Category: Technology

Apple: The Forbidden Fruit, iHolics, PReemption

Posted by Rich Harris – August 17, 2010

My first iPhone: The iPhone 4

I finally broke down. Not the epiphany in counseling type, but more the technology type. The BlackBerry rocked before social media came and forced it’s OS to be more app friendly for Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s safe to say that for many, the new need for multiple social apps and other ‘always on/connected’ apps were just too much for the BB push technology pipeline. After many crashes over a few years with multiple social media/content client apps, I was sick of java errors, hang ups, and a mobile experience that has been outdated for 4 years now….I needed a change. So being that I was already an Apple product user in everything else I do online, it was time to switch.

I love my iPhone 4 and have witnessed none of the issues related to Antennagate. I dig the user experience, the aesthetic, the apps…..all of it. It totally fits me and my life. The only issue I had with it was trying to install the 4.0.1 update to fix the signal issue. My issue basically was when attempting the update, it got about 3/4 of the way through and hung and then my phone was essentially bricked so I had to take it into the Apple store. My issue was a one off. Otherwise the phone rocks so I wasn’t trippin’ or considering the device a ‘failure.’ However, I did have an interesting experience at the Genius Bar that I’ll explain further down this post.

The Apple Store replaced my phone no questions asked and I was up and running again. All good. I’ve been in tech long enough to know that sometimes things fail or are defective. I’m cool with that. Now then…..

What is Wrong With Questioning Companies & Products That You Love?

I don’t understand the human need to invest so much blinder-level emotional commitment to Apple, or any company for that matter, that they are willing to get on their knees and drink in all the cool-aide, figuratively beer-bonged down their throats, regardless of how shitty it can sometimes taste if said figurative batch is fucked up. They just keep drinking. The power of customers connecting with each other via social channels STILL hasn’t empowered Apple fan boys enough to break free of the clutches of the black turtleneck so that they fully think for themselves as consumers. The weird thing about the Apple phenomena is that these very same customers would blow the whistle on any other company, product or service if they ever had a simliar experience. No one will ever be this loyal to Sony, Philips, Samsung, or even Microsoft (for the most part). Even then, the word loyal is probably too level-headed of a word in this scenario….sometimes, based on my convos with good friends who love Apple and a recent experience I had at the Genius Bar in the Los Gatos Apple Store, I wonder if a slight obsession has chemically altered people’s brains somehow after they’ve bought their first Apple product. Maybe our Macbook Pro built-in cameras spew a fine mist of the world’s strongest opiate into our face during use so we get a euphoric numbness and sense of relief that we attribute to Apple products all Pavlov style ….who knows…anyhow, I digress…

My name is Rich Harris, and I too am an iHolic, just like you. But as iHolics, we are entitled to be continually impressed by, passionate about and extremely critical of this awesome company called Apple and it’s suite of products, kapeesh? My kids question me as their father during disagreements, etc. Does that mean they don’t love and respect me? NO.

Side Note: My First Genius Bar Experience

Maybe it’s because he was burnt the F*** out from all the hype rolling in the door and asking him about antennas, etc. but his response when I questioned him about the 4.0.1 update crashing my phone etc., I felt was a little disturbing. I told him that my iPhone had bricked from the update and he says to me, “yeah I don’t know why everyone is making a big deal out of the signal being accurately displayed on the phone, who looks at that anyway?”. What the hell kind of answer is that? I’d say that not only is that important but companies have made that a priority since mobile phones came out! Just like when Apple launched a phone in the beginning that didn’t support MMS even though every other crappy flip phone supported it and had for years, this signal accuracy bug in my opinion is just another “stupid.” The fact that the Apple Store employee tried to minimize this right in front of me and disregard the issue is even more ridiculous. In fact, if I ran that store, he would’ve been in the unemployment line the next day. Call me an asshole but when customers invest as much passion and money in their “Apple Lifestyle” as they currently do, we’re allowed to expect the BEST from a company and it’s employees that claim it to BE the best. The best doesn’t mean you don’t have flaws and bugs, but the best does mean that you don’t release your products with really lame amateur issues.

Antennagate: No Pedestal Can Transcend The Pressure of Social Media

A PR department has basically two jobs: Announcements & Damage Control (preemptive & post). Both of these fall under the over-arching umbrella of perception. Antennagate was a perfect example of a great company with even greater products that pushed their social media ignorance and side-stepping a little too far. It is true that the acceptable amount of iPhones with antenna issues fell within the acceptable failure rate threshold (all technology hardware companies have one). So the amount of customers with issues and the issue itself, really WEREN’T the issue. The issue was that they tried to do the notorious Apple PR ‘brush off’ during a time when direct communication via social media is at an all time high, run by the people, syndicated by the people, all FOR the people….a large part of those people this time around were considering buying their first iPhone, and because that fact was a component of the timing, while Apple will recover of course (their latest earnings are insane), they will pay for this financially and already have, big time.

There was a really great article on Mashable about what we can learn from this from a PR and social media perspective titled, “4 Lessons Small Businesses Can Learn from Apple’s Antennagate“. The four things (with some quotes from the post) they cover in this article are:

  • Address The Real Problem – “Part of what got Apple into trouble was its initial approach to Antennagate. After Steve Jobs blew off some of the concerns, Apple admitted there was a problem, but blamed it on a software issue and sidestepped the very real hardware problem.”
  • Taken Control of The Situation – “When you’re in crisis mode, the last thing you need is to have the situation spiral completely out of your control. Establish control of the situation as quickly as you can.”
  • Make Reparations and Don’t Be Cheap – “If you find yourself in a crisis and you are at fault, don’t be afraid to make it up to your customers, no matter the cost. While it may be very painful in the short-term, it could very well be what saves your company in the long run.”
  • Better Late Than Never – “While Apple made many mistakes during the entire Antennagate saga, in the end it admitted that there was a problem and took enough steps to keep consumers happy.”

Dear Apple

I love your products. I have none of the well publicized issues with my iPhone 4. I love the phone and life is good. I will continue to use nothing but Apple products for all my mobile/computing needs. HOWEVER, you need to get onboard with the social side of things. You need to be leveraging social media and it’s channels to not only speak the truth quickly when problems arise like most product companies nowadays, but you also should take a long hard look at how much headache you can save with a simple ongoing blog post on the issue, or a hashtag on Twitter with real-time info on what’s going on so we can all follow and feel like we can be your co-pilot as you work through it. You would’ve saved yourself some serious dough and headed off TONS of unwarranted online media flack. I’m hoping the cost of the free bumpers is a little reminder that the days of spoonfeeding us what you want us to hear are actually over. Keep making the great products you do and start being up front using the tools that we all use to communicate. No one wants to be the “BP” of computing products when it comes to PR.

Onward.

Another Guest Post on ZDNet

Posted by Rich Harris – August 10, 2010

Late last month my good friend Jennifer Leggio let me squawk about the importance of making sure your digitals are tangibles and how The Cloud rocks but keeping your personal stuff back up and safe and close to you rocks even more.

“It’s safe to say that most of us in the age range of 30+ still have an attachment to these analog artifacts. However, it’s not just an emotional attachment. When it comes to memories and things that matter to us, we know that physical tangibility is something we can trust, something that holds it’s own unique value, reminding us that our lives have been actual, real and organic.”

Read the full article here

Quick’n’Dirty Episode 50: Be Interesting and Be Interested

Posted by Rich Harris – July 3, 2010

This week’s episode made us hungry, and not just for food. After co-hosts Jennifer Leggio and Aaron Strout had the opportunity to chat with Winnie Hsia (@MissWinnie), Social Media Specialist for Whole Foods (@WholeFoods on Twitter), we were reminded that if you have a passion for customers and the business you are in, it is possible for that passion to resonate up the corp ladder influencing change in long-standing policies etched in proverbial stone by a 30 year old company. It’s also rad when you can applicably discuss business and food in the same show. You can listen to this episode here.

First topic of the show was our Social App of the week. With location-based apps and functionality becoming more than just a personal novelty, making their way into the advertising space, marketing campaigns and creating more biz partnerships, it’s a very hot topic right now. This week we chose location-based app Whrrl. This app has been around for a few years and while it is not new and they offer some of the standard features of the other loc-based apps, one of the things that sticks out is their “Societies” feature, making it easier for you to virtually group together with others that share your specific interests and passions. Giving users an option to either join a “Society” or create their own if they haven’t found one that serves a need or specific interest they’re looking for, is a great way to foster new relationships virtually and meet new friends in a way that is more meaningful online. Really cool.

Next was our featured guest, Winnie Hsia. Many of us can vouch for the fact that it’s always a challenge bringing social media into an older company. While she started out doing some part-time stuff on Twitter/Facebook for Whole Foods, Winnie was able to create value for Whole Foods quickly within the social media landscape and has since turned it into a full time job. From answering questions from headquarters via various social media channels, to encouraging and educating individual store managers on how to leverage SM to increase sales and customer involvement, she has really helped paved the way for a company based on everything organic, gracefully transition into the digital lives of it’s customers without missing a beat. She has found a way to utilize her passion for food, community and technology to connect and engage with customers on Twitter, Facebook and beyond. Her closing tweetable thought was so awesome I had to make it the title of this blog post: “Be interesting and be interested.”

Finally, our Twitterer of the week was none other than Jo Garfein (@JOpinionated). After reading through her tweets, credentials and various projects that she is part of, I assure you that if you at all think you are truly in the know when it comes to pop-culture, you have more than met your match with Jo. She is a pop culture content machine and an unparalleled Lost fan. You can check out her various projects at JOpinionated.com. Jo, we love your tweets!

Last but not least, for our point/counterpoint segment, Aaron & Jennifer went on to discuss businesses being able to attach a dollar value to a fan or follower. This to me is the Holy Grail of data in social media, data that if at least 85%+ accurately established and forecasted, will finally allow businesses to fully harness SM for revenue purposes as well as help those of us in running the  SM show to be more iron clad in our pitches to executives and both internal/external clients in business. The discussion was sparked by Q’n'D after discovering and reading a recent article posted at GigaOM. They do a terrific job discussing some of the challenges and discoveries covered in a recent report developed by Syncapse, a social media measurement firm.

Here are some of the more insightful takeaways from the study:

  • On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
  • Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.
  • Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.

This information is definitely helpful and was finally presented in a way that most of us in business can make sense of. It also reinforces how marketing will always be, to some extent or another, a series of moving targets that will evade our business objectives if we don’t make research a huge part of the equation.

Next week we’ll talk to Bob Knorpp, of The BeanCast. Please join us next Thursday live at noon PT / 3 ET in the Blog Talk Radio chat room or feel free to listen anytime on iTunes. Have a great weekend!

Onward.

Like A Population of Over-Stimulated Newborns

Posted by Rich Harris – June 10, 2010

Recently, a friend of mine, Bill Pennington (@blazing_b on Twitter) shared an amazing reminder of an article called “The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People.” I really got to thinking a lot about this, and all the really creative people I know that have been successful in flourishing within the confines of their right-brain (the more complex, amorphous and sometimes torrential, side of our intellect – my opinion of course).

Our Culture

The average American adult spends 8 1/2 hours a day staring into screens. We have gotten down on our knees and ripped the faucet off the water main of information with mouths and hands wide open. By majority, we are a culture of people in a constant state of waiting for the next thing to do, the next thing to react to, to eat, to drink, to socialize, to attend, to take care of, to engage on whatever level enough to prompt us to feel like we know what we’re supposed to do next while we are awake. I truly believe it’s NOT human nature that we are control freaks with how much idle time we allow. I believe we are taught by our environment how to, and why we should limit our solitude, deviate from it, stay misinformed on how to leverage it for personal growth. We do this out of fear. To us I think deep down we know that solitude is the ultimate place of vulnerability, where we are forced to face the truth, ourselves, with no distraction, and it’s uncomfortable.

I think our full tilt culture lacks balance in a way that creates more unnecessary stress, turmoil, and bad decision-making than we give it credit for. We are feeding our brains a TON of info without allowing them enough time to process what we’re taking in, apply it to our psyche the way it’s meant to be physiologically and emotionally applied, and then purge the excess “noise” from our short-term memories so that we can move onto the next thing.

Our Brains

The Similarity Between Mental & Physical Process

The average American eats about 1,800 pounds of food per year, or about five pounds per day.

Our brains are the digestive systems of information. Our actual digestive systems are a process, a series of required steps to do their job correctly, only beneficial if all steps are allowed to happen. Just like when we consume food and beverages, we chew it, swallow it, digest it – methodically processing and getting all required nutrients where possible and then disposing of the unnecessary.

Now if, relatively speaking of course, we ate 100 times the amount of food we normally do, for one day (500 pounds vs. 5 pounds), but only allowing our bodies to only process and dispose of it at the same frequency we do on an average day when we ate only 5 pounds of food, what would happen? Would our body adjust and allow more throughput to accomodate the massive increase in regular input (food)? Would our stomach eventually learn to produce a 100 times more acid to break down food faster? Would our intestines eventually adjust, able to work 100 times harder to absorb nutrients? Would our bodies eventually be able exploit and take advantage of 100 times the intake of vitamins from those nutrients? Would we be able to eventually expel 100 times more waste after processing? I know that’s a little graphic but you get my point.

My Answer: Hell NO it wouldn’t.

Our bodies would shut down. Heart attacks, strokes, bursting organs, and aneurisms would dominate the mortality charts of the U.S. Department of Health within 48 hours. The reason for this is that our bodies are designed for a certain amount of input within a range, a range whose boundaries guarantee the survival of our species. It is to this point, I believe that our brains have their own set of limitations as well when it comes to input. The Information Age has really put humanity’s processing power to the test. [I went into more detail on my opinion about this test in this post.]

Our Capacity for Input, The Natural Limitations

SMS, Facebook, IM, Email, RSS, Breaking News from 100 sources at within seconds via web, smartphone, and now iPads and other tablet computers, is now becoming a normal way of life. To boot, that is all information that blasts us in the side of the skull OUTSIDE the face-to-face part of our daily lives (raising children, having significant others, working in an office with other professionals, talking to friends, doing dishes and laundry, et al.).

I do believe that we’ve been able to adjust quite well to the amount of information now instantly available via computer and phone. But I still think that we have limits that we are inadvertently overlooking. The implementation of boundaries supporting these limitations is our responsibility and is only possible with balance.

Solitude & Balance

The sister post to the one about Creativity on ZenHabits.net was called “The Lost Art of Solitude.“ What an amazing post this was. And until I applied it to my life over the last year or so, I had no idea how important this was for our daily existence.

I’m a single dad with 3 sons that I have half the week. I have a challenging and busy (sometimes more than full time) corporate job that I spend at least 45-50 hours a week on, sometimes more depending on what’s going on, and I’m in a band (95% fun, 5% work). Whether it’s fun or work, it’s all activity, input requiring a response or some tending to from me.

When I started carving out one day a week for solitude, it was a dramatic visceral experience at first. I equate it with me freeing up a traffic jam of information, a gridlock made of of millions of cars filled with frustrated drivers and passengers waiting to get through to reach their final destination. When I allowed myself to be alone for a day, letting some of these proverbial cars through, I was not only able to start processing what I had experienced during the week, I was also freeing up issues and thoughts, good and bad, in my brain that had been buried for a LONG time, issues that were long overdue for some TLC.

I found that the most significant shifts in development as a person, both personally and professionally, happen when I’m alone, giving myself some time to process life’s input. I end up more inspired, more grounded, more clear-headed, more patient, and more thoughtful in everything I do, even if I just give myself one day, or even one evening a week.

I highly recommend to anyone that they schedule some time for themselves if they don’t already. I don’t believe people should always be alone and not socialize. Just make sure to balance them. The better you balance socializing and solitude, the more you’ll get out of both.

Onward.

[image borrowed humbly from distractible.org]

Respect Your OWN Online Privacy

Posted by Rich Harris – June 3, 2010

Facebook

Let’s face it, Facebook could’ve done a better job at a few things:

  1. By default, upon sign up, make each user’s privacy settings the most private they can be. This shows them that you are there for them to enjoy your site, putting their safety first.
  2. Make detailed information about the risks involved in posting ANY content on a social network WAY more prominent.
  3. Explain in very very simple terms with videos/flash animations what it means to allow applications to access your content, what those applications might use your content for, and how you can keep it blocked if you so choose.
  4. Make a security/privacy video required viewing before they’re even allowed to create their account.

I agree that Facebook’s popularity exploded faster than it’s inexperienced college student of a leader could even fathom. His inexperience with owning/operating a real business and being accountable to those people called “customers” shined right on through and bit him right in the ass. I almost feel bad for him….almost….but not quite.

This whole privacy issue that happened has created legitimate concerns that absolutely need to be addressed, however, it has also unearthed a reminder about human behavior and it’s common and lazy aversion to personal responsibility online.

Just Because You Like It, Doesn’t Mean You Should Trust It

Here’s a news flash for ya: All online activity is logged. Even though some of the logged content is logged privately somewhere inside a network like Facebook, or Gmail, there’s ALWAYS the chance, that someone who does have access to that email, that IM conversation, that private tweet, that private message/convo on Facebook can dump that data somewhere and share it with whoever they want for any amount of money or just for the sake of being an asshole. That’s the most extreme version of course but I’m trying to make a point that newer generations are putting too much trust in the cloud, too much trust that the tangible things that mean the most to them are to be trusted in such an intangible environment (electrical impulses and 1′s and 0′s).

My recommendation is that if you really care about your online social privacy, if you really care about who sees what content that is yours and when, then only upload or post stuff that is not personal. Millions of people are trusting their most personal content to one of the most impersonal environments in existence, a social network. A social network is meant to be just that: social. The allure and culture of a social network is to share and be shared with, to feed and to be fed (personal experiences via data), and this is to happen openly and by design.

If you don’t want people to see certain things that you consider ‘private’, things that could provide an opportunity for companies or others to exploit blatantly or subversively, then don’t upload it, don’t post it, don’t share it. Plain and simple.

Nothing is more annoying to me than online users getting mad at the baker just because they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

Onward.

Leech Marketing: Stop The Algorithmic Madness

Posted by Rich Harris – May 31, 2010

Like most social media peeps, I sit around all day and watch Twitter as a part of my job. I watch several keyword/phrase streams like everyone else, to keep my thumb on the pulse of the business, various industries, market segments and influencers. Lately I’ve been surprised (and a little dissappointed) to see what some of the fairly notable and medium to large companies have been doing, some of which are publicly traded. I’ve covered this and similar observations in a recent rant “Twitter Auto-DM’s: Perpetuating Our Inner Lemming?” which more of a Twitter-specific bitchfest but still lends itself to a bigger issue I’m seeing that is not platform, industry, or era-specific. I don’t think this issue will ever really go away because there will always be a layer of misguided marketers and businesses doing things that are just lame, hoping to capitalize on customers that haven’t been trained to think for themselves as consumers (yet).

In this world there are three types of people:

  1. Givers
  2. Takers
  3. Those that know the importance of balancing being both.

In business it’s no different.

What is Leech Marketing?

In the social media/web world, to me leech marketing is basically the effort behind leveraging search algorithms to make quick money from uninformed customers with no concern for the real long-tail value of one’s business or industry. The unfortunate effect of this behavior is that it brings down the social capital value of those businesses that are doing social the right way for the right reasons. So to explain what the hell I’m really talking about here, these are a few (of many) leech methods, sucking the value out of social media by muddying the waters of our intended target audiences.

Irrelevant Hashtagging

This definitely can make trying to do business on Twitter (the right way) more time consuming as you watch keyword/phrase streams, trying to follow current market segment-specific conversations as well as unearthing new potential markets. People are hashtagging business-related tweets by top ten Twitter trending topics rather than relevancy to one’s target audience in an effort expose a ‘conversation’ to new randoms, more shotgunning.

Unfortunately (and statistically) your ROI will not only suck, but you are actually hurting other businesses that aren’t even in your space. This will NOT give you a competitive edge and additionally makes you (personal brand) or your company look desperate and clueless. You want to be the company that looks like you are smarter and wiser than everyone else, that you’ve risen above it all, focusing on what’s really important. Here’s what I’m talking about.

Examples:

Say you want to sell your Canon point-and-shoot camera on Craigslist……

  • Good: “Selling my point-and-shoot camera. DM me if interested. LINKTOCRAIGSLISTPOST #photography #pointandshoot #photographer #forsale”
  • Bad: “Selling my point-and-shoot camera. DM me if interested. LINKTOCRAIGSLISTPOST #socialmedia #justinbieber #oilspill”

Irrelevant Categorizing/Tagging of Blog Posts is Clutter

Similar to tweet construction, categorizing/tagging blog posts is an art. It’s probably safe to say that since search engines give preference to blogs, I believe that category/tag spam and it’s content irrelevance is responsible for probably a surprising percentage of lost business, wasted bandwidth, wasted time, and overall confusion for customers.

I understand that one way to help proliferate or unearth new customers and markets is to tag posts with keywords/phrases with ‘somewhat relevant’ tags. I think that’s all smart and good, but tagging anything “Justin Bieber” alongside anything other than what’s relevant is what I’m against.

Let’s take the same concept, selling a used Canon point-and-shoot camera on Craigslist, except this time, you write a blog post about it with info about the camera and then linking to your Craigslist entry.

Examples:

  • Good Tagging: “For sale, camera, canon, point and shoot, photography, photographer, used camera, craigslist, beginner camera”
  • Bad Tagging: “canon, camera, photography, oil spill, bp gas, justin bieber, lost, social media”

Above I’m not saying it’s “bad” because it won’t work, however I am saying that you are creating more clutter for the rest of us and hurting online business flow by doing it. This method of tagging reduces the value of search and other social media tools for the business and personal web experience.

Search rankings don’t mean squat without a real conversion that supports the business objective(s).

“Mannequin” Blog Posts, Keyword-Based Post Aggregators – Automated or Manual

A “mannequin” blog post basically consists of the first paragraph or so of an original post, plus the link to the source so you can link back to it. I’m not opposed to this at all as long as the mannequin’d post is relevant to your business/brand and if it only makes up a fairly miniscule portion of your content. Those that have set up websites that in a scripted fashion crawl every blog post with a certain brand name, product type, specific industry keywords/phrases, then in a scripted fashion duplicate the post, creating a blog post and publishing it, is not only wrong for search/business clutter reasons, it’s also one of the many ways the companies sell their soul if that website or process is a documented part of their business plan. It’s weak and not a good foundation for your brand….my opinion of course.

Blind Following, Friending, Liking, Retweeting

Doing any of the above without researching the person/website first to make sure it’s relevant and has intrinsic value to your business and it’s objectives is just dumb. Plain and simple.

Common Sense

On the web, especially nowadays, people and content are data points, data points whose connection and strength lies solely in their relevance. The less relevant, the less valuable. The less valuable, the bigger the reason you shouldn’t do it, but you already know that. :-) Here’s a few other good articles on this stuff. Some old, some new.

How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study
Why Hashtag Hijacking Is Bad for Everyone
Onward.

Quick’n'Dirty Episode 46: Hold An iPad to Your Face

Posted by Rich Harris – May 28, 2010

This episode of ye olde Q’n'D, I filled in for co-host Jennifer Leggio (@Mediaphyter). This week the fearless Aaron Strout (@AaronStrout) rang in this episode with a little primer about Postling.com, the social site of the week, followed by an awesome and insightful discussion with special guest Sylvia Marino (@SylMarino), Executive Director of Online Community Operations & Social Media for Edmunds.com. The Twittererererer of the week was none other than one of the rockstars of #agchat, Jeff Fowle (@JeffFowle). Last but not least, what was intended to be a point/counterpoint discussion back and forth between Aaron and I about whether or not the iPad is truly unique and necessary as opposed to just an oversized iPhone.

Social Site of the Week: Postling.com

First up on the call Aaron brought his site of the week to the table, Postling.com. In a nutshell, it’s a way for you to add multiple accounts (Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, etc.) so that you can post updates/links/photos to them simultaneously. Where this app is NOT similar to sites like Ping.fm and some of the other atomic status updaters is that you have a nice dashboard and you can actually take your account posting management up a couple notches by organizing a group of accounts into a “brand” so if you are managing multiple accounts for multiple brands you can keep it all nice and organized, able to drill down into each “brand” and watch conversations, comments, etc. This is pretty cool and easy to use. Curious to see how popular something like this gets as the age of the personal brand continues. It definitely seems to have that type of thing in mind.

Featured Guest: Silvia Marino, Edmunds.com

Silvia, @SylMarino on Twitter, has been at Edmunds for quite awhile, helping the company connect with car buyers, building/managing their communities, proactively tweaking their social media strategy to meet customer needs, and ensuring that the latest social media tools are integrated into Edmunds service offering in a way that is seamless, engaging, and personal. She’s done and amazing job and was terrific to chat with. She talked to us about her background, some of the transitions from the old days of using only forums back in the mid 90′s, into the nimble age of social media, augmenting the already a successful community reputation that Edmunds.com is known for. Her closing meaningful tweet was awesome and is advice that every seasoned marketer should follow: “Explore, participate, share, measure & repeat….until dead.” Amen Sylvia. We look forward to witnessing more stellar examples of customer satisfaction through methodical and smart engagement from Sylvia and her team at Edmunds.com.

Twitterer of The Week: @JeffFowle

I met Jeff Fowle at the #140tc in Seattle in early March of this year. He’s a farmer. He’s not just any farmer though. What makes him special is his ability to leverage social media to educate people on food/agriculture. Honestly I had no idea before we met that that industry would even have a use for sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. He continues to do an amazing job educating people on how their food makes it from the farm to your dinner table, issues and the science behind agriculture and how it affects our food, and as a food consumer advocate helping to correct misconceptions about what what we *think* we’re buying at the store, and what we are actually buying. He’s heavily involved in #agchat discussions on Twitter. He’s a really nice guy and knows his stuff. You can also check out the website, KK Ranch. Check back here soon as I will be publishing a more in depth interview with Jeff about his experiences in bringing social media into the folds of the farming industry.

Point/Counterpoint: Is the iPad Bitchin’ or Just a Gluttonized iPhone?

This part of the show didn’t last that long but Aaron made the mistake of allowing me to talk first after I had just consumed my quad tall cappuccino. It ended up being more of a Point/Point instead as we are both kind of on the same page. At first both of us had wondered if this thing was kind of silly. I particularly thought Job’s portion of the launch keynote for this thing as a little silly. After I started reading about how universities were handing them out to newly registered students, seeing people use them for presos, and in one case, actually embedding one into a kitchen cabinet (check out the video), I started to get it. I can see how non-smartphone owners who don’t want to pony up for a Macbook but would still like to be able to send email, view videos, and enjoy Facebooking and surfing the web while en route to wherever would make sense. Plus, to Aaron’s point, it has a battery life that makes the iPhone seem like it’s running on hamsters. What do you think?

[Giant iPhone image borrowed humbly from an old Gizmodo post.]

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Twitterocalypse 2010: Etiquette vs. Value

Posted by Rich Harris – May 14, 2010

Ok ok…..Twitterocalypse is quite a bit overkill when describing what happened on May 10th, 2010 but I’m obnoxious and sarcastic 98.386% of the time. Basically, on that day, for a very brief period, the number of followers/following were both set to 0 for a brief time. A heavy metal band had inadvertently found a command line weakness and it began being exploited once the info got out. So twitter put the kabash on the follower data temporarily while the fixed it. Personally I didn’t give much of a crap about my numbers being at 0 but watching the waves of reactions, from everyone ranging from soccer moms to influencial marketers to small businesses, to music teachers, everyone was showing their true colors as far as what their reasons are or intent was, for using Twitter. It struck a chord with people on so many levels. Right away I saw tons of people complaining that they were so bummed that now no one was following them. Others were worried that they’d lose touch with people or not be able to find them again. Some folks openly said “I feel so lonely now” and they weren’t being facetious….which is a little telling about certain sects of humanity. Just by watching all the discussion you really got a great sense of how infused Twitter use is becoming in our culture. There are still many who don’t tweet but I guarantee you that if they understood Twitter, they would join the dark side ASAP.

The Two Schools of Thought

So I’m not gonna talk about the old discussion about quantity vs. quality of followers here. That horse has already been beaten into the center of the earth and we all know the truth there by now. In this post, I’m more talking about the line between etiquette and value on Twitter, one vs. the other, OR are they one in the same OR does it depend and is it to varying degrees? Depends on who you ask but I’ll break it down. Now, I’m talking about personal here, not business. Although the fact that everyone is now their own brand kinda lends itself to a blurry mass of grey area.

Option 1: Follow Those Based On Their Value to You

Option 2: Follow Everyone That Follows You

To me, the difference between these two is obvious. It’s the difference between hosting a bbq at your house and telling your close friends/family to come on by (Option 1), and (Option 2) posting flyers all over town about the bbq you are having at your house, to see who shows up, regardless if you know them or not, having no idea if they might bring any value to you.

Who/What *Really* Defines Twitter Etiquette?

Who the hell decided, with a stone tablet and chisel, up on top of the highest mountain, with a long flowing white beard and white robes while the sun beameth down upon them, that following someone back if they follow you, was the official etiquette on Twitter? What is this etiquette based on? If my content offers you no value, why would I expect you to follow me? If you did follow me and I offer you no value, then it’s hollow and lame and almost insulting. If your content is of no real value to me, do you really feel the need to have me follow you? If so, why would that bother you if I didn’t reciprocate. Is this etiquette requirement just a revelation of how fragile everyone’s egos actually are? If you find someone’s content valuable so you opt in, does it bother you that they don’t feel the same about your content? If so, why do you care? The more you attach your emotions to this Twitter craze, the less useful and efficient you make it. My opinion of course.

The Bigger Question: How Do You Define The True Value of a Follow/Follower?

The true value of social media is and will always be (at least for awhile longer) one of the most highly discussed topics. Taking that convo to a Twitter-only discussion, I think it’s important to really think about why you follow someone and what makes you or anyone else ‘followable‘. To me, followable means that your content is truly and legitimately valuable to someone other than yourself. By content I don’t mean just business-related. It could be anything – your hobbies, interests, sense of humor…standard stuff that brings people together. For those of you that follow 50,000+ people: If you were to look at the list of people that you follow, does every single person bring real value to your Twitter experience? If your answer is ‘no’, I recommend you think about that, especially if you carry that philosophy into your social media business practices (which is ludicrous if anyone does).

Onward.

If Hunter S. Thompson Wrote for The Tech Industry

Posted by Rich Harris – May 13, 2010

Sooooo…..I work for Seagate. They make hard drives. I’m subscribed to any and all Google alerts where Seagate’s products/services are mentioned to keep my thumb on the pulse of what people are saying about the company so that I can do my job. The latest Google alert I had received had a link titled ‘hard drive seagate‘. It linked to this URL: http://hooydgzznq.co.cc/2010/05/13/hard-drive-seagate/

If you look at the page that I just gave you the link to, it’s pretty harmless/innocuous. When you visit it nothing bad will happen to your computer, (or at least it didn’t to my Mac) but you’ll notice that you can’t *see* the copy I’ve pasted in below but what you can see is ads. I couldn’t figure out from the link I saw how the hell the link ranked so high in the alert until I viewed the source and to my lack of surprise, the copy below had been hidden in the HTML code to trick search engines and suck you in to click on their PPC ad to make you think you were going somewhere. This is a very common thing for hackers to do to cash in on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads….but alas, that is not why I’m writing about this.

The reason I’m posting this is that I have to give whatever acid trip’d existential mofo hacker a strong and well-deserved “Hunter S. Thompson of Technology Blogger of The Year” Award. While he/she/it put this little ditty together in an attempt to lure in search engine users looking for products in the high tech industry, I say he did it because he’s trying to connect the dots in the universe for us all to understand better…..well not really…but I got a good laugh out of it….so here it is. Enjoy this literary journey.

“Sony was also naive, but its business name was the most odd, dell inspiron 4000 audio driver. Josef mengele, the due angel of death of auschwitz, who has given versions for more than 30 classes. The 1540 place of layolle s voice is own, but no vote or rainbow boys attend. Commercial barebone computers and laptops, the state s bedroom this battery was sound s of santana. Denna proceeds in temperature with richard, commercial to his sandstone on receiving her dam despite the system she came him. Yellow security in nashville gives 83 floor in the lyrics and 60 simpletech in the appliances, which is sold primal for the southeastern united states. The writing got viable duck for a game of needs. Peoplefictionalplaceswaffle is a company milk referred by tom dell which made under power and later unix, vtech kinder laptop 3 jaar. Thoroughly through a mountain of a series of a class i address a traditional area at disk who architecturally does me a percent of the way which i usually update. An oriented design was that performance speakers would be stupid, since small parts would be coming not. Happy has been rectified of jobs verbose and available name. Sager notebook support drivers, traditional components of the supply have not disguised but skillz is laid to undergo a much link in which he faces the shareholders. Davidson county happily quite. Microsoft did to stop number carnival with windows, installing on configuring paragraph to genoese city political changes while apple was pointing a briefly disrupted, but main, public. In the different today to the laptop is st, laptop driver m6 video. i ranked together of the channels to the reputation in talk and he of mix challenged instead into his substance, laptop driver m6 video. Bivotar and juranda are on a landscape to hunt the three palantirs of zork and to learn the odd fleet krill. Another plant is that the keyboard was a culper ring film devoted as agent 355, now this memory is generally extended to major motherboard, seagate hard drive 300gb. Divorce time and functional imaging cameras. You think a magic flanked with uninstaller very form, leapster ac adapter. This mother is according to be transferred to deliver approve standard.”

Consider yourself enlightened. :-P

I’ve Joined The Quick ‘n’ The Dirty

Posted by Rich Harris – May 11, 2010

Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking to Jennifer Leggio (@Mediaphyter) and Aaron Strout (@AaronStrout), and not just about their inability to agree on what smartphone is the suckiest….(an ongoing topic of snarky contention between them both always making it’s way onto the show).

They started The Quick’n'Dirty Podcast on BlogTalkRadio almost a year ago and it has since grown to the point where they need some help. Their reputations, experience and down to earth approach in business and social media have helped them grow the show quickly and attract some well known talent as guests on the show. My role as producer on the show will be to help put together and implement the tools needed to make the content syndication more fluid, tightening up some of the nuts and bolts of the show, and at times standing in as co-host if either Jen or Aaron get called off to duty to better mankind through social media.

I’m honored to be onboard  and thankful for the opportunity to work with and be surrounded by so much talent and intellect. It’s nice when you can work with people that you are also comfortable enough inviting to a bbq at your house and sharing a beer with.

For more information on The Quick’n'Dirty Podcast and it’s co-hosts check out these links:

Aaron Strout’s Blog

Jennifer Leggio’s Blog on ZDNet

Q’n'D on BlogTalkRadio

Q’n'D Podcast Subscription

Q’n'D on Twitter (@quickndirty)

Q’n'D on Facebook

Our main blog is in development and it’s launch will be announced in the coming weeks.

Your Social Media Stereo EQ

Posted by Rich Harris – April 29, 2010

The Conversation

I have to credit a tweet from Adam Cohen (@AdamCohen on Twitter, His blog: http://adamhcohen.com/) as the genesis for this post. He was attending the Social Business Summit 2010 in Austin I believe (assumed based on his hashtag). While attending a keynote/panel of some sort he had said the following:

@adamcohen “Social applies in product dev, marketing, sales, customer svc, lines of business, Ops/IT/back office, but some more than others #sbs2010″

I then responded with:

@47project: “@adamcohen Yep…like adjusting a stereo EQ for business, depending on the business needs.”

I just kinda said it quickly without fully visualizing it and then moved on but I started to really think about it and, maybe because I’ve been a musician all my life, the above image immediately materialized in my noggin. So I exercised some of my below average Photoshop skills to demonstrate how I believe social marketers that deal with medium to large companies need to approach social media.

Silver Bullets

I kind of mentioned this in my last post “A Couple Social Media Observations“, yammering on about werewolves and such. In the same way that there is no silver bullet measuring tool for social media, no silver bullet platform or website that would perfectly serve every customer or market segment for every type or size of company, NOR is there a silver bullet approach or equation as to what tools you should use, in what combination, and to what extent, for your engagement efforts. You can only make an educated guess based on some initial critieria/research.

Everything you do in social media is a combination, an equation full of multiple variables that need tweaking every month, tweaking that is influenced by ongoing metric/data collection and analysis (obviously). While you may eventually find that yes, Twitter is the best tool for that campaign or LinkedIn is the best solution for this initiative, you should never go into it initially with some preconceived notion of what THE best anything is, honestly…

One of the main reasons why so many seasoned professionals struggle so much with the assessment of social media and it’s value or place is that it’s natural state is fairly amorphous because you are dealing with humans. Social media has finally helped translate the gray area in business into something valuable and palpable with the interwebs and all the popular tools. Now it’s up to us to embrace it for what it is.

The Art of Fine Tuning

Even though there is no, and will probably never be, a piece of rack-mounted hardware like the one I created above where you can just simply turn a dial to crank up the Twitter juice for PR, or turn down the Facebook juice in sales, by now you understand the approach I’m talking about. If you run into any blog posts where someone is trying to get the readers to pigeon hole their efforts into one particular app, website or tool, I recommend you move on.

Social media is an ocean full of wildlife and ever changing temperatures and currents, and extreme weather conditions. While you are at the helm of your ship, equipped with senstive navigational instruments (Insights, Radian6, web analytics) to make your way through everything, you know it makes no sense to just set all of them to one setting and “hope it all works out”. You need to make adjustments along the way based on all kinds of changing variables, sometimes frequently. Social media is no different.

Onward.

FeedTheMuse.net – Power to the Artists. Power to the Fans.

Posted by Rich Harris – April 26, 2010

Old School

From 1998-2001, I was in an aspiring band called Stitch that was starting to do well. We had a distribution deal with Metal Blade Records, we were in Tower and Wherehouse record stores, had a good lawyer, were one of the first bands on MP3.com (yeah remember that?), and had a half-stable bulletin board/forum application that ran on PHP when it was new and obnoxiously vulnerable to PHP injection attacks. Back then our only opportunity to get support, sell products, etc. (unless you had a web developer or designer in the band), was to be touring or playing a ton of shows……..Not anymore.

New School

In an age where record labels almost don’t mean anything anymore. In an age where if an artist or band is capable of  running their own show if their music has that magic and speaks to people thanks to all the great fluid syndication that happens on these interweb thingies…only a handful of sites have a real genuine ‘Give to the Artists That Inspire You’ vibe. FeedTheMuse.net is a website that enables and empowers the talent to enlist their actual fans to help them out. No middle man. No bullshit. Fundraising for bands for the same reason that public schools need to hold a bake sale to buy school books – The powers that be don’t always have the well-being of the talented folks top of mind that actually NEED the support. They’re too busy lining their own pockets.

All you gotta do is create a free page on their site, upload a band pic, fill in your mantra/bio, and people can just start supporting you financially. It’s cool because you set up different donation tiers. For example,  donate $1 and it is just you helping, donate $10 and get a band demo/t-shirt, etc…

A good example of this solution in action is for a local bay area band called “Electric Leaves”. Check out the implementation at: http://www.feedthemuse.net/electricleaves.

If you are in a band and want to make it easy for your fans to hook you up while you hook them up, I highly recommend this site. Everyone wins.

Onward.

Will Facebook’s Web Proliferation Be Too Noisy?

Posted by Rich Harris – April 21, 2010

Ok, so I wasn’t able to make it to F8 this year but I’ve been following pretty closely. I won’t go into some big ol’ assessment about all of Facebook’s recent announcements but I will say that while @aviel on Twitter is right on with his statement: “I feel the need to say it again… Facebook has won the internet. Thanks for playing everybody.”, will Facebook proliferation make all of our feeds more insane and overloaded? I’ve slowly started to started to see the results with several of my friends “Like”ing IMDB pages and a couple others for instance.

So my questions are…..What happens when it’s a standard for big high traffic websites to add this Facebook functionality to every article? What happens when every blogger on the planet adds the new Facebook/Like plugin to their WordPress install for every post? I understand that this helps Facebook bring the entire web “to” them “for” us however now all of our feeds won’t just contain stuff we find on Facebook that we thought was cool, we’ll be seeing the result of EVERYTHING people like from all over the web shoved into our feed……or will we? When I checked out what my options were when trying to hide the content I show on the image of my friend’s activity in this post, I didn’t have the option of hiding “Like’s from IMDB”, etc. I could only hide all of the content from that person, which was not what I wanted.

Will our Facebook feeds be nothing but “Likes” pretty soon just because of sheer volume? I’m looking forward to seeing what type of controllability Facebook will provide for us so that we can Hide content like we can native or authorized Facebook games/apps. It’s a-changin’…….

Some other articles/discussions about Facebook’s announcements

ReadWriteWeb: Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil?

Mashable: Facebook Makes Major Announcements at F8 [LIVE]

The Facebook Blog: New Ways to Personalize Your Online Experience

CNN.com: Facebook makes it easier for users to share interests across web

You Can Check In, But Can You Check Out?

Posted by Rich Harris – April 18, 2010

I stopped using Foursquare. Not because it’s a bad app. Not because there’s anything wrong with it. It’s a great app, first of it’s kind to really put Geo-Loc on the map with regards to mainstream popularity. I was enjoying using it. But a line in a recent blog post entitled Foursquare and the Analog Groundswell by Michael Brito (@Britopian on Twitter), he had said, “…..Heck, if I had the time I would be all over Yelp but I am on profile overload at the moment and just don’t have the time.” While the whole article was great, this particular line really struck a chord with me.

Honestly, over the last few weeks I’ve been feeling like an over-stimulated newborn. Outside of my actual day job, submitting data to services like this on a daily basis in my personal life was turning into a full time job in itself and I was realizing that I was losing my ability to be present. It was beginning to feel 10 times as draining as the most high maintenance relationship I’ve ever been in. It’s funny too because without even having any discussions about this with a good friend of mine, Jennifer Leggio (@Mediaphyter on Twitter), she had almost simultaneously written a blog post, Five reasons to check out of Foursquare, about some similar thoughts and realizations.

Let’s face it, the only way to get the most social capital of apps like Foursquare is to be fully committed to consistency, checking into every venue you are at, at all times without missing a beat. If you are a mover, this can really crank up your commitment to your Blackberry/iPhone on a whole other level. When that commitment starts to take over the things going on in your offline life that are actually tangible and matter – Time with your friends & family, enjoying a sunset, etc. – When you are attending an event or experiencing something and are focusing more on documenting it and making sure you are ‘checking in’ as opposed to just being present and fully enjoying the experience for what it was meant to be, then you are sacrificing parts of yourself that aren’t meant to be sacrificed while you walk this earth. That’s my opinion anyway.

I’m not dogging the apps, or the technological and social concepts, or even the business and commercial value. I still think all that stuff is cool. I just knew something was wrong when my 7 year old got frustrated with me for stalling in a Safeway aisle so I could ‘check in’.

Onward.

Sharing (Info) is Caring

Posted by Rich Harris – April 11, 2010

So if you know me, you know that while I mean well and have the best intentions, I’m one scatter-brained dude, always consuming and outputting as much information and *stuff* as possible. I follow so many talented people in the social media space and have so many feeds and streams of information coming at me from so many directions that I was finding it hard to man handle all of it, let alone (and most imortantly) be able to methodically share the stories and tidbits I found with all the people I know that could benefit. The other side of this is that my personal and business life overlap a LOT and I wanted to organize that at least a little bit so that I could focus on having some sort of non-business side to my personal life and some sort of non-personal side to my business life.

I created a Facebook Fan page for ‘The 47 Project’. I know your first thought is probably: What a self-absorbed narcisitic jackass. While I do overshare and generate tons of my own original content, this fan page is going to be 5% content created by me, and 95% created by everyone else in the social media space. There will of course be some smatterings of humor, personal commentary, etc. but that’s about it from me. I like being the messenger.

I think if we all spent more time unearthing someone else’s talent and lifting them up than we do ourselves, the world would be a better place.

Anyhow….enjoy.

You can either click on the Become a Fan link in the right column on this page or go directly to the page.