’m finally embracing a part of me that I have too often suppressed, or that has required my being dragged kicking and screaming into it. My problem, if you can call it that, is that I’m always exploring the edges and looking for and finding things others can’t quite yet see. There’s a certain discomfort in constantly doing things that most of my friends and associates are not yet doing. I’m sure many of them see me as eccentric for what I see as just my natural inquisitiveness. After all, somebody had to be the first, second or third guy to use a parachute, right? I think a little history will help you better understand where I’m coming from.

How I Got Here

When I was younger, I was reluctant to deal with the ramifications of my idiosyncracies. At the University of Florida, after not picking a college until threatened with expulsion, I quickly switched course tracks from Journalism, to Public Relations, and, finally, to a PR sub-track for Magazine and Feature Writing. It was the newest program in the college and offered what I was unconsciously seeking: the fewest constraints on form and style. It was a great fit for me. For instance, I once conducted an interview with the vending machines at my fraternity house – the resulting story was used as an example of correct interview article form for several semesters. My graduating class in Magazines was only six people; as I recall, all of us were misfits.

My greatest passion is communications innovation. I love finding new ways to combine existing ideas, concepts and methods to leverage better results. I’ve created, managed and publicized strange-but-successful events; navigated around outdated policy to assure that my organization’s positions on issues got press; developed methods to analyze people’s past behavior to get wins in political and marketing campaigns; and, crafted off-beat business and project models when the “normal” ones provided no way to connect with important audiences.

I have always had an affinity for the biographies of people like P.T. Barnum and Bill Veeck. The advent of Web 2.0 and Social Media offers lots of opportunity for people like us. And so, here I am, awestruck by and giddy about the possibilities I see within a communications mode shift that rivals the the changes brought on by printing press, radio and television.

The Old, One-Way Street Gets Paved Over

Print, radio and television share a fundamental communications shortcoming in that they are all primarily one-way modes of communication. While feedback loops in these mediums do exist, i.e., people can write and have letters to the editor published, the exchanges do not usually foster conversation. Plus, anything approaching true conversation in the old media is short-lived, with the exception of talk radio. The same might have been said of the Internet until the concepts that make up Web 2.0 came along. Yes, discussion groups and on line chat have existed, but they were hard to find, ephemeral, unfriendly, cumbersome or too disparately situated from the original source messages to broadly be conversational.

Now things are different. With Web 2.0 and Social Media tools multiplying like rabbits, not only is personal and business communication moving more toward a two-way standard, it may be evolving into a multi-way standard. Not only are we seeing things become more conversational, we’re seeing conversations take place with a high level of permanence; an on line conversation about a hot topic that took place last year may have petered out, but it can be rejoined instantly when some event throws the issue back on the front-burner. New participants can engage conversations from their points and times of origin, wherever and whenever that may have been.

According to a just-published study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 13% of all web users are currently using at least one Social Media tool daily. While I’m not quite sure of the trend-line, based on my off-line conversations with friends and colleagues, I’m seeing an increased awareness that the tools exist, albeit ignorance regarding their practical application prevails. Having been an evangelist in several past technology adoption curves, I’m convinced that we are not far from the tipping point at which these “secrets” go mainstream. I’m far from the only one betting on it; Social Media savvy folks in business are already leveraging it well. For instance, Comcast is using Twitter to respond to customer complaints and Dell is using it to interact with prospects and customers.

After the fold – Permasations

Permasations?

The mode that all this new stuff facilitates is really beyond what we usually consider to be “conversation” and may need a new term to adequately define it. We might as well call this new way of interpersonal engagement the “permasation mode,” a joining of permanent + conversation. I considered dubbing it “perversation mode” but I didn’t want to give the impression that all we are talking about is politicians’ fidelity patterns. So, what you “tweet” on Twitter, follow up with on FriendFeed and share at FaceBook or Del.ico.us or SecondBrain or Disqus can been viewed as accessing multiple channels of the same concept in “permasation mode” for entertainment, personal enrichment, business and, yes, profit.

From a broader perspective, what the advent of permasation means is that any entity that strives to maintain a public brand consciousness, from individuals to corporations to government departments to political campaigns, will have to learn to navigate on fresh intellectual turf. I don’t know that old adages like “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them” are going to work very well going forward. I believe our new mode is going to require more of a “tell them, then tell them again, and again, and again, etc.” approach. If you have a brand to manage, permasation mode communications about it will take place and have the potential to define it whether you decide to participate or not. I’m particularly impressed by the power of the permasation when I browse through a clever new site I discovered, BrandTags.net. I believe you’ll get a clearer picture of what I’m talking about if you take a look at the sort of virtual territory Comcast is navigating already.

Consistently Precise Semantics

In looking at the previous example link, I believe it proves that the semantic precision in how you repetitively tell your story is going to be vital. Because people are getting more and more attuned to using search engines to learn and internalize messages, it probably means that we not only need to have our web sites tweaked toward search word optimization, we also need to start being more consistent with our phrase and word choices when we communicate about ourselves. In essence this means that we will need to communicate in a way that helps optimize our tag clouds; that is, mindful of visual depictions that represent the prioritization of words, phrases and concepts that define us both in the search engines and in the spaces in which permasations take place.

What Might a Permasation Mode Communications Plan Look Like?

I’m going to put an idea out there for you that I’ve been toying with for several months to see if I can get some feedback, um, engage in a permasation about it: I believe that if we are going to manage our reputations and brands through permasational planning, we had better: 1) figure out what our optimal “tag clouds” (maybe we need a new term) should look like; 2) use these tag clouds to build rough structures (mind maps or outlines) for all communications planning; and, 3) strive to fit most of our communications activities within the parameters of these structures.

When I realized that tag clouds are a way of starting to to plan in this new mode communication process, I created one based on my resume. It wasn’t useful, or pretty:

Bob Finch Wordle.net Tag Cloud - Before

So, I decided I would build one that is more descriptive of my desired path and personal brand:

Bob Finch Wordle.net Tag Cloud - After

While this definitional freeze-frame still needs a few tweaks, when I look at it I see that it does a pretty good job of defining me. In a greater sense, it is a picture of what fulfills me. I envision organizations building these types of tag clouds and putting them up as artwork in their offices as aids for the internal reinforcement of messages and brands.

This tag cloud exercise is just the start of a whole new process I really want to engage my readers in creating. I’m not going to lay claim to whatever comes of it and would rather this be a public domain project. With that in mind, I have put this entire site under a Creative Commons License. You are free to take whatever text you like from here and publish it elsewhere, but please give proper attribution wherever you publish or post it.

Summing It All Up

I am completely convinced that we are all going to be affected by the advent of the permasation mode and the new, emerging vision of what constitutes effective communications. It will be easier for the younger generations to handle; they are growing up immersed in it. People like me came of age in a world in which we had no true choice but to accept or dismiss messages being transmitted one-way from radio, TV, magazines and newspapers as “the way things are.” The only alternative we have had was to totally tune out of important cultural streams. We’re not accustomed to interacting with or engaging mass messages or the messengers behind them, but we must learn to do so. The new mode I’m describing is already working well right now, mostly within and among a small cadre of habitual permasators. These technology evangelists are on the cusp of a very cool revolution that I believe will inevitably affect us all, enhancing old relationships and fostering new ones.

Post Script

This is the sort of content you can expect if you frequent this site. You can subscribe to one of the feeds at the upper right corner of my site to keep up with what’s going on. Of course, I’d rather you come a bit closer and engage me in the comments section. I promise that we will all learn stuff to make what we do easier to get done, and if time equals money… well, you do the math.