Social Media

From walled gardens to garden gnomes - everything to do with social media, social marketing and the social web.

Grudge Purchases

October 10, 2014 by Ian Leave a Comment

I often wonder, riding the bus home, whether its intentional that all the advertisements I see on the bus are for “grudge purchases” or services.

Debt relief. Chewing gum. Public service messages about abuse. Last choice jobs.

I’m certain the collection of sentiments isn’t intentional at all, but it is curious. After all, with all the sexy businesses like web services, marketing agencies, and real estate moving into the social web – there’s a gap that has to be filled, and these businesses are taking the opportunity where it exists.

Wait… Why aren’t these businesses doing social media again?

It’s an opportunity thing. Where’s the space to talk about insurance – a grudge purchase if there ever was one – in the midst of all the Occupy Wall Street furor? How could a debt relief agency find the air time to make a dent in people’s awareness as anything other than yet another tag-along subject?

So, if you can’t do social or inbound marketing, what do you do?

You find captive audiences. On the bus – or any other public transit – you’re a certain kind of captive audience. There isn’t much to look at if you’re used to your city. The road might be too bumpy to reliably read a book. Your eyes end up wandering – you people watch, you try to look out the window, but eventually you’ll probably catch sight of the ad banners just overhead.

Their job isn’t to make insurance look sexy – grudge purchases never are. Their job is the same as the simple (and occasionally described as insipid) app Yo – a weak smile and wave from across the street, just to remind you these services exist.

It can’t be tracked. ROI’s hard to calculate. So why do they still exist?

Stab in the dark? Even when your business is based on reliability and pacing – and not explosive profit and innovation – remaining in motion and maintaining that pace is important.

Because “what else would we do?” is still a valid argument, and similarly, doing nothing is not an option.

Facebook Timelines – First Look

September 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

From the site that brought you eight different news feeds in six months, comes a wonderful new toy. A profile dedicated not to what you are, but everything you have ever been. Timelines, introduced last week through developer beta, have been getting a lot of press – but what might they actually mean for your profile?

Here’s what my Timeline looks like at the moment:

It’s fairly spartan for now – I’ve put in some extra information, but largely, the moment you activate your Timeline, the magic… Doesn’t exist. I’ll admit, for the first few minutes, I didn’t see what the big deal was.

What do Timelines do that Profiles didn’t?

One of the biggest features the new profile system enables is called Milestones – you can set one for just about anything. A birth, a marriage, a death – the new system allows you to go back through your life and mark out the things you want to communicate as important to you.

First thing I did? Marked the birth of my son, Liam. Pretty important event in my world.

I’m sure I’ll get around to finding a picture for my own birth in 1982 eventually – but there’s no rush. Milestones aren’t time-sensitive the way status updates are. I can wait until I’ve got access to all the slide shows from the year my family spent in Australia before adding the marker in my profile that says I went there. Next time I travel, I can build a Milestone out of the trip as it happens – and use one of the photos from the trip’s album to do so.

But that’s not all – with the Timelines system, Facebook’s changed how their entire update methodology works.

It’s not listed specifically as a feature, and it’s certainly not obvious, but Facebook seems to be moving away from the pure “timely updates” theory of social networking, toward creating a full life record within their system.

The box you’ll see on your Timeline (and it’s not clear whether this will look similar on your Home screen) does the common Status/Photo/Place combination as usual – but the kinds of milestones you can add seem to suggest a much broader scope to the site.

Sure, we can mention we had a child or got married… But adding a pet? Losing a loved one? Achievements, awards, and health and wellness goals? This isn’t the usual profile-hygiene fare here – it’s a pretty big deal. When combined with the marked difference in how Facebook is now displaying news on your home feed – thanks to this month’s News Feed revamp – it’s clear the network is putting some thought into the kinds of news people want to read.

The same people who religiously review the Obituaries in their local paper might, for example, might be the kind to mark only Milestones in their family’s Timelines as top news, and train the system only to promote big events.

The people who are most interested in music culture may de-prioritize their friends’ news in favor of a particular set of band and artist pages.

Relentless business people? We know what they’ll mark as important, don’t we?

How Timelines might affect your personal brand.

Facebook has never really been good for a personal brand directly from the profile side of the site. Pages, sure – we can optimize them to work with a marketing strategy… But now? Imagine tailoring your milestones and life events to only highlight your professional life. Conferences, speaking engagements, promotions, job changes – the list is endless. You can build your Timeline to reflect a single aspect of your life, and go for as much completionism as you can stomach.

Again, it’s a case of choose your own level of involvement. I’m sure we’ll see a whack of personal branding guides over the coming weeks from some very opinionated voices.

Has privacy on Facebook changed?

Naturally, the changeover to Timelines – and associated App-level permission changes – is causing some concern over privacy. But, then, every change the social network makes to its system and capabilities seems to have that effect. This time, particularly, there’s some concern over apps gaining permission to automatically share what you’re doing. For example, if you authorize the New York Times as an app, you may find mentions of every page you view on that site in your timeline.

This persistent auto-sharing may not be a big deal for some people, but imagine seeing 75 to 100 updates in your stream, from one avid news reader.

Yeah. Not a privacy concern. But I imagine a lot of people will either get annoyed, or immediately shunt these kinds of updates off their feeds – thus destroying any value for the app-makers. Once again, it’s an opportunity for thoughtless publicity (not a bad thing) to turn into obsessive annoyance (a very bad thing). And only your friends list can determine which you’ll end up receiving.

I’m not concerned about privacy on social networks…

Because that’s not what they’re for. By their very nature, social networks are sharing platforms – you don’t share privacy. That’s not the point. Any assumption going against this grain is fundamentally flawed – so why worry about it?

We’re still not very good at dividing our personal and professional lives, or our online and offline lives, or our family lives and public lives. So rather than being concerned that Facebook and other social networks are “stealing our privacy” we need to get better at self-censoring. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing something with the world – it may not be a good idea to put it online. While privacy and restricting options do exist, assuming they’re solid is not a good idea.

In the end, it’s all a game of “Choose Your Poison” anyway.

How you present yourself online is closer to your choice of haircut, than it is your choice of friends. There will be bad hair days on your social networks, and times when it’s so fantastic you worry about being narcissistic. Learn to live with that, and you’ll be fine.

We used to think of Facebook as another photo sharing service. Then it was a microblog alongside. Then it became ten thousand other little parts of our lives.

But now…

What do we call Facebook now, I wonder?

Education and Social Media

May 19, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

There’s a lot of discussion in professional social media circles – from publishers, to consultants, to agencies – about education. Clients need it, businesses need it, the public needs it – but so do the professionals working in these very complex, highly unorganized fields.

There’s now very little stringent education directly related to social networking as a business communication tool; while there are plenty of dyed in the wool professionals, the building of a knowledge base accessible through higher education seems slow in catching up. This isn’t even a theory versus practice problem – I think it’s an educational system problem.

How can we create education for new kinds of professionals, when education itself is failing?

This article from MENG Blend on May 17th tells a strong story about the state of education in general:

[…] even though the real ROI of college over time is well-documented, college completion rates are falling rapidly. On average, four year public schools graduate only 37% of their students within four years. The story at community colleges, which account for 46% of all undergraduates, is even worse: just 25% of those at 2-year colleges graduate within three years of the time they start.

Damning, isn’t it? [Read more…]

3 Ways to Become a Giant

May 17, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We all want to be bigger than we are.

Sadly, growth is complicated. Becoming a giant – no matter your field – takes time, diligence, and attention to goals. Where do we begin? Where do we stop? How much is enough, or too much? Which kind to focus on? Personal, professional, physical advancement?

Growth requires effort – and it can’t be faked.

Or can it?

It turns out there are a number of ways to give the impression of being bigger, without actually changing yourself at all.

Sleight of mind such as;

1. Standing on the shoulders of giants and pretending to be tall. This one’s a classic. Perfect example; managing to guest post on a high powered blog, and touting that as your “arrival” as an expert in your field. This isn’t just foolish, it’s ephemeral; your posturing is temporary, no matter how many places you reference your own success.
2. Make everything around you small – and pretend to be big. This is the worst. This is what happens when you attack others, constantly deride their work, and tear at the things they’re doing to be successful.

Why be that jerk? Why tear other people down, or focus on impermanent improvement and posturing?

Instead, why not focus on the ways you can actually get big?
3. Grow – and keep growing! This is the hardest – but also the best and most permanent of the ways you can grow. It’s difficult to find advice on how to grow, that isn’t either fluff, self-help, or vanilla cheerleading.

These have their place… For a while. But no one can really tell you how to grow.

So I won’t try.

Go figure it out for yourself. Tell us how it goes, ok?

Setting Expectations

May 12, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

If you’re serious about keeping your business human in the face of social media, you need to set expectations.

Not just for yourself – but also for your clients, employees, and employers. Everyone functions better with expectations set.

Your clients need to know when you’re available – and when you’re not. This one’s easy; hours of operation are almost universally respected. Put them on your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter profile – anywhere they might be helpful.

Your employers need to know that when you’re at work, you’re at work. No personal Facebook or Twitter time, unless your personal brand is part of your job description. Your boss has a reasonable expectation that you’ll be mentally and emotionally invested wherever you’re physically located. Conversely, if you workshift, you need to keep your employer apprised of things that limit your working hours. Just because you’re on your computer doesn’t mean you’re working, ready to work, capable of working,or willing to work.

Where this gets complicated is as a leader.

Leadership – yes, you, you’re a leader somewhere – needs to be responsive to the needs of client and employee alike. Leaders need to know when their people can work, and when they cannot. We get that, right? But what about the subtle problems of being a leader who perhaps works more than their troops?

Leadership needs to not set the bar at 2am email flurries.

Leadership needs to not set the bar at retroactive enforcement.

Leadership needs to live by the same rules of engagement that everyone else does.

Even if you tell your people you don’t expect them to work as hard as you do, they’re going to try. They’re going to feel like they’re inadequate sometimes when they can’t spend sixteen hours on a project in one sitting.

Until they understand that their work habits are theirs, and your work habits are yours, your excellence has the hidden opportunity to make people feel like they are less.

And that’s a bad situation to be in. So, please, ask for an end of day response with that 2am email. Tell your people to go home on the weekends. If there’s a shower in your office, turn off the water on holidays. Convince your people that you expect them to take care of themselves.

Or not. Maybe your people work harder than you do. Do they? You’re so lucky. Oh man are you ever.

Unless they worry that they’re working harder than you, and you’re slacking off like a boss. That’s not a good place to be in. Do something about that.

Being awesome has a lot of requirements. One of them is making sure people know when and how they can be awesome too.

Let’s all be awesome together. Who’s with me?