Ok, That's Enough.

This afternoon, on my way home from work, I officially have heard the end of the buzzword "Rockstar". Flat out, 100 percent, that word is now dead to me, and it should be to you now too, and here's why.

I listen to a lot of ESPN Radio - its good drive time listening, and heck, I drive by the place most of it is broadcast from on my way to work. I was on my way home, listening to the Scott Van Pelt show. There was a discussion on the terrible state of the head coaching position as a whole in the NFL these days - I agree, its terrible, but that's not the point of this all here.

I bring to you, the end of the word "Rockstar", as it has now been used to describe A TYPE OF FOOTBALL COACH!! Are you serious? The quote was something like "We don't need to hire another Parcells, or Gruden, one of those rockstar type football coaches"

That's it, its done. That word is officially dead. End. Of. Story. Of course, its been on life support for a while now, but the plug has been pulled, the beep is sounding, and the doctor is declaring the time of death.

Rockstar is gone. Good riddance, too. It's about time. You will not be missed...

Change Happens.

Things change. There's no way around it. Its life.

Sometimes change is good, sometimes change is bad. But there's no way to stop it. Sometimes its big. Sometimes its small. People thrive on change. People hate change. People want good changes, and want to stay away from bad changes. I could go on forever, but I won't.

Recently, Twitter made a big change. The retweet function was added as an option along with favorite and reply. When this was announced, almost everyone thought it would be a great change. Then the code went up as a random chance beta. People disliked it, and it was pretty buggy, and only those who had the new feature could see it. It was taken down in short order.

Then a few days later, it was back, going out to more random people, and apparently everyone has it now, sans bugs. People hate it. People like it. Its typical change. There are good arguements for both sides, which I will not get into, because this isn't about the validity of the change itself. Form your own opinions on it.

Twitter execs have included a link to send feedback on the new feature, which many people have used. Will it make a difference? Time will tell, as there has been no notice from either @ev or @biz or anyone else involved with Twitter in regards to anything.

So its up to time now. Will the new format for retweets on the Twitter website be New Coke? Or will it be Google?

I'll leave it up to you to make your decision... (hopefully below...*hint hint*)

Thanks for reading!

Are Blog Comments Really Comments?

Blogging: You Need To Pay Attention To Your Comments

The above is an interesting blog entry by Ron Miller on the site Social Media 101. Yes, those are my comments left on the entry - I like to leave comments there, because Ron, Julie and the other writers use the comment section to interact with their readers.

This brings me to my titular question. My answer is yes....and no. One blog comment left alone is simply that, a comment. But one blog comment answered by someone else, and seen by dozens (or more) of others can start a conversation, whether it be in the comments section, or via email, or even offline conversation (hey, it could happen)

Yet there are many blogs, both famous and unknown that do not have comment sections. Seth Godin, for instance, has no comment area on his blog, and hasn't since about 2006. I'm sure there are many reasons to why, but I cannot leave him a comment or message to find out about it, because he has no comments. He knows that people will talk about him regardless of the ability to leave a useful, or more than likely a useless snarky comment. He's not controversial, he's not anything really all that special - but he knows how to get people to talk, without having to do much. He wants people talking ABOUT him, he doesnt wan't to talk WITH them.

Some others prefer to use email, or ask you to use Twitter to contact them to leave your comments. That's cool, because you know that it is at least seen, rather than just approved by a random computer program that goes off when comments are made on a website. It's also a great use of social media...well, not so much the email part, but its still neat. But that limits social media, simply because the responses are either individual, or are lost in the mad shuffle of a heavily followed/follower count Twitter account.

I must admit, I've considered turning off comments several times. I love hearing what people have to say about anything I've written, and to constantly stare at the zeros gets daunting after a while. But then someone comes along and leaves me a comment and 99% of the time, it is a useful comment, whether it be critical, appreciative, or what have you. Could I still have that interaction without a comment section? I have no idea...that's why I keep it up.

For an example of how comment sections can take off and spur conversation, go back to LiveJournal (yes, they're still around, and you know you have an account, don't lie) and look at many of the communities, or even some of the individual journals. Many of those have entire conversations carried out in the comment threads, and many of the branch out into completely different topics. Will it happen every time? Shit, no. Can you predict when? Well, kinda, I guess if you know your readers well enough, but more than likely you have no idea that the post you are about to make about what happened at work today will turn into a discussion about what frog looks the coolest or something.

Are blog comments really comments? Literally, yes. But we all know how wrong literal translation can be.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!!

Growing Social Media Presence By Not Using It

I've been interviewing a lot of places lately, and I know a lot of people working in corporate marketing positions of all kinds.

Many of these people, and some of the places I have interviewed at, have fairly aggressive blocking software on the employee work computers. This I understand, as you need to be able to make sure your employees are actually doing their work, and not farting around on Google or checking their fantasy teams, etc.

But the new trend seems to be blocking social networking sites. Yes, these can be addicting to some types of people, so in a way, I can understand it. But on the other hand, the people addicted to social media are usually the ones USING IT CORRECTLY. They're constantly updating their status on FaceBook, leaving comments on friend's pages, and probably updating Twitter along the way.

To my surprise, many of the companies who are claiming to be all about social media, or are attempting to grow their online presence and connect with people are blocking their employees, and that includes everyone from sales and marketing to the president,etc from using social media on the clock. Yeah, some of them have a person who sits and does update Twitter or put news on their Facebook fan pages...they damn well better have that person.

But is that one person really enough? Not when that person has no clue what they are doing. It seems like they just take someone from the marketing department and say "You're the Twitter person now. You also maintain our FaceBook fans page" and just let them do it, no matter how good or bad they may be at it.

You can learn social media as you go along, and in fact, that's pretty much how most of us have done so...but someone like me who doesn't have a corporate reputation behind him can fuck something up and be able to fix it and leave it behind...but if someone screws up the social media reputation of a major company in ANY industry, its possible that they may NEVER recover. They may hit the jackpot like Skittles, and get tons of publicity - or it could fizzle out and pop with a whimper like the dot com bubble back a few short years ago.

Do what you have to do to avoid the latest trend of developing social media by ignoring it. Social media is not the pet rock...social media is the hula hoop, the frisbee, the yo yo. Something that comes in as a fad, but rather than going away in spectacular fashion, it stays around, and will always be there. Maybe a different form sometime down the line, but still there.

Where do you work, and what is their social media policy?

Is Fake Word Of Mouth Still Word Of Mouth?

I was reading a book about word of mouth the other day, and there was a chapter about underground/guerilla style marketing and how its no longer as effective as it was. The big reason is because there are mainstream marketing companies designing faux underground campaigns that use paid scripted actors who shill products in situations that seem more organic, like they happened naturally.

Is this really the death of word of mouth? I don't think so. No matter how it starts, word of mouth is word of mouth. Just because it may have been originated by an actor memorizing a script, instead of a random happenstance, the resulting communications by those who were affected is still word of mouth. Its still organically grown as time goes on, whether it started accidentally or on purpose.

Yeah, its probably not what some of the first word of mouth people had in mind, but in marketing and related things, I don't think there's ANYTHING that has evolved exactly the way that the originators have planned. Sometimes the natural evolution of a strategy is completely against the original thought, but it still works.

As much as people who utilize underground tactics dislike it, things that happen in the underground that work very well, often are adopted by the mainstream. It happens in music, it happens in art, and it happens in business. It doesn't mean that the tactic no longer works, it just means it will probably be changed a little bit to make it more accessible.

Instant Marketing - Just Add Water...Oops, Twitter.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog, since chances are that you found out about it via Twitter to begin with...

But, Twitter has and continues to show itself to be a trendsetter in marketing. Not the service itself, but the users. Thanks to the trending topics slot now in everyone's sidebar by default on the web based client, certain trends can be tracked. In recent times, obviously Michael Jackson, Iran, AT&T, and several other topics have come, stayed and gone, and maybe come again. But the major stuff isn't what I'm actually talking about.

Every once in a while, you get something completely random. Sometimes a meme will crack the list, or sometimes a pro athlete, or whatever. They don't always stay for very long, such is the nature of motion, and a fickle public.

But, if you were good enough about crafting the right kind of message with your 140 characters, imagine the number of people who would possibly see your name, your product, your whatever. Even if you were only on the list for a short time, a rediculous amount of people would possibly see your topic.

I'm definitely not calling for tweets being advertising or anything like that, NOBODY wants that. EVER. What I mean, is there are larger companies (Zappos, Ford, etc) who have enough clout to wrangle a trending topic if they do something big. What's stopping you from crafting something good enough to be picked up by Robert Scoble, or Chris Brogan, or Leo Laporte, guys who have tremendous reach in the Twitter sphere? NOTHING. You just have to do it. If you get the right people or enough people talking, just imagine the possibilities...

What do you see?

Thanks for reading.

UPrinting.com 16x20 Poster Print Contest RESULTS!!!

Thanks again to Uprinting.com for helping me with this giveaway. They are your source for the following, and so much more;

Online Poster Printing
Poster Printing

Without further delay, especially since the post is late, the winner of my contest drawing, drawing done courtesy a web based RNG - The winner is, GUY CROSS! Congrats Guy, make sure to leave me your email address so UPrinting.com will be able to contact you to claim your prize.

Thanks to everyone who entered, hopefully I'll be doing more contests, and get more competitors.

Web 2.0 = Marketing 2.0??

For some reason, lately the need to classify things has been bouncing around in my head. Not trying to classify my own stuff in my house, but why its done. Of course, general classification is obviously and correctly used to differentiate things that for the most part are blatantly different, with small variation.

Animal. Vegetable. Mineral. Mammal. Fish. Arachnid. Whatever, they're for the most part useful.

But what is Web 2.0? What is new marketing? For that matter, what compromised Web 1.0? What exactly is included within traditional marketing? Who's traditions? Mine? Yours? Nostradamus? Bill Clinton? Dave Chappelle? Where do you draw the lines...is it really necessary to draw them?

No.

To concentrate on marketing for a moment...how do you know when to draw the line? Was it when the first spam email went out? Was it when the first banner ad was clicked on? Was it the first television commercial? Was it the first magazine ad? The line is useless....marketing is marketing is marketing. The music industry is full of the same bullshit...everything has to have a label to make it digestable to the latest and the greatest of whatever. Fuck it. Music is music is music. Its all music....leave it at the general classifications that you see in a record store. I don't need new this, or post that, or cross genre classifications. Its music. Get over it. Its marketing. ITS ALL THE SAME! The method of delivery is the difference. Since day one, marketing has been about getting your product or service in front of as many of the right people as often and as cheaply as possible without pissing them off. Thats what it is, thats what its been, and thats what it will always be.

Same with the internet. If you really want to get technical, Web 1.0 was the millitary defense network before any of the concepts of the internet beyond BBSs was even a thought in Al Gore's mind. Which would mean by classification of evolutionary ideas, we'd be on like Web 9.2 at this point. So why aren't we? Because the classification doesn't mean a damn thing. Its subjective, its made up to pigeonhole stuff, much like what I spoke about above. Its the internet. It has a wide variety of uses and has gone through a wide variety of generations...but its still the internet. No need to call it anything else...no more classifications needed. Just leave it alone.

What are your favorite useless classifications?

Thanks for reading...

Depression and Social Marketing

I often wonder how different my views on social networking and social marketing would be if I wasn't on anti depression medication. There are times when I curse social networking, when I really kind of need to talk to someone but nobody's around to chat with....but when people are around and sharing thier ideas, experiences and such, its invauluable.

I'm sure there are times when I hesitate and miss making a connection or replying to a twitter post or a facebook group message...but I'm thinking everyone is like that. Because with social networking and marketing, the whole idea is that there are connections everywhere and if you miss one, you will be able to make another one.

Has anyone else wondered if their social networking or marketing experiences are clouded or heightened by anything??

Thanks for reading...

Good Message vs Big Message

Today I learned that bigger is not always better.

Specifically this particular lesson was in social marketing. There are so many different aspects to social marketing that it is really hard to be in the right mindset for every part of it. I was talking with @unmarketing and @jasontryfon and a few others, and I had expressed about inequality in different circles of twitter. Then both of the guys told me that they viewed things differently....on Twitter, everyone has the same chance to say what they want to say, and people will listen. If you have something worthwhile to say, it will be heard. It doesn't matter if you say it to 100 people, or 10000. If what you have to say is right or good, people will hear it. Quality statements and contributions win over quantity.

I still feel like the little brother that gets stuck playing deep left field, but little brother grows up.

Self Marketing

Regardless of job status, age, gender, whatever classification you want to go by, one of the most important things about you is your image according to other people. Not yourself, other people. We all know how to do things and make things and whatever else that gives off the image that you want to project. Unfortunately there are very few jobs right now where what you want to show or to be is not what everyone else wants to see. Self Marketing, putting forth the best image of yourself for OTHER PEOPLE is one of the hardest skills to learn, yet you are expected to know how to do so before you know how to do anything else.

The difficult thing about Self Marketing is that almost everyone that can see your personal brand isn't looking for the same thing. Adapting yourself to conform to the widest set of opinions possible without compromising your own ideas and opinions is again, probably the hardest thing a person has to do. Most people have trouble thinking from the perspective of someone looking at them, rather than projecting out from themselves.

It's weird, because when you are young you're trained to care about your own image for the most part, and learning how to see yourself in the minds of others is pretty much shuffled to the backseat...and then you hit the real world, and are surprised to learn that you've been doing everything ass backwards your entire life.

Thanks for reading...

Social Networking vs Business Networking

Over the past couple of days, the topic of Social Networking as a business, or being able to USE Social Networking as a business model from the user side, nor the owner side has been emerging. The question that is being raised is if Social Networking as it is set up right now can support or would welcome business integration beyond banner or clicker advertisements.

Social Networking as it stands right now cannot support business. People are too suspicious of spam or mass marketing and similar things to really get into adding a business side to a social network. What needs to be done is there needs to be a business network developed SPECIFICALLY for the business side of things. LinkedIn is part of the way there, because it allows people to communicate on a business level on things they have in common or want to have in common, whether that be a person or a particular characteristic of business.

However, adding a sales side to LinkedIn would be incredibly difficult as things are at the moment. I'm not sure that the internet community as a whole can truly support a social network built for business purposes other than networking. I don't even think it is because of security measures, because things can be done to combat most of the questions. I just don't think that the internet community, or the world at large even is ready to support a full on social business network.

Thanks for reading...