My thoughts on the #SMCLA event

Tuesday night I attended the Social Media Club LA Event. IT WAS A FUCKING BLAST. The real issue started when we discussed the mommy bloggers. Turns out we had one in the crowd. Things got heated, feelings were hurt and general yelling started. Several people got mad that the brands viewed them as a source of money and not a legitimate voice. What was shocking about it, was nothing that was being said was unknown to the crowd. It's not like we are the Social Media Luddite Newb what the fuck is this thing our kids do called the interwebs club?

This event sort of illustrated what I always question when I goto some of these events. Amidst all this Techno-utopian evangelism, I often wonder "We are here to make money right?". I love tech and Social Media and connecting and the social graph. However our work in it is to really connect to the broader audience and make them interested in our brands.

I really liked what Rob Frankel had to say, we don't have to be global brands. The power of the internet is everyone get's to weigh in on a brand. But is everyone even interesetd in your product to begin with? furthermore, is it worth it to spend money marketing to a broad group at the expense of another?

A few days ago, the blagowebospheres blew the fuck up over Obama's handling of the Pot question. If Obama hadn't brushed it off would he have been able to run in 2012? Obama, made his mark in social media, and here he is suddenly disregarding a very active social media community. Brand suicide right? actually apparently not, no one outside of Reddit and Digg seemed to care all that much. Truth is, Obama made the right choice for the TV audience, by throwing the social media audience under the train. One thing Obama does right is make the correct noises for the correct audiences.

The adage is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, well we have thousands of squeaky wheels. They are all of different sizes and we only have so much grease. So you know fuck a couple of you, it's not that we don't care. Truth is we didn't really "care" about you to begin with. We are trying to maximize profits for our brands. That's ok, we don't have to like you, and you know what you don't have to like us. I mean don't get me wrong, I would love to engage everyone is an uber positive awesome conversation about how much our brands love you so much. However at the end of the day, I don't have the fucking time or resources. So stop getting all pissed when I don't bend over backwards for you and buy someone else's products. Don't worry once we have used them up we will swing back around and adjust our campaign to bring you along.

The Social media space seems to have become such a large echo chamber I wonder if we have lost perspective of our scope and size? The fucking #skittles campaign is a great example it blew up on my twitters and my facebooks. But looking at Reddit a place where "tech forward" articles are usually posted, there were only two stories posted. Neither of which made it that far in voting. Apparently in a brand survey less then 1% of people had any clue that they had done anything. At what point have we spent so much time worrying about social marketing that we forget, most people don't use Facebook to connect to brands. They use it to connect to friends and family. You never see non social marketers / entrepreneurs circulating "how to get 50 twitter followers" articles. They just use it to talk to people.

We can be a powerful tool for a brand, but the internet wasn't created for us. It was created for the other people, we are trying to co-opt it. Sad fucking truth, and I believe we all know this. Not saying we are morons, just sometimes I wonder if we lose sight of our real role in the web.

If you would rather be a neo-utopian-techno-futurist there are many great non profit institutions I suggest you look into them.

#Twitter Monetization fail?

I have been meaning to post about my thoughts on twitters announcements on trying to monetize itself. I have also meant to get some fucking sleep (yay 2 A.M. wireframes!).

The first announcement is that Twitter will licensee it's name and run ads for twitter aggregators and apps such as execu tweets and tweet deck. This just seems like the law of diminishing returns. If the only thing a brand has to sell is itself then I just feel like it has announced that it has accepted defeat. Pretty much an epic meh nice try guys.

Also, ad placements on a destination site, that almost no one goes to? Most people prefer to hit it up on their tweetdecks and twitterberries anyways. Their dedication to open API basically just shot them in their own foot. At some point if they want to do display ads, twitter is going to have to face the music and roll them into our streams without our consent, it's just the way it's got to be. I don't even think this would be such a bad thing, if they were very limited, like 1 an hour.

The second announcement is that they are going to create "pro" accounts. These accounts will receive better analytics tools. A couple problems here is that Twitter is so open and so limited that I don't see how they can corner the market on this. Just look at all the pre exisitng twitter apps out there. The fact is there dedication to an open extensible API has shot them in the foot again! Why would I pay for what I can get for free? and how can they continue to give us all the openy goodness services they always have without blocking these apps?

The final issue is that I am still not convinced that Twitter is a good sampling system. Let's see who uses twitter, tech forward people with a strong interest in social marketing and microblogging. Who is on Facebook MY FUCKING MOM JESUS CHRIST WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? I HAVE TO HELP HER ATTACH FILES TO E-MAILS! Again, I hate to sound like a Twitter hater while I ask for seconds on that blueberry Facebook Kool-Aid but seriously it just has so much rich rich rich data.

Twitter Account

Name (sometimes faked Social Marketer, The Angry is not my christian name)
SHORT bio
Website

Facebook

Name (usually real)
Gender
Location
Age
Networks
Religion (admittedly usually something they think is clever)
Politics (also, pretty useless piece)
Single/Married
maybe even Phone Number and Address

Clearly segmenting is a tad easier on Facebook, and more useful. Another thing Facebook has never done is ALLOWED ANYONE AND EVERYONE to scrape that data. The sole gatekeeper is Facebook. I know they wield those keys responsibly but OH HOLY SHIT FACEBOOK KNOWS WAY TO MUCH ABOUT ME!

Seriously, they know every birthday party I have attended, they know which friends I wall post with, how often I post fuzzy animals acting like humans, they know all my past employers, they know where I live, they know what movies I watch on Netflix, they know EVERYFUCKINGTHING ABOUT ME!

Anyways, yeah so that's my take on the prospects of Twitter working to monetize itself. Analytics would be great if had a wider sample set, and if there was reason not to use a free service.

C.E.O.'s are big boys and blogs exist no matter what.

So I was talking to some people last night. One of them was telling me that their CEO hates blogs.and wants nothing to do with them. I can't even comprehend what that means anymore. Is that microbloggers? Is that social media users? Being afraid of blogs is like being afraid of print media its so broad and so varied it just feels unnatural.

If you are afraid of bloggers you are afraid of yourself. Many of us are social miscreants and internet trolls that like to hate on everything (like me!) But we will fucking write about you whether you like it or not!

My personal feelings are if you are afraid of us hating on your product you need a new fucking product. We are pretty much ordinary consumers who used to walk around muttering this shit to ourselves when along came the internet and dropped this goddamn megaphone in our laps. Oh hell yeah it sucks to be you.

The other experience I have had is the luddite ceo who is blocked from the internet by his people. They see one or two bad things on the internet and they get afraid that if he reads one of us trolls he is going to pull the whole goddamn interner budget. I just don't understand. If you run a major company, somewhere along the way you learned how to deal with criticism. Also you must be smart enough to know the difference between worthwhile criticism and the sophmoric bullshit most of us spew out.

So yeah blogs happened! and microblogging happened and forum trolling happened. You can be afraid of us or you can join in on it. Its up to you, but we are going to blog away anyways.

Stop bitching and learn to live with the new Facebook

So, my non social marketing friends are up in arms about the redesign of the facebook. I have seen mixed reviews out there, from the social media scene from the "briliant" to the "awful horrendous stupid." My favorite, is the ones that accuse Facebook of ripping off twitter. Who came up with Micro Blogging first is irrelevant to this article. The thing I find funny is for the last year or so whenever my normal friends get's on twitter they say "it's just fucking status updates?"

The fact of the matter, is that micro blogging happened. It's a hell of a lot easier the actual blogging. I know this because I have to come up with whole articles for this goddamn blog all the time. Twitter, popularized it, but the vast majority of people know microblogging as status updates. In fact Twitter launched in 2006 the same time as the original Facebook Newsfeed. Neither copied each other they just presented the same information in different ways.

Facebook has outgrown the Newsfeed, too much fucking information was coming between photos applications wall posts etc. (How the fuck does lil' green patch requests save the rainforest). The real time status feeed already was on facebook, but hidden. They just brought it front and center and moved the "highlights" reel from the list view on the homepage to the right. The redesign has no new functionality it was always there. Just instead of tabs it was redesigned to incorporate the live feed on the homepage.

So, to wrap up Facebook didn't steal anything from twitter. It just redesigned it's layout. It's a non story the sheeple are up in arms and bitching but nothing has changed but look of the homepage. The fact of the matter is it's good, Facebook is growing exponentially adding features and more importantly growing in the way people use it. People used to update their status once per day, now several. And they comment and like, and post links and engage in apps. The old news feed was broken, people just didn't realize it.

Checking in on Skittles

So I checked out the "Skittles Status Updates"

Wow, I could bitch but they are getting a ton of comments.

Skittles is coming down with a case of march madness.
7:33am · Comment · Like
3,616 people like this.
View 396 comments


Skittles is going to be the guest of honor at Dren's pool party.
Yesterday at 9:13am · Comment · Like
3,650 people like this.
View 1,089 comments


Skittles is green with envy.
Tue 9:25am · Comment · Like
9,040 people like this.
View 1,028 comments


Skittles was once rescued by a Narwhal after falling into the deep end.
Mon 2:59pm · Comment · Like
3,154 people like this.
View 314 comments


Skittles calls shotgun on the space shuttle.
Mon 7:39am · Comment · Like
772 people like this.
View 120 comments


Skittles shouldn't chew and update at the same time.
March 12 at 8:44am · Comment · Like
128 people like this.
View 57 comments


Skittles is jetpacking to the islands for lunch.
March 11 at 12:08pm · Comment · Like
16 people like this.
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ReportAnne Huynh at 8:01pm March 12
Hey. I can be mean to skittles if i want too so back off =P

ReportEmily Koiner at 12:41pm March 15
well geez, ur the one who joined soo, its kinda ur fault


Skittles is half country, half hip-hop and half rock & roll.
March 11 at 5:47am · Comment · Like
45 people like this.
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ReportRachel Morton at 8:23pm March 11
Four halves? Electrotechnisoulspunk, country, country, hiphop, and what is the other one?

ReportRachel Morton at 8:26pm March 11
Well they help
Me focus, so that means their perfect! And If it's four half then it's 400 percent perfect times infinity! You rock!


Skittles isn't sure what that was, but it definitely didn't taste like rainbow.

What exactly are the points of these posts? I have no idea. they do have that crypto-twitter feel. A sense of WTF is going on over there. And they are getting a whole lot of comments, so I guess I can't argue. I do wonder why there is no @skittles, ok so I just found out it apparently belongs to someones fucking Cat. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA I love it, I want to DM @skittles and ask if they have been getting a bunch of friend requests.

If the goal of the skittles page is to get brand awareness and just stay in peoples minds this must be working. 1,000 comments on the post "Skittles is the guest of honor at Dren's pool party" is good. However I have to wonder how long they can keep this up. The benefit to having my friends do cryptowitters is that my mind is realing with what's really going on.

When my friend posts "fuck the zombie apocolypse just grabbed me by the balls" I think holy shit what has that asshole gotten himself into? It's usually something banal like they are playing left4dead but hopefully one day zombies will really eat that guy, he is a fucknut.

anyways I digress, if they are getting 1,000 comments on these posts then good for them. @skittles the cat doesn't even have 5 followers. But again how do we measure the ROI on this social media campaign? when they get 1,000 comments for "Skittles calls shotgun on the spacestation" does sales go up?

I attended the Mad Men Twitter Panel at SXSW and there twitters were the same cryptowitters but they were attached to charachters we knew and understood beautifully realized charachters from the TV show which gives so much weight to Betty Draper twittering "tying my apron strings".

What is the Skittles charachter? what is that voice? how long can it just be this bizzare weirdness? Also, since to me this feels like a pretty generic feed, what will happen as more brands jump on the bandwagon?  What is it about this feed that will separate it from all the others?

Twitter finally updated it's site!

Now instead of paginated endless clicking of "older" it has an ajaxy kind of click more! it's like 0.005% closer to being facebook. Congratufuckinglations!

fuck twitter

Spent a good amount of time going from sxsw party to sxsw party last night while tracking people on twitter. There is definitely a benefit to knowing if the next party fucking blows. However it heightens the "there is a better party somewhere else" sensation. You used to head from party to party and a friend would actually fucking call you say "yo this shit is awesome" and you would show up there. Now everyone is voyeuristically Spying on the web where people are.

I don't mean to hate on every interaction in this brave new world, but don't you miss being surprised everyonce in a while? Or better yet just enjoying where you are?

#SXSW good notes from carnivale cruises...

Listening to the razorfish panel on social media. They just talked about the ship blogging sucked, but the capitains talking had a great post. You need a voice for blogging and engaged. I hope #skittles is listening.

They are now talking about engaing with assholes in social media. Wish more companies would have the balls to accept some people will hate you online.

Update:

Re read this post and realized for your sakes I should never fucking liveblog again!

Lol

Love this

http://twitter.com/themime

Most informative and entertaining Twitter ever.

Jeez the celebrity impersonator/joke twitter account feels almost more relevant then the real twitterers sometime. They have a stated purpose and for the most part they live up to it. @f_nietzsche @jesuschrist and @cwalken are some I have enjoyed.

Skittles the Social Media Page

WTF IS THIS SHIT?

seriously, the webpage is now a widget that hovers over all the other social media pages.

I love the fact that the first thing I get is a big disclaimer that says "skittles is not responsible for any of this all these pages are other stuff". What does that mean? Skittles isn't responsible for what it posts on twitter? Skittles isn't responsible for what's on it's YouTube channel? Skittles isn't responsible for it's flickr stream? It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth to be immediately greeted by we take no responsibility for how our brand is portrayed online by us!

I sorta love the concept but I have to say I am sorta scratching my head. What is the use of the official flickr photostream? why would I tweet about skittles? Social media is about fucking being social. Talking with your clients looking for what's being said out there. For me what's great about social media is when a company finds something you were saying out there and joins the conversation.

The Chatter/Homepage isn't an @skittles it's a #skittles. A company that is building a voice and engaging people has to have an account so that it can be a person talking to people. Although I can't for the life of me think of what @reply I want from skittles.

@theasm: Wow, there seem to be an inordinate amount yellow skittles in this bag.

@skittles: @theasm sorry about that our PA plant had too much yellow dye #5

Whoever did this understands that destination sites for something like skittles are a tad meaningless. But I don't see from this site what it is that they are doing to start the conversation. The Youtube, Flickr, and Facebook sites are all just mini destinations. The point of Social media is me and my friends are all bitching about how much tropical skittles don't taste like tropical fruit, and @skittles chimes in from out of nowhere like a creepy eavesdropper at a party. Social marketing barges into your lives and interrupts it. This site doesn't do anything to push that. It just provides destinations that you could have gone to on your own. 

To me the widget thing just seems fucking lazy. Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook all have open API's so you could make a nice cool page that is a good customer experience and fully leverages all of these social media platforms. There is no reason to be so "in your face" about the web 2.0eeness of this campaign. Nowhere do I really see a voice or aesthetic aside from some snarky photo captions the whole thing is actually pretty sterile.

Is anyone outside of Social Marketers who can't code excited about this? Is someone in Peoria going to fucking hit the roof "ZOMFGBBQ skittles has a facebook fan page! instead of homepage! now I don't have to goto skittles.com to get my awesome skittles news"

Time will tell if they actually use these services to start a conversation. Until then this site isn't social media it's just a neat tech demo. The one thing skittles.com does is allows it's marketers to focus on creating social media instead of a website. However the last video they posted to their Facebook page was 3 months ago, which is a fucking eon on the social webz. Not really relevant engaging content.

Post on Twitter

Great post on Splice Today detailing how god is angry at Twitter. I think this actually has a point inside it. A vague undefined point but still a fucking point. How many people tweet shit to the world that they normally would wait to share with one person.

We used to have to hold in passive aggressive statements to ex's for weeks stewing over the perfect way to say how much cooler we are nonchalantly now with Twitter we can fucking throw that shit all out there. Bonus points cause all of our friends get to see us show how witty and nonchalant we are.

I am of course fucking kidding tweeting usually comes out as the most desperate cry for help ever. 

Twitter dictionary

"Enjoying a quite night to myself" = fuck it's friday night where is everyone

"Could I be having more fun?" = I think all my friends are having more fun tonight then me

"Great post on SEO today http://..." = I am an SEO consultant in a failing economy FUCKINGPITY! ME! 

What is SEO?

Somebody recently used a new term "build out our search cross tables" wtf does that mean?

I still don't quite understand the point of Search Engine Optimization as a marketing tactic. It seems to me the best SEO is getting strong inbound links. That has nothing to do with tables layout keyword matrixes and all that junk people say will help. Google has put in some great stuff for making it so you can search and see the site map underneath I LOVE THAT.

But if I search for a site like "I hate you all" and I am looking for the "sheeple" subpage, and it shows up without a site map I still click on it, then click on the sheeple page. Cause I want to click on the sheeple page. This isn't really marketing so much as customer experience on the web page which is marketing granted. You want people to have a good experience and for the most part get exactly to the page they want.

As far as the other stuff it just seems to be junk. If I had to say one thing that annoys me more then hearing people call themselves a social marketer and opining on the utopian new way of shoving our products down people's throats it's people expounding on SEO. SEO should be part of good IA. Seo should be a web designer putting a page together not just for humans to actively search it but that bots can properly index it. Natural language links are just nice looking instead asdlkjfa;slkdjfa;skdjf.php.

The whole optimizing inbound links can either use a trick or use good social marketing. The only thing a good SEO consultant does is make social marketers look like they use less buzzwords.

Love this post

Love this Newsweek Post on quitting facebook. I think that the author is a bit tough on Facebook. However she does bring up a couple of realy good points in the failings of social media to engender meaningful relationships.

My favorite quote "being on Facebook is like volunteering to receive spam, and the more successful you are at finding friends, the more spam you get!"

I love to hate on social media but the truth is these are new tools engendering new interactions. They aren't replacing old ones and as they evolve we will learn ways to create different kinds of relationships. My real issue is when Social Media gets in the way of engaging people in real life. 

I am questioning now what exactly that new Interaction is supposed to be? When Facebook and Myspace started they were ways to connect in small groups as our social graphs expand (something anyone who works in social marketing is aware happens at an exponential rate). I now have so many friends my news feed no longer has the sense of intimacy it once did.

Going on to my Facebook newsfeed used to make me feel more connected to people that I engaged with afterwork people that I shared my outside life with. Now more an more it's a place for my work relationships. It's no longer a respite from work it's a place I do work.

It's interesting to compare the friends page of a non social marketing freind with that of a social marketing friend they are two completely different places. I wonder if all of us in the social marketing fields have spun ourselves cocoons that no longer reflect the reality of social media for those we are trying to reach.

Like Steve Tuttle is writing in his post, he doesn't "get it". Unlike those of us in the industry who all sing the praises daily and relish in every aspect, however for writers like steve who aren't in our field the whole thing looks bewilderingly inane.

signal to noise ratio

My fucking twitter account is out of control. My homepage is goddamn worthless I would say on average I have one post I care about per page. This is ridiculous. Please for the love of god twitter come up with some innovation to manage this. Some segmented friends ability. If I could split twitter into about five groups it could possibly be useful. I am hoping for a mass exodus from twitter to friend feed / yammer.

I remember when I started to realize that facebook was better then myspace I implored people to switch. Not just people I cared about, anyone who would listen. (Since I am now blogging this drivel you can assume that number was in the low single digits.)

I have nothing to tweet about and for the most part care little about what's out there but please twitter innovate already.

Has twitter even innovated that much, they didn't even build their search they just bought it from summize? (Btw excellent decision that shit fucking rocks). If you don't step up someone will. Course I understand you are busy trying to figure out if you can even monetize this shit.

Whopper Sacrifice

I really loved this campaign it was awesome.

I have way to many facebook friends. They aren't friends they are every random acquaintence I have ever met. The signal to noise ratio on my newsfeed is fucking out of control. I would gladly cut many of you people out. Unrequitted lovers from middle school, co-workers from college summer jobs, extended family that believe in young earth creationism, even you guy I rode in a shuttle with at a conference. Seriously fuck y'all. I don't even want the whopper I will settle for a small fries.

But wait what am I doing, I am unfriending people I actually know! People I actually care about and why! Cause if I sacrifice one of the weirdos we have to actually acknowledge the total lack of depth in our relationship.

So here I am unfriending my actual friends. Actually endorsing the burger king product to my nearest and dearest. Did they know I would do this? Have I become sheeple?

I like to think so. I hope whoever built this awesome condemnation of the shallow nature of online friending, knew that we are too insecure to actually sacrifice a true acquaintence.

Looking at who my "friends" sacrificed, I know I am not alone. Baaaaahhhh!

-asm

@comcasters

So, I saw another post praising @comcasters. Why do people think that comcast following tweets and responding to twitters shows a customer friendly company.

This is not actually what they are doing. They are pacifying the most vocal customers. Good customer service is when they actually just improve their customer service. Not when they give preferential treatment for people who are vocal. It's great marketing tactics no doubt! But not good customer service.

How long really can they keep this up? As more people jump on Twitter (god knows why) it will become harder for them to address all the issues. Just as their phone/e-mail support right now is overloaded. What will happen, when all the Twitter users out there aren't getting responses from comcast?

Using twitter as a tech support tool also makes no fucking sense.126 characters is not a great way to diagnose my modem's connection issues. Nor do I want to broadcast my "@comcast My fucking modem is as slow as balls" "@theasm have you tried restarting it" "@comcasters yeah I did that 10 times already" conversation on the social-webo-tubes-point-oh.

The only benefit of Twitter for tech support is that it can preemptively address issues with customers satisfaction. Recently I was annoyed at my Time Warner connection for a month and would Twitter about it without actually taking the time to call them. However if Comcast has improved it's customer service to the point where it has to go find disgruntled customers, then it really has great customer service.

If Comcast really wants to improve it's customer service then my mom has to be able to pick up the phone and get good service. Again, great fucking PR/Marketing. But people let's call a fucking spade a spade this is NOT good customer service! The worst part is we eat this shit up and spread this fucking mind virus! "ZOMFGBBQ! THEY ARE TALKING TO ME!" I TWITTER TOO! let's pull out our Blackberry's and iPhone's and twitter a bunch of shit about how they get it!

Yeah they do get it, congratulations sheeple you are a tool!

- the ASM