Requesting the end of Auto DMs

This is a post I have been trying to write for two months. Typical me wanted to do some research, poll our community, do more research and then write this really thoughtful piece about the pros and cons of auto DMs, and I finally realized today…I just need to get it out there. It won’t be perfect, but at least I will have said my peace.

I am not a fan of the auto DM and I want people to stop sending them out. Please.

What was once a feature being used to tell people a little more about you has now become nothing but a promotional tool and a total annoyance. On any given day, the Social Media Club account sees 50-75 auto DMs that range from ‘get rich quick’ to ‘get 18,000 followers in two days’ to someone simply saying ‘thanks for following me!’.  None of these have value to me.

The first two are spam, the latter is sweet, but honestly – I would rather you not send that auto DM as it doesn’t tell me anything about you. I understand your desire to recognize the follow, but all it did was cause me to spend an extra minute in the day hitting the delete button. Multiply that by 50 tweets a day with the same message and it has suddenly become a big annoyance. I don’t like it and it seems I am not the only one feeling this way based on the feedback we got when we asked our community in February (just a little sampling):

• Jason Finch: I treat auto-DMs to follows as spam, the spammer then has to do a lot more to get my further respect and trust.
• Anthony Stevens: If social media is about conversation, how can bots take your place? They can’t.
• Jens Schroeter: Since I believe in Social Media as a great opportunity to foster meaningful conversations I don’t believe in any tool to do so. I love tools to search and analyze, but I don’t see any value in auto-responding.
• Andrea: As I see it, the primary issue with auto-responders is that they are impersonal, highly subject to misuse and can be easily turned into another spam tool.
• Kimberly: I think a lot of people using them miss out on opportunities to legitimately connect with new followers through a sincere, personalized hello message. They tend to think that the automated response has made that connection on their behalf, which is just untrue.
• Sue James: When I follow you it’s because I’ve taken the time to browse your tweets, Twitter page and website or blog and appreciated something in particular that I’ve read there. So unless you are prepared to do the same and actually engage with me in some way, don’t send me an auto DM! And also don’t feel you have to follow me back.

As the Twitter community grows so does the number of auto DMs we receive. What was once manageable, now requires 10-15 minutes a day culling through our DM ‘spam’ trying to find the real messages someone actually took the time to pen PERSONALLY.

It makes me wonder if there is some secret ‘getting started with Twitter’ handbook being passed around to everyone signing up for a new account that says the auto DM is a good idea. Trust us, it might have once served its purpose, but it is nothing but an irritant to most people now (see above bullet points and the related post that has more great feedback).

So please, I beg of you. Turn the auto DMs off.

If you are really interested in getting to know me/us, how about we go a little ‘old school’ and do the following:

• Reach out personally 1:1 and let me know a little about you.
• Learn a little about me before you reach out. If you do, you will know that I don’t like to receive ‘get rich quick’ DMs (and I am starting to block people who send those out).
• Understand I am not going to promote something you did just because you asked me to.
• I am not going to click on a random link from someone I don’t know – no matter how enticing the tiny url looks.

And please know I do appreciate the thought of you thanking me for following you, but let’s both just do this telepathically and save me wearing down of my delete key.

Please.

Question of the Week: Responsibilities of web services & their community

Once again, our Editorial Board convened to discuss one of the more compelling questions the Social Media community is facing as it contends with archiving, owning, distributing and maintaining its ever-growing archive of content. To whit, the hugely popular Facebook has suspended accounts if it ‘thinks’ users have misused the services based on what an algorithm finds and changes friend feeds at will. With millions of users, Twitter is noticeably absent in the customer service department, is in dire need of a functionality upgrade and its archiving protocol is subject to debate. Is this ‘fair’ to the community it serves? And how, in turn, should the user community really behave? What do you think? Please let us know your thoughts, experiences and examples of the social media community and social media service working both in tandem and NOT. 

Social Media Club Question of the Week:

What are the responsibilities of Web 2.0 services to engage with and respond to the community it serves and what are the responsibilities of the community to the service? (Twitter, Facebook, etc)?

Do you have examples to illustrate this? 

Listen in to the very short podcast discussion and contribute your perspective.

We welcome your comments, tweets and blog posts. Please tag your responses with the following tags:

#SMCQ2, #Responsibilites

Buyer Be Heard! Social Media Buyers Guide on Blog Talk Radio March 4, 2009

**Updated: The Service Providers and Technology Vendors podcasts are rescheduled for the week of March 9. See below for details.**

Social Media Club is hosting three podcasts next Wednesday, March 4, 2009 for the purpose of gathering supporting research for the Social Media Buyers Guide Project.

Join SMC Founder Chris Heuer and E-Storm CEO William Gaultier as we interview several leading social media technology vendors, services providers and organizational buyers. We will be talking about their lessons learned and the most important advice they have for other organizations evaluating and purchasing social media. Guests will also be asked to share the three most important questions they recommend asking any social media consultant, agency, vendor or solutions provider before signing a contract.

Visit the show pages linked below to listen in on the web. If you have relevant experiences you would like to share or questions you would like answered, please feel free to join the call via the phone numbers below. We would also ask that you take some time to help us with the project, by completing the Social Media Buyers Guide Survey. Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t ask for your help in spreading the word, by pointing your colleagues to this post.

The podcasts are on Wednesday, March 4 at the following times (PST):

• Social Media Buyers Guide: Insights from Technology Vendors, UPDATED: Due to technical difficulties, the show is rescheduled to Monday, March 9, 10:00 AM – 10:45 AM (PST). [was 9:00 - 9:45AM March 4]. You can listen on the web or call: (347) 308-8038
  • Special guests to be announced
• Social Media Buyers Guide: Insights from Service Providers, UPDATED: Due to technical difficulties, the show is rescheduled to Thursday, March 12, 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM (PST). [was 10:00 - 10:45AM March 4]. You can listen on the web or call: (347) 308-8038
  • Special guests to be announced
• Social Media Buyers Guide: Insights from Organizational Buyers, 11:00 – 11:45AM You can listen on the web or call: (347) 308-8038
  • Special guests include Christopher Barger from GM and others to be announced

Other guests are being confirmed as we write this, so this page and the show pages will be updated as they confirm.

Project Background

The Social Media Buyers Guide is a project of Social Media Club, a nonprofit working to improve media literacy and the sharing of lessons learned amongst social media practitioners. The project was developed to help organizational buyers of social media services and technologies make better decisions. For more details, check out the blog post announcing the project, contribute your thoughts on the project wiki, and complete the survey. It is our desire to ultimately serve the individuals in large corporations, small businesses, nonprofits and government agencies who are tasked with being social media champions inside of their organizations.

Using Social Media for Good Causes

Using Social Media to track Hurricane Gustav

I love hearing interesting ways people are using Social Media, and the Ning site put up today to help report news on Hurricane Gustav is a brilliant use of the tools available. The site will aggregate content from a variety of sources, including; Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Utterz, Technorati, etc.- all you have to do is tag the item gustav.

Kudos to Andy Carvin for starting it and for everyone participating/contributing to help educate folks in the affected areas as well as keeping us connected so we can mobilize when needed.

We are all praying Gustav dies before hitting land again, but if it should continue on – here’s hoping we are better prepared to take action and respond quickly.

Do yoono?

Yoono excites me for so many reasons, mostly, as I have been craving a one stop shop where I can log in and manage most of [hopefully, it will be all] the ’social networks’ I belong to in once place, with the simple click of a button. They are a sidebar/browser add-on where you can manage your Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, AOL, GTalk, etc. – very similar to what Flock is/was trying to do, without you having to download anything.

Easy. Fast. Consolidated in one place. Cool.

For a short overview of yoono, check out the video shot at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, and if you would like to sign up for the beta, go to this special priority beta url set aside for Social Media Club members that will ensure you are top of the list when they release.

Can’t wait.

Is SxSW going to be the death of Twitter?

Just about 6 weeks ago, I wrote a post about Twitter being a great evolution of IM, moving to EM, which I called “everywhere messaging”. Well, in the weeks since, I have come to realize it is really about EP, “everywhere publishing” – but not just publishing in the broad sense, but rather, it is a functionally restricted form of micro-blogging. If you look at my Twitter feed, you will see that this is generally how I use it.

Unfortunately, it feels like Fonzi is getting his swim trunks on, and the sharks are looking ferocious. Why would I suggest that this great channel that I have been touting for the last few weeks is about to jump the shark? Because of the amount of focus on the use of Twitter as a communications channel down at SxSW (did I mention how bummed I am that I am not there?). BTW, I am seriously asking the question of whether SxSW will be the death of Twitter? The reason being that we must cross over and bump up against barriers in order for us to realize they exist in new realms – the amount of traffic coming through Twitterific is just overwhelming and causing it to lose its’ intimacy for me.

Tonight, I came back to the Social Media Clubhouse from dinner with Kristie and Tom Foremski to see that my last 20+ Twitters were a back and forth conversation between my friends Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble about Twitter. In fact, Kristie, Tom and I were just having a conversation in the car no more then 60 minutes ago about the same problem. I already can’t keep track of the friends I really care about staying connected to with the increase in usage, and now I am feeling guilty every time someone adds me as a friend when I don’t add them in return. But I can’t add everyone – I just don’t have the extra attention to invest, and to Chris Pirillo’s point

what happens when you have 10,000 followers – and their responses get buried because you can’t reciprocate?

The thing is, the very nature of Twitter, which Kristie pointed out mirrors the addictive nature of Flickr, will lead to a natural increase in the frequency in usage, the scope of usage and the number of people using the service. In the last week, I have received at least 30 friend requests, and I am not really that well known or popular. Scoble is over 1,000 already and climbing fast. Pirillo is right, but he need not go out to 10,000 followers – Scoble is already having responses and more get buried – it has happened in his voicemail where he directs you to email, and even in email and other channels, he is always going to fight to keep up, despite all his very hard work and great intentions.
The thing about Twitter, Flickr and other similarly architected services is that we like staying in touch with the people we care about, the people we WANT to have connecttions with. Unfortunately, and as I have been saying a lot lately – Humans Don’t Scale. Dunbar was really right – I am pretty much putting the Dunbar number in the same category as Newton’s laws of gravity. It is important to note that I am not hoping for its demise – far from it. I am however wondering what can be done about those of us that care about such things in thinking about some sort of guideliness to prevent usage patterns from destroying the incredible value we find in staying connected to the people we care about most.

So what are the limits of Twitter, what are the best uses? Can we put this altogether in a wiki? Am I just crazy? Or is the usage of it morphing in ways that are really decreasing the value of the channel instead of increasing it? Is there any possibility to save Twitter from Twittering itself to death?

Mea Culpa: Occasionally, I do use the dreaded @ myfriend message myself. At this time, I want to apologize to everyone for this terrible, terrible assault on your attention. Direct messages should be sent directly – or if it was/is necessary to build upon a conversational thread, I should have made the slight additional effort to have blogged it myself on my full site. Perhaps Twitter could make a C messageID, or C myfriend feature to redirect some of this additional traffic. But honestly, I think the additional volume, the experimentation and the morphing of this great everywhere publishing must give us all pause, to rethink what works well and what doesn’t – to then start modeling the behaviour we hope to see from others…

Social Media Now: Cisco’s Media Dreams

There’s an old saw in the technology business which says if you want to make money in a gold rush, sell tools to the miners.

Certainly that’s a formula which worked for Cisco during the Internet explosion of the 1990s, and it seems to be a policy the company plans to pursue with social media. This weekend  The New York Times reporting that Cisco will acquire Tribe.net. The deal is Cisco’s second social media acquisition in a month and suggests that the company plans to sell social networking as an enterprise technology.

The Cisco deals were completed by Dan Scheinman who runs Cisco’s Media Solutions Group. Scheinman told The New York Times that, as much as anything, Cisco’s plan is to “form a relationship with media companies and deliver technology services to them.” So it’s less about helping Toyota turn it’s intranet into a
social network, and more about helping Time Warner Cable offer blogging, video sharing, and the like to subscribers.

Om Malik  is typically skeptical (gosh, he’s more cynical than me!):

Social networks and Cisco pairing is as odd as the relationship between Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, aka Fembot and the Freak. That didn’t work out, and neither will this.
…

What media companies does Cisco have a relationship with? Last I checked they sold equipment to large corporations, cable companies and phone companies? And those guys – they can’t even get people to use their email!

Joe Duck  agrees with Malik that Cisco’s moves are doomed, but believes the reason is that the success of social networks has little to do with the underlying technology

PlentyofFish.com, a hugely popular dating site, still uses a *single* server and very basic technology despite the fact that it competes with big players working on platforms that probably cost 100x that of PlentyofFish’s.

I think the future will be like the past – successful sites will cater to the needs of people and bend the technologies as needed.   Cisco, Ning, and other social networking technology platforms are great but they won’t define things.   People will do that.

But my guess is that Cisco’s social networking aspirations are doomed by their target audience–media companies.
Big media companies think they are ready to go social, but a comparison between Joost and YouTube is instructive.  Joost, the TV industry’s online video hub of choice, is merely a cable TV style video distributor. YouTube is a community hub with a set of tools allowing all three legs of social media (contribution, participation, meta information generation).  Big media simply is not really ready to embrace the stuff that makes social media so transformative.

When media becomes socially-enabled the source of media’s fundamental value shifts. The intellectual property itself is no longer the thing that drives value, instead, the ability of end users to do something with the intellectual property–tag it, share it, mash it up, comment on it–drives value. Contrary to the RIAA’s belief, a song that you can only listen to is considerably less valuable than one you can share, tag or remix.

Reading a book, watching a movie, listening to the radio, these are the leisure activities that make traditional media entertaining. But posting a video to YouTube, podcasting, or commenting on a blog are the leisure activities that make social media entertaining.

Selling the tools will do Cisco no good unless its clients are ready to use the tools the right way. And if its clients are media companies then Cisco will have to convince them to do what they do best–contribute IP to the community– while allowing the community to do what it will with the IP.

Related links

All Software Should Be Local
Wanted – The Sonos Social Net
Fred Wilson talks with Marc Canter about social software, muses about OpenID, and daydreams about connecting his Sonos system to a social network
Enterprise Infrastructure Industry can Up Business Offering
A look at social networking in the enterprise

SMC is the Media Partner for the Social Software Summit

Chris and I are proud that Social Media Club is the “Knowledge Partner” or “Media Partner” (different brochures say different things) for Technology IQ/IQPC’s “Social Software Summit” April 30-May 2 in San Francisco.

We’re pleased to offer members of Social Media Club 20% off the price, by using code “IUS_15072” when you check out.

Here’s some of their copy about the event:

The World Wide Web + 1, Web 2.0, is now deeply rooted in the fabric of our online society.

Are people tagging your website all over the terrain of the web? Does your company have a blog… do your employees? Do you understand the power of wikis or of RSS feeds?

Now, more than ever, it is crucial that the leaders in social media, the purveyors of collaborative social software, and users of these technologies, are talking to each other. This new ecosystem of services has proved incredibly fruitful and lucrative for Fortune 500 companies across industries. Hear how you too can start reaping the benefits of this improved version of the World Wide Web.

More info at their site.

Chris and I will be doing a session on day 1 about:

The Communications Strategy for a Social Media World
• Discover why knowledge marketing is your not-so secret weapon in a
successful communications strategy
• Create genuine engagement that builds relationship capital and
brand value
• Learn why embracing a holistic communications strategy will improve
your products and your bottom line

AND

we’ll be doing a Pre-Conference session called “Mastering Social Media Concepts and Practices.”

We hope to see you there.

How to search blogs for authority – an unfinished post

A PR person I met at a recent Social Media Club meeting has asked if I could help him find the bloggers are who are most authoritative relating to the product category and the specific brand of his client.

We agreed that I’d answer his email in public (thanks, Doc Searls for that metaphor) by blogging this discussion, and hopefully increasing the learning both for him and for the Social Media Club community as a whole. I know enough about this process to write a decent blog post, but there are people out there who do this kind of thing every day. To them, I say, the comment section is open, and operators are standing by. Please, Please, Please add your two cents to this discussion – that’s why this is a blog post instead of a private email back to our PR person.

A few disclaimers: I’m not being paid by this PR firm. The product category and the brand names are in no way connected to the actual client for which he’s trying to figure this out. I just decided that by taking a well-known product category with high brand recognition and loyalty, as well as multiple ways for people to refer to the product, I’d find a good example.

So let’s pretend our PR person is working for an agency that wants to understand people blogging about Coke, as in the non-diet version of a brown-colored carbonated beverage. It can also be referred to as Coca-Cola. The competitor would be, of course, Pepsi, also known as Pepsi-cola.

How do we find, in this case, the soft-drink blogger community, and specifically, the bloggers who people turn to when they want to know the latest about Coke?

Let me note here that this kind of exercise is the full time job of people at companies like Buzz Logic (disclosure – I know a founder, don’t have any financial interest, have not used the products or services), and on and on, there are lots of them.

These firms all have tools, algorithms, and analysts that you can hire to do some of the work I’m going to discuss here. However, even if you’re hiring them, or using their tools, you should still be able to do some of your own searching and seeking on behalf of your company and your clients. Ready?

We go searching for our Brand and bloggers who pay attention to it.

Google Alerts

We could set up alerts that let us know when someone blogs about Coke, Coca Cola, Pepsi, or Pepsi Cola. For example, going to:
http://www.google.com/alerts?t=4&hl=en&q=coca+cola&ie=UTF-8
will set up a Google Alert and send an email to you everytime someone blogs about Coca-Cola. (This worked well for me as I was already logged into my Google Accounts. If you don’t have a Google Gmail or personal home page account, it might make you create one.)

Google Blog Search
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&q=coke+and+pepsi&btnG=Search+Blogs
Would give us a bunch of results on blogs talking about Coke and Pepsi.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&q=coca+cola&btnG=Search+Blogs
shows us Coke. Etc.

These are helpful, but they don’t tell us who or what is important. There are some Google Web tools that let you do analytics on sites and inbound/outbound links.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
But this is more for seeing how your own site is doing in google’s eyes than analyzing someone else’s. Which brings us to:

Technorati

Technorati can give you a list of “blogs about coke” with “any authority” in “English” that contain the phrase “Coca Cola.”
A little chart comes up on the right side of the page:

One blog that comes up is “Barq’s” and this page is one example of a post where he talks about why he blogs about the Coca-cola owned brand and disclaims being paid. Might be someone to pay attention to, have to look more at his site.

There are lots of ways to look at this data. I’m just getting started here, but hope the community will add techniques I haven’t included.

IceRocket

Go over to Icerocket.com, type “pepsi” or “coke” into the search bar. A box below popped in for me saying “Who has more blog buzz – Pepsi or Coke?”
http://trend.icerocket.com/trend?days=14&query1=Pepsi&query2=Coke&label1=Pepsi&label2=Coke has the results.

What’s the bottom line on this? There are lots of ways to find stuff out. There are people who are paid a lot to do this. And, many people consider this kind of stuff their “special sauce” and don’t share it.

This post is an invite to the community to contribute techniques, so our friend from the SMC meeting I went to can learn more, and do the right thing in the blogosphere. Comments are open.

Recap – Social Media Club NYC – 1-23-07

On Tuesday, January 23rd, Social Media Club in New York met at Fleishman Hilard. Almost 50 people attended, and the meeting was covered and blogged by Donna Bogatin at ZDnet blogs (Monetizing the Conversation).

For those who missed the meeting, a podcast will be uploaded shortly that contains the entire meeting. You will find pictures from the meeting on Flickr here. Below is a summary of the meeting by David Blumenstein, who took the notes, (as verly lightly edited by Howard Greenstein.)

Social Media Club says “Hello World”

New York’s most recent Social Media Club meeting put itself out there for all to see. Howard Greenstein, the organization’s co-founder, has gone “all-in” to borrow a Texas Hold’em poker expression, leaving his day job to pursue this full-time.

The Social Media Club (SMC) was presented as the second disruptive wave after the World Wide Web in the mid 90’s. Coincindentally, Howard and the author of this report were founding members of the WWWAC, the World Wide Web Artists’ Consortium back in the day, and this organization, as such, has a similar feel to it.
SMC is designed to assist its members in leveraging their online and in-person relationships, building upon credentials, and shared knowledge within the group, as well as reaching out to the local communities, schools and not-for-profits. One of their programs is to have members “adopt a blogger” and help them get on the right track online.

To be clear, this is a membership organization running as a “not-for-loss” and there is a dues structure, which can be found here: http://socialmediaclub.org/membership. The stated benefits of being a member are: a social network, discounts to industry conferences and organization
Discounts, and of course a t-shirt and other organization paraphernalia. The intent is that the organization be funded by the members for the members.

The mantra for SMC: “Stop telling people they don’t get it, and them get it, by building a broader understanding, establishing standards and ethical guidelines. Throughout all of the SMC meetings I have attended the concepts of transparency and disclosure have been made paramount.

In a period of 4 months, 800 more than1000 people have met in 8 cities around the United States, with four more locations coming on board: Dallas, Austin, Atlanta and South Florida.
This New York meeting was held on the premises of Fleishman Hillard, a leading Public Relations firm. David Bradfield, Senior VP and leader of its Digital Team had been the only member of the group to put agenda items on the wiki, so he was able to set the agenda. He served as one of the meeting’s facilitators putting forth the evening’s agenda:

* What tools are people using to track Social Media Content?
* What is the perception of Social Media? What matters most?
* Is Social Media redefining Advertising, Public Relations & Marketing?

Tools:

Even with 40+ people in attendance it became readily apparent that the environment fostering Social Media and Web 2.0 development is still so new to so many. The responses to what tools are being used barely scratched the surface: News Readers (Ranchero’s NetNewsWire, Google’s Reader, and EspRSSo), followed up by:

Touchstone – http://www.touchstonelive.com – Stay Informed Without Getting
Distracted

and

Netvibes – http://www.netvibes.com – Personalied news, data feeds, pod and video
casts aggregated on personal website.

All of the above are worthy of merit, I (David) was just struck by such a small list and the lack of vocal enthusiasm on the part of the attendees to champion their respective favorites. Time to stop preaching to the choir. We are far from a common toolset and as for barriers to entry, let’s just agree that they are not physical.

From the assemblage it was clear that both measurement and metrics in a Social Media/Web 2.0 world are wholly subjective. People were hard pressed to agree on how to gauge success, let alone what constitutes it. For those of you reading this who do “get it,” understand that you are clearly in the minority and that there exists such a chasm – the size and scope of the Grand Canyon lends itself to understatement.

Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations are three wholly distinct and separate discipines. This is what I was told and had drummed into my head growing up. Well, these times are a changing. There’s a mad scramble for all these folks to establish their footholds and much like the automobile industry, there definitely will be more hybrid organizations encompassing the three disciplines. It will be interesting to see who runs out of gas first.

The evening was capped off by the attendees breaking into small clusters and banging on about authenticity online. Four distinct groups with their own take.
Here is a sampling:

• The environment is self correcting, and the audience will decide for itself
• Disclosure above and beyond all, maintain relevance, manage thresholds
• Online journalism become the new traditional media
• Greater emphasis on friends and colleagues to prioritize and legitimize

FWIW

David says: I am not sure I trust the general public, or more aptly the audience. There are a lot of television programs that I liked, which got cancelled due to ratings, and more than enough trial verdicts I wish were overturned. The idea of bloggers as journalists and as our “new media” is indeed evolutionary, even revolutionary, but do you really want to have just anybody be your messenger? The idea that we are now relying on our friends and colleagues to help us sift through what is and what is not speaks volumes as to how overwhelming this has become.

The online video space has come full circle. Much like television in the 1950’s, a whole new generation is re-discovering this visual medium and how it can be exploited. Media people are elated. The Internet has doubled back a point in time, a paradigm, which they not only understand, but can sell, albeit in much smaller chunks.

Filed Under About SMC, Education, Events, Social Media Tools, Uncategorized · Comments Off  

SMC’s Most Excellent Ping Server List

January 6, 2007

Once again, I was in need of the latest Ping Server List for a client’s Blog, but I could not find a decent one anywhere that was up to date (if you don’t know – a ping server is a computer that gets notified when a new Blog post is published). Chris Abraham wrote the most popular one a while back which I have previously used blindly as is, only to now find it is woefully out of date. WordPress has a pretty decent list as well, just as out of date. Since it is something I think we all need, I went ahead and collected all the ping server URL’s I found from the first 2 pages of Google results and started testing them. [Read more]

Filed Under About SMC, Social Media Tools · 6 Comments  

Cheating on YouTube

November 21, 2006

This YouTube video documents Time Warner putting up “Superman Returns, The Movie” as a YouTube user, then having >7000 fans in a week. The “fans” are all accounts created the week beforehand. They’re stuffing the ballot box, as it were, to get more visibility for the Superman Returns movie.

To me, this is spamming a Social Media community.

As an organization that is supposed to be discussing the Ethics, among other things, around Social Media, I thought I’d throw this out. Watch the 4 minute video, then Discuss.

Filed Under Ethics, Social Media Tools · 10 Comments  

Social Media Club Portland

November 20, 2006

On Tuesday, December 5th Chris Heuer and Alex Williams will lead a round table discussion on blogs, podcasts and other items of note. They are also accepting suggestions for additional topics, so if there is a subject burning a hole in your noggin – please send it to kristie [at] brainjams [dot] org and we will try to get it on the ‘agenda’.
This roundtable will be held from 6:30pm to 9:30pm and is open to everyone interested in Social Media. It is also free to attend. All we ask is that you pre-register at Eventbrite so we may prepare for your arrival. There will be food and beverages available for purchase and I hear the eats are very tasty at the Hof.
UPDATED 11/29/06: We have secured a venue. The meeting will take place at Fehrenbacher Hof, located at 1125 SW 19th Ave in Portland, Oregon 97205.

Filed Under About SMC, Education, Events, Social Media Tools · 3 Comments  

Chris Heuer Presentation at Search Insider Summit

November 15, 2006

This morning I gave a presentation on Social Media to some of the smartest people in Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization at the Search Insider Summit hosted by Mediapost. Many thanks to my co-panelist Sally Falkow from Press Feed and our moderator Bill Flitter from Pheedo. I think it went pretty well, and considering this was my 3rd and final PowerPoint I am allowing myself to give in 2006, I am also very happy to be done with it.

As many of you know, I detest panels and podiums, but this felt a little different thanks to Bill jumping into the audience to get things going with some audience participation. Despite the low energy level of the room on the first early morning session of the last day of the conference, it seems that many of the people in the audience did actially ‘get it’.

One of the reasons for agreeing to do a Powerpoint (which I started preparing yesterday afternoon), was that I really do need a presentation I can use on an ongoing basis to give to similar audiences on the ‘conference circuit’. I am sure you can find many ways to improve this presentation, so please do let me know your suggestions. The Powerpoint Presentation is available as a 4.8MB Zip file called “It’s Time to Get Real: Why Social Media might be able to improve your SEO, but you will never reap the full benefits until you really ‘get it’”

Rather than talking forever about the presentation, I wanted to close now with all the links that I did not get to include in the PowerPoint.

• Slide 2 – Definition of Social Media on Wikipedia
• Slide 10 – Definition of Truthiness from Wikipedia; Truthiness is 2005 Word of the Year
• Slide 11 – Cluetrain Manifesto
• Slide 13 – Technorati
• Slide 14 – BlogLines
• Slide 15 – The Influentials by Ed Keller; Buzzlogic (I am on their advisory board)
• Slide 17 – Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog with SEC Chairman Comment
• Slide 19 – Campbell’s Kitchen
• Slide 20 – Delicious; Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
• Slide 21 – Tom Foremski
• Slide 22 – Personal Bee
• Slide 23 – Walmarting Across America; Talking About Disclosure
• Slide 25 – Delicious; FURL; Digg; Technorati; You Tube; Blip.TV; Flickr
• Slide 26 – Proactive Customer Relations by David Churbuck; Rick Klau on his Lenovo Support Experience ; Dave Coustan, Earthlink Blogger
• Slide 27 – Diet Coke and Mentos Video; Compensation for Typepad Outage (mistakenly attributed to LiveJournal, also owned by Six Apart)
• After Presentation – Social Media Release

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