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