November 2, 2009 • 2:44 pm
Covering my laptop with geeky social media stickers created me with an evolving techno-mural in the past couple years. The machine was huge — barely fit into the x-ray security tubs at the airport — and provided plenty of landscape for be-stickering.
In case you’re wondering, I’ve only been in a couple client meetings when I wished I didn’t have a “The Internet: All the Piracy, None of the Scurvy” sticker on my presentation laptop.
But today was new laptop day, I spent about 10 minutes fingernail-picking stickers off the beast. And then 10 minutes with Goo Gone trying to get the Peter Shankman/HARO sticker off. That thing was sticky!
What did I do with the stickers? Oh, I made a collage for Doug Hamlin:
I’m now accepting sticker submissions for the new laptop. The snarkier the better.
Filed under: Me Being Stupid , doug hamlin, laptop, peter shankman
October 31, 2009 • 11:37 am
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 28, 2009 • 8:32 pm
You haven’t lived until you’ve literally run through Detroit Metro Airport’s underground terminal connectors blaring live Daft Punk through Bose noise canceling headphones trying to make a connection while the changing ambient wall and ceiling light effects perfectly align with the beat.
Almost makes me want to run back through…maybe next time.
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 26, 2009 • 9:09 am
My new post on Social Studies:
This was my third year at BlogWorld New Media Expo, and it just gets better and better.
Sure, there are plenty of cewebrities, blogerati and scenesters, but BlogWorld continues to bring out some of the best in social media and social marketing thought leadership.
Congrats to the show promoters, the speakers and attendees who got my brain running and thinking about new and exciting possibilities in social marketing.
My biggest takewaways from the conference (via notes I took in 140 characters or less):
- Even the best businesses have negative customer comments. Don’t be the boy who cried “FAIL”
- Humans don’t scale. We only have so much bandwidth. Humility and honesty go a long way in biz/personal
- “By the end of the year, we’re going to talk about Twitter lists, not follower numbers.” -@scobleizer
- Social isn’t just about marketing/PR. This is a cultural shift. It’s about people and relationships.
- Twitter lists has mega-implications for PR/journalist relationships. @scobleizer already on 211 lists.
- Kids are creating multiple MySpace profiles for friends and other ones for their “real” friends
- Google Profiles, Sidewiki, Wave are part of a stealth social network. It’s not a destination. It’s a zen attack.
- Corporate sites should be the hub of a robust Web strategy that goes to where the conversations are outside .com.
- Develop active listening program AND THEN empower a customer advocacy program to tell your story, defend you, etc
- PR is curating disparate SM monitoring databases that should be connected to corporate CRM for customer support
- Five years from now URLs won’t matter. Information will come together in a new way we can’t yet fathom. -@jowyang
- Entire crowd is focused/stuck on SM ROI, and you can sense the aggregate frustration at the implicit vagaries.
I want to touch on that last tweet. In Jeremiah Owyang’s “The Future of Social Media and Business” presentation (great breakdown here), the audience asked many questions about legal, ROI, lead-generation and the culture of fear that surrounds investing in new technologies and strategies without a guaranteed pay-off. Mr. Owyang didn’t have answers beyond his analysis, partly because the answers people were seeking aren’t easily answered in a large forum. The future of social media, by its very nature, will not and does not mirror traditional advertising strategies nor the metrics that fuel them.
Companies who today are seen as innovators in the social media space — whether it’s micro-media customer support, humanistic corporate blogs or social network engagement — didn’t get where they are by betting on a sure thing. Social media has changed the game. Even if Nielsen says X millions watched a primetime show last night, we know a key percentage had a laptop open at the same time. And although I can back up that assertion by pointing to the top Twitter trends on any given evening, most companies cannot quantify that “buzz” directly into sales to the point they can justify a spend with guaranteed results.
Rather, an online conversation is just as valuable — possibly more valuable — than a point of sale impulse display or a print and broadcast advertising buy with guaranteed impressions. The reason Mr. Owyang couldn’t give us the 1-2-punch for selling in social media is that 1) it doesn’t exist, and 2) even if it did, it would change tomorrow.
What can we do in the interim?
- Innovate
- Set measurable objectives
- Benchmark
- Evaluate and adjust
We must change this perception of fear into a lens of opportunity. The control isn’t coming back, and neither is the sure thing.
BlogWorld has me pumped and even more passionate about the possibilities. I’m not waiting around for the sure thing; are you?
Filed under: Social Media, Social Studies , blogworld, bwe09, jeremiah owyang, social marketing, Social Studies
October 25, 2009 • 2:16 pm
Mostly yellows, although still some red and orange. Junior looks around every bend for a playground, but nope…just more trees.
Meanwhile, it’s amazing how tolerable 46 degrees is when you know the snow is imminent.
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 18, 2009 • 12:20 pm
Dude has a laptop with internet in his cab. Surfing while driving! He’s lecturing us on not know how fast our internet is at home. He’s at 4.9 MB on his mobile connection. “You know how much you paid for gas, but you don’t know your upload speed?”
I told him he should have a heads-up display so he wouldn’t have to keep looking down while driving. “I’ll kick you out of this cab right now for sarcasm, boy!”
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 17, 2009 • 1:06 pm
If this were mine I’d hold it on my shoulder and walk around the park
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 16, 2009 • 6:39 pm
Discussing different/wrong uses of social media tools. Posterous is the perfect example of an undefined tool…so far.
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 13, 2009 • 5:07 pm
I’m quoted in this Finance and Commerce piece on social media measurement: Beyond guesswork: Companies work to measure the impact of social media
…But even despite the lack of an industry standard, experts say businesses engaging in social media must begin to measure and monitor their efforts even if they are at first measuring against themselves.
“What I say is benchmark today,” said Greg Swan, digital group manager at public relations firm Weber Shandwick. “For some of our clients for whom we have been measuring different social media impressions for years now, at this point we have a really good benchmark.”…
A company that has a manual sentiment analysis system to help clients measure and monitor social media is Weber Shandwick. Swan, at the company’s Bloomington office, said that the company’s Digital Media Scorecard can analyze the volume, content and sentiment of online conversations about a company or brand and then assign a numeric value to it.
“Software can calculate the number of comments on a post, but it takes a human to analyze the sentiment,” Swan said.
In fact, the lack of a gold standard in terms of measurement may force companies to set some parameters themselves instead of trying to live up to a standard, especially since most don’t expect a standard to emerge, now or ever.
So, for a business-to-business company, a few hundred views of a video that marketers put on YouTube may be a success. For a consumer-facing company that might be in the tens of thousands, Swan said. Thus, the onus of defining those objectives falls on businesses themselves.
Monty of Ford echoed Swan…
Read the entire piece here.
Filed under: Social Media , Social Media, social media measurement
