Because it’s Friday and it’s been a very busy week or two, I offer you no great insights today… just something cool. It’s twistori and I can’t see anything useful you’d do with it, but it’s fascinating. Click on the words on the left hand side of the page and you’ll see a stream of tweets that use them. The words are emotional words like “love” and “hate.” Try not to stare at it too long.
That’s all; have a good weekend.
Who’s responsible for anonymous blog comments? That’s become the subject of a legal action with major implications for social media, as Robert Mark discusses on his blog on MyRagan.com:
Aviation International News reported last night that aircraft builder Eclipse Aviation had subpoenaed Google in an attempt to uncover contact information for a number of anonymous blog posters to the Eclipse Critic blog hosted by the the online giant. Since its inception a few years ago, the Eclipse Critic blog has been, well … upset at what posters see as insincerity at best by Eclipse and at worst downright fabrications about the shortcomings of the company’s only product, the Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet.
Many of the negative posts on the blog have, in the end however, turned out to be accurate.
Eclipse Aviation president Vern Raburn said his company does not wish to shut down the offending blog, but does not believe it is legal for unnamed authors to defame the company’s products while Eclipse simply stands by and watches from the sidelines. [emphasis added - JW] He said his company should have an opportunity to know precisely who is saying what about its products.
My question, when I got to the phrase that I’ve emphasized above, was “Why are they watching from the sidelines?” Robert Mark raises the same issue in a comment in the discussion under his blog post:
I think I’ve wondered why Eclipse simply sits on the sidelines like a victim myself. I know one of the PR people there and I asked last year why they didn’t simply start their own product blog. I never received much of an answer, but I took the response to mean they thought it was too much work. Of course, if there wasn’t some sort of product issue going on at the heart of this mess, there wouldn’t be anything to blog about, would there?
There’s speculation that the commenters are former employees of Eclipse, in which case their goal might simply be to see if they can identify people who’s broken confidentiality agreements or other agreements with the company, and shut them down as a warning to others. Still, it leaves the company looking like they are avoiding product problems rather than doing something about them.
The situation reminds me of what was common during the dot com boom on finance message boards such as those on Yahoo - inevitably, there were people posting on them who seemed to know a little too much about what was going on inside a company. (And in one case, I watched a colleague getting escorted out of the building by security because it turned out he was posting some them, along with other assorted misdeeds.)
I’m actually not a fan of complete anonymity in most online communities; I think the ability to to be completely anonymous gives people a license to be malicious and antisocial. On the other hand, anonymity is pretty important in some cases: where people are taking a personal risk by revealing information in which the public has an interest, or in communities that give people an opportunity to discuss sensitive issues such as health conditions, sexuality, and so on.
But I certainly would like to see decisions about proper conduct an anonymity made by community managers, not lawyers.
I can’t blame Eclipse for wanting to find out if some of their employees are breaking legal agreements with them. It’s unfortunate, though, that they are not engaging with the people who are discussing their product. And it’s unfortunate that in their legal action, they seem to be casting a wide net, rather than focusing on specific commenters whose words make it reasonable to think that they have violated agreements.
It seems that some of the early social media adopters are reconsidering how their online lives.
Robert Scoble says, “turn off the Internet and get things done.” Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips says, “Twitter less and blog more.” Hugh McLeod deleted his Twitter account (but then reactivated it). Lore Sjöberg writes about wasting your life with social networking.
As for me, I just don’t have as much energy for Twitter these days; it’s distracting. It’s more of a quick break than something I monitor throughout the day.
Paul Chaney at Conversational Media Marketing wonders:
I don’t think it would have bothered me had it been just one or the other. But, all of this is happening inside of one week causes me to wonder what’s next. When the guys who got us started on all this social media stuff suddenly wake up one day and write blog posts saying different variations of the same theme, it gives me pause. But that’s just me.
There’s a good conversation about this on that blog post of Paul’s, by the way.
I think it’s part of the process of people figuring out how these new media fit into their lives in ways that enhance life (rather than start to crowd others things out) and it’s no surprise that the early adopters are the early contrarians about it.
Most people will never use social media the way that the power users have been. Watch how people start to refine their use to get some ideas about how the typical users will behave later on. I’m not sure what that will look like, but it won’t be by Twittering every ten minutes all day long.
How do I know? Because more than half of my “___ is following you” emails are now spam. Yes, Twitter is now high-profile enough that people will use it to send you junk!
From the last day:
Gee, thanks.
Sigh.
These are the things that make people become less interested in using social media. First: these are not people. These are organizations, and their “conversation” is mostly advertising.
Not only are they missing the point of social media, as they become more common, social media become less functional for real users.
Inevitable, but annoying.
What happens when a good online conversation gets started? It promptly breaks up into lots of conversations. What started in a blog comment thread is chatted about on Twitter, picked up on other blogs, and - who knows - maybe even discussed face to face at social or business occasions. People have been calling this “fragmentation” or “fracture” of conversations, both of which suggest that there’s a problem here. But that problem notion is also being questioned, thank goodness.
Mack Collier at MarketingProfs asks whether this fragmentation is a problem or an opportunity:
The thinking is that if people discover our blog posts on another site besides our blogs (such as Twitter, Friendfeed, or even via RSS), that they might not be as willing to comment. But is this reason for concern, or cause for celebration?
Shel Holtz calls the “problem” irrelevant:
There is also no question that the fragmentation makes it difficult to figure out where the conversation started. But that’s also the case offline, and always has been. It may not be fair that I don’t get credit for a conversation I kicked off because someone who read it took the story to a Facebook group instead of confining herself to my blog. But life’s not fair, and life never had the equivalent of a blog, where every conversation was contained in a single place, except maybe group therapy. The fragmentation of social media, then, is an evolution into something more like the real world, with which we must cope the same way we do in the real world.
Funny thing about people: they will talk about things that interest them where they want to, when they want, and in whatever way they want to. Some will read a blog post and Twitter about it. Some will leave a comment. Some will go write their own blog post on the subject, and maybe they’ll link back and maybe they won’t. And some will go to lunch with a friend and say, “Hey, I read something interesting today.”
You can’t measure it all, and you can’t monitor it all. Most importantly, you can’t force any of it back to your own site. (If you’re using social media with any kind of marketing or PR goals in mind, don’t you want the buzz to travel beyond your own web site?)
Holtz closes with a really important point about measurement:
In a comment on the meme, Daniel Riveong wondered if the concern over the broken conversation is targeting the forrest or the trees. Katie Delahaye Paine (author of the terrific new book, ”Measuring Public Relationships”) commented that Daniel rasied an important point. “The point for all measurement is to figure out what the program is doing for the business or the organizational mission (if its a non-profit),” she wrote. “Until people stop worrying about capturing every blog mention, and look instead at what impact it’s having on the business, we’re all wasting our time.” [emphasis mine - JW]
Precisely! But just being talked about isn’t really the point, unless you’re just in business for your ego. Knowing that you were mentioned on 157 blogs and 4,332 tweets is interesting. Knowing that after the conversation started, more people started coming to you with a business need is more interesting. The right measures will vary for different organizations, but they’re rarely going to be as simple as blog mentions.
I went and set up an account on FriendFeed (all the cool kids are doing it!). It was quite easy, and in no time I had aggregated lots of different bits of my online existence. And then I thought, “So, now what?”
That’s the experience I was thinking about when I read Josh Catone’s post on the lifestreaming backlash on Read Write Web:
Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.
Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman asks how the feed concept will scale. “I love the concept of the News Feed. I think it is an early implementation of the Implict Web, helping to break down the data silos. However, I’m now receiving hundreds of feed updates a day. And with the combination of (1) more users activating feeds and (2) more web sites offering them, I think that feed volume is poised to increase exponentially. And I can sense that … the volume will increase to a level that will require 24 hour vigilence to remain informed,” he writes.
I think that’s all correct, but there’s a larger question: what problem does lifestreaming solve? In my case, I wondered who wants to look at all of the content I create. I suppose there are a few people who want to see what I have to say about social media here, and also read the marketing blog I co-author, and also want to check my personal blog to see pictures of my puppy and other completely personal comments, and check out my political writing on the local newspaper site, and keep up with my Twittering. I could add in my Utterz but I really just use that as a convenient way to send pictures I take with my mobile phone to my blog, so it’s kind of pointless. So… how many people need all that aggregated?
Probably not more than two or three. I do all of these things for specific audiences and specific personal reasons, and if I thought they same people read them all, I’d probably just put them all on one blog.
People use things because they provide value: they’re useful. Twitter gives you access to an ongoing set of conversations with people you select. Blogging lets you publish easily and cheaply and keep up with people who are publishing content you find valuable. Lifestreaming lets you do… what, exactly?
I’m not sure that in its current infant form, it’s offering any great new benefit to many people. And it does add to information overhead, especially if you use a lifestreaming platform to track your social graph by establishing links to people… something you are probably already doing in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
On a related topic, Andy Wibbels asks, why isn’t RSS mainstream? He blames the geeky terminology, and I think that’s part of it, but I think you’ve also got to ask, what does this do for anybody?
A lot, if you’re me (or, presumably, Andy). If part of your day is sorting through vast amounts of incoming information, RSS is a lifesaver. But do most people actually do that? From Andy’s post:
The real truth, I think, is that most people simply don’t want that much information f***ing up their day. [slight language edit by me - JW]
Just like with bad copywriting - we focus so much on features features features and not benefits. We are transfixed by our amazing technology. How does it help people? Real people.
Those of us who deal with these technologies and platforms every day are the power users, and before we decide that something is the Next Big Thing, it’s important to stop and ask ourselves, What would normal people do with this? By normal I mean, not social media junkies. Because in reality, none of this is as important to most people as it is to those of us who are soaking in it all the time.
So you’ve moved into your new house, and you discover that there are foundation problems. They’re showing up as cracks in the walls. You plan to live in the house for a while, so what should you do?
Get the foundation problems repaired, or
Paint over the cracks?
You can choose either, of course, but if you choose the latter option, you’ll just have some new cracks later. If you were planning to leave in six months, that might work, but if you’re going to be around a while, you need to address the fundamental problem first, right?
The other day I gave Comcast a bit of a razzing over on the Opinionated Marketers blog. The reason is that I’ve been going through a customer service experience with them that ranks among the top couple of worst support experiences ever in my life. I won’t go into the gory details, but essentially, they installed my phone service incorrectly, they fixed the problem, but not all of it, so some features were simply not active. These things shouldn’t happen, but they do. The problem is that I’ve spent hours trying to get it fixed, and finally had to escalate it to the executive level - which I was only able to do because through some persistent Googling - and that still didn’t solve the problem. The entire time, I was struck by the fundamental issue here: once I reported a problem to Comcast, there was nobody there to take charge of fixing it. Each step of the way, it was my job to guide the issue through their internal systems (which are entirely opaque to me). Lots of people at Comcast seem to be responsible for handling support transactions, but nobody seems to be responsible for actually taking a problem, once identified, and making sure it actually gets fixed.
As it happens, as I was having this experience, Dwight Silverman at the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog wrote about Comcast’s social media outreach. His first post talked about how high-profile tech blogger Michael Arrington had a problem with his Comcast service, vented about it online, and got help. (He actually threatened to use unsold TechCrunch ad inventory to run anti-Comcast banners before they contacted him.)
In a follow-up post, Dwight talked about how Arrington’s experience was high profile but not all that unique:
In Monday’s blog post about Comcast helping prominent blogger Michael Arrington after he complained loudly about a service outage on Twitter, I expressed doubt that the Comcast executive who helped him would pay attention to someone who didn’t have such a high profile.
Apparently, I was wrong. And in this case, I’m very happy to stand corrected!
Dwight talks about Frank Eliason, Comcast’s emissary to the social media world.
And it’s great that Comcast is doing this. It sounds like Eliason just took this on, and it grew into a larger project. I give him credit for that; he’s the forward-looking guy who understands that social media provide feedback that you won’t normally get.
What Eliason is doing is great, but it’s not enough: he is putting a nice coat of paint up, but the foundation has cracks in it. One of the reasons his job of looking for Comcast complaints in the social media world grew so fast is that Comcast provides appallingly bad customer support.
He shouldn’t stop doing it, but the folks at Comcast need to realize that his work, forward-looking and smart as it is, does not solve their problem. In fact, it may draw attention to the customer service issues at Comcast, because now we’ve got discussion about the discussion of them.
Here’s the good news: Eliason gets it. He and I have had an email conversation over the past few days about some of the issues that make Comcast support such an awful experience for customers, and it sounds like he’s helping get a number of initiatives started to address some of the fundamental problems. Meanwhile, his social media work is no doubt helping customers solve problems right away, and uncovering issues that need more systemic fixes.
This is a great use of social media for a company having the problems that seem to be plaguing Comcast. Social media are acting as an emergency response system, but I’m sure that what Eliason is finding out by having direct conversations with customers is going to help him bolster his case internally for investment in fixing the bigger problems. The kind of frustration that seems to be common among the company’s customers is often hard to understand when it’s buried in reports of numbers of incidents resolved, customer surveys, and so on. It comes to life when you hear the voice of the customer.
Meanwhile, if you’re a frustrated Comcast customer, I highly recommend following Frank on Twitter and using that as a channel to get help.
And this is where the coast of pain metaphor stops working, because you can do what Comcast is doing: both options. You can use social media to help customers and gather information now, even while you are working on bigger issues. I give Frank and Comcast credit for doing this; they seem to be alone in their industry in tuning into customers via social media. Will it work? That remains to be seen, but I wish him luck (as every Comcast customer should).
Email is a social medium, and it’s the one that gives all kinds of people enormous headaches. I know very few people who haven’t, at some point, looked at their inbox first thing in the morning and thought, “I just want to delete it all and start over.”
This is not new, but it does seem like it’s the topic of the day; I’m seeing a steady stream of blog posts and news articles about getting control of your inbox. One of the better ones is this post by Mark at the Nutshell Mail blog.
It’s a good set of rules; I’ll just add my endorsement of the “inbox zero” concept of emptying your inbox every day. After the initial hellish clear-out, it keeps things manageable, and by diligently turning every message into a filed-away informational item, a to-do on your to-do list, or simply deleting it - if, of course, you haven’t responded to it - things seem to work much better. Some people talk about these email management techniques as transformational - I haven’t found that, personally. They’re just really useful.
If you’re having the usual email headaches, though, check it out.
It’s easy to forget the lots and lots of people still read things printed on paper. And they might be people who should know about your blog. Josh Catone at Read Write Web wrote about a small New Zealand blog, The Flying Pickle, that boosted its audience (and ad revenue) with a printed digest of their best posts.
“There are literally millions of blogs, but only a few get any readership. Trying to attract the local population to your blog may be a very difficult task. Trying to make them participate is even harder,” writes ZetaPrints, who believe that the print edition was a key to success for the Flying Pickle. Each week the blog selects its best posts and prepares them in a A5-sized, newsletter that it then places in letterboxes in the three local communities it targets. The total population for the area the blog serves is about 6,500.
Very quickly, the blog saw participation grow to about 6% of the local population and comments on the posts increased. Initially, the blog drafted volunteers from its core audience to help distribute the newsletter, but they have since switched to paid, professional distribution.
There is something compelling about content printed on paper you can hold in your hand. When you’re thinking about how to get people to look at your web content, don’t forget that they don’t live on the web all day long.
Photo by Looking Glass, reproduced under Creative Commons license.
Blogger Andy Sernovitz blew the whistle on MGM using comment spam to promote a DVD this week:
MGM is systematically using dishonest blog spam to promote a DVD. I’ve caught them twice, which means there are probably many more examples. (I did give them a week to respond to my request for more info before I posted this).
The offending comments are reproduced there on his blog.
The spam in question is your basic brainless stuff: Hey, speaking of your trip to the Grand Canyon, I bet you’d love this new DVD that’s coming out! Hey, speaking of your dog, have you heard of this new movie? Hey, speaking of… well, whatever! Let me tell you what I want to sell you!
Which of course is the social media equivalent of walking into a cocktail party and screaming, “Shut up and let me tell you about the life insurance policies I sell!”
How does a company with the resources of MGM wind up doing something so stupid? One of Andy’s commenters wonders if it is their agency thinking “outside the box” to show them how they’re using social media to promote them; it’s possible, though in this case the box in question would be called “ethical, honest online behavior.”
I think it’s something a bit more pernicious than that; no matter how many smart marketers take the time to understand social media and learn to use it in ways that benefit themselves, their customers, and other user, there seem to be a whole lot more who simply view every new thing that comes along as a better way to waste your time and insult your intelligence. (For evidence of this, count the number of messages about erectile dysfunction treatments caught in your spam filter.)
In any case, this serves as an incredibly useful example: don’t do this. This poster comes to mind.