Tag: facebook

Social Media: Some Low Hanging Fruit For Newbies

Posted by Rich Harris – October 26, 2009

323436829_f6afb5c48eMany large corporations are still new to social media and are trying to figure out how it works, their short term plan, their long term plan, etc. After setting up your Twitter account and a Facebook Fan page for your company, now what? A company CAN do a few things almost immediately to expand their presence in social media with little effort/cost. This list assumes you already have a Twitter account, Facebook/MySpace or other sites that are built and established.

1. Spread Your Tweets Like Butter: Make sure all tweets are either manually posted or automatically posted to your other social sites. There are tons of widgets out there and just about everything posted on Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, etc. has a URL that can be crawled by search engines. That’s money in the bank.

2. Let Your Social Media Hitch A Ride: Talk to any and every internal team in your company that manages outbound communications. At the very least text links to your primary social media accounts/profiles should be on there. You’d be surprised how many of your customers and partners didn’t know you were in the social media space, especially if it’s new for your company. With tens of thousands of emails going out per blast to customers that trust you and have opted in, every email without a link to you on Twitter, is a lost opportunity.

3. Welcome Aboard, Follow Us: Most established companies have an HR dept of some sort and those departments have a process for onboarding new employees. Your company’s social media info should be included in the welcome packet (whether virtual or paper). Most people are using the popular sites for personal reasons so they most likely don’t need to be recruited to use Facebook or Twitter. As long as employees aren’t a disgruntled loose canon, you almost get an extension of your marketing efforts when they can see stuff and contribute to it, even if it’s just ‘liking’ something on Facebook.

4. Let Search Do The Work: This one sounds obvious but even some of the biggest companies do not do this, at all. Some of the mainstay companies that have some of the strongest online consumer brands in the world, like Apple, usually don’t have to link to their social profiles as people will seek them out. However, if you are not Apple, it’s helpful to have text links to social media profiles somewhere as part of the standard footer or navigation on any of your web properties. I’m not saying plaster huge Twitter icons and logos everywhere, but just a text link can do you some good. Also make sure you have some kind of landing page or provision on your site’s contact page with all of your social media links. If you get decent traffic on your site from search engine referrals, there’s some easy intrinsic opportunity to show up in more search results that you are not currently in without those links.

5. C’mon, Everyone Is Doing It: Social media may not be for everyone. I still have friends who even barely have an email account. However, if you have a company that is marketing itself online and you have employees that are online, send out company-wide emails reminding them to join your company on Facebook, Twitter, or whichever sites you have made to be your social marketing avenues. If they are not on Facebook or Twitter yet, they may actually want to check it out and sign up. Your employees are part of your army, make sure they feel like it.

Social Media: Join The Convo or Instigate & Observe?

Posted by Rich Harris – October 22, 2009

talking-headsAn Interesting Question

I recently was sent a really interesting article posted at Adweek.com titled “When Silence Can Be Golden” written by Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group. It was an interesting commentary and perspective on how brands should consider utilizing social media. We’ve all heard everyone say stuff like “get your brand to ‘join the conversation‘ or ‘build a real direct relationship with your customers‘”.

That’s all fine and dandy and of course as a social media guy, I can’t disagree with that statement. However, the article I mentioned above discusses the potential absurdity behind having a static or inanimate brand engage customers directly or attempting to build a relationship with them. A couple lines from the article that I really liked and hadn’t thought about before were:

“Maybe some brands shouldn’t be conversational. Maybe most shouldn’t.

Social media was not made for brands. Lots of other stuff on the Internet was, but not Facebook and not Twitter.”

I mostly agree with the above, with some exceptions. I agree that some brands maybe shouldn’t be conversational but I also think we need to remember that business IS people. People make products and then people pay for those products. ‘Tis life. Later on in the article he talks about how a company should probably evaluate their approach with social media. Your evaluation does not mean that you should wonder if your company should even get into social media at all (of course it should). The real question is: Does it make sense for you to promote your brand having the conversation with your customers OR does it make more sense for your brand to promote the environments where your customers have conversations with each other about your brand and it’s products/services?

What Are Your Options?

So based on what I’ve said above, you basically have a couple concrete options that could be considered a best fit for your company. You ALSO have a massive grey area that may need to be explored, demanding that you get creatively amorphous and nimble with your approach.

Join The Conversation:

This is the old adage, the trendy social media goto defacto standard tagline that any marketer uses to bring his/her newly discovered career path to the customers. It still has value and substance and has a proven track record for success when done right. Industry types where I think this would be most appropriate are ones whose business is serving human beings and their experiences, where tangible goods are just a facet of the overall experience. These would be anything like hotels (as mentioned in the article by Palmer), restaurants, airlines, general product support services like Geek Squad, etc. People pay for a good experience from other humans that represent or are employed by these industries so direct engagement with them via social media would most likely feel more natural.

Instigate, Observe, Tweak, Observe, Repeat.

Next up is the other concrete option that Palmer spoke of which is: create an environment, or mechanism, or medium, for your customers and target audience to hang out and discuss your brand with each other while you watch and learn and strategize your next moves. In many cases, you can learn how to humanize your non-human products. You can learn much more by listening to your customers as a fly on the wall of your company’s Facebook Fan Page, the stream of tweets containing your brand name (or your competitor’s for that matter), and so on. The industries or companies where this applies are pretty much any company where a tangible product represents their brand. A hard drive, a pack of gum, a bottle of water that supposedly has vitamins in it. :-)

Meet Me In The Middle

The third option is that your real triumph may require you to do a combination of both. You may have a static tangible product that you will sell the most of if you create environments for your customers to talk with each other about their experiences while also conversing with them directly in the same environment so they feel like the brand is their for them, backing it’s product(s). It all depends. Every company and audience is different and complex in it’s own way. It’s all doable but the intuition of your social media/marketing team is crucial to find that balance yielding the best return so that your compay’s foray into social media is worth the hype behind the lengthy social media pitch you just gave to your execs.

Onward.

[ Talking Heads image courtesy of, and borrowed from, 8ninths ]

Stats from The Solis

Posted by Rich Harris – October 13, 2009

Brian’s recent blog post: “The Great Social Divide: Twitter, Facebook Traffic Surges, Myspace Fades“, was chock full of some really great social media nuggets. The behemoth that is Facebook, the rise of Twitter, the process of the fall of MySpace. I highly recommend checking this post out. It’s always nice for us social media guys when someone else goes out there and pulls and the information we really care about into one location instead of the 8 different ones we have to go. The best quote by far from the post at the bottom that is in sync with the rest of the better known social media/marketers was this:

“This is why, in social media, digital anthropology, sociology, ethnography, and psychology prevail…”

Amen to that.

Automation Killed The Social Media Star

Posted by Rich Harris – September 1, 2009

So a short while ago the mighty Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) tweeted the following: “Social media isnt cool. Human interaction is cool. Just fyi.”

Some people took that as him dogging Social Media but if you know Chris you know that’s not true. I think he’s just getting a little spent on the level of noise and clutter that is being slung around Twitter spammy DM’s and other social sites. I’m sure he’s also probably tired of all the new social media “experts” that have cropped up that are more savvy as used car salesmen than they are true marketers who actually care about the conversation. The buzz-word minutiae that won’t seem to let up when it comes to “Social Media” is…..overwhelming, like tidal wave :-) . When I hear or read that phrase now, it is starting to feel like I’m getting my first tattoo and the artist keeps going over the same spot again and again and again even though he should be moving on to another spot. “STOP I GET IT!” Shotgun marketing methods and not knowing the real point of Social Media is the cause of all this chaos.

Here’s How I See It

Now onto the main point of this post. Whether you are using Auto DM messages on Twitter or regularly and aggressively scheduling libraries of recursive tweet ads (twads? blech…) on TweetLater, you are tired of the time commitment and maintenance of this new “social media” fad that you are trying to convert into a “get rich quick” scheme. My humble message to those people: I have some news for you.

Automation (“in the recurring output of scheduled ads” sense) and Social Media cannot live in the same in universe philosophically with causing the apocalypse. This does NOT include one press release tweet being scheduled early one morning, an Auto DM set up to let people know you are on vacay, etc. I’m talking about the meager attempt, whether intentional or not, by low quality marketers who are trying to replace human interaction and relationship building, with scripts and automated tools.

We all know that the marketing relationships with our customers are only as solid (and lucrative over the long term) as the amount of time, effort and genuineness that we are willing to give to them. It takes time to cultivate real conversations and relationships in marketing. You can’t automate that. It’s like me trying to write a script that will raise my 3 sons for me…..as much as I’d like to have that lying around when they are bickering so I could go have a peaceful cup of coffee some place until my new bickering children script helps them figure it out, there will never be a time when marketing is not about real people having real conversations, especially in this day and age.

If you don’t like people, interaction with people, investing time in people, then please don’t get into social media. :-)

Corporate Facebook Strategy: Multiple Fan Pages.

Posted by Rich Harris – August 26, 2009

Growth, It Happens.

As the Social Media guy (manager, dude, whatever) at Seagate, I have seen social media go from something that was an incremental piece of the communications landscape to a “must have” for many functions within the company. While that’s all good and validates the understanding of the power of social media  it does pose a bit of problem: how does a large corporation strategically support all these functions without muddying the waters and turn people away from the communities it’s trying to build? The answer I’m finding is that through some trial and error, companies may need to constantly rethink their approach to social media particularly as new functions within the organization look for real estate in the social media world.

I began this journey by building a Facebook Fan Page in the summer of 2008. As I’ve watched over the last several months, the unavoidable requirement for Facebook to support companies and their passionate desire to market f themselves on social networks has become a tidal wave of opportunity for third-party developers, marketers, small to medium businesses, and huge global companies. In most companies the social media foundation has been laid, the frame built, drywall, sheetrock, plumbing, electrical, flooring, paint…you name it….it’s now done here. Now it is time to sit back and figure out the next steps that make sense for your company. In social media, specific strategies need to be applied to EACH social media tool that is used by a company. On top of that, global companieshave multiple market segments and personas that have to be tended to, all of which are sprinkled throughout the various platforms/social sites. In this case, it’s more important than ever to move beyond the main house you’ve built, containing the furniture and feng shui that is the current social media entity and to start building a community with different neighborhoods in certain parts of ‘town’. I know I’m speaking a lot in metaphors. I do that a lot and apologize if you are confused about this blog post. I just liken building a marketing effort, – short term and long term, with building a house from scratch, adding surrounding neighborhoods, and beyond.  Anyhow, this is the point where I believe you need to start modifying your strategy, one social site/network at a time, with the big and little picture in mind.

First Up: Facebook

Seagate on FacebookSo in the beginning, the Gods of Facebook created groups. We started one for Seagate. Shortly after, they created Fan Pages. The benefit to fan pages was the zing and marketing-esque options, they way they updated people’s feeds, etc. The Seagate Fan Page was born. Very quickly this page has grown in content, userbase (fanbase ?), and most importantly – the amount of interaction with peeps from all over the world.

Many companies are at this point in their FB plan. One big corporate FB Fan Page with a variety of company information. What happens then when other functions and departments want to promote their particular product of service that is very specific and unique? No, is probably not the right answer. But what is the right answer?  . With every company in the world looking to reduce their budgets to save money and become more efficient, many departments see Facebook fan pages as an opportunity to market their specific product or service.  It’s all good, but what are the paths that can be taken to ensure alignment and messaging without damaging your company’s rep? Initially, I thought let’s duplicate content and have a “the more, the better” approach. Then I thought about how duplicated content on multiple web properties for a company was something that had always rubbed me the wrong way. I’ve never liked the shotgun approach to marketing because I always felt like it was lazy and underestimated (publicly and bluntly) our customers. At the same time, as the Social Media point person, you want to support their efforts. There-in lays the rub.

I’ve been watching companies/entities like Dell, Zappo’s, and the USAA closely, and how they’ve been extremely proactive with social media, allowing themselves to get their hands dirty in fairly uncharted territory when it comes to marketing their brands on social sites (outside of normal banner adverts). Dell has multiple pages that are fairly niched out but I still don’t feel like there’s much of a coordinated effort there…lots of pages with tons of content all the time. I’d prefer an approach that attempts to more cohesively connect Facebook pages strategically. And that’s exactly the approach I’m taking. Is it the right or only answer? Maybe. Maybe not. As I said, companies have to constantly go through a bit of trial and error and make corrections along the way.

Before building something like this you have to ask a few questions to legitimize the usefulness and need that a business unit or department would have for creating a Facebook fan page under your company’s umbrella. Questions like, “Is there a business benefit to marketing your department outside of the company?” or “Are resources available that can tend to the administration, maintenance and content of your page?” should be asked. Just make sure everyone is wanting to do this for your company for the right reasons and the same corporate message.

A couple general rules I like to adhere to for these fan pages is stuff I’ve mentioned above:

1. Avoid grossly duplicative content from any other company fan page unless it’s relevant to the purpose/subject matter of the fan page in question. Keep the content focused and precise and relevant. When someone joins a fan page that has a certain title and description, they are there to get that content and not be upsold everything else that the company has under the sun. You lose people that way, quickly.

2. Overarching content ideas should always be funneled through the person or team that is the official holder of the social media keys to the kingdom for a large company. Social media is fast and furious and people notice problems and discrepancies with everything that companies post. The internet as we know is forever, so if silos start happening within your company, ESPECIALLY on a social network, Twitter, etc. you risk a PR nightmare and potential legal issues…plus your company looks confused and clueless internally. No bueno.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has or manages a multi-tiered Facebook Fan Page enviornment (or equivalent on another social site). Please chime in here also if you have feedback, other ideas, disagree etc….please post your thoughts. I’m open to new ideas here as well.

Thanks for reading and happy Facebooking!

iJango Facebook Ploy: C’mon now, we aren’t stupid.

Posted by Rich Harris – August 19, 2009

Ijango_banner_598_x_259So the other day I got a message from someone that I had accepted a friend request on Facebook for iJango. At first I thought, “eh, they are trying to get me to join so just ignore it” but then someone else in the list of people they had sent the message to (there was a group of about 20 of us) replied and tag teamed with the original sender also doing a sales pitch for iJango….like were all a bunch of morons ready to devour a polished turd on a silver platter. Here’s snippets for ya…I’ll leave the names of the people out of this as I tend to give everyone at least one “get out of social media jail FREE card”.

=========================

First person/message:

“……What If you could multi-level Google, IJango just did!!!

THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE GROWTH OF FACEBOOK, MYSPACE, TWITTER ETC.!!!!

Ok, so i’m going to make this quick for you! If you are a network marketer, are interested in network marrketing, or never thought of it really but want an opportunity to make some serious money, then just keep reading……..”

Shortly after that post…another person chimed in with a response…

Second person/message:

“….Hi xxxxxx,

Thanks for the friendship. How is Ijango going for you? I have heard rumors that it is not going as well as people originally thought it was going to. I have two close friends who are leaders in it that are actually jumping ship. I hope that you are not experiencing the same results……”

First person’s response to that:

“…..Actually its going very well. Ijango is really taking off. we just got word that it is generating more prospects in this pre-launch phase than google did when it was first getting started. My heart is really in this. So thank you. With absolutely no product to sell, no change required in the way people use the internet, and its offering the site for free to everyone globally….this is definetely a gold mine….“

=========================

This is the kind of thing that will make Social Media fail. The point to social media is to assume and embrace the fact that consumers and potential customers are intelligent and NOT rock-headed lemmings, hungry to eat the next line of bullshit that you feed them. The method in which these iJango peeps used above was flat out insulting to any consumer that has an IQ of 45 or above.

To folks repping iJango: Be smarter about how you push your offering and do it through real relationships and not used car salesmen tactics from the 1950′s.

/Onward

Social Media: The Kids Are Alright (but make sure you talk to them)

Posted by Rich Harris – August 14, 2009

It Started With My Skate Shop

st05-boy-computer-240-g-skd227302sdcA few years ago, around 2005, MySpace was at one of it’s most optimally active times with teenagers. I had opened up a local skateboard shop and teens were in there hanging out all day, checking their MySpace pages, talking about MySpace, etc…I had actually avoided MySpace for a year or so after that and even then now I don’t use it that much. One thing I did get exposure to since I wasn’t their parents and had the street cred as a funny tattooed skate shop owner guy that listened to all their problems (and let them complain about the world), was an unfiltered view into what these kids were really thinking about and doing on MySpace. I unfortunately also got a glimpse into how much their parents didn’t know about it, and more sadly, how much their parents didn’t communicate with them about what they were doing on there. They weren’t engaging them about something that was consuming 60% of their teenager’s week socially. As I started my own foray into Social Media for business and personal reasons, I realized that there’s this whole other social element that will be a defacto standard in less than a couple years for all teenagers and kids – having a ‘profile’ somewhere…anywhere..that is accessible to their friends and family, but also accessible to some of the wackos that roam the earth. At the time I owned the shop, my kids weren’t old enough to get started on MySpace so I kind of steered them away from Social sites as long as I could so I could spend more time on the sites to figure out the risks as well as the benefits (there are lots of cool reasons to be on these sites for adults and kids).

NOTE TO PARENTS: Just because you don’t understand or know about something does NOT make it bad for your child. If you see that it’s popular and it’s a trend, get involved as soon as possible. Our culture STILL supports too much reactive parenting in my opinion and that is what drives a huge wedge in between us and our teens….but that’s another blog post. :-)

The Bad

We already know about online predators. We know about hackers stealing personal information from websites and your home computer. With social media it’s more complex and nebulous because predators and assholes in general know how to create multiple accounts and very subtly get connected with people that don’t know them. They’re smart, bored and insane to an extent. Social sites have continued to put some controls in place for administering your accounts but it will always be a battle that we need to be proactive about. Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are no exception and STILL have major issues with predators, spammers, stalkers and hackers setting up multiple impostor accounts, using some racy female profile photo so that they can request to add your teenage son as a friend…and out of hormones and curiosity, your teen might accept it…unless you get engaged and educate them on the etiquette and red flags….which I’m getting to……

The Excellent

Whether you like it or not. These current generations are being raised in the information age and setting up an account on Facebook/MySpace is one of the first things they’re gonna want to do to look cool and will probably be pressured to do in jr. high and beyond. Social sites are a great thing for kids. They’re a creative expressive place for them to stay in touch with their friends all over the world and with relatives that don’t live close by. More importantly, for us parents, is that if we embrace it, we can be ‘friends’ with them online, stay out of their business, but still be able monitor/observe their interactions with their friends, see who else they are friends with, etc.

Just remember that your pre-teens/teens need their space and time to have their own social lives without mom and dad interfering all the time, getting all up in their biz. Another cool thing is that I’ve added my son’s friend’s parents to my list and we can all kind of keep tabs together forming a big protective space for our kids to all be teenagers and do what they do.

In a nutshell, if you aren’t privy to social media/sites, your kids probably already are and if they are not legal adults yet, get involved and talk to them about it. Embrace it and get informed and watch what is going on. They (and you) will benefit from it later. Just don’t micromanage them and post crap on their Facebook wall all the time. They need their own space. :-)

The Rules

Set up some basic rules for them online about what’s appropriate online and what isn’t. Because teens typically don’t realize the entire world is watching them while they’re online B.S.’ing with their friends, we need to remind them to avoid and/or be careful about publicly joking about topics like sex, religion, race, sexual preference, murder, suicide, etc.

In your mind you might be like, “What??? My children don’t do that! They’re only in Junior High!” I’m telling you all right now that public or private school, healthy or unhealthy home life, they hear about it, sometimes participate in those discussions, and are surrounded by those conversations and that kind of humor every day at school.

Denial is a parents’ worst enemy….and denying THAT is even worse.

At the End of the Day

Your kids don’t run the show online. You do…but you can do it while letting them enjoy the information and all the social stuff that comes with it.

I’m sure my teens are cringing, reading this now and rolling their eyes. :-) I’m almost positive I’ll get crap for it later.

Here’s a good link (there’s tons’ more just Google stuff) for Teens and High Tech:

Keeping Teens Safe Online

/Onward

Facebook: Excavating Our Identity Crisis

Posted by Rich Harris – August 10, 2009

Where Did All Mah Peeps Go? Am I Being Abandoned? Did I Leave The Iron On?

I know I’ve done a lot of write-ups that appear to be “about” Facebook but honestly they’re more about behavioral psychology and what Facebook has tapped into when it comes to the human condition. I’ve been noticing a couple other things that have come up with Facebook and all of our behavior with it.

Being the socially whorish and obnoxious guy that I am, I have several friends and acquaintances that run the gamut of ethnicity, lifestyle, religion, sexual preference, socio-political opinions, apathy, workaholic, passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, naivete, over-education to the point of pretentiousness, sensitive, tactless, creative, logical, lawless, and clueless…..the list goes on.

I’ve also noticed over the last few months that certain friends who I had connected with on Facebook from high school, places of employment from the past, etc…have un-friended me even though there was no negative incident or interaction with them that would be grounds for: “well screw you we aren’t friends anymore.”

They just…..simply……quietly……….with ninja stealthiness…….”unfriended” me. Where’s my WAH-mbulance?

Actually it doesn’t bother me at all….I’m about to tell you why….

In The Words Of The Great Philosopher Jackie Chan – “WHO AM I?”

(with hands in the air, insert cheesy echo from top of mountain here)

identity_crisis-291x300I realized after taking a look at the people that did “unfriend” me that they were probably offended by certain parts of Rich Harris (or just hated the fact that I filled up their Facebook feed, I’m cool with that). For example, I have some very right-wing fundamentalist Christian friends on here that I know would not be down with certain things I’ve posted, my sarcasm and openness to Buddhism, assessing it as probably borderline blasphemous. I know that I have some hessian metalhead friends that think I’m too emo. I have emo friends that think I’m sometimes too harsh and too much of a metalhead. I have blue collar friends that think I’m too geeky and dorky and geeky friends that think I’m too blue collar, gritty and rough around the edges for their liking.

Then, it dawned on me….I realized that I had established these relationships with these people on their terms, or what was comfortable for them. I had built that bridge from them to a facet of who I am but not who I am as a whole. One of my strengths is diplomacy, and dealing with small talk, total strangers, etc. So when I meet and relate with people it’s on topics that are comfortable or appropriate for that specific person. While I’m not dishonestly interacting with them socially or necessarily “hiding”, I am not revealing all of myself. Is this lying by omission about who I am or is it me being appropriate socially, showing tact, filters and self-control….and who the hell decides that definition?

What it comes down to honestly is at first I had an anxiety attack wondering how many people I offended and should I reach out and contact all those people making sure we were “all good”. But I realized that that is bullshit. The social mechanism, Facebook in this case, forces you to just be one person in front of all your various flavors of friends, family and acquaintances. I can’t be spiritual sometimes, and other times not be. I can’t only be a musician and other times only be sarcastic and other times only like Jameson and other times only be an internet geek and other times only be creative and other times only be white collar and other times only be blue collar……I am all those things at the same time and I shouldn’t have to hide that. Everyone else on Facebook has all their own little simultaneous facets. That’s what makes life and the world interesting. The universe would suck if we were identical robots, created in some factory somewhere.

We all have a choice when it comes to how much of ourselves we want to share with the world and it can be daunting to some people because they know that the internet is forever so they have to decide how far they’ll put themselves out there. Everyone’s comfort level is different. Everyone’s level of desire to share who they really are publicly is different. There’s no right or wrong here. We all have blood-spitting demons and cute white fuzzy bunny rabbits all inhabiting the same closet that is ourselves. Being the socially shape shifting guy that I can be, Facebook has forced me to be comfortable publicly in front of everyone of every ilk, to be ok with that..to be ok with the fact that some people from long ago may not be into who I am now….and to start shedding any insecurities I have about that.

At the end of the day the people that will stick with you are the ones that appreciate all aspects of you, even if it makes them uncomfortable. The rest of the people will ‘go away.’ – not cause they hate you or because you did anything wrong, but just because it’s trying to put a putting a social square peg through a round hole. Sometimes it’s just not a good fit. It’s ok and normal and ethical to be socially incompatible with people without hard feelings. We already know this…but I said it anyway.

Onward….

Facebook Is A Chemical

Posted by Rich Harris – June 12, 2009

FacebookWhat has always existed…

Human beings have always wanted to connect. It is the nature of who we are. You may have seen some of those documentaries where babies were not given the proper physical/emotional connection with their mothers. They end up rocking uncontrollably in the corners, cerebral synapses needed to function correctly just couldn’t connect, and it can’t be undone in most cases at that level.

Then as children, kids automatically start trivial little clubs with their friends….the desire to connect with others and identify with others. Whether it’s a negative environment (teenage gangs, etc.) or a positive one (communities coming together to help those less fortunate than themselves). We can’t help it. We convene, we group together, we reach out. When we don’t connect with other human beings at least on some level, I don’t care how ‘solo’ you THINK you are (for those self-proclaimed loners out there reveling in themselves), we as individuals head down a destructive path…from mild depression to suicide or other violent behavior if we don’t connect with other people somehow. This one of the few common elements in every single human being.

I know at this point you are probably wondering if I’ve fallen off the deep end and “where the hell is he going with this?”

I’m a kooky bastard but I’m getting to that I promise.

Facebook On It’s Own

I use Facebook A LOT, more than your average dude for sure. All my ‘friends’ know it. I’m sure about 80% of the people who are my friends probably thirst for a way to effectively filter Rich Harris. I’m ok with that. :-) I do stuff on Facebook for a living so I’m on it all day, making it easy for me to be active for long periods of time. When I created my Facebook account awhile ago, I first started reconnecting with current co-workers, then co-workers from my previous job, then with as many co-workers as I could remember in my entire career.

Slowly I started finding people from high school, then junior high school, then elementary school, and of course my own immediate and distant family members.

Now, whenever I attend an event for business, almost every new business contact I make is on Facebook. I then find and connect with them.

Facebook is Way Bigger Than Facebook Whether They Realize It Or Not – Keeping Humanity Up-To-Date In Realtime

I realize that MySpace is one of the originals in this social frat party phase of the web but I’m going to use Facebook here since it’s more sophisticated, refined, and people are starting to at least subconsciously feel how it has unlocked something amazing that was hindered before, and rumors about that peeople are starting to bail on MySpace.

The lack of technology: essentially the great wall that existed due to limitations in communication methods, coupled with the shear size of this planet, and lastly, the randomness that holds true when it comes to where each individual ends up geographically while living their lives as adults.

While I do credit the overall Information Age with opening up doors to people/places/products in other parts of the world that we never got to see before, Facebook has started gluing humanity together. It has proved synergistic in catalyzing something that has always been in our genetic makeup since humans first walked the earth: Connecting with other humans.

PeopleIt blows my mind that I now have friends all over the world, to varying degrees of closeness, that I now always know what is going on with them, with their kids, their careers, their health, their hobbies…with pictures and video. If there is someone that I knew that was associated with that person, regardless of where THAT person maybe, I actually have a decent shot at reconnecting with them. This is really cool for an obsessively social bastard like myself and maybe scary to those who are much more private.

While I don’t feel obligated to communicate with some of the almost 1000 people I’m connected to on Facebook/MySpace via email or private/public messages more than once a month, if even at all, the fact that I can “like” something they posted or quickly comment and nothing more, puts me in touch with everyone worldwide on some basic level at almost any given moment without really invading their privacy. They’ve kind of ‘opted in’ by posting it. I now get such an amazing 360 view of the world, where everyone’s paths have gone and continue to take them and their families…and they are sharing it, almost constantly. I’ve even noticed that friends of mine who are  much more introverted in-person, have no problem throwing it out there on Facebook for everyone to see and comment.

One dynamic that is hilarious to me is that I have pockets and clusters of friends, with varying degress of spirituality, believing in different religions or none at all, different types of humor at various levels, progress in their career, different types of careers, developing chapters in their lives, etc. No matter what I say or post, how liberal or conservative, how right brain or left brain, how logical or abstract, how sensitive or harsh, various clusters of people are drawn in to comment or participate who have commonality with each other and with what it is I had just posted…..affirmation that we are all very different but we all have something to say.

Human beings could never interact like this before. It used to be that after high school, you graduated (hopefully) :-) and then people went to work or to college and just kinda got lost out there in the world. It used to be a freak of nature moment to re-connect with a childhood friend that had gone away from the town where ya’ll grew up to go to college or to travel on some exchange-student program. Now it’s almost expected that we get to stay in contact with these people the rest of their lives instantaneously.

My 3 sons will never know what it’s like to not be able to find someone as all their friends are being raised to use Facebook/MySpace. I think it’s gonna be one cool way to keep their minds open to new ideas and paths that they can take in life. Life is about choices and the nature of Facebook helps remind us that you can do whatever you want in life at any time.

Social Media Experts? You Have Lots To Learn Grasshopper.

Posted by Rich Harris – March 11, 2009

Now that title may at first glance appear somewhat pretentious but even being someone who manages social media for a large company like myself, I have a hard time proclaiming guru or expert status.

Here’s the thing. You can’t be an expert at something that first of all has really only started culminating the last couple years, and second, changes almost every week. You can call yourself a social media ninja, bad ass, maestro, whatever the hell you wanna call it….but there’s a 96.87% chance you are no guru or expert.

First, to say something positive (I’ve been trying to start off all my recent blog posts on a positive note), I love social media and I love how excited everyone is about it. It’s reshaping company/brand PR/Marketing efforts in a way that is healthy, creative, and cost effective…most of the time. I’d say my only complaint about it is that it’s made internet life quite a bit “noisier”…which I expected to happen.

Now then…..my point in this post is that to those claiming to be social media experts or even someone that claims to be in the know with social media and it’s big picture….this is probably not true. Just because you have a twitter account and you know how to use it, doesn’t make you a social media marketer. There’s an art to understanding that social media is all about people, about meaningful conversation that is genuine, relevant, intelligent (sometimes), and more importantly: REAL.

No one likes repeated spammy comments on Twitter, their MySpace comments section, or their Facebook walls, etc.

Also, you need to understand that because you have accounts on all the various sites, it does not make you an expert. If you want to eventually be an expert or guru at social media, the most important aspect of it that you need to understand, more important than the tools themselves that are at your fingertips is PEOPLE. To be really good, you need to ‘get’ people….different types of people, their interests, personalities, various thought processes, locales, etc. You might say to yourself..”ok that’s basic segment marketing analysis,” but we, as social marketers, have to understand that this landscape is different. The consumers of social media don’t like to be spoon fed empty one way communications about products, services and other crap. They are smarter than the old consumer, they have a lower attention span, and they put up with less bullshit than ever before. They have the power to immediately weed out and block all crap, unlike email spam which is and will always barely be under control.

The other side of this on the tools/technology side is that you need a cohesion that takes the sum of all the parts of what you do for a company or client. There should be a high level premise and plan on how all the accounts/tools all tie together to push out one message and a wave of consistent content. If you don’t have that, your efforts are null and void. Might as well head home and start gardening.

To be a social media expert or guru, you need to understand all the tools, how they all work together and you need to have a passion for human beings and their behavior, good, bad and ugly. If you understand that stuff, have a vision,  and are fascinated with human beings, you will be a social media jedi one day. I hope I get to be one too. :-)

Flock Social Networking Client

Posted by Rich Harris – April 9, 2008

This is my test blog post using the Flock “Social Browser”. Basically it’s goal is to effectively pull together all your standard social communities into a browser experience, automatically pulling in your feeds/accounts/etc. from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. The main issue I see with it so far is that there’s no MySpace add for it. That seems silly to me.

Anyway. I’m blogging this post right from within the Flock blog post client and I was able to have it detect my blog type (WordPress) by just giving it the domain, it figured it out, probably looking to see if standard WordPress URL existed, etc.

I was also able to add my gmail and yahoo mail accounts to it and easily use them through the browser alongside my social sites.

I’m really liking this so far and will grill it a lot harder of the next few weeks.

Peace and Grease.

-Rich